Archer Mayor - The sniper's wife

There was the inevitable dark side, of course, and ample evidence of decay. As he neared the Lower East Side-a slum virtually from its inception-where Mary had last lived, this transition grew exponentially, until at last all that was left, up and down her actual street, was a grimy, silent, commerce-free backwater of urban depression: a home for rats, cockroaches, and humanity's rejects.

Willy stood across from his late ex-wife's address and thought back to how often he'd gone to buildings similar to this, both here and in Vermont's grittiest corners, knowing that all he would find would be hopelessness personified.

For a man who pretended he'd lost the habit, this was way too much thinking. Willy took a deep breath and crossed the street.

The security in Mary's building was poor, no great surprise. Willy punched ten of the call buttons above the row of dented, graffiti-decorated mailboxes, got an atonal chorus of mixed replies over the loudspeakers, and at least one person who merely hit the buzzer opening the front door lock.

He decided to reconnoiter first, climbing to the third floor to find the apartment number he'd seen in the lobby under Mary's name, reacquainting himself with the familiar smell of poverty that clung to the walls like fresh paint. One flight up, however, he was stopped by an elderly woman who stepped out from behind her door.

"You ring downstairs?" she asked, her voice sharp and her jaundiced eyes narrowed. "Somebody rang."

He put on a surprised expression. "Me? No. Why?"

She ignored the question. "I don't know you."

He reached into his back pocket with feigned boredom and flashed his Vermont badge too fast for her to read it. It didn't actually look much like a New York detective's gold shield, but it was the right color, and he had the right attitude.

"Believe me, lady, the pleasure's all mine."

Her faced reddened and she slammed the door. He continued upstairs.

On the third floor, he caught sight of the yellow crime scene sticker down the hall to the left. The apartment was halfway to the end, the telltale sticker carefully applied to span where the door met the jamb. He studied the door briefly-old, battered, in need of paint, but undamaged- and gave the knob a tentative twist.

That would have been too lucky.

He checked out the rest of the floor, getting a feel for the place, before retreating back downstairs, past the lobby, and descending to the basement. There, he found a door labeled, "Super," just as he'd hoped.

A small, dark-skinned man with a thick mustache opened the door at the second knock. Willy already had his pad out, opened to a blank page.

"What?" the man asked.

Willy glanced at the pad. "Mr. Martinez? Detective Murphy. I need to get into apartment 318." Seemingly as an afterthought, he did the same dismissive badge flash he'd pulled on the old woman.

The super didn't even glance at it. "My name is Jose Rivera. I don't know Martinez."

Willy flipped back a couple of pages. "Jerks. Somebody screwed up-has you as Martinez in one place, Rivera in another. Typical. You got the key?"

Rivera looked disgusted. "Yeah, I got the key. Why, I don't know. Somebody dies and I lose the place for a year. You watch. What good's a key for a place I can't rent? You people need to fix that. The system stinks, and the apartment stinks, too. All the shit that's in there, and nobody to clean it up. The neighbors bitch and I can't do nothing about it. I had a guy die two years ago and rot for a week before I found out. I lost three places that time- the people next to him moved out 'cause of the smell. Three places I was out." He held up three fingers.

Willy nodded. "Key?"

Rivera stared at him a moment. "You guys," he muttered disgustedly, before unhooking a key from the wall just inside the door. "Here." He pointed to an oldfashioned mail slot cut into his front door. "When you're done with it, put it back here." Back upstairs, Willy paused before Mary's door, again listening to the murmurs of life around him, and more specifically to how well he could hear them. It was a reflex born of years of practice. His pilgrimage here was emotionally stimulated. He wasn't running an investigation. But habits, good and bad, were hard to break, and this one told his subconscious that the walls in this building were as thin as might be expected-and, as the woman downstairs had demonstrated, not without ears.

He carefully slit the police label at its crease, fitted the key to the lock, and pushed the door open.

The smell that swept out to envelop him wasn't staggering, but it wasn't good, either: cloying, sweet, with an overripe pungency that caught in his throat. He began breathing through his mouth and closed the door softly behind him.

He didn't turn on any lights at first. He just stood there, looking around, letting his eyes adapt to the darkness. He could see from the faint glimmer seeping in through the far door facing him that he was already in a small, narrow kitchen. He'd noticed earlier that the building easily dated back a hundred and fifty years, maybe more. The kitchens had probably all been afterthoughts, put in where entryways had once allowed visitors to take off their coats.

Moving slowly, he passed by a counter, sink, and stove to his left, a closet and a shallow pantry on his right. At the doorway opposite, he stopped again.

Light through a dirty window on the right wall etched a glowing rectangle across the floor and partially up the wall beside him, brightly enough that he could see most of the room's details. There was a dark, caved-in couch before him facing the window, a narrow coffee table in front of it, and some shelves lining the wall opposite, bracketing both sides of the window. In the corner across from him was an armchair, covered with a shawl. Hard to his right, doubling back and paralleling the kitchen, was a tiny bathroom, and just beyond its open door was a wooden crate, also draped, supporting a small, ancient television set. A little incongruously, given the cool temperature, there was a plastic electric fan balanced on top of the set.

On the far side of the living room was another open door.

He studied the gore and debris spread across the couch and the floor before it-the bodily fluids showing black, and the gloves and other discarded medical paraphernalia looking like bits of bleached wreckage in the gloom. Overlying it all, quivering and moving with a barely perceptible clicking, a carpet of cockroaches was feasting.

His heart rate didn't increase, he made no gesture or comment, he showed no emotion whatsoever as he recreated in his head the scene that had left such a signature. He could almost see Mary's body sprawled across the couch, and the paramedics doing whatever they routinely did to bodies they had no real intention of reviving.

He'd seen too much of this kind of thing to do anything other than look at it clinically.

He crossed over to the last room in the apartment, noticing as he did that the window overlooked a fire escape and a dark alleyway below, and that the light seeping through it came from an assortment of apartments across the way.

He was now looking into a small bedroom, the darkest corner yet, especially with him filling the doorway. Its one narrow window had been blocked with a colorful poster and jammed shut with a wad of old subway Metro cards. But the lingering odor in here, even tainted by what was behind him, was fresher, cleaner, and faintly scented by intimate memories of a bright-eyed, smiling, happy young woman.

He returned to the living room window, drew down the paper shade for privacy, and began turning on lights.

This should have resulted in a jarring contrast: a place of misery cloaked in darkness, revealed in brittle brightness as even worse than imagined. Instead, the reverse proved true. What Willy discovered was a poor, rundown, seedy little apartment enhanced by paint and colorful fabrics, highlighted by fake flowers and cheerful calendar pictures. The mask couldn't hide the reality of the setting, but the attempt had been heartfelt and thorough, and by and large successful. The mess covering the couch stood out not as confirmation of the lifestyle echoed throughout the rest of the building and the neighborhood, but in gruesome contrast to Mary's concerted efforts to make this hole a home.