There was a long white extension cord plugged into a socket at the bottom of the fluorescent fixture; it dropped down from the fixture to the floor beside the cabinet and led across the blue bath mat up to the edge of the tub, where it disappeared behind the shower curtain.
Merrion stepped back from the bathroom door and went down the hall into the bedroom. The door was ajar. He pushed it open slowly and silently and looked into yellowish window-shaded dimness onto an empty, unmade double bed, a pale-green top sheet and two woolen blankets, one white and one tan, mounded up on a wrinkled and stained pale-green bottom sheet; there were two pillows in pale-green slip cases jumbled together at the head of the bed. There was a small table next to the far side with a clear glass lamp and a small alarm clock on it. There was a four-drawer pine chest of drawers in the far corner of the room. There was a small yellow upholstered chair in the corner to his right; it was filled with a pile of soiled clothing. The room smelled stale and loamy.
Merrion had no desire to go in. He turned around and started back toward the living room. 'Any sign of him?' Brody called softly and hesitantly from the doorway.
'Nothin',' Merrion said. 'Janet isn't what you'd call a great housekeeper, though. 'S pretty rank in here.'
'Because see, I was just thinkin',' Brody said, clearing his throat, 'that unless you really hadda, you know, wake her up and ask her things, maybe what we could do here, we could then just go back out, and close the door behind us?'
'And then she wouldn't ever know that we were in here; you're tryin' to say that to me, Steve? Nobody else'd know that I made you invade this unit this morning?' Merrion was at the bathroom door again. He paused, smiling, and waited for Brody's reply. He could hear Janet snoring peacefully in the next room. Brody did not answer.
'Steve?' Merrion said. 'You still out there? Haven't gone into a panic here, run out on me here, have you? Certainly hope not. You're my witness here, you know, everything I did was kosher, absolutely by the book, from the minute I stepped in. Can't afford to have you leave me in here now, all by myself.'
'Well,' Brody said, drawing it out, 'no, I didn't do that. I was just thinking here was that if there wasn't any need, you know, to wake her up, well, it does seem as though she's sleeping pretty sound. Doesn't look like she's gonna wake up by herself.'
'Not unless somebody shows up here with a howitzer and shoots it off in the kitchen, no, I don't think she will,' Merrion said. 'But I'm still gonna wake her up, Steve, no matter what you say here, and you might as well deal with it it's gonna happen.' He pushed the bathroom door all the way open, flipping the light switch outside as he went in. The light did not come on and he hesitated in mid-stride, flipping the switch again. The light did not come on. 'Because this bozo she's been hangin' out with's got a pretty vivid history of being dangerous.
'And therefore what I'm doing here today,' he said, using his left hand to pull the shower curtain back, 'is first seeing if I can find out… oh oh. Uh oh.
'Yeah,' he said, looking down at the two brown knobby knees protruding from the grey-cloudy soapy water in the middle of the tub, and under the handles and the faucet and the drain shutoff, the white hair-dryer tethered by its own white cord to the white extension cord, half-submerged between the two feet underneath the faucet at the front of the tub. He could make out the shins and calves of the lower legs buckled up behind the ugly feet, and beyond the knees the black-haired swarthy head with brown staring eyes in the gaping face above the milky surface at the back.
'What?' Brody said from the other room. 'What's going on in there?
Everything all right?'
'Yeah, oh yeah,' Merrion said, making a brief dismissive brushing gesture with his right hand against his pantsleg. 'Yeah, everything's fine here. Well, everything's all right for me, I mean, in here, and probably for you.' He heard Brody come into the bathroom behind him.
'But I don't think it is for him. And if what I'm seein's what I think it is I'm seeing, and I'm damned sure that it is, I don't think it's gonna be all right much longer for our friend Miss Janet out there. Not for some time at least. She's probably in for some excitement, and then a nice long rest. Although maybe not; her lawyer'll be glad to see those bruises. This naked gentleman in front of us I suspect is Lowell Chappelle, and also that he's somewhat dead.'
He yanked the curtain back all the way and stood looking down at the shiny-black-haired dark-skinned man in the tub, his eyes staring and mouth frozen open in the head that looked as though it had been impaled on the rigid neck sticking out of the surface of the grey water covering the shoulders and the torso of the submerged body. 'Yes, now I'm sure of it,' he said. 'No longer any question in my mind he's completely fuckin' dead. My guess is that in this very bathtub, Steve, the late Lowell Chappelle, former well-known desperado, learned last night after a few drinks that his electrifying girlfriend didn't like it when he hit her. Just before he became truly, fuckin', dead.'
He turned aside to let Brody step up to the tub beside him. 'You wanna take a look here, Steve? See you recognize him? After all, you know the guy, seen him around, when he was breathin' and so forth. Before this terrible shock. I'd turn the light on for you but I think the fuse's blown.'
Merrion paused expectantly but Brody did not respond. He continued to stare down into the tub. 'He kind of stinks, a little,' he said. 'I would have to say.' He stepped back and looked up at Merrion. 'You think we should get someone, see if they can, you know, get him out of here maybe, and then maybe do something with him? Undertaker, something? Can't just leave him like this, I don't think, can we? It wouldn't be right to do that. At least not for me, the building and all. We should do something, I think.'
Merrion took Brody's left elbow with his right hand and turned him around to face the bathroom door, propelling him toward it at the same time. 'Indeed we should do something, Steve,' he said. 'You should do something and I should do something, and then after that we should both of us do absolutely nothing. Until the cops get here, and then it'll be all in their hands.'
'The cops?' Brody said, momentarily resisting. 'You really sure we need alia that stuff, get the cops up here? TV cameras and stuff, alia trouble they make?'
'Well, yeah,' Merrion said, getting him going again and steering him toward the doorway onto the landing. Janet snored comfortably in the reclining chair, 'Yeah, I do think we should have the cops come up and all, it's traditional, you know? Someone looks like he's been murdered, and you find the body? Well, the cops like it if you give them a call. Invite them to come up and look the place over. See there's anything they might like to take note of and so forth in case they decide, later on, they'd like to accuse someone of killing whoever it was, and maybe punish them. A little, anyway. That's the sort of thing they do. And when you help them to do that, they appreciate it.
You don't call them, they get mad. My experience's always been that if you can do something that cops appreciate, it makes life a lot easier in the long run to do it; I have always found that.
'So the first thing I think we should do is shut the door and lock it, and have you stand in front of it. We do not want Janet to wake up and figure what we're doin' here, and then decide that this'd be a perfect time to take a hike. Then right after that I am gonna pick the phone up know I saw one, we came in; oh yeah, there it is there, right there by the corner 'frigerator — call ah cops an' get 'em up here, tell 'em what we found. It'll be their baby then.'
'You think she murdered him?' Brody said.
Merrion shoved him toward the hallway door. Brody lurched forward. 'Go over there and shut the fuckin' door, Steve,' he said. 'Shut the door and lock it and then lean against it, and don't let nobody out, while I get the cops up here and tell 'em how Janet LeClerc killed her boyfriend in the bathtub by switchin' on her hair-dryer an' throwin' it inna tub with him after he fell asleep inna warm water. He'd had a hard day's work getting' his belly full of beer and beatin' his meat and givin' his girlfriend a good beatin'. Betcha when that Conair splashed it got his attention. Helluva thing to do to a man, I must say. Jesus, what a surprise. Bops the daffy girlfriend in the eye, just a little innocent fun, and what does she do but electrocute him.
I don't know how long he lived after she did it, but I will bet you one thing sure: not long enough to forget it.'
'I can't,' Brody said, after he had shut the door and had shaken himself to regain his composure, watching Merrion punch numbers on the phone while Janet snored efficiently by the window, 'I can't believe she'd do that. She could've done that to him. I never saw a side of her that'd make me think she'd do an awful thing like that, just go and kill a man. Never in a million years.'
'I know it,' Merrion said, hearing the phone begin to ring at the police station. 'I'm the same way too. I can never believe it either.
As many times I've seen it happen, I still can't make myself believe it. They always tell you, every time, they
