I spoke her name several times, then turned her onto her back, her eyes like a doll’s snapping open. She seemed all right, nothing missing, everything where it ought to be. I checked out her pulse, which was no news at all. I put my ear to her chest. No heartbeat. I tried the other side. No thumps, nothing. “Damn it, get up,” I said, shaking her. “You’re asking for trouble.” And then I saw the purple bruises on her neck.
She was dead. She, Mellisa Markey, sister of my best friend.
Dead. I was too stunned to move and sat mindlessly on the edge of the bed, looking over my shoulder at what was unmistakably the body of a naked woman. When someone murders a person it’s your job to protect, you’re supposed to do something about it. Thinking — police siren already in the wind — what do I do about it? I was only twenty at the time and inexperienced with vengeance.
Early the next morning, I called Mellisa’s roommate, Sweetheart, from a phone booth in a subway station. “You don’t have to believe this,” I said, “but I’d like you to. I’m innocent.”
“You must have the wrong number,” she said, her voice so weak I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t inventing her conversation.
I called again an hour later. “Where are you, Sam?” she asked.
“Place is unimportant,” I said. “It’s time that matters. Mellisa’s boss was the last one to see her alive. I heard them before they went into her room.”
“That’s eavesdropping,” she said.
Sweetheart had a fine idea of the world and when reality didn’t correspond to that idea she tended to shut it out of mind. I put things in perspective for her. “A beautiful woman’s dead and an innocent man’s being sought for the murder. If you want to help solve this thing, you’ll give me the name of Mellisa’s boss.”
She said she would on the condition that I let her tag along, and wouldn’t if I didn’t. I agreed to her terms, but warned her that she might be sorry afterward.
“I’m always sorry afterward,” she said. “His name is Harvard Sollness. And don’t break your promise or you’ll burn in hell.”
Hell, I can tell you, was the least of my worries. There was no Harvard Sollness of any spelling in’ the Manhattan phone book. There was a Harris H. Solness on East 67th Street, and H. L. Solness on West 72nd, a Dr. Harwood Sollness (two l’s) in the Squibb Building and that was it. I would have to wait for Sweetheart to find out which of these Sol(l)nesses was the right Sol(l)ness. I was in a bad mood. There was nothing in the morning papers on the murder, which I can tell you made me suspicious. “Never trust a woman that wasn’t standing where you could see her.” my father used to say. “And you’re a damn fool if you have nothing better to do than gawk at a woman all day.” He was a smart old bird but they got him when he turned his head.
I was thinking murderous thoughts when I saw Sweetheart coming toward me at the corner of l20th and Amsterdam wearing a large floppy pink hat, a yellow summer frock, and dark glasses, looking worried and swell.
The man I was looking for, she told me (her milky tongue circling the globe of an ice cream cone), was director of a non-profit government organization called the Trade Winds Foundation which had something hush-hush to do with Latin America. Mellisa hadn’t told her much, she said had acted as if there was some mystery involved, something not quite right.
I glanced at my watch while Sweetheart nibbled at the edges of her cone. It was late and getting later. I had to get to Sol(l)ness before the heat got to me, which meant get to him fast. Though new to the detective business then, I had an instinct for it. It was in the blood, I guess. My old man had been a private eye, one of the best, before women and booze and an excess of integrity did him in. I improvised a plan which was something, if I do say so myself, to catch the conscience of a king. “Do you know what you’re supposed to do?” I asked when I had finished.
She nodded, licked her lips. “Why don’t we go back to my place and make whoopee. Sam?”
I could live to be thirty-three and never understand the way a woman’s mind worked. “Mellisa is dead.” I reminded her.
The news seemed to surprise her. “I forgot,” she said. “I’ve always had a short memory, Sam. You want me to phone Sol(l)ness and say I’m Mellisa. That’s it, isn’t it? What if he doesn’t believe I’m Mellisa?”
“He’ll know that you’re not Mellisa, Sweetheart, but he’ll be too clever to let you know that he knows.”
“Then I’m to tell him that I want to see him, that it’s a matter of life and death. Then…don’t tell me…just give me the first word.”
“You make an appointment to see him. You write the time and place on a scrap of paper and leave it for me in a phone booth on the northeast corner of Broadway and 121st.”
I went over the plan with her again. “You tell him, see, you know everything.”
“I know everything,” she said as if a transforming self-discovery. “You know, for example, he took her out to dinner and brought her home shortly after midnight. Playing on her weakness, he insinuated himself into her room.”
“Of course. Insinuated himself.”
“You overheard them from your room. At about 1:30, they had an argument — perhaps about his wife, perhaps about the Trade Winds Foundation and she said something that made him murderously angry, something unforgivable.”
“It was unforgivable.”
“And then…” I hesitated for effect…”pretending that you wanted to make up, you put your arm around her neck, and gradually increasing the pressure, very gradually — she might have thought she was being hugged — you strangled her to death.”
Sweetheart choked on the last remnant of her cone. “It wasn’t me,” she said. “I was in my room at the time. You said so yourself.” Her thumb wormed its way into her mouth.
I punched her affectionately on the chin. “You’re good, Sweetheart,” I said. “You’re very good.”
“I wish we could be together under other circumstances,” she said, smiling through her tears.
“Someday we will.” I kissed her goodbye, warned her to be careful, lit a cigarette to steady my nerves and looked out at the river. What a screwed up piece of business life is, I thought.
I lost another ten minutes in the race against time, riffling the phone booth, before I found Sweetheart’s note ingeniously concealed in the coin return.
SCANDINAVIAN PAVILION
2:15
come as you are.
S.
I looked at my watch. Then I noticed a big beefy man in a dark blue suit waiting outside the phone booth, his back to me. If you didn’t follow your hunches, right or wrong, the old man used to say, you were halfway to being a machine and therefore no match for them because they had better machines than you could ever hope to be. I called the weather.
The temperature at 1 pm in Central Park is 84 degrees relative humidity 82 percent. Variable winds at ten to fifteen miles an hour. The forecast for today
The forecast for today
The booth opened and something hard came down on the back of my head. Something quite hard. I remembered thinking: what the. I never saw it coming, saw only the shadow of the blow, an intuition of its reality reconstructed after the fact like an imagined or remembered dream.
I woke as if from the dead. My head hurt like hell. “He’s moving,” a voice said, which was certainly true. “Hold him,” a woman said, a matronly broad in a flowerprint dress. “He has no business going anywhere in that condition.” She took a whistle from her purse and blew a lightning bolt against my eardrum. No doubt she meant well. I went into the nearest building, which was Teachers College, and into a Men’s Room which smelled of structured curriculum and lonely afternoons. There was somewhere I had to be, dim urgency prodding the surface of memory. Water was supposed to revive you so I turned on the cold and put my head under the faucet.