Out on the Cutting Edge
Page 12

I'd told her I was looking for an E. Dunphy in the 400 block of West Fifty-first Street. She didn't have that, but she showed a P. J. Dunphy at 507 West Fifty-first, which could put him three or four doors west of Tenth Avenue. That sounded likely. It had been his mother's apartment, and he wouldn't have bothered to change the way the phone was listed.
Number 507 was like its neighbors, an old-law tenement six stories tall. Not all of the bells and mailboxes had nameplates, but there was a slip of white cardboard in the slot next to the bell for 4-C with dunphy hand-lettered on it.
I rang his bell and waited. After a few minutes I rang it again and waited some more.
I rang the bell marked super. When the buzzer sounded in response I pushed the door and let myself into a dim hallway that smelled of mice and cooked cabbage and stagnant air. Down at the end of the hall a door opened and a woman emerged. She was tall, with straight shoulder-length blond hair secured with a rubber band. She wore blue jeans that were starting to go at the knee and a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and the top two buttons unbuttoned.
"My name's Scudder," I told her. "I'm trying to locate one of your tenants. Edward Dunphy."
"Oh, yes," she said. "Mr. Dunphy's on the fourth floor. One of the rear apartments. I think it's 4-C."
"I tried his bell. There was no answer."
"Then he's probably out. Was he expecting you?"
"I was expecting him."
She looked at me. She'd appeared younger from a distance but at close range you could see that she had to be crowding forty. She carried the years well enough. She had a high broad forehead with a sharply defined widow's peak, a jawline that was strong but not severe. Good cheekbones, interesting facial planes. I had kept company with a sculptor long enough to think in those terms, and the breakup had been too recent for me to have lost the habit.
She said, "Do you think he's upstairs? And not answering his bell? Of course it's possible that it's out of order. I fix them when the tenants report them, but if you don't get many visitors you wouldn't necessarily know that your bell wasn't functioning. Do you want to go up there and knock on his door?"
"Maybe I'll do that."
"You're worried about him," she said. "Aren't you?"
"I am, and I couldn't tell you why."
She made up her mind quickly. "I have a key," she said. "Unless he's changed the lock, or put on an extra one. God knows I would, in a city like this one."
She returned to her own apartment, came back with a ring of keys, then double-locked her own door and led the way up the stairs. Other smells joined the mouse and cabbage scents in the stairwell. Stale beer, stale urine. Marijuana. Latin cooking.
"If they change the locks, or add new ones," she said, "I'm supposed to get the key. There's actually a clause to that effect in the lease, the landlord has the right of access to all apartments. But nobody pays any attention to it, and the owner doesn't care, and I certainly don't care. I've got a key that's marked 4-C, but that doesn't mean it's likely to open anything."
"We'll try it."
"That's all we can do."
"Well, it's not quite all," I said. "Sometimes I'm not too bad at opening a lock without the key."
"Oh, really?" She turned to give me a look. "That must be very useful in your profession. What are you, a locksmith or a burglar?"
"I used to be a cop."
"And now?"
"Now I'm an ex-cop."
"No kidding. You told me your name but I lost it."
I told her again. As we climbed, I learned that her name was Willa Rossiter and that she'd been the building's superintendent for some twenty months. She received the apartment rent-free in exchange for her services.
"But it doesn't really cost the landlord anything," she said, "because he wouldn't be renting it anyway. There are three empty apartments in the building beside mine. They're not for rent."
"You'd think they'd go fast."
"They'd go in a minute, and they'd bring a thousand a month, crazy as it sounds. But he'd rather warehouse the empty apartments. He wants to turn the building into a co-op, and every untenanted apartment is ultimately a vote on his side, and an apartment he can sell for whatever the traffic will bear."
"But in the meantime he loses a thousand a month on each vacancy."
"I guess it's worth it to him in the long run. If we go co-op, he'll get a hundred thousand dollars for each of these rabbit warrens. But that's New York. I don't think there's anyplace else in the country where you could get that for the whole building."
"Anywhere else in the country, the building would be condemned."
"Not necessarily. It's a solid building. It's over a hundred years old, and these old tenements were cheap working-class housing when they went up. They're not like the brownstones in Park Slope and Clinton Hill that were very grand in their day. Even so, this is a sound structure. And that's Mr. Dunphy's door. In the rear on the right."
She got to his door and knocked on it, a good strong knock. When no answer came she knocked again, louder. We looked at each other, and she shrugged and fitted her key into the lock. She turned it twice around, first to disengage the dead bolt, then to snick back the spring lock.
As soon as she cracked the door I knew what we were going to find. I gripped her shoulder.
"Let me," I said. "You don't want to see this."
"What's that smell?"
I pushed past her and went to look for the body.
* * *
The apartment was a typical tenement railroad flat, with three little rooms lined up in a row. The hall door led into a living room furnished with a matching couch and armchair and a table-model TV. The armchair's seat was sprung, and the fabric was worn through on its arms, and on the arms of the couch. There was an ashtray on the table that held the television set. It had a couple of butts in it.
The next room was the kitchen. The stove and sink and refrigerator were in a row against the wall, and over the sink was a window looking out on an airshaft. Away from the appliances stood a large old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub. Some of its porcelain exterior had chipped away to reveal black cast iron. A plywood top, painted a glossy off-white, converted the tub into a dining table. There was an empty coffee cup on top of the tub-table, and another dirty ashtray. There were dishes stacked in the sink, and clean ones in a wire strainer on the drainboard.
The last room was the bedroom, and that was where I found Eddie. He was sitting on the edge of his unmade bed, slumped forward. He was wearing a plain white T-shirt and nothing else. There was a stack of glossy magazines beside him on the bed, and one in front of him on the linoleum-covered floor, this last open to a double-page spread shot of a young woman with her wrists and ankles bound and ropes wrapped elaborately around her body. Her large breasts were tightly wrapped with lamp cord, or something that looked like it, and her face was contorted in an unconvincing grimace of pain and terror.
There was a rope around Eddie's neck, a noose fashioned from a length of plastic-coated clothesline. Its other end was fastened to a pipe running the length of the ceiling.
"My God!"
It was Willa, come to see for herself. "What happened?" she demanded. "Jesus God, what happened to him?"
I knew what had happened.
The cop's name was Andreotti. His partner, a light-skinned black patrolman, was downstairs getting a statement from Willa. Andreotti, a bear of a man with shaggy black hair and bushy eyebrows, had followed me up three flights to Eddie's apartment.
He said, "You were on the job once yourself, so I assume you followed the procedures. You didn't touch anything or change the position of any article on the scene, right?"
"That's right."
"He was a friend of yours and he didn't show up. What was it, he had an appointment with you?"
"I was supposed to see him yesterday."
"Yeah, well, he woulda been in no condition to show up. The AME'll fix a time of death, but I can tell you right now it's more than twenty-four hours. I don't care what the book says, I'm opening a window. Why don't you get the one in the kitchen?"
I did, and the living room window as well. When I came back he said, "So he didn't show and then what? You called him?"
"He didn't have a phone."
"What's that there?" There was an upended orange crate serving as a bedside bookshelf, and on top of it stood a black telephone with a rotary dial. I said that it was out of order.
"Oh, yeah?" He held the receiver to his ear, cradled it. "So it is. It unplugged or what? No, it oughta work."
"It had been disconnected some time ago."
"What was he doing, keeping it as an art object? Shit, I wasn't supposed to touch it. Not that anybody's gonna dust the place. We'll close this one right away, it looks pretty open and shut, don't you think?"
"From the looks of it."
"I seen a couple of these. Kids, high school, college age. First one I seen, I thought, shit, this ain't no way to kill yourself. 'Cause this is a teenage kid that we found in his own clothes closet, if you can picture it, and he's sitting on an upside-down milk crate, one of those plastic milk crates? And there's this knotted bedsheet around his neck, and it's looped around the whatchacallit, the horizontal bar the clothes hangers hang on. Now say you're gonna hang yourself, that's not how to do it. 'Cause all you gotta do is stand up the minute you lose your nerve and you take the weight off the rope, or in his case the bedsheet. And if there's real weight put on, enough to strangle you fast or snap your neck, it's gonna pull the whole bar down.
"So I was ready to go off half-cocked, figuring somebody strangled the kid and tried to fake a suicide, and did a real ass-backward job of it, too, when fortunately the guy I'm partnered with puts me wise. First thing he points out is the kid's naked. 'Autoerotic asphyxiation,' he tells me.
"I never heard of it before. What it is, it's a new way to masturbate. You cut off your air by half strangling yourself and it boosts the thrill. Except when you do it wrong like this poor bastard did, and then you're dead meat. And this is how your family finds you, with your eyes bulging and your cock in your hand."
He shook his head. "He was a friend of yours," he said, "but I bet you never knew he was into shit like this."
"No."
"Nobody ever knows. High school kids, sometimes they tell each other. With adults, shit, can you picture a grown man telling another guy, 'Hey, I found this great new way to beat my meat?' So you weren't expecting to find what you found. You just figured maybe he had a heart attack, something like that?"
"I was just generally worried that something was wrong."
"So she opened the door with her passkey. It was locked?"
"Double-locked. The spring lock and the deadbolt."
"And all the windows shut. Well, that's pretty clear cut, you ask me. He got any family ought to be notified?"
"His parents were dead. If he had anybody else, he never mentioned it."
"Lonely people dyin' alone, it'd break your heart if you let it. Look how thin he is. The poor son of a bitch."