Dark Maze

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    Manhattan is next door to Bellevue Hospital. But in this case, I did not see the need of standing on ceremony. I wanted a few minutes alone in the moonlight with the remains of Ronald Reiser before the rest of the world learned that somebody could bluff his way into Bellevue fairly easily and kill a psychiatrist if he wanted. Besides, I could not in very good conscience go downstairs and put in my calls while Freddy stayed up on the roof woozing and heaving and jangling.
    Poor Freddy. All the way up the stairs from the Zoo to the rooftop he kept apologizing for the oversight in his search for Reiser. I knew what he was thinking: This floor’s crawlin ' with loons...
    The atmosphere on the roof did nothing to help Freddy’s sweat glands. It was still and black up there, the way Ruby once told me it gets down in Louisiana just before a hurricane blows up from the Gulf of Mexico; the air felt wet and dead. We walked the three hundred or so feet from the door to Reiser’s garden, where his big wooden planters were arranged six in a circle with a seventh one at the center. The sound of our feet moving over the close-packed gravel was muffled by the roaring hum of air-conditioning pumps and incinerator chimneys.
    Then we noticed the pigeons.
    Maybe thirty to forty pigeons were clustered around a single tub in the garden, the middle one. They were pecking furiously at something, silent but for the rustling of wings. Another step closer and we were hit by the sharp, sickening odor of blood, urine and feces. Which was when Freddy took ill.
    As Freddy loped off, I shooed away the scavenging pigeons. Then I stepped into an inky shaft of light wafting from the fluorescent stairwell of an adjacent building and fished out the Polaroid that Picasso had mailed from a jacket pocket. I squinted and studied the photograph in this poor light. The painting in the photo showed Reiser from the rear, flopped over the edge of one of his planter tubs with the knife sticking up about where his belt loops would be. Then I stepped back to Reiser’s body, to compare compositions.
    The knife as it actually appeared in Reiser was considerably higher up the back than in Picasso’s painting. In the painting, the blade would have been piercing through Reiser’s kidneys en route to his lower abdomen. In real death, however, one or both of Reiser’s lungs had been sliced open, judging from the knife’s final position, and by the huge pool of blood beneath his head. Where Reiser’s face lay smashed in the planter tub, the soil glistened. A knife-ripped lung quickly fills with blood, which then gushes up through the windpipe and pours out of the body through the mouth and nostrils; almost always, the victim of a back-stabbing such as Reiser’s gags to death on his own blood before the lung ceases its respiratory function.
    The heavy expulsion of bodily wastes told me that Reiser had been completely at ease before the surprise assault, that his back was undoubtedly turned on his killer and that he never knew what hit him. Consequently, his bladder and bowels never clenched tight, as they do when a man takes on his assailant face-to-face.
    By now, the odor was overwhelming me. And the handkerchief that I had bunched up to cover my nose and mouth no longer worked. There was not much more that I could learn by my preliminary examination.
    A garden trowel lay about ten feet from the tub that held Reiser’s lifeless body; it must have flown from his hand the first time he was struck. I touched the blood caked on Reiser’s lab coat; it was still somewhat tacky, but turning dusty the way blood does after exposure to the air for a few hours. The autopsy report would pinpoint the time of his death, but for right now I guessed that Reiser got it right about when the Bellevue medical staff was changing from day to evening shift and anybody might reasonably assume he had left for home. He probably got it when Ruby and I were eating a late luncheon of fish and chips at Angelo’s Ebb Tide.
    I was halfway across the roof toward Freddy when it struck me: in Picasso’s painting, Dr. Reiser was not wearing a lab coat. I made a mental note to write this down later.
    Freddy had nothing left inside him but coughs and whimpers. I held him by the shoulders. He looked at me gratefully as I steered him back downstairs.

    Central Homicide was having a slow night. It was closing in on ten o’clock and during the whole day I had turned up the only murder in