ER - A Murder Too Personal (12 page)

“Let me see his room,” I said.

She half nodded and led me to a wooden
staircase with a runner that looked as old and dirty as the hills.
She led me up the stairs, each one creaking more than the one
before and showed me to a room at the top of the landing. It was a
pitiful room for a grown man. Worse than the one in the Van Gogh
painting. The room was as dirty as the rest of the house. It had a
sloping ceiling that made it feel even more cramped than it was.
The one small window was coated with a film of grease that wouldn’t
even allow the daylight to shine through. Poor suffering
bastard.

I took a long look around and asked her, “Did
he leave anything behind?”

She laughed. “Sure, he left his books and an
empty bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey.”

“Let me see.”

She jerked her head toward the closet. I
yanked open the door and looked in. On the floor were stacked four
corrugated cartons, filled mostly with paperbacks. I slid them out
into the middle of the room and put the boxes side by side. The
motes of dust floated up and caught what little light entered the
room. I reached out and flicked on a gooseneck lamp on a rickety
wooden table next to the bed.

Well, if Wheelock was a lowlife son of a
bitch, he was an intelligent one. The books were a good sampling of
what a well-educated man might want to read. There were some works
by the classical philosophers, standard histories of shining eras
of Western civilization, and great fiction that stood the test of
time. It was a collection that could have come from the circulation
desk of a good liberal arts college. The only deviation was a
significant number of books by Sacher-Masoch, de Sade, and their
ilk, and some Victorian pornographers and earlier specimens like
Fanny Hill. There was nothing else in the boxes. I put the books
back in the boxes and shoved them back into the closet.

“He leave anything else?” I asked her.

She thought for a while before she answered.
“Left a note, is all.”

“Do you still have it?”

She grunted, “Yeap.”

“Let me see it.”

She padded out of the room and back down the
stairs. I was alone in the room—me and Wheelock’s ghost. The
mattress was stripped bare and rolled up at the foot of the bed.
That’s how thin it was.

“Why did you take her away from me, you
bastard?” I said out loud.

The response came back silently. “Because you
let me.”

The landlady’s steps sounded on the stairs
and the landing like the soft strokes of a brush. She walked into
the room and handed me the note. It was scrawled on a legal- size
lined yellow sheet. The handwriting was jagged and uneven.

Dear Mrs. Lenkowsky,

I’m sorry I had to leave without

paying the rent. As soon as I have the

money, I’ll send it to you. For security,

I’m leaving you my books. I know you
don’t

think they’re worth two months rent, but
to

me they’re worth a lot more.

Again, my apologies.

Sincerely,

Steven Wheelock

I looked up at the old woman.

“He never sent the rent?”

She shook her head vigorously, like she
wanted to shake his memory out of her head.

“Son of a bitch,” she repeated.

“What else can you tell me? Did he ever see
anyone or talk to anyone that you knew of?”

She hesitated. She needed some incentive. I
fished in my pocket, came up with a ten, and held it up for her to
see. Her eyes followed the bill, savoring it.

“Some woman used to call him. Said she was
his sister.”

“Did she give a name?”

“Nope.” She reached for the ten. I let her
pull it out of my hand.

“Anything else you can think of that would
help me find him?”

She was engaged in some heavy duty thinking
now, the glint of greed flashing somewhere far back behind her
eyes.

Finally she shrugged in resignation. “I don’t
know where he is.”

“OK,” I said and gave her my card. “Call me
if you have anything. There’s money in it for you.”

I’d engaged her interest. “Yes sir,” she
said, her voice a notch higher. “You betcha.”

The ride back to the city was a breeze. It
was Friday night and I was going against the traffic. Anybody who
could rub two nickels together was headed out of town for the beach
or the mountains. I didn’t feel like going back to an empty
apartment so I called Rachel from the car, but all I got was her
machine with a sexy message about how much fun the caller was
missing. I told the machine to get back to me and left my home and
cell phone number, hoping she’d return soon. There was nothing to
eat in my fridge except a pack of frozen hot dogs and some cheese
that was showing its age, so I pulled into the garage under my
building, parked in my space and took a copy of Fortune along to
read while I grabbed a bite. There was a coffee shop on the next
block that was friendly, if nothing else. The place was half-empty
when I walked in so I had my choice of seats. I slid onto a stool
at the counter and winked at the waitress. She was
Mediterranean-looking, late twenties, always looked tired and
sweaty, but never begrudged a smile.

“Hiya, doll,” I said. “What’s good
tonight?”

“Hello, Mister,” she smiled back and put her
hand on my forearm. “Steak, mashed potatoes, green peas. Real good
today.”

“You sold me. And a real cold beer.”

The beer came first. I slugged down a couple
of gulps as I thumbed through the pages of Fortune, not really
paying attention until I saw a small piece with a picture of
Stallings. The story said his firm had been pressured to fire an
unnamed analyst because of an overly-aggressive sell
recommendation. It seems the analyst had jumped to some rash
conclusions and had knocked down the stock price by some seven
points. Stallings had stuck by his employee initially, but relented
when threatened with a ruinous lawsuit.

Over-zealous employees. It brought to mind
Talleyrand’s advice to his ministers. “Above all, not too much
zeal.”

The steak was a major miscalculation. It was
small, dark and hard, like an old whore’s heart. I consoled myself
by ordering another brew and ate the mashed potatoes and peas
instead. To fill the empty part of my stomach, I had apple pie a la
mode and coffee. The apple pie was home-made and had little pits in
it. I gave the girl a good tip and rolled up the magazine. The
clock on the wall said it was five to eleven. I resigned myself to
going up to an empty apartment, just like I’d done so many times
before. The sad part was that everything would still be where it
was when I’d left early in the morning.

The night was clear and quiet, and
Forty-ninth street was completely deserted. It was quicker to cut
through the garage, so I headed down the ramp. Jimmy, the
attendant, wasn’t in his usual place in the little office with the
cinderblock walls. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the
shadow of somebody by my car. At first, I thought it was Jimmy. As
I stepped closer to take a look, I could make out a guy kneeling
next to the BMW with some kind of tool in his hand.

I followed my first instinct, which is
usually not too smart.

“Get away from my car, you scumbag,” I
yelled.

He stumbled back and fell down.

That was my mistake. I never saw the joker
behind me. I sensed him rather than saw him. As I dropped and
turned, his knife sliced into the top of my left shoulder. The
shoulder pad of my jacket partly deflected the blow, but it still
hurt like hell. I knew it was bad. My vision started going in and
out of focus.

The garage was strangely silent, except for
their grunts. They were both on me in a flash. It was a happy
coincidence that I wasn’t carrying a gun today. All I had was a
damn rolled-up magazine in my good hand. They both had knives.
Wicked looking switchblades. I turned to look from one to the
other. They both kept moving the knives from side to side.

Jesus, I hated knives.

I couldn’t move my left arm.

I could see the guy to my left and his blade.
That was OK. It was the guy to my right that I was worried about. I
made a half-turn and saw his knife come arcing down. He shouldn’t
have done that. The magazine caught his wrist below the blade and
checked the downward motion. I kneed him in the balls and, as he
crumpled, I slammed the end of the magazine into his throat. It
crushed his voice box. He made a kind of gurgling sound and fell to
his knees. I pounded my heel into his face and saw him cough up
blood and bile and half his supper.

The other guy hesitated. Then he lunged at
me. The blade got past my right arm and took a slice out of my
side. As he pulled back, I swung the magazine but it hit his elbow
and flew out of my hand.

The first guy was on his back, grabbing at
his throat and giving off hoarse grunts.

I was in a big hole now. One arm gone, the
other side hurting like hell, and an asshole with a knife about to
punch my ticket.

He took a step toward me. I took a step back.
And tripped. Over a goddam speed bump. I went down, off balance,
and jammed my bad shoulder into a fender. I believe I let out a
good-sized yell. The pain was that bad.

The guy was right after me. He didn’t miss a
beat. But he was a dunce because he swung the knife downward. My
right hand caught his wrist and held it. My back was against the
floor and my arm was rigid. The knife wasn’t going anywhere. He
realized this and the first sign of panic showed in his eyes. He
had me on the floor with a knife point at my chest and he was
scared. He couldn’t push down, so he pulled to the side. That gave
me the chance to roll away from him. He brought the blade down
again but it missed me and scraped against the concrete.

I was up now and facing him. He came for me.
I let him reach me, then half-twisted so he went past as I slammed
the heel of my good hand into his face, ramming his septum up into
his brain. He stood motionless for half a second and then went down
like a sack of shit.

He was finished.

The other guy saw what happened and scrambled
up the ramp out onto the street. It was going to be hard to catch
up with him after all the blood I’d lost. I was starting to feel
light-headed and it was tough to focus my eyes. I held my shoulder
to try to stop the flow and ran after him. But he was twenty paces
ahead of me and he turned the corner and was out of sight.

I went back to the garage and examined the
guy on the floor. The pulse in his throat was almost gone. He’d be
checking out before the medics could get here.

I went over to where the magazine was lying
on the floor and picked it up. Hell, I knew Forbes was called the
capitalist tool, but I never really thought of Fortune in quite the
same way.

From where I stood, I could see into Jimmy’s
little office. His feet were sticking out of the doorway and his
head was under the desk. When I got closer, I saw the large blood
stain on his chest.

It was getting hard for me to stand so I sat
on the edge of the metal desk and dialed 911. Maybe they could
still save Jimmy. He took better care of my car than anyone else I
knew.

They kept me in the hospital less than
twenty-four hours. I was given some blood and some stitches, and
told how lucky I was. The cops were more of a pain in the ass. They
kept me repeating statements, then more statements, and finally
more statements. I felt like Uncle Remus telling all those Br’er
Rabbit stories over and over. Finally these geniuses came to the
conclusion that this was a foiled case of grand theft, auto. I
didn’t agree with them. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want
to steal a ten-year-old BMW, except maybe a fan of automobile
nostalgia. The dead guy was made as a small-time junkie, pusher and
car thief. Gene Black came by with another cop to see how I was
doing. He said Jimmy was going to pull through. Then he delivered
his judgment on the dead guy.

“Good riddance to bad rubbish was how my
mother used to put it,” he told me. His eyes were sad, maybe from
remembering his sainted mother.

I got home in a taxi and checked my messages.
Rachel had returned my call and there was a message from Laura
asking me to call her. Laura wasn’t home and I was too played out
to banter with Rachel, so I grabbed a can of beer and climbed into
the rack. I hadn’t even finished the beer before I was out.

***

When I woke, the clock said six-thirty, but I
wasn’t sure if it was AM or PM. I didn’t really give a rat’s ass.
All I wanted was a hot shower and a rare steak. The shower was hot,
but I had to settle for a couple of franks instead.

While I ate, I turned on the TV. The local
news was on, so I knew it was the evening. I was beginning to feel
relatively close to an approximation of a human being again. The
doc had put my left arm in a sling and the shoulder still throbbed.
My right side gave me a twinge every time I moved the wrong
way.

Laura called about eight and, when I filled
her in on what happened, she said she was coming right over. She
rang the bell a half hour later. When I opened the door, she was
standing there like an angel of mercy with a pot of soup in her
hands. She was wearing a short flowered cotton dress and she had a
white crochet shawl draped over her shoulders.

She made me go back to bed while she put the
soup in a bowl. At least she didn’t insist on feeding me. But she
did sit on the edge of the bed watching me with troubled eyes as I
wolfed it down. She didn’t say a word. It was some kind of
home-made vegetable soup. I had always felt that home-made soup was
somehow magical. I didn’t know anyone who actually made soup.