And, finally, we have the kind of fool’s errand I was on this lovely Sunday. I didn’t know what I wanted or where he’d stashed it, or even if it existed, whatever it might turn out to be. I had to look everywhere, because I didn’t know how big or small it was, or if it had to be kept cold or dry or out of drafts.
And it’s terribly frustrating. If you find something, is that it? Or is there something more waiting to be found? Conversely, if you don’t find anything, do you keep at it until something turns up? Or should you go on home because there’s nothing there?
You know what it’s like? Sex without orgasm. How can you tell when you’re supposed to stop?
So I was almost glad to have CAPHOB to think about while I searched. I wouldn’t call my musing terribly productive, but I came up with some interesting ideas.
1. Suppose CAPHOB was an acronym. Suppose each letter stood for a word. That would be a good way to compress a lot of information into the number of letters you could fit on the side of an attaché case before your life trickled out of you. Just what the letters stood for was hard to say, but the possibilities were extensive, surely. Can Anyone Pinch Hit Or Bunt? Criminal Activity Pays Horribly On Balance. Cancel Anniversary Party-Having Our Baby! None of these struck me as the sort of thing I’d be likely to choose as my last word to the world, but I hadn’t been lying there bleeding, struggling to scribble my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the city.
2. Suppose CAPHOB was upside down. After all, I didn’t know how Hoberman had spent the years since his adventures in Anatruria. Maybe he’d devoted some of them to a career selling life insurance, until jotting things down upside down had become second nature to him. To test the hypothesis, I printed CAPHOB and turned the piece of paper upside down, and I got the same meaningless word upside down and backwards. Then I printed the individual letters upside down, and this worked a little better, because four of the letters were unchanged. What I got looked something like CVdHOB, except the V was really an upside-down A. I suppose I could have taken this a step further and tried to work out what CVDHOB might be an acronym for, but you have to draw the line somewhere.
3. Maybe the most obvious explanation was the real one, and he’d been trying to write his name. This did make a certain kind of sense, actually. There’d been no identification found on his person, which suggested that Candlemas might have taken his wallet from him while he lay dying. Maybe Hoberman had recoiled at the thought of rotting away in an unmarked grave, and wanted to let the world know who he was. When you considered the fact that even now the tag on his toe read “Hugo Candlemas,” his concern didn’t seem so farfetched. It was a damned unsatisfying dying message, pointing not to the killer but to the victim, but what are you going to do, send it back to Hoberman with a rejection slip?
4. Maybe, as Carolyn had suggested earlier, Hoberman was dyslexic. He’d written the right letters but got them in the wrong order. I switched them around without coming up with anything more promising than HOPCAB. It was true, to be sure, that the Boccaccio (say) was only a short hop away by cab, but could that possibly be the urgent information Hoberman wanted to pass on to whoever found his body? I couldn’t see it. If I was ready to say the long goodbye and sleep the big sleep, I’d at least try for something profound, like “Life is a fountain,” say, or “Take two and hit to right.”
5. Perhaps, startling as it was to entertain the notion, perhaps CAPHOB was a word. It wasn’t in the dictionary, nor was anything that started out with those first four letters, but suppose it was a proper name. In fact, suppose it was Candlemas’s name. It didn’t much sound like a name, but was it that much less plausible than Souslik or Marmotte? What would you think if you saw either of those written in blood on the side of your attaché case?
6. Was it possible it was just drivel? Consider Dutch Schultz’s famous last words, a great extended monologue duly recorded for posterity as he lay dying. They were words, all right, and some of the sentences even parsed, but the great man had made no sense at all. Suppose the good captain, presented with a small canvas, had managed the neat trick of distilling a whole world of meaninglessness into six meaningless letters.
And so on.
Sometime in the middle of the afternoon I got hungry. I was all set to order Chinese food when I realized it wouldn’t work; I couldn’t open the door to receive it because of the police seals. By this time I was really in the mood for it, too, so I thought about having it delivered to the Lehrman apartment and waiting for it down there. I don’t know what made me think that was a sensible idea. Maybe I’d overdosed on meditation, using CAPHOB as my mantra. Fortunately I nipped the whole enterprise in the bud and raided the kitchen instead.
What I found was leftover Chinese food, but it had been left too long. You wouldn’t want to touch it with a ten-foot chopstick. I toasted a couple of English muffins (the bread was stale) and spread them with peanut butter and jelly (the butter was rancid) and washed them down with black instant coffee (the milk was beyond description). Someday, I thought, when all of this was but a memory, I’d be eating real meals again, hearty coffee-shop breakfasts, overseasoned ethnic lunches with Carolyn, real dinners in real restaurants. For now, though, I seemed destined to grab breakfast on the run, skip lunch or steal it, and make the big meal of the day popcorn. My clothes were neither falling off me nor gripping me too tightly, so I seemed to be getting away with it. But it would be nice to eat like a human being again.
I drank the last of the coffee, rinsed my dishes in the sink, and got back to work.
By the time I was done, I had some calls to make. I sat down in the leather club chair, swung my feet up onto the ottoman, held the receiver to my ear and decided against it. How did I know who had one of those doohickeys on his phone that displays the caller’s number? And how could I be sure that none of the folks I wanted to call would recognize Hugo Candlemas’s telephone number?
No point taking chances. I’d left NYPD seals intact, I’d steered clear of tainted General Tso’s Chicken. After all that, I didn’t want to be hoist on the petard of modern communications technology.
I left the Candlemas residence neat and clean, with no evidence of my visit aside from the peanut butter and jelly I’d scarfed and the fingerprints I’d left behind. (I’d wiped up some after myself, but hadn’t been a fanatic about it; they already had all the prints they were ever going to lift from the crime scene.) To protect the place from the elements, I cut a rectangle of cardboard from a corrugated carton, shrouded it in plastic wrap from a drawer in the kitchen, and carried it and a roll of tape out onto the fire escape with me. There I drew the casement window shut, reached in and latched it, then withdrew my arm and taped the cardboard in place of the missing pane. Then I scuttled quickly and quietly past the Gearhardts’ window and into the Lehrmans’ apartment a flight below.
This would have been rendered more complicated if their houseguest had returned in the interim, but he hadn’t. I closed their window after me, repositioned the jade plant and the bookcase-the planter was definitely Rockwood, I decided-and chose a telephone in the front room, where I could keep an eye and ear on the door.
I made my phone calls.
When I was done I treated myself to a tour of the apartment. Aside from a massive Chippendale highboy and a closet they’d cleared out for him, the Lehrman possessions remained essentially undisturbed during their absence. I window-shopped, leaving everything where I found it, and being much more careful about fingerprints than I’d been two flights up.