"Mr. Mitla?"
There was no answer, but the little shuffling sound came again. From down the hall. That meant the bathroom or the bedroom. Officer O'Bannion advanced in that direction, raising his gun and pointing its muzzle at the ceiling. He was now carrying it in much the same way Howard had carried the hedgeclippers.
The bathroom door was ajar. O'Bannion was quite sure this was where the sound had come from, and he knew it was where the worst of the smell was coming from. He crouched, then pushed the door open with the muzzle of his gun.
"Oh my God," he said softly.
The bathroom looked like a slaughterhouse after a busy day. Blood sprayed the walls and ceiling in scarlet bouquets of spatter. There were puddles of blood on the floor, and more blood had run down the inside and outside curves of the bathroom basin in thick trails; that was where the worst of it appeared to be. He could see a broken window, a discarded bottle of what appeared to be drain-cleaner (which would explain the awful smell in here), and a pair of men's loafers lying quite a distance apart from each other. One of them was quite badly scuffed.
And, as the door swung wider, he saw the man.
Howard Mitla had crammed himself as far into the space between the bathtub and the wall as he could get when he had finished his disposal operation. He held the electric hedgeclippers on his lap, but the batteries were flat; bone was a little tougher than branches after all, it seemed. His hair still stood up in its wild spikes. His cheeks and brow were smeared with bright streaks of blood. His eyes were wide but almost totally empty--it was an expression Officer O'Bannion associated with speed-freaks and crackheads.
Holy Jesus, he thought. The guy was right--he did kill his wife. He killed somebody, at least. So where's the body?
He glanced toward the tub but couldn't see in. It was the most likely place, but it also seemed to be the one object in the room which wasn't streaked and splattered with gore.
"Mr. Mitla?" he asked. He wasn't pointing his gun directly at Howard, but the muzzle was most certainly in the neighborhood.
"Yes, that's my name," Howard said in a hollow, courteous voice. "Howard Mitla, CPA, at your service. Did you come to use the toilet? Go right ahead. There's nothing to disturb you now. I think that problem's been taken care of. At least for the time being."
"Uh, would you mind getting rid of the weapon, sir?"
"Weapon?" Howard looked at him vacantly for a moment, then seemed to understand. "These?" He raised the hedgeclippers, and the muzzle of Officer O'Bannion's gun for the first time came to rest on Howard himself.
"Yes, sir."
"Sure," Howard said. He tossed the clippers indifferently into the bathtub. There was a clatter as the battery-hatch popped out. "Doesn't matter. The batteries are flat, anyway. But . . . what I said about using the toilet? On more mature consideration, I guess I'd advise against it."
"You would?" Now that the man was disarmed, O'Bannion wasn't sure exactly how to proceed. It would have been a lot easier if the victim were on view. He supposed he'd better cuff the guy and then call for backup. All he knew for sure was that he wanted to get out of this smelly, creepy bathroom.
"Yes," Howard said. "After all, consider this, Officer: there are five fingers on a hand . . . just one hand, mind you . . . and. . . have you ever thought about how many holes to the underworld there are in an ordinary bathroom? Counting the holes in the faucets, that is? I make it seven." Howard paused and then added, "Seven is a prime--which is to say, a number divisible only by one and itself."
"Would you want to hold out your hands for me, sir?" Officer O'Bannion said, taking his handcuffs from his belt.
"Vi says I know all the answers," Howard said, "but Vi's wrong." He slowly held out his hands.
O'Bannion knelt before him and quickly snapped a cuff on Howard's right wrist. "Who's Vi?"
"My wife," Howard said. His blank, shining eyes looked directly into Officer O'Bannion's. "She's never had any problem going to the bathroom while someone else is in the room, you know. She could probably go while you were in the room."
Officer O'Bannion began to have a terrible yet weirdly plausible idea: that this strange little man had killed his wife with a pair of hedgeclippers and then somehow dissolved her body with drain-cleaner--and all because she wouldn't get the hell out of the bathroom while he was trying to drain the dragon.
He snapped the other cuff on.
"Did you kill your wife, Mr. Mitla?"
For a moment Howard looked almost surprised. Then he lapsed back into that queer, plastic state of apathy again. "No," he said. "Vi's at Dr. Stone's. They're pulling a complete set of uppers. Vi says it's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Why would I kill Vi?"
Now that he had the cuffs on the guy, O'Bannion felt a little better, a little more in control of the situation. "Well, it looks like you offed someone."
"It was just a finger," Howard said. He was still holding his hands out in front of him. Light twinkled and ran along the chain between the handcuffs like liquid silver. "But there are more fingers than one on a hand. And what about the hand's owner?" Howard's eyes shifted around the bathroom, which had now gone well beyond gloom; it was filling up with shadows again. "I told it to come back anytime," Howard whispered, "but I was hysterical. I have decided I . . . I am not capable. It grew, you see. It grew when it hit the air."
Something suddenly splashed inside the closed toilet. Howard's eyes shifted in that direction. So did Officer O'Bannion's. The splash came again. It sounded as if a trout had jumped in there.
"No, I most definitely wouldn't use the toilet," Howard said. "I'd hold it, if I were you, Officer. I'd hold it just as long as I possibly could, and then use the alley beside the building."
O'Bannion shivered.
Get hold of yourself, boyo, he told himself sternly. You get hold of yourself, or you'll wind up as nutty as this guy.
He got up to check the toilet.
"Bad idea," Howard said. "A really bad idea."
"What exactly happened in here, Mr. Mitla?" O'Bannion asked. "And what have you stored in the toilet?"
"What happened? it was like . . . like . . ." Howard trailed off, and then began to smile. It was a relieved smile. . . but his eyes kept creeping back to the closed lid of the toilet. "It was like Jeopardy," he said. "In fact, it was like Final Jeopardy. The category is The Inexplicable. The Final Jeopardy answer is, 'Because they can.' Do you know what the Final Jeopardy question is, Officer?"
Fascinated, unable to take his eyes from Howard's, Officer O'Bannion shook his head.
"The Final Jeopardy question," Howard said in a voice that was cracked and roughened from screaming, "is: 'Why do terrible things sometimes happen to the nicest people?' That's the Final Jeopardy question. It's all going to take a lot of thought. But I have plenty of time. As long as I stay away from the . . . the holes."
The splash came again. It was heavier this time. The vomitous toilet seat bumped sharply up and down. Officer O'Bannion got up, walked over, and bent down. Howard looked at him with some interest.
"Final Jeopardy, Officer," said Howard Mitla. "How much do you wish to wager?"
O'Bannion thought about it for a moment . . . then grasped the toilet seat and wagered it all.
Sneakers
John Tell had been working at Tabori Studios just over a month when he first noticed the sneakers. Tabori was in a building which had once been called Music City and had been, in the early days of rock and roll and top-forty rhythm and blues, a very big deal. Back then you never would have seen a pair of sneakers (unless they were on the feet of a delivery boy) above lobby-level. Those days were gone, though, and so were the big-money producers with their reet pleats and pointy-toed snakeskin shoes. Sneakers were now just another part of the Music City uniform, and when Tell first glimpsed these, he made no negative assumptions about their owner. Well, maybe one: the guy really could have used a new pair. These had been white when they were new, but from the look of them new had been a long t
ime ago.
That was all he noticed when he first saw the sneakers in the little room where you so often ended up judging your neighbor by his footwear because that was all you ever saw of him. Tell spied this pair under the door of the first toilet-stall in the third-floor men's room. He passed them on his way to the third and last stall. He came out a few minutes later, washed and dried his hands, combed his hair, and then went back to Studio F, where he was helping to mix an album by a heavy-metal group called The Dead Beats. To say Tell had already forgotten the sneakers would be an overstatement, because they had hardly registered on his mental radar screen to begin with.
Paul Jannings was producing The Dead Beats' sessions. He wasn't famous in the way the old be-bop kings of Music City had been famous--Tell thought rock-and-roll music was no longer strong enough to breed such mythic royalty--but he was fairly well-known, and Tell himself thought he was the best producer of rock-and-roll records currently active in the field; only Jimmy Iovine could come close.
Tell had first seen him at a party following the premiere of a concert film; had, in fact, recognized him from across the room. The hair was graying now, and the sharp features of Jannings's handsome face had become almost gaunt, but there was no mistaking the man who had recorded the legendary Tokyo Sessions with Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, John Lennon, and Al Kooper some fifteen years earlier. Other than Phil Spector, Jannings was the only record producer Tell could have recognized by sight as well as by the distinctive sound of his recordings--crystal-clear top ends underscored by percussion so heavy it shook your clavicle. It was that Don McLean clarity you heard first on the Tokyo Sessions recordings, but if you wiped the treble, what you heard pulsing along through the underbrush was pure Sandy Nelson.
Tell's natural reticence was overcome by admiration and he had crossed the room to where Jannings was standing, temporarily unengaged. He introduced himself, expecting a quick handshake and a few perfunctory words at most. Instead, the two of them had fallen into a long and interesting conversation. They worked in the same field and knew some of the same people, but even then Tell had known there was more to the magic of that initial meeting than those things; Paul Jannings was just one of those rare men to whom he found he could talk, and for John Tell, talking really was akin to magic.
Toward the end of the conversation, Jannings had asked him if he was looking for work.
"Did you ever know anyone in this business who wasn't?" Tell asked.
Jannings laughed and asked for his phone number. Tell had given it to him, not attaching much importance to the request--it was most likely a gesture of politeness on the other man's part, he'd thought. But Jannings had called him three days later to ask if Tell would like to be part of the three-man team mixing The Dead Beats' first album. "I don't know if it's really possible to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear," Jannings had said, "but since Atlantic Records is footing the bills, why not have a good time trying?" John Tell saw no reason at all why not, and signed on for the cruise immediately.
*
A week or so after he first saw the sneakers, Tell saw them again. He only registered the fact that it was the same guy because the sneakers were in the same place--under the door of stall number one in the third-floor men's. There was no question that they were the same ones; white (once, anyway) hightops with dirt in the deep creases. He noticed an empty eyelet and thought, Must not have had your own eyes all the way open when you laced that one up, friend. Then he went on down to the third stall (which he thought of, in some vague way, as "his"). This time he glanced at the sneakers on his way out, as well, and saw something odd when he did: there was a dead fly on one of them. It lay on the rounded toe of the left sneaker, the one with the empty eyelet, with its little legs sticking up.
When he got back to Studio F, Jannings was sitting at the board with his head clutched in his hands.
"You okay, Paul?"
"No."
"What's wrong?"
"Me. I was wrong. I am wrong. My career is finished. I'm washed up. Eighty-sixed. Over-done-with-gone."
"What are you talking about?" Tell looked around for Georgie Ronkler and didn't see him anywhere. It didn't surprise him. Jannings had periodic fugues and Georgie always left when he saw one coming on. He claimed his karma didn't allow him to deal with strong emotion. "I cry at supermarket openings," Georgie said.
"You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear," Jannings said. He pointed with his fist at the glass between the mixing room and the performance studio. He looked like a man giving the old Nazi Heil Hitler salute. "At least not out of pigs like those."
"Lighten up," Tell said, although he knew Jannings was perfectly right. The Dead Beats, composed of four dull bastards and one dull bitch, were personally repulsive and professionally incompetent.
"Lighten this up," Jannings said, and flipped him the bird.
"God, I hate temperament," Tell said.
Jannings looked up at him and giggled. A second later they were both laughing. Five minutes after that they were back to work.
The mix--such as it was--ended a week later. Tell asked Jannings for a recommendation and a tape.
"Okay, but you know you're not supposed to play the tape for anyone until the album comes out," Jannings said.
"I know."
"And why you'd ever want to, for anyone, is beyond me. These guys make The Butthole Surfers sound like The Beatles."
"Come on, Paul, it wasn't that bad. And even if it was, it's over."
He smiled. "Yeah. There's that. And if I ever work in this business again, I'll give you a call."
"That would be great."
They shook hands. Tell left the building which had once been known as Music City, and the thought of the sneakers under the door of stall number one in the third-floor men's john never crossed his mind.
*
Jannings, who had been in the business twenty-five years, had once told him that when it came to mixing bop (he never called it rock and roll, only bop), you were either shit or Superman. For the two months following the Beats' mixing session, John Tell was shit. He didn't work. He began to get nervous about the rent. Twice he almost called Jannings, but something in him thought that would be a mistake.
Then the music mixer on a film called Karate Masters of Massacre died of a massive coronary and Tell got six weeks' work at the Brill Building (which had been known as Tin Pan Alley back in the heyday of Broadway and the Big Band sound), finishing the mix. It was library stuff in the public domain--and a few plinking sitars--for the most part, but it paid the rent. And following his last day on the show, Tell had no more than walked into his apartment before the phone rang. It was Paul Jannings, asking him if he had checked the Billboard pop chart lately. Tell said he hadn't.
"It came on at number seventy-nine." Jannings managed to sound simultaneously disgusted, amused, and amazed. "With a bullet."
"What did?" But he knew as soon as the question was out of his mouth.
" 'Diving in the Dirt.' "
It was the name of a cut on The Dead Beats' forthcoming Beat It 'Til It's Dead album, the only cut which had seemed to Tell and Jannings remotely like single material.
"Shit!"
"Indeed it is, but I have a crazy idea it's gonna go top ten. Have you seen the video?"
"No."
"What a scream. It's mostly Ginger, the chick in the group, playing mudhoney in some generic bayou with a guy who looks like Donald Trump in overalls. It sends what my intellectual friends like to call 'mixed cultural messages.' " And Jannings laughed so hard Tell had to hold the phone away from his ear.
When Jannings had himself under control again, he said, "Anyway, it probably means the album'll go top ten, too. A platinum-plated dog-turd is still a dog-turd, but a platinum reference is platinum all the way through--you understand dis t'ing, Bwana?"
"Indeed I do," Tell said, pulling open his desk drawer to make sure his Dead Beats cassette, unplayed since Jannings had given it to him on the last day
of the mix, was still there.
"So what are you doing?" Jannings asked him.
"Looking for a job."
"You want to work with me again? I'm doing Roger Daltrey's new album. Starts in two weeks."
"Christ, yes!"
The money would be good, but it was more than that; following The Dead Beats and six weeks of Karate Masters of Massacre, working with the ex-lead singer of The Who would be like coming into a warm place on a cold night. Whatever he might turn out to be like personally, the man could sing. And working with Jannings again would be good, too. "Where?"
"Same old stand. Tabori at Music City."
"I'm there."
*
Roger Daltrey not only could sing, he turned out to be a tolerably nice guy in the bargain. Tell thought the next three or four weeks would be good ones. He had a job, he had a production credit on an album that had popped onto the Billboard charts at number forty-one (and the single was up to number seventeen and still climbing), and he felt safe about the rent for the first time since he had come to New York from Pennsylvania four years ago.
It was June, trees were in full leaf, girls were wearing short skirts again, and the world seemed a fine place to be. Tell felt this way on his first day back at work for Paul Jannings until approximately 1:45 P.M. Then he walked into the third-floor bathroom, saw the same once-white sneakers under the door of stall one, and all his good feelings suddenly collapsed.
They are not the same. Can't be the same.
They were, though. That single empty eyelet was the clearest point of identification, but everything else about them was also the same. Exactly the same, and that included their positions. There was only one real difference that Tell could see: there were more dead flies around them now.
He went slowly into the third stall, "his" stall, lowered his pants, and sat down. He wasn't surprised to find that the urge which had brought him here had entirely departed. He sat still for a little while just the same, however, listening for sounds. The rattle of a newspaper. The clearing of a throat. Hell, even a fart.
No sounds came.
That's because I'm in here alone, Tell thought. Except, that is, for the dead guy in the first stall.