Nightwork

by Irwin Shaw

  The man was heavy, with a big loose paunch that belied the thin legs and buttocks, and I grunted as I pulled the body over onto its back. Then I saw what the whore had said the man had been waving at her, that might have been a club. It wasn’t a club, but a long cardboard tube tightly wrapped in brown paper, the kind artists and architects use to carry rolled-up prints and building plans. The man’s hand was still clutching it. I didn’t blame the whore for being frightened. In the dim light of the corridor I’d have been frightened, too, if a naked man had suddenly sprung out waving the thing menacingly at me.

  I stood up, feeling a chill on my skin, nerving myself to touch the body once more. I stared down at the dead face. The eyes were open, staring up at me, the mouth in a last tortured grimace. Grunting animal sounds, the whore had said. There was no blood, no sign of a wound. I had never seen the man before, but that was not unusual with my working hours, coming in after guests had checked in for the night and leaving before they came down in the morning. It was a round, fat, old man’s face, with a big fleshy nose and wispy gray hair on the balding skull. Even in the disarray of death, the face gave the impression of power and importance.

  Fighting down a rising feeling of nausea, I knelt on one knee and put my ear to the man’s chest. His breasts might have been those of an old woman, with just a few straggles of damp white hair and nipples that were almost green in the bare light. There was the sour, living odor of sweat, but no movement, no sound. Old man, I thought, as I stood up, why couldn’t you have done this on somebody else’s time?

  I bent down again and hooked my hands under the dead man’s armpits and dragged him through the open doorway into room 602. You couldn’t just leave a naked body lying in the corridor like that. I had been working in the hotel business long enough to know that death was something you kept out of the sight of paying guests.

  As I pulled the body along the floor of the little hallway that led into the room proper, the cardboard tube rolled to one side. I got the body into the room, next to the bed, which was a tangle of sheets and blankets. There was lipstick smeared all over the sheets and pillows. The lady I had let out around one o’clock, probably. I looked down with something like pity at the old body naked on the threadbare carpet, the flaccid dead flesh outlined against a faded floral pattern. One last erection. Joy and then mortality.

  There was a medium-sized but expensive-looking leather suitcase open on the little desk. A worn wallet lay next to it and a gold money clip, with some bills in it. In the bag three clean shirts were to be seen, neatly folded.

  Strewn on the desk were some quarters and dimes. I counted the money in the clip. Four tens and three ones. I dropped the clip back on the desk and picked up the wallet. There were ten crisp new hundred-dollar bills in it. I whistled softly. Whatever else had happened that night to the old man, he had not been robbed. I put the ten bills back into the wallet and carefully placed it back on the desk. It never occurred to me to take any of the money. That was the sort of man I used to be. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not do a lot of things.

  I glanced at the open suitcase. Along with the shirts there were two pairs of old-fashioned button shorts, a striped necktie, two pairs of socks, some blue pajamas. Whoever he was, number 602 was going to stay in New York longer than he had planned.

  The corpse on the floor oppressed me, made uncertain claims on me. I took one of the blankets from the bed and threw it over the body, covering the face, the staring eyes, the mutely shouting lips. I felt warmer, death now only a geometric shape on the floor.

  I went back to the corridor to get the cardboard tube. There were no labels or addresses or identification of any kind on it. As I carried it into the room, I saw that the heavy brown paper had been torn raggedly away from the top. I was about to put it on the desk, next to the dead man’s other belongings, when I caught a glimpse of green paper, partially pulled out of the opening. I drew it out. It was a hundred-dollar bill. It was not new like the bills in the wallet, but old and crumpled. I held the tube so that I could look down into it. As far as I could tell, it was crammed with bills. I remained immobile for a moment, then stuffed the bill I had taken out back in and folded the torn brown paper as neatly as I could over the top of the tube.

  Holding the tube under my arm, I went to the door, switched off the light, stepped out into the corridor and turned the passkey in the lock of room number 602. My actions were crisp, almost automatic, as though all my life I had rehearsed for this moment, as though there were no alternatives.

  I took the elevator down to the lobby, went into the little windowless room next to the office, using the key. There was a shelf running along above the safe, piled with stationery, old bills, ragged magazines from other years that had been recuperated from the rooms. Pictures of extinct politicians, naked girls who by now were no longer worth photographing—the momentarily illustrious dead, the extremely desirable women, monocled assassins, movie stars, carefully posed authors—a jumble of recent and not-so-recent American miscellany. Without hesitation I reached up and rolled the tube back toward the wall. I heard it plop down onto the shelf, out of sight, behind the dog-eared testimony of scandals and delights.

  Then I went into the lighted office and called for an ambulance.

  After that I sat down, finished unwrapping my sandwich, opened the bottle of beer. While I ate and drank, I looked up the register. Number 602 was, or had been, named John Ferris, had booked in only the afternoon before, and had given a home address on North Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.

  I was finishing my beer when the bell rang and I saw the two men and the ambulance outside. One of the men was dressed in a blue uniform and was carrying a rolled-up stretcher. The other was in a white coat and was carrying a black bag, but I knew he wasn’t a doctor. They don’t waste doctors on ambulances in Manhattan, but dress up an orderly who is something of a medical technician, good enough to give first aid, and can usually be depended upon not to kill a patient on the spot. As I was opening the door, a prowl car drove up and a policeman got out.

  “What’s wrong?” the policeman asked. He was a heavyset, dark-jowled man, with unhealthy rings under his eyes.

  “An old man croaked upstairs,” I said.

  “I’ll go along with them, Dave,” the policeman said to his partner at the wheel. I could hear the car radio chattering, dispatching officers to accidents, cases of wife beating, suicides, to streets where suspicious-looking men had been reported entering buildings.

  Calmly, I led the group through the lobby. The technician was young and kept yawning as though he hadn’t slept in weeks. People who work at night all look as though they are being punished for some nameless sin. The policeman’s shoes on the bare floor of the lobby sounded as though they had lead soles.

  Going up in the elevator nobody spoke. I volunteered no information. A medicinal smell filled the elevator. They carry the hospital with them, I thought. I would have preferred it if the prowl car hadn’t happened along.

  When we got out on the sixth floor, I opened the door to 602 and led the way into the room. The technician ripped the blanket off the dead man, bent over him, and put his stethoscope to the man’s chest. The policeman stood at the foot of the bed, his eyes taking in the lipstick-smeared sheets, the bag on the desk, the wallet and money clip lying next to it. “Who’re you, Jack?” he asked me.

  “I’m the night clerk.”

  “What’s your name?” The way he asked was full of accusation, as though he was sure whatever name I gave would be a false one. What would he have done if I had answered, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings”? Probably taken out his black book and written, “Witness asserts name is Ozymandias. Probably an alias.” He was a real nighttime cop, doomed to roam a dark city teeming with enemies, ambushes everywhere.

  “My name is Grimes,” I said.

  “Where’s the lady who was here with him?”

  “I have no idea. I let a lady out around one o’clock. It might have been t
his one.” I was surprised that I wasn’t stuttering.

  The technician stood up, taking the stethoscope plugs out of his ears. “DOA,” he said flatly.

  Dead on arrival. I could have told that without calling for an ambulance. I was discovering that there is a lot of waste motion about death in a big city.

  “What was it?” the cop asked. “Any wounds?”

  “No. Coronary, probably.”

  “Anything to be done?”

  “Not really,” the technician said. “Go through the motions.” He bent down again and rolled back the dead man’s eyelids and peered into the rheumy eyes. Then he felt around the throat for a pulse, his hands gentle and expert.

  “You seem to know what you’re doing, friend,” I said. “You must get a lot of practice.”

  “I’m in my second year in medical school,” he said. “I only do this to eat.”

  The policeman went over to the desk and picked up the money clip. “Forty-three bucks,” he said. “And in the wallet—” His thick eyebrows went up as he inspected it. He took out the bills and riffled them, counting. “An even grand,” he said.

  “Holy man!” I said. It was a good try, but from the way the cop looked at me, I wasn’t fooling him.

  “How much was there in it when you found him?” he asked. He was not a friendly neighborhood cop. Maybe he was a different man when he was on the day shift.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea,” I said. Not stuttering was a triumph.

  “You mean to say you didn’t look?”

  “I didn’t look.”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Why what?” This was a good time to look boyish.

  “Why didn’t you look?”

  “It didn’t occur to me.”

  “Yeah,” the cop said again, but let it go at that. He riffled the bills again. “All in hundreds. You’d think a guy with that much dough on him would pick a better place to knock it off than a creep joint like this.” He put the bills back into the wallet. “I guess I better take this into the station,” he said. “Anybody want to count?”

  “We trust you, Officer,” the technician said. There was the faintest echo of irony in his voice. He was young, but already an expert at death and despoliation.

  The policeman looked through the wallet compartments. He had thick hairy fingers, like small clubs. “That’s funny,” he said.

  “What’s funny?” the intern asked.

  “There’s no credit cards or business cards or driver’s license. A man with more than a thousand bucks in cash on him.” He shook his head and pushed his cap back. “You wouldn’t call that normal, would you?” He looked aggrieved, as though the dead man had not behaved the way a decent American citizen who expected to be protected in death as in life by his country’s police should have behaved. “You know who he is?” he asked me.

  “I never saw him before,” I said. “His name is Ferris and he lived in Chicago. I’ll show you the register.”

  The policeman put the wallet into his pocket, went quickly through the shirts and underwear and socks in the bag, then opened the closet door and searched the pockets of the single dark suit and overcoat that were hanging there. “Nothing,” he said. “No letters, no address book. Nothing. A guy with a bad heart. Some people got no more sense than a horse. Look, I got to make a inventory. In the presence of witnesses.” He took out his pad and moved around the room, listing the few possessions, now no longer possessed, of the body on the floor. It didn’t take long. “Here,” he said to me, “you have to sign this.” I glanced at the list. One thousand and forty-three dollars. One suitcase, brown, unlocked, one suit and overcoat, gray, one hat …” I signed, under the patrolman’s name. The cop put his thick black pad into a back pocket. “Who put the blanket over him?” he asked.

  “I did,” I said.

  “You find him there on the floor?”

  “No. He was out in the corridor.”

  “Starkers—like that?”

  “Starkers. I dragged him in.”

  “What did you want to do that for?” The policeman sounded plaintive now, faced with a complication.

  “This is a hotel,” I said. “You have to keep up appearances.”

  The policeman glowered at me. “What are you—trying to be smart?” he said.

  “No, Officer, I’m not trying to be smart. If I’d left him out where I found him and somebody had come along and seen him, I’d have had my ass chewed down to the bone by the manager.”

  “Next time you see a body laying anyplace,” the policeman said, “you just let it lay until the law arrives. Just remember that, see?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “You alone in this hotel all night?”

  “Yes.”

  “You work in the office all by yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’d you happen to come up here? He telephone down or something?”

  “No. A lady was leaving the building and she said there was a crazy old naked man up on the sixth floor who was making advances toward her.” Objectively, almost as though I were listening to myself on a tape, I noted that I hadn’t stuttered once.

  “Sexual advances?”

  “She implied that.”

  “A lady? What sort of lady?”

  “I would think she was a whore,” I said.

  “You ever see her before?”

  “No.”

  “You get a lot of lady traffic in this hotel, don’t you?”

  “Average, I would say.”

  The policeman stared down at the contorted bluish face on the floor. “How long you think he’s been dead, bud?”

  “Hard to tell. Anywhere from ten minutes to a half hour,” the technician said. He looked up at me. “Did you call the hospital as soon as you saw him? The call came in at three fifteen.”

  “Well,” I said, “first I listened to see if I could get a heartbeat, then I pulled him in here and covered him and then I had to go down to the office and phone.”

  “Did you try mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” The technician wasn’t being inquisitive; it was too late at night and he was too tired for that; he was just going through a routine.

  “It didn’t occur to me,” I said.

  “A lot of things didn’t occur to you, mister,” the policeman said darkly. Like the intern he was going through a routine. Suspicion was his routine. But his heart wasn’t in it and he sounded bored already.

  “Okay,” the intern said, “let’s take him away. No sense wasting any time. When you find out what the family wants to do with the body,” he said, addressing me, “call the morgue.”

  “I’ll send a telegram to Chicago right away,” I said.

  The two ambulance men lifted the body onto the stretcher. “He’s a heavy old sonofabitch, isn’t he?” the driver said, as he let the cadaver down. “I bet he ate good, the old goat. Sexual advances. With a droopy old cock like that.” He draped a sheet over the body and strapped the ankles to the foot of the stretcher while the technician buckled a strap across the chest. The elevator was too small to handle the body lying flat and they would have to stand the stretcher up to fit it in. They took the stretcher out into the hall, following the policeman. I took a last look around the room and put out the light before closing the door.

  “Had a busy night?” I asked the technician pleasantly, as the elevator started down. Be matter-of-fact, normal, I told myself. Obviously it was perfectly normal for all three of these men to carry dead men out of hotels in the middle of the night, and I tried to fit into their standards of behavior.

  “This is my fourth call since I came on,” he said. “I’ll trade jobs with you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll still be sitting here all night working an adding machine while you’re raking in the loot year after year.” Now, I thought, why did I use the word loot? “I read the papers,” I said quickly; “doctors make more than anybody else in the country.”


  “God bless America,” the technician said as the elevator came to a stop and the door opened. He and the driver picked up the stretcher, and I led the way across the lobby. I opened the door for them with my key and watched as they put the body into the ambulance. The policeman at the wheel of the car was asleep, snoring softly, his cap off and his head lolling back.

  The technician got into the ambulance with the corpse, and the driver slammed the door shut. He went around to the front and started the motor, revving it loudly. He had the siren going while he was still in first gear.

  “What the hell is his hurry?” the policeman standing on the sidewalk with me said. “They’re not going anywhere.”

  “Aren’t you going to wake your pal up?” I asked.

  “Nah. He wakes up if a call comes for us. He’s got the instinct of a animal. Might as well let him get his beauty rest. I wish I had his nerves.” He sighed, weighed down by cares which his own nerves were not strong enough to support. “Let’s get a look at the register, mister.” He followed me back into the hotel, his tread heavy, the law weighty.

  I unlocked the office door. I didn’t look up at the shelf over the safe, where the cardboard tube lay hidden behind the boxes of stationery and the piles of old magazines. “I have a bottle of bourbon in here, if you’d like a slug,” I said, as we went into the front office. Even as I spoke I admired the absolutely matter-of-fact way in which I was behaving. I was running on computers; all the cards were correctly punched. Data input. But it had been an effort not to look up at the shelf.