Free A Long Line of Dead Men by Lawrence Block Page A

having occurred five to seven days before discovery of the body. Must have been ripe, huh?"
    "That's why they broke in."
    "Didn't have to, it says here the super had a key. Woman across the hall noticed the smell."
    She'd also told the investigating officers that Gabriel had seemed despondent since his wife's departure several years earlier, that his only visitors had been delivery boys from the liquor store and the Chinese restaurant. He'd worked up until two months of his death, managing a film lab in the West Forties, but had been out of work since then.
    "Most likely drank himself out of the job," Selig offered.
    His wife, apprised of his death, said she hadn't seen Gabriel since they'd signed their separation agreement in June of 1980. She described her late husband as a sad and lonely man, and seemed saddened herself if not terribly surprised by his death.
    Fred Karp had left a note. He'd tapped it out on his computer screen, printed out two copies, left one on his desk and tucked the other, neatly folded, into his shirt pocket. I'm sorry, it read. I can't take it anymore. Please forgive me. Then he'd opened the window of his fifteenth-floor office and stepped out.
    That's tough to do in the newer buildings, where you generally can't open the windows. Often they aren't windows at all, just glass walls. At an AA meeting I once heard an architect talk about how he'd had to reassure office workers who had a phobic response to glass walls. He used to run full speed and crash headlong into the wall to demonstrate its solidity. "People got the point," he said, "but I felt pretty stupid the time I broke my collarbone."
    You could open the windows in Karp's building. It was a twenty-two-story prewar office building on Lexington Avenue, just a couple of blocks north of Grand Central Station and the Chrysler Building. Karp was an importer, dealing primarily in goods from Singapore and Indonesia. He'd sent his secretary home at five, called his wife to tell her he'd be working late. A deli on Third Avenue delivered two sandwiches and a container of coffee around seven. At ten after nine he went out the window, and it was easy to pinpoint the time of death because there were people on the street who saw him land. One of them collapsed, and was treated by paramedics at the scene.
    This had happened just three years ago, and the police of-ficer I spoke to was still attached to the Seventeenth Precinct and had no difficulty remembering the incident. "Hell of a mess," he said, "and a hell of a way to do it. Suppose you change your mind halfway down. 'Hey. I take it back! I was only kidding!' Yeah, right, lots of luck."
    There was no question in his mind that it was suicide. There was the note, on Karp's desk and in his pocket and right up there on the still-glowing screen of the computer monitor. And there were no injuries inconsistent with a fall from a great height, although he agreed that the fall itself would have erased evidence of an earlier blow to the head, or indeed of anything less obvious than a gunshot wound.
    I said, "I wish the note was handwritten. Who on earth types out a suicide note on a computer?"
    "It's a new world," he said. "You get used to a computer, you want to use it for everything. Pay your bills, balance your checkbook, keep your appointments straight. Here's a guy ran his whole business by computer. He wants to get the note right, he can tinker with it, phrase it just the way he wants it. Then he can print out all the copies he wants with one keystroke, plus he can save it on his hard drive." He was around thirty, part of the computer generation himself, and he was eager to tell me how the computers in the station house speeded up the paperwork and took a lot of the unpleasantness out of it. "Computers are great," he said. "But they spoil you. The trouble with the rest of life is there's no UNDO key."
    I went to Karp's office, now occupied by an attorney specializing in patents, a man about my age with a