Armstrong's to call him again.
The same busy signal, and it sounded different to me from the usual sort of busy signal. I called the operator and told her I wanted to know if a certain number was engaged or if the telephone was simply off the hook.
I got a girl who evidently didn't speak much English and wasn't sure how to perform the task I'd asked of her. She offered to put me in touch with her supervisor, but I was only half a dozen blocks from Fuhrmann's place, so I told her not to bother.
I was quite calm when I set out for his place and extremely anxious by the time I got there. Maybe I was picking up signals and they were coming in stronger as the distance decreased. But for one reason or another I didn't ring the bell in his vestibule. I looked inside and saw no one around, and then I used my piece of celluloid to slip the lock.
I climbed the stairs to the top floor without running into anyone.
The building was absolutely silent. I went to Fuhrmann's door and knocked on it, called his name, knocked again.
Nothing.
I took out my strip of celluloid and looked at it and at the door. I thought about the burglar alarm. If it was going to go off I wanted to have the door open by the time it began to make noises so I could get the hell out of there.Which ruled out slipping the bolt back. Subtlety has its uses, but sometimes brute force is called for.
I kicked the door in. It only took one kick because the dead bolt had not been set. You need the key to set the dead bolt, just as you need a key to set the alarm, and the person who had last left Fuhrmann's apartment had not had those keys or had not troubled to use them. So the alarm did not go off, which was all to the good, but that was all the good news I was going to get.
The bad news was waiting for me inside, but I'd known what it would be from the instant the alarm had failed to sound. In a sense I'd known before I even reached the building but that was instinctive knowledge, and when the alarm stayed quiet it became deductive knowledge, and now that I could see him it was just cold, hard fact.
He was dead. He was lying on the floor in front of his desk, and it looked as though he had been leaning over his desk when his killer took him. I didn't have to touch him to know he was dead. The left rear portion of his skull was pulped, and the room itself reeked of death.
Dead colons and bladders divest themselves of their contents. Corpses, before the working of the undertaker's art, smell as foul as the death that grips them.
I touched him anyway to guess how long he'd been dead. But his flesh was cold, so I could only know that he'd been dead a minimum of five or six hours. I'd never bothered to pick up much knowledge of forensic medicine. The lab boys handle that area, and they're reasonably good at it, if not half so good as they like to pretend.
I went over to the door and closed it. The lock was useless, but there was a plate for a police lock on the floor, and I found the steel bar and set it in place. I didn't intend to stay long but wanted no interruptions while I was there.
The phone was off the hook. There were no other signs of a struggle, so I assumed the killer had taken the phone off the hook to retard discovery of the body. If he was that cute, there weren't going to be any prints around, but I still took the trouble not to add any of my own or smear any that he might inadvertently have made.
When had he been killed? The bed was unmade, but perhaps he didn't make it every day. Men who live alone often don't. Had it been made up when I'd visited him? I thought about it and decided I couldn't be certain one way or the other. I recalled an impression of neatness and precision, which suggested it had indeed been made up, but there was also an impression of comfort, which would mesh well enough with an unmade bed. The more I thought about it, the more I decided it didn't make any difference one way or the other. The medical examiner would fix the time of death, and I was in no rush to know what I would learn from him soon enough.
So I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at Doug Fuhrmann and tried to remember the precise sound of his voice and the way his face had looked.
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 theClark Street station just over the bridge inBrooklyn . I had to ask directions to get to PierrepontStreet .
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.
