compulsion. Lil was now in its thrall. It seemed that someone had found Igor’s body at the bottom of the stairs just before dawn. He had tumbled down headfirst. Anybody could see his neck was broken. The rest of his body lay twisted about on the steps just above it. Rigor mortis had begun to set in by the time they found him. He still reeked with alcohol. Wasn’t hard to add up two and two, was it. By the time Lil woke up, the police were already here… and tenants were already out on the catwalks, chattering and clattering and pointing… a regular percussion concert for aluminum walkers. At first they all clattered to the courtyard, where you could get the best view. Igor’s body—or “Nicolai’s,” as Lil put it—was at the bottom of the stairway from the second level to the courtyard level. Right away, the police put a blanket over the body but left it the way it was, all twisted and broken. Why didn’t they take the poor man’s body away and stretch it out horizontal and give what was left of him a little dignity? But he was still there, and the police were standing around doing nothing but putting up yellow crime-scene tape that you see in the movies. Same thing. They taped off the stairway, so nobody could go up or down. Then they built a whole fence of yellow tape in the courtyard to keep people from getting too close to the body, there were so many nosy people in the courtyard. Then they shooed them all out and began putting tape across every opening to the courtyard.
“Take a look. You see right there?” said Lil. “The tops of the stairway?… That’s the tape. And over there?”
She was pointing past the stairway. For the first time Nestor could see a fence of yellow tape around the entrance to an apartment… Igor’s. Two bored cops stood nearby. “You should take a look!” Lil said with enthusiasm. “A good look. Things like that you don’t see around here. A big piece a tape, this wide”—about six inches—“they glued it over the handle to the door and the keyhole. And on the piece a tape? The writing you can’t see from here. It’s a warning about how the tape—don’t mess with it. You ever see such a thing? A good look you should get. I got here before they put that big piece a tape, and the door was still open. They had a whole bunch a cops in there. Looked the same as it was when we saw it, except all those pictures were gone from that wall.”
“They were gone?!” said Nestor. He hadn’t meant to reveal such surprise. “You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. The ones in a line on that long wall. Them I woulda noticed, they were so bad. Maybe the poor man couldn’t stand them. Maybe he threw them out. Pictures like that, I had them on my wall, I woulda started drinking, too… the poor soul,” she added, so as not to speak ill of the dead.
“They’re gone…” said Nestor, as much to himself as to her.
Just then one of the cops turned, and Nestor thought he was looking right at him. ¡Mierda! Maybe it was because he was so much younger than anybody else up here on the catwalk. Or maybe—the first one must have said something to the other one, because now they were both looking right at him. He wanted to pull his plastic straw hat down over his face, but that would only make it worse.
“I wanna see it from over there,” Nestor said to Lil. He indicated the opposite side of the catwalk.
“Over there? Straight there you should go for a good look,” said Lil, indicating the yellow tape around Igor’s doorway.
“No… first I go over there,” said Nestor. He hoped he didn’t sound as frightened as he really was. He wheeled about to leave, but not before Lil glanced sideways at Edith. He could see the striations in her neck as she lowered her lips on one side, as if to say, “The boy’s a nut job.”
He tried to walk nonchalantly in a crouch that would keep him below the eye level of the aluminum walker gawkers and the rest of the spectators up here. Walking nonchalantly in a crouch—it couldn’t be done. The active adults were staring at him. He must have looked like a prowler or something. So he stood up… and