LITMIR.BIZ

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      The day before I found her dead started like any other day. I’d been at The Morpheum for about a year. It was a nice hotel and I had a lot of friends there. Sometimes you think some guy’s your friend but he might not be, so you have to be careful, because that guy might get you in trouble.

      You always had to go by Elsie to get in or out. She kept her door open in the daytime so that she could see out into the hallway, and she always sat in this stuffed chair with her feet up on a card table that I’d cut the legs down for her because her ankles got puffy. I liked to help her and she said I was handy and I could fix things. I had a key to the supply closet and nobody else did, and I had tools.

      She had her feet up on the table I fixed for her, and she had furry slippers, and nylon stockings rolled down just below her knees. She was the landlady. She sat in that chair every day, all day long, and she didn’t miss much. Nothing got by her, not in the daytime anyway. Sometimes things happened at night, and she didn’t see any of that.

      Anyway, I had just made it down the hallway past her parlor, thinking she hadn’t seen me, and I was turning the door knob when she called my name.

      “Willy!”

      I figured either she had a job for me or she wanted my back rent. It was a sunny day and was going to get hot later, and I wanted to go out.

      “Willy!”

      I smelled soup cooking on her hot plate. I had a lot of things to do outside, but I hadn’t eaten yet, either.

      “Willy, get in here. I want to talk to you.”

      Sometimes Elsie had me eat lunch with her. I went into her parlor. She was watching TV with the sound off. I thought they might be showing the spacemen, but they weren’t. I fixed the rabbit ears on the TV to give her a better picture; it didn’t hurt to be nice to her. Her pillow had slid out from behind her neck.

      “Let me fix your pillow for you, Elsie,” I said.

      She grabbed the pillow away from me when I tried to fix it for her. I guess she just didn’t want to be comfortable. I sat in the chair I always sat in and we looked at the TV.

      “They don’t show the spacemen anymore,” I said.

      “You mean the astronauts. They came back from the moon over a month ago. What makes you think it would be on TV now? Whatever put that idea into your head?”

      “I don’t know.”

      It was just doctors and nurses on TV, and Elsie always watched that.

      “Something has gotten into Nancy,” she said.

      “It’s that Roy,” I said.

      “Willy, has Roy been bothering Nancy?”

      “He’s been following her around. She doesn’t want anything to do with him because he’s a drug dealer. Francine said the police caught him and cut his arm off.”

      “You know better than to believe anything Francine says. The police don’t cut people’s arms off.”

      “I know,” I said. “I’m just telling you what Francine said.”

      “Roy lost his arm in an accident.”

      “He sells dope to little kids.”

      “Stop

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