The man in the doorway did almost nothing. He squinted out at us behind thick glasses as if he had not heard us correctly, and then he turned to repeat the word over his shoulder. “Police, dads?” he said curiously.
He didn’t get an answer. There were about six quick footsteps and then there was the sound of a chair clattering to the floor. A second after that a window went up, hard, jarring the weights inside its molding. The man in the doorway had blocked us unintentionally, but I had a hunch the elbow I planted in his liver would remind him to be less careless in the future. I saw the second man’s back as he cleared the window ledge, which was about twenty feet away in the far wall of a rear room, and then he was out of sight and rattling down a fire escape.
Twenty feet. A man with my stride, or Brannigan’s, can cover the distance from a standstill in approximately a second. We both started to, but neither of us quite made the window. Because the second hadn’t fully elapsed when the sound began, and when it came we were both rooted like snow-heavy birches, bent forward and frozen.
It was a man’s scream. I had heard one exactly like it a dozen years before in North Africa. Press me and I could tell you the date, the name of the crossroads, exactly what I’d been doing when it happened. The G.I. had been sleeping off a binge on the edge of a ditch. When they’d backed the tank off him you could have peeled up what was left of his legs to wrap your holiday mailing.
Brannigan looked out first. He said, “Oh, God, oh, my God,” and a priest giving final rites would have had a voice just as hushed. After that he choked and was fighting to keep himself from vomiting and you could hardly blame him for that.
The man had gone down one flight of the fire escape toward the narrow yard below and then had changed his mind. There was an alley behind the building which faced on the next block and he had decided to go over there. There was a spiked fence between the yard and the alley, with its spikes sticking up about a foot above the crossbar which held them in place. The spikes were about an inch thick at the bar, tapering sharply to four-sided points from there upward. Evidently the man had climbed the railing at the second landing and tried to jump it.
Whoever he was, athletics obviously hadn’t been his long suit. Half of him had gotten across.
He was hanging face-downward with his arms and trunk over the far side and his legs toward us. The spikes were set closely enough together so that he had caught three of them in the bowels. They were sticking up through the back of his pants like dirty fingers through a moth-eaten scarf.
The shoelace he had tripped over was still swinging loose.
CHAPTER 15
I climbed out. Brannigan was turning back to the man called Henry as I went, but Henry was not leaving. He wanted a look, too.
He got it as I was climbing down. From the way it tore him up, I gathered that the lad on the fence would be a grief he’d find hard to sustain. “Man,” I heard him say, “like shishkebob!”
I got down there. “Any point in an ambulance?” Brannigan said.
“Hearse, Nate.”
The deceased had been about thirty-five and a redhead, but you could not tell much from his face about anything else. He had bitten a deep gash into his tongue, which was hanging out like an empty mitten, and his eyes were bulging.
I stood there for a minute. He was impaled at just about the level of my shoulders and he did not look heavy. He would have leaked, however.
I glanced up. “You want me to?”
Brannigan’s face was drawn. The other man was still gaping. He was small and thin-faced and maybe forty, and his lenses looked thick enough to double as casters. “Leave him,” Brannigan said finally. “Wait a second.”
He moved away from the window. There was already a fly or two at the man I supposed had been Arthur Leeds. I doubted that he was the boy who had killed Cathy, since he would not have been just waiting around for us that way, so I shooed the flies off.
Brannigan came back. He had a balled-up tan bedspread in his hands and he tossed it down to me. He was right enough about that. There were only eight or ten windows looking out that way, but sooner or later someone’s favorite aunt was going to open one of them to sprinkle the geraniums. Some of them should have shot up when he’d screamed. Probably there was a quiz show on.
I billowed out the spread and threw it over him, then ripped it across some of the spikes so that it would not slip off. I left him like that.
The other man was slumped in a straight chair when I came up. He was wearing a red and gray plaid jacket that some peddler’s stout horse was happier for the lack of, and a black string tie which disappeared into the top of his pants. That left all of four inches of the tie showing, since the pants ended under his armpits somewhere. He had taken off his glasses and was holding them, and it seemed to have finally gotten through to him. His face was the color of soggy oatmeal.
Brannigan was standing over him with his hands on his hips. “Leeds, man, oh, yes,” the man was muttering. “Arthur indeed. Like wow, what a fadeout!”
“Damn it,” Brannigan said, “what was it all about? What made him run?”
“Sugar, man, you’re the flatfoot. I just spin tunes, you know? Like I mean, you ought to know what he bugged out for.”
Brannigan hit him. He brought the back of his hand across the man’s jaw from right to left and the man sucked in his breath with a sound like a punctured accordion. He scrambled backward, losing the chair. It started to go over and he caught it with one hand, dancing behind it and waving his glasses hysterically. “Don’t, man!” he screeched. “Like don’t! Sugar, it ain’t none of mine! Like I couldn’t whistle note-one of that tune, that’s for real, except that he just now told me. I just ambled over to spin some lyrics, you know? Like right there — there’s my notebook on the piano, see? Oh, yes, oh, yes, Henry Hen-shaw, like it’s got my name on the cover. Like I wouldn’t even blow my mother-in-law’s coin for that stuff, you dig me? I ain’t been hooked for lo, these ten years. I—”
His voice trailed off as Brannigan stood up. Brannigan’s jaw was set and his lips were tight. He grunted disgustedly. “What did he have? Had Narcotics been on to him?”
“The real goods, oh, yes. Far out. The mighty H, like. He announced they had been bugging him bad. They picked him up two weeks ago but he was clean. But like he was terrified, man. He just got in this new horn full. That cat on the fence, you know? I mean not me. All this is just what he mentioned in passing. True, dad, that’s straight. I don’t lay a hand on hide nor hair, you know? Like I don’t even want to hear any of that chatter, not Henry Hiram Henshaw!”
“He push it?”
“I’m weak on details, man. Like he’s in the middle someplace, kind of a transfer point, you take my meaning? Like some cat dumps it into his pocket and another cat lifts it out again. He gets maybe two bills a week for this inconvenience, like it’s better than they leave it in a locker in Grand Central. He—”
“Where is it? Where’s he keep it?”
“In yon head. Like that’s what he informed me. You dig how calm and cool I’m telling you, don’t you, man? Like I mean, sugar, why ought I not? I’m just here to spin a tune, oh, yes, oh, yes. If I just happen to be coincidentally cognizant of the feet that the cat stashes his nasty old heroin under the sink, like, that saves labor all around, does it not? Doesn’t it?”
Brannigan did not answer him. He nodded to me and I went into the latrine and felt around on the underside of the sink. It was taped into place but it pulled away easily. It was a carton about the size of two packs of Pall Malls end to end, maybe a little more thick. I brought it out.