I reached Seventeenth Street and found the address. Behind the house stood a garage with what looked like an illegal, owner-built addition on top, its shingles crooked, windows off-plumb, the roofing job patched and repatched. Here was the home of a man buying a three-million-dollar commercial building in downtown Manhattan? The idea was absurd. Behind the garage rose a twenty-foot-high chain-link fence grown over with ivy and ribboned with trash. A burglar could climb over it, but it wouldn't be much fun, and if you fell down on the garage side, you landed on a disassembled powerboat and a pile of cement blocks. Thus the apartment over the garage was well protected; the only way in was the exterior wooden staircase up the side. I looked behind me- no one watched. I pushed through the gate. Someone had abandoned a repainting job on the side of the house: Ladder, bucket, and brushes all fallen to the ground. In the weeds lay a rotting pile of freebie newspapers, phone books, shopping fliers, a leaking car battery, and whatever else someone didn't have the time for. I climbed the stairs and peered inside the one small window. The shade was down, nothing. I tried the door- locked. I knocked softly. Nothing. Maybe it was the wrong place; maybe Helmo had ripped me off. Nothing I'd seen proved Jay lived here. Going down the stairs I noticed that the treads were battered and worn. Even the risers were scraped, vertically. And there was a streaked pattern to the wear, suggesting repetition, something heavy going up or down on a regular basis.
Next I tried the garage door; it went up. I ducked beneath and closed it behind me. In the dusty half-light I recognized Jay's truck, a little slush stain on the sidewalls from the trip three nights prior. The truck's doors were locked. I peered into the windows; nothing. But the walls of the garage, I saw, were lined with large tanks, perhaps two dozen. I turned my attention to some boxes set in the back of the garage. They held car stuff, mostly, plus knitting materials and books on collecting dollhouses. Probably not Jay's. What else?
I slipped back under the garage door, picked up one of the paint cans in the weeds, and climbed the stairs. The apartment door was old, with nine panels of glass. I looked around, checked the street. This isn't much of a crime, I told myself, considering what he's already put me through. I swung the paint can against one of the bottom panels, and it cracked the glass enough for me to break out a few pieces. I checked the street again; nobody saw me drop the paint can into the weeds. I reached inside and flipped the dead-bolt lock. The door didn't open. I felt around and found a slide bolt below the doorknob.
Three minutes, I told myself- in and then get the hell out. Here I was breaking into someone's apartment hours after someone had broken into mine. Nice. I turned the knob and shut the door behind me. Jay would discover that someone had broken in, but he wouldn't know who.
The room was a monk's cell ten feet by twelve. You entered directly into the bedroom. A simple camp bed, neatly made. Next to it, an answering machine, red message-light blinking. To one side sat an enormous stainless steel box with a small window in its top, not unlike a space-age sarcophagus. It was the biggest thing in the room and a quick inspection of its dials and switches revealed it to be a hyperbolic oxygen chamber.
Oxygen. The man needed oxygen?
Three oxygen tanks identical to the ones in the garage stood next to the chamber. Bottled oxygen is a controlled substance, I remembered, considered a medicine. You need a doctor's prescription to get it. The tanks are heavy when full. They had to be delivered, and were probably carried with some kind of dolly up and down the outside stairs, hence the wear on the treads.
At the foot of the bed stood an oxygen compressor that huffed rhythmically, its sound not unlike that of waves breaking on a beach.
I saw two trunks under the bed and slid them out. Look inside? I'd come this far, so yes. The first trunk contained work tools: hammers, screwdrivers, socket wrenches. The second had socks, jeans, underwear, T-shirts, all neatly folded. Such neatness is depressing, as if one is preparing for death. I closed the trunks and slid them back. In Jay's closet hung ten suits arranged by color, each with matching shirt and tie, including the one he'd worn the night I'd met him in the Havana Room. These were expensive, good-looking clothes, but in the context of the tiny room, they seemed costumes for a theatrical production. Here was a man who lived militarily, who could move out in the amount of time it took to carry his belongings down the stairs. Perhaps four trips, not including the hyperbolic chamber. In the back of the closet, under a raincoat, sat the seltzer-water box Allison had given him the night of the deal. I tipped it toward myself to look inside: the cash was gone, all of it. Two hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars. Where had he stashed it?
Seconds, burning away. I checked my watch. I'd been inside the apartment one minute. The answering machine beckoned. What else? The kitchenette off to one side looked unused. The refrigerator had no food in it, only a carton of orange juice, several bottles of vitamins, and a dozen odd unmarked cardboard boxes. I pulled one out and opened it. Inside clattered bottles labeled UNIVERSITY OF IOWA HOSPITALS PHARMACY, and by hand: Adrenaline, 500 mg. Another marked Dexi-amphetamine. Prednisone in 10 mg pills. Another marked "Andro." Below this were dozens of small inhalers marked Beclomethasone, Ventolin, Serevent, Albuterol. All stuff to open up the airway, get more oxygen in. In a second box was a bottle of white pills marked Singulair. None of the containers carried the name of a prescribing physician.
In the freezer: hot dogs, bread, TV dinners, ice.
The bathroom was spotless. One towel. Shaving kit. I looked inside. Nothing unusual. No pills in the cabinet. No condoms, no electric nose-hair buzzers. Next to the toilet was a stack of reading material, and it was not your usual hodgepodge of glossy magazines and New Yorker cartoon collections: here, with some articles dog-eared for reference, lay copies of the Journal of American Pulmonary Specialists, The Report of the Oxygen Therapists Association, a printout of "Asthma and the Pulsed Administration of Synthetic Adrenaline," Clinical Tests of Respiratory Function, the Research Journal of the New York Hospitals' Endocrinology Association, and so on. Clearly Jay suffered from some debilitating respiratory problem and was more or less managing his own treatment, depressingly so. I heard myself exhale, out of dread, and put the materials back the way I'd found them. I checked my watch. Six minutes, for God's sake.
I returned to the bedroom and froze there- fascinated, saddened, perplexed. Inasmuch as Jay's life had a physical center, this was it, and what a lonely center it was, too. I saw no television, no personal mail, no sign of indulgent activity or relaxation. No wonder he hadn't told Allison where he lived.
Next to the bed stood a wooden desk and a chair. On top was a giveaway calendar from a heating oil company, and this- a full-height photo of Sally Cowles, taken at great distance. She was in her school uniform, walking on a sidewalk with two friends on a sunny afternoon. From the trees, I could see that the photo had been shot in the late fall or early winter. The girls wore coats but not gloves or hats, and the surfaces of the buildings around them suggested a well-to-do neighborhood in the city. Upper East Side, perhaps, behind them a flower shop. Was there a flower shop near Allison's apartment? Around the corner on the avenue? The girls were walking with unconscious happiness, knapsacks jingling, their school uniforms rippling, hair caught by the breeze, matching socks different lengths. I tried to picture Jay studying this photo. It was in no way overtly sexual, at least not to me. But certain men, I knew, were driven into a frenzy by the sight of a girl in a school uniform. The implied innocence sent them into spasms of lust, and despite myself, then and there I remembered a business trip to Tokyo almost ten years earlier when I was dragged by three drunken Japanese businessmen into a strip joint in the famed Shinjuku district, where along with two hundred more Japanese businessmen I watched one near-pubescent girl after another shed her plaid school uniform and bobby socks. The sight had left me cold- I prefer older women with the mark of gravity upon them, with eyes that smoke with the absolute lack of innocence- but the Japanese men were transfixed by the sight, a few even producing expensive cameras and unapologetically recording the open-thighed displays for later review. Was Jay such a man? I couldn't believe it, I didn't want to believe it.