Lawrence Block - A Ticket To The Boneyard

One can only imagine. Just what he did is uncertain, as is the time he arrived at the Twenty-fifth Street apartment and the time he left it. He may have been there while I stood in the courtyard behind the building, peering up through the fire escape at his window and listening to the rats scuttling among the garbage cans. He may have been on the other side of the apartment door while I was in front of it, looking for light under the door, listening for sounds within. I doubt it myself. I don't think he stayed in the apartment for very much longer than the time it took him to change his clothes for his victim's, but there's no way to know. At four-thirty, while Mick Ballou and I were having an early breakfast at the diner, he was entering the lobby at 345 East Fifty-first.

He found the easy way to get through all those locks. He got her to open them for him.

First he presented himself to the doorman. He showed up in full police regalia and announced that he'd come to talk with one of the building's tenants, a woman named — and here he flipped his notebook's black leather cover and read the name off — a woman named Elaine Mardell.

The doormen were never supposed to let anyone in unannounced, and they'd received special instructions recently as far as visitors for Miss Mardell were concerned. Even so, the doorman might not have called on the intercom if Motley had cautioned him against it. A blue uniform cuts through a lot of rules and regulations.

Any NYPD officer looking at him would have seen an Auxiliary Police uniform. If you knew what to look for it wasn't hard to spot the difference. His badge was a seven-pointed star instead of a shield, his shoulder patch was different, and of course he wasn't wearing a holstered firearm. But everything else was right, and there are so many different kinds of cops in the city, Transit Police and Housing Police and all, that he looked good enough to get by.

In any event, he asked the doorman to use the intercom. The attendant had to ring a few times — she was sound asleep at the time — but eventually she came to the phone and the doorman told her that a police officer was asking to speak to her. And handed the phone to Motley.

He probably changed the pitch of his voice. This wouldn't have been necessary. Her intercom distorted voices all by itself, but he might not have known that. Anyway, except for a couple of phone calls she hadn't heard his voice in twelve years, and her doorman had just announced that the caller was a cop, and she was fresh out of bed and barely had her eyes open.

He told her he had to ask her some questions regarding an urgent matter. She asked for more details, and he let out that there had been a homicide earlier that evening, and that the victim was someone presumably known to her. She asked him who it was. He said it was a man named Matthew Scudder.

She told him to come up. The doorman pointed him to the elevator.

When she looked through the peephole she saw a cop. His brimmed cap concealed the shape of the top of his head. He was wearing a pair of drugstore glasses, and he had the notebook in front of him so that the shape of his chin was concealed. That was probably unnecessary, because she was expecting a cop, she'd just talked to him, for God's sake, and here he was in uniform. And she was in a state anyway because somebody was trying to kill her and the man she'd been counting on for protection was dead.

So she unlocked all her locks and let him in.

He was in her apartment for over two hours. He had the knife with which he'd killed Andy Echevarria, a spring-powered stiletto with a five-inch blade. He had Echevarria's nightstick. And of course he had his own two hands, with their long strong fingers.

He used them all on Elaine.

I haven't wanted to think too much about what he did, or the order in which he did it. I suspect there must have been intervals during which she was unconscious, and I'm sure he spent a fair part of the time talking to her, telling her just how strong and brilliant and resourceful he was. Maybe he quoted Nietzsche, or some other genius from the prison library.

When he walked out of there he left her sprawled on her living-room floor with her blood soaking into the white rug. It's possible he thought she was already dead. She would have been in shock, with her breathing imperceptibly shallow and all her vital signs muted. She was still breathing, though, and her heart was still beating, but she would have died there on the floor if it hadn't been for the doorman.

He was a Brazilian, tall and heavyset, with a headful of glossy black hair and a belly that strained the buttons of his uniform. His name was Emilio Lopes. Something began bothering Lopes an hour or so after he showed Motley to the elevator. Finally he picked up the intercom and called upstairs to make sure everything was all right.

He rang a few times and no one picked up. The ringing of the intercom may have prompted Motley to hurry his work and get out of there. When he did leave, striding hurriedly through the lobby around seven o'clock, something in his manner set off Lopes's internal alarm. He rang through on the intercom again, and of course there was no answer. Then he remembered the sketch he'd been shown, the portrait of the one man who most emphatically was not to be given access to Miss Mardell's apartment, and it struck him that the police uniform might have covered that very man. The more he thought about it, the surer he was.

He abandoned his post and went upstairs. He rang the bell and pounded on the door. He tried the door, and it was locked; Motley had pulled it shut. The police locks were unengaged, as was the deadbolt, but the spring lock was enough to secure the door and it engaged automatically when you closed the door.

He turned away, intending to go back downstairs and root around for a passkey. Failing to find one, perhaps he would phone the local precinct. But then something made him turn back again and do what not one doorman in twenty would have done.

He drew back his foot and kicked the door. He kicked a second time, hard, and he was a big man and his legs were strong from carrying his bulk around all day long. They'd always been strong; when he was younger and lighter his legs had been strong from soccer.

The spring lock gave and the door flew open. He saw her on the rug and ran across the room to kneel at her side. Then he got up and crossed himself and picked up the phone and called 911. He knew it was too late but he did it anyway.

And that's what must have happened while I was drinking coffee at the Flame and walking uptown to Mother Goose, while I sat there listening to quiet jazz, while I paid out money to Brian and to Danny Boy. While I traded stories with Mick Ballou, and scared the rats away from their garbage feast, and breakfasted on scrapple in view of the Hudson. While I sat in a car on the other side of that river and watched the sun come up over the city.

I may have some of the details wrong, and I'm sure there are things that happened that I don't know about, and never will. But I think that's pretty close to the way it went down. In any case, I'm sure of one thing. It happened just the way it was supposed to happen. Andy Echevarria might argue the point, and so might Elaine, but just check with Marcus Aurelius. He'll explain the whole thing to you.

New York Hospital is at York and Sixty-eighth. My cab dropped me at the emergency-room entrance and the woman behind the desk determined that Elaine Mardell had come down from surgery and was in the intensive-care unit. She pointed to a floor plan of the building and showed me how to get to the ICU.

A nurse there told me they only allowed immediate family in the ICU. I said the patient didn't have any family, that I was probably as close to family as she had. She asked the nature of our relationship, and I said we were friends. She asked if we were intimate friends. Yes, I said. Intimate friends. She wrote my name on a card, and made a notation.