William Bayer - Blind Side

I was feeling pretty high when I finished. Moody, too. Outside I wandered around for a while. Though the heat was crushing, there were the usual Sunday crowds. At Battery Park I found a place on a bench, stared out at the gleaming harbor and watched the boats pass back and forth. Then I wandered over to the Vietnam War Memorial, raised my Leica and took some photographs.

I walked home through the empty financial district. I found the same wino I'd seen in the morning by the Poe plaque, shirt off now, taking in the rays. When he saw me walking toward him with my camera around my neck, he held up an imaginary camera of his own.

I took his picture. He took mine.

"Gotcha, Shutterbug!" he said.

Back in the studio, I lay down on my bed. I must have fallen asleep. At 7:00 P.m. I woke up, suddenly feeling scared.

When she didn't show at the restaurant, I had assumed it was deliberate, an act of calculated contempt. Now I realized that instead of thinking of myself, I should have been worrying about her.

Had something happened to her? An accident? Or, and the question finally emerged from the shadows, had her explanation for her panic the night before been an attempt to cover up some actual danger she had faced and now had met?

I phoned her apartment again, and this time, when I heard the message, Shadow's mellifluous delivery rang false. Appropriate perhaps for a downtown disco girl, but a little slick for a serious model. Kimberly, I knew, would never have left a message like that. Kimberly, I knew, had too much class.

No point in going up to their place-if no one was home there'd be no one there to let me in. I decided I'd have to keep calling until someone finally answered the phone.

I called again at eight, and then every hour after that until eleven o'clock, meanwhile watching a movie on TV. It was a thriller about cops investigating a pair of bizarre homicides in New York. The lead detective's girlfriend was a photographer; at one point the psychotic killer began to track and terrorize her. The closer the detective came to catching the bad guy, the closer the bad guy came to killing the detective's girl. By the time the show was over I was wild with anxiety. Meantime my messages became increasingly frantic: "Even if you want this sour old photographer out of your life," I told the machine, "Please call to let him know you're safe."

Later, lying in bed, not knowing what to feel, I decided to give her number a final try. I got the same recording, but this time, after Shadow said ". . . you can bet on it," I found I had no words to say. So I just breathed into the receiver, the way a telephone heavy breather might, and then, I don't know why, I got this feeling there was someone at the other end smiling smugly to herself.

I woke early, dialed the number, and this time there was no recorded message. I let the phone ring and ring, and, when there was still no response, dialed again to make sure I'd dialed right. Still no answer. There was only one thing to do. I gulped down my coffee, dialed one last time, then dashed downstairs and up Nassau to the subway, where I grabbed an uptown express.

Though I'd never been inside her apartment, I knew her building well. It was similar to a thousand other anonymous dirty-white-brick monstrosities that dot the cross streets of the Upper East Side. There was no doorman; you had to buzz your way in.

"Stewardess buildings," a friend of mine calls them-buildings where a gang of flight stewardesses will rent a unit for betweenflight shack-ups and rest.

I found the buzzer marked "Devereux/Yates," rang it, waited, then rang again. No answer. I was sure they were up there. The machine was off, which meant one or both of them were home, probably asleep with the phone unplugged. I gave the button another push, and this time held it down. I doubted anyone could sleep through a blast like that. But still there was no response.

I stepped back to the sidewalk. The sun was beating down furiously. I was thinking I might locate their window and throw something at it that would wake them up when I saw a man in the inner hallway moving toward the door. I went back to the lobby. If he opened up and came out, I would try to slip past him pretending I was a resident. But he didn't come out. He stood in the doorway, looking directly at me.

"Hey, buddy? You ringing three-A?" He was husky, bearded, dressed in fatigue pants, with a big ring of keys hanging from his belt. He wore a dark green Marine Corps T-shirt wet under the arms, and his biceps sported nautical tattoos.

"Yeah, that's right," I said.

"Ain't home," he said.

"Just up there myself." He was staring at me in a peculiar way.

"I'm the super," he explained.

"I think they are up there," I said.

"Their answering machine's not on."

"That's 'cause I turned it off. they cleared out most everything, 'cept for that."

"You turned it off"

"They're gone, mister. Flown the coop."

"Impossible," I said.

"Kim Yate amp;-" He smiled. "She's a friend, uh-huh…… I didn't like his intonation, or the way he smiled either.

"What do you mean-you turned it off?"

He studied me a moment before he spoke.

"they took a powder. Pulled out yesterday. Left the furniture, TVall rented stuff. But the clothes are gone. And so are all the shoes. Those girls had lots of shoes." He shrugged.

"They're like that, you know. Here one day, gone the next. And no forwarding address neither. Case they owe you money, you want to find them again." He grinned and showed his teeth.

e was waiting for me to say something, but I was too ned to reply.

'Want to see the apartment?" I nodded.

"Cost you some." I pulled out my wallet, peeled off a ten. He sniffed.

"Quick looksee's all you get for that."

I gave him another ten, his grin grew a little wider, and he beckoned me through the door.

We rode the elevator up in silence. At the third floor he motioned me down the hall. The walls were covered with a cheap green flock. The row of identical doors, each bearing a number and a peephole, reminded me of a dormitory corridor.

The door to 3-A was open. The moment we walked in I knew he was right. The place looked like an empty motel room. The living room furniture, knock-down Scandinavian type, was set awkwardly at one end. There were no books in the bookcase. The wall-to-wall carpeting was beige and nondescript. A small TV, of obscure Korean manufacture, sat beside a cable decoder, a phone and an answering machine in the corner on the floor.

"Couple days from now, after I paint her up, we'll have this place rented out again. Higher rent too. They'll pay anything these days, girls will, just to be in a nice safe neighborhood."

He led me through an archway to the bedrooms. Each one contained a queen-sized bed, mattress exposed and bare. All the bureau drawers were cleaned out, and the closets were open and empty. I stepped into the bathroom. Half a bar of soap was melting in a soap dish and a couple of damp towels lay in a tangle in the tub. The toilet seat bore one of those fuzzy pink covers. The medicine cabinet was open. There was a crushed tampon box on the shelf.

"Cleaned out pretty good," the super said.

"Swept up most of the garbage myself." He walked me back through the bedrooms.

"See those?" He pointed, chuckled.

"Couldn't take those with them, could they?"

I think I was in a kind of daze because it took me a while to figure out what he meant. I looked at him, and he pointed again, first at the closet doors, which were faced with mirrors, and then at the ceilings above the beds where mirrors were mounted too. He laughed.

"What's so funny?"

"Hey, buddy, I'm the super. My job's keep the building neat and clean. they pulled out over the weekend. Neighbors seen one of 'em moving suitcases and crap, yesterday and Saturday too. You gotta expect the old quick exit with girls like that." He looked at me. "they come and go-" The guy was starting to annoy me.