Black House (39 page)

Let us rise up the first flight, past the old canvas firehose in its glass box. Turn right at the second-floor landing (past the pay phone with its yellowing
OUT OF ORDER
sign) and continue to rise. When we reach the third floor, the smell of river fog is joined by the smell of chicken soup warming on someone’s hot plate (the cord duly approved either by Morty Fine or George Smith, the day manager).

The smell is coming from 307. If we slip through the keyhole (there have never been keycards at the Nelson and never will be), we’ll be in the presence of Andrew Railsback, seventy, balding, scrawny, good-humored. He once sold vacuum cleaners for Electrolux and appliances for Sylvania, but those days are behind him now. These are his golden years.

A candidate for Maxton’s, we might think, but Andy Railsback knows that place, and places like it. Not for him, thanks. He’s sociable enough, but he doesn’t want people telling him when to go to bed, when to get up, and when he can have a little nip of Early Times. He has friends in Maxton’s, visits them often, and has from time to time met the sparkling, shallow, predatory eye of our pal Chipper. He has thought on more than one such occasion that Mr. Maxton looks like the sort of fellow who would happily turn the corpses of his graduates into soap if he thought he could turn a buck on it.

No, for Andy Railsback, the third floor of the Nelson Hotel is good enough. He has his hot plate; he has his bottle of hooch; he’s got four packs of Bicycles and plays big-picture solitaire on nights when the sandman loses his way.

This evening he has made three Lipton Cup-A-Soups, thinking he’ll invite Irving Throneberry in for a bowl and a chat. Maybe afterward they’ll go next door to Lucky’s and grab a beer. He checks the soup, sees it has attained a nice simmer, sniffs the fragrant steam, and nods. He also has saltines, which go well with soup. He leaves the room to make his way upstairs and knock on Irv’s door, but what he sees in the hallway stops him cold.

It’s an old man in a shapeless blue robe, walking away from him with suspicious quickness. Beneath the hem of the robe, the stranger’s legs are as white as a carp’s belly and marked with blue snarls of varicose veins. On his left foot is a fuzzy black-and-yellow slipper. His right foot is bare. Although our new friend can’t tell for sure—not with the guy’s back to him—he doesn’t look like anyone Andy knows.

Also, he’s trying doorknobs as he wends his way along the main third-floor hall. He gives each one a single hard, quick shake. Like a turnkey. Or a thief. A fucking thief.

Yeah. Although the man is obviously old—older than Andy, it looks like—and dressed as if for bed, the idea of thievery resonates in Andy’s mind with queer certainty. Even the one bare foot, arguing that the fellow probably didn’t come in off the street, has no power over this strong intuition.

Andy opens his mouth to call out—something like
Can I help you?
or
Looking for someone?—
and then changes his mind. He just has this feeling about the guy. It has to do with the fleet way the stranger scurries along as he tries the knobs, but that’s not all of it. Not all of it by any means. It’s a feeling of darkness and danger. There are pockets in the geezer’s robe, Andy can see them, and there might be a weapon in one of them. Thieves don’t
always
have weapons, but . . .

The old guy turns the corner and is gone. Andy stands where he is, considering. If he had a phone in his room, he might call downstairs and alert Morty Fine, but he doesn’t. So, what to do?

After a brief interior debate, he tiptoes down the hall to the corner and peeps around. Here is a cul-de-sac with three doors: 312, 313, and, at the very end, 314, the only room in that little appendix which is currently occupied. The man in 314 has been there since the spring, but almost all Andy knows about him is his name: George Potter. Andy has asked both Irv and Hoover Dalrymple about Potter, but Hoover doesn’t know jack-shit and Irv has learned only a little more.

“You must,” Andy objected—this conversation took place in late May or early June, around the time the Buckhead Lounge downstairs went dark. “I seen you in Lucky’s with him, havin’ a beer.”

Irv had lifted one bushy eyebrow in that cynical way of his. “Seen me havin’ a beer with him. What are you?” he’d rasped. “My fuckin’ wife?”

“I’m just saying. You drink a beer with a man, you have a little conversation—”

“Usually, maybe. Not with him. I sat down, bought a pitcher, and mostly got the dubious pleasure of listenin’ to myself think. I say, ‘What do you think about the Brewers this year?’ and he says, ‘They’ll suck, same as last year. I can get the Cubs at night on my rah-dio—’ ”

“That the way he said it?
Rah-
dio?”

“Well, it ain’t the way
I
say it, is it? You ever heard me say rah-dio? I say radio, same as any normal person. You want to hear this or not?”

“Don’t sound like there’s much to hear.”

“You got that right, buddy. He says, ‘I can get the Cubs at night on my rah-dio, and that’s enough for me. I always went to Wrigley with my dad when I was a kid.’ So I found out he was from Chi, but otherwise,
bupkes.
”

The first thought to pop into Andy’s mind upon glimpsing the fucking thief in the third-floor corridor had been Potter, but Mr. George I-Keep-to-Myself Potter is a tall drink of water, maybe six-four, still with a pretty good head of salt-and-pepper hair. Mr. One-Slipper was shorter than that, hunched over like a toad. (
A
poison
toad, at that
is the thought that immediately rises in Andy’s mind.)

He’s in there,
Andy thinks.
Fucking thief’s in Potter’s room, maybe going through Potter’s drawers, looking for a little stash. Fifty or sixty rolled up in the toe of a sock, like I used to do. Or stealing Potter’s radio. His fucking
rah
-dio.

Well, and what was that to him? You passed Potter in the hallway, gave him a civil good morning or good afternoon, and what you got back was an uncivil grunt.
Bupkes,
in other words. You saw him in Lucky’s, he was drinking alone, far side of the jukebox. Andy guessed you could sit down with him and he’d split a pitcher with you—Irv’s little tête-à-tête with the man proved that much—but what good was that without a little chin-jaw to go along with it? Why should he, Andrew Railsback, risk the wrath of some poison toad in a bathrobe for the sake of an old grump who wouldn’t give you a yes, no, or maybe?

Well . . .

Because this is his home, cheesy as it might be, that’s why. Because when you saw some crazy old one-slipper fuck in search of loose cash or the easily lifted rah-dio, you didn’t just turn your back and shuffle away. Because the bad feeling he got from the scurrying old elf (
the bad vibe,
his grandchildren would have said) was probably nothing but a case of the chickenshits. Because—

Suddenly Andy Railsback has an intuition that, while not a direct hit, is at least adjacent to the truth. Suppose it
is
a guy from off the street? Suppose it’s one of the old guys from Maxton Elder Care? It’s not that far away, and he knows for a fact that from time to time an old feller (or old gal) will get mixed up in his (or her) head and wander off the reservation. Under ordinary circumstances that person would be spotted and hauled back long before getting this far downtown—kind of hard to miss on the street in an institutional robe and single slipper—but this evening the fog has come in and the streets are all but deserted.

Look at you,
Andy berates himself.
Scared half to death of a feller that’s probably got ten years on you and peanut butter for brains. Wandered in here past the empty desk—not a chance in the goddamn world Fine’s out front; he’ll be in back reading a magazine or a stroke book—and now he’s looking for his room back at Maxton’s, trying every knob on the goddamn corridor, no more idea of where he is than a squirrel on a freeway ramp. Potter’s probably having a beer next door
(this, at least, turns out to be true)
and left his door unlocked
(this, we may be assured, is not).

And although he’s still frightened, Andy comes all the way around the corner and walks slowly toward the open door. His heart is beating fast, because half his mind is still convinced the old man is maybe dangerous. There was, after all, that bad feeling he got just from looking at the stranger’s
back—

But he goes. God help him, he does.

“Mister?” he calls when he reaches the open door. “Hey, mister, I think you got the wrong room. That’s Mr. Potter’s room. Don’t you—”

He stops. No sense talking, because the room is empty. How is that possible?

Andy steps back and tries the knobs of 312 and 313. Both locked up tight, as he knew they would be. With that ascertained, he steps into George Potter’s room and has a good look around—curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought him back. Potter’s digs are a little larger than his, but otherwise not much different: it’s a box with a high ceiling (they made places a man could stand up in back in the old days, you had to say that much for them). The single bed is sagging in the middle but neatly made. On the night table is a bottle of pills (these turn out to be an antidepressant called Zoloft) and a single framed picture of a woman. Andy thinks she took a pretty good whopping with the ugly stick, but Potter must see her differently. He has, after all, put the picture in a place where it’s the first thing he looks at in the morning and the last thing he sees at night.

“Potter?” Andy asks. “Anyone? Hello?”

He is suddenly overcome with a sense of someone standing behind him and whirls around, lips drawn back from his dentures in a grinning snarl that is half a cringe. One hand comes up to shield his face from the blow he is suddenly certain will fall . . . only there’s no one there. Is he lurking behind the corner at the end of this short addendum to the main corridor? No. Andy
saw
the stranger go scurrying around that corner. No way he could have gotten behind him again . . . unless he crawled along the ceiling like some kind of fly . . .

Andy looks up there, knowing he’s being absurd, giving in to the whim-whams big time, but there’s no one here to see him, so what the hey? And nothing for him to see overhead, either. Just an ordinary tin ceiling, now yellowed by age and decades of cigar and cigarette smoke.

The radio—oh, excuse me all to hell,
rah-
dio—is sitting on the windowsill, unmolested. Damn fine one, too, a Bose, the kind Paul Harvey always talks about on his noon show.

Beyond it, on the other side of the dirty glass, is the fire escape.

Ah-hah!
Andy thinks, and hurries across to the window. One look at the turned thumb lock and his triumphant expression fades. He peers out just the same, and sees a short stretch of wet black iron descending into the fog. No blue robe, no scaly bald pate. Of course not. The knob shaker didn’t go out that way unless he had some magic trick to move the window’s inside thumb lock back into place once he was on the fire escape landing.

Andy turns, stands where he is a moment, thinking, then drops to his knees and looks under the bed. What he sees is an old tin ashtray with an unopened pack of Pall Malls and a Kingsland Old-Time Lager disposable lighter in it. Nothing else except dust kittens. He puts his hand on the coverlet preparatory to standing up, and his eyes fix on the closet door. It’s standing ajar.

“There,” Andy breathes, almost too low for his own ears to hear.

He gets up and crosses to the closet door. The fog may or may not come in on little cat feet, as Carl Sandburg said, but that is certainly how Andy Railsback moves across George Potter’s room. His heart is beating hard again, hard enough to start the prominent vein in the center of his forehead pulsing. The man he saw is in the closet. Logic demands it. Intuition screams it. And if the doorknob shaker’s just a confused old soul who wandered into the Nelson Hotel out of the fog, why hasn’t he spoken to Andy? Why has he concealed himself? Because he may be old but he’s not confused, that’s why. No more confused than Andy is himself. The doorknob shaker’s a fucking thief, and he’s in the closet. He’s maybe holding a knife that he has taken from the pocket of his tatty old robe. Maybe a coat hanger that he’s unwound and turned into a weapon. Maybe he’s just standing there in the dark, eyes wide, fingers hooked into claws. Andy no longer cares. You can scare him, you bet—he’s a retired salesman, not Superman—but if you load enough tension on top of fright you turn it into anger, same as enough pressure turns coal into a diamond. And right now Andy is more pissed off than scared. He closes his fingers around the cool glass knob of the closet door. He squeezes down on it. He takes one breath . . . a second . . . steeling himself, getting ready
.
.
.
psyching himself up,
the grandkids would say . . . one more breath, just for good luck, and . . .

With a low, stressful sound—half growl and half howl—Andy yanks the closet door wide, setting off a chatter of hangers. He crouches, hands up in fists, looking like some ancient sparring partner from the Gym Time Forgot.

“Come outta there, you fucking—”

No one there. Four shirts, one jacket, two ties, and three pairs of pants hanging like dead skin. A battered old suitcase that looks as if it has been kicked through every Greyhound Bus terminal in North America. Nothing else. Not a goddamn th—

But there is. There’s something on the floor beneath the shirts. Several somethings. Almost half a dozen somethings. At first Andy Railsback either doesn’t understand what he’s seeing or doesn’t
want
to understand. Then it gets through to him, imprints itself on his mind and memory like a hoofprint, and he tries to scream. He can’t. He tries again and nothing comes out but a rusty wheeze from lungs that feel no larger than old prune skins. He tries to turn around and can’t do that, either. He is sure George Potter is coming, and if Potter finds him here, Andy’s life will end. He has seen something George Potter can never allow him to talk about. But he can’t turn. Can’t scream. Can’t take his eyes from the secret in George Potter’s closet.