‘Best trick since lead into gold,’ Tell said.
‘Yeah, but in the end the magic ran out. One day he only made it down to the third floor.
Someone offed him in the men’s room.’
‘Knifed him?’
‘What I heard was that someone opened the door of the stall where he was s-sitting and stuck a pencil in his eye.’
For just a moment Tell saw it as vividly as he had seen the crumpled bag under the imagined conspirators’ restaurant table: a Berol Black Warrior, sharpened to an exquisite point, sliding forward through the air and then shearing into the startled circle of pupil. The pop of the eyeball.
He winced.
Georgie nodded. ‘G-G-Gross, huh? But it’s probably not true. I mean, not that part. Probably someone just, you know, stuck him.’
‘Yes.’
‘But whoever it was must have had something sharp with him, all right,’ Georgie said.
‘He did?’
‘Yes. Because the briefcase was gone.’
Tell looked at Georgie. He could see this, too. Even before Georgie told him the rest he could see it.
‘When the cops came and took the guy off the toilet, they found his left hand in the b-bowl.’
‘Oh,’ Tell said.
Georgie looked down at his plate. There was still half a sandwich on it. ‘I guess maybe I’m f-f-full,’ he said, and smiled uneasily.
On their way back to the studio, Tell asked, ‘So the guy’s ghost is supposed to haunt . . . what, that bathroom?’ And suddenly he laughed, because, gruesome as the story had been, there was something comic in the idea of a ghost haunting a shithouse.
Georgie smiled. ‘You know people. At first that was what they said. When I started in working with Paul, guys would tell me they’d seen him in there. Not all of him, just his sneakers under the stall door.’
‘Just his sneakers, huh? What a hoot.’
‘Yeah. That’s how you’d know they were making it up, or imagining it, because you only heard it from guys who knew him when he was alive. From guys who knew he wore sneakers.’
Tell, who had been a know-nothing kid still living in rural Pennsylvania when the murder happened, nodded. They had arrived at Music City. As they walked across the lobby toward the elevators, Georgie said, ‘But you know how fast the turnover is in this business. Here today and gone tomorrow. I doubt if there’s anybody left in the building who was working here then, except maybe for Paul and a few of the j-janitors, and none of them would have bought from the guy.’
‘Guess not.’
‘No. So you hardly ever hear the story any more, and no one s-sees the guy any more.’
They were at the elevators.
‘Georgie, why do you stick with Paul?’
Although Georgie lowered his head and the tips of his ears turned a bright red, he did not sound really surprised at this abrupt shift in direction. ‘Why not? He takes care of me.’
Do you sleep with him, Georgie? The question occurred at once, a natural outgrowth, Tell supposed, of the previous question, be he wouldn’t ask. Didn’t really dare to ask. Because he thought Georgie would give him an honest answer.
Tell, who could barely bring himself to talk to strangers and hardly ever made friends, suddenly hugged Georgie Ronkler. Georgie hugged him back without looking up at him. Then they stepped away from each other, and the elevator came, and the mix continued, and the following evening, at six-fifteen, as Jannings was picking up his papers (and pointedly not looking in Tell’s direction), Tell stepped into the third-floor men’s room to get a look at the owner of the white sneakers.
Talking with Georgie, he’d had a sudden revelation . . . or perhaps you called something this strong an epiphany. It was this: sometimes you could get rid of the ghosts that were haunting your life if you could only work up enough courage to face them.
There was no lapse in consciousness this time, nor any sensation of fear . . . only that slow steady deep drumming in his chest. All his senses had been heightened. He smelled chlorine, the pink disinfectant cakes in the urinals, old farts. He could see minute cracks in the paint on the wall, and chips on the pipes. He could hear the hollow click of his heels as he walked toward the first stall.
The sneakers were now almost buried in the corpses of dead spiders and flies.
There were only one or two at first. Because there was no need for them to die until the sneakers were there, and they weren’t there until I saw them there.
‘Why me?’ he asked clearly in the stillness.
The sneakers didn’t move and no voice answered.
‘I didn’t know you, I never met you, I don’t take the kind of stuff you sold and never did. So why me?’
One of the sneakers twitched. There was a papery rustle of dead flies. Then the sneaker — it was the mislaced one — settled back.
Tell pushed the stall door open. One hinge shrieked in properly gothic fashion. And there it was. Mystery guest, sign in, please, Tell thought.
The mystery guest sat on the John with one hand lying limply on his thigh. He was much as Tell had seen him in his dreams, with this difference: there was only the single hand. The other arm ended in a dusty maroon stump to which several more flies had adhered. It was only now that Tell realized he had never noticed Sneaker’s pants (and didn’t you always notice the way lowered pants bunched up over the shoes if you happened to glance under a bathroom stall?
something helplessly comic, or just defenseless, or one on account of the other?). He hadn’t because they were up, belt buckled, fly zipped. They were bell-bottoms. Tell tried to remember when bells had gone out of fashion and couldn’t.
Above the bells Sneakers wore a blue chambray work-shirt with an appliquéd peace symbol on each flap pocket. He had parted his hair on the right. Tell could see dead flies in the part.
From the hook on the back of the door hung the topcoat of which Georgie had told him. There were dead flies on its slumped shoulders.
There was a grating sound not entirely unlike the one the hinge had made. It was the tendons in the dead man’s neck, Tell realized. Sneakers was raising his head. Now he looked at him, and Tell saw with no sense of surprise whatever that, except for the two inches of pencil protruding from the socket of his right eye, it was the same face that looked out of the shaving mirror at him every day. Sneakers was him and he was Sneakers.
‘I knew you were ready,’ he told himself in the hoarse toneless voice of a man who has not used his vocal cords in a long time.
‘I’m not,’ Tell said. ‘Go away.’
To know the truth of it, I mean,’ Tell told Tell, and the Tell standing in the stall doorway saw circles of white powder around the nostrils of the Tell sitting on the John. He had been using as well as pushing, it seemed. He had come in here for a short snort; someone had opened the stall door and stuck a pencil in his eye. But who committed murder by pencil? Maybe only someone who committed the crime on . . .
‘Oh, call it impulse,’ Sneakers said in his hoarse and toneless voice. ‘The world-famous impulse crime.’
And Tell — the Tell standing in the stall doorway — understood that was exactly what it had been, no matter what Georgie might think. The killer hadn’t looked under the door of the stall and Sneakers had forgotten to flip the little hinged latch. Two converging vectors of coincidence that, under other circumstances, would have called for no more than a mumbled ‘Excuse me’ and a hasty retreat. This time, however, something different had happened. This time it had led to a spur-of-the-moment murder.
‘I didn’t forget the latch,’ Sneakers told him in his toneless husk of a voice. ‘It was broken.’
Yes, all right, the latch had been broken. It didn’t make any difference. And the pencil? Tell was positive the killer had been holding it in his hand when he pushed open the stall door, but not as a murder weapon. He had been holding it only because sometimes you wanted something to hold — a cigarette, a bunch of keys, a pen or pencil to fiddle with. Tell thought maybe the pencil had been in Sneakers’s eye before either of them had any idea that the killer was going to put it there. Then, probably because the killer had also been a customer who knew what was in the briefcase, he had closed the door again, leaving his victim seated on the John, had exited the building, got . . . well, got something . . .