Lawrence Block - In the Midst of Death

"Do you want to call him? Or see him for a while? Don't pass him up on my account, Matthew."

"He can wait."

"If you think it's important—"

"It's not. He can wait until tomorrow."

Evidently Fuhrmann didn't think so. A little later the phone rang. Trina answered it and made her way to our table. "Same caller," she said. "Do you want to talk to him?"

I shook my head. "I was in," I said. "I got his message and said something about calling him in the morning. And then I had a drink and left."

"Gotcha."

Ten or twenty minutes later we did leave. Esteban was swinging the midnight-to-eight shift at the desk of my hotel. He gave me three messages, all of them from Fuhrmann.

"No calls," I told him."No matter who. I'm not in."

"Right."

"If the phone rings I'll figure the building's on fire because otherwise I don't want any calls."

"I understand."

We rode up in the elevator, walked down the hallway to my door. I opened it and stood aside to let her in. With her at my side the little room looked starker and more barren than ever.

"I thought of other places we could go," I told her. "A better hotel or a friend's apartment, but I decided that I wanted you to see where I live."

"I'm glad, Matthew."

"Is it all right?"

"Of course it's all right."

We kissed. We held each other for a long time. I smelled her perfume and tasted the sweetness of her mouth. After a time I released her. She moved slowly and deliberately around my room, examining things, getting a sense of the place. Then she turned to me and smiled a very gentle smile, and we began undressing.

All through the night one of us would wake and awaken the other. Then I woke up for the last time and found I was alone. Pale sunlight filtered by bad air gave the room a golden cast. I got out of bed and picked my watch up from the bedside table. It was almost noon.

I had almost finished dressing when I found her note. It was wedged between the glass and the frame of the mirror over my dresser. Her handwriting was very neat and quite small.

I read:

Darling-

What is it that the children say? Last night was the first night of the rest of my life. I have so much to say, but I am in no condition to express my thoughts well.

Please call me. And call me, please,

I read it through a couple of times. Then I folded it carefully and tucked it into my wallet.

There was a single message in my box. Fuhrmann had called a final time around one-thirty. Then he had evidently given up and gone to sleep. I called him from the lobby and got a busy signal. I went out and had some breakfast. The air, which had looked to be polluted from my window, tasted clean enough on the street. Maybe it was my mood. I hadn't felt this well in a long time.

I got up from the table again and called Fuhrmann again after my second cup of coffee. The line was still busy. I went back and had a third cup and smoked one of the cigarettes I had bought for Diana. She had had three or four the previous night, and I had smoked one each time she did. I burned up about half of this one, left the pack on the table, tried Fuhrmann a third time, paid my check, and walked over to Armstrong's just to check if he was there or had been in yet. He wasn't and hadn't.

Something hovered on the edge of consciousness, whining plaintively at me. I used the pay phone at Armstrong's to call him again. The same busy signal, and it sounded different to me from the usual sort of busy signal. I called the operator and told her I wanted to know if a certain number was engaged or if the telephone was simply off the hook. I got a girl who evidently didn't speak much English and wasn't sure how to perform the task I'd asked of her. She offered to put me in touch with her supervisor, but I was only half a dozen blocks from Fuhrmann's place, so I told her not to bother.

I was quite calm when I set out for his place and extremely anxious by the time I got there. Maybe I was picking up signals and they were coming in stronger as the distance decreased. But for one reason or another I didn't ring the bell in his vestibule. I looked inside and saw no one around, and then I used my piece of celluloid to slip the lock.

I climbed the stairs to the top floor without running into anyone. The building was absolutely silent. I went to Fuhrmann's door and knocked on it, called his name, knocked again.

Nothing.

I took out my strip of celluloid and looked at it and at the door. I thought about the burglar alarm. If it was going to go off I wanted to have the door open by the time it began to make noises so I could get the hell out of there. Which ruled out slipping the bolt back. Subtlety has its uses, but sometimes brute force is called for.

I kicked the door in. It only took one kick because the dead bolt had not been set. You need the key to set the dead bolt, just as you need a key to set the alarm, and the person who had last left Fuhrmann's apartment had not had those keys or had not troubled to use them. So the alarm did not go off, which was all to the good, but that was all the good news I was going to get.

The bad news was waiting for me inside, but I'd known what it would be from the instant the alarm had failed to sound. In a sense I'd known before I even reached the building but that was instinctive knowledge, and when the alarm stayed quiet it became deductive knowledge, and now that I could see him it was just cold, hard fact.

He was dead. He was lying on the floor in front of his desk, and it looked as though he had been leaning over his desk when his killer took him. I didn't have to touch him to know he was dead. The left rear portion of his skull was pulped, and the room itself reeked of death. Dead colons and bladders divest themselves of their contents. Corpses, before the working of the undertaker's art, smell as foul as the death that grips them.

I touched him anyway to guess how long he'd been dead. But his flesh was cold, so I could only know that he'd been dead a minimum of five or six hours. I'd never bothered to pick up much knowledge of forensic medicine. The lab boys handle that area, and they're reasonably good at it, if not half so good as they like to pretend.

I went over to the door and closed it. The lock was useless, but there was a plate for a police lock on the floor, and I found the steel bar and set it in place. I didn't intend to stay long but wanted no interruptions while I was there.

The phone was off the hook. There were no other signs of a struggle, so I assumed the killer had taken the phone off the hook to retard discovery of the body. If he was that cute, there weren't going to be any prints around, but I still took the trouble not to add any of my own or smear any that he might inadvertently have made.

When had he been killed? The bed was unmade, but perhaps he didn't make it every day. Men who live alone often don't. Had it been made up when I'd visited him? I thought about it and decided I couldn't be certain one way or the other. I recalled an impression of neatness and precision, which suggested it had indeed been made up, but there was also an impression of comfort, which would mesh well enough with an unmade bed. The more I thought about it, the more I decided it didn't make any difference one way or the other. The medical examiner would fix the time of death, and I was in no rush to know what I would learn from him soon enough.

So I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at Doug Fuhrmann and tried to remember the precise sound of his voice and the way his face had looked.

He had tried to reach me. Over and over again, and I wouldn't take his calls. Because I was a little peeved with him for holding out on me. Because I was with a woman who was using up all my attention, and that was such a novel experience for me that I hadn't wanted it diluted even for a moment.