to pass on to whoever found his body? I couldn’t see it. If I was ready to say the long goodbye and sleep the big sleep, I’d at least try for something profound, like “Life is a fountain,” say, or “Take two and hit to right.”
5. Perhaps, startling as it was to entertain the notion, perhaps CAPHOB was a word. It wasn’t in the dictionary, nor was anything that started out with those first four letters, but suppose it was a proper name. In fact, suppose it was Candlemas’s name. It didn’t much sound like a name, but was it that much less plausible than Souslik or Marmotte? What would you think if you saw either of those written in blood on the side of your attaché case?
6. Was it possible it was just drivel? Consider Dutch Schultz’s famous last words, a great extended monologue duly recorded for posterity as he lay dying. They were words, all right, and some of the sentences even parsed, but the great man had made no sense at all. Suppose the good captain, presented with a small canvas, had managed the neat trick of distilling a whole world of meaninglessness into six meaningless letters.
And so on.
Sometime in the middle of the afternoon I got hungry. I was all set to order Chinese food when I realized it wouldn’t work; I couldn’t open the door to receive it because of the police seals. By this time I was really in the mood for it, too, so I thought about having it delivered to the Lehrman apartment and waiting for it down there. I don’t know what made me think that was a sensible idea. Maybe I’d overdosed on meditation, using CAPHOB as my mantra. Fortunately I nipped the whole enterprise in the bud and raided the kitchen instead.
What I found was leftover Chinese food, but it had been left too long. You wouldn’t want to touch it with a ten-foot chopstick. I toasted a couple of English muffins (the bread was stale) and spread them with peanut butter and jelly (the butter was rancid) and washed them down with black instant coffee (the milk was beyond description). Someday, I thought, when all of this was but a memory, I’d be eating real meals again, hearty coffee-shop breakfasts, overseasoned ethnic lunches with Carolyn, real dinners in real restaurants. For now, though, I seemed destined to grab breakfast on the run, skip lunch or steal it, and make the big meal of the day popcorn. My clothes were neither falling off me nor gripping me too tightly, so I seemed to be getting away with it. But it would be nice to eat like a human being again.
I drank the last of the coffee, rinsed my dishes in the sink, and got back to work.
By the time I was done, I had some calls to make. I sat down in the leather club chair, swung my feet up onto the ottoman, held the receiver to my ear and decided against it. How did I know who had one of those doohickeys on his phone that displays the caller’s number? And how could I be sure that none of the folks I wanted to call would recognize Hugo Candlemas’s telephone number?
No point taking chances. I’d left NYPD seals intact, I’d steered clear of tainted General Tso’s Chicken. After all that, I didn’t want to be hoist on the petard of modern communications technology.
I left the Candlemas residence neat and clean, with no evidence of my visit aside from the peanut butter and jelly I’d scarfed and the fingerprints I’d left behind. (I’d wiped up some after myself, but hadn’t been a fanatic about it; they already had all the prints they were ever going to lift from the crime scene.) To protect the place from the elements, I cut a rectangle of cardboard from a corrugated carton, shrouded it in plastic wrap from a drawer in the kitchen, and carried it and a roll of tape out onto the fire escape with me. There I drew the casement window shut, reached in and latched it, then withdrew my arm and taped the cardboard in place of the missing pane. Then I scuttled quickly and quietly past the Gearhardts’ window and into the Lehrmans’ apartment a flight below.
This would have been rendered more complicated if their houseguest had returned in the interim, but he hadn’t. I closed their window after me, repositioned the jade plant and the bookcase—the planter