Nightwork Read Online Free PDF Page B

occur to me.”
    “Yeah,” the cop said again, but let it go at that. He riffled the bills again. “All in hundreds. You’d think a guy with that much dough on him would pick a better place to knock it off than a creep joint like this.” He put the bills back into the wallet. “I guess I better take this into the station,” he said. “Anybody want to count?”
    “We trust you, Officer,” the technician said. There was the faintest echo of irony in his voice. He was young, but already an expert at death and despoliation.
    The policeman looked through the wallet compartments. He had thick hairy fingers, like small clubs. “That’s funny,” he said.
    “What’s funny?” the intern asked.
    “There’s no credit cards or business cards or driver’s license. A man with more than a thousand bucks in cash on him.” He shook his head and pushed his cap back. “You wouldn’t call that normal, would you?” He looked aggrieved, as though the dead man had not behaved the way a decent American citizen who expected to be protected in death as in life by his country’s police should have behaved. “You know who he is?” he asked me.
    “I never saw him before,” I said. “His name is Ferris and he lived in Chicago. I’ll show you the register.”
    The policeman put the wallet into his pocket, went quickly through the shirts and underwear and socks in the bag, then opened the closet door and searched the pockets of the single dark suit and overcoat that were hanging there. “Nothing,” he said. “No letters, no address book. Nothing. A guy with a bad heart. Some people got no more sense than a horse. Look, I got to make a inventory. In the presence of witnesses.” He took out his pad and moved around the room, listing the few possessions, now no longer possessed, of the body on the floor. It didn’t take long. “Here,” he said to me, “you have to sign this.” I glanced at the list. One thousand and forty-three dollars. One suitcase, brown, unlocked, one suit and overcoat, gray, one hat …” I signed, under the patrolman’s name. The cop put his thick black pad into a back pocket. “Who put the blanket over him?” he asked.
    “I did,” I said.
    “You find him there on the floor?”
    “No. He was out in the corridor.”
    “Starkers—like that?”
    “Starkers. I dragged him in.”
    “What did you want to do that for?” The policeman sounded plaintive now, faced with a complication.
    “This is a hotel,” I said. “You have to keep up appearances.”
    The policeman glowered at me. “What are you—trying to be smart?” he said.
    “No, Officer, I’m not trying to be smart. If I’d left him out where I found him and somebody had come along and seen him, I’d have had my ass chewed down to the bone by the manager.”
    “Next time you see a body laying anyplace,” the policeman said, “you just let it lay until the law arrives. Just remember that, see?”
    “Yes, sir,” I said.
    “You alone in this hotel all night?”
    “Yes.”
    “You work in the office all by yourself?”
    “Yes.”
    “How’d you happen to come up here? He telephone down or something?”
    “No. A lady was leaving the building and she said there was a crazy old naked man up on the sixth floor who was making advances toward her.” Objectively, almost as though I were listening to myself on a tape, I noted that I hadn’t stuttered once.
    “Sexual advances?”
    “She implied that.”
    “A lady? What sort of lady?”
    “I would think she was a whore,” I said.
    “You ever see her before?”
    “No.”
    “You get a lot of lady traffic in this hotel, don’t you?”
    “Average, I would say.”
    The policeman stared down at the contorted bluish face on the floor. “How long you think he’s been dead, bud?”
    “Hard to tell. Anywhere from ten minutes to a half hour,” the technician said. He looked up at me. “Did you call the hospital as soon as you saw him? The call came in at three