Lawrence Block - Out on the Cutting Edge

I told her again. As we climbed, I learned that her name was Willa Rossiter and that she’d been the building’s superintendent for some twenty months. She received the apartment rent-free in exchange for her services.

“But it doesn’t really cost the landlord anything,” she said, “because he wouldn’t be renting it anyway. There are three empty apartments in the building beside mine. They’re not for rent.”

“You’d think they’d go fast.”

“They’d go in a minute, and they’d bring a thousand a month, crazy as it sounds. But he’d rather warehouse the empty apartments. He wants to turn the building into a co-op, and every untenanted apartment is ultimately a vote on his side, and an apartment he can sell for whatever the traffic will bear.”

“But in the meantime he loses a thousand a month on each vacancy.”

“I guess it’s worth it to him in the long run. If we go co-op, he’ll get a hundred thousand dollars for each of these rabbit warrens. But that’s New York. I don’t think there’s anyplace else in the country where you could get that for the whole building.”

“Anywhere else in the country, the building would be condemned.”

“Not necessarily. It’s a solid building. It’s over a hundred years old, and these old tenements were cheap working-class housing when they went up. They’re not like the brownstones in Park Slope and Clinton Hill that were very grand in their day. Even so, this is a sound structure. And that’s Mr. Dunphy’s door. In the rear on the right.”

She got to his door and knocked on it, a good strong knock. When no answer came she knocked again, louder. We looked at each other, and she shrugged and fitted her key into the lock. She turned it twice around, first to disengage the dead bolt, then to snick back the spring lock.

As soon as she cracked the door I knew what we were going to find. I gripped her shoulder.

“Let me,” I said. “You don’t want to see this.”

“What’s that smell?”

I pushed past her and went to look for the body.

The apartment was a typical tenement railroad flat, with three little rooms lined up in a row. The hall door led into a living room furnished with a matching couch and armchair and a table-model TV. The armchair’s seat was sprung, and the fabric was worn through on its arms, and on the arms of the couch. There was an ashtray on the table that held the television set. It had a couple of butts in it.

The next room was the kitchen. The stove and sink and refrigerator were in a row against the wall, and over the sink was a window looking out on an airshaft. Away from the appliances stood a large old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub. Some of its porcelain exterior had chipped away to reveal black cast iron. A plywood top, painted a glossy off-white, converted the tub into a dining table. There was an empty coffee cup on top of the tub-table, and another dirty ashtray. There were dishes stacked in the sink, and clean ones in a wire strainer on the drainboard.

The last room was the bedroom, and that was where I found Eddie. He was sitting on the edge of his unmade bed, slumped forward. He was wearing a plain white T-shirt and nothing else. There was a stack of glossy magazines beside him on the bed, and one in front of him on the linoleum-covered floor, this last open to a double-page spread shot of a young woman with her wrists and ankles bound and ropes wrapped elaborately around her body. Her large breasts were tightly wrapped with lamp cord, or something that looked like it, and her face was contorted in an unconvincing grimace of pain and terror.

There was a rope around Eddie’s neck, a noose fashioned from a length of plastic-coated clothesline. Its other end was fastened to a pipe running the length of the ceiling.

“My God!”

It was Willa, come to see for herself. “What happened?” she demanded. “Jesus God, what happened to him?”

I knew what had happened.

The cop’s name was Andreotti. His partner, a light-skinned black patrolman, was downstairs getting a statement from Willa. Andreotti, a bear of a man with shaggy black hair and bushy eyebrows, had followed me up three flights to Eddie’s apartment.

He said, “You were on the job once yourself, so I assume you followed the procedures. You didn’t touch anything or change the position of any article on the scene, right?”

“That’s right.”

“He was a friend of yours and he didn’t show up. What was it, he had an appointment with you?”

“I was supposed to see him yesterday.”

“Yeah, well, he woulda been in no condition to show up. The AME’ll fix a time of death, but I can tell you right now it’s more than twenty-four hours. I don’t care what the book says, I’m opening a window. Why don’t you get the one in the kitchen?”

I did, and the living room window as well. When I came back he said, “So he didn’t show and then what? You called him?”

“He didn’t have a phone.”

“What’s that there?” There was an upended orange crate serving as a bedside bookshelf, and on top of it stood a black telephone with a rotary dial. I said that it was out of order.

“Oh, yeah?” He held the receiver to his ear, cradled it. “So it is. It unplugged or what? No, it oughta work.”

“It had been disconnected some time ago.”

“What was he doing, keeping it as an art object? Shit, I wasn’t supposed to touch it. Not that anybody’s gonna dust the place. We’ll close this one right away, it looks pretty open and shut, don’t you think?”

“From the looks of it.”

“I seen a couple of these. Kids, high school, college age. First one I seen, I thought, shit, this ain’t no way to kill yourself. ’Cause this is a teenage kid that we found in his own clothes closet, if you can picture it, and he’s sitting on an upside-down milk crate, one of those plastic milk crates? And there’s this knotted bedsheet around his neck, and it’s looped around the whatchacallit, the horizontal bar the clothes hangers hang on. Now say you’re gonna hang yourself, that’s not how to do it. ’Cause all you gotta do is stand up the minute you lose your nerve and you take the weight off the rope, or in his case the bedsheet. And if there’s real weight put on, enough to strangle you fast or snap your neck, it’s gonna pull the whole bar down.

“So I was ready to go off half-cocked, figuring somebody strangled the kid and tried to fake a suicide, and did a real ass-backward job of it, too, when fortunately the guy I’m partnered with puts me wise. First thing he points out is the kid’s naked. ‘Autoerotic asphyxiation,’ he tells me.

“I never heard of it before. What it is, it’s a new way to masturbate. You cut off your air by half strangling yourself and it boosts the thrill. Except when you do it wrong like this poor bastard did, and then you’re dead meat. And this is how your family finds you, with your eyes bulging and your cock in your hand.”

He shook his head. “He was a friend of yours,” he said, “but I bet you never knew he was into shit like this.”

“No.”

“Nobody ever knows. High school kids, sometimes they tell each other. With adults, shit, can you picture a grown man telling another guy, ‘Hey, I found this great new way to beat my meat?’ So you weren’t expecting to find what you found. You just figured maybe he had a heart attack, something like that?”

“I was just generally worried that something was wrong.”

“So she opened the door with her passkey. It was locked?”

“Double-locked. The spring lock and the deadbolt.”

“And all the windows shut. Well, that’s pretty clear cut, you ask me. He got any family ought to be notified?”

“His parents were dead. If he had anybody else, he never mentioned it.”