Death Notes

corner of his mouth. I peered in closer, then recoiled. It was his tongue.
    I heard a sick moan, realized it was me, then staggered backward, fighting the rising nausea as I ran through the debris to the window in the main room. I threw it open and gulped in the cool night air.
    The shock of the cold sobered me and, after a moment, the awful squeamish feeling passed. I opened my eyes. Two stories below, on the sidewalk, locals and tourists wound their way from restaurant to bar to shop, seemingly oblivious to what was going on right over their heads.
    Could it have been one of them? Was it the man in the Greek sailor cap looking over his shoulder? Or the tall man in leather crossing the street and heading south?
    Then I saw it. The grinning face of Richard Nixon gazed up at me from the comer, down by the alley. As soon as he saw me glance his way, he vanished behind the wall.
    Without thinking, I sprinted out the door, flew down the stairs and ran after him. It was late at night but it was Friday so there were a lot of people to dodge. They slowed me down, but he would have had to dodge them, too. But when I rounded the comer and kept going, he was out of sight. I kept running, circling the block, checking the back streets and alleys, even poking my head into some of the bars, but he’d vanished like a phantom.
    I walked back to my apartment, soaked in sweat, and stopped in at the Quarter Moon.
    ‘Harry?’
    The bartender looked up.
    ‘Did you see anybody go upstairs tonight?’ I asked.
    He smiled, then gestured at the packed room in front of him.
    ‘They been keepin’ me too busy, Ronnie. Is there a problem?’
    I shook my head, thanked him anyway, then trudged back upstairs with every intention of cleaning up, or at least throwing out the dead rat, but when I saw the mess all over again, I changed my mind. I walked over to the phone and dialed the familiar number.
    ‘Philly Post,’ I said. ‘Tell him it’s important.’
     

45
     
    I regretted calling Philly Post the second I hung up. He wasn’t going to do anything except be rude and nasty to me and I would have phoned back and asked him not to come if I thought he would have listened.
    So when he showed up and acted like a professional officer of the peace, I was shocked. My guess was his investigation had gone so stale that he was actually glad that I’d somehow managed to shake something loose.
    The place was crawling with crime scene people photographing and dusting for prints and looking busy. None of them, however, was doing a thing to clean the place up. Now, on top of the mess, I had their oily black dust smudged over everything I owned.
    Post and I were halfway through going over my day - I was telling him where I’d been and what I’d done and I’d already decided I’d tell him I went over to check in on Sharon, not break into her house - when he glanced over at my answering machine. The little light was blinking.
    ‘Oh, no,’ I said.
    Neither one of us moved.
    ‘You check your messages tonight?’
    I shook my head.
    ‘How long since you last checked them?’
    ‘This afternoon.’
    He stood and walked toward the machine. I jumped in front of him.
    ‘Hey! That’s private property,’ I said.
    I knew Blackie wouldn’t leave a message asking how the break-in went, but all the same, I didn’t want Post listening to my messages.
    ‘I’ve got rights, you know. Privacy rights.’
    ‘Forget it, Ventana. This is a crime scene.’
    He reached around me and pressed the ‘Play’ button.
    The tape rewound itself and the robotic voice announced, ‘ You’ve got five new messages. First new message .’
    Post leaned in closer. The fingerprint technician - a tiny, gray-haired woman with enormous hands and a permanent squint - was the only other person still in the apartment besides us. She stopped and tilted her head to listen, but I scowled at her and she went back to work.
    Four-fifty-five pm. ‘Hey, doll. I’m at Elwin’s tonight.’ He rattled off a phone number. ‘If you need anything, give me a call.’ Beep.
    Post glanced over at me.
    ‘Coogan?’
    While I nodded, message number two began. It was Hakim, asking about the rent, again. Next came Sharon, telling me she might have more cash for me at the end of next week. The rest of the calls were hang-ups - probably the nasty guy who’d trashed my apartment. Once we’d heard them all, Post pressed save and looked over at me. The comers of his mouth were twitching.
    ‘Sharon