The Manual of Detection (4 page)

He had not boarded the train that morning after all, had not gone into the country. The sight of the woman in the plaid coat had stopped him. She was a mystery to him, and mystery enough to keep him from leaving. So long as she was there each morning, he would wait with her, and so long as no one appeared to meet her, he would return to work: that was the unspoken bargain he had struck with her.

Still, these detectives in the elevator were watching him—intently, he felt. He tapped his umbrella against the floor while humming a few bars of a tune he knew from the radio, but this must have looked too calculated, since humming and umbrella-tapping were not among his usual habits. So instead of tapping, he used his umbrella as a cane by gently and repeatedly shifting his weight onto it and off it again. This was a habit Unwin could call genuine. But employed as a distraction, it seemed even to him a very suspicious-looking contrivance. He had not read a word of
The Manual of Detection,
while these detectives probably knew it front to back, knew even the rationale behind Samuel Pith’s assertion that operatives must have secrets of their own.

The attendant brought the elevator to a halt at floor twenty-nine, and the three detectives brushed past, then turned. The one in the black suit scratched a rash above his collar, glaring at Unwin as though he were somehow the cause of it. The one in green hunched bulkily, a dull, mean look in his half-lidded eyes. Navy blue stood in front, his mustache a crooked line over his lip. “That’s no hat to wear to the thirty-sixth floor,” he said.

The other two chuckled and shook their heads.

The attendant closed the door on the detective’s thin scowl, and again the needle climbed upward. From above came the creaking of machinery; steadily the sound grew louder. When the door was opened at last, a chill wind escaped from the elevator shaft to play about Unwin’s ankles. His socks were still damp.

The corridor was lit by yellow light fixtures shaped like upended tulips, and between them were doors without transoms. At the opposite end of the hall, a single window permitted a rectangle of gray, rain-ribboned light.

“Thirty-six,” the attendant said.

In the memo Lamech had identified himself as a watcher. That title was unfamiliar to Unwin, but the intricacies of Agency hierarchy could not be entrusted to just any employee. There were clerks innumerable, with underclerks beneath them and overclerks above, and then the detectives, those knights-errant upon whose work so much depended, while everywhere at once scurried the messengers, lower in status, perhaps, than even the underclerks but entrusted with special privileges of passage, for their words, on any particular day, could originate in the highest halls of the Agency offices. And dwelling in those halls? What shrewd powers, with what titles? On that, Unwin did not care to speculate, nor do we now, except to this extent: on the thirty-sixth floor, behind doors marked by bronze placards bearing their names, the watchers performed what duties were entrusted to them.

The seventh door on the right (Unwin counted thirteen to a side) bore the name he was looking for. Unlike all the others, this door was ajar. He knocked gently and called through the opening. “Mr. Lamech?”

No response. He knocked harder, and the door swung inward. The room was dark, but in the column of light from the hall Unwin saw a broad maroon rug, shelves of thick books with blue and brown spines, a pair of cushioned chairs angled toward a desk at the back. To one side was a great dark globe, and before the window loomed a bald and massive globelike head. On the desk a telephone, a typewriter, and a lamp, unlit.

“Mr. Lamech,” Unwin said again, crossing the threshold, “I am sorry to have to bother you, sir. It’s Charles Unwin, clerk, floor fourteen. I’ve come about the matter of the promotion. I believe there may have been some kind of error.”

Lamech said nothing. Maybe he did not wish to speak with the door open. Unwin closed it and approached. As his eyes adjusted, he began to discern a heavy-featured face, shoulders wide as the wide-backed chair, big unmoving hands folded over the desk.

“Not your error, of course,” Unwin amended. “Probably a transcriptionist’s typo or a bad connection on one of the older lines. You know how things get when it rains, sir. Fits of static, the occasional disconnect.”

Lamech regarded him wordlessly.

“And it has been raining on and off for days now. Fourteen days, in fact. More rain than we’ve had in quite some time.”

Unwin stood before the desk. “It’s a matter of poor drainage, sir. Bound to interfere with the lines.”

He saw that Lamech’s telephone was in fact unplugged, the cord left dangling over the edge of the desk. The watcher said nothing. The only sound was the rain against the window—the cause, Unwin supposed, for all his talk about the weather.

“Unless you protest,” Unwin hazarded, “I’ll just switch on your desk lamp for you. That way I can show you some identification, which I’m sure you want to see before bothering with any of this. Wouldn’t want to waste your time. And you can’t trust anyone these days, isn’t that right?”

He tugged the cord. The lamp, identical to the one on Unwin’s own desk twenty-two floors below, made a puddle of pale green light over the desktop, over Unwin’s outstretched hand, over the seated man’s gray crisscrossed fingers, and over his heavy gray face, from which a pair of bloated, red-flooded eyes glared out at nothing.

Corpses were nothing new to Unwin. Hundreds of them populated the reports entrusted to his care over the years, reports in which no detail was spared. People poisoned, shot, gutted, hanged, sliced to ribbons by industrial machinery, crushed between slabs of cement, clobbered with skillets, defenestrated, eviscerated, burned or buried alive, held underwater for lengthy intervals, thrown down stairs, or simply kicked and pummeled out of being—the minutiae surrounding such incidents were daily fare, so to speak, to a clerk of the fourteenth floor. Whole indices, in fact, were organized according to cause of death, and Unwin himself had from time to time contributed new headings and subheadings when an innovative murder necessitated an addition or expansion: “strangulation, unattended boa snake,” was one of his, as was “muffins, poisonous berry.”

A man so thoroughly versed in the varieties of dispatchment might, then, regard with unusual ease the result of an actual murder, in this case a man whose neck had been bruised by strangulatory measures, tongue emitted as a result of smotheration, eyes bulged almost clear of the skull, result of the same.

Unwin yanked his hand from the light and took several steps backward, tripped over the edge of the rug, and fell into one of the thickly cushioned chairs, the softness of which did nothing to diminish his revulsion. In each dark corner, Unwin could almost see a killer crouched, waiting for an opportunity to strike. To move from where he sat would have brought him closer to at least one of them.

So he remained motionless, briefcase clutched in his lap, seated as for a proper meeting with Mr. Lamech. This meeting went on for some time, with only the weather having anything to say, and the weather spoke only of itself.

THREE

On Corpses

 

 

 

A
knock at the door shook Unwin from his stupor. How long had he been sitting there? Long enough for his eyes to adjust to the light, for him to see that he was quite alone with Lamech’s corpse. If someone were going to leap out and kill him, he would have done it by now.

A second knock at the door, louder this time. He should have left as soon as he saw the corpse, should have cried out, or even run into the hall and fainted. That would have made his role in the matter obvious: he was the unlucky discoverer of a horrendous crime. But what would they think when he answered the door and said, “Please, come right in. And look, there’s a dead man at the desk. Strange, isn’t it?”

He could squeeze himself behind the end of the bookshelf, but that would make for a poor hiding place. When he was found cowering there, the suspicion against him would only increase. If he waited a little longer, maybe, the person at the door would give up and go away.

Unwin waited. There was no more knocking, but he heard the sound of a woman’s voice. “Mr. Lamech?”

The body, then. He would have to do something with the body. He went to stand behind Lamech’s chair and gazed down at the broad, blank scalp. From this angle it looked as though there was nothing wrong with the man. He was only very tired, had eased back into his chair for a brief nap. He did not even smell as Unwin imagined a corpse would smell. He smelled like aftershave.

Still, Unwin could not bring himself to touch the dead man. He took hold of the chair and rolled it slowly backward. Lamech’s big hands drifted apart as they slid over the surface of the desk, but his fingers stayed rigid. Then the arms dropped suddenly, and the upper half of the body fell forward. Unwin had to yank the chair back to keep the man’s head from striking the edge of the desk. The chair creaked under the slumped weight of the corpse.

The woman knocked again, so loudly this time that everyone on the floor must have heard.

“One moment!” Unwin shouted, and the woman let out a little
oh!
as though she had not really expected an answer.

With his foot on one leg of the chair to keep it in place, Unwin heaved against the body with both hands. It bowed deeper and the spine emitted a series of popping sounds that made him recoil. He closed his eyes, held his breath, and pushed again. This time the body slid off the chair and tumbled soundlessly into the dark beneath the desk.

In the most commanding tone he could muster, Unwin called for Lamech’s visitor to enter.

The woman wore a black dress with white lace around the collar and cuffs. The dress was very fine, but of a style Unwin had not seen worn in the city for ten years or more. In her hands she clutched a small purse, also strangely old-fashioned. Her hair was bound up in a black lace cap, still damp from the rain. She was perhaps ten years older than Unwin, and very beautiful—
a real stunner,
Sivart might have written. She was also the most tired-looking woman Unwin had ever seen. She gazed warily into the room, the shadows beneath her eyes so dark that Unwin mistook them at first for an exotic sort of makeup.

“Please come in,” he said.

She came forward with dreamlike hesitancy, always about to stumble, somehow remaining miraculously on her feet.

“Mr. Lamech,” she said.

He sat down, relieved that she did not know the watcher by sight, but the tip of his left shoe made contact with the body under the desk, and he had to cough to conceal his alarm.

“I know this isn’t how things are done here,” she said.

Unwin’s stomach tightened. Had he given himself away so quickly?

“I know I’m supposed to request an appointment,” the woman went on, “and then someone informs me who will be handling my case. But I couldn’t wait, and I couldn’t see just anyone. I had to see you.”

So it was she who had broken the rules. Unwin cleared his throat and gave her a stern look. Then, to demonstrate his generosity, he gestured for her to sit.

She gazed at the thick cushion, her eyelids drooping. “I mustn’t,” she said. “I would fall asleep in an instant.” Just the thought of sitting down appeared to overwhelm her; she squeezed her purse and closed her eyes for a long moment.

Unwin rose from his seat, thinking he might have to catch her. But she steadied herself, blinked several times, and said, “I’m something of a detective myself, you see. I figured out that you are Sivart’s watcher.”

Unwin knew as she said it that she was right. Lamech had been Sivart’s watcher, just as he was Sivart’s clerk. Now he was all three of them at once: clerk by appointment, detective by promotion, watcher by mistake.

“My name is Vera Truesdale,” she said, “and I’m the victim of a terrible mystery.”

Unwin sat down again, knowing he would have to play along for now. He had left his briefcase beside the other chair, so he opened the uppermost desk drawer and found what he was looking for: a pad of notepaper. He set this in front of him and took up a pencil.

“Proceed,” he said.

“I arrived from out of town about three weeks ago,” Miss Truesdale said. “I’m staying at the Gilbert Hotel, Room 202. I have repeatedly asked to be moved to a room on a higher floor.”

Unwin resorted to shorthand to get it all down. “Why do you want to be moved?” he asked.

“Because of the mystery,” Miss Truesdale said. Her voice had taken on an impatient edge. “If I were staying in a room on a higher floor, they might not be able to get in.”

“Who might not be able to get in?”

“I don’t know!” Miss Truesdale nearly shouted. She began to pace the short width of the room. “Every morning I wake up surrounded by . . . odds and ends. Empty champagne glasses, bits of confetti, roses. Things of that nature. They’re scattered over the floor, over
my bed.
It’s as though someone has thrown a party in my room. I sleep through it, but I don’t feel that I do. I feel as though I haven’t slept in years.”

“Champagne glasses, confetti, and . . .”

“Long-stemmed roses.”

“. . . and roses, long-stemmed. Is that all?”

“No, that isn’t all,” she said. “The window is open, and the room is freezing cold. There’s a dampness to everything, a terrible, cold dampness. I can hardly stand it any longer. I’m sure I’ll lose my mind if this continues.” She opened her eyes very wide. “Maybe I already have lost my mind. Is that possible, Mr. Lamech?”