anything or change the position of any article on the scene, right?'
'That's right.'
'He was a friend of yours and he didn't show up. What was it, he had an appointment with you?'
'I was supposed to see him yesterday.'
'Yeah, well, he woulda been in no condition to show up. The AME'll fix a time of death, but I can tell you right now it's more than twenty-four hours. I don't care what the book says, I'm opening a window.
Why don't you get the one in the kitchen?'
I did, and the living room window as well. When I came back he said, 'So he didn't show and then what? You called him?'
'He didn't have a phone.'
'What's that there?' There was an upended orange crate serving as a bedside bookshelf, and on top of it stood a black telephone with a rotary dial. I said that it was out of order.
'Oh, yeah?' He held the receiver to his ear, cradled it. 'So it is. It unplugged or what? No, it oughta
work.'
'It had been disconnected some time ago.'
'What was he doing, keeping it as an art object? Shit, I wasn't supposed to touch it. Not that anybody's gonna dust the place. We'll close this one right away, it looks pretty open and shut, don't you think?'
'From the looks of it.'
'I seen a couple of these. Kids, high school, college age. First one I seen, I thought, shit, this ain't no way to kill yourself. 'Cause this is a teenage kid that we found in his own clothes closet, if you can picture it, and he's sitting on an upside-down milk crate, one of those plastic milk crates? And there's this knotted bedsheet around his neck, and it's looped around the whatchacallit, the horizontal bar the clothes hangers hang on.
Now say you're gonna hang yourself, that's not how to do it. 'Cause all you gotta do is stand up the minute you lose your nerve and you take the weight off the rope, or in his case the bedsheet.
And if there's real weight put on, enough to strangle you fast or snap your neck, it's gonna pull the whole bar down.
'So I was ready to go off half-cocked, figuring somebody strangled the kid and tried to fake a suicide, and did a real ass-backward job of it, too, when fortunately the guy I'm partnered with puts me wise.
First thing he points out is the kid's naked. 'Autoerotic asphyxiation,' he tells me.
'I never heard of it before. What it is, it's a new way to masturbate.
You cut off your air by half strangling yourself and it boosts the thrill.
Except when you do it wrong like this poor bastard did, and then you're dead meat. And this is how your family finds you, with your eyes bulging and your cock in your hand.'
He shook his head. 'He was a friend of yours,' he said, 'but I bet you never knew he was into shit like this.'
'No.'
'Nobody ever knows. High school kids, sometimes they tell each other. With adults, shit, can you
picture a grown man telling another guy, 'Hey, I found this great new way to beat my meat?' So you weren't expecting to find what you found. You just figured maybe he had a heart attack, something like that?'
'I was just generally worried that something was wrong.'
'So she opened the door with her passkey. It was locked?'
'Double-locked. The spring lock and the deadbolt.'
'And all the windows shut. Well, that's pretty clear cut, you ask me. He got any family ought to be notified?'
'His parents were dead. If he had anybody else, he never mentioned it.'
'Lonely people dyin' alone, it'd break your heart if you let it. Look how thin he is. The poor son of a bitch.'
In the living room he said, 'You willing to make a formal identification? In the absence of next of kin, we ought to have somebody ID him.'
'He's Eddie Dunphy.'
'Okay,' he said. 'That's good enough.'
Willa Rossiter was in 1-B. It was a rear apartment and had the same floor plan as Eddie's, but it was on the east side of the building so everything was reversed. And someone had modernized the plumbing in her unit, and there was no tub in her kitchen. Instead she had a two-foot-square stall shower in the small water closet off the bedroom.
We sat in her kitchen at an old tin-topped table. She asked me if I'd like something to drink and I said I'd welcome a cup of coffee.
'All I've got is instant,' she said. 'And it's decaf at that. Are you sure you wouldn't rather have a beer?'
'Instant decaf is fine.'
'I think I want something stronger myself. Look at me, how I'm shaking.' She held out a hand, palm toward the floor. If it was in fact trembling it didn't show. She went to the cupboard over the sink and got out a fifth of
