In the Midst of Death

He had tried to reach me. Over and over again, and I wouldn't take his calls. Because I was a little peeved with him for holding out on me. Because I was with a woman who was using up all my attention, and that was such a novel experience for me that I hadn't wanted it diluted even for a moment.

And if I'd taken his call? Well, he might have told me something that he would never tell me now. But it was more likely that he would only confirm what I had already guessed about his relationship with Portia Carr.

If I'd taken his call, would he be alive now?

I could have wasted the whole day sitting on his bed and asking myself that sort of question. And whatever its answer, I had already wasted enough time.

I unlocked the police lock, opened the door a crack. The hallway was empty. I let myself out of Fuhrmann's room and went down the stairs and out of the building without encountering anyone at all.

Midtown North- it used to be the Eighteenth Precinct- is on West Fifty-fourth just a few blocks from where I was. I rang them from a booth in a saloon called the Second Chance. There were two wine drinkers at the bar and what looked to be a third wino behind it. When the phone was answered I gave Fuhrmann's address and said that a man had been murdered there. I replaced the receiver while the duty officer was patiently asking me my name.

I was in too much of a hurry to take a cab. The subway was faster. I rode it to the Clark Street station just over the bridge in Brooklyn. I had to ask directions to get to Pierrepont Street.

The block was mostly brownstones. The building where Leon Manch lived was fourteen stories tall, a giant among its fellows. The doorman was a stocky black with three deep horizontal lines running across his forehead.

"Leon Manch," I said.

He shook his head. I reached for my notebook, checked his address, looked up at the doorman.

"You have the right address," he said. His accent was West Indian, and the a's came out very broad. "You come the wrong day is all the problem."

"I'm expected."

"Mr. Manch, he is not here no more."

"He moved out?" It seemed impossible.

"He doan' want to wait for the elevator," he said. "So he take a shortcut."

"What are you talking about?"

The jive, I decided later, was not flippancy; it was an attempt to speak around the edges of the unspeakable. Now, abandoning that tack, he said, "He jump out the window. Land right there." He pointed to a portion of the sidewalk that looked no different from the rest. "He land there," he repeated.

"When?"

"Las' night." He touched his forehead, then made a sign similar to genuflection. I don't know whether it was a personal ritual or part of a religion with which I was unfamiliar. "Armand was working then. If I am working and man jump out window, I doan' know what I do."

"Was he killed?"

He looked at me. "What you think, man? Mr. Manch, he lives on fourteen. What you think?"

The nearest precinct house, and the one that figured to have the case, was on Joralemon near Borough Hall. I got lucky there- I recognized a cop named Kinsella whom I'd worked with some years back. And I was lucky a second time because he evidently hadn't heard I'd gone to work for Jerry Broadfield, so he had no reason not to cooperate with me.

"Happened last night," he said. "I wasn't on when it happened, but it looks to be pretty clear cut, Matt." He shuffled some papers, set them down on the desk. "Manch lived alone. I suppose he was a fruit. A guy living alone in that neighborhood, you can draw your own conclusions. Nine out of ten he's gay."

And one out of ten he's a toilet slave.

"Let's see now. Went out the window, did a header, dead on arrival at Adelphi Hospital. Identification based on contents of pockets and clothing labels plus which window was open."

"No identification by next of kin?"

"Not that I know of. Nothing listed here. Any question that it's him? If you want to go take a look at him it's your business, but he landed head-first, so- "

"I never saw him, anyway. He was alone when he went out the window?" Kinsella nodded. "Any eyewitnesses?"

"No. But he left a note. It was in a typewriter on his desk."

"Was the note typewritten?"

"It doesn't say."

"I don't suppose I could have a look at the note?"

"Not a chance, Matt. I don't have access to it myself. You want to talk to the officer in charge, that's Lew Marko, he'll be coming on duty sometime tonight. Maybe he can help you out."

"I don't suppose it matters."

"Wait a minute, the wording's copied down here. This help you at all?"

I read:

Forgive me. I cannot go on this way. I have lived a bad life.

Nothing about murder.

Could he have done it? A lot depended on when Fuhrmann was killed, and I wouldn't know that until I found out what the medical examiner learned. Say Manch killed Fuhrmann, came home, was overtaken by remorse, opened his window-

I didn't like it much.

I said, "What time did he do it, Jim? I don't see it listed."

He looked through the records, frowning. "There ought to be a time here. I don't see it. He was DOA at Adelphi at eleven thirty-five last night, but that don't tell us what time he went out the window."

But then again it didn't really have to. Doug Fuhrmann made his final call to me at one-thirty, an hour and fifty-five minutes after a physician pronounced Leon Manch dead.

I liked it better that way the more I thought about it. Because everything was starting to fall into place for me, and the way it was breaking Manch wasn't Fuhrmann's killer or Portia Carr's killer, either. Maybe Manch was Manch's killer, maybe he'd typed a suicide note because he couldn't find a pen, maybe his remorse was compounded of disgust with the life of a toilet slave. I have lived a bad life- well, who the hell has not?

For the time being, it didn't matter whether Manch had killed himself or not. Maybe he'd had help, but that was something I couldn't know yet and didn't have to know how to prove.

I knew who had killed the other two, Portia and Doug. I knew it in much the same way that I had known before reaching his building that Doug Fuhrmann would be dead. We call such knowledge the product of intuition because we cannot precisely chart the working of the mind. It goes on playing computer while our consciousness is directed elsewhere.

I knew the killer's name. I had some strong ideas about his motive. I had more ground to cover before it would all be wrapped up, but the hard part was over. Once you know what you're looking for, the rest comes easy.

Chapter 15

It was another three or four hours before I got out of a cab in the West Seventies and gave my name to a doorman. It was not the first taxi I'd taken since I got back from Brooklyn. I had had to see several people. I'd been offered drinks but hadn't accepted any. I had had some coffee, including a couple of cups of the best coffee I'd ever had.

The doorman announced me, then steered me to the elevator. I rode upstairs to the sixth floor, found the appropriate door, knocked. The door was opened by a small, birdlike woman with blue-gray hair. I introduced myself and she gave me her hand. "My son's watching the football game," she said. "Do you care for football? I don't find it of any real interest myself. Now you just have a seat and I'll tell Claude you're here."

But it wasn't necessary to tell him. He was standing in an archway at the rear of the living room. He wore a sleeveless brown cardigan over a white shirt. He had bedroom slippers on his feet. The thumbs of his pudgy hands were hooked into his belt. He said, "Good afternoon, Mr. Scudder. Won't you come this way? Mom, Mr. Scudder and I will be in the den."

I followed him into a small room in which several overstuffed chairs were grouped around a color television set. On the large screen an oriental girl was bowing before a bottle of men's cologne.

"Cable," Lorbeer said. "Makes for absolutely perfect reception. And it only costs a couple of dollars a month. Before we signed up for it we just never got really satisfactory reception."

"You've lived here a long time?"

"All my life. Well, not quite. We moved here when I was about two and a half years old. Of course my father was alive then. This was his room, his study."

I looked around. There were English hunting prints on the walls, several racks of pipes, a few framed photographs. I walked over to the door and closed it. Lorbeer noted this without commenting.

I said, "I spoke to your employer."

"Mr. Prejanian?"

"Yes. He was very pleased to hear that Jerry Broadfield will be released soon. He said he's not sure how much use he'll get out of Broadfield's testimony but that he's glad to see the man won't be convicted of a crime he didn't commit."

"Mr. Prejanian's a very generous man."

"Is he?" I shrugged. "I didn't get that impression myself, but I'm sure you know him better than I do. What I sensed was that he's glad to see Broadfield proved innocent because his own organization doesn't look so bad now. So he was hoping all along that Broadfield would turn out to be innocent." I watched him carefully. "He says he'd have been glad to know earlier that I was working for Broadfield."

"Really."

"Uh-huh. That's what he said."

Lorbeer moved closer to the television set. He rested a hand on top of it and looked down at the back of his hand. "I've been having hot chocolate," he said. "Sundays are days of complete regression for me. I sit around in comfy old clothes and watch sports on television and sip hot chocolate. I don't suppose you'd care for a cup?

"No, thank you."

"A drink? Something stronger?"

"No."

He turned to look at me. The pairs of parenthetical lines on either side of his little mouth seemed to be more deeply etched now. "Of course I can't be expected to bother Mr. Prejanian with every little thing that comes up. That's one of my functions, screening him from trivia. His time is very valuable, and there are already far too many demands on it."

"That's why you didn't bother to call him yesterday. You told me you'd spoken with him, but you hadn't. And you warned me to route inquiries through you so as to avoid antagonizing Prejanian."

"Just doing my job, Mr. Scudder. It's possible I committed a judgmental error. No one is perfect, nor have I ever claimed perfection."

I leaned over, turned off the television set. "It's a distraction," I explained. "We should both pay attention to this. You're a murderer, Claude, and I'm afraid you're not going to get away with it. Why don't you sit down?"

"That's a ridiculous accusation."

"Have a seat."

"I'm quite comfortable standing. You've just made a completely absurd charge. I don't understand it."

I said, "I suppose I should have thought about you right at the beginning. But there was a problem. Whoever killed Portia Carr had to connect up with Broadfield in one way or another. She was killed in his apartment, so she had to be killed by someone who knew where his apartment was, somebody who took the trouble to decoy him out of it first and send him off to Bay Ridge on a wild-goose chase."

"You're assuming Broadfield is innocent. I still don't see any reason to be sure of that."