"Yes," Tell said. "That's what I heard. But the janitor wouldn't tell me anymore, or maybe he didn't know anymore. He just laughed and walked away."
"It happened before I started to work with Paul. Paul was the one who told me about it."
"He never saw the ghost himself?" Tell asked, knowing the answer. Yesterday Paul had been sitting in it. Shitting in it, to be perfectly vulgarly truthful.
"No, he used to laugh about it." Georgie put his sandwich down. "You know how he can be sometimes. Just a little m-mean." If forced to say something even slightly negative about someone, Georgie developed a mild stutter.
"I know. But never mind Paul; who was this ghost? What happened to him?"
"Oh, he was just some dope pusher," Georgie said. "This was back in 1972 or '73, I guess. Before the Slump."
Tell nodded. From 1975 until 1980 or so, the rock industry lay becalmed in the horse latitudes. Kids spent their money on video games instead of records. For perhaps the fiftieth time since 1955, the pundits announced the death of rock and roll. And, as on other occasions, it proved to be a lively corpse. Video games topped out; MTV checked in; a fresh wave of stars arrived from England; Bruce Springsteen suddenly became all the things the newsmagazines had said he was ten years before.
"Before the slump, record company execs used to deliver coke backstage in their briefcases before big shows," Georgie said. "I was concert-mixing back then, and I saw it happen. There was one guy-I don't want to say his n-name because he's dead, dead since 1978, but you'd know it-who used to get a jar of olives from his label before every gig. The jar would come wrapped up in pretty paper with bows and ribbon and everything. Only instead of water, the olives came packed in cocaine. He used to put them in his drinks. Called them b-b-blast-off martinis."
"I bet they were, too," Tell murmured.
"Well, back then everybody thought coke was a good clean high. It didn't hook you like heroin or f-fuck you over so you couldn't work. And this building, man, this building was a regular snowstorm. Pills and pot and hash too, but mainly it was cocaine. It was the big fashion drug. And this guy-"
"What was his name?"
Georgie shrugged and worked on his sandwich. "I don't know. But he was like one of the deli delivery boys you see going up and down in the elevators with coffee and doughnuts and b-bagels. Only instead of delivering coffee-and, this guy delivered dope. You'd see him this is what I heard, anyway - two or three times a week, riding all the way up and then working his way down. He'd have a topcoat slung over his arm and an alligatorskin briefcase in that hand. He kept the overcoat over his arm even when it was hot. That was so people wouldn't see the cuff. But I guess sometimes they did a-a-anyway."
"The what?"
"C-C-Cuff' Georgie said, spraying out bits of bread and corned beef and immediately going crimson. "Gee, Johnny, I'm sorry."
"No problem. You want another cream soda?"
"Yes, thanks," Georgie said gratefully.
Tell signalled the waitress.
"So he was a delivery-boy," he said, mostly to put Georgie at his ease again - Georgie was still patting his lips with his napkin.
"That's right." The fresh cream soda arrived and Georgie drank some. "When he got off the elevator on the eighth floor, that briefcase chained to his wrist would be full of dope. When he got off it on the ground floor again, it would be full of money."
"Best trick since lead into gold," Tell said.
"Huh?"
"Nothing. Go on."
"Not much to tell. One day he only made it down to the third floor. He made his deliveries, went into the men's room, and someone o-offed him."
"Shot him?" Tell asked, thinking dubiously of silencers-in the movies they made a sound very like that of the pneumatic elbow-joint on the men's room door.
"What I heard," Georgie said, "was that someone opened the door of the stall where he was s-sitting and stuck a pencil in his eye."
For just a moment Tell saw it as vividly as he had seen the crumpled bag under the conspirators' restaurant table: a yellow Eberhard Faber #2, sharpened to an exquisite black point, sliding forward through the air and then shearing into the startled black well of pupil. He winced.
Georgie nodded. "It's probably not true. I mean, not that part. Probably someone just, you know, stuck him."
"Yes."
"But whoever it was sure had something sharp with him, all right," Georgie said.
"He did?"
"Yes. Because the briefcase was gone."
Tell looked at Georgie. He could see this, too.
"When the cops came and took the guy off the toilet, they found his left hand in the b-bowl."
"Oh," Tell said.
Georgie looked down at his plate. There was still half a sandwich on it. "I guess maybe I'm f-f-full," he said, and smiled uneasily.
On their way back to the studio, Tell asked, "So the guy's ghost is supposed to haunt ... what, that bathroom?" And suddenly he laughed, because gruesome as the story had been, there was something comic in the idea of a ghost haunting a men's room.
Georgie smiled. "You know people. At first that was what they said. When I was first working with Paul, guys would tell me they'd seen him in there. Not all of him, just his sneakers under the stall door."
"Just his sneakers."
"Yeah. That's how you'd know they were making it up, or imagining it, because You only heard it from guys who knew him when he was alive. From guys who knew he wore sneakers."
Tell, who had been an eleven-year-old kid living in rural Pennsylvania when the murder happened, nodded. They had arrived at the building. As they walked up the hall toward the elevators, Georgie said, "But you know how fast the turnover is in this business. Here today and gone tomorrow. I doubt if there's anybody working here who was working there then, except maybe for a few j-janitors, and none of them would have bought from the guy.
"And he was probably one of those guys who you never even noticed if you didn't buy from him."
"Yeah. Unless you were a c-cop. So you hardly ever hear the story anymore, and no one ever says they see the guy. "
They were at the elevators.
"Georgie, why do you stick with Paul?"
Although Georgie lowered his head and the tips of his cars turned a bright red, he did not sound really surprised at this abrupt shift in direction. "He takes care of me."
Do you sleep with him, Georgie? Something else he couldn't say. Wouldn't, even if he could. Because Georgie would tell him.
Tell, who could barely bring himself to talk to strangers and never made friends (except maybe for today), suddenly hugged Georgie Ronkler. Georgie hugged him back. Then they stepped away from each other, and the elevator came, and the mix continued, and the following evening, at six-fifteen, after the wrap and Janning's curt goodbye (he left with Georgie trailing behind him), Tell stepped into the third-floor men's room to get a look at the owner of the white sneakers.
Talking with Georgie, he had remembered what he had forgotten. Something so simple you learned it in the first grade. Telling was only half. Showing was the other half.
There was no lapse in consciousness this time, nor any sensation of fear ... only that slow steady deep drumming in his chest. All his senses had been heightened. He smelled chlorine, the pink disinfectant cakes in the urinals, old farts. He could see minute cracks in the paint on the wall, and chips on the pipes. He could hear the hollow click of his heels as he walked toward the first stall.
The sneakers were now almost buried in the corpses of dead flies.
There were only one or two at first. Because there was no need for them to die until the sneakers were there, and they weren't there until I saw them.
"Why me?" he asked clearly in the stillness.
The sneakers didn't move and no voice answered.
"I didn't know you, I never met you, I don't even take the kind of stuff you sold. So why me?"
One of the sneakers twitched. There was a papery rustle of dead flies. Then the sneaker-it was the mislaced one-settled back.