it, and the owner doesn't care, and I certainly don't care. I've got a key that's marked 4-C, but that doesn't mean it's likely to open anything.'
'We'll try it.'
'That's all we can do.'
'Well, it's not quite all,' I said. 'Sometimes I'm not too bad at opening a lock without the key.'
'Oh, really?' She turned to give me a look. 'That must be very useful in your profession. What are you, a locksmith or a burglar?'
'I used to be a cop.'
'And now?'
'Now I'm an ex-cop.'
'No kidding. You told me your name but I lost it.'
I told her again. As we climbed, I learned that her name was Willa Rossiter and that she'd been the building's superintendent for some twenty months. She received the apartment rent-free in exchange for her services.
'But it doesn't really cost the landlord anything,' she said,
'because he wouldn't be renting it anyway.
There are three empty apartments in the building beside mine.
They're not for rent.'
'You'd think they'd go fast.'
'They'd go in a minute, and they'd bring a thousand a month, crazy as it sounds. But he'd rather warehouse the empty apartments. He wants to turn the building into a co-op, and every untenanted apartment is ultimately a vote on his side, and an apartment he can sell for whatever the traffic will bear.'
'But in the meantime he loses a thousand a month on each vacancy.'
'I guess it's worth it to him in the long run. If we go co-op, he'll get a hundred thousand dollars for each of these rabbit warrens. But that's New York. I don't think there's anyplace else in the country where you could get that for the whole building.'
'Anywhere else in the country, the building would be condemned.'
'Not necessarily. It's a solid building. It's over a hundred years old, and these old tenements were cheap working-class housing when they went up. They're not like the brownstones in Park Slope and Clinton Hill that were very grand in their day. Even so, this is a sound structure. And that's Mr. Dunphy's door. In the rear on the right.'
She got to his door and knocked on it, a good strong knock. When no answer came she knocked again, louder. We looked at each other, and she shrugged and fitted her key into the lock. She turned it twice around, first to disengage the dead bolt, then to snick back the spring lock.
As soon as she cracked the door I knew what we were going to find. I gripped her shoulder.
'Let me,' I said. 'You don't want to see this.'
'What's that smell?'
I pushed past her and went to look for the body.
* * *
The apartment was a typical tenement railroad flat, with three little rooms lined up in a row. The hall door led into a living room furnished with a matching couch and armchair and a table-model TV. The armchair's seat was sprung, and the fabric was worn through on its arms, and on the arms of the couch.
There was an ashtray on the table that held the television set. It had a couple of butts in it.
The next room was the kitchen. The stove and sink and refrigerator were in a row against the wall, and over the sink was a window looking out on an airshaft. Away from the appliances stood a large old-fashioned claw-foot bathtub. Some of its porcelain exterior had chipped away to reveal black cast iron. A plywood top, painted a glossy off-white, converted the tub into a dining table. There was an empty coffee cup on top of the tub-table, and another dirty ashtray. There were dishes stacked in the sink, and clean ones in a wire strainer on the drainboard.
The last room was the bedroom, and that was where I found Eddie.
He was sitting on the edge of his unmade bed, slumped forward. He was wearing a plain white T-shirt and nothing else. There was a stack of glossy magazines beside him on the bed, and one in front of him on the linoleum-covered floor, this last open to a double-page spread shot of a young woman with her wrists and ankles bound and ropes wrapped elaborately around her body. Her large breasts were tightly wrapped with lamp cord, or something that looked like it, and her face was contorted in an unconvincing grimace of pain and terror.
There was a rope around Eddie's neck, a noose fashioned from a length of plastic-coated clothesline. Its other end was fastened to a pipe running the length of the ceiling.
'My God!'
It was Willa, come to see for herself. 'What happened?' she demanded. 'Jesus God, what happened to him?'
I knew what had happened.
The cop's name was Andreotti. His partner, a light-skinned black patrolman, was downstairs getting a statement from Willa. Andreotti, a bear of a man with shaggy black hair and bushy eyebrows, had followed me up three flights to Eddie's apartment.
He said, 'You were on the job once yourself, so I assume you followed the procedures. You didn't touch
