As if on cue, the phone rings, the short staccato tone signaling a call from the front desk. So, no, he’s awake.
“Mr. Andersen?” Phylloh from downstairs, still phrosty. Were you Margot’s collaborator? He knows that someone had to be helping Margot. Why not Phylloh? It would explain how Margot got back into the apartment that night.
“Yes?”
“There is a man here to see you.”
“A gentleman?”
“A police officer.”
The first o is long, the tone skeptical. Phylloh probably has many reasons, life experiences, not to think that Officer Friendly is friendly, whereas Gerry is a white man who has spent six decades driving, walking, running, existing without fear of police officers. Oh, sure, he has known the frisson of nervousness when glimpsing a patrol car in his rearview mirror, but the fear is of a ticket, not death.
Now his heart feels as if it’s throwing itself against his rib cage, a bird stuck in a soffit, trying to escape. （This happened in his mother’s house when he was away at college. She listened for days to the terrible scratching and did nothing until Gerry came home from Princeton and found an infestation of flies in the linen closet, as the bird had finally starved to death.）
Terror has feathers, too, Emily Dickinson. A woman has died in his apartment. He may be responsible. （He is definitely responsible.） The body is gone. Another person has made that possible, which gives that person significant power over him. Gerry is in bed, taking far more Ambien than he should. He could use his condition, his pain, his fog, to send the officer away.
Yet when an inspector calls, the suspects always open the door to him. The only way the guilty can pretend to innocence is by acting as if they have nothing to hide.
“Send him up, by all means.”
The detective who arrives a few minutes later, admitted by a clearly curious Victoria, does not fit any archetype that Gerry knows, but then every detective archetype Gerry knows is from television or literature. He is not a slow-talking good ol’ boy with a shrewd intelligence under his coarse, buffoonish manners. He is not a Black Dapper Dan with an ornate vocabulary. He does not wear a rumpled raincoat. He is a man of indeterminate race named John Jones, who looks as if he were made in a factory. His one distinctive feature is his glacial blue eyes, but those only make him seem more android-like.
“I’m with the NYPD. A woman—Margot Chasseur—has gone missing. We believe you may be one of the last people to see her.”
Dates are fuzzy for Gerry, but that’s to his advantage. There was nothing momentous about his final meeting with Margot. Okay, his penultimate meeting, and she attacked him, forcing him to push her hard enough that it might have left bruises, not that there’s any skin left to inspect. Still, he honestly can’t remember the date.
“I’ve seen her twice since my accident. Both were unexpected visits.”
“When was the last time?”
“I couldn’t say. Maybe a week or two ago?” Because it’s not an important date to me because I didn’t kill her, I really don’t think I killed her, does it count if you’re on Ambien, if you can’t remember anything?
“According to Amtrak, she bought a round-trip ticket here on March 12. Was that the last time you saw her?”
“That sounds right. Dates, days—they mean less to me now. When you’re in my condition, the days run together.”
“But she was here?”
He is aware of Victoria, bustling around in the kitchen, taking an inordinate amount of time to make tea. A nosy parker, his mother would have called her. Gerry realizes he has no idea what a nosy parker is. His mother’s speech had been full of mysterious anachronisms, a by-product of her voracious, indiscriminate reading.
“Yes, she was. My assistant was there that day. Victoria, do you remember the date?”
“It was the day before you sent me to Princeton—yes, the twelfth.” Victoria takes her tea and goes downstairs. Eavesdropping is one thing, but she apparently has no desire to be pulled into the conversation. Good. Gerry wouldn’t want her to share what she saw that afternoon. But if the detective asks to talk to her, he supposes he will probably have to let him.
“That train ticket is the last thing we can tie to her. She hasn’t answered her phone or used her credit cards.”
“Oh my God, are you suggesting—” Gerry catches himself. Because he does not know she’s dead, he would be distraught, this news is unexpected. He is a character in a novel. He knows how to do this, how to inhabit a character’s POV without authorial omniscience.