Let it flow down, down to the ancient grass.
I asked if I could copy it into my notebook. Her laugh was light, merry. 'Why? Does it tell who killed her?'
'I don't know what it tells me. Maybe if I keep it I'll figure out what it tells me.'
'If you figure out what it means,' she said, 'I hope you'll tell me.
That's an exaggeration. I sort of know what I'm getting at. But don't bother copying it. You can have that copy.'
'Don't be silly. That's your copy.'
She shook her head. 'It's not finished. It needs more work. I want to get her eyes into it. If you met Kim you must have noticed her eyes.'
'Yes.'
'I originally wanted to contrast the blue eyes with the green glass, that's how that image got there in the first place, but the eyes disappeared when I wrote it. I think they were in an earlier draft but somewhere along the line they dropped out.' She smiled. 'They were gone in a wink. I've got the silver and the green and the white and I left the eyes out.' She stood with her hand on my shoulder, looking down at the poem. 'It's what, twelve lines? I think it should be fourteen anyway.
Sonnet length, even if the lines are irregular. I don't know about schism, either. Maybe an off-rhyme would be better. Spasm, chasm, something.'
She went on, talking more to herself than to me, discussing possible revisions in the poem. 'By all means keep that,' she concluded.
'It's a long way from final form. It's funny. I haven't even looked at it since she was killed.'
'You wrote it before she was killed?'
'Completely. And I don't think I ever thought of it as finished, even though I copied it in pen and ink. I'll do that with drafts. I can get a better idea of what does and doesn't work that way. I'd have kept on working on this one if she hadn't been killed.'
'What stopped you? The shock?'
'Was I shocked? I suppose I must have been. 'This could happen to me,' Except of course I don't believe that. It's like lung cancer, it happens to other people. 'Any man's death diminishes me.' Did Kim's death diminish me? I don't think so. I don't think I'm as involved in mankind as John Donne was. Or as he said he was.'
'Then why did you put the poem aside?'
'I didn't put it aside. I left it aside. That's nitpicking, isn't it?' She considered this. 'Her death changed how I saw her. I wanted to work on the poem, but I didn't want to get her death into it. I had enough colors. I didn't need blood in there, too.'
Chapter 17
I had taken a cab from Morton Street to Donna's place on East Seventeenth. Now I took another to Kim's building on Thirty-seventh.
As I paid the driver I realized I hadn't made it to the bank. Tomorrow was Saturday, so I'd have Chance's money on my hands all weekend.
Unless some mugger got lucky.
I lightened the load some by slipping five bucks to the doorman for a key to Kim's apartment, along with some story about acting as the tenant's representative. For five dollars he was eager to believe me. I went up to the elevator and let myself in.
The police had been through the place earlier. I didn't know what they were looking for and couldn't say what they found. The sheet in the file Durkin showed me hadn't said much, but nobody writes down everything that comes to his attention.
I couldn't know what the officers on the scene might have noticed.
For that matter, I couldn't be sure what might have stuck to their fingers.
There are cops who'll rob the dead, doing so as a matter of course, and they are not necessarily men who are especially dishonest in other matters.
Cops see too much of death and squalor, and in order to go on dealing with it they often have the need to dehumanize the dead. I remember the first time I helped remove a corpse from a room in an SRO
hotel. The deceased had died vomiting blood and had lain there for several days before his death was discovered. A veteran patrolman and I wrestled the corpse into a body bag and on the way downstairs my companion made sure the bag hit every single step. He'd have been more careful with a sack of
potatoes.
I can still recall the way the hotel's other residents looked at us.
And I can remember how my partner went through the dead man's belongings, scooping up the little cash he had to his name, counting it deliberately and dividing it with me.
I hadn't wanted to take it. 'Put it in your pocket,' he told me.
'What do you think happens to it otherwise? Somebody else takes it. Or it goes to the state. What's the state of New York gonna do with forty-four dollars? Put it in your pocket, then buy yourself some perfumed soap and try to get this poor fucker's stink off your hands.'
I put it in my pocket. Later on, I was the one who bounced bagged corpses down the stairs, the one who
