Ed McBain: The Last Dance

She does not, in all truth, enjoy her father's company

very much. She confesses this, too, to the pickup jury

of five men who sit noncommittally around the long

table scarred with the cigarette burns of too many long

interrogations over too many long years. It is almost as

if she has been wishing to confess forever. She has not

yet said a word about Tampering or Obstructing, but she

seems willing to confess to everything else she has ever

done or felt. It suddenly occurs to Carella that she is a

woman who has nobody to talk to. For the first time in her

life, Cynthia Keating has an audience. And the audience is giving her its undivided attention.

"He's a bore," she tells them. "My father. He was a

bore when he was young, and now that he's old, he's an

even bigger bore. Well, he used to be a nurse, is that an occupation for a man? Now that he's retired, all he can talk about is this or that patient he remembers when he worked at 'The Hospital.' I don't think he even remembers which hospital it was. It's just 'The Hospital.' This or that happened at 'The Hospital.' It's all he ever talks about."

The detectives notice that she is still referring to her father in the present tense, but this is not uncommon, and does not register as anything significant. They are patiently waiting for her to get to Tampering and Obstruction. That is why they are here. They want to know what happened in that apartment between nine o'clock last night and ten-oh-seven this morning, when she dialed .

She has dressed for today's weather in a green tweed

skirt and turtleneck sweater she bought at the Gap. Low-heeled walking shoes and pantyhose to match the skirt. She likes walking. The forecasters have promised rain for later today . . .

It is, in fact, still raining as she continues her recita

tion, but none of the people in the windowless room know

or care about what's happening outside . . .

. . . and so she is carrying a folding umbrella in a tote bag slung over her shoulder. The subway station isn't far

from her apartment. She boards the train at about twenty

to nine, and is across the river and in the city forty minutes

later. It is only a short walk to her father's building. She enters it at about nine-thirty. She remembers seeing the

super putting out his garbage cans. Her father lives on

the third floor. It is not an elevator building, he can't afford that sort of luxury. His wonderful days at "The Hospital" left him precious little when he retired. As she climbs the stairs, the cooking smells in the hallway make her feel a bit nauseous. She pauses for breath on the third-floor landing, and then walks to apartment A and knocks. There is no answer. She looks at her watch. Nine thirty-five. She knocks again.

The things he does often cause her to become impa

tient at best or exasperated at worst. He knows she is coming here this morning, she told him last night that she'd be here. Is it possible he forgot? Has he gone out somewhere for breakfast? Or is he simply in the shower? She has a key to the apartment, which he gave to her after the last heart attack, when he became truly frightened he might die alone and lie moldering for days before anyone discovered his corpse. She rarely uses the key, hardly knows what it looks like, but she fishes in her bag among the other detritus there, and at last finds it in a small black leather purse that also contains the key to his safe deposit box, further insurance against a surprise heart attack.

She slips the key into the keyway, turns it. In the silence of the morning hallway—most people off to work already, except the woman somewhere down the hall cooking something revoltingly vile-smelling—Cynthia hears the small oiled click of the tumblers falling. She turns the knob, and pushes the door open. Retrieving her key, she puts it back into the black leather purse, enters the apartment. . .

"Dad?"

. . . and closes the door behind her.

Silence.

"Dad?" she calls again.

There is not a sound in the apartment.

The quiet is an odd one. It is not the expectant stillness of an apartment temporarily vacant but awaiting imminent

return. It is, instead, an almost reverential hush, a solemn

silence attesting to permanency. There is something so

complete to the stillness here, something so absolute that

it is at once frightening and somehow exciting. Something

dread lies in wait here. Something terrifying is in these rooms. The silence signals dire expectation and sends a

prickling shiver of anticipation over her skin. She almost

turns and leaves. She is on the edge of leaving.

"I wish I had," she says now.

Her father is hanging on the inside of the bathroom

door. The door is opened into the bedroom, and his hanging figure is the first thing she sees when she enters the room. She does not scream. Instead, she backs away and collides with the wall, and then turns and starts to leave again, actually steps out of the bedroom and into the corridor beyond, but the mute figure hanging there calls her back, and she steps into the bedroom again, and moves across the room toward the figure hanging on the inside of the bathroom door, a step at a time, stopping before each step to catch her breath and recapture her courage, looking up at the man hanging there and then looking down again to take another step, watching her inching feet, moving closer and closer to the door and the grotesque figure hanging there.

There is something blue wrapped around his neck.

His head is tilted to one side, as if it had dropped that way when he fell asleep. The hook is close to the top

of the door, and the blue—scarf, is it? a tie?—is looped

over the hook so that her father's toes are an inch or so off

the floor. She notices that he is barefoot and that his feet

are blue, a blue darker and more purplish than the fabric

knotted around his throat. His hands are blue as well, the

same dark purplish-blue that resembles an angry bruise

all over the palms and the fingers and the backs of the

hands, open as if in supplication. He is wearing a white shirt and gray flannel trousers. His tongue is protruding

from his mouth. It appears almost black.

She steps up close to his body hanging there.

She looks up into his face.

"Dad?" she says, disbelievingly, expecting him to

stick his tongue out farther, perhaps make a razzing sound, break into a grin, she doesn't know what, something, anything that will tell her he's playing a game, the way he used to play games with her when she was a little girl, before he got old . . . and boring. . . and dead. Dead, yes. He does not move. He is dead. He is really and truly dead and he will never grin at her again. She stares into his wide-open eyes, as green as her own, but flecked with pinpricks of blood, her own eyes squinched almost shut, her face contorted not in pain, she feels no pain, she doesn't even feel any sense of loss or abandonment, she has not known this man for too long a time now. She feels only horror and shock, and anger, yes, inexplicable anger, sudden and fierce, why did he do this, why didn't he call somebody, what the fuck is the matter with him?

"I never use such language," she tells the five men

listening to her, and the room goes silent again.

The police, she thinks. I have to call the police. A

man has hanged himself, my father has hanged himself,

I have to notify the police. She looks around the room.

The phone. Where's the phone? He should have a phone

by the bed, he has a heart problem, a phone should always

be within—

She spots the phone, not alongside the bed but across

the room on the dresser, would it have cost him a fortune to install another jack? Her mind is whirling