Vernon was there on the couch, all right, in exactly the same position as before. He was sitting back, his legs and arms splayed out, his eyes staring directly ahead of him – or rather, appearing to stare, because clearly Vernon wasn’t capable of staring at anything any more.
I stepped closer and saw the bullet-hole in his forehead. It was small and neat and red. Despite having always lived in New York City I’d never actually seen a bullet-hole before, and I paused over it in horrified fascination. I don’t know how long I stood there, but when I finally moved I found that I was shaking, and almost uncontrollably. I simply couldn’t think straight, either, as though some switch in my brain had been flipped, causing my mind to deactivate. I shifted on my feet a couple of times, but these were false starts, and led nowhere. Nothing was getting through to the control centre, and whatever it was that I should have been doing I wasn’t doing – which meant, therefore, that I was doing nothing. Then, like a meteor crashing to earth, it hit me: of course, call the fucking police, you idiot.
I looked around the room for the telephone and eventually saw it on the floor beside the upturned antique bureau. Drawers had been removed from the bureau and there were papers and documents everywhere. I went over to the phone, picked it up and dialled 911. When I got through to someone I started babbling and was quickly told, Sir – please… calm down, and was then asked to give a location. I was immediately put through to someone else, someone in a local precinct presumably, and I babbled some more. When I finally put the phone down, I think I had given the address of the apartment I was in, as well as mentioning my own name and the fact that someone had been shot dead.
I kept my hand on the receiver of the phone, clenching it tightly, possibly in the mistaken belief that this was still actually doing something. The thing was, I had a lot of adrenalin to deal with now, so after a bit of rapid reflection I decided that it would be better to keep busy, to do something requiring concentration, and that pointedly not looking at Vernon’s body on the couch would probably be a help as well. But then I realized that there was something I had to do in any case, regardless of my mental state.
I started shuffling through the papers around the upturned bureau and after a couple of minutes found what I was looking for, Vernon’s address book. I flicked it open to the M section. There was one number on this page, and it was Melissa’s. She was Vernon’s next of kin.
Who else was going to tell her?
I hadn’t spoken to Melissa in I couldn’t remember how long – nine, ten years – and here now in front of me was her telephone number. In nine or ten seconds I could be talking to her.
I dialled the number. It started ringing.
Shit.
This was all unfolding a bit too quickly.
Rinnnnnggg.
Click.
Hum.
Answering machine. Fuck, what did I do?
The next half minute of my life was as intense as anything I could remember in the previous thirty-six years. First, I had to listen to what was undeniably Melissa’s voice saying, I’m not here right now, please leave a message, though in a tone I found disconcertingly unfamiliar, and then I had to respond to her recorded voice by recording my own voice saying that her brother – who was here with me in the room – was dead. Once I’d opened my mouth and started speaking, it was too late, and I couldn’t stop. I won’t go into the details of what I said to her, mainly because I can’t remember what I said, not exactly anyhow – but whatever… the point is that when I’d finished and had put the phone down, the strangeness of it all hit me suddenly and I was overwhelmed for a few moments by an uneasy mix of emotions… shock, self-disgust, grief, heartache… and my eyes filled up with tears…
I took a few deep breaths in an effort to control myself, and as I stood at the window, looking out over the city’s blur of architectural styles, one thought kept running through my mind: at this time yesterday I hadn’t even bumped into Vernon yet. Until that very moment on Twelfth Street I hadn’t spoken to him in nearly ten years. Neither had I spoken to his sister, or really thought that much about her – but now here I was in the space of less than a day getting myself re-entangled in her life and in a period of my own life that I thought had gone for ever. It was one of those imponderables of existence that months, even years, can go by without anything significant happening, and then suddenly a cluster of hours comes along, or even of minutes, that can blow a hole in time a mile wide.
I turned away from the window – flinching at the sight of Vernon on the couch – and walked over towards the kitchen area. It had been ransacked as well. The cupboards had been opened and gone through, and there were broken plates and pieces of glass all over the floor. I looked back at the mess in the living-room, and my stomach sank yet again. Then I turned and went along the hallway to the door on the left, which led into the bedroom, and it was the same in there – drawers had been pulled out and emptied, the mattress had been upturned, there were clothes everywhere, and a large cracked mirror lay on the floor.
I wondered why it had been necessary to make such a mess, but in my confused state – and obvious as it was – it still took me a couple of minutes to get it… of course, the intruder had been looking for something. Vernon must have opened the door to him – which also meant he’d known him – and when I came back I must have interrupted him. But what had he been looking for? I felt a quickening of my pulse even as I formed the question.
I reached down and lifted up one of the emptied drawers. I stared into it and flipped it over. I did the same with the other drawers, and it wasn’t until I was going through some shoe-boxes on a high shelf in the closet a couple of minutes later that I realized two things. First, I was leaving my finger-prints all over the place, and second, I was actually searching Vernon’s bedroom. Neither of these things was a good idea, not by any stretch of the imagination – but the question of leaving finger-prints in the bedroom was especially worrisome in the short term. I had given the cops my name and when they arrived I fully intended telling them the truth – or at least most of the truth – but if they found out that I’d been poking around in here, my credibility would surely be undermined. I could be charged with disturbing a crime scene maybe, or with evidence-tampering, or I might even be implicated in the crime itself, so I immediately began retracing my steps, using the sleeve of my jacket to wipe over as many of the objects and surfaces I had touched as possible.
Standing in the doorway a few moments later, I looked back into the room to check that I hadn’t missed anywhere. For some reason which I can’t explain, I then looked up at the ceiling – and in doing this I noticed something quite odd. The ceiling was a grid of smallish square panels and one of them, directly above the bed, seemed to be slightly out of alignment. It looked as if it had recently been disturbed.
At the same time as I noticed this, I heard a police siren in the distance, and I hesitated for a moment, but then I went over to the bed, stood on it and reached up to the loose panel. I pushed it out of position and peered into the dimness above, where I could just barely make out pipes and ducts and aluminum casing. I stuck my hand up and felt inside and around the edges. My fingers came into contact with something. I reached in further, straining my arm muscles, and grabbed whatever it was, pulling it down out of the square hole. It was a large, brown padded envelope, which I let fall on to the upturned mattress.