“I bet Alexa still looks the same, blonde and beautiful.
Does she?”
“She’s all right, I guess, if she remembers to keep her teeth in,” I said.
I don’t think he heard me. He was eating his second jelly doughnut with a faraway and long ago look in his eye.
* * *
I puttered around in the office all afternoon, snarling rude remarks at Alexa, who was not present.
At five p.m., I arranged my half-done office work in neat piles and set out on my next challenge. Sammy Dash.
I figured by five, Sammy would be home from his afternoon activities and not out yet for the evening of wowing the ladies. I decided it would be better if he didn’t know I was coming.
Merv’s information had Sammy at a very snooty highrise just off Sussex Drive. Like my own building, Sammy’s had security designed to let the good people in and keep the bad people out. I decided that for the purposes of this visit, I was one of the good people.
A small rental moving van was parked outside of the building in the circular drive. I looked around to see if there were any movers I could pretend to accompany. But no luck.
I didn’t want to buzz Sammy’s apartment, since a surprise visit seemed more likely to elicit useful information. I stood by the door balancing my briefcase in one arm and pretending to dig for my keys with the other. A couple in tennis gear smiled as they let me pass in with them.
“Bad enough to have to work Saturday,” I said, “and now I can’t find my blankety-blank keys.”
“Isn’t it frustrating,” she said, “the way those blankety-blank keys always sink to the bottom of your purse and hide?”
“It never fails,” I said, as we stepped into the elevator.
“Sometimes I think if we had a system of personal access codes, it would be better. But I know I’d probably forget mine.”
“I know what you mean,” she said. Her male companion smiled. No doubt he was enjoying the natural superiority of one who always knew where his keys were.
They pressed the button for the twelfth floor. Sammy was on the twentieth. I pressed twenty-two and decided to walk down two flights. I was enjoying the sense of skulduggery.
I hoped it would be worth it in practical terms, and that the visit to Sammy would yield at least one or two small pieces to fill in the puzzle. It didn’t occur to me to be afraid of Sammy.
On the twentieth floor, the coast was clear. No one was in the corridor, but there was a movers’ dolly in the hallway, near Sammy’s door.
I knocked on the door of 2012, Sammy’s apartment. The knock was brisk, businesslike.
The door swung open. No one stood there to welcome me or tell me to go to hell. I knocked again on the open door. After a minute, I called out.
“Hello, hello. Mr. Dash, important message for you. Hello.”
There are times in your life when you behave intelligently and there are times in your life when your actions are about as stupid as they can be. I knew that. And yet I stepped into Sammy Dash’s parlour, wondering who was the spider and who was the fly.
“Hello. Mr. Dash. I have something urgent to tell you,” I called out, stepping along the foyer towards the living room. I passed a large corrugated cardboard box, with an illustration of a sofa on it. That explained the dolly, I thought.
My sensible internal voice was screaming, get out, get out, the man’s probably in the shower, he’ll probably call the police when he sees you in his apartment, get… A smell like rotten broccoli grew stronger as I approached the living area, expecting to be set upon by an enraged Sammy Dash, wearing only a towel.
Instead, I saw a pile of refuse. Dead vegetables, cans, meat wrappers, yogurt containers piled on a ruby red oriental carpet. Sticky stuff oozed out from under the debris. The pile was high, much higher than you would expect to find in one person’s apartment. It looked like a year’s worth of garbage.
I slumped into a leather armchair, held my nose and pondered the scene. Destructive, vicious. Someone must have broken into Sammy’s apartment. Someone with a major grudge and an imaginative notion of revenge.
I’m not certain why it took so long to realize that having entered Sammy Dash’s apartment without his invitation at the same time that the vandalism took place might look damned suspicious to some people.
Thanking God that no one had seen me enter the apartment, I stood up to sneak out. Still holding my nose. Someone else could report this, I’d be long gone when it happened. My sensible voice, which had been busy saying I told you so, starting screaming. This time I listened.
After a minute, I crossed the room to call the police and report the damage. It was only then I spotted the shoes sticking out of the pile of garbage. A banana peel dangled off one of the heels. A scoop of something, mashed potatoes with old gravy perhaps, was stuck to the other.
Couldn’t be, I told myself, although my heart rate accelerated into the unsafe zone and goosebumps crawled up my arms. Not possible, I kept saying, until I saw the hand, lying in a sticky puddle, clutching a piece of paper.
I leaned closer, my hand covering my nose and mouth. The hand belonged to Sammy Dash. I could see the rest of him half-hidden by rotting food. His eyes stared past me, over my shoulder.
I staggered towards the phone, gagging. I never reached it. I didn’t have time to swing around when I heard the step behind me. I was dimly aware of a pair of tan shoes before I marvelled at the explosion of light in my head and heard my sensible voice say, I told you so, stupid, as I hit the floor.
* * *
The story as I told it to McCracken had a few editorial changes. Notably, that Sammy had agreed to see me and was expecting my visit.
“How did you get in? If the guy was dead, he could hardly have buzzed you in.”
McCracken was not an easy man to fool and I decided to keep the fabrications to a minimum. But I felt it was important to prevent any notion of unauthorized entry from edging into the conversation.
“A couple of tenants let me in with them. I must have looked respectable.”
“The things people do,” he said.
I was sitting on the sofa in Sammy’s apartment, holding my head and trying to figure out what happened.
McCracken was sitting on the chair, watching me.
“Now you’re telling me that Dash’s body was lying here, right on this carpet.”
“That’s right.”
“There’s no body now,” McCracken said.
Reasonable enough. There wasn’t. Except for a lingering, light odour of garbage masked by something else, floral bouquet carpet shampoo and room freshener I thought, there was no sign of anything unusual in Sammy Dash’s apartment.
“True,” I said, “but trust me on it.”
Mombourquette was lounging against the wall on the far side of the room, smirking rattily.
McCracken looked troubled. “Pretty weird story,” he said.
“But the lab boys will check out the rug. If there was blood on it, they’re going to find it.”
“Not if. Was.”
McCracken looked at me with a strange expression.
Concern?
“Whatever you say, but you’ve got to keep in mind that you’ve been hit on the head. That kind of injury can be…”
“Wait for the lab results,” I snapped.
But I