Small Town

He put his hand into the pocket of his suit jacket and drew out the little turquoise rabbit. He’d been carrying it ever since he took it from Marilyn Fairchild’s apartment, and now he walked over to Clara’s body, got down onto one knee, and placed the rabbit so that it covered the hole the chisel had left in her chest.

What would they make of that?

He went around the apartment, using a hand towel to wipe surfaces he remembered touching and others he might have touched. But he’d touched the rabbit, hadn’t he? He picked it up and wiped it off and decided he wasn’t ready to leave it behind after all. He put it in his pocket and left Clara’s wound uncovered.

The poor girl...

He had the towel over his hand when he turned the doorknob to let himself out, dropped it behind him before he drew the door shut.

He walked crosstown to his hotel. On the way he stopped several times to discard the tools from his briefcase, dropping them into three well-separated storm drains. He hadn’t used the big screwdriver, had never even removed it from the briefcase, but he got rid of it just the same, and left the briefcase propped against a trash can. Perhaps someone would get some use out of it.

eleven

From the moment he’d found Marilyn dead in her apartment, the very apartment he’d been so blithely cleaning, opening doors ceased to be a carefree enterprise for Jerry Pankow. He couldn’t turn a key without at least a quiver of anxiety over what he might find on the other side of the door.

Not so much with his commercial clients, the three bars and the whorehouse. But when he called on his once-a-week residential clients, he couldn’t entirely banish the fear of finding a dead person on the premises. He rang the doorbell first, as he had always done, and then he knocked, as always, and then he turned the key in the lock and opened the door and called out Hello! once or twice, and stood still listening for a response.

And after that, after he’d assured himself that there was no one conscious within, he was very careful to survey the entire apartment, to look in every room. Not until he’d determined that he was alone did he set about doing his job.

So far the most unnerving moment had come one afternoon when, after he’d done his routine of ringing and knocking and helloing, he’d walked through a silent apartment to find Kyle Lanza, who worked downtown all day every day, not only home but sprawled flat on his back on his bed, his eyes closed, his arms at his sides. He was wearing sweatpants and a Bad Dog T-shirt — and, Jerry noticed, just in time to keep from losing it altogether, a giant set of earphones. Roused, he was full of apologies. And, thank God, alive.

Time passed, and the apartments he cleaned kept not having dead bodies in them, and he kept up the precautions but lost the apprehension. It was possible to walk in on a dead client, it had in fact happened once, but that didn’t mean it was likely to happen again.

Nor did that July morning come equipped with premonitions. All he felt was fine, and the sun was out and the sky was clear, and he didn’t have a residential customer today, so he’d made a date with himself — after breakfast he’d be stretched out on a towel on the roof of his building, wearing nothing but sunscreen and Speedos.

He was looking forward to it as he mounted the half-flight of steps to the building on East Twenty-eighth. He gave a wave to the Korean woman in the nail shop, opened the door of the vestibule for the three upstairs floors, rang the third-floor bell, rang again, used his key. There was a bell beside the door leading to the apartment, and he rang that as always and knocked as always and used his other key, and as soon as he opened the door he knew this was going to be a bad day, and he could forget about working on his tan.

The smell hit him the instant he cracked the door. He probably would have noticed it under any circumstances, but he knew what death smelled like and recognized it immediately. He went in anyway and closed the door and threw the bolt, which was ridiculous, because he didn’t have to fear the outside world, where the sun was shining and people were alive. Anything fearful was here, and he’d just gone and locked himself in with it.

Every odor was particulate. He’d heard or read this somewhere, and it was information he wished he didn’t have, because it meant that, if you could smell it, you were breathing it in, you were taking it into your system. But in fact it wasn’t that overpowering, it wasn’t enough to make you gag. It was knowing what it was that made it so upsetting.

And then seeing it. One on the parlor floor, her face unrecognizable, and two in one of the bedrooms, one crumpled at the other’s feet.