Manhattan Is My Beat (4 page)

Who else lived in the building? she wondered. Elderly people, she supposed. There were a lot of retirees around there. She herself would rather spend her final years there than in Tampa or San Diego.

But how had they happened to end up there? she wondered.

There’d be a million answers.

Them’s the breaks
….

The building just across the alley from Mr. Kelly’s was much nicer, painted, clean, a fancy security gate on the front door. A blond woman in an expensive pink jogger’s outfit and fancy running shoes pushed out the doorway and stepped into the alley. She started her stretching exercises. She was pretty and looked disgustingly pert and professional.

Save our neighborhood
…

Rune continued to the front stairs of Mr. Kelly’s building. An idea occurred to her. She’d pick up the tape but instead of going back to the store she’d take a few hours off. She and Mr. Kelly could go have an adventure.

She’d take him for a long walk beside the Hudson.

“Let’s look for sea monsters!” she’d suggest.

And she had this weird idea that he’d play along. There was something about him that made her think they were similar. He was … well, mysterious. There was nothing literal about him—being
un
literal was Rune’s highest compliment.

She walked into the entryway of his building. Beneath the filth and cobwebs she noticed elaborate mosaic tiles, brass fixtures, carved mahogany trim. If it were scrubbed up and painted, she thought, this’d be a totally excellent place….

She pushed the buzzer to 2B.

That’d be a fun job, she thought. Finding junky old buildings and fixing them up. But people did that for a living, of course. Rich people. Even places like this could cost hundreds of thousands. Anyway, she’d want to paint murals of fairy tales on the walls and decorate the place with stuffed animals and put magical gardens in all the apartments. She supposed there wasn’t much of a market for that kind of look.

The intercom crackled. There was a pause. Then a voice said, “Yes?”

“Mr. Kelly?”

“Who is it?” the staticky voice asked.

“Here’s Johnnyyyyyyy,” she said, trying to impersonate Jack Nicholson in
The Shining
. She and Mr. Kelly had talked about horror films. He seemed to know a lot about movies and they’d joked about how scary the Kubrick film was even though it was so brightly lit.

But apparently he didn’t remember. “Who?”

She was disappointed that he didn’t get it.

“It’s Rune. You know—from Washington Square Video. I’m here to pick up the tape.”

Silence.

“Hello?” she called.

Static again. “I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Is this Mr. Kelly?” The voice didn’t sound quite right. Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe he had a visitor.

“A minute.”

“I can come up.”

A pause. “Wait there,” the voice commanded.

This was weird. He’d always seemed so polite. He didn’t sound that way now. Must be the intercom.

Several minutes passed. She paced around the entry-way.

She was looking outside when, finally, she heard footsteps from inside, coming down the stairs.

Rune walked to the inner door, peered through the greasy glass. She couldn’t see through it. A figure walked forward slowly. Was it Mr. Kelly? She couldn’t tell.

The door opened.

“Oh,” she said in surprise, looking up.

The woman in her fifties, with olive-tinted skin, stepped out, glanced at her. She made sure the door closed before she left the entryway so Rune couldn’t get inside—standard New York City security procedures when unknown visitors were in the lobby. The woman carried a bag of empty soda and beer cans. She took them out to the curb and dropped them in a recycling bin.

“Mr. Kelly?” Rune called again into the intercom. “You all right?”

There was no answer.

The woman returned and looked over Rune carefully. “Help you?” She had a thick Caribbean accent.

“I’m a friend of Mr. Kelly’s.”

“Oh.” Her face relaxed.

“I just called him. He was going to come down.”

“He’s on the second floor.”

“I know. I’m supposed to pick up a videotape. I called five minutes ago and he said he’d be right out.”

“I just walked past his door an’ it was open,” she said. “I live up the hall.”

Rune pushed the buzzer and said, “Mr. Kelly? Hello? Hello?”

There was no answer.

“I’ma go see,” the woman said. “You wait here.”

She disappeared inside. After a moment Rune grew impatient and buzzed again. No answer. She tried the door. Then she wondered if there was another door— maybe in the side or in the back of the building.

She stepped outside. Walked to the sidewalk and then continued on to the alley. The pert yuppie woman was still there, stretching. The only exercise Rune got was dancing at her favorite clubs: World or Area or Limelight (dancing was aerobic and she also built upper-body strength by pushing away drunk lawyers and account execs in the clubs’ co-ed rest rooms).

No, there was nobody else. Maybe she—

Then she heard the scream.

She turned fast and looked at Mr. Kelly’s building. Heard a woman’s voice, in panic, calling for help. Rune believed the voice had an accent—maybe the woman she’d just met, the woman who knew Mr. Kelly. “Somebody,” the voice cried, “call the police. Oh, please, help!”

Rune glanced at the woman jogger, who stared at Rune with an equally shocked expression on her face.

Then a huge squeal of tires from behind them.

At the end of the alley a green car skidded around the corner and made straight for Rune and the jogger. They both froze in panic as the car bore down on them.

What’s he doing, what’s he doing, what’s he doing? Rune thought madly.

No, no, no …

When the car was only feet away she flung herself backward out of the alley. The jogger leapt the opposite way. But the woman in pink hadn’t moved as fast as Rune and she was struck by the side-view mirror of the car. She was thrown into the brick wall of her building. She hit the wall and tumbled to the ground.

The car skidded onto Tenth Street and vanished.

Rune ran to the woman, who was alive but unconscious, blood pouring from a gash on her forehead. Rune sprinted up the street to find a pay phone. It took her four phones, and three blocks, before she found one that worked.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mr. Kelly’s door was open.

Rune stopped in the doorway, stared in shock at the eight people who stood in the room. No one seemed to be moving. They stood or crouched, singly or in groups, like the mannequins she’d seen in the import store on University Place.

Gasping, she rested against the doorjamb. She’d raced back from the pay phone and charged up the stairs. No trouble getting in this time; the cops or the Emergency Medical Service medics had wedged the building door open.

She watched them: six men and two women, some in police uniforms, some in suits.

Her eyes fell on the ninth person in the room and her hands began to tremble.

Oh, no … oh, no …

The ninth person—the man whose apartment it was. Robert Kelly. He sat in an old armchair, arms outstretched,
limp, palms up, eyes open and staring skyward, like Jesus or some saint in those weird religious paintings at the Met. His flesh was very pale—everywhere except his chest. Which was brown-red from all the blood. There was a lot of it.

Oh, no …

Her breath shrank to nothing, short gasps, she was dizzy. Oh, goddamn him! Tony! For making her pick up the tape and see this. God
damn
Frankie Greek, god
damn
Eddie for pretending to fix the fucking monitors when all they were really doing was figuring out how to get into a concert for free …

Her eyes pricked with tears.
Goddamn
.

But then Rune had a curious thought. That, no, no, if this
had
to happen, it was better that
she
was there, rather than them. At least she was Mr. Kelly’s friend. Eddie or Frankie would’ve walked in and said, “Wow, cool, a shooting,” and it was better for her to be the one to see this, out of respect for him.

No one noticed her. Two men in business suits gave instructions to a third, who nodded. The uniformed cops were crouched down, writing notes, some were putting a white powder on dark things, a black powder on light.

Rune studied the faces of the cops. She couldn’t look away. There was something odd about them and she couldn’t figure it out at first. They just seemed like everybody else—amused or bored or curious about something. Then she realized:
that’s
what was odd. That there was nothing out of the ordinary about them. They all had a workaday glaze in their eyes. They weren’t horrified or sickened by what they were looking at.

God, they seemed just like the clerks in Washington Square Video.

They looked just like me, doing what I do, renting movies eight hours a day, four days a week: just doing the job. The Big Boring J.

They didn’t even seem to notice, or to care, that somebody had just been killed.

Her eyes moved around the apartment slowly. Mr. Kelly lived
here
? Grease-spotted wallpaper sagged. The carpet was orange and made out of thick, stubby strands. The whole place smelled like sour meat. There was no art on the walls: some old-time movie posters in frames leaned against a shabby couch. A dozen boxes were scattered on the floor. It seemed he’d been living out of them. Even his clothes and dishes were stacked in cartons. He must have moved in recently, maybe around the time he’d joined the video club, a month before.

She remembered the first time he’d come into Washington Square Video.

“Can you spell your name?” Rune’d asked, filling out his application.

“Yes, I can,” he’d answered, offhand. “I’m of above-average intelligence. Now, do you
want
me to?”

She’d loved that and they’d laughed. Then she’d taken down the rest of the facts about Kelly, Robert, deposit: cash. Address: 380 East Tenth Street, Apt. 2B. He’d wanted a detective film, and, thinking about the old
Dragnet
series, she’d said, “All we want is the facts, sir, just the facts.”

He’d laughed again.

No credit cards. She remembered thinking that was definitely one thing they had in common.

What were the words? You knew them real well at one time. How did they go?

Rune’s eyes were on
him
now. A dead man who was a little heavy, tall, dignified, seventh-decade balding.

All that the father giveth me, he that raised up Jesus from the dead will also quicken up our mortal bodies
…

What bothered her most, she decided, was the completely still way Mr. Kelly lay. A human being not moving
at all. She shuddered. That stillness made the mystery of life all the more astonishing and precious.

I heard a voice from Heaven saying ashes to ashes, dust to dust, sure and certain I hope for Resurrection, and the sea shall give up
…

The words coming fast now. She pictured her father, laid out by the talented siblings of Charles & Sons in Shaker Heights. Five years before. Rune had a vivid recollection of the man, lying in the satiny upholstery. But that day her father had been a stranger—a caricature of the human being he’d been when alive. With the makeup, the new suit, the smoothed hair, there was something slick and phony about him. He didn’t even seem dead: he just seemed odd.

There was something far more real about Mr. Kelly. He wasn’t a sculpture, he wasn’t unreal at all. And death was staring right back at her. She felt the room tilting and had to concentrate on breathing. The tears tickled her cheeks with a painful irritation.

The Lord be with you and with thy spirit blessed be the name of the Lord
….

One of the men near the body noticed her. A short man in a suit, mustachioed. Trimmed black hair flowing away from his center part, held close to his head with spray. His eyes were close together and that made Rune think he was stupid.

“You’re one of the witnesses? You’re the one called nine one one?”

She nodded.

The man noticed where her eyes were aimed. He stepped between her and Mr. Kelly’s body.