went into City Market and there was nobody minding the store. The place was empty. I took a newspaper off the rack, walked to the cooler, grabbed a bottle of Thunderbird and waited at the counter.
“Anybody home?” I said.
There was no answer. The register was right there in front of me. With all the crime there was, you would think that Old Man Watson would have known better than to leave everything wide open like that. Grabbing the Thunderbird had been a reflex. I didn’t know if I had the money to pay for it.
I walked to the door and opened it, to see if Mr. Watson was maybe out sweeping the street or something like that, being careful to hold the bottle so that it stayed inside the store. I looked up and down the street and I didn’t see anybody. I wrapped the bottle in the newspaper so that it wouldn’t get broken, and started to put it in the shopping bag.
I heard Mr. Watson coming up the stairs from the basement. My knees buckled like my legs were getting ready to run, but my hands scrounged in my pockets and came up with ninety cents; a nickel short. The top half of me wasn’t going to follow my legs, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I looked around and there was half of a nickel sticking out from the edge of the mat by the magazine rack. Mr. Watson was an old man and I picked up the nickel and was standing at the counter when he came in from the back.
When I got back to the hotel Stanley was still sitting in my chair and I thought, He’s Elsie’s little pet. She wanted to know what was in the shopping bag, and I showed her the bottle and the newspaper. She said she had a new policy and from now on she didn’t want me bringing alcohol into the hotel anymore. She was just being nasty. Stanley was sitting there watching everything.
I started for my room and Elsie said, “You have something else in that bag. Show me what it is.”
“It’s none of your business,” I said. That set her back some, because I never talked like that to her. But I didn’t like the way she’d been treating me since Nancy died, and her having Stanley spying on everyone. She didn’t have any legal right to look in my bag, and she knew it.
I stomped up to my room and closed my door, and put the bag on the floor. Mr. Winkley stuck his head out of the bag, looked around to make sure of where he was, and came out of the bag.
“Watch out for that Stanley,” I said. “He’s a spy.”
By this time Mr. Winkley had gotten used to living in my room, and the way he went out was by the balcony. I’d leave the balcony door open, and he’d go out through a hole he’d made in the screen door, jump up on the balcony railing, then onto the limb of an elm tree, and climb down the tree, tail end first, to the sidewalk. He’d walk down the sidewalk and around the corner to the back of the hotel, and I’d find him on the fire escape, meowing and pawing at Nancy’s closed window. He wouldn’t climb the tree and come in by way of the balcony. I’d tried putting him in his tree so that I could point up at the balcony, thinking maybe he’d catch on, but he grabbed the front of my shirt with his claws so that I couldn’t even get him onto the tree. He was so used to coming in through Nancy’s window that he didn’t know any other way.
I’d known that I’d find him at Nancy’s window when I came back from City Market, and that’s why I took the shopping bag with me. Every time I climbed the fire escape to get him I looked through the window trying to see the bureau where Nancy kept the statue, but her bureau was against the same wall as her window, and so even with my cheek pressed against the glass I couldn’t see but only a corner of the bureau and I didn’t know if the statue was or wasn’t there. If it wasn’t in her room, I wondered, where was it?
Mr. Winkley wanted to go out again, and he began scratching at the closed balcony door, and looked at me and meowed. I couldn’t keep sneaking him by Elsie without her knowing. Sooner or later he’d meow or start jumping around inside the bag or something.
“You can’t go out,” I said. “Maybe later.”
He was mad at me because I wouldn’t let him go out, and he walked over to a pair of underpants I’d left on the floor and he looked right at me and started pissing on them. I yelled, “Hey!” and he ran under the bed.
I opened the bottle, lit a cigarette and lay on the bed. There was a spider web in the corner of the room, up near the ceiling. A spider had been living there for a week or so, and I used to watch him. He just sat in the middle of his web and waited.
Everyone was saying that Nancy had OD’d on heroin or some other drug, either accidentally or on purpose. The police must have thought so too, because they hadn’t been back. I didn’t believe it, though.
I took a drink from the bottle and set it down on the floor next to the bed. I was watching the spider to see what he would do.
I didn’t think that Nancy would ever use drugs, so I didn’t think she died by accident. She was a Catholic, and I didn’t think that Catholics committed suicide. So if it wasn’t an accident, and she didn’t commit suicide, then somebody must have killed her.
I was still watching that spider, but he was just sitting in the middle of his web. I took the last drag from my cigarette and dropped it on the floor. Sooner or later that spider would move. I kept my eyes on him and slid my foot off the bed, squashed the cigarette under my shoe, and swung my foot back up on the bed.
It had to have been murder, because it couldn’t have been anything else; but who, why, and how, I didn’t know. Probably the killer lived in the hotel, because every night Elsie always locked the outside door, and she watched the hallway like a hawk the rest of the time. We all had a key to the hotel, and I wondered if someone from outside might have gotten hold of one of the keys. But the killer must have spent some time in Nancy’s room before, to get to know the layout, how the locks on her door worked, how to get in and out leaving the room locked from the inside, and all like that. She hadn’t had any visitors from outside the hotel, I didn’t think. Probably the killer was somebody I knew.
Mr. Winkley jumped up on the bed and lay down next to me.
Gladys’s room was right next to Nancy’s, and I wondered if maybe there was a secret panel between their rooms, or if Gladys maybe cut a hole in the wall. Gladys’d had a junk habit, but as far as I knew she’d been clean for a couple of years. That’s what she said, anyway. She and Nancy were friends, so I didn’t think she killed Nancy.
The Colonel and Howie were my friends, so I didn’t think it could be either of them.
Francine wasn’t smart enough.
Elsie could hardly walk up the stairs without help.
Roy had been bothering Nancy, and maybe she told him to stop bothering her, and he decided that if he couldn’t have her, nobody could. Or maybe she was going to report him for selling drugs and he gave her a hot shot to shut her up. It would be hard for him to do it with only one arm, but he was pretty strong.
I had another half of a cigarette in my pocket, and I lit it and drank from the bottle.
Stanley was the joker in the deck; he could be anything or anybody. I thought, He pretends he can’t talk, and he’s a sneak and a spy, and always kissing up to Elsie. He’d been following Nancy, and she told me that he’d been snooping around in her room. He could have recorded all the details of the inside of her room in his mind, probably
