Lawrence Block: A Long Line of Dead Men

From the doorway of the apartment house, she watched him get on the elevator, watched the doors close behind him. There was a panel of numbers above the elevator that lit up when the car was moving to show you what floor it was on. She couldn't make it out from the entrance, but when the elevator had finished its ascent she walked through the unattended lobby and pressed the button to summon it. The 5 lit up right away.

"So he's on the fifth floor," she said. "I don't know which apartment."

And she thought he was there now. She couldn't swear to it, because she had a job to do, making change for people, washing and drying and folding clothes for customers who paid extra to drop their laundry with her and pick it up later. So she'd been unable to spend every moment watching the entrance of his building, but she'd watched it as much as she could, and she hadn't seen him leave.

I stayed in the Laundromat, not wanting to risk running into him in the lobby or being spotted from a fifth-floor window, while TJ checked the bells and mailboxes. He came back with a list of the fifth-floor tenants. There were twelve apartments on the fifth floor, and there was a nameplate in every doorbell and mailbox slot. None of the surnames began with an S.

I slipped out the door with my face averted, walked to the corner of 116th Street, then crossed the street and walked back to the building where Severance had been spotted. I rang the super's bell, and a voice came over the static-ridden intercom. I said, "Investigation. Like to talk to you." He told me to come to the basement and buzzed me through the door.

I rode down on the elevator, walked past a padlock door marked LAUNDRY and another marked STORAGE. At the end of the corridor was an open door. Inside a white-haired man was watching television and drinking coffee. His hands were arthritic, their backs dark with liver spots. I showed him the sketch and he didn't recognize it at first. I said I believed the gentleman was living on the fifth floor. "Oh," he said, and got out a pair of reading glasses and took another look.

"I didn't place him at first," he said. "It's Silverman."

"Silverman?"

"Five-K. Subletting from the Tierneys."

Kevin Tierney was on the faculty at Columbia, his wife a teacher at a private school in the West Eighties. The two had the summer off and were spending it in Greece and Turkey. Shortly before they left, they had introduced Joel Silverman as a friend who would be staying in their apartment.

"But he wasn't no friend of theirs," he said. "All that month they were bringing people in, showing the place. They didn't want to notify the landlord and sublet formally, so as soon as somebody took the place he becomes their friend, if you take my meaning. Tierney gave me a couple bucks to look the other way, which was decent of him, no question, but it shows you where he's coming from, don't it?" And what kind of tenant was Silverman?

"I never see him. That's why I didn't recognize him right off, not until you said fifth floor. No complaints from him, no complaints about him. Be okay with me if they were all like him."

If I'd been a cop, with a warrant and some backup and a Kevlar vest, I would have gone right in. I'd have put a man on the fire escape and others on the exits, and gone through the door with a gun in my hand.

Instead we waited across the street at the Laundromat. TJ and I took turns keeping an eye on the entrance across the street, and on the one set of 5-K's windows that were visible from our vantage point. TJ kept coming up with stratagems for gaining access to the apartment. He could pose as a delivery boy, as a student of Professor Tierney's, as an exterminator come to spray for roaches. I told him we'd just wait.

Shortly before sunset a light came on in Severance's window. I was on the phone when it happened, and TJ pointed it out to me. Now we knew that he was still in there, that he hadn't slipped out before we reached the scene, or while we were looking the other way.

TJ went around the corner and brought back pizza and a couple of Cokes. I made another telephone call. The light went out across the street.

TJ said, "What's that mean? He goin' to sleep?"

"Too early."

Five minutes later he was standing in front of his building, wearing a T-shirt and a pair of army fatigues. His hair was cut shorter than the last time I'd seen him, but it was unmistakably him.

"Go," I told TJ.

"You got the beeper?"

"I've got everything. Try to keep him in sight, but I'd rather have you lose him than let him spot you. If you do lose him, beep me and let me know. You know the code."

"Got it all writ down."

"After you beep me, come back here where you can watch the entrance. Beep me again when you see him come home. It's no big deal if you lose him, but try not to let him spot you."

He grinned. He said, "Hey, don't worry, Murray. Nobody spots the Shadow."

I'd acquired a set of keys from the super, easing his conscience with cash. One of them let me into the building. The other two opened the dead-bolt locks on the door of apartment 5-K. I let myself into the darkened apartment, drew the door shut, and refastened the locks. Without turning on any lights, I moved around the apartment, getting a feel of the place. There was a good-sized living room, a small bedroom, a windowed kitchen, and an office in what must originally have been a smaller second bedroom.

I sat down and waited.

The time would have passed faster if I could have read a book from the Tierneys' enormous library, but I didn't want to risk a light in the window. I left the television set off for the same reason. The boredom was part of the territory, but fatigue was a problem. My mind drifted, and my eyes kept wanting to close. I went into the kitchen, looking for something that might keep me awake, and found a half-full sack of unground coffee beans in the refrigerator. I stuck a handful in my pocket, chewing one from time to time. I don't know what did more for me, the caffeine or the bitter taste, but one way or another my eyes stayed open.

Some forty-five minutes after I got there, TJ's beeper sounded. We'd worked out a whole system of two-digit signals, but he'd punched in a whole seven-digit number. I picked up the phone and dialed it.

He answered the instant it rang. His voice pitched low, he said, "We in the movies. I followed him over to Broadway an' down. You know how people keep lookin' over their shoulders, seein' if they bein' followed? He didn't do that."

"It's probably a good thing."

" 'Cept I thought maybe he's bein' slick. Maybe he just goin' to duck into the movies and then slip out a side exit. Minute he bought the large-size popcorn I knew I didn't have to worry. Man's in for the duration, Jason."

"You're in the theater?"

"Phone in the lobby. I went in, saw where he's sittin'. Soon's I hang up I'll go back where I can keep an eye on him. Won't be keepin' no eye on the screen, tell you that. You know what he had to see?"

"What?"

"Jurassic Park."

"You already saw that, didn't you?"

"Seen it twice. Man, I so sick of dinosaurs. They wasn't extinct, I'd go out an' kill 'em myself."

The show was scheduled to break at 10:15, and we added a new signal to our battery of codes. At twenty after ten the beeper sounded and I saw that he'd punched in 5-6, indicating that they had left the theater. In the course of the next hour he beeped me three times, each time with the same code, 2-4, indicating he was still in contact with Severance. Another beep came at ten to twelve, and the 1-1 meant Severance was entering the building.

I switched off the beeper. I didn't want it making any sounds. I moved to a chair to the left of the doorway.

I got out the gun, the one I'd been carrying since I got the first call that afternoon. I turned it over in my hands, trying to get accustomed to the feel of it.