Like Love Page 2

  He came down the street heavily, feeling like Lee J. Cobb minus one sample case. He wondered whether he’d sell any more brushes today; he needed three more sales before he filled his quota, who the hell wanted to buy hairbrushes when Spring was holding a dance in the street? Sighing, he climbed the stoop of the nearest tenement, passing a pimply-faced sixteen-year-old blond girl wearing dungarees and a white blouse, and wondering whether she knew how to hula. He entered the dim and foul-smelling vestibule, walking past the mail-boxes with their broken locks and hanging front flaps, and then past the open and miraculously intact frosted-glass inner door. Garbage cans were stacked alongside the staircase wall on the ground floor. They were empty, but their stench permeated the hallway. He sniffed in discomfort, and then began climbing the steps toward the natural light coming from the air-shaft window on the first floor.

  He had three minutes to live.

  The sample case was heavier when you climbed. The more you climbed, the heavier it got. He had noticed that. He was a particularly astute human being, he felt, intelligent and observant, and he had noticed over the years that there was a direct correlation between the physical act of climbing and the steadily increasing weight of his sample case during the ascent. He was pleased when he gained the first-floor landing. He put the sample case down, reached for his handkerchief, and mopped his brow.

  He had a minute and a half to live.

  He folded the handkerchief carefully and put it back into his pocket. He looked up at the metal numerals on the door ahead of him. Apartment IA. The A was hanging slightly askew. Time was running out.

  He located the bell button set into the door jamb.

  He reached out with his forefinger.

  Three seconds.

  He touched the button.

  The sudden blinding explosion ripped away the front wall of the apartment, tore the salesman in half, and sent a cascade of hairbrushes and burnt human flesh roaring into the air and down the stairwell.

  Spring was really here.

  * * * *

  2

  Detective 2nd/Grade Cotton Hawes had served aboard a P.T boat during the last great war for democracy, and his battle experience had therefore been limited to sea engagements alone. He had, to be fair, once participated in the shore bombardment of a tiny Pacific island, but he had never seen the results of his vessel’s devastating torpedo attack on a Japanese dock installation. Had he been a foot soldier in Italy, the chaos in the tenement hallway would not have surprised him very much. But he had had a clean bed to sleep in, and three squares a day, as the saying goes, and so the ruin confronting him just inside the vestibule door was something of a shock.

  The hallway and the staircase were littered with plaster, lath, wallpaper, wooden beams, kitchen utensils, hairbrushes, broken crockery, human flesh, blood, hair, and garbage. A cloud of settling plaster dust hovered in the air, pierced the afternoon sunlight which slanted through the airshaft window. The window itself had been shattered by the explosion, a skeleton of its former self, with broken glass shards covering the first-floor landing. The walls surrounding the window and the staircase were blackened and blistered. Every milk bottle resting in the hallway outside the other two apartments on the landing had been shattered by the blast. Fortunately, the seductress Spring had lured the other first-floor tenants into the street, and so the only loss of human life that April afternoon had been in the hallway and in apartment IA itself.

  Following a coughing, choking patrolman up the littered staircase, Hawes covered his face with a handkerchief and tried not to realize he was climbing past the blood-soaked squishy remains of what had once been a human being. He followed a trail of hairbrushes to the shattered wall and demolished doorway of the apartment; it had rained hairbrushes that day, it had rained hairbrushes and blood. He entered the apartment. Smoke still billowed from the kitchen, and there was the unmistakable aroma of gas in the Mr. Hawes had not thought he would need the mask which had been pressed into his hand by the patrolman downstairs, but one whiff of the stench changed his mind. He pulled the face piece over his head, checked the inlet tube connected to the cannister, and followed the patrolman into the kitchen, cursing the fact that the glass eyeholes on the mask were beginning to fog up. A man in overalls was busily working in the kitchen behind the demolished stove, trying to cut off the steady leakage of illuminating gas into the apartment. The explosion had ripped the stove from the wall, severing its connection with the pipes leading to the main, and the now steady flow of gas into the apartment threatened a build-up which could lead to a second explosion. The man in overalls-undoubtedly sent by either the Department of Public Works or the Gas and Electric Company-didn’t even look up when Hawes and the patrolman entered the room. He worked busily and quickly. There had been one explosion, and he damn well didn’t want another, not while he was on the premises. He knew that a mixture of one part carbon monoxide to one-half part of oxygen, or two-and-a-half parts air was enough to cause an explosion in the presence of a flame or a spark. He had opened every window in the joint when he’d arrived-even the one in the bedroom where what was on the bed didn’t particularly appeal to his esthetic sense. He had then gone immediately to work on the bent and twisted pipes, trying to stop the flow of gas. He was a devout Catholic, but even if the Pope himself had walked into that kitchen, he would not have stopped work on the pipes. Hawes and the patrolman didn’t even rate a nod.

  Through the fogged eyepieces of his mask, Hawes watched the man working on the pipes and then glanced around the demolished kitchen. It did not take a mastermind to determine that this was the room where the explosion had taken place. Even without the presence of the upended stove and the stench of illuminating gas, the room itself was a shambles-it had to be the nucleus of the blast. Every pane of glass had been shattered, every pot and pan hurled through the air and peppered with holes. The curtains had gone up in instant flame-happily, there had not been a major conflagration. The table and chairs had been tossed into the room closest to the kitchen, and even in that room, the sofa had been blasted out of place and rested upended against one damaged wall.

  The bedroom, in contrast to the other two rooms, had been almost untouched. The window had been opened by the gasman, and the spring breeze touched the curtains, played idly with them. The blanket had been drawn back to the foot of the bed. There were two people lying on the clean white bedsheet. One was a man, the other was a woman; that’s the way it is in the spring. The man was wearing undershorts and nothing else. The undershorts were striped in blue. The woman was wearing only her panties.

  They were both dead.

  Hawes did not know very much about pathology, but the man and woman on the bed-even when viewed through his fogging mask-were both a bright cherry-red color, and he was willing to bet his shield they had died of acute carbon monoxide poisoning. He was further willing to speculate that the death was either accidental or suicidal. He was too good a cop to rule out homicide immediately, but he nonetheless began a methodical search for a suicide note.

  He did not have to look very far.

  The note was on the dresser opposite the bed. It had been placed flat on the dresser top, and then a man’s wrist watch had been put on top of it to hold it down. Without touching either the wrist watch or the note, Hawkes bent over to read what had been written.

  The note had been typed. He automatically glanced around the room to see if he could locate the machine and saw it resting on a small end table near the bed. He turned his attention back to the note.

  Dear God, forgive us for this terrible thing. We are so much in love, and the world is all against us. There is no other way. Now we can end the suffering of ourselfs and others. Please understand.

  Tommy and Irene

  Hawes nodded once, in silent understanding, and then made memo to pick up both note and wrist watch as soon as the photographers were finished with the room. He walked across the room and filled out a tag which he would later affix to the typewriter for de
livery to the laboratory where Lieutenant Sam Grossman’s boys would perform their comparison tests.

  He walked back to the bed.

  The man and woman appeared to be in their early twenties. The man had involuntarily soiled himself, probably after sinking into a deep coma once the gas had really taken hold. The woman had vomited into her pillow. He stood at the foot of the bed and wondered what they had thought it would be like. A nice quiet peaceful death? Something like going to sleep? He wondered how they had felt when the headache appeared and they began to get drowsy and faint and unable to move themselves off that bed even if they’d changed their minds about dying together. He wondered how they’d felt just when their bodies had begun to twitch, just before they passed into a stupor where vomiting and evacuation were things beyond their control. He looked at this dead man and woman in their early twenties-Tommy and Irene-and he shook his head and thought, You poor stupid boobs, what did you hope to find? What made you think a painful death was the answer to a painful life?

  He turned his eyes away from the bed.

  Two empty whisky bottles were on the floor. One of them had spilled alcohol onto the scatter rug on the woman’s side of the bed. He didn’t know whether or not they had drunk themselves into insensibility after turning on the gas jet, but that seemed to be a standard part of the gas-pipe routine. He knew there were people who felt that suicide was an act of extreme bravery, but he could never look upon it as anything but utter cowardice. The empty whisky bottles gave conviction to his thoughts. He made out the tags for each bottle, again postponing the actual tagging until photographs had been made.

  The woman’s clothes were hung over the back and resting on the seat of a straight-backed chair alongside the bed. Her blouse was hanging, and her brassiere was folded over it; her skirt, garter belt, nylons, and leather belt were folded on the seat. A pair of high-heeled black leather pumps were neatly placed at the foot of the chair.

  The man’s clothes were over and on an easy chair at the other end of the room.

  Trousers, shirt, undershirt, tie, socks, and belt. His shoes were placed to one side of the chair. Hawes made a note to have the technicians pick up the clothing, which they would place in plastic bags for transmission to the laboratory. He also noted the man’s wallet, tie clip, and loose change lying on the dresser top, together with the woman’s earrings and an imitation pearl necklace.

  By the time he’d finished his search of the apartment, the gas leak had been plugged, the laboratory boys, police photographers, and assistant medical examiner had arrived, and there was nothing to do but go downstairs again and talk to the patrolman who had reported the explosion to the precinct. The patrolman was new and green and terrified. But he had managed to pull his wits together long enough to find a charred and tattered wallet in the hallway rubble, and he turned this over to Hawes as if he were very anxious to get rid of it. Hawes almost wished the patrolman hadn’t found it. The wallet gave an identity to the remains of a human being that had been spattered down the staircase and over the walls.

  He called on the salesman’s wife later that day, after he had spoken to the lab. The salesman’s wife said, “Why did it have to be Harry?”

  He explained that the lab’s supposition was that her husband had probably approached the door of apartment IA and pressed the buzzer and this in turn had caused an electrical spark which had precipitated the explosion.

  “Why did it have to be Harry?” the salesman’s wife asked.

  Hawes tried to explain that these things happened some times, that they were nobody’s fault, that her husband was simply doing his job and had no idea the apartment behind that door was full of illuminating gas. But the woman only stared at him blankly and said again, “Why did it have to be Harry?”

  He went back to the squadroom with a weary ache inside him. He barely said hello to Carella who was at his own desk typing up a report. Both men left the squadroom at eight-fifteen that night, two-and-a-half hours after they were officially relieved. Carella was in a rotten mood. He ate a cold supper, snapped viciously at his wife, didn’t even go in to peek at the sleeping twins, and went straight to bed where he tossed restlessly all night long. Hawes called Christine Maxwell, a girl he had known for a long time, and asked her to go to a movie with him. He watched the screen with interesting annoyance because something was bugging him about that apparent suicide and he couldn’t quite figure out what.

  * * * *

  3

  Dead people do not sweat.

  It was very warm in the morgue, and a light sheen of perspiration covered the faces of Carella and Hawes, clung to the upper lip of the man with them, stained the armpits of the attendant who looked at the three men bleakly for a moment and then pulled out the drawer.

  The drawer moved almost soundlessly on its rollers. The girl Irene lay naked and dead on the slab; they had found her in her panties, but these had been shipped immediately to the lab, and she lay naked and cool and unsweating while the attendant and the three men looked down at her. In a little while, she would be shipped to another part of the hospital, where an autopsy would be performed. For now, her body was intact. All it lacked was life.

  “Is that her?” Carella asked.

  The man standing between the two detectives nodded. He was a tall, thin man with pale blue eyes and blond hMr. He wore a gray gabardine suit, and a white button-down shirt with a striped tie. He did not say anything. He simply nodded, and even the nod was a brief one, as if motion were an extravagance.

  “And she’s your wife, sir?” Hawes asked.

  The man nodded again.

  “Could you give us her full name, sir?”

  “Irene,” the man said.

  “Middle name?”

  “That is her middle name.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her name is Margaret Irene Thayer.” The man paused. “She didn’t like the name Margaret, so she used her middle name.”

  “She called herself Irene, is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And your address, Mr. Thayer?”

  “1134 Bailey Avenue.”

  “You were living there with your wife?”

  “Yes.”

  Carella and Hawes glanced at each other. Homicide at its best stinks to high heaven because everyone walking this earth has a closet he’d prefer leaving closed and homicide rarely knocks before entering. The girl Margaret Irene Thayer had been found on a bed wearing only her panties, and she’d been lying alongside a man in his undershorts. The man who had just positively identified her was named Michael Thayer, and he was her husband, and one of those little closets had just been opened, and everyone was staring into it. Carella cleared his throat.

  “Were… er… you and your wife separated, or… ?

  “No,” Thayer said.

  “I see,” Carella answered. He paused again. “You know, Mr. Thayer, that… that your wife was found with a man.”

  “Yes. Their pictures were in the paper. That’s why I called the police. I mean, when I saw Irene’s picture in the paper. I figured it was some kind of mistake. Because I thought… you see, she’d told me she was going out to visit her mother and I never suspected… so you see, I thought it was a mistake. She was supposed to be spending the night at her mother’s, you see. So I called her mother, and her mother said no, Irene hadn’t been there, and then I thought… I don’t know what I thought. So I called the police and asked if I could… could see… could see the body of the girl they’d… found.”

  “And this is your wife, Mr. Thayer? You have no doubts about that?”

  “She… she’s my wife,” Thayer said.

  “Mr. Thayer, you said you saw pictures of both your wife and the man in the newspa…”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you happen to recognize the man?”

  “No.” Thayer paused. “Is… is he here, too?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I want to see him.”

 
“If you didn’t recognize him, there’s no need to…”

  “I want to see him,” Thayer repeated.

  Carella shrugged and then nodded at the attendant. They followed him across the long, high-ceilinged room. Their footsteps echoed across the tiled floor. The attendant consulted a typewritten list on a clipboard, moved down the aisle, stooped, and pulled open a second drawer. Thayer stared down into the face of the man they’d found with his wife.

  “He’s dead,” he said, but the words did not seem intended for anyone.

  “Yes,” Carella said.