I was worried about him. I'd spoken to him the night before . . ."
"What time was that?" Carella asks.
"Around nine o'clock."
All three detectives are thinking he was still alive at nine last night. Whatever happened to him, it happened
sometime after nine p.m.
Her father's apartment is a forty-minute subway ride
from where she lives across the river in Calm's Point.
Her husband usually leaves for work at seven-thirty. Their habit is to have breakfast together in their apartment overlooking the river. After he's gone, she gets ready for her own day. They have no children, but neither does she work, perhaps because she never really trained for anything, and at thirty-seven there's nothing productive she can really do. Besides—
She has never mentioned this to a soul before but she
tells it now in the cramped confines of the interrogation
room, three detectives sitting attentively stone-faced on
one side of the table, her husband and her attorney sitting equally detached on the other. She doesn't know why she
admits this to these men now, here in this confessional
chamber, at this moment in time, but she tells them without hesitation that she never thought of herself as being particularly bright, just an average girl (she uses the word "girl") in every way, not too pretty, not too smart, just, well . . . Cynthia. And shrugs.
Cynthia is not one of the Ladies Who Lunch, but she nonetheless busies herself mindlessly throughout the day, shopping, going to galleries or museums, sometimes catching an afternoon movie, generally killing the time between seven-thirty a.m. when her husband leaves for work and seven-thirty at night, when he gets home. "He's in corporate law," she says, as if this completely explains his twelve-hour day. She is grateful, in fact, for the opportunity to visit her father. It gives her something to do.
She does not, in all truth, enjoy her father's company
very much. She confesses this, too, to the pickup jury
of five men who sit noncommittally around the long
table scarred with the cigarette burns of too many long
interrogations over too many long years. It is almost as
if she has been wishing to confess forever. She has not
yet said a word about Tampering or Obstructing, but she
seems willing to confess to everything else she has ever
done or felt. It suddenly occurs to Carella that she is a
woman who has nobody to talk to. For the first time in her
life, Cynthia Keating has an audience. And the audience is giving her its undivided attention.
"He's a bore," she tells them. "My father. He was a
bore when he was young, and now that he's old, he's an
even bigger bore. Well, he used to be a nurse, is that an occupation for a man? Now that he's retired, all he can talk about is this or that patient he remembers when he worked at 'The Hospital.' I don't think he even remembers which hospital it was. It's just 'The Hospital.' This or that happened at 'The Hospital.' It's all he ever talks about."
The detectives notice that she is still referring to her father in the present tense, but this is not uncommon, and does not register as anything significant. They are patiently waiting for her to get to Tampering and Obstruction. That is why they are here. They want to know what happened in that apartment between nine o'clock last night and ten-oh-seven this morning, when she dialed .
She has dressed for today's weather in a green tweed
skirt and turtleneck sweater she bought at the Gap. Low-heeled walking shoes and pantyhose to match the skirt. She likes walking. The forecasters have promised rain for later today . . .
It is, in fact, still raining as she continues her recita
tion, but none of the people in the windowless room know
or care about what's happening outside . . .
. . . and so she is carrying a folding umbrella in a tote bag slung over her shoulder. The subway station isn't far
from her apartment. She boards the train at about twenty
to nine, and is across the river and in the city forty minutes
later. It is only a short walk to her father's building. She enters it at about nine-thirty. She remembers seeing the
super putting out his garbage cans. Her father lives on
the third floor. It is not an elevator building, he can't afford that sort of luxury. His wonderful days at "The Hospital" left him precious little when he retired. As she climbs the stairs, the cooking smells in the hallway make her feel a bit nauseous. She pauses for breath on the third-floor landing, and then walks to apartment A and knocks. There is no answer. She looks at her watch. Nine thirty-five. She knocks again.
The things he does often cause her to become impa
tient at best or exasperated at worst. He knows she is coming here this morning, she told him last night that she'd be here. Is it possible he forgot? Has he gone out somewhere for breakfast? Or is he simply in the shower? She has a key to the apartment, which he gave to her after the last heart attack, when he became truly frightened he might die alone and lie moldering for days before anyone discovered his corpse. She rarely uses the key, hardly knows what it looks like, but she fishes in her bag among the other detritus there, and at last finds it in a small black leather purse that also contains the key to his safe deposit box, further insurance against a surprise heart attack.
She slips the key into the keyway, turns it. In the silence of the morning hallway—most people off to work already, except the woman somewhere down the hall cooking something revoltingly vile-smelling—Cynthia hears the small oiled click of the tumblers falling. She turns the knob, and pushes the door open. Retrieving her key, she puts it back into the black leather purse, enters the apartment. . .
"Dad?"
. . . and closes the door behind her.
Silence.
"Dad?" she calls again.
There is not a sound in the apartment.
The quiet is an odd one. It is not the expectant stillness of an apartment temporarily vacant but awaiting imminent
return. It is, instead, an almost reverential hush, a solemn
silence attesting to permanency. There is something so
complete to the stillness here, something so absolute that
it is at once frightening and somehow exciting. Something
dread lies in wait here. Something terrifying is in these rooms. The silence signals dire expectation and sends a
prickling shiver of anticipation over her skin. She almost
turns and leaves. She is on the edge of leaving.
"I wish I had," she says now.
Her father is hanging on the inside of the bathroom
door. The door is opened into the bedroom, and his hanging figure is the first thing she sees when she enters the room. She does not scream. Instead, she backs away and collides with the wall, and then turns and starts to leave again, actually steps out of the bedroom and into the corridor beyond, but the mute figure hanging there calls her back, and she steps into the bedroom again, and moves across the room toward the figure hanging on the inside of the bathroom door, a step at a time, stopping before each step to catch her breath and recapture her courage, looking up at the man hanging there and then looking down again to take another step, watching her inching feet, moving closer and closer to the door and the grotesque figure hanging there.
There is something blue wrapped around his neck.
His head is tilted to one side, as if it had dropped that way when he fell asleep. The hook is close to the top
of the door, and the blue—scarf, is it? a tie?—is looped
over the hook so that her father's toes are an inch or so off
the floor. She notices that he is barefoot and that his feet