Out on the Cutting Edge

I rang the bell marked super. When the buzzer sounded in response I pushed the door and let myself into a dim hallway that smelled of mice and cooked cabbage and stagnant air. Down at the end of the hall a door opened and a woman emerged. She was tall, with straight shoulder-length blond hair secured with a rubber band. She wore blue jeans that were starting to go at the knee and a plaid flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and the top two buttons unbuttoned.

"My name's Scudder," I told her. "I'm trying to locate one of your tenants. Edward Dunphy."

"Oh, yes," she said. "Mr. Dunphy's on the fourth floor. One of the rear apartments. I think it's 4-C."

"I tried his bell. There was no answer."

"Then he's probably out. Was he expecting you?"

"I was expecting him."

She looked at me. She'd appeared younger from a distance but at close range you could see that she had to be crowding forty. She carried the years well enough. She had a high broad forehead with a sharply defined widow's peak, a jawline that was strong but not severe. Good cheekbones, interesting facial planes. I had kept company with a sculptor long enough to think in those terms, and the breakup had been too recent for me to have lost the habit.

She said, "Do you think he's upstairs? And not answering his bell?

Of course it's possible that it's out of order. I fix them when the tenants report them, but if you don't get many visitors you wouldn't necessarily know that your bell wasn't functioning. Do you want to go up there and knock on his door?"

"Maybe I'll do that."

"You're worried about him," she said. "Aren't you?"

"I am, and I couldn't tell you why."

She made up her mind quickly. "I have a key," she said. "Unless he's changed the lock, or put on an extra one. God knows I would, in a city like this one."

She returned to her own apartment, came back with a ring of keys, then double-locked her own door and led the way up the stairs. Other smells joined the mouse and cabbage scents in the stairwell. Stale beer, stale urine. Marijuana. Latin cooking.

"If they change the locks, or add new ones," she said, "I'm supposed to get the key. There's actually a clause to that effect in the lease, the landlord has the right of access to all apartments. But nobody pays any attention to it, and the owner doesn't care, and I certainly don't care. I've got a key that's marked 4-C, but that doesn't mean it's likely to open anything."

"We'll try it."

"That's all we can do."

"Well, it's not quite all," I said. "Sometimes I'm not too bad at opening a lock without the key."

"Oh, really?" She turned to give me a look. "That must be very useful in your profession. What are you, a locksmith or a burglar?"

"I used to be a cop."

"And now?"

"Now I'm an ex-cop."

"No kidding. You told me your name but I lost it."

I told her again. As we climbed, I learned that her name was Willa Rossiter and that she'd been the building's superintendent for some twenty months. She received the apartment rent-free in exchange for her services.

"But it doesn't really cost the landlord anything," she said,

"because he wouldn't be renting it anyway.

There are three empty apartments in the building beside mine.

They're not for rent."

"You'd think they'd go fast."

"They'd go in a minute, and they'd bring a thousand a month, crazy as it sounds. But he'd rather warehouse the empty apartments. He wants to turn the building into a co-op, and every untenanted apartment is ultimately a vote on his side, and an apartment he can sell for whatever the traffic will bear."

"But in the meantime he loses a thousand a month on each vacancy."

"I guess it's worth it to him in the long run. If we go co-op, he'll get a hundred thousand dollars for each of these rabbit warrens. But that's New York. I don't think there's anyplace else in the country where you could get that for the whole building."

"Anywhere else in the country, the building would be condemned."

"Not necessarily. It's a solid building. It's over a hundred years old, and these old tenements were cheap working-class housing when they went up. They're not like the brownstones in Park Slope and Clinton Hill that were very grand in their day. Even so, this is a sound structure. And that's Mr. Dunphy's door. In the rear on the right."

She got to his door and knocked on it, a good strong knock. When no answer came she knocked again, louder. We looked at each other, and she shrugged and fitted her key into the lock. She turned it twice around, first to disengage the dead bolt, then to snick back the spring lock.

As soon as she cracked the door I knew what we were going to find. I gripped her shoulder.

"Let me," I said. "You don't want to see this."

"What's that smell?"

I pushed past her and went to look for the body.

* * *