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A Pedestrian In The Age Of The Automobile

A Pedestrian in the Age of the Automobile

Larry A. Ytuarte

The bottle was empty. The cap was beside it on the kitchen counter. I can’t remember how long I stood there staring at that empty bottle. A minute? Several minutes? A mixture of emotions welled inside me. I had woken up thinking about the juice in that bottle, how good it was going to taste, how it would be such a nutritious way to start the morning. But the bottle was empty.

It was going on eight. I had spent too much time staring at the empty bottle, thinking about it. I was going to be late for work.

I stepped out into the already muggy air. The weatherman had predicted more of the same: hot, hazy, humid, high nineties. Summer in the city. I walked to work, trying to ignore the sweat that left my shirt wet and clinging to my skin after only a few blocks. I risked my life at every crosswalk, where people in their cars would make their turns pretending that they didn’t see me, or not even bothering to pretend but staring straight at me instead, clearly aware that I was there, angry with me for nothing more than my being a pedestrian in the age of the automobile. Some shouted at me, some made obscene gestures, some deliberately aimed their vehicles at me.

It was a terrible summer - the worst summer ever. I was living in a third-floor apartment in a grim, ivy-covered building on Union Turnpike. There were roaches. The water tasted odd. There was a fire escape outside the living room window, with black paint peeling in flakes from the metal slats and railings. The bolts that held the structure to the brick wall were coming loose, some nearly an inch out of the masonry. The whole thing would shake and rattle when I stood on it.

I was at some sort of turning point in my life. A D and an F in two successive semesters of organic chemistry had essentially ended my plans of going to medical school. The future was growing increasingly uncertain, and my financial situation was bleak. I was working only twenty hours a week in a work-study job at Clark College, earning the minimum wage as an assistant in the chemistry lab stockroom. Mondays through Fridays, from 8 AM to noon, I would help old Walter Munson get things ready for the summer session labs: distributing handouts, checking that each station had the proper glassware, occasionally preparing a solution when Walter was too busy with something else.

I arrived nearly twenty minutes late that morning. Walter didn’t mind. He just smiled and asked how I was feeling. He was like that: calm, unruffled, concerned.

I was still thinking about that empty bottle. I didn’t mention it to Walter, but it was still bothering me. I hadn’t drunk that juice. I was certain of that, absolutely certain. But the empty bottle on the kitchen counter - it was a puzzle that I couldn’t put aside.

On my way home I stopped in at the little bodega where I’d purchased the bottle of juice the day before, and bought another: Greer’s All Natural Vegetable Juice. It was expensive, especially for such a small bottle. I was saving money by walking to and from work instead of taking the bus, and the idea of spending some of those savings on something as blatantly overpriced as a small bottle of vegetable juice bothered me. But I promised myself that I was going to start eating better and leading a healthier lifestyle. I’d been getting headaches. My ability to concentrate was diminishing. I had developed a rash on my back and shoulders.

There was a moment when I thought about just walking out of the store with the bottle, walking calmly, leaving as if I had simply not found anything that I wanted, keeping the bottle out of sight by my side. But when I turned I saw the young man at the register watching me. He looked mean. I walked over and paid.

It was evening. The new bottle of juice was in the refrigerator. It had been there for many hours. I would drink it for breakfast. I was trying to read, but I couldn’t concentrate. What if, come morning, the new bottle was empty?

I thought of my roommate, Albert, and I asked myself how he would handle such a strange affair. Like me, Albert was a student at Clark College. Unlike me, he had gotten A’s in both semesters of organic chemistry. It all seemed so easy to him: hybrid orbitals, steric hindrance, bimolecular nucleophilic substitution. I’ll admit that I was envious of him.

Albert was away for the summer. His exceptional grades had gotten him an eight-week internship at the Naval Research Institute in Potowomut, Rhode Island, where he was studying the ecological impact of local industry on marine life in Narragansett Bay. He would be returning to the apartment at the end of the summer. When he’d left for Rhode Island he gave me his entire share of the rent for July and August, plus two hundred and fifty dollars for electric bills and gas bills and anything else that might crop up. I couldn’t ask for more in a roommate.

Anyway, I decided that Albert would handle the matter of the empty juice bottle in a clear and reasonable way. He would devise a test. He would repeat the experiment. He would draw no conclusion until he’d gathered enough data.

Just before I went to bed that night I did two things: I went to the refrigerator and checked to see that the bottle of juice was still there, and then I went into my bedroom and wrote myself a note. It said: "Unopened bottle of juice still in refrigerator as of 11 PM. Going to bed now." I put the note beside my alarm clock and got into bed.

The alarm sounded. I reached to shut it off and saw the note. It took all my effort to go about my normal morning routine of showering and shaving and dressing for work. When I finally stepped into the kitchen I saw the empty bottle on the counter.

The sight of it did something to me. It shook me from the soles of my feet to the very top of my head. It confirmed my worst suspicions: someone was getting into the apartment at night, while I slept. I checked each room carefully. Everything seemed to be in place. Whoever it was, he or she was getting into the apartment, drinking the juice, and leaving. Nothing else seemed to have been taken or even moved. The stereo equipment was untouched. Albert’s racing bicycle still leaned against a wall in his bedroom.

At about 10 AM I told Walter that I wasn’t feeling well and that I was going to go home early. He looked concerned, told me not to worry, and said that he hoped I would be feeling better. On the way home I bought another bottle of juice at the little bodega. The mean-looking man at the register watched me closely as I counted out my coins and paid him.

That afternoon I went into the dim, depressing laundry room in the building’s basement to wash a load of clothes. Mrs. Kaplan from 3B was there. She was standing at a table, folding her things. Her hair was in curlers and a net, and she was wearing a blue housedress that looked more like a tent than an article of clothing.

"So how’s the doctor?" she asked.

At some point - some moment of stupidity - I’d told Mrs. Kaplan that I was studying to go to medical school. She’d never forgotten. I ignored her question and, in an attempt to steer our conversation away from my ruined career plans, suddenly found myself telling her about the empty juice bottles. I had expected to see some concern or alarm in her expression. There wasn’t any. She stood there in her blue tent and looked at me as if I’d told her what day of the week it was. I explained to her what it meant: someone was getting into my apartment.

At that she smirked and shook her head.

"You’re walking in your sleep," she said very matter-of-factly.

I looked at her standing there, folding her clothes, her curlers and hair net. Walking in my sleep - it was a ridiculous idea. It was stupid. I turned my back on her and loaded my clothes into one of the machines. When she left I didn’t say goodbye.

The idea that I might have been walking in my sleep bothered me very much. It was all I could think about for the remainder of the day. Was it really possible that I was getting out of bed, going into the kitchen, taking the bottle of juice out of the refrigerator, drinking it, putting the empty bottle on the counter, going back to bed, and then waking up in the morning with no recollection of what I had done? I couldn’t believe it. It was absurd. But the idea continued to haunt me.

That evening I was watching a documentary about the panda. I was having trouble following it, but there was a scene that caught my attention: a man was adjusting a videocamera on a tripod out in the forest.

Albert had a videocamera, a "camcorder" he called it. His parents had gotten it for him on his birthday, and he kept it in a case on a shelf in his bedroom closet. I went to the closet and found it. He hadn’t taken it with him to Rhode Island, and that didn’t surprise me. Albert was not the picture-taking type. I saw him playing with the camera once, a few days after he’d received it, and never again.

There was a video tape in the case along with the camera. I had what I needed.

That night, before bed, I went to the kitchen and set the camcorder on the stove. With the zoom lens at its widest setting there was a good, unobstructed view of the refrigerator and the counter across from it. Anyone opening the refrigerator door would be clearly visible. I checked that the tape was in the camera and that the bottle of juice was still unopened and in the refrigerator. Everything was set. I pressed the record button on the camera, left the kitchen light on, and went to bed.

I lay there for several minutes before drifting off, staring into the darkness, proud of myself for thinking of the camcorder and using it in such a clever way. I had devised an excellent test. The puzzle would be solved.

The next morning I went to the kitchen and saw the empty bottle on the counter. I was breathless. It had happened again. I removed the tape from the camera. For a moment I thought I’d done something wrong: the tape was at its beginning. But then I remembered what I had read in the manual: when it reached the end of a tape, the camera automatically rewound it to the beginning.

We had a VCR. It was in the living room. But the tape-drive motor had died a couple of months earlier and we’d never gotten it repaired. We still kept the television wired to the VCR because it helped reception, but I would not be able to watch the tape on it. I remembered that the camera itself could be used to view a tape. I put the tape back into the camera, pressed PLAY, and looked into the eyepiece. There were a few seconds of snowy nothingness, unrecorded tape, and suddenly I was watching a tiny image of the kitchen. It was as lifeless as a still photograph: the counter stretching away, the refrigerator, a calendar on a wall, the lower left corner of the kitchen window.

I didn’t have time. I had to get to work. And then I thought of something. I removed the tape from the camera again, put it in a paper bag, and took it with me as I left for work.

I wasn’t much help to Walter that morning. I was distracted. Once or twice I saw that look of concern on his face, but he said nothing. At noon I grabbed the bag with the tape and practically ran to the main building. I went to the second floor, to the media resource center. It was almost empty. I went to one of the booths with a VCR and television monitor, put the tape in, and pressed PLAY.

It was the kitchen again: the counter, the refrigerator, the calendar, the corner of the window. The still life. Only now it was bigger and clearer. After a minute or two I became impatient. I stopped the tape, pressed FAST FORWARD, and let the cassette wind almost to its end. When I pressed PLAY the black screen filled with the same image: counter, refrigerator, calendar, window. There was no empty bottle in sight. That image remained until I heard a click. The screen went dark and the tape began to rewind automatically in the VCR. The puzzle remained unsolved.

I thought hard as I walked home. Had it all been for nothing? Or had I perhaps learned something? The camcorder recorded at a particular speed for tapes. The tape I’d used would have run for two hours. That hadn’t occurred to me earlier. Two hours. I had started taping when I went to bed at 11 PM. The tape would have reached its end at 1 AM. But the bottle had been empty, the juice gone, when I got down to the kitchen at 7:30 that morning. I had learned something. The juice had vanished sometime between 1 AM and 7:30 AM. The intruder - he or she - had drunk the juice sometime in that six and a half hour period. The test had not been a complete loss. A piece of the puzzle had snapped into place.

A bus nearly ran me down as I crossed Hillside Avenue. The heat was rising off the concrete in waves. I was about two blocks from the bodega. I reached into my pocket, pulled out my money, and found that there was enough for a bottle of juice. I would have eighteen cents left. I stood on the corner, in the heat, amid the exhaust fumes, deciding whether or not to buy another bottle.

Time-lapse. It just popped into my head. Time-lapse. Albert’s camcorder had a time-lapse feature. I’d only skimmed over that section of the user’s manual. Time-lapse. That would do it. I walked to the bodega, bought another bottle of Greer’s All Natural Vegetable Juice, and walked the rest of the way home happy, with the video tape in hand and eighteen cents in my pocket.

As soon as I got into the apartment I sat down and read the portion of the camcorder user’s manual that dealt with the time-lapse feature. It was actually quite simple. There was a switch on the side of the camcorder that, when activated, controlled the camera’s recording mechanism. The camera would record for one second then stop. It would do this once every minute. At the end of one hour there would be sixty seconds of tape that had been used. It would only take one minute to watch what had transpired over one hour. Ten hours would be compressed to ten minutes.

That’s how I would learn who the intruder was. I would use the time-lapse feature. I would be able to watch everything that had occurred overnight in the kitchen in about eight or nine minutes. There would be no problem with the tape running out.

That night before bed, I went to the kitchen and set the camcorder on the stove. I made sure that the tape was at its beginning and in the camera. I made sure that the time-lapse switch was in the ON position. I made sure that the bottle of juice was still unopened and in the refrigerator. I pressed the record button. There was a soft click and a whirring sound that lasted about a second. And then there was silence. I waited a minute. The sounds came again. It was working. I left the light on and went to bed.

Before I fell asleep it occurred to me that the whole thing - the empty bottles, the secret intruder, the puzzle - was good for me. It was giving me focus. It was helping me through a rough period in my life by affording me a chance to prove to myself that I could solve problems, that I could handle pressure, that I could persevere and ultimately win.

In the morning the empty bottle was on the counter. The intruder had come again. I removed the tape from the camera. As I’d expected, only a small portion of the tape had been used. My plan had worked.

I could have watched it there, in the apartment, using the camera’s eyepiece, but the image was so small and unclear, and I didn’t want to miss any details. Before leaving the house I called the chemistry stockroom. Walter, as always, was already there. I told him I would be about a half-hour late getting to work. He told me not to worry about it.

I went straight to the media resource center in the main building. At a few minutes past 8 AM the place was deserted except for a pair of employees talking by a desk. I went to the same booth that I had occupied the day before. I put the tape in the VCR, rewound it, and pressed PLAY.

What appeared on the screen looked very much like the first recording I’d made: the counter, the refrigerator. I could see a bit more of the window this time, and part of the calendar was now out of the frame. It occurred to me that each second that I spent watching represented a minute that had passed in the night. It was a bit disorienting. There were no cuts or blackouts between the scenes. They flowed smoothly from one to another. The static nature of the picture made it impossible for me to tell that time, on the television screen, was passing sixty times faster than normal.

Several minutes passed and I found myself getting impatient. The scene remained unchanged.

And then the empty bottle appeared on the counter! Like magic! Suddenly there! I hit the stop button, rewound the tape for a few seconds, and pressed PLAY. An empty counter. No bottle. Then the bottle appears! I watched the remaining few minutes. Nothing changed except for the lighting as sunshine suddenly began to fill the window and pour into the kitchen. And then the tape ended at the point where I’d entered the kitchen and turned the camera off.

The truth made me angry: the intruder had outsmarted me. He was clever. Or she was. My secret intruder had spotted the camcorder and noticed that it was recording in the time-lapse mode. He or she had determined that for one second each minute the camera was recording. My secret intruder was both observant and intelligent. He or she had waited until the camcorder finished recording a one-second interval, then entered the kitchen, took the bottle of juice from the refrigerator, and left the kitchen before a minute had passed and the next interval was recorded. Very clever. And then, after drinking the juice, my secret intruder had waited for the right moment again, reentering the kitchen after another interval of recording, and bothered to place the empty bottle on the counter. Clearly, it was a calling card of sorts, a way of letting me know that I wasn’t nearly as sharp as I might have thought I was.

I was the loser. My secret intruder had bested me. I was, after all, what the facts of my life had seemed to indicate: I was inadequate, not quite up to par, one best suited to roach-infested apartments and easily-attained dreams.

I couldn’t accept that. I rewound the tape and watched it again, this time checking my watch and keeping track of the minutes as they passed. The empty bottle appeared after four minutes and twenty seconds from the start of the tape. I had started the camcorder at 11 PM. The math was easy. My secret intruder had placed the empty bottle on the kitchen counter at about 3:20 AM. It was something - not much, but something. Another bit of information. Another piece of the puzzle.

It was hectic at work. My arriving at twenty minutes to nine hadn’t helped matters. Fridays were always a little crazy, with two general chemistry labs in the morning and Dr. Peterson’s dreaded instrumental analysis lab in the afternoon.

At about 11 AM Walter asked me if I would be interested in making up those two hours of work I’d missed on Wednesday, when I’d gone home early. I didn’t like the idea of staying at work until 2 PM, but I really couldn’t afford to lose two hours’ pay. And anyway, I could see that Walter wanted me to stay. He needed my help, and that made me feel good about myself. I told him I would stay.

Walter normally took a half hour lunch from 11 to 11:30. He’d bring something from home, a sandwich usually, and he’d eat it in his little office off of the stockroom. But that day he had to leave at noon and pick up his wife at her place of work. I don’t recall why. But I would be in charge of the stockroom while he was away. It was a sign from Walter, a way of showing me that he had confidence in me, that he knew I could handle responsibility.

He was gone perhaps fifteen minutes when Dr. Peterson appeared at the counter above the open top-half of the stockroom door. Dr. Peterson, with that little goatee and those lunatic eyes - he was angry. We’d done something wrong.

"The potassium chloride solution!" he shouted.

The potassium chloride solution. It meant nothing to me. He was making me nervous standing in the doorway, staring at me.

"Potassium chloride?" I asked.

"Potassium chloride!" he shouted again. He brought the palm of his hand down on the counter with a bang. "Potassium chloride! K-C-L! K-C-L!" He banged the counter again.

We must have forgotten to prepare a potassium chloride solution for his instrumental analysis lab. He turned then and walked away, without saying another word.

It was several minutes before I had calmed down enough to consider what to do. I went to Walter’s prep area and found the instruction sheet for Dr. Peterson’s lab. Under "REAGENTS NEEDED" it said: "2.5 L 0.750 M KCl (aq)." Walter had forgotten to prepare two and a half liters of a zero-point-seven-five-zero molarity potassium chloride solution with water as solvent.

I wouldn’t let Walter down. I would make the solution. I would handle the responsibility. I went to the glassware cabinet and found a two-point-five liter volumetric flask, then I let myself into the chemical storage room and searched for the potassium chloride. All chemicals were stored alphabetically, and I found the potassium chloride in a matter of seconds. When I pulled the jar off the shelf I glimpsed bold, red letters: "DANGER." It was printed on the label of a jar right near the one I’d taken. There was a red skull and crossbones on the label as well. It was a jar of potassium cyanide.

I returned to Walter’s prep area and, with the help of my calculator and the periodic table on the wall, prepared Dr. Peterson’s potassium chloride solution. I went down the hall and hand delivered it. Dr. Peterson took it from me gently. He turned it, studied it, carefully reading the label that I had written and affixed to the flask.

"Good man," he blurted. "Good man."

Back in the stockroom I cleaned up Walter’s prep area. Before returning the jar of potassium chloride to the chemical storage room, I opened a drawer and removed a small, amber glass vial and a screw cap. I put these items in my pocket, then took a stainless steel measuring scoop from the box on the shelf above.

I went to the chemical storage room, returned the jar of potassium chloride, and took down the jar of potassium cyanide. It took me less than two minutes to fill the amber vial, cap it, put it in my pocket, return the jar of cyanide to the shelf, and get back to the stockroom. I washed the measuring scoop thoroughly and put it in the drying rack.

Walter returned at 1:15. I told him about Dr. Peterson and the missing potassium chloride solution. Walter closed his eyes and shook his head. I told him not to worry. I explained that I had made the solution and delivered it to Dr. Peterson myself. Walter smiled and thanked me. He was proud of me. I had handled things well.

I left at 2 PM. I was literally singing to myself as I walked down the streets in the baking heat of summer, my videotape in hand. Every so often I would reach into my pocket and assure myself that the little vial of potassium cyanide was still there.

I would win. That’s all there was to it: I would win. Yes, my secret intruder was clever, I couldn’t deny that. But I would win. What I had needed was a powerful move, something bold, something that would end the game and solve the puzzle in a clear and unambiguous fashion. What I had needed was a definitive test. And I’d come up with one. My secret intruder was clever, but I was more so.

I stepped into the bodega on Hillside Avenue. The mean-looking man wasn’t at the checkout area to my right. My eyes adjusted to the shadows and I saw him at the far end of an aisle, on his knees, slicing open cartons with a knife and shelving canned items. He looked over at me, studied me for a moment, and went back to his work.

I walked over to the shelf and took a bottle of Greer’s All Natural Vegetable Juice. Something occurred to me then. I felt a sinking feeling inside me. I reached into my pocket and felt the vial. There was nothing else. I checked my other pocket. Coins. I pulled them out. Eighteen cents. I had forgotten to take some money when I’d left for work. All I had was the change from the day before.

I needed that bottle of juice. I stood there for a moment and waited, listening, unsure of what to do. There was a sound from the rear of the store: the knife slicing cardboard. The mean-looking man was busy. It was my opportunity. I gripped the bottle tighter, turned, and ran out into the blinding sunlight. An elderly woman stepped directly in front of me. I knocked her over onto the sidewalk. Someone shouted. I kept running.

I showered when I got home. I put on a comfortable tee shirt and shorts and went into the kitchen. Through the window I could see the other ugly buildings and the street below. A car sat unmoving in the eastbound left-hand lane of Union Turnpike, its hood open, its driver gone. Horns honked and people shouted as they fought with each other to get around the obstruction. I wondered about my secret intruder. Why had he or she chosen me as the other player in this game? Was he or she out there somewhere, right at that very moment, wondering about the next move and waiting for the night to come?

I opened the bottle of vegetable juice, placed it on the counter, and placed the cap beside it. Carefully, I opened the amber vial and poured the potassium cyanide powder into the bottle. It floated there for a few moments, on the surface of the juice, a tiny, white, crystalline island on a red sea, and then it sank from sight. I recapped the bottle tightly and shook it, then placed it in the refrigerator.

I rinsed out the amber vial thoroughly, placed it and its cap in a paper towel, folded the paper towel over several times, placed the tiny bundle on the kitchen floor, and hit it repeatedly with the bottom of a heavy saucepan until I was convinced that the contents had been pulverized. I took the remains down to the smelly garbage room in the building’s basement and dropped them into one of the more fly-infested metal cans.

Mrs. Kaplan was coming out of 3B when I reached the landing. She was going out somewhere. She had on big sunglasses and her hair looked unusually puffy and red.

"So is somebody still breaking into the doctor’s apartment?" she asked me, smiling.

"Yes," I answered, walking right past her. "But not for much longer." It was my turn to smile.

The waiting was extremely difficult. I couldn’t follow anything on television, and reading was out of the question. At about eight in the evening I put on a pair of sneakers and went out for a walk. It was just getting dark. I walked down to the service road of Grand Central Parkway and headed east. I walked a long way. Night fell with all its blackness. The service road vanished at 188th Street, and I got lost in the winding roads of a neighborhood I’d never seen before. The houses were huge, made of old stones, castle-like, with manicured lawns and nicely-colored little lights in the ground that highlighted trees and shrubs.

When I checked my watch it was going on ten. I found my way back to somewhat familiar terrain, got my bearings as best I could, and finally found myself again on the service road of the parkway. I headed home.

It was past eleven when I entered my apartment. I went straight to the refrigerator. The bottle of juice was still there.

The walk had exhausted me. My feet were sore and my legs felt like rubber. I went into the bathroom, washed, brushed my teeth, went to my bedroom, removed my clothes, and dropped onto my bed. The pillowcase felt cool to my skin. I closed my eyes.

What if Mrs. Kaplan were right? The question suddenly popped into my head. What if I had been sleepwalking? What if it had been me all along, getting up in the middle of the night, drinking the juice, even outsmarting myself with the videocamera? What if there were no secret intruder? What if I had been playing this game against no one but myself?

What if, what if, what if - the answer was obvious: I would know in the morning when I found the body of my secret intruder. Or I would never know anything. I told myself that there are two kinds of people in this world: those who want to know the truth, and those who want to keep their heads in the sand.

I felt myself drifting off... my tired legs... the smooth pillowcase against my cheek...

I awoke. The empty juice bottle was in my hand. I was standing in the kitchen. The light was on. I placed the bottle on the counter, beside the cap. Mrs. Kaplan had been right: it was me. It had been me all along. I’d been walking in my sleep and drinking the juice. I’d been waging a battle of wills against an enemy that didn’t exist. The thought of it made me laugh.

Death by cyanide poisoning - what had I read? Painful - violently so - the contorted faces of the Nazis who had, upon capture by the Allies, crushed those hidden capsules between their teeth - the writhing and screaming of all those misguided souls in Jonestown, Guyana.

I could only wait. I stood as straight as I was able. I planted my feet firmly on the floor. I clenched my fists and set my jaw and waited for death. I certainly would not leave this world writhing and screaming.

A minute passed. Another. The clock above the stove said 3:35. Through the kitchen window I saw an occasional pair of headlights passing by on the street below. Still nothing.

Cyanide is fast acting. I was pretty sure of that. I took a deep breath, held it, let it out slowly. Nothing. I waited longer. Nothing.

Something wasn’t right. I wandered out of the kitchen. I heard a siren in the distance. It faded. I was alive.

Something caught my attention as I passed the doorway to the living room. Blink. Blink. A red light. It took me a moment - the call light on the answering machine.

I stepped into the living room, flipped on the lamp, and went to the machine. The display told me that there was one message, and that it had come in at 8:22 PM. I had been out on my long walk at the time. And on my return I’d been so tired that I hadn’t even looked into the living room. I pressed PLAY MESSAGE. There was a moment of silence and then a familiar voice.

"What’s happening, buddy?"

It was Albert, my roommate, calling from Potowomut, Rhode Island.

"I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be coming in tonight. Nothing special, just want to see how things are going down there. I figured maybe we could drive out to Stony Brook tomorrow and go to the planetarium. Don’t wait up for me. I won’t be getting out of here until ten, so it’ll be about two in the morning when I get there. If you hear someone stumbling around in the middle of the night, don’t call the cops. It’s me." The message ended.

It was past three-thirty. Albert should have arrived quite a while ago. I went to the window and looked down onto the street. Albert’s little car was parked beneath a streetlight.

Albert had arrived. He must have entered the apartment quietly so as not to wake me. He might have been thirsty after his long drive. He might have gone into the kitchen for something to drink. He might have checked the refrigerator.

I stepped out of the living room and looked down the hall. The door to Albert’s bedroom was open. His lifeless body was sprawled on the floor.