Then I paused and listened. There were two sirens wailing now, maybe three, and they were definitely in the vicinity.
I reached back up to the ceiling and repositioned the loose panel as best I could. Then I got down off the bed and picked up the envelope. I quickly ripped it open and tossed the contents out on to the mattress. The first thing I saw was a little black notebook, then a thick roll of bills – I think they were all fifties – and, finally, a large plastic container with an air-lock seal across the top, a bigger version of the one Vernon had produced from his wallet in the bar the previous afternoon. Inside it were – I don’t know – maybe three hundred and fifty, four hundred, five hundred of the tiny white pills…
I stared down at them, with my mouth open – stared down at what was possibly as many as five hundred doses of MDT-48. Then I shook my head and started doing rapid calculations. Five hundred, say, by five hundred… that was, what… $250,000? A mere three or four of these things, on the other hand, and I could have my book finished in a week. I looked around me, acutely aware all of a sudden that I was in Vernon’s bedroom, and that the sirens – which had been getting louder as I opened the envelope – were now winding down, and in unison.
After another moment of hesitation I gathered all the stuff up off the mattress and put it back into the envelope. Carrying it under my arm, I went into the living-room and over to the window. Way down at street level I could see three police cars clustered together, their blue lights rotating. There was a buzz of activity now as uniformed officers appeared out of nowhere, as passers-by stopped to look and comment, and as the cross-street traffic on Ninetieth began clogging up.
I rushed over to the kitchen and searched for a plastic bag. I found one from the local A & P and stuffed the envelope into it. I went down the hallway and out the main door, making sure that I left it open. At the far end of the corridor – in the opposite direction from the elevators – there was a large metal door I’d seen earlier, and I ran towards it. The door opened on to the emergency stairs. To the left of the stairs, there was a small area where the garbage chute was located, and a concrete alcove with a broom and some boxes in it. I dithered for a second, before deciding to run up the stairs to the next level, and then up to the next level again. There were four or five unmarked cardboard boxes stacked in the alcove. I put the plastic bag in behind these boxes, and without looking back I ran down the stairs again, taking the steps two or three at a time. I stumbled out through the metal door, still running, and back into the corridor.
With a couple of yards to go, I heard the elevator doors opening, and then a rising tide of voices. I got to the door of the apartment and slipped in. I went as fast as I could down the hallway and into the living-room – where of course at the shock of seeing Vernon again my heart lurched violently sideways.
Totally out of breath now, I stood in the middle of the room, panting, wheezing. I put my hand on my chest and leant forward, as though trying to ward off a coronary. Then I heard a gentle tap on the door outside and a circumspect voice saying, ‘Hello… hello,’ – a pause, and then – ‘police.’
‘Yep,’ I said, my voice catching a little between breaths, ‘in here.’
Just to be busy, I picked up the suit I’d dropped earlier, and the bag with the breakfast in it. I placed the bag on the glass table and the suit on the near side of the couch.
A young cop in uniform, about twenty-five years old, appeared from the hallway. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, consulting a tiny note-book, ‘… Edward Spinola?’
‘Yes,’ I said, feeling guilty all of a sudden – and compromised, and like a bit of a fraud, and a low-life – ‘yes… that’s me.’
6
OVER THE NEXT TEN OR FIFTEEN MINUTES, the apartment was invaded by what seemed like a small army of uniformed officers, plainclothes detectives and forensics technicians.
I was taken aside – over to the kitchen area – and quizzed by one of the uniforms. He took my name, address, phone number and asked me where I worked and how I knew the deceased. As I answered his questions, I watched Vernon being examined and photographed and tagged. I also watched two plainclothes guys hunkering down beside the antique bureau, which was still on its side, and sifting through the papers on the floor all around it. They passed documents and letters and envelopes to each other, and made comments that I couldn’t hear. Another uniform stood by the window talking into his radio, and another one again was in the kitchen looking through the cupboards and the drawers.
There was a dream-like quality to the way the whole process unfolded. It had a choreographed rhythm of its own, and even though I was in it, standing there answering questions, I didn’t really feel a part of it – and especially not when they zipped Vernon up in a black bag and wheeled him out of the room on a gurney.
A few moments after this happened, one of the plainclothes detectives came over, introduced himself to me and dismissed the uniformed officer. His name was Foley. He was medium height, wore a dark suit and a raincoat. He was balding and overweight. He fired some questions at me, stuff about when and how I’d found the body, which I answered. I told him everything, except the part about the MDT. As evidence to back up what I’d been saying, I pointed at the dry-cleaned suit and the brown paper bag.
The suit was laid out flat on the couch and was just up from where Vernon’s body had been. It was wrapped in plastic film, and looked eerie and spectral, like an after-image of Vernon himself, a visual echo, a tracer. Foley looked at the suit for a moment, too, but didn’t react – clearly not seeing it the way I saw it. Then he went over to the glass table and picked up the brown paper bag. He opened it and took out the items inside – the two coffees, the muffin, the Canadian bacon, the condiments – and laid them out along the table in a line, like the fragments of a skeleton displayed in a forensics laboratory.
‘So, how well did you know this… Vernon Gant?’ he asked.
‘I saw him yesterday for the first time in ten years. Bumped into him in the street.’
‘Bumped into him in the street,’ he said, nodding his head and staring at me.
‘And what line of work was he in?’
‘I don’t know. He used to collect and deal furniture when I knew him.’
‘Oh,’ Foley said, ‘so he was a dealer?’
‘I-’
‘What were you doing up here in the first place?’
‘Well…’ I cleared my throat at this point, ‘… like I said, I ran into him yesterday and we decided to meet up – you know, chew over old times.’
Foley looked around. ‘Chew over old times,’ he said, ‘chew over old times.’ He obviously had the habit of repeating lines like this, under his breath, half to himself, as though he were mulling them over, but it was clear that his real intention was to question their credibility, and to undermine the confidence of whoever he was speaking to at the time.
‘Yes,’ I said, letting my irritation show, ‘chew over old times. Anything wrong with that?’
Foley shrugged his shoulders.
I had the uneasy feeling that he was going to circle around me for a while, pick holes in my story, and then try to extract a confession of some kind. But as he spoke, and fired more questions at me, I noticed that he’d begun eyeing the coffee and the wrapped-up muffin on the table, as though all he wanted or cared about in the world was to sit down and have some breakfast, and maybe read the funny papers.
‘What about family, next of kin?’ he said, ‘you have anything on that?’
I told him about Melissa, and how I’d phoned and left a message on her answering machine.