“What floor does Morris work on?” I asked Gella. We were parked across the street from the building, on Melrose. There was nobody out at that time of night.
“Two,” she said.
“So the key is in that pot on the right?”
“Under the inside lip of the one on the right as you face the door,” she said, obviously parroting something that her husband had told her many times, “toward the back.”
“Okay. I’m’a go in alone.”
“I’ll come with,” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
I had the whole ride up from Culver City to think about that question. I didn’t want Gella to find out about Lily unless she absolutely had to; not that I cared that he had a girl on the side or even how Gella would feel about that, but we were in a tight situation, people were getting killed, and I didn’t need any excess passion boiling in the backseat if the cops pulled us over.
“I’m gonna leave the key in the ignition,” I said, “so that if we have to leave fast again, I can just jump in and hit it. But if I leave the keys and ain’t nobody in the car, then when we come out, there might not be a vehicle to get away with. That won’t do.”
“But there’s no one to run from here,” she argued.
“Maybe not for you alone, but if you’re with a black man, at night, in a closed office building, going through a man’s papers and such without his permission — then maybe there might be a reason to move fast.” By the time I had gotten through that mouthful I had convinced myself.
“Can I turn on the radio?” she asked in defeat.
“Knock yourself out.”
THE KEY WAS where it was supposed to be, which made me think that I was not where I should have been. Everything so far that had worked out right had ended up wrong. I went through the front door anyway.
The second floor was dark. The key that opened the office building was also designed to work on the Minor Insurance Company door. The office was one middle-size room with two desks, one ash and the other constructed from sheet steel that was painted light gray.
I knew from first glance that the wooden desk belonged to Morris; it was as sloppy as he was. It was covered with candy bar wrappers, Men at War magazines, and a thin layer of dirt comprised of eraser dust, crumbs, and good old L.A. soot. He had a few files for insurance policies in one of the lower drawers. Mostly art items were covered: paintings, rare books, and the like. The policies were all pretty thick, mainly with pages detailing the authenticity of the piece covered. Some of the histories dated back to the sixteenth century. The values attached to these works of art were staggering.
Morris was the executing agent on all of them. He was also the signatory agent of a dozen or more European and British insurance companies. I knew that Morris couldn’t have been the agent of such expensive policies. Therefore he had to be a patsy; a big dodo sitting on a swan’s clutch.
I went through every gritty, chocolate-stained file but came up empty. No Lily or secret apartment to be found.
I had to jimmy the file drawer on Minor’s desk. At first I was surprised that the boss would have taken the uglier piece of furniture for himself, but then I realized that it was for the enhanced security. I wouldn’t have bothered at all except that I had a notion.
Minor’s lower drawers had more policies. These also listed Morris Greenspan as the agent. Rodin, Kandinsky, Picasso were but a few of the names that I recognized from the cheap art picture paperbacks I sold in my store. Policies ranged from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The owners were people from around the world. I sifted among the files and folders until I came upon a policy for a set of jewelers’ tools. I took Sol’s newspaper clipping from my wallet and checked it against the last entry on the documentation section — the dates coincided with the auction that caught Sol’s attention. The sale was brokered by Lawson and Widlow, the accounting firm Sol had worked for. Ten or eleven other policies had Lawson and Widlow mentioned one way or another; brokers, gallery representatives, collateral holders.
There was fraud in there somewhere, I was certain of that; not that I cared. All I wanted was the cost to set up a new bookstore. The rest they, whoever they were, could keep.
I knew that Minor had something to do with the bond; that’s why he came to see Fanny. Or maybe he knew that Fanny was dead and he intended to search the house personally. There was nothing about it in his desk. The only connection I could make to Sol and Fanny were Lawson and Widlow, the article that Sol had clipped, and the fact that Morris Greenspan coincidentally 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. Maybe Lily works on the third floor, I thought. Maybe that light up there is them.
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.