“Believe me, lady, the pleasure’s all mine.”
Her faced reddened and she slammed the door. He continued upstairs.
On the third floor, he caught sight of the yellow crime scene sticker down the hall to the left. The apartment was halfway to the end, the telltale sticker carefully applied to span where the door met the jamb. He studied the door briefly—old, battered, in need of paint, but undamaged— and gave the knob a tentative twist.
That would have been too lucky.
He checked out the rest of the floor, getting a feel for the place, before retreating back downstairs, past the lobby, and descending to the basement. There, he found a door labeled, “Super,” just as he’d hoped.
A small, dark-skinned man with a thick mustache opened the door at the second knock. Willy already had his pad out, opened to a blank page.
“What?” the man asked.
Willy glanced at the pad. “Mr. Martinez? Detective Murphy. I need to get into apartment 318.” Seemingly as an afterthought, he did the same dismissive badge flash he’d pulled on the old woman.
The super didn’t even glance at it. “My name is José Rivera. I don’t know Martinez.”
Willy flipped back a couple of pages. “Jerks. Somebody screwed up—has you as Martinez in one place, Rivera in another. Typical. You got the key?”
Rivera looked disgusted. “Yeah, I got the key. Why, I don’t know. Somebody dies and I lose the place for a year. You watch. What good’s a key for a place I can’t rent? You people need to fix that. The system stinks, and the apartment stinks, too. All the shit that’s in there, and nobody to clean it up. The neighbors bitch and I can’t do nothing about it. I had a guy die two years ago and rot for a week before I found out. I lost three places that time— the people next to him moved out ’cause of the smell. Three places I was out.” He held up three fingers.
Willy nodded. “Key?”
Rivera stared at him a moment. “You guys,” he muttered disgustedly, before unhooking a key from the wall just inside the door. “Here.” He pointed to an oldfashioned mail slot cut into his front door. “When you’re done with it, put it back here.”
Back upstairs, Willy paused before Mary’s door, again listening to the murmurs of life around him, and more specifically to how well he could hear them. It was a reflex born of years of practice. His pilgrimage here was emotionally stimulated. He wasn’t running an investigation. But habits, good and bad, were hard to break, and this one told his subconscious that the walls in this building were as thin as might be expected—and, as the woman downstairs had demonstrated, not without ears.
He carefully slit the police label at its crease, fitted the key to the lock, and pushed the door open.
The smell that swept out to envelop him wasn’t staggering, but it wasn’t good, either: cloying, sweet, with an overripe pungency that caught in his throat. He began breathing through his mouth and closed the door softly behind him.
He didn’t turn on any lights at first. He just stood there, looking around, letting his eyes adapt to the darkness. He could see from the faint glimmer seeping in through the far door facing him that he was already in a small, narrow kitchen. He’d noticed earlier that the building easily dated back a hundred and fifty years, maybe more. The kitchens had probably all been afterthoughts, put in where entryways had once allowed visitors to take off their coats.
Moving slowly, he passed by a counter, sink, and stove to his left, a closet and a shallow pantry on his right. At the doorway opposite, he stopped again.
Light through a dirty window on the right wall etched a glowing rectangle across the floor and partially up the wall beside him, brightly enough that he could see most of the room’s details. There was a dark, caved-in couch before him facing the window, a narrow coffee table in front of it, and some shelves lining the wall opposite, bracketing both sides of the window. In the corner across from him was an armchair, covered with a shawl. Hard to his right, doubling back and paralleling the kitchen, was a tiny bathroom, and just beyond its open door was a wooden crate, also draped, supporting a small, ancient television set. A little incongruously, given the cool temperature, there was a plastic electric fan balanced on top of the set.
On the far side of the living room was another open door.
He studied the gore and debris spread across the couch and the floor before it—the bodily fluids showing black, and the gloves and other discarded medical paraphernalia looking like bits of bleached wreckage in the gloom. Overlying it all, quivering and moving with a barely perceptible clicking, a carpet of cockroaches was feasting.