Out on the Cutting Edge

6

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.”

In the living room he said, “You willing to make a formal identification? In the absence of next of kin, we ought to have somebody ID him.”

“He’s Eddie Dunphy.”

“Okay,” he said. “That’s good enough.”

Willa Rossiter was in 1-B. It was a rear apartment and had the same floor plan as Eddie’s, but it was on the east side of the building so everything was reversed. And someone had modernized the plumbing in her unit, and there was no tub in her kitchen. Instead she had a two-foot-square stall shower in the small water closet off the bedroom.

We sat in her kitchen at an old tin-topped table. She asked me if I’d like something to drink and I said I’d welcome a cup of coffee.

“All I’ve got is instant,” she said. “And it’s decaf at that. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather have a beer?”

“Instant decaf is fine.”

“I think I want something stronger myself. Look at me, how I’m shaking.” She held out a hand, palm toward the floor. If it was in fact trembling it didn’t show. She went to the cupboard over the sink and got out a fifth of Teacher’s and poured about two ounces into a Flintstones jelly glass. She sat down at the table with the bottle and the glass in front of her. She picked up the glass, looked at it, then drank off half the whiskey in a single swallow. She coughed, shuddered, heaved a sigh.

“That’s better,” she said.

I could believe it.

The kettle whistled and she fixed my coffee, if you could call it that. I stirred it and left the spoon sitting in the cup. It’s supposed to cool faster that way. I wonder if it really does.

She said, “I can’t even offer you milk.”

“I drink it black.”

“There’s sugar, though. I’m positive of that.”

“I don’t use any.”

“Because you don’t want to mask the true flavor of the instant decaf.”

“Something like that.”

She drank the rest of her scotch. She said, “You recognized the smell right away. That’s how you knew what you would find.”

“It’s not a smell you forget.”

“I don’t expect to forget it. I suppose you walked into a lot of apartments like that when you were a cop.”

“If you mean apartments with dead bodies in them, yes, I’m afraid I did.”

“I guess you get used to it.”

“I don’t know if you ever get used to it. You generally learn to mask your feelings, from others and from yourself.”

“That’s interesting. How do you do that?”

“Well, drinking helps.”

“Are you sure you won’t—”

“No, I’m positive. How else do you stop yourself from feeling anything? Some cops get angry at the deceased, or express contempt for him. When they bring the body downstairs, more often than not they drag the bag so the body bounces down the steps. You don’t want to see that when the guy in the body bag was a friend of yours, but for the cops or the morgue crew, it’s a way to dehumanize the corpse. If you treat him like garbage, you won’t agonize as much over what happened to him, or have to look at the fact that it could happen to you someday.”

“God,” she said. She added whiskey to her glass. It showed Fred Flintstone with a goofy grin on his face. She capped the bottle, took a drink.

“How long since you were a cop, Matt?”

“A few years.”

“What do you do now? You’re too young to be retired.”

“I’m a sort of private detective.”

“Sort of?”

“I don’t have a license. Or an office, or a listing in the Yellow Pages. Or much of a business, as far as that goes, but people turn up from time to time wanting me to handle something for them.”

“And you handle it.”

“If I can. Right now I’m working for a man from Indiana whose daughter came to New York to be an actress. She lived in a rooming house a few blocks from here, and a couple of months ago she disappeared.”

“What happened to her?”

“That’s what I’m supposed to be trying to find out. I don’t know a hell of a lot more than I did when I started.”

“Is that why you wanted to see Eddie Dunphy? Was he involved with her?”

“No, there was no connection.”

“Well, there goes my theory. I had a flash just now that he’d gotten her to pose for one of those magazines, and the next thing you knew she was in a snuff film, and you can take it from there. Do they really exist?”

“Snuff films? Probably, from what I hear. The only ones I ever came into contact with were pretty obvious fakes.”

“Would you watch a real one? If someone had a print and invited you to watch it.”

“Not unless I had a reason.”

“Curiosity wouldn’t be enough of a reason?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think I’d have that much curiosity on the subject.”

“I wonder what I would do. Probably watch it and then wish I hadn’t. Or not and wish I had. What’s her name?”

“The girl who disappeared? Paula Hoeldtke.”

“And there was no connection between her and Eddie Dunphy?” I said there wasn’t. “Then why did you want to see him?”

“We were friends.”

“Longtime friends?”

“Fairly recent.”

“What did the two of you do, go shopping for magazines together? I’m sorry, that’s a callous thing to say. The poor man’s dead. He was your friend and he’s dead. But the two of you seem like unlikely friends.”

“Cops and criminals sometimes have a lot in common.”

“Was he a criminal?”

“He used to be, in a small-time way. It was an easy thing to grow up into, raised in these streets. Of course this neighborhood used to be a lot rougher than it is now.”

“Now it’s getting gentrified. Yuppified.”

“It’s still got a ways to go. There are some hard people living on these blocks. The last time I saw Eddie he told me about a homicide he’d witnessed.”

She frowned, her face troubled. “Oh?”

“One man beat another to death with a baseball bat in a basement furnace room. It happened some years ago, but the man who swung the bat is still around. He owns a saloon a few blocks from here.”

She sipped her whiskey. She drank like a drinker, all right. And I don’t think it was her first of the day. I’d noticed something on her breath earlier, probably beer. Not that that meant she was a lush. When you stop drinking, you become unnaturally sensitive to the smell of the stuff on other people. She’d probably just had a beer with her lunch, the way most of the world does.

Still, she drank neat whiskey like an old hand. No wonder I liked her.

“More coffee, Matt?”

“No thanks.”

“You sure? It’s no trouble, the water’s still hot.”

“Not just yet.”

“It’s pretty lousy coffee, isn’t it?”

“It’s not that bad.”

“You don’t have to worry about hurting my feelings. I haven’t got a whole lot of ego tied up in my coffee, not when it comes out of a jar. There was a time I used to buy beans and grind my own. You should have known me then.”

“I’ll settle for knowing you now.”

She yawned, extending her arms overhead, stretching like a cat. The movement drew her breasts into relief against the front of her flannel shirt. A moment later she had lowered her arms and the shirt was once again loose on her, but I remained aware of her body, and when she excused herself to go to the bathroom I watched her as she walked from the table. Her jeans were tight on her butt, worn almost white on the cheeks, and I stared after her until she was out of the room.

Then I looked at her empty glass, and the bottle standing next to it.

When she came back she said, “I can still smell it.”

“It’s not in the room, it’s in your lungs. It’ll take a while to get rid of it. But the windows are open up there and the apartment’ll air out fast enough.”

“It doesn’t matter. He won’t let me rent it.”

“Another one for him to warehouse?”

“I expect so. I’ll have to call him later, tell him he lost a tenant.” She gripped the base of the bottle with one hand, spun the oversize cap with the other. There were no rings on her fingers, no polish on her nails. She wore a digital watch with a black plastic strap. Her fingernails were clipped short, and one thumbnail showed a white spot near the base.

She said, “How long has it been since they took the body out? Half an hour? Any minute now there’ll be somebody ringing my bell, asking if his apartment’s available. People are like vultures in this town.” She poured a little whiskey into her glass and Fred Flintstone grinned his silly grin. “I’ll just say it’s rented.”

“And meanwhile people sleep in the subway stations.”

“And on park benches, but it’s getting too cold for that now. I know, I see them all over, Manhattan’s starting to look like a Third World country. But the people on the streets couldn’t rent one of these apartments. They haven’t got a thousand a month.”

“And yet the ones who do get city housing wind up costing more than that. The city pays something like fifty dollars a night to house people in single rooms in welfare hotels.”

“I know, and they’re filthy and dangerous. The welfare hotels, I mean. Not the people.” She sipped her drink. “Maybe the people, too. As far as that goes.”

“Maybe.”

“Filthy and dangerous people,” she sang tunelessly, “in filthy and dangerous rooms. Now there’s an urban folk song for the Eighties.” She put both hands behind her head and fiddled with the rubber band that was holding her hair in place. Once again her breasts pushed against the front of her shirt, and again I was drawn to them. She unfastened the rubber band, combed her hair with her fingers, gave her head a shake. Loose, her hair fell past her shoulders and framed her face, softening its lines. Her hair was several different shades of blond, ranging from very light tones to a medium brown.

She said, “The whole thing is crazy. The whole system is rotten. That’s what we used to say, and it looks as though we were right all along. About the problem, if not about the solution.”

“We?”

“Hell, yes, all two dozen of us. Christ.”

She was, it turned out, a woman with a past. Twenty years ago she’d been a college kid in Chicago for the Democratic Convention. She’d lost two teeth to a police baton when Daley’s cops lost it and rioted. Already radicalized, the incident propelled her into an SDS offshoot, the Progressive Communist Party.

“In all innocence,” she said, “we wound up with the same initials as angel dust. Of course this was twenty years ago and dust didn’t amount to much, but then neither did we. Our total membership never exceeded thirty. And we were going to start a revolution, we were going to turn the country around. Government ownership of the means of production, complete elimination of class lines, an end to discrimination on the basis of age or sex or color — the thirty of us were going to lead the rest of the country to heaven. I think we really believed it, too.”

She gave the movement years of her life. She would move to some city or town, get a job waitressing or working in a factory, and do whatever she was ordered to do. “The orders didn’t necessarily make sense, but unquestioning obedience to party discipline was part of the deal. You weren’t supposed to notice if the instructions made sense or not. Sometimes two of us would be ordered to move to Dipshit, Alabama, and rent a house and live as man and wife. So two days later I’d be shacked up in a trailer with somebody I barely knew, sleeping with him and fighting about who’d do the dishes. I’d say he was trapped in his old sexist roles if he expected me to do all the housework, and he’d remind me that we were supposed to blend in with our surroundings, and how many househusbands with elevated consciousness were you going to find in your average redneck trailer park? And then two months later, when we’d just about got it worked out, they’d send him to Gary, Indiana, and me to Oklahoma City.”

Sometimes she was ordered to talk to fellow workers with the goal of recruiting new members. A few times she’d performed unfathomable acts of industrial sabotage. Often she went someplace to await further instructions, and no instructions came; finally she’d be moved somewhere else, and told to wait some more.

“I can’t really convey what it was like,” she said. “Maybe I should say that I can’t really remember what it was like. The party became your whole life. You were isolated from everything else because you were living a lie, so you never got past the surface stage in relationships outside the party. Friends and neighbors and fellow workers were just part of the scenery, props and stage dressing in the false front you were presenting to the world. Besides, they were just pawns in the great chess game of history. They didn’t know what was really going on. That was the heady part, the drug — you got to believe that your life was more significant than other people’s.”

Five years ago she’d begun to get profoundly disillusioned, but it took a while before she was ready to write off such a big portion of her life. It was like a poker game — you were reluctant to fold a hand when you already had so much invested in it. She fell in love finally with someone who was not in or of the movement, and defied party discipline by marrying him.

They moved to New Mexico, where the marriage fell apart. “I realized the marriage was just a way out of the PCP,” she said. “If that’s what it took, so be it. You know what they say about ill winds. I got a divorce. I moved here. I became a super because I couldn’t figure out how else to get my hands on an apartment. How about you?”

“What about me?”

“How’d you get here? And where is it you’ve got to?”

I’d been asking myself the same goddamned questions for years.

“I was a cop for a long time,” I said.

“How long?”

“Close to fifteen years. I had a wife and kids, I lived in Syosset. That’s on Long Island.”

“I know where it is.”

“I don’t know that you could say I got disillusioned. One way or another the life stopped suiting me. I quit the police force and I moved out, got a room on Fifty-seventh Street. I’m still there.”

“A rooming house?”

“A little better than that. The Northwestern Hotel.”

“You’re either rich or rent-controlled.”

“I’m not rich.”

“You live alone?” I nodded. “Still married?”

“The divorce went through a long time ago.”

She leaned forward and put a hand on top of mine. Her breath was richly seasoned with scotch. I wasn’t sure I liked smelling it that way, but it was a lot easier to take than the smell in Eddie’s apartment.

She said, “Well, what do you think?”

“About what?”

“We looked on death side by side. We told each other the story of our lives. We can’t get drunk together because only one of us is drinking. You live alone. Are you involved with anybody?”

I had a sudden sense-memory of sitting on the sofa in Jan’s loft on Lispenard Street, with Vivaldi chamber music playing and the smell of coffee brewing.

“No,” I said. “I’m not.”

Her hand pressed down on mine. “Well, what do you think, Matt? Do you want to fuck?”