A change of gravity

"Yeah," he said, looking down at the two brown knobby knees protruding from the grey-cloudy soapy water in the middle of the tub, and under the handles and the faucet and the drain shutoff, the white hair-dryer tethered by its own white cord to the white extension cord, half-submerged between the two feet underneath the faucet at the front of the tub. He could make out the shins and calves of the lower legs buckled up behind the ugly feet, and beyond the knees the black-haired swarthy head with brown staring eyes in the gaping face above the milky surface at the back.

"What?" Brody said from the other room. "What's going on in there?

Everything all right?"

"Yeah, oh yeah," Merrion said, making a brief dismissive brushing gesture with his right hand against his pantsleg. "Yeah, everything's fine here. Well, everything's all right for me, I mean, in here, and probably for you." He heard Brody come into the bathroom behind him.

"But I don't think it is for him. And if what I'm seein's what I think it is I'm seeing, and I'm damned sure that it is, I don't think it's gonna be all right much longer for our friend Miss Janet out there. Not for some time at least. She's probably in for some excitement, and then a nice long rest. Although maybe not; her lawyer'll be glad to see those bruises. This naked gentleman in front of us I suspect is Lowell Chappelle, and also that he's somewhat dead."

He yanked the curtain back all the way and stood looking down at the shiny-black-haired dark-skinned man in the tub, his eyes staring and mouth frozen open in the head that looked as though it had been impaled on the rigid neck sticking out of the surface of the grey water covering the shoulders and the torso of the submerged body. "Yes, now I'm sure of it," he said. "No longer any question in my mind he's completely fuckin' dead. My guess is that in this very bathtub, Steve, the late Lowell Chappelle, former well-known desperado, learned last night after a few drinks that his electrifying girlfriend didn't like it when he hit her. Just before he became truly, fuckin', dead."

He turned aside to let Brody step up to the tub beside him. "You wanna take a look here, Steve? See you recognize him? After all, you know the guy, seen him around, when he was breathin' and so forth. Before this terrible shock. I'd turn the light on for you but I think the fuse's blown."

Merrion paused expectantly but Brody did not respond. He continued to stare down into the tub. "He kind of stinks, a little," he said. "I would have to say." He stepped back and looked up at Merrion. "You think we should get someone, see if they can, you know, get him out of here maybe, and then maybe do something with him? Undertaker, something? Can't just leave him like this, I don't think, can we? It wouldn't be right to do that. At least not for me, the building and all. We should do something, I think."

Merrion took Brody's left elbow with his right hand and turned him around to face the bathroom door, propelling him toward it at the same time. "Indeed we should do something, Steve," he said. "You should do something and I should do something, and then after that we should both of us do absolutely nothing. Until the cops get here, and then it'll be all in their hands."

"The cops?" Brody said, momentarily resisting. "You really sure we need alia that stuff, get the cops up here? TV cameras and stuff, alia trouble they make?"

"Well, yeah," Merrion said, getting him going again and steering him toward the doorway onto the landing. Janet snored comfortably in the reclining chair, "Yeah, I do think we should have the cops come up and all, it's traditional, you know? Someone looks like he's been murdered, and you find the body? Well, the cops like it if you give them a call. Invite them to come up and look the place over. See there's anything they might like to take note of and so forth in case they decide, later on, they'd like to accuse someone of killing whoever it was, and maybe punish them. A little, anyway. That's the sort of thing they do. And when you help them to do that, they appreciate it.

You don't call them, they get mad. My experience's always been that if you can do something that cops appreciate, it makes life a lot easier in the long run to do it; I have always found that.

"So the first thing I think we should do is shut the door and lock it, and have you stand in front of it. We do not want Janet to wake up and figure what we're doin' here, and then decide that this'd be a perfect time to take a hike. Then right after that I am gonna pick the phone up know I saw one, we came in; oh yeah, there it is there, right there by the corner 'frigerator – call ah cops an' get 'em up here, tell 'em what we found. It'll be their baby then."

"You think she murdered him?" Brody said.