Rachel Alexander 03 - A Hell of a Dog

roof.
    There beneath us was Central Park, and beyond, the skyline of Fifth Avenue. On the roof there were exhaust fans and vents, a water tank, and an equipment shed. We walked forward, as cautiously as if we each thought the other was the one who had pushed Martyn off a few hours earlier.
    Once at the edge, we leaned forward to look down so that we could locate the spot from which Martyn had gone over. I could feel a sour taste in my throat, and my knees seemed to be made of sand as I looked down to the sidewalk.
    “Are you okay?” He took my arm.
    “Just glad I haven’t had breakfast yet.” I stepped back from the edge.
    ‘There’s a little ledge down here,” Chip said, still looking over the parapet.
    “Big enough to stand on?”
    “Not big enough for me to stand on.”
    “Are you thinking Martyn did? That he climbed down onto it and jumped?”
    I stepped forward again, trying not to imagine toppling over and landing on the sidewalk below, right beside Martyn. Hands on the wall, one I would have made about three feet higher, I crouched low before looking down at the ledge, so I wouldn’t be seen if anyone below looked up.
    ‘There’s Martyn,” I whispered. He was lying on his back, one arm flung up over his head, the other at his side. His legs were apart. The way one turned in, you could see it was broken, even from up here. He looked almost like a rag doll, the way he lay there, so small and far away, so flat and still.
    “The ledge is covered with pigeon droppings, feathers, and lots of good old-fashioned New York dirt. If Martyn had climbed down onto it, that mess there would have been disturbed.”
    Chip crouched next to me. “It is, sort of. There’s one spot that looks cleaner than the rest of it. And it’s right above where Martyn landed.”
    “Must have been from one of the birds. It’s too small to have been made by Martyn standing there. He didn’t jump, Chip. He was pushed. Three people can’t have died accidentally in one hotel in just a few days. It just couldn’t happen.”
    I duck-walked backward and stood, looking around the roof. It was spring, no snow to show footprints of Martyn or his killer. It hadn’t rained either. There was nothing on the stairs we had climbed to get here. There was one thing, something black lying next to one of the huge exhaust fans.
    “Chip, look.”
    “Is that Martyn’s, do you think?”
    “I do. I think it’s the one he used in the temperament test.” The umbrella was closed, lying on the side of the fan farthest from the door to the roof. The little band that held the ribs neatly together was fastened, so that it almost appeared to be a cane.
    “What’s that all about? Was he going to float down to the street, as if he were the Penguin?”
    “No. This was a temperament test.”
    “What was?”
    “This murder.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I don’t have the answer yet,” I told him, starting to feel like a broken record, “but whatever happened here began as a test of Martyn’s character. It was something clever, something he’d have to respond to. You know, the cops always say how dumb criminals are, that if they were half as smart as they thought they were, the detectives would be out of work because they’d never catch any of them. But whoever did this was no dummy. Come on. Let’s get out of here before the detectives arrive, because you better believe if I thought to check out the roof, they will too.“
    “There won’t be any prints on the umbrella, will there?“
    “Other than Martyn’s? No. Whoever is doing this is too damn smart to leave a signature.”
    We took the stairs down to the lobby, thinking our own thoughts as we walked. The old man still wasn’t behind the desk. “Shall I put the passkey back?” Chip whispered.
    “No. We’re going to need it again later.”
    “We are?”
    “Yeah, I don’t know when we’re going to be able to squeeze it in—you’re talking this morning, and we have the panel this afternoon. But there’s at least one more room we have to get into today.”
    He held the front door for me. The police had arrived and were milling around waiting for the medical examiner to show up. From the top of the stairs, we could see Martyn splayed out on the sidewalk.
    “Do you see a pattern in any of this?”
    I looked up at the roof. I remembered looking up at it from across the street, after taking Dashiell to the park. The building seemed to have grown taller since then, the roof