I sprang to the lobby-intercom apparatus on the wall beside the main door, held my finger against the signal button for an eternity, and at length heard the doorman’s brutal grunt.
“Call the police,” I said, “and send them to five K.” “Why?”
“There’s been a murder.”
“That ain’t humorous, sonny. You just wait for your mama to come home.”
I realized that I had been affected vocally by the shock, and endeavored to lower my voice. “I’m a grown man. There’s a corpse in my bathtub. Please go to an outside phone and call the cops.”
After a moment I heard either a vigorous exhalation or a downright Bronx cheer. “Whyn’t you go fuck yourself?” He hung up.
I gave him a furious shot of the buzzer and when he came on again I cried, commanding in my desperation an idiom that ordinarily was quite foreign to me: “Listen, you rotten little punk, I’m on my way down there to push your teeth through the back of your head.” His pregnant silence caused me to go too far and add: “I’m the murderer, see?”
He literally whined like the legendary cur. And apparently let the instrument dangle, for I could hear his running footfalls against the lobby tiles. I should not have made that foolish threat. If he had the usual character of a New York doorman—tough in modo, cowardly in re—and also, with the rest of the population, utterly cynical about the police, he would run away and hide for the rest of the week.
I did not think of the worst consequence: that he would indeed call the constabulary and when they arrived assure them I had boasted of killing a human being.
Thus, five minutes later—impressively proving that the law does act promptly at the sound of the word “murder,” at least in my precinct, far south of Spanish Harlem and its Saturday-night sports—my door reverberated with the savage onslaught of revolver butts, and when I opened it a squad of policemen vaulted in, hurled me onto the bed, arranged my body into an X, and ransacked its clothing.
They were most of them young men, and almost all wore long sideburns and handle-bar mustaches, with thick clumps of hair protruding from the backs of their caps. They looked very like the actors who represent cops in movies and on TV, which was no doubt the source of their style, but they did not say “Freeze” when pointing their guns at my face, nor did they give me my “rights.” Therefore I suspected they were the real thing this time.
When the search of my person was finished and I was, by default, permitted to sit up, I sought to remove the basic misconception.
“I’m the person who called you. I’m not the criminal!”
The boys in blue made no response to this information; but when I tried to get to my feet, one of them pushed me down.
“The body,” said I, “is in the bathroom. Shouldn’t you look in there?”
A sandy-haired policeman, whose name plate read T. J.Muenzer, ostentatiously returned my wallet to me and said: “You got identification?”
“Tons,” said I, relieved to have reached a plateau of rationality, and plucked out the sheaf of documents which, with the rest of the race, I must carry to prove I exist. Shaken as I was—though with much rustle of leather and sound of snaps they were now putting away their artillery—I hastily fanned the deck of credit cards, etc., chose a piece of certification that had had to be folded to be of uniform size with the others, namely my private-investigator’s license, and handed it to Muenzer.
He peeled it apart, perused it deliberately, and then applied his pale hazel eyes to me. “Where is this Ophelia?”
“Who?”
He fluttered the paper at me. “Duh dawg.” “Dog?”
“This is an attack animal?”
“May I?” I asked, cautiously extending my fingers. He permitted me to take the paper. I studied it. It was a dog license, issued by the ASPCA for the City of New York, registering a female great Dane, named for the poor nymph in whose orisons Hamlet asked that all his sins be remembered, to an owner named…T. Villanova.
No doubt I blanched. “Believe it or not,” I howled, “I do not now own a dog. I have never owned a dog—”
“Sure, Mr. Villanova. You just take it easy. You’re all right, see. You got more little cards there?” He now addressed me as if speaking to an idiot child—the fashion in which Matthew Arnold is alleged to have addressed everybody, for what that’s worth.
I hung my head. My voice was sheepish as well. “You won’t believe this, either, but my name isn’t Teddy Villanova.”
He smirked significantly at his confreres and shrugged.Then to me: “If you say so. Maybe you’d like to tell us what your name is?” “Russel Wren.”
“Mind if I look at them other cards you got there?” I handed them over. He began to read aloud the designation on each, and on all it was Villanova.
6
Patrolman Muenzer lowered the handful of “identification”—though it was not mine—and grinning with only his mouth, his eyes lusterless, said: “You picked Villanova’s pocket?”
“Someone must have picked my own,” said I. “Took my wallet, changed the documents therein, and stealthily returned it.”
“It is your billfold?” He put his hands at his waist, one just above the gun and the other near a leather sheath, containing two pens, at his left hip. If I had had any doubts as to his authenticity as a policeman, this attitude would have removed them.
I examined the article in question, somewhat embarrassed by his implicit correction of my term: it was indeed a billfold and not a wallet. It had been Peggy’s gift to me at lunchtime on the previous Xmas Eve (in response to the collapsible plastic rain hood I had given her that morning, taking her aback some distance, owing to my only lately having denounced the holiday as meretricious; she burst into tears at my charitable treachery; she really has certain fetching ways).
I now lost no time in ripping open the bill compartment. Yes, my seven dollars were still there. Washburn’s two hundreds remained in my trouser pocket.
“Well,” I said at length, “it certainly looks like my property…Of course, this is a common type of billfold, no? Looks like new. But then so did mine, which was only three months old, and got little traffic, because—ha!— business hasn’t been that good.”
Again I tested him with a rhetorical laugh, but he merely and humorlessly reshuffled the cards of identity.
“Ya know,” said he, squinting from them to me and back again several times. “Not one uvem says the name’s Teddy. Aluvem just have the letter T.”
“Before we get into these complex matters,” said I, “hadn’t you better look into the bathtub?”
“They’re doon that.”
“Oh.”
He sighed. “You got anything that says yoowaw who you say yoowaw?”
This time I did not respond with “miles” or any other exaggeration. I was too fearful that whoever was ruining my life so deftly as to gain access to my closely guarded billfold would have done an even more thorough job on my apartment, from which I had been absent for three weeks, and into which, with impunity, he or she or they had managed to move an enormous corpse, not to mention a woman’s wardrobe.
“If you’ll just let me look…?”
Muenzer gasped at the suggestion that he of all people might impede me and (in the nonce phrase of our common 1950s boyhood, which has stubbornly persisted) said, throwing his hands off his belt: “Be my guest.”
However, neither he nor the other uniformed gentry moved their stubborn figures from my projected path— a disinclination ever to do which would seem another trait of local law-enforcement officers, along with driving through stoplights even when not in hot pursuit of malefactors. Though I am not now nor have ever been a sociopath, I half-expected them, as I penetrated their picket line in a half crouch, to treat me as the victim of a gauntlet run and each administer his peculiar kick or blow to my quailing body. But I am happy, with the thought of the proportion of my taxes that go to pay their wages, to report that this was but the “flight forward,” to use R
eik’s term, of the masochist that perhaps each of us is when confronted by the only municipal employees who legally carry death-dealing weapons.
I had a birth certificate, drivers-license renewal stub, and the like, in an asbestos-lined envelope I had prudently purchased from the catalogue of Sunset House, the well-known mail-order vendors of a thousand and one cunning items for the home and office; and furthermore the envelope was itself enveloped by a Baggie.
This package lay behind the Selected Thomas Aquinas on the hanging shelves I had installed myself with those perforated strips and movable supports one buys in hardware stores along with Molly, that fastener who spreads her limbs back of hollow walls. It was this volume I now removed…then the Aristotle, then Diogenes Laertius, the pre-Socratics—but why go through thirty centuries? I simply emptied the entire five shelves, and a crumbling alpine range of books, ranging figuratively from poetry to pushpins, rose high as my kneecaps.
My auxiliary documents of identification were gone. In a way, looking on the refulgent side of this murky adventure, I was relieved that I had not found them and again read the name Villanova on each.
While I was employed in this futile endeavor, a number of policemen stepped into the hallway so as to allow room for the entrance of two white-suited men of the black race who pushed in a wheeled stretcher on which lay a withered gray sleeping bag. This duo repaired to the bathroom and fetched Bakewell’s corpse therefrom, and I don’t like to think about the efforts they must have made to straighten his body; but eventually they trundled the now swollen sack, from which two feet, wearing shoes large as skiffs, protruded to the ankles. I hoped that would be the last I should see of those ubiquitous remains.
The policemen who had gone into the hall did not return, and others left as several civilian-dressed persons arrived, my now old acquaintance Muenzer among the departing. He took no formal leave of me; I had given him no reason for one, being unable to provide him even with a verified name.
He stopped just inside the door to relate whatever he had to tell to a plain-clothesman, a withered young man with a sparse beard and a disorder of facial skin wherever it was visible. This minion of the law was dressed as a lumberjack, in plaid woolen shirt and high-laced boots; but he was much too slight to have worked at that grueling trade, being concave-chested and spidery of limb, and furthermore he displayed a kind of palsy in the grip of which he trembled incessantly. His eyes were running, and he frequently wiped at his prominent nose with a red bandanna. He looked for all the world like Peggy’s bête noire, a Puerto Rican delivery boy who spent all his wages on a heroin habit. He was however a detective. At last I had encountered a cop of the new breed. I was soon to find that he was not even Latin, despite the nose, the generous lips, black eyes, and swarthy tight curls that clasped his head.
Swabbing at his nose and eyes, he listened briefly to Muenzer; then his rickety shoulders climbed as high as his ears, while his body quivered even more violently than before. I thought he might be at the onset of a mortal seizure, but Muenzer correctly interpreted it rather as his own dismissal and left.
The mean little figure approached me, studying the ceiling either for dramatic effect or in some restraint of the mucous membranes as when one tries to inhibit the birth of a sneeze. I was confronted with a pair of hairy nostrils and the whites of under eyes, marbled with scarlet veins—which suggests how far back his head was thrown, for he was a good half a foot shorter than I.
At length his watery irises descended to take a focus on my Adam’s apple. He wiped his nose once again and spoke, through the bandanna but clearly enough.
“My name is Zwingli, and I’m a detective. I’ll show you my identification, if youll me yours, as Henry James might say.” Then he looked directly at me and I had the strange conviction that he believed his beard to be thicker than it was and that his slight smile was concealed within it; whereas in actuality neither of these assumptions was true, and his expression was quite obviously one of self-satisfaction.
“Zwingli with a z?” was, I’m afraid, all I could come up with, though I was somewhat nettled by his quick boast of literacy.
He immediately became even more overweening. “As with the celebrated Swiss reformer. I understand that though there is reason to believe you are Villanova, you insist you are instead Wren, as with the noted architect who built St. Paul’s.”
“‘If you seek his monument, look around you.’”
In his gloat he went too far: “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.”
“Well,” said I, seeing my chance for a lethal thrust,“that’s pretty vulgar, isn’t it? To translate back into the original what is already clearly understood?”
He turned plaintive: “It’s pretty remarkable for a cop, though, don’t you think?”
He did have a point, and I was abashed. Also, he was corporeally a pathetic sight, exacerbating the rash on his nose with that red rag, his eyes oozing, his beard straggly. I suddenly felt protective.
“Do you have an allergy? There’s a squeeze bottle of NTZ in the bathroom cabinet and also a few remaining capsules of Allerest, a Sinutab or two as well. I’d get them for you myself, but I’m still queasy. They just took a corpse from my tub.”
“Precisely why I’m here,” said Zwingli. “I may accept your kind offer, but first I should be in your debt were you to relate this unlucky deed, speaking of yourself as you are and nothing extenuate. Did you cause that man to shuffle off his mortal coil?”
“Certainly not.”
“Then we must look for a murtherer most foul? Or could the victim have made his own quietus with a bare bodkin?”
“I believe he was shot.”
At last he sneezed, rather modestly given the elaborate prelude. Having scrubbed his nose to a brilliant scarlet, he glanced at my pile of books. “Do I see one or more volumes in the old Boni and Liveright Modern Library, flexible leatherette bindings? You wouldn’t happen to have Andreyev’s The Seven Who Were Hanged?” He plunged to his knees and picked up a little volume. “Ah, Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism, just the ticket.” He thumbed it, found a page, and opened it wide with a binding-cracking sound that made me wince. He read aloud: “‘As far as I know, none but the votaries of monotheistic, that is to say, Jewish religions, look upon suicide as a crime.’” He tossed the book back on the pile and rose.
His entire performance since entering had been sufficiently dramatic to distract me from noticing, until now, that the other detectives were taking my apartment to pieces. One stout fellow in a rumpled suit had been ransacking my desk. He was now in the act of taking from a drawer the script of my unfinished play. Doubting, from his Visigoth expression, that he was equipped to render authoritative judgment on it, I appealed to Zwingli, who in sympathetic response went to him and claimed the double handful of loose sheets, the other surrendering them with a groan of either derision or relief.
Zwingli cocked a skinny buttock and sat on the edge of the desk, beginning to read with discolored eyelids so heavy-looking as to seem closed; it was only from the tremor of separate hairs in his mangy beard, as he apparently vocalized the dialogue in his palate, behind closed lips, that told me he was not dozing. In such fashion he actually read, or painstakingly pretended to read, three pages, without checking the numbers to determine whether they were in sequence—which likely they were not: more than once I had after a brief perusal hurled the sheaf away in chagrin: I won’t say why and so nourish the Schadenfreude of other would-be dramatists whose scenes, after a vigorous start, founder in the middle as characters desperately ignite cigarettes or spill cups of coffee for wont of pungent dialogue that will get them to the curtain lines which are forceful, e.g.:
ROBERT: Lynne, you’re acting like a tart.
LYNNE [wryly]: Oh?
(She being secretly an ex-streetwalker who earned enough to send herself through medical school.)
Zwingli at last lowered the manuscript, which he held in the hand that also clutched the clammy bandanna. He
spoke solemnly.
“It’s good. It may even be brilliant. There seems to be some direct borrowing from Aristophanes, but that’s legitimate enough.”
My play was of course never intended to be comedy, but why pick at lint? I was touched. In fact, I was devastated. And while I was in that weakened condition Zwingli whipped a pair of handcuffs from somewhere under his lumberman’s shirt and clamped them around my wrists.
With some shame I must admit that while this action seemed unmotivated I did not take it as an outrage, and I made no resistance physically or vocally. No one, not even the liberal-lawyer’s wife, had so lavishly praised my work. In fact, but for Daphne Leopold, for such was her name, no one had ever made upon it a judgment that could actually have been interpreted as in any way favorable. The instructor in my playwriting class at The New School, an acrid man who had once seen a one-acter of his own on an Off-Off Broadway run of three nights, had been almost bleak in his assessment of my talent.
“You really think it has some merit?” I asked shyly, my steel-cuffed hands nestling like sleeping puppies in the small of my back.
Zwingli frowned. “It’s a pity,” said he, “that such a potentially splendid career will never blossom. But he who abandons the pen for the pistol should not be amazed if he is hoist with his own petard.” He was caught suddenly by an impulse to sneeze again; but with a violent convulsion of his entire body, which would seem to take more from him than any mere ejaculation of nose, he conquered it.
This passage is very humiliating to detail, in my now cold blood, but I must further report that I next said: “Why don’t you take along the entire manuscript? Perhaps from time to time you could visit me in jail, and then of course you’ll be at my trial: we might talk during the recesses. Your criticism would be invaluable. Funny, I wasn’t aware of the obvious debt to Aristophanes—though of course you’re quite right, and will find even more of it when you get to the second act.”
“Say, Knox,” Zwingli called to the stout detective. “Mind stepping over here? He’s confessing.” To me he said: “You have a right to remain silent. You have a right to—”