Dead Letter Drop

1

There is a strange sensation you get when you know someone has entered your room but you haven’t yet seen or heard him. You just feel him there. I got that feeling in my bedroom late one night. It was very late and very dark.

I had had the same chill before on a thousand different occasions, in a thousand different circumstances; a car breaking its grip on a wet road, an aeroplane dropping 5,000 feet in an air pocket, a shadow coming from a dark alley.

There was definitely someone in the room. He wasn’t a friend. Friends don’t drop by into my bedroom at 2.30 in the morning — not on the thirty-second floor of a building where the elevator has been switched off, and the key is in my jacket pocket, hanging on a chair near the bed, where there are 3 Ingersoll ten-lever deadlocks, 2 Chubb two-bolt upright mortices, a Yale No. 1, and a double safety chain, not to mention a 24-hour armed door surveillance, making entry to this building harder than the exit from most jails. He was no friend. I didn’t move. He didn’t move. I had an advantage over him: he thought I was asleep. He had a better advantage over me: he’d probably been in the dark for a long time and his eyes would be well accustomed to it. He had one bigger advantage still: he wasn’t sprawled, stark naked, dripping in baby oil, with one foot manacled to the bedstead, and he didn’t have a quietly sleeping naked bird occupying the 5 feet 11½ inches that separated an extremely greasy hand from an uncocked Beretta.

I spent the next several tenths of a second debating what to do. My visitor obviously wasn’t going to hang about for the rest of the evening — he’d have to have been a very dedicated voyeur to go to such lengths. He certainly wasn’t any kind of cat burglar out to steal anything — the place didn’t have any valuables, neither the Fort Knox nor the National Gallery variety; there was nothing in it that a colourblind midget with an IQ of 24 couldn’t have bought from a Bloomingdale’s sale in half an hour flat for a couple of thousand dollars — and in fact probably had. What there was could best be described as embryonic Jewish Renaissance, and constituted the equivalent amount of personal effects you are likely to encounter walking into a room of a half-built Holiday Inn.

My visitor didn’t seem like he wanted to chat. If he did, he’d probably have opened the dialogue by now. No, the most likely reason for his visit, I concluded in the two-tenths of a second it took me to weigh up the alternatives, was to do some killing.

On account of lack of choice the most likely victims seemed to be either Sumpy or me. Sumpy is a variation of ‘sump’ — a nickname I gave her for her fascination with Johnson’s Baby Oil — at the procreation end, which is what she seemed to think it was for, rather than at the end product of same for which it was originally intended. If the visitor was for her it could only have been some jilted lover; since Houdini had died before she was born I ruled out the possibility of the caller being for her.

All of a sudden I felt lonely. Our house guest must have just about figured out who was who by now; a 9-millimetre silenced parabellum slug for me and a razor for her so she wouldn’t be waking the neighbours with any hollering.

There was no way I could make it to my gun in time. There was no way I could swing my right foot high into the air and bring that bedstead crashing down on his head prior to having to retrieve my brains and most of my skull from my neighbour’s apartment. It was equally unlikely that if I remained still he might go away.

The bang came. Not a quiet, silenced plug sound but a great, hefty, high-velocity, 200-grain magnum .44 explosion, and death descended on me. It was a hot, dark thump; a huge, great weight that crushed my bone and shot the wind out of me, shot all the wind out of me. It was damp and bloody and hurt like hell. It was the son-of-a-bitch visitor himself.

He lay there, sprawled over the top of me, revolver sticking in his mouth and most of the back of his skull deposited out onto Park Avenue.

I sat up, managed to get the lights on. There were shouts. There were yells and footsteps and bells and sirens and pounding sounds, and Sumpy woke up without even opening her eyes and asked if I had gone mad and went back to sleep again.

I disentangled my foot and staggered to the kitchen to put the kettle on — it didn’t look as if I was going to get much more sleep that night. I cracked my head on a cupboard door because I was confused. Reckon I had a right to be. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to commit suicide.