The Hanged Man, twitter thread #2

“Escape,” Jim breathed, swallowing another piece of tomato. “It’s all escape. People don’t know how to face up to where they are, what they’re doing. I seen it all the time.”

Doris lowered her napkin too primly, settling it atop her plate with the finality of a sheet draped over a corpse.

Jim looked at her, found her eyes, and they locked.

But he said nothing to her. He didn’t need to.

She knew, and she looked at her hands, at the thick, heavy wedding set that encircled her aged, wrinkled finger.

Jim looked away, feeling a splinter of guilt prick his heart.

“I got another story, if you want to hear it,” he said, grunting himself away from the table a bit.

No one spoke to deny him or agree with him, and so he took this as permission to tell his tale.

“It was back in ’61 or ’62, I’m not sure now,” he said, closing his eyes and letting the details of the time and place wash over him. “But it was hot, damn hot.”

***

It was '62, and it was hot, all the more so back in this time when ac was a novelty. The air was heavy, languorous, like moving through the waters of a heated swimming pool. Breathing was like taking in lungfuls of hot syrup, thick and sticky, every breath an effort.

Jimmy remembered this clearly, and the smell, wet and fetid, like the city was a huge, panting dog, stunned by the heat.

As the proverbial Irish cop, Jimmy was not genetically suited for life in a hot, humid climate, and his baby-white skin turned pink and sweated gallons during the hot, long summers patrolling alone in his black-and-white, the windows cranked down.

But no air conditioner. No, he wouldn’t drive a squad car with that feature for another ten years.

He’d received the call over the radio, the call no officer wanted to hear, especially in the heat of summer.

“One Mark 17, One Mark 17. See the owner of the Munich Arms Hotel, 768 North Broadway. Report of a suspicious odor coming from a guest room. Over.”

Big Jim, for this was before he was a sergeant or a lieutenant, sighed and acknowledged receipt of the call.

Suspicious odor? Jesus tap dancing Christ.

He turned the car around in a lazy arc, then sped back the way he’d come, thumbing the squad car’s lights and sirens on.

The Munich Arms was in the northernmost tip of St. Louis, a mostly German area that was quietly going to seed. The place had been a hotel at one time, but had fallen first into a sort of stately disrepair, then into the seedy squalor that it currently wore.

It sat between a gas station and an empty lot choked with weeds and large chunks of whatever building had stood there previously. Its front entrance was overhung with a slanted, rusted sign that proclaimed, in half-burnt-out neon letters, “Munich Arms, Vacancy.”

Jim snorted as he parked the squad car and turned off his lights and siren.

“I bet there’s plenty of vacancies,” he said, grabbing his hat.

He climbed out of the car, saw that another squad car was already there.

Why would they need two cars here, unless…

Jesus Christ.

In those days, there were no county medical examiners, no morgue officials, no separate ambulance service for dead bodies. Police officers presented with a dead body were expected to remove it themselves, place it in their own cars and escort it to the nearest hospital.

It wasn’t a detail of the job that any officer enjoyed. You spent your entire day in your car. It became office, home, sometimes bed, often where you ate your meals. The last thing you wanted to do was to stink it up with a dead body, particularly on a day as hot as this.

Jim wiped the heel of his hand across his forehead, flicked a spray of sweat.

Inside the Munich Arms was only minimally cooler than standing outside under the full sun. The lobby was marked chiefly by scuffed, yellowed linoleum that had seen a great many feet lurch over it.

Big Jim stepped into the darkened lobby and let his eyes adjust to the lack of sunlight. A few sunken couches, looking like broken down, sway-back horses, clustered near a huge black-and-white console TV with a small, wavering screen.

On the couches were three or four older men, unshaven, droop-faced and wearing stained T-shirts and worn pants. They took no notice of Jim as he entered.

He sniffed the air. Even with the front door open, it was close and stale, with dust and mildew, the tang of unwashed men. There was also the unmistakable odor of tobacco and alcohol ground into everything, the dark, scarred woodwork, the threadbare furniture, the dingy floor.

A small reception desk squatted to his left, and the man behind it, also wearing a torn T-shirt, smoked a cigarette. He watched as Jim approached, said nothing.

“Someone report a strange odor in a room?”

The man behind the desk, a thin, slick, weasel from whom the smell of alcohol rolled in powerful waves, snorted.

“Whatchya smell here, now that’s a strange odor,” he said, then jerked his head up toward the ceiling. “That smell up there, it’s got strange beat all to hell.”

“Another officer already here?”

The man took a drag off his cigarette.

“Been up there a few minutes. Fifth floor.”

“Where’s the elevator?”

The man smiled, tiny, crooked, yellow teeth that made him seem even more like a weasel. He pointed to a sign that said, “Stairs.”

“Thanks.”

He thumped the desk hard enough to rattle the weasel’s ashtray and make him jump, then he moved toward the stairwell. It stretched in the darkness, and more odors swirled here, chiefly garbage and a whiff of urine.

Jim took a deep breath, mounted the first stair.

By the time he reached the top, he was thoroughly winded. He was a young man, but it was hot outside and several years in a squad car had already taken their toll. Besides, the stairwell was closed in, and the temperature was stifling here, much hotter than outside.

Breathing heavily, he gained the landing, paused to catch his breath.

And wished he hadn’t.

The odor was faint here, but unmistakable. It was a sweet and greasy smell, equal parts of decaying fruit and bad pork. It oozed on the hot air, almost visible.

<<End Thread 2>>