'You have the right address,' he said. His accent was West Indian, andthea's came out very broad.
'You come the wrong day isall the problem.'
'I'm expected.'
'Mr.Manch , he is not here no more.'
'He moved out?' It seemed impossible.
'Hedoan ' want to wait for the elevator,' he said. 'So hetake 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, 'Hejump out the window.Land right there.' He pointed to a portion of the sidewalk that looked no different from the rest. 'Heland 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 do an ' 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.
