It wasn’t long before I knew the routine of the house, by day. Mrs. Garr rotated from the davenport in her parlor at the front of the house, where she was seldom, to the black chair in the hall, where she was slightly more often, to the basement, where she spent most of her time. After I had been down there with my boxes of wrappings, I knew she had a table and rocking chair down there by the furnace.
She didn’t read, didn’t knit, didn’t sew; I could sometimes hear her rocker creaking on the cement floor an entire afternoon. That’s how I came to picture her, as an evil-eyed old woman with lovely white hair, sitting there doing nothing, with the three big cats sitting on her lap or rubbing against her chair, and the black dog parked alongside.
But the rest of the household was reasonably respectable. If that gentlemanly Mr. Grant, for instance, lived here by choice, then I should be able to stand it, considering that I’d have to pay almost twice for what I was getting, anywhere else.
That, I remember, was my attitude the first week. The Friday I had been there a week I woke early; the April morning was lovely, and the air streaming in my windows smelled sunny and as fresh as Easter tulips. I wandered outdoors, after I’d dressed, to get more of that air. The house I left behind me was still quiet, but the morning outside crackled with spring growth. I walked across the paved court at the back of the house to stand at the railing and look down.
It had rained in the night and, as happens once in almost every April, the twelve hours since yesterday seemed to have brought us suddenly into spring. The plots of earth between the houses below were green for sure now: that lovely, sunny, tender green of spring.
Green even showed beneath the straggly brown stalks of last year’s weeds at the foot of the concrete drop. The inhabitants of Water Street threw refuse there: paper, tins, boxes, rusted iron.
Someone had even thrown a heap of old clothes out there.
A heap of clothes.
I found myself leaning perilously far out over the guardrail.
Not a heap of old clothes. For a moment I clung dizzily to the rail.
A head with dark hair, arms outflung, feet . . .
A man, a man twisted and motionless in a position that could only mean death, lay facedown in the weeds of Water Street, straight below where I stood.
3
A MAN, A DEAD man, sixty feet below me!
As if the rail had pushed at me, I jumped for the house.
“Mrs. Garr,” I cried, speeding through my rooms. “There’s someone lying at the foot of the drop! In the weeds! He looks dead. We’ve got to call a doctor, call the police! How do you get ’em? How do you get the police?”
I fumbled dazedly with the phone book, trying to get the operator. Mrs. Garr stumbled out of her room in a short white nightgown, just as she had come from her bed.
“You can’t call without a nickel!” she screamed at my incompetence.
I sped back for a nickel; it seemed minutes before my fingers could pick one from the inside pocket of my handbag.
The operator switched me quickly to the police.
“There’s someone lying in the weeds, the weeds down below on Water Street,” I babbled. “He looks dead. It’s a man.”
“Who is it?” the big voice at the other end of the wire asked calmly.
“I don’t know. I just saw it lying there.”
“Where is it? Where you calling from?”
“Five ninety-three Trent Street. Oh, hurry, hurry!”
“Right there!”
The receiver clicked.
“What should we do?” I continued into the unhearing phone. “What should we do now?”
“We could go on down there.” There was a greedy light in Mrs. Garr’s eyes. She turned back into the room under the stairs for a bathrobe, then, still in her bare feet, padded through my rooms and across the back court to the guardrail, to peer avidly over.
The scene below was just as it had been. Heap of clothes in last year’s weeds.
“It’s a sure thing it’s a man lyin’ down there,” Mrs. Garr cried back to me. “There’s been illegal dealings down below in one of them houses; I’ll bet that’s what it is. Some fella stuck a knife in him and dumped him—Here they come!”
It was no longer than that before the siren wailed, far off, then near. I ran around the house to intercept the two policemen at the front door.
“Did you call up about a—”
“Yes, I did,” I said breathlessly. “Come around the back. You can see—”
I ran back; the two officers walked after, their longer legs keeping pace.
“Right down there, Off’cer, right down there,” Mrs. Garr screamed, pointing.
The two men looked once, then ran back to their car. The car slung off, leaving Mrs. Garr and me at the rail alone, but not for long. People began popping out of my back door. First the man I had guessed was Mr. Waller, elbowing into a bathrobe, his slippers flapping.
“What’s all the racket?”
We told him what I’d found. He leaned excitedly beside us.
“That’s right. That’s right, all right. That’s a man there!”
He and Mrs. Garr repeated that, over and over. The police car came hurtling up the street below; as it did so, two more men ran down my back steps to be greeted with explanations. They were the two men I’d seen together that first morning. I paid them little
