by Parnell Hall
With an incredible racket, the clothes began to whirl.
Great. Fifteen minutes and they’d be done. I could either stand here like a fool and watch them, or go ring for the elevator, take it upstairs, and have to turn around and come back down almost as soon as I got there. I mean, when you add in the time waiting for the elevator and going up and waiting for the elevator and coming down, what would I have, a whopping five minutes? I mean, was it worth even doing?
I stood there like a schmuck, vacillating, wasting more time, the choice of going upstairs becoming a more ridiculous one with each passing second.
And the lights went out.
Suddenly, just like that, the laundry room was dark.
My first thought was a power failure. But, no, the racket from the dryers assured me that was not the case. It was just the lights.
And just the laundry room lights. Through the door at the far end of the room a faint light was shining in from the basement hall.
So what happened?
Who turned out the lights?
The thought made me shiver. Which was stupid. Here I was, safe and sound in my own building. We had manned elevators. No one could get in.
So what happened to the damn lights?
Even with the light coming in the door, it was pitch dark in my end of the laundry room. With my hand ahead of me, I groped my way around the table for folding clothes, and headed for the door. Where, if my memory served me well, the light switch was.
Yes, there it was, right next to the door. The silhouette of the metal box that controlled the lights in the room. Had someone switched it off?
Before checking that I checked the doorway, peered around out into the basement hall. There was nothing there. A long, empty hallway overhung with pipes. Dusty, dimly lit, just what you’d expect in an old apartment building. But empty, not a soul in sight.
So who turned out the lights?
Back to the light switch. I could see the box, but not the switch itself—it was too dark. I reached out, felt it with my hand.
The switch was up. Surely that meant on. Nonetheless, I clicked it down.
Nothing.
Back up.
Nothing.
Didn’t that mean no one had turned off the switch?
Well, at least not there. But what about the fuse box? Someone could have thrown a circuit breaker. Who?
Jesus Christ. I had to tell myself again, no one could get into the basement. There were no stairs down from the lobby. The only way to get to the basement was in the elevator.
Except for the back door.
The thought chilled me. Despite the fact I knew full well that, one, the back door was locked, and, two, the back door led to a courtyard that was accessible only by an iron gate that was locked and topped with razor wire.
Even so, the decision to ring for the elevator and go upstairs didn’t seem quite so stupid as it had.
I came out of the laundry room into the basement hallway, stood in front of the elevator, contemplated doing just that.
And heard a noise.
Yeah, I know, I’d been hearing the noise from the dryers. But out of the laundry room around the corner in the hall, that noise was faint and muted.
This noise was sharp.
And from the other direction.
From the other end of the hall.
Where the door to the courtyard was.
That was around the bend at the other end of the hall. Or one of the bends. To the right was the boiler room. To the left the door to outside. So surely it was the boiler I heard. Some clang from the boiler.
Wasn’t that it?
No, it wasn’t.
It was the rustling of paper.
Jesus.
As if drawn by a magnet, I turned, took two steps down the hall.
And felt a chill.
But this time it was real. Cold air on my forearm, on my cheeks.
A draft.
From where?
Another step. Yes, damn it. Cold air.
Common sense told me to get out of there. Turn around, ring for the elevator. But I didn’t want to turn my back on it. I had to know. Somehow, I had to know.
The sound again.
Or was it?
And once again, I couldn’t tell, from the left or from the right?
Another step. My eyes darting around. In the shadows. In the dim light. Making sure. There is no one in that doorway, and the door is locked. That is not a prowler, that is a fire hose. That is not the fuse box, where the hell is it?
Suddenly I’m at the end of the hall. And I can’t hear the dryers at all anymore. Or the sound that drew me there. But if I take one more step and look to the left, I can see the door to the courtyard.
I turned, looked at the back door.
It was open!
As I looked, horrified, the rustling sound came right behind me.
I jumped a mile. Wheeled around. Nearly wet my pants.
Nothing. No one there. Just ...
The door to the boiler room.
He’s in there.
Or was he?
Suddenly, I realized I had my back to the door.
The open door.
I turned, flattened my back against the wall, so I could look in both directions.
The sound again. From the boiler room. Never mind the door. He’s in there.
I stepped on something. Looked down. It was a piece of pipe. I reached down, snatched it up. Held it like a weapon. It was a gooseneck, probably from a kitchen sink. It must have looked ridiculous, the wrong shape for a weapon. I didn’t care. I held it up, ready to strike, crept toward the boiler room door.
No light inside. Wouldn’t you know it. Just a metal staircase leading down. Not for me, thanks. It’s back to the elevator for me, gang. This has all been a lot of fun, but—
It happened so fast I didn’t have time to react.
A shadow shot from the doorway, whizzed by my face before I could even move the pipe. Startled, I dropped it. It clanged on the cement floor.
With a yowl of rage and fright, my attacker darted through the hallway and out the back door.
It was a cat.
It’s hard to describe what I felt then. Relief, yes, but my heart was pounding, my adrenaline surging. And I had been absolutely, positively wired. The realization it was a cat punctured this, and it rushed away like air escaping from a balloon.
I exhaled, slumped back, leaned against the wall.
That’s when it hit me.
That’s when I realized, this was it, this was when it happened. In movie after movie, this was how it played out. The incredibly tense scene, the sudden shock, then the comic relief—oh, it’s just a cat—the hero relaxes, then, bam!, the killer strikes.
Only it didn’t happen. And, I slowly realized, it wasn’t going to happen. Because it wasn’t a movie, and no one had written the script. There was no prowler, no killer, no lurker in the dark. And the only one who’d gotten in the open back door was the cat.
And no one had thrown the circuit breaker, cutting the lights. The bulb in the laundry room had simply burned out.
I rang for the elevator, went upstairs, got a new bulb and a flashlight. Then I went back to the laundry room and answered the age-old question, how many private detectives does it take to change a light bulb? I changed it, then folded the laundry, feeling as foolish as you might imagine.
I still couldn’t help looking over my shoulder as I did.
I needn’t have bothered.
The killer wasn’t stalking me in my basement that night.
The killer was somewhere else.
34.
DOUG MARK HADN’T BEEN STRANGLED.
He’d been shot.
He was sitting on his living room couch, right where I’d left him. As always, his head was askew. Only now the asymmetrical picture was compounded by the circular hole in his forehead and the red racing stripe that ran down his left cheek.
To be honest, racing stripe wasn
’t the first image that came to mind. I’ve had things published myself—magazine articles, to be sure—still, the line of blood reminded me of nothing so much as the stroke of a copy editor’s red pencil. The circular hole and the straight red line were a delete symbol.
Someone had edited Doug Mark out.
I looked up from the body to find Sergeant Thurman standing there glaring at me.
“Well?” he demanded.
It was a question I was ill prepared to answer.
It was nine thirty in the morning. I’d been beeped off my stakeout of the 34th Street pay phone. I’d been glad when the beeper went off. I thought it meant my client had gotten another phone call. Which would have proved Sergeant Thurman wrong. Instead, two cops had picked me up and brought me here, where I’d encountered Doug Mark’s corpse. Exactly what that proved was yet to be determined.
“Well?” I said. “What do you mean, well?”
“Don’t play games with me. Do you know this man?”
“Of course I do. His name’s Doug Mark. He was Kenneth P. Winnington’s first editor.”
“Is that right?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I’m asking the questions here.”
“Then ask some that make sense. If you know enough to drag me in here, you must know who he is.”
“Don’t fuck with me,” Thurman said. “I want some answers and I want ’em now. How do you know this guy?”
“I saw him yesterday.”
“Here?”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“Four thirty, five o’clock.”
“What did you want with him?”
“Information.”
“No shit. Don’t be a wise ass. What were you doing here?”
“Looking for someone with a reason to hate Kenneth P. Winnington.”
"Come again."
“Winnington dumped him. I figured he qualified.”
“That’s pretty thin.”
“Then why’s he dead?”
The look on Thurman’s face was priceless. I had a feeling when his thought process caught up with him he might punch me in the nose.
Fortunately, we were interrupted by the arrival of the medical examiner, a black man with white hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He squeezed his portly figure into the room, insinuated himself between the coffee table and the couch, and bent over the body of Doug Mark. After a few moments he straightened up and declared, “This man is dead.”
“No shit, doc,” Thurman said. “You think you could tell me when?”
“He’s dead right now,”
The two cops who had brought me up grinned.
Thurman didn’t. “You think you could tell me when he died?”
The ME appeared unruffled. “Yeah, I could take a crack at that. When would you like him to have died?”
Thurman’s eyes narrowed. “I wouldn’t like anything. I’m wondering about five o’clock yesterday afternoon.”
The ME nodded. “Could have died then. We’ll get him down to the morgue, run some tests.”
“Fine, you do that,” Thurman said. He wheeled back on me. “I want some answers, and I want ’em fast, and I want ’em straight. How’d you get a line on this guy?”
“From the agent.”
“What agent?”
“Winnington’s agent. What’s-his-name. Abe Feinstein.”
“He sent you here?”
“No, he just told me about him. Coming here was my idea.”
“But he gave you the address?”
“Actually, it was the editor who gave me the address.”
“The editor?”
“Winnington’s editor. Elizabeth Abbott.”
“How come she gave you the address?”
“Because the agent didn’t have it?”
Thurman’s eyes narrowed. “You giving me a runaround?”
“I’m giving you the straight facts. They just don’t happen to make sense.”
“No shit.”
“How’d you connect me?”
“I’m askin’ the questions here.”
“Yeah, but why? How’d you know to pull me in?”
“What’s a matter, you hard, of hearing?” Thurman said. “I ask and you answer. That’s how it works. But never mind. Since you seem to be having trouble, why don’t you cool out and think things over.”
Thurman turned to the cops who’d brought me in. “Okay, he’s ID’d the body, now run him downtown.”
The cops took hold of me, piloted me out the door.
My head was spinning. What the hell was going on? I seemed to be having more than my usual trouble figuring everything out. And it wasn’t just the shock of finding Doug Mark dead. Sure, that was a kick in the head, what with me having just talked to him and all that. But, aside from that, it occurred to me that absolutely nothing made sense.
Why the hell had I been dragged in here? More to the point, why had I been dragged in here if Sergeant Thurman didn’t know about Doug Mark? I could understand it if Sergeant Thurman had connected Doug Mark to Kenneth P. Winnington, and decided to question me on that. But that still wouldn’t make a lot of sense unless he knew I’d called on him. I suppose he could have learned from Elizabeth Abbott or her assistant at the publisher’s, since they’d given me the address, but how could he have possibly gotten to them so soon?
I had no idea.
The only thing I knew for sure, the only satisfaction I could take from this, if one can use such terms about a gruesome murder, was that the death of Doug Mark accomplished one thing. It blew Sergeant Thurman’s theory out of the water. Which was probably what was eating him up, and why he was so pissed off just now. Unless the nebbishy writer Sergeant Thurman was sitting on had actually killed Doug Mark, in which case the murders would be solved, this murder exonerated him. Just as it would have had there been another telephone call.
Yeah, that much I knew. Which basically meant I knew nothing. But I kept thinking about it, and going over it in my mind, because it was easier to do that than to think about the other thing that I was trying not to think about.
The fact that in one way or another, by leading the killer to him, I had probably caused Doug Mark’s death.
35.
“WHY AM I HERE?”
ADA Frost did not favor me with a baby-faced smile. This morning he looked particularly grim. “Sit down,” he said.
We were alone in his office. The two cops had driven me downtown, ushered me into his office, and left.
I’d have left too, if I could. But there was no reason to make a fuss. I took the offered chair.
“I’ll ask again,” I said. “Why am I here?”
“You mind telling me about Doug Mark?”
“Doug Mark is dead.”
“So I understand. What’s his connection with you?”
“Do I need an attorney here?”
“You tell me.”
“That’s a new one. I tell you?”
“Absolutely. If you killed him, you need an attorney. Frankly, I find that rather unlikely, but in that case you do. Otherwise, there’s no reason we shouldn’t just talk.”
I considered calling Richard and the whole nine yards. The prospect was unpleasant. More than likely we’d get the other two lawyers in here too, and start that whole merry-go-round again. And this time I had nothing to hide—it wasn’t like I was trying to keep my client’s name out of it. There was no reason for me not to talk since Frost didn’t really peg me for the murder. For the moment I just felt bad, and wanted to get it over with.
“Okay,” I said. “Talk.”
“I would prefer to hear from you,” Frost said. “How do you know Doug Mark?”
I gave him a rundown of what happened.
“That’s very interesting,” he said. “You got Doug Mark’s phone number from Kenneth P. Winnington’s publisher yesterday afternoon. Till then, you had not met the man, talked to the man, had no idea where he lived.”
“U
h-huh.”
“You went to the publisher, secured his number, and called on him last night.”
“That’s right.”
“And he admitted being in this editor’s office. Elizabeth Abbott. Where he could have gotten Winnington’s new number.”
“Yes, he did. Although he claims he didn’t get it. And even if he did, why would that be a reason to kill him?”
“I have no idea,” Frost said. “I’m merely assembling facts.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, you have some I don’t,” I said. “Because this man is found dead, and two cops drag me up to his apartment before Sergeant Thurman even knows what’s happening.” I put up my hand. “Not that it’s that unusual for Sergeant Thurman not to know what’s happening, but you know what I mean. Sergeant Thurman dragged me in without knowing my connection to Doug Mark. Now why did he do that?”
“Why do you think?”
“I have no idea. Please, fill me in.”
Frost leveled a finger. “You understand this goes no further. This is something we plan to withhold.”
“What, for Christ’s sake?”
Frost leaned back in his desk chair, laced his fingers together, put his hands behind his head. “The crimes are not at all similar. Sherry Pressman was strangled. I understand this man was shot.”
“Yeah. So?”
“So, basically, there’s no connection. Except for the rather tenuous one that both of them at one time or another had worked with Kenneth P. Winnington.”
“Why are you stating the obvious?”
“I’m not stating the obvious. The obvious connection is you. You called on both people. Both people subsequently died,”
“How’d you know?”
“Huh?”
“How’d you know I called on Doug Mark?”
Frost smiled. He raised one finger. “Ah. There you’ve hit on it.” He cocked his head. “Are you telling me you have no idea?”
“Yeah. I’ve no idea,”
“Really. Of course, you didn’t see. Still, I would have thought.”
“Would you mind not talking in cryptic half sentences? Just what the hell is going on?”
“I guess I should explain,” Frost said. “Doug Mark had a girlfriend. Didn’t live with him, but she had a key. She was supposed to meet him for breakfast this morning. When he didn’t show, she went to wake him up. You know what she found.”