I needed a bucket of Popeyes.
I made it through the building’s faux-Soviet lobby and across Forty-Fourth Street without incident, unless you count one near-collision with a taxi, one actual collision with a UPS dolly, and some dubious looks from the doorman, a red-bearded Sikh. I ducked into Popeyes, placed my order politely, then hit the ATM next door to liquidate the next installment of my college fund. I’d come to a decision the previous night: I’d figured out my next move, and it was a doozy. The plane ticket alone, according to my calculations, would cost all I had left in the bank.
I was still standing at the ATM ten minutes later, my arms outstretched as if in supplication. Its screen had just informed me, in no uncertain terms, that not a dime of Orson’s cash would be forthcoming. It had informed me of this sixteen times in a row, and the people behind me — eight of them, the last time I’d checked — were starting to run low on Christian feeling. When the machine finally opted to swallow my card, leaving me with nothing but my driver’s license and my Ogilvy ID, the woman behind me nudged me with her purse. “Here’s a dollar,” she whispered. “Go buy yourself a Snickers. Then get yourself a motherfucking job.”
For want of any other option, Mrs. Haven, I took her advice. I went back into Popeyes and canceled my order and brought her dollar to a bodega at the corner of Forty-Fourth and Sixth. I spent it on a Mars bar, not a Snickers, and ate it while I browsed morosely through the Times. Which is how, within fifteen minutes of reconnecting with the outside world, I found out that Enzie was gone.
ENZIAN TOLLIVER, HARLEM RECLUSE, FOUND DEAD AT 62
Police Require Two Hours to
Break into 5th Ave. Home,
Booby-Trapped with Junk
SISTER FAILS TO APPEAR
BY WILLIAM HALL
Enzian Tolliver was found dead yesterday in her decaying tenement apartment at 2078 Fifth Avenue, but the legend of the reclusive Tolliver twins persists.
Her sister, Gentian, devoted to the frail and aging Enzian, may still be in the seven-room apartment, her home since 1969, although it is now boarded shut. There was no sign of her yesterday, despite the police activity at her home.
The circumstances surrounding the death of 62-year-old Enzian, rarefied as the flower both she and her sister were named for, are as mysterious as the life the two eccentric sisters lived on the unfashionable upper reaches of Fifth Avenue, at the Harlem terminus of Central Park.
UNKNOWN MALE CALLER GAVE TIP
A mysterious telephone call to Police Headquarters yesterday morning reported that there was a dead woman at 2078 Fifth Avenue. The caller gave his name as Waldemar Toula, a deceased uncle of the sisters. Police believe that it may in fact have been Waldemar “Jack” Tolliver, the sisters’ nephew, who reportedly is visiting the city.
I stopped there a moment, punch-drunk with shock. The shopkeeper said something to me but I ignored him.
Police Emergency Squad 6 used crowbars and axes in trying to force their way into the apartment, but the reinforced door proved impassable. It was 12:10 P.M. before Patrolman LaMont Barker forced his way through the picture window at the fourth-story front.
He disappeared from view for several moments, then returned and called down, “There’s a D.O.A. (Dead on Arrival) here.” Detective Ali Lateef climbed the ladder to inspect the body. He reported that the dead woman was in a sitting position, dressed only in a Pendleton shirt. The emaciated body was tentatively identified as Enzian by Willis James Buckram, a neighbor. At 3:45 P.M. Medical Examiner Roger C. Erfect reported that the woman had been dead for fourteen hours.
There was no sign of Gentian Tolliver in the building, no indication of how she entered or left the apartment on her heretofore regular shopping trips to buy food and medication for her sister. The entire foyer of the apartment, to a distance of sixteen feet from the door’s interior side, was packed with bundled newsprint from ceiling to floor, to a total weight of seventeen and one-half tons.
“NEPHEW” SOUGHT FOR QUESTIONING
A search has been initiated in all five boroughs for Waldemar Tolliver, the sisters’ nephew, who was last seen at 2078 Fifth Avenue one week ago. He is believed to remain at large in New York City.
There was more — an attempt to catalog the apartment’s astonishing contents, interviews with the neighbors, disgustingly explicit (and grossly exaggerated) forensic details — but I’ll do both of us a favor, Mrs. Haven, and skip all of that. Once I’d gotten over my panic at the thought of being wanted by the NYPD, I found myself more intrigued by what the article omitted than by the few anemic facts that it contained. What had the medical examiner (the suspiciously named Roger C. Erfect) determined to be the cause of death? Why was no mention made of the army of Iterants I’d seen on my last visit, but such elaborate mention made of me? Why, come to think of it, was “nephew” in quotation marks? And where on earth had Genny disappeared to?
The answer to the last of these mysteries wasn’t long in coming, Mrs. Haven, though it raised more questions than it laid to rest.
“What you got there’s from yesterday,” the shopkeeper said. “I won’t charge you for that.” He handed me a newer, fatter paper from a stack beside the register.
BODY OF GENTIAN TOLLIVER FOUND
Eight-Hour Search of Junk-Filled
Home Believed Fruitless — Then
a Puzzling Discovery
CROWD GATHERS IN STREET
The police searched the junk-filled home of the Tolliver sisters at 2078 Fifth Avenue for eight hours yesterday, but found no trace of Gentian Tolliver, missing since Thursday. Just as the apartment was being sealed, however, her body was found, in a location that had been inspected repeatedly in the course of the day.
“It (Tolliver’s body) was just inside the door of the library, the first room to the right off the hall, under a writing desk,” said Detective Ali Lateef of the 23rd Precinct. “It was covered by newspapers, but it should have been obvious,” said another member of the force, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “This was a room we’d covered twice. The second time was just two hours earlier.”
Neither officer volunteered an explanation for the oversight.
I went up to Harlem that same day, in spite of the risk, for reasons I still don’t fully comprehend. The frost of the week before had thawed, leaving the park looking the way I imagined the forest around Czas must have looked after the Wehrmacht and the Soviets had left: muddied and broken and bereft, with bits of garbage strewn about like evidence of some lost civilization. There were still a few bored-looking loiterers outside my aunts’ building, but the crowd had dwindled to a morbid handful. The show had already moved on.
One man, who claimed to be a researcher for 1010 WINS news radio, was summarizing the events of the day in a high, nasal voice, but nobody seemed to be listening. If there were cops around, I couldn’t pick them out. The windows on my aunts’ floor seemed blocked from the inside, except for the sixth from the left — the bathroom window, I was guessing — which was open in spite of the damp. I was gripped by the urge to duck under the POLICE LINE: DO NOT CROSS tape — I could say I was a tenant, if anyone asked — but I had the good sense to resist it. The 1010 WINS guy was the only one who noticed.
“Too late, buddy,” he said, grinning at me in a way that made me want to kick him in the shins. “Everything worth taking’s already gone.”
* * *
The annals of art and science, writes Kubler, like those of bravery, record only a handful of the many great moments that have occurred. When we consider the class of these great moments, we are usually confronted with dead stars. Even their light has ceased to reach us. We know of their existence only indirectly, by their perturbations, and by the immense detritus of derivative stuff left in their wakes.