Jade in Aries (23 page)

We had come this far when we entered “Advertising in the Fifties,” this being the room I had cut through to reach the main stairs when Linda had knocked at the door. We were now coming in from another direction, and would cross that earlier route of mine.

Linda was the first to see it. She was slightly ahead of me, and I bumped into her when she stopped and said, “Oh.”

The physical contact between us—our first—confused me for just a second. Then I looked past her and saw the naked dead man lying on his face in the middle of the floor, and forgot all that.

T
HE FIRST PATROL CAR
was there in seven minutes. They were both young and already beginning to be a little too heavy in the torso; riding in the car so much is what does it. When I saw them I felt a surprising embarrassment, one I hadn’t expected. All three of us were in uniform, theirs dark blue and mine a medium gray, and although mine was quiet and restrained, I nevertheless felt dressed up like a parody of them, a burlesque cop. The old phrase “You don’t deserve to wear the uniform” went through my head, and of course that was it, the same guilt about Jock in yet another way.

One of them said, “We had a report on a death.”

“This way.”

In coming downstairs after finding the body, I had turned on every light I’d passed, so we went upstairs now in a white glare. The room with the body was square and small, about ten feet on a side, with white walls and ceiling, dark wood floor, a backless black-upholstered bench against one wall, and mounted magazine advertisements from the fifties all the way around. The bench was the only furniture, so that the pale body on the wooden floor was completely alone. It was strange how small and unreal it looked; in the setting, it could have been a modern sculpture rather than a man.

“Did you touch it?”

I shook my head. “No.”

Neither did they. Standing on either side of it, gazing down for a moment, they looked like the paranoid dream of a police state; a pair of brutal cops over their prostrate victim.

One of them glanced over at me. “You know who it is?”

“I haven’t seen his face.”

“You call anybody else?”

“My office.”

They both frowned at me. “What office?”

“Allied Protection Service.” I patted my shoulder patch, with the company name on it in yellow letters in a triangle formation. “They’re sending somebody over,” I said.

“Why?”

“To protect their interests, I suppose.”

They looked at each other, and one said, “I’ll call in.”

“Right.”

He said to me, “Come along,” and I went with him. Going down the stairs he said, “Any other entrances?”

“Two.”

“Check them recently?”

“Not since I found the body.”

“Take a look now,” he said, “and then wait by the front door.”

“All right.”

There was a fire emergency exit that opened onto the garden beside the building, and a rear door that led to an alley between two apartment houses and out to the next street. Both were locked and undisturbed. I went up the rear stairs to check the fire-escape windows on both the second and third floors, and the metal gates remained closed and locked over both of them. I took the front stairs down from the third floor and found the patrolman waiting for me just inside the main entrance. He frowned when he saw me coming down the stairs, and said, “Where’d you go?”

I told him about the fire escape. He nodded and said, “Okay.”

“I can’t think how he got into the building,” I said. “He wasn’t here the last time I made my rounds.”

“Kept ahead of you,” he suggested.

“Naked? What did he have in mind?”

He shrugged, and I remembered the credo of the uniformed patrolman: leave the thinking to the Detective Squad. He changed the subject then, saying, “You ever on the force?”

“I used to be.”

“You’re better off the way you are,” he said, and went on to tell me anecdotes illustrating the public’s lack of respect for the police.

He was interrupted a few minutes later by the arrival of two plainclothesmen. One was short and wiry and Italian, and said his name was Grinella. The other was big and heavy-set and truculent, and he didn’t give his name. The uniformed patrolman gave them his report, and Grinella told him, “Stay on the door.”

“Yes, sir.”

Grinella turned to me. “Lead the way, will you, Mr. Tobin?”

“Of course.”

We went upstairs, where the other uniformed patrolman turned from reading a Volkswagen ad mounted on the wall, and for a minute we all studied the dead body some more. Grinella asked a few questions and I answered them. Still no one touched the body.

I was still in the room when the assistant medical examiner arrived. He knelt beside the body, touched it, satisfied himself it was dead, and then rolled it over. Then we could see what had been done to it. It was as though someone had killed him by injecting gallons of purple paint into his head, so much paint that it had bulged his face outward, the eyes popping, fat tongue straining out of the mouth, cheeks bulging. The paint had discolored the flesh, and some of it had seeped out around the eyes and from the nostrils and the corners of the mouth.

Except, of course, that there was no purple paint. It was blood, and it was the result, not the cause. The assistant medical examiner, still kneeling beside the corpse, looked up at the detectives and said, “Clipped him on the jaw here, where this mark is. Knocked him out. Then wrapped wire around his neck. Did a good tight job.” He pointed, and the line where the wire was embedded in the skin of the neck was just barely visible. The wire couldn’t be seen at all, only the crease it caused.

Detective Grinella said, “In this room?”

“Definitely not.”

“Why not?”

“When this happens, bowel and bladder release. It’s just automatic. Somebody cleaned him up after he was dead.”

“And brought him here,” Detective Grinella said.

“Yes.”

The detectives looked at one another. The bigger one said, “I’ll call. You talk to the keyhole.”

He meant me. Since he was referring to the kind of private detective whose livelihood comes from gathering divorce evidence, and since I had never done that kind of work in my life and never would, the insult missed its target. Still, the very fact that a gratuitous insult had been tossed in my direction was enough to make me bristle, though I tried not to show it.

Grinella, a more easygoing type, said to me, “You have someplace we can sit down?”

“Sure.”

I took him down to the office, where we repeated the positions that Linda and I had taken less than an hour before; I again on the sofa, Grinella on the chair. He started filling a pipe—I would have guessed him to be a cigarette man, too quick-moving for a pipe—and said, “Looks like a hell of a lot of activity around here tonight.”

“I don’t understand it,” I said.

He kept poking his thumb into the bowl of the pipe, watching himself do it. “Somebody got in,” he said, “left a body, went away again.”

“Through locked doors,” I said.

He nodded, and kept watching his hands with the pipe. “Makes it tougher,” he said. “When was the last time you saw that room empty?”

“Ten forty-five.” That was when Linda had arrived.

“And you found the body?”

“Eleven seventeen.”

“Half an hour. Lot of activity for half an hour.” He glanced at me. “You recognize him?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Hard to tell, of course,” he suggested, “with his face like that.”

“I’m pretty sure I don’t know him.”

He nodded, and at last put the pipe in the corner of his mouth, but made no move yet toward lighting it. “You got chain locks on all the doors? Or could a man get in with a key?”

I said, “The front door you could get in with three keys. The rear door has a chain and a bolt. The emergency door on the side you could get in with two keys. The fire-escape windows are latched on the inside, but once you opened the window you could open the gate with a key. It’s closed with a padlock.”

“Windows disturbed?”

“No. Still latched.”

“Where were you between ten forty-five and eleven seventeen?”

“Partly here, partly doing my rounds.”

He glanced around the room, as though pointing the unfit pipe at different pieces of furniture. “Would you hear somebody coming in the front door?”

“From this room? Not if they were reasonably quiet.”

“What about the side door?”

“Not at all, not from here.”

He looked at me. “Anybody else in here with you tonight?”

Here came my lie. “No,” I said.

When we had first found the body, it had been necessary to make a decision. Keep Linda with me and tell the complete truth, or send her quickly home and play it as though she had never been there. The complete truth—and normal police questions would have brought out the whole thing, from our past affair and Jock’s death and my dismissal in disgrace down to Dink’s current trouble with his former friends—would have, it seemed to me, not only complicated and confused the issue of the dead man with a huge red herring, but would also have strained several lives unnecessarily: Linda’s, Dink’s, Kate’s and mine. Since I had nothing to do personally with the dead man, but was merely the hired guard who had found him, it seemed to me simpler to keep my own story to a minimum. So I had sent Linda away, and now I was telling Detective Grinella one simple lie.

He accepted it without visible qualms, and said, “Anything missing that you noticed?”

“Stolen?”

“Missing. Not here.”

I shook my head. “I’m pretty sure the displays are still intact,” I said. “If you take one picture down from a row, the blank spot is pretty noticeable.” I gestured toward the desks. “If anything was taken from a desk drawer, or from the storeroom downstairs, I wouldn’t know about it.”

“The storeroom? Isn’t that part of your rounds?”

“No. Just the display areas. The door to the basement is kept locked at night.”

“You don’t have a key?”

I pointed at the door behind him. “There’s a complete set of keys on the back of that door. In case of fire, things like that. I don’t carry them around with me.”

He got up and went over to the door, which was completely open against the wall. He pulled it partly closed and looked at the key rack on the back. “They all here?”

I could see from where I was sitting. “Yes.”

He nodded, and came back and sat down again. Taking the pipe from his mouth, he brooded at it, and shook his head. “I’ll never get used to it,” he said. He gave me a sheepish grin, and put the filled but unlit pipe away in his pocket, while at the same time pulling out a crumpled pack of Marlboros. “I’ve been trying to give these things up,” he said. “My wife’s idea. You smoke?”

“Not any more.”

“You’re lucky.” He lit a cigarette, and smiled around it. “I do the pipe pretty good at home,” he said. “But on the job I just need a cigarette. You didn’t call the papers, did you?”

“No.”

“Or a TV station. People do that more and more these days. They used to call a newspaper, but now they call a TV station. Changing times.”

“I suppose so.”

“They’ll love this one, though. Naked, strangled, locked room. You like publicity?”

“Not a bit,” I said.

He grinned. “You could have some now,” he said. “Talk in front of the TV cameras about how you found the body.”

“I’d rather not, if I had the choice.”

“We’ll try and get you out of here before they show up.”

“Thanks,” I said, though I knew he was making the offer at least as much for himself as for me. If the discoverer of the body wasn’t around to be interviewed, more attention would be paid to the detectives on the case.

The other plainclothesman came in at that point and gave me a heavy disgruntled look. “You’ve got a lawyer out here,” he said.

I looked at him. “I do?”

He stood in the doorway and glowered at me. “What do you think you need a lawyer for?”

“I don’t,” I said. “Unless the company sent him.”

“What do
they
need a lawyer for?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“He’s waiting out by the door.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He grunted, and went away.

Detective Grinella said, “I won’t keep you any more. Just give me your name and home address and phone number.”

I waited till he got out pen and note pad, and gave them to him. Then I said, “Does your partner have a reason to be down on me, or is that just his personality?”

Grinella’s face was a study in bland innocence. “I don’t follow you,” he said.

“Okay,” I said.

“You can go now,” he said.

“I’m not sure I can,” I told him. “I’m supposed to be on duty here till seven in the morning.”

“I’m pretty sure we’ll have our own people around all night,” he said. “Why not check that with your lawyer?”

It wasn’t my lawyer, but it seemed pointless to correct him. I collected the bag with my uneaten lunch in it, wished Grinella luck in his campaign against cigarettes, and went down to the main entrance to see the lawyer.

He said his name was Goldrich. He was about fifty, short and brisk and irritable. He looked and acted like a failed Oscar Levant. He said, “They finished with you?”

“Yes.”

“Come on, then. My car’s outside.”

So I wasn’t to work here any more tonight. I went out with him, and we got into his car, a recent Pontiac. The back seat was littered with old magazines, empty paper bags, crumpled cigarette packages and other debris. The ashtray in front was open, and so full of butts that it couldn’t be closed. Road maps and empty diet soft drink cans were on the floor under my feet.

Goldrich started the car, and we drove a block in silence. Then he said, “Where do you live?”

“Queens.”

“So do I. What part?”

I told him, and he offered to drive me home. I accepted, and he patted a cassette tape recorder on the seat between us. “Before I turn this on,” he said, “let me ask you one question off the record. Just between us, and to help me make the right decisions.”

I waited.

He glanced at me, then looked out at the nighttime traffic around us. We were heading down Second Avenue toward the Midtown Tunnel. He said, “Did you do it?”