The room gave off a sickly-sweetish odour, but it wasn’t as bad as I feared. The single window was wide open.
I glanced into the wooden box. It was empty. I closed the door and got out of there.
I reported to Casserman that night. He shook his head, ‘I feel bad about it. We waited too long. Maybe we could have done something. But that slob is all wet. The runt wasn’t lyin’ dead in that room for any two weeks. We saw him here just a few nights ago.’
I sipped my beer thoughtfully. ‘Well, Catallo lost track of time, that’s all.’
Casserman gave me an enigmatic troubled look and then moved down the bar to wait on a new customer.
I should have dismissed the business from my mind right then and there — I had plenty of other problems to worry about — but I kept fretting about it.
After all, I had detected an odour in the room.
I didn’t sleep well that night. The next day I went to see the autopsy surgeon. Not the coroner, but the doctor who had actually performed the autopsy. For the average citizen this might have proved sticky, but a newspaperman does have certain advantages.
I met him in a little anteroom near the morgue, a Doctor Seilman. He was still wearing his white hospital coat but he had taken off his mask and gloves. He nodded.
He remembered the cadaver of the runt, Fred Amodius, very well.
‘One of the worst cases of malnourishment I’ve seen,’ he told me. ‘He was a walking skeleton.’
‘What was the cause of death?’ I asked him.
‘We put down pneumonia as the immediate cause. But he also had a massive viral infection not necessarily related to the lung condition. Beyond that, he had bleeding ulcers, cirrhosis of the liver and probably a weak heart. Besides the malnutrition.’
‘How long had he been dead — before he was found I mean.’
Seilman didn’t hesitate. ‘Three weeks.’
I stared at him. ‘I don’t think that’s possible.’
He shrugged. ‘Well, we don’t pretend to pin it right to the day. Three weeks, twenty days, eighteen days, something like that.’
I felt perspiration rolling down my face. ‘What, Dr. Seilman, would you say was the absolute minimum?’
He looked at me curiously and thought a minute. ‘I’d say the absolute minimum would be sixteen days. There was no evidence of foul play.’
I thanked him and left.
I can’t even remember what went on in the city room that night. All I could think about was Catallo’s phrase, "croaked up there in that closet a coupla weeks ago". And then Dr. Seilman’s "I’d say the absolute minimum would be sixteen days".
It didn’t add up. Nothing added up. Because both Casserman and I had seen the runt that last night — and that was only three days before they carried him out of Catallo’s closet, less than three full days actually.
I told Casserman that night. He swore. ‘Cripes! Somebody’s loco! We saw him sittin’ there. The both of us can’t be crazy!’
‘It looks like somebody is,’ I said.
He leaned across the bar later in the evening. ‘Don’t laugh now,’ he said frowning, ‘but I’ve been thinkin’. I mean the way the runt didn’t drink his beer and stopped leavin’ a dime. Could both of us been seein’ a ghost?’
I glanced toward the end of the bar. ‘Well — could be. But I believe he just kept going longer than they figured anybody could with his ailments. Will power, you know.’
Casserman nodded. ‘Yeah, maybe.’ He wasn’t convinced and neither was I. I kept remembering that sickish-sweet odour up in the closet room.
Even then, I didn’t drop the business. I tried to find out all I could about Fred Amodius. There were pitifully few facts available.
Over a period of several weeks I picked up scattered bits of information. Amodius had been an orphan, kicked around from one foster home to another. Sometime in his early teens he had wound up in the street. His formal schooling must have been minimal.
He had wanted to be a jockey but he had never made it — never even came close to it. One rainy day I stood at the big local race track talking to a stable "boy" (he was about sixty).
He picked up a currycomb and shrugged. ‘Yeah, I remember the guy, a faded, funny-lookin’ little character. Wanted to ride. Everybody just laughed at him. He didn’t have nothin’.’
He shook his head. ‘He gave up, I guess. Finally tried a stable job, but they kicked him out after a couple days.’ He looked up at me. ‘You know what, mister?’
‘No, what?’
‘He frightened the horses! The boss told him "Get lost!" The jerk!’
That’s about all I could find out. I suppose there wasn’t much more to find out. Amodius drifted around the track, panhandled and once in a while picked up some kind of odd job. How he lived as long as he did is a mystery. They put his age down at thirty-four and although there was some uncertainty about it, that must have been fairly close.
He lived in flophouses and cheap hotels, sometimes slept in doorways and wound up in Catallo’s miserable little closet room.
So far as I could discover, he had no friends. Women must have been rare, or perhaps non-existent, in his life. One informant told me: ‘I never saw that little creep with a dame.’ He may have spent some time with a few of the lower-rung prostitutes. There’s no way of telling. God knows he didn’t have much to offer a woman.
As the stark, pitifully dreary outline of his existence began to take form, I saw why that pale, shadowy, pathetic figure had clung so long to his usual place at the end of Casserman’s bar.
He had been an individual with virtually no emotional life. All his years he had known a shabby, bleak and isolated existence. He must have hungered for life, without ever finding it. Hunger, that was the keynote. Hunger, remorseless and unremitting. Hunger for love, for affection, for recognition, for acceptance, for status — for anything.
Having no inner emotional life at all, the thought of being hurled into the detached world of the mind, of spirit, must have been, to him, the ultimate horror. How could he survive in the world not of flesh, he must have subconsciously asked himself, when he had nothing of the spirit to remember?
He must have looked on death, not as release, but as a last unending loneliness. With his inward emptiness, his non-life as it were, his terrible emotional deprivation, he must have neared death with a sense of fearful desperation.
Death loomed before him as an indescribable abyss of enduring darkness, of ultimate isolation.
If we survive death, we survive, probably, on our memories, on our emotional experiences and recollections, on the relationships which enriched our lives.
Amodius had none, or almost none. The outer darkness must have filled him with inconceivable terror.
And that, I think, is why he lingered at Casserman’s bar. That is why we saw him there nearly two and a half weeks after he was supposed to be dead. That is why we saw him there, or thought we saw him there, when his cadaver was lying in Catallo’s closet.
Casserman’s bar was probably the nearest thing to "home" which he had known in many years. If he was not exactly cherished in the establishment, he was certainly not challenged. He was never badgered, nor annoyed, nor made conspicuous. At the worst he was ignored. Casserman himself always treated him courteously; some of the rest of us nodded to him.
I am convinced that some element of him, some residue as it were, anchored itself desperately to Casserman’s even after the formal death of the flesh. It clung with inconceivable loneliness and longing to the one spot where it had known a degree of warmth, of toleration, of familiarity and friendliness.
It left with enormous reluctance. It was torn away, I suppose, as the tenuous threads which held it temporarily at last yielded to the irresistible tug of the terrible outer gulfs.