On the afternoon of his death, Mendelssohn emerges from the elevator — an uneventful ride, he stands silently alongside Sally James — and they walk together into the lobby.
It is one of those ancient New York foyers, marble and flowers and chandeliers. Brass wall lights. A mahogany table. Black-and-white tiles. A long strip of carpet down the middle. Bad art on the walls, the sort created expressly not to offend.
Sally disappears around the corner a moment, and Mendelssohn takes a few steps alone. He wears a long overcoat. A Homburg hat. A drowsy determination on his face. The space awaiting his chronic fate. In zoom the eyes are hooded, the jaw is slack, he wears little half-moons of fatigue beneath his spectacles. A burst of wrinkles from the eyes. Another little burst of hair from the side of his hat. His head deeply veined at the side temples. The small sag of skin and the chickenwattle at his neck. The marks of decades. The detectives can imagine him at home, slackmouthed in sleep, his pajama collar askew, a light snore sailing from the back of his throat.
But later, when he moves along the corridor, they notice a drop of joy in his shuffle. Not a sideways lean or a bedraggled pull-along. A man still attached to the world. A curmudgeonly grace. The detectives examine the walk, as if the movement might carry a forensic clue to his being. They are well aware that a moment on its own, like a word, means little or nothing, but it is their accumulation that begins to make them matter. Life has been made strange by a series of actions and so there must be a corresponding series of triggers. The past is a key to the future: hidden causes must become plain, time should move to a singular point of revelation. The thrill is in finding the point where the mystery is dismantled. Then they can jigsaw the logic back together. If they can find one piece, they will glimpse another nearby, test it for fit.
The trick eventually comes in the agility to see the pieces all at once, and then build outward and backward — to commit the solution.
On the strength of the fluidity of motion alone, simply the way he walks, the detectives are sure that there has been no death threat to Mendelssohn, no advance suggestion of murder, even when he raps his walking stick on the ground and Sally James rounds the corner from the elevator, and seems to put a hand to his throat. His neck looks wattled and slack, as if it might be about to sound out the after-gulps of a sink. But then she gently wraps the scarf around him, and moves forward, supporting his elbow.
The nurse is, by all appearances, well looked after. She wears a large coat with fur on the collar. On her feet, tall boots.
They shuffle the length of the corridor and stand inside the double front doors. Sally pauses and turns while Mendelssohn has a word with the doorman, Tony DiSalvo, a man who looks lifted from a Mexican cantina, portly and balding, a hint of violence about him and yet a suggestion, also, of rumbling intelligence. Later, under questioning, it will be revealed that Tony is Puerto Rican, a former philosophy major from the University of Miami, but that the conversation was just yet another of those daily New York exchanges about the weather, how awful it is outside, how much snow there has been this winter, a familiar joke from Mendelssohn about being out to lunch, and how Tony wants Mendelssohn to be careful at the traffic lights, the taxis have been sliding all morning long.
Tony helps Mendelssohn down the steep steps and watches as the old man and the nurse step out of frame.
The detectives scrub through the footage from the previous days too, in case they can find something in the patterns of time that will propel them toward a critical epiphany, a mid-verse logic. A meter. An enjambment. Or a rhyme.
For the week of the murder they watch at a rate of thirty-two by: the world zooming past. A whole day slips along in less than an hour. There is a comic texture to the motion, especially when Mendelssohn, with his nurse, uses his cane and stutterstarts out of the frame. As the days wind down, they slow the picture and go forward at a rate of sixteen by, then eight by. Each minute takes seven and a half seconds. Four hours in half an hour. Their fingers glide over the keys. Looking. Digging. Scratching. Mining. A face seen one two three times. Someone loitering near the awning. A covert glance. A nervous tic. Or maybe something more brazen, more obvious, an assailant with a malevolent fuck-you stare. Every incident with its own peculiar rhythm: the ordinary comings, the goings, the delivery trucks, the doorman shuffle, the tenants, Mendelssohn and his nurse, the arrival of the snowstorm.
On the day of the murder they watch in real time, stopping, starting, chopping, rewinding. Over and over again. Think. Stop. Rethink. Watch Mendelssohn emerge. Gaze at the storm. Adjust his collar. Kick the first of the white snow off his shoe. Lean against his nurse. See Sally laugh. See Tony nod. See Mendelssohn smile. See nothing odd. See Mendelssohn go. See the old man disappear. See the snow coming down.
They wait, careful with the time stamp, to discover if anything happens in the intervening hour, but it is only the doorway, the awning, the pavement, the street, the increasing white of the storm, the return, back into frame, of Sally from the restaurant, with a nod to Tony and a blow of warm air into her hands, little else. For a while they wait for Mendelssohn to return from lunch, as if the video itself could trump reality.
They scrub the footage forward a few hours, just in case: a murderer is often known to return to the site of his work. They scan the faces of neighbors, paramedics, delivery boys, voyeurs, all hanging around the front entrance of the apartment building. The detectives dig through the ordinary, looking for any tiny finger-smear of evidence, any face that pops, a shadow that threatens. The evidence could be there in the oddest of moments, the briefest of glances, the slightest of shoulder rubs. They focus in on the son, Elliot Mendelssohn, the hedge fund man, political aspirant, well-known philanderer, parting the crowd. He is tall and broad-shouldered, with a large stomach, as if he has swallowed a bag of rocks. In and out of the building Elliot goes, several times, a cell phone clutched to his ear, a harried look on his face as if he might never have the chance to talk to anyone more interesting than himself.
Late in the evening Elliot emerges with a torn black ribbon placed over his heart, and the detectives, with their radar for the unusual, find it interesting that he could have so early a showcase of grief especially given the secular nature of the Mendelssohns: did he have the ribbon stored in his jacket beforehand? Did he tear one upstairs in his father’s apartment?
Later they observe the arrival of nephews and cousins and in-laws and old friends to the apartment: nothing creates a family quite like a murder.
The detectives slide back on the digital timeline to the moment when Mendelssohn steps out into the snowstorm: there is something of the Greek epic about it, the old gray man with his walking stick, venturing out, into the snow, out of frame and away, like an ancient word stepping off a page.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
Trusty walking stick. Old reliable. He could, of course, use the Zimmerframe or even the motorized wheelchair upstairs, collecting dust in the rear bedroom, but why draw attention? He’d rather not end up like all those idiots zipping along Fifth Avenue, beep beep, out of the way, colonoscopy call, Fifth Avenue here I come, pave the way, Dr. Jim. He had to use a chair once, a few years ago, when he broke his hip after a tumble outside the Guggenheim. On a patch of ice. Before he knew it, he was sprawled on the pavement. The management was scared that he might sue, but that was not his style, he loved the law, respected it, obeyed it. It wasn’t for trifling idiocies like an old man’s fall. Two weeks in the hospital and then Elliot bought him a motorized chair. More buttons on it than an SOC-3. Magnetos engaged. Radar on. Spin that propeller. Contact! He crashed it into the hospital bed on his very first try. You needed a PhD in civil engineering just to sit in the thing for crying out loud.