'I know him,' he said. 'You don't have to describe him for me. I know all of them. I just tryin' to think if I seen him today.' He closed his eyes in concentration. 'No,' he said at length. 'I don't see him in a while. You want to leave your card, I call you when I see him.'
'I think we should see if he's all right.'
'You mean open his door?'
'That's what I mean.'
'You ring his bell?'
'I don't know which bell is his.'
'Don't it got his name on it?'
'No.'
He sighed. 'A lot of them,' he said, 'they don't want no name on the bell. I put the name in, they just take it out. Then their friends come, ring the wrong bell, disturb everybody. Or they ring my bell. I tell you, it's a big pain in the ass.'
'Well,' I said.
He got to his feet. 'First thing we do,' he said, 'is we ring his bell. Then we see.'
We rang his bell and got no response. We went inside and climbed three flights of stairs, and the house was about what I'd expected, with a Lysol smell battling the odors of cooking and mice and urine. Carlos led us to what he said was Shorter's door and banged on it with a heavy fist. 'Hey, open up,' he called. 'This gen'man wants to talk to you.'
Nothing.
'Not home,' Carlos said, and shrugged. 'You want to write him a note, put it under the door, an' when he comes home-'
'I think you should open the door,' I said.
'I don't know about that.'
'I'm worried about him,' I said. 'I think he might have had an accident.'
'What kind of accident?'
'A bad one. Open the door.'
'You say that,' he said, 'but I'm the one gets in trouble.'
'I'll take the responsibility.'
'And what do I say, huh? 'This guy took the responsibility.' It's still my ass inna crack, man.'
'If you don't open it,' I told him, 'I'll kick it in.'
'You serious?' He looked at me and decided I was. 'You think maybe he's sick in there, huh?'
'Or worse than that.'
'What's worse'n sick?' I guess it came to him, because he winced at the thought. 'Shit, I hope not.' He hauled out a ring of keys, found his master passkey, and fitted it in the lock. 'Anyway,' he said, 'you wouldn't have to kick it in, less'n he got the chain on. These locks is nothin', you can slip 'em with a plastic card. But if the chain's on, shit, you still gonna have to kick it in.'
But the chain wasn't on. He turned the lock, paused to knock on the door one final unnecessary time, and pushed the door inward.
The room was empty.
He stood in the doorway. I pushed past him, walked around the little room. It was as neat and bare as a monk's cell. There was an iron bedstead, a chest of drawers, a bedside table. The bed was made.
The drawers were empty. So was the closet. I looked under the bed. There were no personal articles anywhere, just the thrift-shop furniture that had been there when he moved in.
'I guess he moved out,' Carlos said.
The telephone was on the beside table. I slipped a pencil under the receiver and lifted it enough to get a dial tone, then allowed it to drop back in place.
'He didn't say nothin' to nobody,' Carlos said. 'He pays a week at a time, so he's paid through Sunday. Funny, huh?'
TJ walked over to the bed, picked up the pillow. There was a booklet under it. He took a close look at it and handed it to me.
I already knew what it was.
'It don't make sense,' Carlos said. 'You gonna move out, why you gonna make the bed first? I got to change it anyway before I rent it to somebody else, don't I?'
'Let's hope so.'
'Course I do.' He frowned, puzzled. 'Maybe he's comin' back.'
I looked at the AA meeting book, the one I'd bought him, the only thing he'd left behind.
'No,' I said. 'He's not coming back.'
25
Martin Banszak took off his rimless glasses and fogged the lenses with his breath, then polished each in turn with his handkerchief. When he was satisfied with the results he put them on and turned his sad blue eyes on me.
'You must know the caliber of men we get,' he said. 'Guard work pays just one or two dollars an hour over the minimum wage. It's a job that requires no experience and minimal training. Our best men are retired police officers looking to supplement a city pension, but men like that can usually find something better for themselves.
'We get fellows who are out of work and looking for stopgap employment until something opens up for them. They're often good workers, but they don't stay with us long. And then we get men who work for us because they can't do any better.'
'What kind of checks do you run on them?'
'We do the minimum. I try not to hire convicted felons. After all, this is security work. You don't hire the fox to guard the henhouse, do you? But it's hard to avoid. I can run computer checks, but what good is that when the name's a common one? 'Query: Has William Johnson been an inmate in the New York State prison system?' Well, there are probably half a dozen William Johnsons in prison in this state on any given day, so how am I to know? And when a man comes to me and says his name is William Johnson, how can I tell if it's the name he was born with? If a man shows me a Social Security card and a driver's license, what can I do but accept it?'
'Don't you run their prints?'
'No.'
'Why not?'
'It takes too long,' he said. 'By the time I get a response from Washington, two weeks or more have passed. The applicant's found other work in the meantime.'
'Couldn't you hire him provisionally? And let him go if he doesn't check out?'
'Is that how they do it at Reliable? Well, I'm sure you charge more for your services. A Manhattan firm, a fancy address. That's all well and good for the clients who can afford to cover your overhead for you.' He picked up a pencil, tapped its eraser end on the desktop. 'I can't have half my employees checking up on the other half,' he said. 'I'd be out of business in no time.'
I didn't say anything.
'Two years ago,' he said, 'we tried taking fingerprints when we accepted applications for employment. You know what happened?'
'Your applications dropped off.'
'That's exactly right. People didn't want to go through a messy and demeaning process.'
'Especially the ones with outstanding warrants,' I said. 'It would have been particularly messy and demeaning for them.'
He glared at me. 'And the ones who had stopped paying alimony,' he said. 'And the ones running away from bad debts. And, yes, the ones who'd served time for minor narcotics violations and other low-level criminal
