Irwin Shaw: Nightwork

“We trust you. Officer,” the technician said. There was the faintest echo of irony in his voice. He was young, but already an expert at death and despoliation.

The policeman looked through the wallet compartments. He had thick hairy fingers, like small clubs. “That’s funny,” he said.

“What’s funny?” the technician asked.

“There’s no credit cards or business cards or driver’s license. A man with more than a thousand bucks in cash on him.” He shook his head and pushed his cap back. “You wouldn’t call that normal, would you?” He looked aggrieved, as though the dead man had not behaved the way a decent American citizen who expected to be protected in death as in life by his country’s police should have behaved. “You know who he is?” he asked me.

“I never saw him before,” I said. “His name is Ferns and he lived in Chicago. I’ll show you the register.”

The policeman put the wallet into his pocket, went quickly through the shirts and underwear and socks in the bag, then opened the closet door and searched the pockets of the single dark suit and overcoat that were hanging there. “Nothing,” he said. “No letters, no address book. Nothing. A guy with a bad heart. Some people got no more sense than a horse. Look, I got to make a inventory. In the presence of witnesses.” He took out his pad and moved around the room, listing the few possessions, now no longer possessed, of the body on the floor. It didn’t take long. “Here,” he said to me, “you have to sign this.” I glanced at the list. “One hundred and forty-three dollars. One suitcase, brown, unlocked, one suit and overcoat, gray, one hat…” I signed, under the patrolman’s name. The cop put his thick black pad into a back pocket. “Who put the blanket over him?” he asked.

“I did,” I said.

“You find him there on the floor?”

“No. He was out in the corridor.”

“Starkers – like that?”

“Starkers. I dragged him in.”

“What did you want to do that for?” The policeman sounded plaintive now, faced with a complication.

“This is a hotel,” I said. “You have to keep up appearances.”

The policeman glowered at me. “What are you – trying to be smart?” he said.

“No, Officer, I’m not trying to be smart. If I’d left him out where I found him and somebody had come along and seen him, I’d have had my ass chewed down to the bone by the manager.”

“Next time you see a body laying anyplace,” the policeman said, “you just let it lay until the law arrives. Just remember that, see?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“You alone in this hotel all night?”

“Yes.”

“You work in the office au by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“How’d you happen to come up here? He telephone down or something?”

“No. A lady was leaving the building and she said there was a crazy old naked man up on the sixth floor who was making advances toward her.” Objectively, almost as though I were listening to myself on a tape, I noted that I hadn’t stuttered once.

“Sexual advances?”

“She implied that.”

“A lady? What sort of lady?”

“I would think she was a whore,” I said.

“You ever see her before?”

“No.”

“You get a lot of lady traffic in this hotel, don’t you?”

“Average, I would say.”

The policeman stared down at the contorted bluish face on the floor. “How long you think he’s been dead. Bud?”

“Hard to tell. Anywhere from ten minutes to a half hour,” the technician said. He looked up at me. “Did you call the hospital as soon as you saw him? The call came in at three-fifteen.”

“Well,” I said, “first I listened to see it I could get a heartbeat, then I pulled him in here and covered him and then I had to go down to the office and phone.”

“Did you try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?”

“No.”

“Why not?” The technician wasn’t being inquisitive; it was too late at night and he was too tired for that; he was just going through a routine.

“It didn’t occur to me,” I said.

“A lot of things didn’t occur to you, mister,” the policeman said darkly. Like the technician he was going through a routine. Suspicion was his routine. But his heart wasn’t in it and he sounded bored already.

“Okay,” the technician said, “let’s take him away. No sense wasting any time. When you find out what the family wants to do with the body,” he said, addressing me, “call the morgue.”

“I’ll send a telegram to Chicago right away,” I said.

The two ambulance men lifted the body onto the stretcher. “He’s a heavy old sonofabitch [6], isn’t he?” the driver said, as he let the cadaver down. “I bet he ate good, the old goat. Sexual advances. With a droopy old cock like that.” He draped a sheet over the body and strapped the ankles to the foot of the stretcher while the technician buckled a strap across the chest. The elevator was too small to handle the body lying flat and they would have to stand the stretcher up to fit it in. They took the stretcher out into the hall, followed by the policeman. I took a last look around the room and put out the light before closing the door.

“Had a busy night?” I asked the technician pleasantly, as the elevator started down. Be matter-of-fact, normal, I told myself. Obviously it was perfectly normal for all three of these men to carry dead men out of hotels in the middle of the night, and I tried to fit into their standards of behavior.

“This is my fourth call since I came on,” he said. “I’ll trade jobs with you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll still be sitting here all night working an adding machine while you’re raking in the loot year after year.” Now, I thought, why did I use the word loot? “I read the papers,” I said quickly; “doctors make more than anybody else in the country.”

“God bless America,” the technician said as the elevator came to a stop and the door opened. He and the driver picked up the stretcher and I led the way across the lobby. I opened the door for them with my key and watched as they put the body into the ambulance. The policeman at the wheel of the car was asleep, snoring softly, his cap off and his head lolling back.

The technician got into the ambulance with the corpse, and the driver slammed the door shut. He went around to the front and started the motor, revving it loudly. He had the siren going while he was still in first gear.

“What the hell is his hurry?” said the policeman standing on the sidewalk with me. “They’re not going anywhere.”

“Aren’t you going to wake your pal up?” I asked.

“Nah. He wakes up if a call comes for us. He’s got the instinct of a animal. Might as well let him get his beauty rest. I wish I had his nerves.” He sighed, weighed down by cares which his own nerves were not strong enough to support. “Let’s get a look at the register, mister.” He followed me back into the hotel, his tread heavy, the law weighty.

I unlocked the office door. I didn’t look up at the shelf over the safe, where the cardboard tube lay hidden behind the boxes of stationery and the piles of old magazines. “I have a bottle of bourbon in here, if you’d like a slug,” I said, as we went into the front office. Even as I spoke I admired the absolutely matter-of-fact way in which I was behaving. I was running on computers; all the cards were correctly punched. Data input. But it had been an effort not to look up at the shelf.

“Well, I’m on duty, you know,” the policeman said. “But one small slug…”

I opened the register and pointed out the entry for room 602. The policeman slowly copied it out into his black book. The history of the city of New York, faithfully recorded in twenty thousand handwritten pages by the graduates of the Police academy. An interesting archaeological discovery.