You Might As Well Die (27 page)

A door opened down the hallway. Mrs. Volney, the old nosybody, peeked her silver head out.
Speaking of shriveled, lonely old ladies . . .

“Good evening to you, Mrs. Parker,” the elderly woman said in her threadbare voice. “I heard a disturbance. Is everything quite all right?”

Is everything all right?
Dorothy thought, exasperated
. I feel responsible for the death of a third-rate painter. I’m blackballed from my favorite speakeasy as well as every other drinking hole in the city. I have to write a book review for a book with no words in it—when I can’t even get a decent contract for my own actual book with actual words in it. Not to mention, Mr. Benchley and I owe a gangster fifty thousand dollars. And on top of that, I’m getting lonely-hearts advice from the gangster’s girlfriend.

But Lucy Goosey was already walking the other way along the corridor, toward the elevator.

“You bet, ma’am,” Dorothy said to the old lady. “Everything is just jake.”

D
orothy and Dr. Norris entered through the heavy oak door of the Mansion nightclub. She had never been inside before. Dr. Norris flashed his member’s card at the front desk.

A palatial, high-ceilinged rotunda served as the entrance hall. A dignified attendant in a military-style uniform led them up a broad, graceful staircase to a circular barroom with a domed ceiling. A small orchestra of black musicians dressed in immaculate white tuxedos played a quick, upbeat number. (Dorothy spotted the name “Hiram Higgin-botham and the Harlem Horns.”) But the orchestra was largely ignored by the well-to-do gentlemen and ladies, who brandished glasses of top-shelf whiskey or brandy and puffed carelessly on fifty-cent cigars and Turkish cigarettes.

The attendant led Dorothy and Dr. Norris through the barroom to the quieter but more spacious dining room and showed them to a table for two laid with linen, silver and crystal.

Once they were seated, Dr. Norris immediately ordered a bottle of a newly imported champagne that Dorothy had never heard of before. She felt as though she was dining at Versailles.

When the wine steward left, Norris smiled curiously at Dorothy. “We’re much the same, you and I. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“We’re much the same?” She looked him over—his deep-set eyes, his perfectly groomed goatee, his fashionable clothes, his easygoing affluence.... But she wasn’t going to be swept away by his extravagant manner or the opulence of the restaurant’s surroundings. “How do you figure we’re the same? Because we both smell? Me, like perfume. You, like disinfectant?”

“Joke if you like, but I feel we
are
much the same.”

“I do like,” she said. “But since you’re paying the tab, you might as well explain yourself.”

An efficient waiter brought the champagne in a bucket stand filled with ice. He showed the bottle to Dr. Norris, who nodded his approval, and then deftly popped the cork and quickly filled a pair of wide-mouthed champagne glasses.

Dorothy accepted the glass greedily. But when she looked over the rim to see Dr. Norris—and not Benchley—gazing back at her . . . well, drinking didn’t seem like such fun now.

She took a big sip anyway. She felt she’d need it to get through the evening. “So you were saying, we’re the same?”

He smiled. “In many ways, we are. We both work in solitude. You at your typewriter and me at my autopsy table. We both dissect—me with bodies, you with thoughts and words and sentences. We both dig deep for the underlying meaning, the hidden truth. We both aim for the heart of the matter.”

“The heart? Don’t be so literal. Just because I ponder heartache and you investigate heart attack, don’t think we automatically have something in common.”

“But we do.” He raised his glass to her. “We both wear our hearts on our sleeves. You, figuratively. Me, literally.”

She looked at his bleached white shirt cuffs as he sipped from his glass. No atrial blood there, thank goodness. She had anticipated that he’d be creepy. But she didn’t expect him to be so amorous, too.

“More champagne?” he asked, and filled her glass without waiting for an answer.

“Don’t mind if I do. Keep ’em coming. That’s at least one thing we have in common.” They clinked glasses and sipped.

“I like you,” he said, wagging his finger at her. “You’re vivacious and audacious.”

“Oh, you old softie, I bet you say that to all the cadavers.”

Now the champagne was going down nicely. She held out her glass.

“Another?” he asked.

“Your diagnosis is correct, Doctor.”

He watched her drink it, simply enjoying her presence. “I’m not merely a medical examiner, you know. I’m a student of the human condition.”

“The human condition? As long as the human is in inert condition.” She drained her glass. “Me, I prefer the intoxicated condition.”

“You have me all wrong. In contrast to my work, I love life. I love fine restaurants. I live for the opera. I adore all that is transcendent. A day of death brings me to life at night.”

“Hmm, which one of us is the poet now?”

“Exactly. My work demands that the poet in me emerge when I’m not at one of my tables.”

“I’m not interested in seeing your poet emerge, thank you very much.”

“What are you interested in seeing?” He reached for her hand.

“Oh dear.” She should have expected as much. She put her glass down. She didn’t feel like drinking anymore.

What was she doing here with this man? Was she using him just to get a few drinks and a fancy dinner? Or was she really just looking for a distraction, a way to occupy the evening?

She felt like a heel. She didn’t want to be here with this man. She should be spending the evening with Benchley, doing nothing special. Just clowning around.

Damn that Lucy Goosey!
She had put these thoughts into Dorothy’s head. Now they felt stuck there for good.

Dr. Norris stood up gallantly. “Shall we dance?”

“Not interested.” She looked away. “Go find some other warm body.”

He was crestfallen. He dropped back into his seat. “Well, you’ve made yourself abundantly clear.”

“Now, don’t take it like that,” she said.
Great. Now he was going to pout
.

“How else can I take it? Oh, you’ve no idea what it’s like, the way women look at you when you tell them what you do for a living.”

“Don’t I?” She laughed. “Like being a poet is honorable employment? You wouldn’t believe the looks I get. I may as well say I’m the tooth fairy. Men roll their eyes so far back in their heads, they can look at their own tiny brains.”

He laughed. “So, do you still think we have nothing in common?”

 

Before long the evening was going better, now that they had come clean and decided to be friendly. Dorothy was no longer unsociable and Norris was no longer pitching woo. The lights had dimmed. The band had taken five. The dining room had quieted down.

Dr. Norris was telling her tales of the early days of the coroner system in New York. “Before my time, coroners were paid a handsome fee for every body they brought in. So frequently, they’d arrive on the scene simultaneously, and a brawl would ensue over who could lay claim to the corpse.”

“Highly professional,” she said.

Norris smiled ruefully. “On one particular occasion, a body was found floating in the East River. Coroners from Brooklyn and Manhattan paddled out in rowboats to grab it up. They fought over the body using their oars as clubs, with a crowd of people cheering and jeering from the shore. One of the coroners fell into the water, and the other one grabbed the body and hauled it into his boat.”

“They were like pirates,” she said. “Only the booty was the body.”

“Indeed. Needless to say, that kind of reprehensible behavior no longer occurs with our modern medical examiner system of today. We’re paid an annual salary, not a commission for each body.”

Dorothy steered the conversation toward the death of Ernie MacGuffin. She wanted to get Norris’ insight on whether MacGuffin was actually murdered, and if so, how—and by whom.

“Funny you should ask,” Norris said. “Do you know what today is?”

“Saturday?”

“It’s also November second, the Mexican Day of the Dead, Día de los Muertos.”

“Yes, that
is
funny. You got a hell of a sense of humor, Doc. I’d think every day is the Day of the Dead for you.”

“It’s the day to pay honor to the deceased.” Norris raised his glass. “So—to Ernie MacGuffin! May he rest in peace.”

“To Ernie,” Dorothy said, clinking his glass, feeling the guilt return. “We lift our glass to a pain in the ass.” She swallowed the champagne in two gulps.

“De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est,”
Norris said with an air of superiority. “‘Of the dead, say nothing but good.’ ”

“Enough of the pig Latin. Just tell me, what’s your professional opinion? Was he murdered?”

Norris set down his glass. “As I said before, I can’t be sure how he died. I wasn’t at the scene. It was a rainy morning. There’s very little evidence to say it
wasn’t
some sort of accident.”

“But—?”

“But . . .” he said thoughtfully. “It doesn’t exactly look like any sort of accident I’ve seen before.”

“When Captain Church had you on the phone this morning, you were the one who said the word
murder
.”

Norris didn’t answer directly. “I find it odd. If it
was
murder, it’s a very odd sort of murder. No weapon. No witnesses that we know of. Nothing, except that his head was smashed in by something like a large block of concrete, which is a very unusual and rather cumbersome way to murder someone.”

“But it could have happened?”

He laughed. “Mrs. Parker,
anything
could have happened. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. There could be some random explanation that we can’t account for.”

“Then why did you say
murder
in the first place, if you still think it might be an accident?”

He leaned forward. “Because my gut tells me it wasn’t an accident.”

She let that sink in a minute. “So now what? Who did it? How?”

“I don’t know how.” He paused to think. “But as for
who
may have done such a thing . . . If I were the police, I’d look for a tall, strong man.”

She instantly thought of Snath. “Why tall?”

“The culprit, assuming it was murder, smashed in the parietal portion of the cranium—the top and back of MacGuffin’s skull. It only stands to reason that the person was as tall as or taller than MacGuffin and could hit him on top of the head from behind.” His eyes narrowed. “Do you have someone in mind?”

“I do. What should I do?”

“Tell the police.”

She frowned at the thought. The police seemed ineffectual to her. “What will they do?”

“Follow the suspect—or suspects.”

“Follow the suspects? That’s all?”

“Certainly,” he said. “What do you think the police do? They have no magic. They knock on doors and ask if anyone saw anything. They shake down sources. They follow people around. They bring them in for questioning. That’s about it.”

“They don’t look for clues?”

“Not like Sherlock Holmes—not much, at any rate. Usually they don’t exactly need to. The majority of murders are committed by one spouse getting furious and killing the other spouse. The police come in and find the wife crying at the kitchen table, her husband right there on the floor with the carving knife sticking out of him. Mystery solved.”

“And the minority of murders?”

“Nine out of ten of those, it’s something like a bar fight. One fellow insults another fellow’s baseball team or something. The insults lead to shouting. Shouting leads to punches. Punches lead to a knife or a gun. Next thing you know, one of them is dead on the sidewalk. There’s twenty or thirty witnesses, but of course none of them agree. Nevertheless, it’s no great mystery.”

“You said nine out of ten. What about the one out of ten? Who did that one?”

He gulped his champagne. “The hell if I know. Those are the ones that keep the captains and the detectives up at night.” He emptied the rest of the bottle into her glass. “Here, let’s have another drink, and let’s put an end to this dismal conversation.”

D
orothy walked home alone that night. She turned down Dr. Norris’ offer to take her back to the Algonquin. She’d had enough chitchat with Norris—and she’d had more than enough champagne. She needed to clear her head in the cool night air. And, going down Sixth Avenue, the ’Gonk was only a few short blocks away.

The evening with Norris turned out to be fun, after all. Well, perhaps not fun, but at least enjoyable. She didn’t plan to go out with him ever again, although she had given him an innocent peck on the cheek when they said good-bye. She didn’t care if he might misinterpret it—she wanted to end the night on a positive note. And, in the end, she truly enjoyed his company and appreciated his attention.

She turned the corner from Fifth Avenue—still rather lively even at one in the morning—and strolled down the much quieter Forty-fourth Street. Meanwhile, her thoughts turned to Benchley.

Why did Benchley encourage her to go out with Dr. Norris ? Was he tiring of her? Did he not care about her? Or was this
his way
of caring, to encourage her to find some sort of romance?

And what about what Lucy Goosey had said? Show Benchley how she feels, under some picture-postcard sky? Or not even wait until the perfect moment, but grab him and kiss him at the first quiet minute they have alone? Could she—
should she
—do such a thing?

These thoughts, and the champagne, filled her mind—so much so that she didn’t notice the car creeping up in the street beside her.

“Lady!” the driver yelled.

She jumped. She couldn’t see the man’s face in the darkness, but his voice was deep, rough and unfamiliar. Instinct (bred by a lifetime of city living) told her to keep walking—fast.