Songs of Innocence

Chapter 14

I flagged down a taxi, blew my last twenty on the trip home. I paid the driver at the corner, folded the few bucks change, and walked the rest of the way to my building. I hadn’t been home since...when? It had been more than a day. Not since I was trying to guess Dorrie’s password. It felt like a very long time ago.

I climbed up the stairs to my apartment, unlocked the door. The curtains were open and blowing in the breeze, but the place stank. Enough light was coming in through the window for me to see an odd bulk on top of my bed. I felt for the light switch, flipped it on.

Miklos’ words came back to me: Go home. He makes you a present of this one.

I stood there with my finger on the light switch and looked at my bed, where Jorge Ramos’ corpse lay.

His throat had been cut. There was blood everywhere, even on the ceiling.

The smell was very strong; only the air flowing through the open window kept it from being stronger.

I swallowed heavily, checked the door behind me. It was closed.

My mind raced. How had they gotten him in here? Unlike Dorrie I did have a fire escape, but could you carry a struggling man Ramos’ size up the outside of a building? Miklos and Ardo were both big men themselves, but that was asking a lot. Then I realized how they must’ve done it: one of them would have climbed up the fire escape, broken in, and unlocked the door from the inside, while the other lured or forced Ramos to my apartment and brought him in the conventional way.

I thought of Ardo and his cavernous grin. They’d spent hours on this, tracking Ramos down and setting him up just so. Just so what? Apparently so I could take the heat for killing him. Two birds with one stone. Sure, maybe I’d tell the cops that Ardo had done it, but would they believe me when I had the dead man’s blood on my shirt, his bloody wallet in my pocket, and his bloody corpse, throat slit from ear to ear, in my bed? But officer, it wasn’t me, Black Ardo did it! Sure he did, son. Sure he did.

Enough. I had to concentrate. I thought about what I needed to do. My first instinct was to get rid of the body somehow, but that was hopeless. Carting a dead body down five flights unnoticed wasn’t a lot easier than carting a live one up. Not when he weighed more than I did. My next thought was to call the police. But I knew how that would go. Maybe I’d beat the rap at trial—maybe—but that would be months from now and until then I’d be locked up. That left one option: run.

I pulled open my shirt, my fingers fumbling with the buttons. One button popped off and went springing along the carpet. I ignored it. I pulled a new shirt from the closet, tugged it over my head, balled up the bloody shirt and the wallet and stuffed both into a plastic garbage bag. I’d find somewhere to get rid of them, somewhere far from here. I took a quick look around. Was there anything I needed? Because I probably wasn’t going to be able to get back in here any time soon.

I couldn’t think of anything. And I was conscious of time ticking away. Who knows what one of my neighbors might have seen or heard. Or smelled.

I took one last look at Ramos’ body. His eyes were open, his lips brown with bloody spittle, his teeth bared.

Who the hell is Jorge Ramos?

Ardo’s words echoed in my head. I wished I knew the answer. He’d come after me and Julie with a gun, and he’d been ready to use it. But why? Who’d sent him?

I let myself out of the apartment, locked up behind me.

I’d made it down to the third floor when I heard footsteps below me, coming up. Heavy footsteps. Familiar heavy footsteps. The labored steps of men carrying thirty pounds of gear. I peeked over the banister and snatched my head back instantly, then turned around and started to climb, two steps at a time. As quietly as I could, as quickly as I could, my heart hammering in my chest.

What had I seen? I’d seen the hairless face of James Mirsky’s partner, and he did not look happy.

I rounded the corner to the fifth floor landing and kept going. The cops would stop there, would knock on my door, would wait for an answer, but they wouldn’t wait long. Those regulation shoes may not have been stylish or comfortable, but they did one hell of a good job when it came to kicking doors in, especially the flimsy ones in these old tenement buildings.

And then they’d find what they were looking for, what surely someone had tipped them off that they would find in my apartment. Because I didn’t believe it was a coincidence that they’d shown up here just minutes after I had. Someone had called them, someone who’d been assigned to watch my building and drop a quarter in a payphone when I came home. And why not? Why should a man like Ardo go to all the trouble of building a neat little frame and then not invest the extra bit of effort needed to ensure his work hadn’t been wasted?

I swung open the door that led from the main stairwell to the short extra flight up to the roof. Seconds later, I was outside. It was a cold night, but clear. Wind-blown clouds scudded beneath the nearly full moon, alternately obscuring and revealing it. I let the door swing shut behind me, holding it so it wouldn’t slam. Then I crossed the overlapping squares of tarpaper to the edge of the roof and looked down. A cop car was parked at the curb, red and blue lights revolving. The fire escape was tempting—but I couldn’t climb down that way without crossing in front of my apartment windows, and that was a sure way to be seen.

Which left only one way off the roof. The buildings on either side were taller than mine, but one wasn’t taller by much. Unfortunately, that was also the one that didn’t abut my building—there was a narrow alleyway that ran between them. Only three feet wide, not much more than an airshaft, but—

But three feet across was still sixty feet down.

I heard a muffled crash below me. That would be my door. Right now they’d be turning on the lights, and in a moment they’d have seen the corpse, and then—

From years of watching old movies on TV, I think I was expecting a shrill whistle to blow, the sound tearing through the night like an alarm. What I heard instead was the crackle of a walkie-talkie, followed by Mirsky’s nasal voice, calling for backup, for a coroner’s van. Through my apartment’s open window, I heard the response. They were on their way. I didn’t have long.

I looked across at the other building. On a level with my roof there was a window—dark, thank god, either the people who lived there weren’t home or they’d drawn the blinds and gone to bed. And the window had a nice, deep sill protruding from the wall—deep enough to hold a good-sized potted plant, and plenty deep enough to stand on. Above the window was a stone balustrade with thin, widely spaced uprights. A person who was standing on the sill wouldn’t have to be especially nimble or strong to grab hold of one of the uprights and pull himself up to the roof above. It wouldn’t require superhuman acrobatics, just basic high-school chin-up skills.

That, and crossing three feet of empty space.

I closed my eyes. What was three feet? New Yorkers made leaps wider than that every time there was a storm, when they strained to step over patches of snow or deep puddles of rainwater at a street corner. But of course sometimes I missed those steps—we all did. And the penalty then was a shoeful of filthy water. The penalty here would be...

Don’t think about it, I told myself. There’s no time. Just go.

I still had the plastic bag with me, the one with the bloody shirt and wallet wadded up inside it. I raised it with both hands, aimed it like a basketball, and released it like a free throw from half court. The bag soared easily above the balustrade, landing with a soft plop on the other roof.

If only I could cross so easily.

I stepped carefully up onto the waist-high parapet at the edge of my roof, took several deep breaths. Beneath me, the alleyway was dark—dark and deep. My Frost came back to me. The woods, I thought. The woods are lovely, dark, and deep. But I have promises to keep. And miles to

I raised my right foot and lunged out with it, into space.

My foot landed on the sill opposite—and I realized, with horror, that I hadn’t thought this through. Because now I had one foot on each building and no way to bring the other one across. I scrabbled with my hands against the wall in front of me. All my weight was on my forward leg, my right leg, but I could feel the other leg pulling me back, and my balance going, and below me, the yawning gulf of the alley, hungrily dragging me down.

And there was a quiet voice that whispered to me in that moment, a seductive voice, a voice that whispered inside my head, saying, So much simpler. No? And: You’re so tired, so very tired. You deserve to rest. And: Why struggle? For what, really? For what?

But then my grasping fingers found one of the uprights of the balustrade over the window and reflexively gripped it, and I used it to pull myself forward, to pull my other leg across. I found another upright with my other hand and stood there, holding on for dear life. My heart was exploding, my ribs ached—but I was steady and stable and alive and over on the other side, and that little voice in my head had shut the fuck up.

I didn’t let go of the balustrade till I’d pulled myself up and over, swinging one leg over the edge of the roof and squeezing through the gap between two uprights. I lay there, breathing ragged breaths, and it was a minute before I could stand. I spotted the plastic bag about twenty feet away. Good thing I hadn’t thrown it harder—it might have gone over the edge and landed in the street, at the feet of the cops.

I dragged open the heavy stairwell door and climbed down the seven stories to the ground floor, then one more to the basement. There was a garbage room here, and a small office furnished with damaged, mismatched pieces: a sofa with one missing foot and a stained cushion; a metal folding chair with no back; a TV stand covered with “Hello Kitty” stickers. Presumably all scrounged by the super from things his tenants had thrown out. The man himself was nowhere to be seen, though the TV was running, so he’d probably be back any minute.

I hunted around till I found the service entrance, opened it, and peeked out. The rear of the building was in shadow. A narrow passage led off between two trees and then took a sharp left turn, leaving me on Bedford Street. There were no cops in sight. Not yet, anyway—I could hear a siren in the distance. I saw an empty cab and wanted desperately to flag it down, but with only a few bucks in my pocket, there was no way I could pay for it. And the last thing I needed right now was a cab driver calling over a cop to complain about his deadbeat fare.

I let the cab go and just walked, as quickly as I could without breaking into a run, toward Leroy Street.