“Kee-rist!” he said. “Well, I’ll be damned. He’s dead.” There was no doubt at all on that score. I tried to escape the terror in those eyes by poking my head in the bedroom. The bed was made. No sign of a search in there. When I came out, the super had still not moved. He kept repeating, “Well, I’ll be damned,” and shaking his head.
“Better get the police,” I said. That seemed to bring him back to the world of traffic tickets and sudden death in a flash. He jumped-I almost thought to attention- and made for the telephone. “Hold it,” I shouted. “Better not use that phone. There might be fingerprints. See if you can get Sergeant Staziak at Homicide. But if you can’t, it doesn’t matter. Just tell them the address and that it looks like there’s been a murder.” He left. I almost said escaped, he went so fast. As soon as I saw the elevator door close, I ran to look at the file cabinet. As close as I could make out, whole files had been removed from their places. Whoever did it came with a box or bag to carry away with him what he knew to be here. I probed with my trusty ball-point pen into the files and found an interrupted alphabetical system. I looked up Yates. Missing. I looked up Ward on a hunch. Bad guess. I probed some of the files. Dr. Zekerman’s scrawl was impenetrable. Some of the patients were Medicare subscribers. That might help, I thought, if I could get a complete list from them. At the bottom of one file drawer, a few pages lay, spilled from their folders. I looked through the names that came to light, trying not to touch the metal sides of the case. Filing cabinets give the fingerprint boys a chance to show off. A smooth metal surface is as easy as glass. Most of the names didn’t mean a thing to me, but I was suddenly getting lucky. I recognized one of the names. It belonged to alderman Vern Harrington. Nice, I thought, very nice.
I looked around for an appointment book. That would tell who had been in and out of the room in the last few hours. That was missing too. I tried to think. What else would a good detective do while waiting for the police to arrive? I couldn’t think straight. I was concentrating on keeping my back to Zekerman’s eyes. I was putting off the job nobody liked to do. I tried to come at him so that I wouldn’t have to look at his face. I couldn’t manage it, started to retch and just made it to the bathroom in time. By the time the dry retching stopped, my glasses were misted up and I was out of breath. I fetched that back and lit a shaking cigarette. I pulled a dark blue towel from behind the bathroom door and covered up Zekerman’s head.
Now I could take him in a little better. He was wearing soft, crepe-soled shoes with floppy wool socks; an expanse of blue calf was visible above them. I touched his skin. Warm. That was a bit silly, I guess, since I knew he was alive at four o’clock. It was only just after six. A detailed medical examination couldn’t fix the time of death much more accurately than that. Zekerman wore beige corduroy trousers and an old comfortable wool sweater. He hadn’t been trying to impress today’s patients with his wardrobe. His hands lay with their backs up on his stomach. His fingernails would have kept him from getting a job as a bus-boy in a greasy spoon. The shirt collar made of some synthetic drip-dry material added a dash of green to the otherwise beige impression.
Then I went through his pockets with speed and efficiency. His wallet contained a thousand dollars mostly in fifties. He had the usual credit cards and belonged to the golf club. There were a couple of restaurant receipts he was saving for his income tax. Duty entertainment. None of this looked useful, so I put it all back.
On the table beside his chair, on the right side, a pipe lay with a lot of ashes in a big brown ashtray. The ashes in the pipe were warm, but not hot. In the ashtray next to the other chair I found an assortment of butts, some with lipstick, some without, some filtered, some plain. I could see them loving that downtown.
I heard the elevator stop on this floor through the still open door, and I tried to saunter innocently to the middle of the room. The super came in still shaking his head.
“Kee-rist, how could a thing like this happen? I’ll get shit for it sure as anything. They’ll figure out some way I should have been able to stop it. I might as well start looking for a new job right now, Kee-bloody-rist.” He seemed a bit wheezy, as though he’d run up the stairs. There was sweat under his big arms. “Anyway, I phoned, like you said. Only they’re sending over some uniformed cop right away. That guy you said wasn’t there. You’re right about not touching anything: the cop on the phone told me that too.” I handed him a lit cigarette and he took it like a junky taking a fix that’s a couple of hours late. Funny how his belly stayed behind his belt like that. That took a lot of sucking. “Jesus,” he said, “I haven’t seen a dead man since I was in Germany in 1945. Didn’t bother me then. I’d seen a few. Damn it, though, it throws you when you come on it sudden.” I told him my name for something to do, but he didn’t hear it, and when he took my hand neither of us put much into it.
It didn’t seem more than three or four centuries until we heard the elevator door again. A couple of constables from downtown made their way shoulder to shoulder through the narrow doorway. Constables Keith and Morressey. They asked if we had touched anything, and warned us in future not to touch anything if we should be so inclined. They looked around at the mess, peeked under the blue towel and took down our names in their day books. They then asked the usual questions and they wrote down our answers. They seemed to be getting a bang out of writing up more than a description of a bruised fender or noting the failure of a brake light. I couldn’t blame them; this was their glimpse of the big time.
Just when they were beginning to feel that the investigation was all theirs, someone arrived to spoil their fun. He stood about seven feet tall in his regulation boots, which went with the uniform although he was in plain clothes. His freckled face frowned at the scene around him, took us in, the body of the shrink, and the general mess. He turned to both the super and me, introduced himself as Corporal Cahill, and warned us not to touch anything. It seemed like a good idea.
The corporal led us both back over our stories after he spoke with the uniformed men. He took us one at a time into the bedroom and, sitting on the edge of Zekerman’s bed, where we weren’t blurring any latent fingerprints, he nodded his head on its thick neck as he made notes. I told him that I’d had a call from the doctor, that he had asked me to come at six o’clock to see him, and that when he didn’t answer his buzzer after I’d leaned on it for a few minutes, I hunted up the superintendent, whose name was Uhernick, by the way, and together we had discovered the corpse. He assumed that I was trying to see the doctor on business, that I was a patient of his, and short of foaming at the mouth I let him believe that. After my turn, I sent Uhernick to see Cahill. Outside the big room was alive with cops in all shapes and sizes. Flash-bulbs went off like a Hollywood opening. A guy I took to be the coroner was holding hands with Zekerman, bending his wrist back and forth. He’d removed the blue towel from where I’d put it and I got another look at those staring frightened eyes. As if my day wasn’t already perfect. The fingerprint boys had dusted the telephone, doorknobs, desk filing cabinet with talc, and were now brushing them off again with dry camelhair brushes. The coroner sneezed and shot a dirty look in the direction of the man working in a crouched position near the phone. After a half hour of this, just as Cahill had begun to think of this as his investigation, Sergeant Harrow stood in the doorway. This gave Mr. Uhernick and me a chance to escape the noise again. In the bedroom, we once more got to tell our stories. This time I didn’t do so well. He remembered me for a start. He didn’t like me much. I could see that. If it wasn’t for me he would be at home carving a supermarket roast of beef. I tried to look agreeable. It didn’t help.