“You could be a reporter,” he said. “You sorta look like a reporter — or what a reporter thinks he oughta look like. You know, when guys get your age they’ve pretty well made themselves look like what they are.”
I thought about telling him that he looked like a philosopher, but decided not to. “I used to be a reporter,” I said.
“But you’re not anymore?”
“No.”
“How much do reporters make nowadays, about three hundred?”
“About that,” I said. “Some make more; a lot make less.”
“I didn’t think you was a reporter,” he said. “You wanta know why?”
“All right. Why?”
“Because nobody’s gonna send anybody who’s making three hundred a week down here to ask questions about a nobody like Peskoe, that’s why.”
“You didn’t like him?”
“What was to like? He stayed in his room. Eight-nineteen.”
“How long did he stay here?”
The clerk yawned and didn’t try to cover it up. The yawn gave me a good look at the inside of his mouth. His teeth were gray all the way back, except where they were black. Or the fillings were. His tongue was mostly yellow. There didn’t seem to be much pink in his mouth. When he was through yawning, he said, “You know how I got this job?”
“How?”
“My wife kicked me out. So I checked in here because it was cheap. Then I got fired from my job and got behind in my rent so they let me work nights. For a while I tried to find another job, but who wants to hire anybody fifty-three years old?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What kind of work did Peskoe do?”
The clerk was still wrapped up in his own problem. “I get my room and sixty-six bucks a week. Twenty-five of that goes for alimony. That leaves me forty-one a week and with withholding and social security that leaves me about thirty-five a week. Did you ever try eatin’ on thirty-five a week?”
“It sounds tough,” I said and pulled a twenty from my billfold and smoothed it out on the counter. It lay there for all of two seconds before disappearing into the clerk’s pocket.
“Peskoe was here for a month,” he said. “He didn’t do nothing. I mean he didn’t work. He just stayed in his room most of the time. He didn’t have no visitors. He didn’t get no calls or no mail. He just stayed in his room except when he went out to eat. Once in a while he’d go out at night. But not a lot”
“Did he drink?” I said.
“Nah. Maybe a pint a week.”
“Then he wasn’t drunk when he went out the window.”
“He wasn’t drunk.”
“Did he seem depressed?”
The clerk looked at me curiously. “You with an insurance company?”
“Why?”
“I’ve heard if it’s suicide, you guys don’t have to pay off. On life insurance, I mean.”
“I’m not with an insurance company.”
The clerk seemed to believe me. He nodded a couple of times and then looked around the lobby. “You ask if he was depressed. He lived here, didn’t he? We haven’t got no happy guests. None I know of anyhow.”
I brought out a package of cigarettes and offered the clerk one. He took it and I lit both of them. “What do the cops say?” I said.
The clerk shrugged. “Fell or jumped.”
“Not pushed.”
A crafty look went halfway across his face before it stopped and changed into greed. “Why would anyone wanta push a guy like Peskoe out of a window?”
I inspected the tip of my cigarette. “Maybe he owed them a little money and he wouldn’t pay it.”
That made sense to the clerk because he nodded a few times. “Maybe he owed you a little money, huh?”
“Maybe.”
“And maybe he owed quite a few people a little money and maybe as long as he was alive there was a little chance that he might pay it off, huh?”
“Not a little chance,” I said. “A big one. Peskoe was a safecracker. One of the best. Now do you understand?”
He started nodding his head again. “Now I get it,” he said. “Now it makes sense.”
It didn’t, of course. But he was just smart enough not to want to seem stupid. “Did you notice anyone around just before Peskoe jumped or fell?”
The clerk lowered his eyes and started moving his finger back and forth across the surface of the counter. “Like I said, I make about thirty-five a week take-home and—”
“Here,” I said and slid a ten across to him.
He pocketed the bill and then looked around the lobby. It was still empty, but he seemed to like the conspiratorial nonsense. “I ain’t telling you anything I ain’t already told the cops.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“There were two guys who went up just before Peskoe went out the window.”
“Where’d they go?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. They coulda gone to eight or five or three. I don’t know.”
“They go up together?”
“They went up together.”
“What’d they look like?”
He spread his hands in a gesture of defeat. “I don’t know, I swear to God I can’t remember. I saw em go up, but I didn’t pay no attention. It’s just like I told the cops, who pays attention in a place like this? All I know about em is what I didn’t notice.”
I sighed. “Okay. What didn’t you notice?”
“I didn’t notice em come back down.”
10
The new batch of twenty-dollar and fifty-dollar bills amounting to ninety thousand dollars was delivered to me at 8 A.M. Tuesday at the Adelphi by Miles Wiedstein who this time accepted a cup of coffee while I counted the money and gave him another receipt. By 10 A.M. I was pushing my way through the entrance of the West Side Airlines Terminal’s men’s room, the blue Pan-Am bag slung over my left shoulder.
The first stall was occupied so I waited in front of it. A well-dressed man came out of the third stall down and saw me waiting. “Here,” he said, holding the door open. “I’ll save you a whole dime.”
I shook my head. “I like this one,” I said, pointing at the first stall.
“Christ, fella, a stall’s a stall.”
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s some kind of mental block. I can’t go unless I use the first stall.”
The man slammed shut the door he had been holding open. “You got a real bad problem there, don’t you, sonny?” he said and walked out of the room before I could remind him that he hadn’t washed his hands.
I stood there in front of the first stall, trying not to listen to the sounds and trying not to think much about why I was in a business that required me to stand there and listen to them at ten o’clock in the morning. Finally, at six minutes past ten the toilet in the first stall flushed and a small man of about sixty with a large nose came out zipping up his pants.
“I tried to hurry,” he said apologetically. “I heard what you said about not being able to go except in the first stall. I’m like that at home, except that I can’t go on the first floor. I gotta go upstairs.”
“We both have a problem,” I said and went through the door that he held open for me, thus saving another dime toward early retirement.
Once inside, there was nothing to do but sit down and wait. I waited four minutes until the stall next to me lost its occupant. Fifteen seconds later I heard its door open and close. I held the airline bag on my lap and kept my eyes on the space where the partition that separated the two stalls ended a foot above the floor.
I counted to thirty-five slowly and then a blue airline bag, this one from United, was kicked into my stall. I didn’t see the foot that kicked it. I bent down and picked it up. I put my own bag on the floor. I unzipped the United bag and looked inside. There were five eight-and-a-half-by-fourteen-inch ledgers. I took out the first one and opened it at random. The entry was March 19, 1953. Written in blue-black ink in a precise, but somehow childlike hand was all the information that I would need to steal seventy-three thousand dollars from a Pittsburgh jewelry fence who talked too much to a girl in Manhattan. Everything was there: the time, the date, the method, and a virtual guarantee that the Pittsburgh fence would never complain to anyone. If it had been March 19, 1953, I might have been tempted.