After the First Death
Block, Lawrence
I Books (2002)
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SUMMARY:
Lawrence Block weaves his spell in this suspenseful taleof a man haunted by murders he hopes he hasn¹tcommitted . . . It was all too frighteningly familiar. For the second time in his life, Alex Penn wakes up in an alcoholic daze in a cheap hotel room off Times Square and finds himself lying next to the savagely mutilated body of a young woman. After the first death, he was convicted of murder and imprisoned, then released on a technicality. But this time he has to find out what happened during the blackout and why? before the police do.
After the First Death
Lawrence Block
for
What’s-Her-Name
Contents
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A New Afterword by the Author
A Biography of Lawrence Block
1
I CAME UP OUT OF IT VERY SLOWLY. AT FIRST THERE WAS ONLY the simple awareness of existence. I was lying on my right side, my right arm bent oddly so that my head rested upon my wrist There was a slight tingling sensation in the fingers of my right hand, as though the weight of my head was cutting off part of the circulation in that hand. My left arm was stretched out at my side. I left every part of me as it was, and I kept my eyes shut. If I moved, or opened my eyes, my head would ache. It would ache soon enough anyway, but if I could slide gently back into sleep I could postpone the headache. With more than the usual amount of luck I might even be able to sleep through the entire hangover. This had happened occasionally in the past, though not often.
I knew there would be a hangover, knew too that I had gone out and earned one, though I could not remember it I could remember very little, actually. I did not know where I was, or how I had gotten there, or what day it was, nor was I particularly anxious to find out any of these things. I knew—although I did not remember—that I had been drinking. When I drink I get drunk, and when I get drunk I have massive blackouts during which I do things, for better or for worse, which I do not remember, for better or for worse.
Usually for worse.
I had been drinking. I had thought that I had given that up, but evidently I had been wrong. I had been drinking, and I had gotten drunk, and I had blacked out, all according to the usual pattern, and if I moved or opened my eyes I would have a hangover, and I didn’t want one. If I opened my eyes just a crack I could at least learn whether it was day or night, and I thought about this, and it occurred to me that learning whether it was day or night was not reward enough to balance the punishment of a headache. It occurred to me, too, that all of this thinking was dangerous. It got in the way of a return to sleep. I kept my eyes closed and I made my mind push each thought resolutely away, like a beach rebuffing one wave after another until the sea grew calm. One thought after another, one wave after another, push, push, and the dark curtain came mercifully down.
The second time, my right hand woke me. The tingling in the fingers had ceased entirely, and now the whole hand was quite stiff, with the immobile fingers feeling at least twice their usual diameter. I pulled my hand out from beneath my head and shook it foolishly in the air. Then I used the left hand to rub the right wrist, rubbing furiously at arteries and veins to restore circulation. My eyes were still closed. My head spun with idiot visions of gangrene and amputation. I rubbed my wrist, and after a long time the fingers began to tingle once again, and I was able with effort to clench and unclench them. The headache began then, a two-pronged affair, a dull pain emanating from the center of the forehead and a sharp stabbing pain at the base of the skull in back. I went on rubbing my hand and flexing the fingers, and eventually the tingling subsided and the hand felt as a hand is supposed to feel although the wrist was slightly sore from the rubbing.
I was lying on top of a bed, uncovered. I was cold. I touched my body with my hands and found that I was naked. I still did not know where I was, other than that I was in bed, and I still did not know whether it was day or night, as I still had not opened my eyes. I thought that I might as well open my eyes, as I had the damned headache anyway, but I somehow did not get around to it.
Chunks of time went by. I moved my arms and legs, rolled over onto my back. A chain of shivers jolted me and a wave of nausea started up in the pit of my stomach. I could not seem to catch my breath. I opened my eyes. There were cracks in the ceiling. A lightbulb, hanging from the ceiling, glared fiercely at me. I tilted my head. There was a window above the foot of the bed. I could see daylight through it, backed by the wall of another building. Red brick, once-red brick, faded almost colorless by the years. It was day.
I sat up. Everything ached. I was naked and cold, and by the side of the grimy window through which I could see that it was day, by the side of the window, there was a chair. My clothing was piled upon the chair. I crawled to the foot of the bed and stretched out an arm for my clothing. I could not reach it at first. For some reason I did not walk from the bed to the chair, though that would have been the most logical way to get the clothing. For some reason I had to stay on the bed, as though it were an island in the raging sea and I would drown if I left it. I stretched out head-first upon the bed and reached out with both arms until I was able to pull my clothing from the chair piece by piece. I dropped one sock onto the floor but managed to bring all the other garments safely over the sea of floor and onto the island of bed.
My shirt and trousers were damp and sticky. I held my shirt in both hands and stared thoughtfully, stupidly, at it. Dark red stains. Sticky. I wondered if I had been drinking wine. Usually I drank whiskey, at least at the beginning, but once I was well into it, once I was past the point of no return, which happened often, and quite quickly, then I was apt to drink almost anything. And, once I reached a certain plateau of drunkenness, I was equally apt to spill whatever I had been drinking upon myself.
I touched one of the stains. It was not wine. I looked at it and smelled it and touched it again, and it was blood.
Had I been in a fight?
That was possible, of course. Anything was possible when I drank. Anything at all.
Had I been hurt? Once I had awakened quite like this to find myself tied to a bed, my feet tied to the foot of the bed, my hands to the headboard. I had been in a hospital, with no memory of being taken there and no idea of what was wrong with me. Very little, as it had turned out I had cut myself and had been bleeding, but not that badly.
Had I had a nosebleed? I get nosebleeds frequently, especially when I drink. The alcohol dilates the small capillaries in the nose and makes them more easily ruptured. I investigated my nose carefully with both hands. There did not seem to be any blood around the nose or any blood caked inside the nostrils. I wondered idly where the blood might have come from.
I started to put on the shirt, then stopped suddenly, realizing that I could not possibly go anywhere in these horrible bloody clothes. Then how was I to get out of this place? Obviously, I would have to call someone on the telephone and have him bring around fresh clothes. But how? I didn’t even know where I was. I couldn’t even be sure what city I was in, as far as that went Of course I might find out that much from the telephone, but I couldn’t find out the address from the telephone. Or could I?
It was a
ll a problem and I did not want to think about it. I looked at my hands. They were bloody from the clothes. I decided that I could not have slept very long, or else the blood on my clothes would have dried by now. I wondered how I could have gotten blood on my clothes. A nosebleed seemed unlikely. Had I been cut?
I investigated my body very carefully. Everything appeared to be sound and undamaged. Then how had the blood gotten on my clothes? Was it someone else’s blood? If so, whose? And how had it gotten there?
I didn’t care to think about all of this. I stretched out on the bed again, on my side again, and I closed my eyes. I would push away all thoughts, I thought again, like a beach rebuffing waves, and everything would be calm and dark again.
But it did not work. I could not even keep my eyes closed. I was awake, undeniably and irretrievably awake, and everything ached—my arms and legs, my back, my head, my stomach, everything. Nausea returned, stronger than before, and I only fought it off with a great effort.
I couldn’t stay there. I had to get away. I had to find out where the hell I was, and I had to have someone bring clean clothes, and then I had to get dressed and go home. Had to.
I sat up on the bed and looked around. I was in a small room with the door closed. There was the one window I had seen before, and the single wooden chair, and a battered chest of drawers with innumerable cigarette burns on its otherwise empty top.
I started to get up, and there was something on the floor, something sticky that my feet touched.
Wet and sticky.
I closed my eyes. A shiver went through me, a chill caused by more than the cold and my own nakedness. I kept my eyes closed and folded my arms foolishly across my chest. I did not want to look. I did not want to know. I wanted to go to sleep and stay asleep for ages and wake up elsewhere, miles and years away.
I wondered, briefly, if it was a dream.
I opened my eyes again. I picked up one foot and looked hopelessly at the bottom of it. Blood. I tried to catch my breath, and somehow couldn’t, and I looked at the floor, and the nausea came back again, in a flood, with no warning. I threw up with the spontaneity of the knee-jerk reflex. It was that automatic—I looked, I saw, I vomited. And did so repeatedly, long past the point where there was anything in my stomach to eliminate.
I thought of the way I had reached across the floor as if it were a sea in which I dared not set foot. An apt image. The floor was a sea of blood. A body floated upon this ocean. A girl; black hair, staring blue eyes, bloodless lips. Naked. Dead. Her throat slashed deeply.
It had to be a dream. It had to, had to be a dream. It was not a dream. It was not a dream at all.
I’ve done it again, I thought. Sweet Jesus, I’ve done it again. I believe I spoke the words aloud. And put my head in my hands, and closed my eyes, and laughed and cried and laughed and cried.
2
IN THE YEARS WHEN I TAUGHT HISTORY (SURVEY OF WESTERN Civilization, Europe Since Waterloo, Tudor and Stuart England, French Revolution and Napoleon) we made much of historical imperatives, of the inevitability of virtually all major developments from the fall of Rome to the Russian Revolution. I was never wholly convinced of the validity of this viewpoint. I have since come to reject it utterly. History, I suspect, is little more than the record of accident and coincidence and random chance. The English Reformation was born in a lustful gleam in a regal eye. Presidents have fallen to the lucky shots of madmen.
For want of a nail, says Mother Goose, a kingdom was lost. And well I believe it.
Had there been a telephone in that room, I would have dialed the operator and asked for the police, and they would have come at once to take me away. There was no telephone in the room. I looked, and there was none.
Had my clothes not been so thoroughly soaked with blood, I would have dressed at once and left the building. I would then have proceeded at once to the nearest telephone and summoned the police, with the same results above described. But my clothes were bloody, so very bloody that I could not bring myself to put them on, let alone go anywhere in them. I could barely summon up the strength to handle them.
Accidents, coincidences, chance. That there was no phone. That my clothes were bloody. That a Supreme Court ruling had released me from prison. That I had taken that unremembered first drink a day or a week or a month ago. That I had met the girl, and brought her here, and killed her. For want of a nail, for want of a nail.
I wanted a cigarette, I wanted a drink, I wanted to go away. My first reaction, to call the police, was temporarily stalemated. I had to do something. I couldn’t stay where I was, in the room, with the girl, the dead girl. I had to do something. I had to get out of there.
There was a key on the floor by the side of the old dresser. An old-fashioned brass key attached by a piece of metal to a triangular wedge of pressed board a little longer than the key itself. HOTEL MAXFIELD, 324 WEST 49TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY. DBOP IN ANY MAILBOX. WE PAY POSTAGE. The key itself was stamped with the number 402.
I was in a hotel. A cheap hotel, obviously, judging by the appearance of the room and the address of the hotel. A room, judging now by both the address and the body upon the floor, in one of those Times Square hotels to which streetwalkers take their clients. A room to which I had been taken and in which I had committed murder.
The headache grew more violent than ever. I covered my forehead with my hand and tried unsuccessfully to will the pain away. I took a step, slipped, and very nearly fell to the floor. I looked down and saw that I had slipped in the blood.
I turned my head so that I would not see the body or the blood. I walked carefully, skirting the blood, and got back to the bed. I sat on the bed and took the pillowslip from the pillow and used it to wipe the blood from my hands and feet. There were traces of blood elsewhere on my body and I got them off as well as I could with the pillowslip.
I stood up again and stripped one of the sheets from the bed. I folded it around me like a Roman toga and walked around blood and body once again and picked up the key and went to the door. It was latched. I slid the bolt back and eased the door open. The hallway, narrow and dark and dingy, was empty. I slipped out of the room and closed the door and locked it. The door did not have a spring lock; one had to lock it with the key. I walked down the hallway, feeling ridiculous in the improvised toga, hoping desperately that no one would appear. I found the communal bathroom—such hotels have communal bathrooms; I know much about such hotels, I have been in so many of them, so very many of them—and I entered the bathroom and shut and bolted the door. Someone had recently been sick in the toilet. I flushed it, and I closed my eyes, and opened them, and thought of the body on the floor of room 402—my room—and was sick again, and flushed the toilet a second time.
I filled the tub, after first washing it out carefully, and I seated myself in the full tub and bathed. The blood was my main concern. I had to get the blood off. Whatever I was going to do, I had to get the blood off me. I thought of Lady Macbeth. Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? So very much blood in one little girl.
When I got out of the tub I had nothing to dry myself with but the sheet I used it and was left with nothing to wear. I looked at myself in the little fly-specked mirror over the sink. I did not seem to have more than a day’s growth of beard. Then today was Sunday, I thought. The last thing that I remembered was Saturday, Saturday morning, and—
No. I was not yet ready to begin remembering things.
And it couldn’t be very late. At those hotels, checkout time was generally somewhere between eleven a.m. and noon, although few of the guests stayed more than an hour or so. No one had come banging on my door, so it was probably still morning. Sunday morning.
I couldn’t stay in the bathroom forever. I took my damp bedsheet and folded it neatly several times until it was the approximate size of a bath towel, then wrapped it around my waist and folded it upon itself so that it would hopefully stay in place without being held. I opened the bathroom door and saw a
little old man walking down the hallway. I closed the door again. He passed the bathroom and continued on down the hall. When I heard his footsteps on the staircase I opened the door again, and this time the hallway was empty.
I went back to my room. There was no place else to go.
And it was there, in the room, perhaps half an hour after I had first looked for a telephone to summon the police, that I realized that I was not going to call the police at all.
I had been in prison for four years. Inside, my fellow prisoners called it (how they had despised me; they were criminals, professional or amateur criminals, and I was a woman-killer, and they loathed me for it). I had been inside for four years, and could look forward, according to the standard actuarial tables, to remaining inside for another thirty-seven years. I had become virtually resigned to it. It was not a good life inside. No one could say that it was. But it was a life of sorts, a life with pattern and regularity to it, a life even with the illusion of purpose, albeit the self-deceiving purpose of a hamster upon a treadmill. I had become resigned to it, and they should have left me there until I died.
That they did not was more my fault than theirs. Some damned guardhouse lawyer began making noises down in Florida. He submitted a brief to the Supreme Court, whereupon the Court made one of its landmark decisions. This took the stopper out of the bottle. I read that decision, and obtained a transcript of my own trial, and burrowed through law books, and discovered that my whole case now appeared to be a legal comedy. An unsubstantiated confession, lack of immediate criminal counsel, illicitly obtained evidence—a variety of crucial irregularities, unnoticed at the time, which now took on the shape of a passport to the outside world.
I could have let well enough alone. I was where I felt I belonged and could have remained there. But I was plugged into the machinery of liberation; like a driver so taken with the performance of his car that he misses his turn and drives on into the next county, the discovery of a way out caught me up completely. I was on the road, not stopping to wonder where it might lead.