by Parnell Hall
I didn’t take ’em. When I turned the corner of the 3rd floor landing there were people on the stairs. Four of ’em. They were standing right in the spot where Sherry Webber fell.
I hadn’t seen these four on my way up the stairs. I was sure of it. I’d have remembered ’em. The guys I’d seen before had seemed scary to me, but these guys were something else. It was as if, as soon as I’d got into Sherry Webber’s apartment, they had been rushed over by Central Casting to play the part of junkies. They were too good to be true. Motorcycle jackets. Army coats. Chains. Headbands. Sideburns. Mustaches. Two-day growths. Missing teeth. Scars. And, so help me god, an eyepatch.
One of the guys was holding a glass pipe up for a second guy, who was sucking on it. A third guy was holding a cigarette lighter the size of a butane torch up to the pipe. The fourth guy was just kind of drooling and waiting his turn.
Holy shit! Crack addicts!
I looked at them. They looked at me. Shit. What was I going to do? One thing I knew I was not going to do was whip out my camera and start taking accident photos. Sorry, Richard, but I’m about to break one of your rules. If I get out of here alive, I’ll explain it to you.
I couldn’t just stand there. And I wasn’t going back up. So I started down the stairs.
And one of them, the fourth guy who’d been waiting his turn, said, “Hey, let the man through.”
I wasn’t sure whether he meant “man” as in “person,” or “the Man” as in “cop,” but I wasn’t going to question him on it. I kept going.
And they parted for me, like the sea, the one guy even taking his mouth from the pipe.
I pushed through them, mumbling, “Sorry, guys,” and pounded on down the stairs.
I took the last flight of steps rather fast. In fact it was an effort not to take ’em two at a time.
The lobby was still mobbed. I felt as if I were running a gauntlet. I weaved through the people to the front door and out.
I half ran, half walked to my car. I unlocked the door, got in, locked the door, switched off the code alarm, gunned the motor, and got the hell out of there. I wheeled around the corner, drove a block, took another corner, and headed west to the relative safety of Broadway.
I pulled into a meter, shut the car off, and sat there.
Holy shit! I thought the projects were dangerous. How bad is it going to be? Put a red star next to this one.
I sat there for about fifteen minutes, which was how long it took me to calm down. When I finally did, and I finally realized I was alive and out of there, and everything was all right, I began to think somewhat rationally and take stock of my situation.
As far as my job was concerned, unless something came in on the beeper, I was through for the day. I had no other assignments, except for taking Sherry Webber’s accident pictures, and I’d made up my mind to tell Richard he could damn well have some other investigator who carried a gun go back and take those. So there I was in Harlem with time on my hands and nothing to do.
Except for Pamela Berringer.
Which is why, after thinking it over, I decided to call on Darryl Jackson. I didn’t know what I was going to tell him. I had no plan or anything. But I realized no matter how long I thought about it, I wasn’t going to come up with any plan. So what the hell, I might as well sound him out. Maybe I’d learn something that would suggest a plan. Maybe I wouldn’t. At any rate, I wouldn’t be any worse off than I was now. Besides, the time was right for it. I wasn’t any too keen about calling on some black pimp in Harlem, but then, after Sherry Webber’s place, how bad could it be?
I checked the address in my notebook. It was in the West 120’s. I pulled a U-turn on Broadway and headed downtown.
The address was a brownstone a couple of blocks east of Broadway. It wasn’t a particularly inviting-looking building, but the front door was propped open. And there was no one in the foyer, which put it about ten notches above Sherry Webber’s place in my estimation.
I parked my car and went up the front steps. No one in the lobby, no one on the stairs. A row of mailboxes. Darryl Jackson’s name was there, listed as Apt. 4R. I headed up the stairs.
I met no one. I reached the 4th floor and looked around.
There were two apartments to a floor, one in the front of the building and one in the back. Both doors were at the top of the stairs. Neither door had a number. The door to the front apartment was to the right, the door to the back apartment was to the left. So, 4R could either mean 4th floor right or 4th floor rear. I’d been in a lot of buildings like this, and sometimes it meant one, and sometimes it meant the other. You flipped a coin.
There was music coming from the front apartment, so I chose right. I knocked on the door. There came the sound of steps, and then the door opened and a huge black man stared out at me.
“Yeah?” he demanded.
“Darryl Jackson?”
“Next door,” he grunted, and jerked his thumb, giving me a look of disgust, as if I were the idiot who hadn’t put the numbers on the doors.
To tell the truth, I was glad. This guy looked like he could have played fullback for the Jets, and trying to wrestle him out of a video tape would not have been my idea of a good time. Whatever Darryl Jackson was like would have to be an improvement.
I banged on the door to the left. No answer. I tried again. Nothing. Darryl Jackson wasn’t home.
I was about to go when suddenly I realized this was my big chance. Darryl Jackson wasn’t home. All I had to do was get into his apartment, find the tape, and that would be that. I’m sure that’s what any private detective worth his salt would do in this situation.
Only, I couldn’t do it. You see, I have this problem with locked doors. My problem is, I can’t open them.
I stood there looking at the door. What was I going to do? Well, I knew a guy named Leroy Stanhope Williams who was one of Richard’s clients and who also happened to be a professional thief, who could get in that door in nothing flat. But Leroy lived out in Queens, and even if he were home, by the time he got up here, Darryl Jackson probably would have showed up and it would have been a hell of a mess. So what the hell was I going to do?
The answer I arrived at was: nothing. When I stopped to think about it, I realized burglarizing apartments was a little out of my line. If Darryl Jackson wasn’t at home, I would just damn well come back some time when he was.
I knocked on the door one last time, just in case he’d been in the john or something, and hadn’t heard me. As expected, there was no response. As an afterthought, I tried the doorknob. I turned it and pushed. And the door opened.
I couldn’t believe it. What a schmuck. I stand in the hallway trying to figure out how to get the door open, and it’s unlocked all the time. I went in and closed the door behind me.
The place was a wreck. The living room, at one time, had been nicely furnished, but you’d never know it now. Things were thrown everywhere. The cushions had been taken off the couch, slit open, and thrown about the room. Feathers covered everything. The couch itself had been tipped over, the bottom slit open, and the stuffing pulled out. Books had been knocked from the shelves and were strewn about the room. The rug had been pulled up and tossed in a crumpled pile in the corner.
Most everything had been smashed, but nothing seemed to have been stolen. A stereo system, that had occupied a cabinet had been pulled out and hurled on the floor. The cabinet itself had been pulled out from the wall and tipped over. The way I knew the stereo had been in the cabinet was that the plug still ran through it to an outlet in the wall.
A TV and VCR on a stand did not appear to have been touched, except that the VCR was the top-loading type, and the top had been popped open to reveal no tape inside.
In short, the apartment had not been burglarized, it had been searched. The thing was, I had no way of knowing if what the intruder had been looking for had been found.
That caught me up short. Intruder. The word was a double whammy. At the moment, I was the intruder. B
ut there had been another intruder, the real intruder, and where was he now? Could I really be sure he had left?
Fear is relative. I’d felt fear in the crack house, and I felt fear now, and which was more intense? Who gives a shit? Intruder. What about the intruder? There was no noise before I knocked on the door, was there? I hadn’t heard anything, except from the adjoining apartment. Didn’t that mean no one was there? I wasn’t sure. What if he’d heard my footsteps on the stairs, and kept quiet and hid? What if he was here now?
I looked around. On the far wall was a door to a hallway, and down it I could see two closed doors, presumably one to the bedroom and one to the bath. What if the guy was in there?
I have never had a worse moment of indecision. Every bone in my body was telling me to get the hell out of there, but there I was. A heaven sent opportunity. Something had happened here, and I didn’t know what it was, did I, Mr. Jones? But it was going to make a hell of a difference to Pamela Berringer if I could find out. At the expense, of course, of scaring myself to death. I mean, shit, she’s a fucking whore, for Christ’s sake. I mean, I should get myself killed for a fucking whore?
Asshole, I told myself. Pompous, self-righteous asshole. Stand here and judge the woman not on her merits, but on the grounds that you’re chicken-shit and you want an excuse to take the easy way out. Screw Pamela Berringer. What are you going to do?
I had to know. Scared as 1 was, I had to know. I didn’t expect to find anything, but there was one thing I could learn: if the intruder had found what he was looking for. ’cause if he’d found it, he would have stopped looking. So if there was anything in the apartment that wasn’t torn up, it was a pretty good indication he’d found it. But if the whole place was wrecked, it was a pretty good indication he hadn’t. And suppose, just suppose, he’d been looking for the tape.
I had to do it. I tiptoed across the room to the hallway. I reached the first door, put my hand on the knob, and flattened myself against the wall, as if I were a goddamn cop stalking a gunman. I don’t know why I did it. I didn’t have a gun, and if there was a killer in there, I was going to be dead no matter how I opened the door, but I did it just the same. I twisted the knob, and, with a jerk, slammed the door open.
Nothing. An empty bathroom. The door to the medicine cabinet was open, and the stuff inside had been strewn out on the floor, but otherwise it was a perfectly ordinary bathroom.
I tried the other door. Same technique. Flattened against the wall, turned and pushed.
The door flew open. I peered around the corner.
Nothing. The room had been ransacked, but there was no one in it. There was a closet, but the door was open, and as everything in it had been pulled out, there was nothing for anyone to be hiding behind.
The apartment was empty.
I heaved a huge sigh of relief. Great. I could make my inspection. See what I could learn.
My first glance told me the room had been totally wrecked, indicating the intruder had not found what he wanted. But I wanted to make sure.
I looked around. The dresser drawers had been pulled out and dumped on the floor. Ditto the drawers of a small desk unit. Both pieces of furniture had been tipped over.
The blankets and sheets had been pulled off the bed and tossed in a corner. The mattress had been slit open in all directions. Springs protruded through the holes. Cotton stuffing was everywhere. The mattress itself had been thrown back on the boxspring in a haphazard fashion, so it was resting diagonally, half on and half off the bed.
I walked around the corner of the bed and stopped short. There on the floor was a young black man in the sartorial splendor of a pimp. He was lying face down on the floor, half covered by the mattress. His head was turned to the side so I could see the profile of his face. His eye was open, glassy, staring, and there was a stream of saliva running down his chin.
He was dressed from head to toe in shocking pink, except for the one area where the pink gave way to a vivid red that seemed to be emanating from where the handle of the carving knife protruded from the middle of his back.
8.
THE THING IS, I’d never found a dead body before. I know this is a failing in a private detective. On TV, private detectives find ’em all the time. And they know just what to do about it, too. They examine the body and search the apartment for clues. Yeah, that’s what a TV detective would have done.
What I did was throw up.
I count it to my credit that I managed to get into the bathroom before I did, but, having accomplished that feat, I promptly heaved my cookies into the toilet.
If you think that’s an extreme reaction, I don’t. I said this was the first time I’d ever found a dead body. It was also the first time I’d ever seen one. Even the few funerals I’d attended had always been closed-coffin. This was my first dead man, period. And what a first. Who would have thought the little pimp to have had so much blood in him? The knife must have hit an artery or vein or something, whichever the hell it is that bleeds a lot. The blood had soaked through the pink shirt, ran down his side, and formed a pool on the floor. The wound was still seeping when I saw it, though I didn’t know enough about forensics to know what that indicated in terms of time of death, and, frankly, the thought didn’t occur to me at the time. All that occurred to me was that I’d be better off in the bathroom, which turned out to be true, for even though I reacted promptly, I barely made it.
I sat on the floor in front of the toilet, feeling that hot flush you always feel in your face after you vomit. I took deep breaths, trying to calm down, and trying to get my thoughts together.
What should I do? I knew what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to call the police, but should I do it? I didn’t know. If I called the police, I’d have to explain why I was there. I’d have to tell ’em about Pamela Berringer. Somehow, in my code of ethics that didn’t seem right.
What if I didn’t call the police? What if I beat it the hell out of there, pretended it didn’t happen, and let someone else discover the body? Not good. Forget the fact that it might be ages before anyone else came here, which would make a huge difference in whether the medical examiner could pinpoint the time of death. Consider the fact that that would make me an accessory to murder. Could they prove it? They sure as shit could. I’d left fingerprints all over the apartment. In my present state I couldn’t even remember everything I’d touched. Unless I wanted to do a thorough housecleaning, my fingerprints would be there. And if I did clean up, I’d probably eliminate the murderer’s fingerprints as well. Another count of accessory after that fact. Screw that. What about the fingerprints? Could they ever find me to match ’em up? No. Shit, yes. The videotape. They find the videotape and get a lead to Pamela Berringer. She talks and implicates me. Then they take my fingerprints. No. You’re just being paranoid. Maybe they talk to you, but they don’t really consider you a suspect and—Shit. The guy next door. The potential Jet fullback. He tells the police about the guy who knocked on the door of the wrong apartment. The police let him take a look at me and that’s that. I was trying to get into Darryl Jackson’s apartment. So they take my fingerprints to see if I did. I’ve already lied to them about it, so, instead of being a witness, I’m the number one suspect.
That thought tipped the scale. Sorry, Pamela. I’ll protect you if I can. But I’m no hero. I’m Stanley Hastings, bloody fucking coward, and I haven’t got the stomach for it, as you can see. I gotta call the cops.
You have to understand what happened next, because it’s going to sound stupid to you. I know because it sounds stupid to me now, thinking about it, but it didn’t at the time.
Having made the decision to call the cops, I got up from the bathroom floor and was not at all surprised to find I was shaky on my feet. I grabbed a hold of the sink to steady myself, leaving a few more fingerprints, but what did that matter now, since I was calling the cops anyway. I closed the mirror on the medicine cabinet and looked at myself. I looked like shit. I splashed some cold water on my face a
nd rinsed out my mouth, which made me feel a little better. Then I flushed the toilet.
It didn’t flush. It was one of those old fashioned types with a tank up on the wall and a pull chain, but when I pulled the chain nothing happened. Either the stopcock was stuck or the tank was empty. At any rate it didn’t work.
And that’s when I did the thing that doesn’t make any sense—the thing I have to explain. See, I knew I was gonna call the cops, and I didn’t want ’em to come in and see I puked in the toilet. And what makes it stupid is, I’m not macho, and I don’t pretend to be. And if the cops asked me what I did when I found the body, I’d tell ’em the first thing I did was throw up. But to me there was a difference between telling ’em that, and having a whole bunch of homicide dicks roaming around the apartment saying to each other, “Hey, look here where this guy blew his lunch in the toilet.” I didn’t want that. Somehow it made a difference.
Which is why I went out of my way to flush the toilet. I closed the toilet seat, stood on it, reached up, and slid the cover off the tank. I reached my hand in to find the toggle and jiggle it. And my hand felt something strange. It wasn’t water and it wasn’t metal. It was plastic. I grabbed it and pulled it out.
It was a heavy white plastic bag, tied shut with a twist-tie. My father-in-law manufactured bags just like it, in fact, he might have even made this one. Whatever was in it was pretty large, which was why it had been displacing so much water in the tank, and why the toilet wouldn’t flush.
I hopped down from the toilet, sat on the seat, and opened the bag. Inside were six VHS video cassettes.
Which made it a brand new ballgame.