When she didn’t come again on Thursday evening, he left the café at seven-thirty and walked the three blocks to her apartment building. The space on the 2-B mailbox where her name had been Dymo-labeled was now empty. Moved out, then, he thought with a brief, sharp feeling of disappointment. Where? The manager might know; the label on the box marked 1-A — D. & L. Fong — also bore the abbreviation Mgr. He hesitated. Did he really want to know where she’d gone?
No, he thought, I don’t.
He rang the Fongs’ bell.
There was no admitting buzz at the door. But after half a minute a thin, middle-aged Asian woman appeared in the lobby and peered out at him through the door glass. His demeanor wouldn’t have alarmed even the most paranoid individual — the woman opened the door almost immediately.
“Yes?”
“Mrs. Fong?”
“Yes. The apartment isn’t ready for renting yet. Next week, could be.”
“I’m not here about an apartment. I... well, I’m wondering about Janet Mitchell.”
Mrs. Fong’s eyes narrowed. Her lips pinched together in tight little ridges. “Her? You know her?”
“Yes, I know her,” Messenger lied. “Can you tell me where she went?”
“Where?”
“Or at least why she moved out.”
“Moved out? You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“She’s dead.”
“Dead!”
“Sunday night. Sit in bathtub, cut her wrists with a razor blade.” Mrs. Fong rolled her eyes. “My building — killed herself in my building. Terrible. You know how terrible it is to clean up so much blood?”
2
He sat in his living room with the lights off, a glass of brandy warming in his hands. He’d poured the brandy when he first came in, but he hadn’t felt like tasting it yet. He sat watching patterns of light from occasional passing cars flicker across the drawn window curtains. From the stereo turntable, the melodic contours and rhythmic innovations of Ellington and his band swelled and ebbed. One of the Duke’s original thirties recordings, this one. “Perdido,” with Cootie Williams’s trumpet growly sweet and low-down blue.
Perdido. Lost.
Like Janet Mitchelclass="underline" low-down blue and lost.
Why?
The question throbbed in him to the beat of the music. She’d left no note, Mrs. Fong had told him. Given no warning. And the police had found nothing among her meager effects to hint at a motive. What about her past? he’d asked. Who was she, where did she come from? Mrs. Fong had no idea. Showed up one day five months ago, rented the apartment on a month-to-month basis. Paid two months’ rent in advance, plus a cleaning deposit, all in cash; paid each subsequent month’s rent in cash. Where did she work? Mrs. Fong shrugged. Self-employed, private income — that was what Janet Mitchell had told her and she hadn’t bothered to ask for references. No need for references, not when you were handed several hundred dollars in good green cash in advance and then promptly on the first of every month. Visitors? No visitors, before or after her death. Just him, today. The police hadn’t come back, which meant they’d been satisfied that her death was in fact suicide. They wouldn’t care otherwise; she was another statistic to them. Mrs. Fong didn’t care; to her Janet Mitchell was nothing more than an annoying mess to clean up. Had anybody cared that she’d ended her life? A relative — had the authorities found one to claim the body? Mrs. Fong didn’t know about that, either. Mrs. Fong was tired of answering questions. Mrs. Fong politely but firmly shut the door in his face.
He felt dull and empty, sitting here now in the dark — almost the same way he’d felt when first his father and then his mother died. But they’d been his parents; he’d loved them, even if he hadn’t been close to them. It made no sense that he should feel some sense of loss over a woman he had spoken to once in his life, who hadn’t even known he existed.
Or did it?
The blues, he thought. One blue lonesome individual empathizing with the plight of another. But it was more than that. In jazz there were two forms of the blues: a simple, direct, personal sadness, the sadness of remembrances past and of the deep darkness of the unconscious; and the other kind, a deterioration and decline of the personal spirit, a kind of resolution downward to plaintive, desperate resignation. Ms. Lonesome had had the second type. Perdido. Lost. He wondered if maybe he did, too. If this entire business with her was symptomatic of an approaching downward spiral in his own existence. More than just a midlife crisis; a rest-of-his-life crisis, in which he descended gradually into a void of utter passivity.
The possibility worried him, yet he wasn’t frightened by it. Perhaps that too was symptomatic. If you think you might be on the edge of a breakdown, you ought to be terrified of the prospect — and if you’re not terrified, then isn’t that in itself a sign of something clinically wrong? Utter passivity: a synonym for despair. Like the kind of despair Ms. Lonesome had been suffering from?
No. The difference was, he wasn’t suicidal. Sit in bathtub, cut her wrists with a razor blade. He simply wasn’t made that way. He could never commit an act of self-destruction.
Maybe she hadn’t believed she could, either. Once.
Why did she do it?
What drove her into the depths?
The Duke’s arrangement of “Blue Serge” was playing now, a piece even more reflective of plaintive resignation than “Perdido.” Messenger listened, let himself be folded into the music for a minute or so — and then popped out again, back into bleak awareness. He sipped some of the brandy. It tasted bitter: bitter heat. He set the snifter down. Outside, a motorcycle raced past with its engine cranked up, momentarily drowning out Ellington’s band. A sudden siren sliced the night, close by; white and then blood-red lights flashed across the curtains and were gone. The room, he realized, was chilly. He ought to get up and put on the furnace. But he didn’t do it. He did nothing except sit, thinking and trying not to think.
After a while, when the record ended and quiet pressed down, he said aloud, “She shouldn’t have been alone. Nobody should have to die that much alone.”
He sat there.
“Lost, wasted life.”
He sat there.
“Ms. Lonesome,” he said to the darkness, “why did you use that goddamn razor blade?”
It was warm in the coroner’s office on Bryant Street. Too warm: Messenger could feel the sweat moving on his face and neck. Another of life’s little illusions shattered. He’d always thought places like this would be dank and cold from top to bottom. And a bare, antiseptic white, presided over by sepulchral types in starched uniforms. Maybe it was that way down in the basement, where the morgue and autopsy room were, but up here was a straightforward business office paneled in wood; and the male clerk who waited on him was young and brisk and nattily dressed in a dark blue blazer and gray slacks.
“Janet Mitchell,” the clerk said, and tapped out the name on his computer keyboard. He studied the file that came up on the screen. “Oh, right. The Jane Doe suicide last week.”
“Jane Doe? Does that mean her name isn’t Janet Mitchell?”
“Evidently not.”
“Then her body hasn’t been claimed yet.”
“Not yet. It’s still here, in storage.”
“Storage,” Messenger said.
“In cases like this cadavers are frozen immediately after autopsy. Do you think you might be able to identify the deceased? If so, I can arrange a viewing...”