Manhattan Is My Beat

getting in this time; the cops or the Emergency Medical Service medics had wedged the building door open.
    She watched them: six men and two women, some in police uniforms, some in suits.
    Her eyes fell on the ninth person in the room and her hands began to tremble.
    Oh, no … oh, no …
    The ninth person—the man whose apartment it was. Robert Kelly. He sat in an old armchair, arms outstretched, limp, palms up, eyes open and staring skyward, like Jesus or some saint in those weird religious paintings at the Met. His flesh was very pale—everywhere except his chest. Which was brown-red from all the blood. There was a lot of it.
    Oh, no …
    Her breath shrank to nothing, short gasps, she was dizzy. Oh, goddamn him! Tony! For making her pick up the tape and see this. God
damn
Frankie Greek, god
damn
Eddie for pretending to fix the fucking monitors when all they were really doing was figuring out how to get into a concert for free …
    Her eyes pricked with tears.
Goddamn
.
    But then Rune had a curious thought. That, no, no, if this
had
to happen, it was better that
she
was there, rather than them. At least she was Mr. Kelly’s friend. Eddie or Frankie would’ve walked in and said, “Wow, cool, a shooting,” and it was better for her to be the one to see this, out of respect for him.
    No one noticed her. Two men in business suits gave instructions to a third, who nodded. The uniformed cops were crouched down, writing notes, some were putting a white powder on dark things, a black powder on light.
    Rune studied the faces of the cops. She couldn’t look away. There was something odd about them and she couldn’t figure it out at first. They just seemed like everybody else—amused or bored or curious about something. Then she realized:
that’s
what was odd. That there was nothing out of the ordinary about them. They all had a workaday glaze in their eyes. They weren’t horrified or sickened by what they were looking at.
    God, they seemed just like the clerks in Washington Square Video.
    They looked just like me, doing what I do, renting movies eight hours a day, four days a week: just doing the job. The Big Boring J.
    They didn’t even seem to notice, or to care, that somebody had just been killed.
    Her eyes moved around the apartment slowly. Mr. Kelly lived
here
? Grease-spotted wallpaper sagged. The carpet was orange and made out of thick, stubby strands. The whole place smelled like sour meat. There was no art on the walls: some old-time movie posters in frames leaned against a shabby couch. A dozen boxes were scattered on the floor. It seemed he’d been living out of them. Even his clothes and dishes were stacked in cartons. He must have moved in recently, maybe around the time he’d joined the video club, a month before.
    She remembered the first time he’d come into Washington Square Video.
    “Can you spell your name?” Rune’d asked, filling out his application.
    “Yes, I can,” he’d answered, offhand. “I’m of above-average intelligence. Now, do you
want
me to?”
    She’d loved that and they’d laughed. Then she’d taken down the rest of the facts about Kelly, Robert, deposit: cash. Address: 380 East Tenth Street, Apt. 2B. He’d wanted a detective film, and, thinking about the old
Dragnet
series, she’d said, “All we want is the facts, sir, just the facts.”
    He’d laughed again.
    No credit cards. She remembered thinking that was definitely one thing they had in common.
    What were the words? You knew them real well at one time. How did they go?
    Rune’s eyes were on
him
now. A dead man who was a little heavy, tall, dignified, seventh-decade balding.
    All that the father giveth me, he that raised up Jesus from the dead will also quicken up our mortal bodies
…
    What bothered her most, she decided, was the completely still way Mr. Kelly lay. A human being not moving at all. She shuddered. That stillness made the mystery of life all the more astonishing and precious.
    I heard a voice from Heaven saying ashes to ashes, dust to dust, sure and certain I hope for Resurrection, and the sea shall give up
…
    The words coming fast now. She pictured her father, laid out by the talented siblings of Charles & Sons in Shaker Heights. Five years before. Rune had a vivid recollection of the man, lying in the satiny upholstery. But that day her father had been a stranger—a caricature of the human being he’d been when alive. With the makeup, the new suit, the smoothed hair, there was