A Long Line of Dead Men

A woman said, "Is this the man looking for the man in the picture?"

There had been calls from time to time. Who was the man in the picture? What did I want with him? Was it true about the reward?

"Yes," I said. "I'm the man."

"You really gonna pay me that money?"

I held my breath.

" 'Cause I seen him," she said. "I know right where he's at."

31

Two hours later I was in a Laundromat on the corner of Manhattan Avenue and 117th Street, next door to a Haitian store-front church. I had TJ with me, dressed in khakis and a light green polo shirt and carrying his clipboard. The manager was a short, squat woman in her sixties with unconvincing yellow hair and a European accent. It was she who had called me, and I had a hard time convincing her that she would indeed get ten thousand dollars when we had the man on the palm card in custody, but nothing if he gave us the slip. She wanted more than a promise before she parted with her information, and I could see her point. I gave her two hundred dollars up front and made her sign a receipt for it, and I think it was the receipt that convinced her, because why would I want anything on paper if I planned to stiff her? She took four fifties from me, folded them together, tucked them in a pocket of her apron and secured them there with a safety pin. Then she took me to the window and pointed diagonally across the street.

The building she indicated was a seven-story apartment house built sometime before the First World War. The facade was in good repair, and there were plants hanging in some of the windows. It didn't look like any SRO I'd ever seen.

But she was sure that was where he lived. He had come in at least once before, and afterward she had remembered the card someone had given her and found it in a drawer, and sure enough, it was him. So she almost called the number, but what was she going to say? She didn't know his name or where he lived. And if she said anything to anybody, how could she be sure she was the one who wound up with the reward?

So she'd said nothing, electing to wait for him to return. Laundry, after all, was not a one-time occurrence. You washed your clothes, sooner or later you would have to wash them again. Every day she looked at the sketch on the card to make sure she would know him if she saw him again. She was starting to think maybe it wasn't really him, and then today he'd come in with a laundry bag and a box of Tide, and it was him, all right. No question. He looked just like his picture.

She almost made the call while his clothes were spinning around, first in the washing machine, then in the dryer. But how could she make sure she was the one who collected the reward? So she'd let him sit there, his face buried in the newspaper, until his wash was done. When he left, she slipped out the door and followed him. She left the Laundromat unattended, risking her job in the process. Suppose the owner stopped in while she was gone? Suppose there was an incident in her absence?

But she wasn't gone long. She followed her quarry a block and a half uptown and waited across the street while he stopped in a deli. He came out moments later carrying a shopping bag in addition to his sack of clean clothes, and he turned back in the direction he'd come from, and wound up entering the apartment house diagonally across the street from her Laundromat.

From the doorway of the apartment house, she watched him get on the elevator, watched the doors close behind him. There was a panel of numbers above the elevator that lit up when the car was moving to show you what floor it was on. She couldn't make it out from the entrance, but when the elevator had finished its ascent she walked through the unattended lobby and pressed the button to summon it. The 5 lit up right away.

"So he's on the fifth floor," she said. "I don't know which apartment."

And she thought he was there now. She couldn't swear to it, because she had a job to do, making change for people, washing and drying and folding clothes for customers who paid extra to drop their laundry with her and pick it up later. So she'd been unable to spend every moment watching the entrance of his building, but she'd watched it as much as she could, and she hadn't seen him leave.

I stayed in the Laundromat, not wanting to risk running into him in the lobby or being spotted from a fifth-floor window, while TJ checked the bells and mailboxes. He came back with a list of the fifth-floor tenants. There were twelve apartments on the fifth floor, and there was a nameplate in every doorbell and mailbox slot. None of the surnames began with an S.

I slipped out the door with my face averted, walked to the corner of 116th Street, then crossed the street and walked back to the building where Severance had been spotted. I rang the super's bell, and a voice came over the static-ridden intercom. I said, "Investigation. Like to talk to you." He told me to come to the basement and buzzed me through the door.