“Oh, I don’t know. He’s working on a book now, you know.”
“Bill’s always painting. At least he always was before the rain. Did the rain stop Hugh from writing?”
“I think it slowed him down some. It slowed every body down.”
“It stopped Bill cold. But even if he’s working, you know, he wants me with him. I couldn’t imagine not living with somebody.”
“I guess I’ve gotten used to it.”
“I don’t just mean the sex. It probably sounds as though I just mean the sex, huh?”
“Oh, I don’t—”
“But I mean having somebody to be with. But maybe getting used to it makes a difference. I hope I never have to find out, to tell you the truth.”
Tanya went on chattering as they climbed the stairs to their floor. The girl was just the sort of companion Linda needed at the moment, and she smiled at the discovery. It seemed paradoxical, as Tanya’s conversation centered on precisely those subjects Linda would have preferred not to think about, but she was able to bathe in the rushing stream of Tanya’s words so that they oddly took her mind off what Tanya was saying. The girl would never look pensive, Linda thought, because the girl could never hold a thought in her little head without marveling at the fact that she was thinking.
On impulse she asked Tanya to come in for coffee. “Well, if Billie wants to,” she said. “Unless you wouldn’t want him.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know. He makes some people sort of nervous, not talking and all. I guess I talk enough to make up for it. I’ll ask him, okay?” She knocked on the door while Linda was fitting her key into her own lock. “That’s funny,” Tanya said. “He wouldn’t go to sleep so early. Bill?”
“Maybe he stepped out.”
“He hardly ever goes anywhere. But maybe he did. He’s been in this mood.”
“Do you have a key?”
“Yeah, in my purse somewhere. You go ahead, Linda. If he’s out I’ll leave a note and be over in minute.”
She opened her own door, switched on the light. Then Tanya’s scream cut through her like a sword.
She spun around. Across the hall Tanya was framed in the doorway, facing into the room. Over her shoulder Linda could see Bill Donatelli swinging on a rope from the overhead light fixture. His tongue, black and obscenely swollen, projected between enlarged purple lips.
His whole face was tones of blue and purple and his bulged from his head and his body swung in slow circles.
Tanya screamed and screamed.
Afterward she could never be certain of the sequence of things. Her memory would hold scenes and flashes of scenes, jumbled together like bits of intercut film. The room and hallway filled up with people. How they got there or the order of their coming she never knew.
Two men from the second floor stood arguing, one determined to right the chair overturned at Bill Donatelli’s feet so that he could climb on it and cut him down, the other insistent that nothing be touched or moved until the police arrived.
“He’s obviously dead, man. You can’t help him by cutting him down.”
“Well, forget the police, man. I mean that’s suicide, man. I mean forget television, I mean it’s suicide, that’s all it is, and what you do is you cut him down just in case and get that fucking rope off his fucking neck.”
“Man, how you gonna help a dead man?”
“You keep saying dead, but how do you know he’s dead? Like how many dead men did you ever see?”
“Man, the first spade I saw, I knew right in front he was black. Anything looks like that is fucking dead, baby.”
Linda’s own role was never in doubt. Throughout it all she stood holding Tanya in her arms, patting her back, holding her while she cried, listening to her when words spilled from her.
“It was the rain. He couldn’t paint because of the rain. He would sometimes say it was the light but it wasn’t the light, it was what the rain did to his head. He got so down. And then it stopped and I thought it would be all right but he said whenever he went to paint all he could see in his head was the rain, just rain coming down all the time. But I thought he was getting better. I should of known because he couldn’t ball. He would get excited and then we would start to do it and he would go soft and start crying and telling me that he couldn’t do anything anymore, but there’s no more rain, it’s all over, the rain, the rain is over, Bill is over, it’s all over. I never had that abortion but he wanted me to. He told me I had to have the abortion. He didn’t want a baby. I didn’t want one either, but I want one now, I wish I had his baby now. Oh, my God, his poor face. I hope he never knew what it would make him look like. He was so beautiful, and I try to see his face in my mind and all I see is the way he looks now, God, and I don’t have a single picture of him, not a single one....”
It was Clyde Herman, the night shift policeman, who cut the body down, George Perlmutter, the doctor, who examined the grotesque naked corpse and pronounced him officially dead. And it was Warren Ormont who somehow stepped into the center of things to take charge, dealing in turn with the policeman and the doctor and Tanya herself.
“Now Miss Leopold, I’m going to need a statement from you, and I know it’s a difficult situation for you right now, but if you could just—”
“It was that fucking rain.”
“The rain. Let me get this right, your name is Tina Leopold, now if you could spell that—”
“No, Tanya, but that’s a stage—”
“Clyde, for heaven’s sake stop doing your Joe Friday number, won’t you?”
“Look here, Warren—”
“Oh, look here yourself, for the love of God. The girl’s in no condition to talk and you’re barely in condition to listen. You’ll get her statement in the morning. You act as though you’ve never seen a suicide in your life.”
“Maybe it’s supposed to look like a suicide.”
“When all the time it’s an elaborate locked-room murder. And you’re Dr. Gideon Fell himself.”
“All the same, I’d be happier with a note.”
“He wasn’t a writer, Clyde.”
“Huh?”
“Writers leave notes. Then they wash sleeping pills down with booze, but not until they’ve done half a, dozen drafts of the note. Doctors shoot themselves. They have dozens of neat painless methods at their disposal and, invariably blow their brains out with revolvers. Painters take off all their clothes and hang themselves.”
“How do you know all this, Warren?”
“I’ve made a study of it. Self-destruction fascinated — I can’t imagine why anyone would hurry it, though, instead of carefully stretching it out over a lifetime.”
“How do actors do it?”
“In front of an audience. They call an ex-lover in the middle of the night and announce they’ve already taken pills, and after they hang up they actually take the pills. Or they excuse themselves, go to another room, and use a knife or a gun. It depends how they perceive their roles. Donatelli never used words in his life, Clyde. Not even in conversation. Anyway, there’s his note.”
He pointed to an easel, where an abstract canvas was quartered by a black X.
“That’s, a note? I get the point, but maybe that was his idea of how he wanted the picture to look.”