Death Notes

and peeled him off me. When I turned I saw his face.
    Match Margolis. His eyes caught me first: sunken blue eyes, glazed and opaque. They stared right through me. Something was terribly wrong.
    He clutched at me again and this time I reached out to him. But I was too late. He slid right through my hands and slumped face down on the floor at my feet. That’s when everybody finally seemed to notice what was going on.
    The chatter stopped gradually. I heard something like a collective gasp. Some people were still smiling, the rest just looked confused. Sharon wasn’t anywhere in sight.
    I dropped to my knee beside Match, laid a tentative hand on his neck where I figured his jugular was and tried to find a pulse. Nothing. But what did I know?
    I leaned down and tried to see if he was breathing. I put my lips close to his ear. ‘Match! Match? ’
    Nothing.
    ‘Call an ambulance,’ I shouted.
    Somebody shuffled behind the bar, probably Lucius the bartender. In the stark silence I heard a number being punched out on a touch-tone phone.
    ‘What the fuck’s wrong with him?’
    I looked up. Blackie towered over me, then knelt down opposite, on Match’s right side. He felt for a pulse like I had, being careful not to move him.
    ‘He needs a doctor,’ I said. ‘I think it’s a heart attack.’
    Then I lifted my hand - the one that had been resting lightly on Match’s back - and my fingers came away sticky. I held them up in the dim light and my heart sank.
    ‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Blood.’
     

2
     
    N aturally, it had to be Lieutenant Philly Post who showed up at the Riff Club after the paramedics talked to somebody over the radio and declared Match Margolis dead. Post didn’t look happy to see me, but then he never did.
    Post was supposed to be one of San Francisco PD’s finest - tops in Homicide, unusually bright, a big man with a barrel chest, large, even white teeth, bushy eyebrows that hid his eyes most of the time - but he had the sourest disposition I’d ever run across. Once you’ve met him, he’s the kind of guy you wouldn’t hesitate to cross the street to avoid.
    The uniformed cops all practically genuflected when Post walked through the club’s double doors. He cut through the milling crowd and strode into the sacred space marked off with yellow police tape. From there, he stared at Match’s body for a solid minute, scowling like he’d eaten something that didn’t agree with him, then looked up and took in the room.
    The uniforms had asked me to stick close by since I was the one nearest Match when he went down. And Blackie was special, too, since he’d come up to Match after I had. So Blackie stood beside me. We were just outside the yellow police tape while everybody else was sequestered at the far end of the hall.
    ‘I should have known you’d be here, Ventana.’
    Beside me, Blackie stiffened.
    Post said, ‘Well?’
    ‘Well what?’ I answered.
    ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’
    I glanced from Post to Match’s body. Nobody had bothered to cover him and to me, at least, it looked like his skin was starting to turn gray. Post just kept staring at me without speaking and suddenly it sank in.
    ‘You can’t think I killed Match?’
    ‘Why not? You were right here when he died.’
    ‘So was everybody else. They...’ I stopped. He was joking. He had to be. ‘Look around,’ I told him in case he wasn’t. ‘There’s nothing here that says I had anything to do with this murder.’
    ‘We’ll see,’ Post said, then turned his eyes to Blackie. Post didn’t bother to speak, just shot him a dirty look.
    Blackie smiled back at him with pure malevolence and said, ‘Must be amateur night.’
    Post muttered an oath under his breath, then squinted across
    the room at the corner full of subdued people. Everybody looked numb and deflated in rumpled clothes that seemed garish under the lights. They sat in little clusters of five or six at the cocktail tables or lined against the back wall, sipping free cups of coffee that Lucius had passed out while we all waited for somebody to tell us we could go home.
    With the lights up, the Riff Club seemed suddenly cheap and dirty: sawdust on the floor, burn scars on all the stained table tops, and faded green walls, scuffed and marred with years of grime and graffiti. The band, so cool and self-possessed under the spotlight an hour ago, huddled near the stage with stony faces of disbelief. Except for the hawk-nosed Latino trumpet player.