Three-Day Town

think that her son had any idea what a girl’s nude anatomy looked like. If he did it, was it because he was jealous of Lee or was it simply an adolescent joke?

Like Corey Wall taking the elevator when it was left unattended?

The digital clock beside the bed clicked from 11:45 to 11:46. When it hit 11:53, I slipped out of bed. No need to switch on any lamps; the reflected glow from outside was more than enough to let me navigate the rooms. I went out to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, but I wasn’t really hungry and none of the little boxes or packets tempted me. Instead, I poured myself half a glass of wine from the opened bottle on the counter and wandered back to the living room. Too cold to go out onto the balcony, but I stood by the French doors that let me see a small sliver of upper Broadway where traffic had dwindled to a few cars and cabs.

The street below me seemed almost as deserted as the lanes that crisscross the farm back home, yet even as I watched, a cab slowed to a stop in front of the building across the way. I moved to the dining room window for an unobstructed look and saw a couple emerge from the cab. The woman wore an evening cape and a long gown. With his back to me, I couldn’t tell if the man was wearing a tux underneath his overcoat, but that was certainly a white silk scarf draped around his neck. Fred and Ginger home from a formal party?

I was amused by the juxtaposition of elegance and ugliness as he helped her from the cab. The space immediately out front was clear enough for her high heels and his patent leather shoes, but dirty snow still lined the curbs on either side of the polished glass door and large black bags of garbage were piled atop the snow by the service entrances of all the buildings from one end of the street to the other. I counted six bags from this building alone. Trying to multiply the garbage on this one street by the number of streets in the city numbed my brain. I sipped my wine and I wondered how many trucks it would take every day and what did they do with so much trash? Where was it all dumped? Or was it incinerated?

I vaguely remembered that when I’d lived here with Lev a million years ago, there had been controversy over landfills in the Brooklyn marshes, but surely they had long since reached capacity?

And why was I standing here in the middle of the night wondering about New York’s garbage?

My glass was empty but I still wasn’t sleepy. Okay, another half glass ought to do it, I decided.

When I returned to the window, I saw a figure turn the corner onto Broadway. A moment later, the man on duty across the way stepped out onto the sidewalk and flexed his arms as if to get the stiffness out. He seemed to be waiting for something, and sure enough, down the block from West End Avenue came a slender dark-haired woman with a beagle on a leash. She paused to toss a small bag onto their pile of garbage, then the night man held the door for them and followed them back inside.

One thing about living in the country, you don’t have to walk your dog and you don’t have to pick up after it.

A cab moved slowly down the street, its headlights bouncing off the shiny trash bags and making the sidewalks sparkle as if dusted by glitter. Glassphalt. Made from recycled glass. Before I could start trying to estimate how much waste glass the city must generate, I finished my wine and went back to bed.

Just before I fell asleep, I found myself remembering Lee’s comment that he thought someone had been in his locker before today. “I can’t say how, but sometimes things look a little different,” he had written.

Right. Thinking of how messy my own high school locker had been, I yawned and drifted off wondering how he could possibly tell.

It was still dark and the digital clock read 6:23 when I opened my eyes. I lay there quietly for a moment trying to grasp why I was awake. It was almost as if I had heard Lee’s voice say, “Things look a little different.”

Huh?

I closed my eyes and was almost asleep again when it finally registered.

Quietly, so as not to wake Dwight, I got up and went back to the living room. Without switching on any lights, I went straight to the window, looked out, and saw that I was right.

Last night, I had counted the garbage bags in front of this building’s service entrance. I had then gone into the kitchen, poured myself a second glass of wine, and returned to this window to watch a cab come down the street. Its headlights had thrown the bags in sharp relief, enough to subliminally register a small change.

I carefully counted. Seven large black garbage bags were now heaped on the curb where before there had only been six.

My first impulse was to wake Dwight.

My second impulse was to call Sigrid Harald.

My third impulse, motivated by not wanting to appear melodramatic and stupid, was the one I acted on.

Even though I couldn’t imagine why someone would lug another garbage bag out to the street in the middle of the night when there were no porters on duty, this was New York and what did I know? Maybe the person I’d seen disappearing around the corner earlier was a doctor responding to a late-night emergency, someone who suddenly realized he’d missed the evening garbage collection and decided to drop it off on his way out. And wouldn’t I look like the village idiot if I woke Dwight or Sigrid because someone had added a bag of dirty diapers, vegetable peelings, and coffee grounds to the bags already there?

I stepped into my boots and slipped a parka on over my sweatshirt and warm-up pants. Out in the hall I started to ring for the elevator. Then I pictured Dwight leaning over my coffin to say, “If you didn’t want to feel stupid, what made you get into an elevator with the only employee still in the building? The one man who was known to be here when both Lundigren and Clarke were killed?”

Too late then to say, “Whoever heard of a killer in a walrus mustache?”

So I opened the door to the service landing instead. I was briefly tempted to use the self-service back elevator. Sidney had told us that Jani Horvath usually slept during the long quiet hours of the night, but I didn’t want to risk his hearing any mechanical rumbling. As quietly as possible, I crept down the stairs and past the first floor to the basement, where I eased open the automatic door into a dim and shadowy hallway that had only a security light to show me the way to the outer door. The instant I heard the door click shut behind me, I realized that I’d made a dumb mistake. Sure enough, when I tried to open the door, it was securely locked.

Damn!

“This could be a problem,” said my internal preacher.