by Alan Glynn
On the ride back up to the seventeenth floor I could smell the food from the brown paper bag, and wished that I’d got something for myself besides the black coffee. I was alone in the elevator and toyed with the idea of appropriating one of Vernon’s strips of Canadian bacon, but decided against it on the grounds that it would be too sad, and – with the suit on a wire hanger – also a little difficult to manoeuvre.
I got out of the elevator, walked along the corridor and around the corner. As I approached Vernon’s apartment, I noticed that the door was slightly open. I edged it open further with my foot and stepped inside. I called out Vernon’s name and went along the hallway to the living-room, but even before I got there I sensed that something was wrong. I braced myself as the room came into view, and started back in shock when I saw what a complete mess the place was in. Furniture had been turned over – the chairs, the bureau, the wine-rack. Pictures on the wall were askew. There were books and papers and other objects tossed everywhere, and for a moment it was extremely difficult to focus on any one thing.
As I stood there in a state of paralysis, holding up Vernon’s suit and the brown paper bag and the Boston Globe, two things happened. I suddenly locked on to the figure of Vernon sitting on the black leather couch, and then, almost simultaneously, I heard a sound behind me – footsteps or a shuffling of some kind. I spun around, dropping the suit and the bag and the newspaper. The hallway was dark, but I saw a shape moving very quickly from a door on the left over to the main door on the right, and then out into the corridor. I hesitated, my heart starting to beat like a jack-hammer. After a moment, I ran along the hallway and out through the door myself. I looked up and down the corridor but there was no one there. I rushed on as far as the end and just as I was turning the corner into the longer corridor I heard the elevator doors sliding closed.
Partly relieved that I wasn’t going to have to confront anyone, I turned and walked towards the apartment, but as I did so the figure of Vernon on the couch suddenly flashed back into my head. He was sitting there – what… pissed off at the state of his living-room? Wondering who the intruder was? Calculating the cost of having the bureau repaired?
Somehow none of these options sat easily with the image I had in my mind, and as I got closer to the door I felt a stabbing sensation in my stomach. I went in and made my way down to the living-room, pretty much knowing at this stage what I was about to see.
Vernon was there on the couch, all right, in exactly the same position as before. He was sitting back, his legs and arms splayed out, his eyes staring directly ahead of him – or rather, appearing to stare, because clearly Vernon wasn’t capable of staring at anything any more.
I stepped closer and saw the bullet-hole in his forehead. It was small and neat and red. Despite having always lived in New York City I’d never actually seen a bullet-hole before, and I paused over it in horrified fascination. I don’t know how long I stood there, but when I finally moved I found that I was shaking, and almost uncontrollably. I simply couldn’t think straight, either, as though some switch in my brain had been flipped, causing my mind to deactivate. I shifted on my feet a couple of times, but these were false starts, and led nowhere. Nothing was getting through to the control centre, and whatever it was that I should have been doing I wasn’t doing – which meant, therefore, that I was doing nothing. Then, like a meteor crashing to earth, it hit me: of course, call the fucking police, you idiot.
I looked around the room for the telephone and eventually saw it on the floor beside the upturned antique bureau. Drawers had been removed from the bureau and there were papers and documents everywhere. I went over to the phone, picked it up and dialled 911. When I got through to someone I started babbling and was quickly told, Sir – please… calm down, and was then asked to give a location. I was immediately put through to someone else, someone in a local precinct presumably, and I babbled some more. When I finally put the phone down, I think I had given the address of the apartment I was in, as well as mentioning my own name and the fact that someone had been shot dead.
I kept my hand on the receiver of the phone, clenching it tightly, possibly in the mistaken belief that this was still actually doing something. The thing was, I had a lot of adrenalin to deal with now, so after a bit of rapid reflection I decided that it would be better to keep busy, to do something requiring concentration, and that pointedly not looking at Vernon’s body on the couch would probably be a help as well. But then I realized that there was something I had to do in any case, regardless of my mental state.
I started shuffling through the papers around the upturned bureau and after a couple of minutes found what I was looking for, Vernon’s address book. I flicked it open to the M section. There was one number on this page, and it was Melissa’s. She was Vernon’s next of kin.
Who else was going to tell her?
I hadn’t spoken to Melissa in I couldn’t remember how long – nine, ten years – and here now in front of me was her telephone number. In nine or ten seconds I could be talking to her.
I dialled the number. It started ringing.
Shit.
This was all unfolding a bit too quickly.
Rinnnnnggg.
Click.
Hum.
Answering machine. Fuck, what did I do?
The next half minute of my life was as intense as anything I could remember in the previous thirty-six years. First, I had to listen to what was undeniably Melissa’s voice saying, I’m not here right now, please leave a message, though in a tone I found disconcertingly unfamiliar, and then I had to respond to her recorded voice by recording my own voice saying that her brother – who was here with me in the room – was dead. Once I’d opened my mouth and started speaking, it was too late, and I couldn’t stop. I won’t go into the details of what I said to her, mainly because I can’t remember what I said, not exactly anyhow – but whatever… the point is that when I’d finished and had put the phone down, the strangeness of it all hit me suddenly and I was overwhelmed for a few moments by an uneasy mix of emotions… shock, self-disgust, grief, heartache… and my eyes filled up with tears…
I took a few deep breaths in an effort to control myself, and as I stood at the window, looking out over the city’s blur of architectural styles, one thought kept running through my mind: at this time yesterday I hadn’t even bumped into Vernon yet. Until that very moment on Twelfth Street I hadn’t spoken to him in nearly ten years. Neither had I spoken to his sister, or really thought that much about her – but now here I was in the space of less than a day getting myself re-entangled in her life and in a period of my own life that I thought had gone for ever. It was one of those imponderables of existence that months, even years, can go by without anything significant happening, and then suddenly a cluster of hours comes along, or even of minutes, that can blow a hole in time a mile wide.
*
I turned away from the window – flinching at the sight of Vernon on the couch – and walked over towards the kitchen area. It had been ransacked as well. The cupboards had been opened and gone through, and there were broken plates and pieces of glass all over the floor. I looked back at the mess in the living-room, and my stomach sank yet again. Then I turned and went along the hallway to the door on the left, which led into the bedroom, and it was the same in there – drawers had been pulled out and emptied, the mattress had been upturned, there were clothes everywhere, and a large cracked mirror lay on the floor.
I wondered why it had been necessary to make such a mess, but in my confused state – and obvious as it was – it still took me a couple of minutes to get it… of course, the intruder had been looking for something. Vernon must have opened the door to him – which also meant he’d known him – and when I came back I must have interrupted him. But what had he been looking for? I felt a quickening of my pulse even as I formed the question.
I reached down and lifted up one of the emptied drawers. I stared into it and flipped it over. I did the same with the other
drawers, and it wasn’t until I was going through some shoe-boxes on a high shelf in the closet a couple of minutes later that I realized two things. First, I was leaving my finger-prints all over the place, and second, I was actually searching Vernon’s bedroom. Neither of these things was a good idea, not by any stretch of the imagination – but the question of leaving finger-prints in the bedroom was especially worrisome in the short term. I had given the cops my name and when they arrived I fully intended telling them the truth – or at least most of the truth – but if they found out that I’d been poking around in here, my credibility would surely be undermined. I could be charged with disturbing a crime scene maybe, or with evidence-tampering, or I might even be implicated in the crime itself, so I immediately began retracing my steps, using the sleeve of my jacket to wipe over as many of the objects and surfaces I had touched as possible.
Standing in the doorway a few moments later, I looked back into the room to check that I hadn’t missed anywhere. For some reason which I can’t explain, I then looked up at the ceiling – and in doing this I noticed something quite odd. The ceiling was a grid of smallish square panels and one of them, directly above the bed, seemed to be slightly out of alignment. It looked as if it had recently been disturbed.
At the same time as I noticed this, I heard a police siren in the distance, and I hesitated for a moment, but then I went over to the bed, stood on it and reached up to the loose panel. I pushed it out of position and peered into the dimness above, where I could just barely make out pipes and ducts and aluminum casing. I stuck my hand up and felt inside and around the edges. My fingers came into contact with something. I reached in further, straining my arm muscles, and grabbed whatever it was, pulling it down out of the square hole. It was a large, brown padded envelope, which I let fall on to the upturned mattress.
Then I paused and listened. There were two sirens wailing now, maybe three, and they were definitely in the vicinity.
I reached back up to the ceiling and repositioned the loose panel as best I could. Then I got down off the bed and picked up the envelope. I quickly ripped it open and tossed the contents out on to the mattress. The first thing I saw was a little black notebook, then a thick roll of bills – I think they were all fifties – and, finally, a large plastic container with an air-lock seal across the top, a bigger version of the one Vernon had produced from his wallet in the bar the previous afternoon. Inside it were – I don’t know – maybe three hundred and fifty, four hundred, five hundred of the tiny white pills…
I stared down at them, with my mouth open – stared down at what was possibly as many as five hundred doses of MDT-48. Then I shook my head and started doing rapid calculations. Five hundred, say, by five hundred… that was, what… $250,000? A mere three or four of these things, on the other hand, and I could have my book finished in a week. I looked around me, acutely aware all of a sudden that I was in Vernon’s bedroom, and that the sirens – which had been getting louder as I opened the envelope – were now winding down, and in unison.
After another moment of hesitation I gathered all the stuff up off the mattress and put it back into the envelope. Carrying it under my arm, I went into the living-room and over to the window. Way down at street level I could see three police cars clustered together, their blue lights rotating. There was a buzz of activity now as uniformed officers appeared out of nowhere, as passers-by stopped to look and comment, and as the cross-street traffic on Ninetieth began clogging up.
I rushed over to the kitchen and searched for a plastic bag. I found one from the local A & P and stuffed the envelope into it. I went down the hallway and out the main door, making sure that I left it open. At the far end of the corridor – in the opposite direction from the elevators – there was a large metal door I’d seen earlier, and I ran towards it. The door opened on to the emergency stairs. To the left of the stairs, there was a small area where the garbage chute was located, and a concrete alcove with a broom and some boxes in it. I dithered for a second, before deciding to run up the stairs to the next level, and then up to the next level again. There were four or five unmarked cardboard boxes stacked in the alcove. I put the plastic bag in behind these boxes, and without looking back I ran down the stairs again, taking the steps two or three at a time. I stumbled out through the metal door, still running, and back into the corridor.
With a couple of yards to go, I heard the elevator doors opening, and then a rising tide of voices. I got to the door of the apartment and slipped in. I went as fast as I could down the hallway and into the living-room – where of course at the shock of seeing Vernon again my heart lurched violently sideways.
Totally out of breath now, I stood in the middle of the room, panting, wheezing. I put my hand on my chest and leant forward, as though trying to ward off a coronary. Then I heard a gentle tap on the door outside and a circumspect voice saying, ‘Hello… hello,’ – a pause, and then – ‘police.’
‘Yep,’ I said, my voice catching a little between breaths, ‘in here.’
Just to be busy, I picked up the suit I’d dropped earlier, and the bag with the breakfast in it. I placed the bag on the glass table and the suit on the near side of the couch.
A young cop in uniform, about twenty-five years old, appeared from the hallway. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, consulting a tiny note-book, ‘… Edward Spinola?’
‘Yes,’ I said, feeling guilty all of a sudden – and compromised, and like a bit of a fraud, and a low-life – ‘yes… that’s me.’
6
OVER THE NEXT TEN OR FIFTEEN MINUTES, the apartment was invaded by what seemed like a small army of uniformed officers, plainclothes detectives and forensics technicians.
I was taken aside – over to the kitchen area – and quizzed by one of the uniforms. He took my name, address, phone number and asked me where I worked and how I knew the deceased. As I answered his questions, I watched Vernon being examined and photographed and tagged. I also watched two plainclothes guys hunkering down beside the antique bureau, which was still on its side, and sifting through the papers on the floor all around it. They passed documents and letters and envelopes to each other, and made comments that I couldn’t hear. Another uniform stood by the window talking into his radio, and another one again was in the kitchen looking through the cupboards and the drawers.
There was a dream-like quality to the way the whole process unfolded. It had a choreographed rhythm of its own, and even though I was in it, standing there answering questions, I didn’t really feel a part of it – and especially not when they zipped Vernon up in a black bag and wheeled him out of the room on a gurney.
A few moments after this happened, one of the plainclothes detectives came over, introduced himself to me and dismissed the uniformed officer. His name was Foley. He was medium height, wore a dark suit and a raincoat. He was balding and overweight. He fired some questions at me, stuff about when and how I’d found the body, which I answered. I told him everything, except the part about the MDT. As evidence to back up what I’d been saying, I pointed at the dry-cleaned suit and the brown paper bag.
The suit was laid out flat on the couch and was just up from where Vernon’s body had been. It was wrapped in plastic film, and looked eerie and spectral, like an after-image of Vernon himself, a visual echo, a tracer. Foley looked at the suit for a moment, too, but didn’t react – clearly not seeing it the way I saw it. Then he went over to the glass table and picked up the brown paper bag. He opened it and took out the items inside – the two coffees, the muffin, the Canadian bacon, the condiments – and laid them out along the table in a line, like the fragments of a skeleton displayed in a forensics laboratory.
‘So, how well did you know this… Vernon Gant?’ he asked.
‘I saw him yesterday for the first time in ten years. Bumped into him in the street.’
‘Bumped into him in the street,’ he said, nodding his head and staring at me.
‘And what line of work was he in?’
‘I don’t
know. He used to collect and deal furniture when I knew him.’
‘Oh,’ Foley said, ‘so he was a dealer?’
‘I-’
‘What were you doing up here in the first place?’
‘Well…’ I cleared my throat at this point, ‘… like I said, I ran into him yesterday and we decided to meet up – you know, chew over old times.’
Foley looked around. ‘Chew over old times,’ he said, ‘chew over old times.’ He obviously had the habit of repeating lines like this, under his breath, half to himself, as though he were mulling them over, but it was clear that his real intention was to question their credibility, and to undermine the confidence of whoever he was speaking to at the time.
‘Yes,’ I said, letting my irritation show, ‘chew over old times. Anything wrong with that?’
Foley shrugged his shoulders.
I had the uneasy feeling that he was going to circle around me for a while, pick holes in my story, and then try to extract a confession of some kind. But as he spoke, and fired more questions at me, I noticed that he’d begun eyeing the coffee and the wrapped-up muffin on the table, as though all he wanted or cared about in the world was to sit down and have some breakfast, and maybe read the funny papers.
‘What about family, next of kin?’ he said, ‘you have anything on that?’
I told him about Melissa, and how I’d phoned and left a message on her answering machine.
He paused and looked at me. ‘You left a message?’
‘Yes.’
He actually did mull this one over for a moment and then said, ‘The sensitive type, huh?’
I didn’t respond, although I certainly wanted to – wanted to hit him. But at the same time I could see his point. Even from the remove of a mere thirty or forty minutes, what I’d done by leaving that message now seemed truly awful. I shook my head and turned away towards the window. The news itself was bad enough, obviously – but how much worse was it going to be for her hearing it from me, and on an answering machine? I sighed in frustration, and noticed that I was still shaking a little.
