worked for Minor.
The putz, as Fanny called him, wasn’t there, but I didn’t expect that. The way I figured it he was at Lily’s house unleashing his laments upon her bosom. The only reasons I helped Gella were that I hoped she could get me closer to the bond and to keep Fearless from getting distracted. It would have been good to have found an address or number for Lily. That way I might have had some leverage over Morris; maybe I could have even turned him against Minor.
Then a thought hit me. Most of the time a married man taps on a woman he has easy access to. Wedlock keeps him from going out every night prowling the bars and nightclubs; he meets his girlfriends at work or next door.
LIGHT FROM a single bulb spilled out from the crack into the gloomy hallway. To my disappointment the word JANITOR was stenciled on the red-brown door. There was no sound coming from anywhere.
I pulled the door open, expecting to see a deep-basined sink and a worn-out collection of mops and brooms.
I wondered how long he knew about the exposed beam that ran across the ceiling of the third-floor hopper room; the perfect timber to hold the rope firmly.
His face was darker than mine, and his inelegant hands were now stiff from the onset of rigor mortis. His skin was room temperature. The pants were unzipped and his grayish pink penis poked out. Morris looked as uncomfortable in death as he had in life. Under his feet was an overturned step ladder he had used to reach up with the rope and then kicked away to end his life. In the corner was a dwindling puddle that had the strong stench of urine. In the opposite corner was a cream- colored envelope that, I found, held the suicide note.
A few weeks later, when I was taking a forced vacation, it came to me that the piss in the corner was Morris’s last act of sloppy rebellion, the comment that summed up his life and then evaporated. The suicide letter was just a footnote to that metaphor.
I squatted down outside of the janitor’s door and read the five sheets of small, surprisingly neat, print. Then I read it again. The words were craftily penned, but the mind that wrote them was still a mess.
Morris was filled with fears and hallucinations, delusions of grandeur and deep self-hatred. His girlfriend, it seemed, was a prostitute, his dreams empty and pitiful.
I’m a fast reader, so I read the letter a third time and then put it in my pocket. I went all the way down to the front door and then stopped. Ever since Elana had come into my store I had been making the wrong decisions, going in the wrong direction. Therefore my next choice had to be considered. What would I say to Gella Greenspan? If I told her about her husband, she would want to call a hospital, and they would call the police. The police would want to know her movements that night, and those movements included me. Simon Jonas would be happy to press charges of assault, and if I didn’t ditch the pistol, they’d also have me on theft. On the other hand, if I didn’t tell her, it would be up to strangers, cold-hearted cops who’d just as likely accuse her of some crime connected to the idiot’s demise.
Pat Boone was fumbling a note when I opened the door to the car. Gella was asleep in the passenger’s seat. The sound startled her, but when she saw my face she smiled.
“Did you find anything?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing.”
31
FEARLESS AND DORTHEA were asleep in the bedroom when I got back to our apartment at a little past five. I’d dropped Gella off at her place twenty minutes earlier. When we neared her house she worried that maybe Morris came home while she was gone and that he’d be worried about her. I kept my silence, telling myself that it would be less painful this way.
“Paris?” Fearless said from the bed.
“What time is it?” Dorthea groaned.
“Go back to sleep,” Fearless told her.
He threw on his clothes and met me in the kitchen of our little unit. I breathed Morris’s suicide in a whisper. It wasn’t until we got in the car and were driving that I told him the rest.
“And you didn’t tell her that her husband was upstairs,” he said, “dead?”
“I told you, man. It was nighttime, and they had already called her about Sol. And the dude was stone-cold dead. She couldn’t’a helped him. How would it have been good for her to see the husband she loved with his neck stretched out a foot long on a
