I started up the stairs and didn’t meet anyone until I reached the second landing and turned to go up the remaining flight to the third story. A man came down the stairs. He was in a hurry, maybe even a rush, because he took the steps two at a time. I stepped back out of his way. He didn’t see me at first because he was watching his feet, making sure not to trip. He looked up finally, saw me, hesitated — or seemed to — and then kept on going. I thought he even picked up a little speed.
He was a wide, stocky man with short legs. He had heavy black eyebrows and a dark face that could have been tanned, but wasn’t. He was about thirty-five. He wore a suit. A light blue one. I turned to get a better look at him because I thought I’d seen those heavy eyebrows somewhere before. But all I got was a glimpse of the back of his head. There was a round, white bald spot in his crown about the size of a cookie.
I went on up the stairs to the third floor trying to remember where I had seen the man before. Quane’s apartment, number six, seemed to be toward the back, to my right. I started down the hall. It had the smell of sour milk and Spanish spices. When I reached number six I found the door open. Not much. Just an inch or so. I knocked, but when nobody said anything and nothing happened I went in.
The place wasn’t much of a love nest. It was merely a kitchen to the right and a bathroom to the left. The furnishings were simple, almost rudimentary. There was a table of Formica and chrome, which I think they still call dinettes, and four matching chairs. It looked fairly new as did the sofa, which was the kind that could be made into a bed. On the floor was a cheap rug. A green one.
There were a couple of other chairs, a lamp or two, and in front of the sofa was a coffee table. On it was a phone, the black push-button kind. Next to the phone was a full cup of black coffee with a saucer and a spoon.
I said, “Max?” and then I said, “Anybody home?”
I was looking toward the kitchen, thinking that Quane perhaps had forgotten the cream or the sugar for his coffee. There was a sound to my left. I looked. Max Quane came out of the bathroom.
He came out slowly, on his hands and knees, crawling, although he looked as if he might just be learning how to crawl, the way a baby learns. He was crawling toward the phone. It was hard. The phone was far away, at least eight feet, perhaps even nine. Quane made a yard, crawling on his hands and knees. Then he stopped crawling and collapsed on the green rug, facing my way, his gray eyes open and staring up at me although I don’t think they really saw me. I don’t think they saw anything.
Ear to ear. That’s how throats are cut. “His throat was cut from ear to ear.” I had read it many times, but I couldn’t remember where. Max Quane’s throat had been cut, but whoever had done it must not have been much of a reader, because he hadn’t bothered about ear to ear. There was a deep, short slash on each side of Quane’s throat. The slashes had reached the big arteries. There was a lot of blood on Quane, and he had left a trail of it on the green rug as he had tried to learn how to crawl all over again and had made a yard before he had quit trying and died.
The rest of the blood must have been in the bathroom and I remember thinking that it would be easier to clean up there. It wasn’t much of a thought, but I wasn’t thinking too clearly. I stood there, not moving, staring down at Quane. He stared back up at me, or seemed to, but his eyes didn’t move and they didn’t blink and after a moment or so I knelt down and felt for his pulse, but I didn’t find any. I hadn’t really expected to.
I rose and went into the kitchen. There was nobody there. Just a kettle and a jar of Yuban instant coffee and a box of sugar cubes. I felt the kettle. It was warm, nearly hot. I made myself go look into the bathroom. There are five quarts of blood in the human body, but there seemed to be more than that in the bathroom. It was all over everything, the tub, the toilet, the sink, the floor, even the walls.
Bathrooms are where you go when you’re going to be sick. But I couldn’t go in there so I hurried back into the kitchen and threw up in the sink. After that I ran some cold water and washed my face and dried it with a paper towel.
I went back into the living room, skirting Max Quane, trying not to look at him, but not succeeding. I moved toward the phone that rested on the coffee table next to the cup and the saucer and the spoon. I was going to use the phone to call the police and tell them that Max Quane was dead.
It was then that I really saw the spoon. I stared at it, picked it up and looked at it closely. I must have looked at it for almost half a minute. It made me remember many things and wonder about even more. I put the spoon in my pocket.
I then turned to leave the apartment where Max Quane lay dead with his throat cut. I was going to leave without either calling the police or looking at Quane again. I didn’t call the police, but I couldn’t help but look at Quane. Although they didn’t want to, my eyes went to his throat where the slashes were. Below the slashes was his tab collar with its neat little gold pin. There didn’t seem to be any blood on the pin.
Chapter Seven
I don’t know why I went through Georgetown. I didn’t even remember getting there. But when I realized where I was I pulled into a gas station on M Street and used a pay phone to call the police. I told whoever answered that they could find a murdered man in the apartment on Mintwood Place. I didn’t say who the murdered man was, I didn’t say who I was, but I did say that the dead man’s throat had been cut and then I made myself hang up because I had the feeling that if I didn’t, I would add that the dead man’s throat had been cut from ear to ear and that wasn’t at all the way it had happened.
It got a little better after that. But only a little. I remembered that there was something I had to do. I couldn’t quite recall what it was until I was almost to Key Bridge and then I remembered that Ruth had told me that we needed some gin. Well, that was true. We did need some. Quite a lot, in fact, so I stopped in a liquor store and bought two fifths of Gilbey’s. Or perhaps it was Gordon’s. I really don’t remember.
I do remember getting one of the bottles open and taking my first gulp before I was halfway across Key Bridge. I gagged on the straight warm gin, but it stayed down, and after a few minutes it did what it was supposed to do to my nerves because my foot no longer twitched on the accelerator.
It wasn’t until I’d had my second gulp of gin that I realized that I was going the long way — out the George Washington Parkway to the 495 beltway and then west on Leesburg Pike to Leesburg where I would pick up Route 9 to Harpers Ferry. It wasn’t really the long way in miles, but it was the long way in time. The quicker way was to use I270 to U.S. 340 and then head south. That was longer, but quicker.
I took out my tin box and rolled three cigarettes with one hand because I knew I’d smoke at least that many before I got home and probably more. I had to roll the windows up so that the tobacco wouldn’t blow around and by the time I’d finished rolling the cigarettes it was stifling in the pickup and I was sweating all over. I imagined that I could feel the gin oozing from my pores. I lit one of the cigarettes, rolled the windows down, and had another drink.
Although I may have thought that it could, the gin didn’t keep me from thinking about Max Quane. All that it really did was make me sweat and stop the twitching in my foot. The right one.
I thought about Quane and his throat and how it had been cut and again I found myself resisting the phrase ear to ear. I wondered when it had happened and decided that it must have happened while I was passing the two bare-chested Cubans who were sharing a bottle of something out of their brown paper sack. That meant that it had happened about a minute or two before I got to the three-story row house and passed the two children on the porch and started up the stairs where I had met the wide man with the short legs and the thick dark eyebrows whom I had seen somewhere before, but couldn’t remember where.