He moved quickly to the bed, made a fist, and punched her as hard as he could in the face. He turned her on her back again and punched her again. He reached for the telephone, to pull the line free from the socket. It wouldn’t come at first and he pulled harder, and then the line snapped, and the phone came out of his hand and flew across the room and smashed into the mirror mounted on the wall. The mirror broke into three large pieces, and two of them fell to the floor, where they shattered into small pieces.
Jesus Christ, that made enough noise to wake the fucking dead!
“That’s going to cost you, bitch!” he said, menacingly.
He realized he was breathing heavily and took a moment to calm down.
Then he looked down at Cheryl.
There was a little blood on her face, running down over her lips, and she was looking at something on the ceiling.
He looked up to see what she was looking at. There was nothing but the ceiling and the light fixture. He looked back down at her, and she was still looking at the ceiling.
He waved his hand in front of her eyes. There was no reaction.
“Jesus Christ!” Homer said, softly.
He reached down and slapped Cheryl on both cheeks.
“Goddamn you, wake up!” he said.
There was no reaction.
“Oh, shit,” Homer said, softly, and waved his hand in front of her open eyes again.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Homer said.
Then he went to the door, turned the lights in the bedroom off, and made his way back through the apartment to the kitchen, and let himself out, taking care to make sure the screen door’s latch had automatically locked after he pushed it shut.
He went quickly to the De Ville, and was halfway down the block before he remembered to take the black ski mask off.
And then Homer had an at first chilling thought.
I don’t have the fucking camera!
He patted his pockets to make sure.
Shit, shit, shit!
Oh, fuck it! I never took the rubber gloves off, so there won’t be any fingerprints, and they can’t trace it to me. I bought it in that store with the Arabs in Times Square in New York, the time I picked up the silver-gray Bentley. I paid cash. I’ll just have to get another one. It was getting pretty old, anyway.
SEVEN
On the other side of Cheryl Anne Williamson’s bedroom wall in her second-floor apartment on Independence Street was the bedroom wall of the apartment occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Herbert McGrory.
There was a mirror on that wall, too-the apartments were roughly mirror images of each other-and when Cheryl’s bedside telephone slipped out of Homer C. Daniels’s hand and flew with sufficient velocity into her mirror to cause it to shatter, it also struck the plasterboard behind the mirror.
At that point on the wall, behind the plasterboard, was one of the two-by-four-inch vertical studs, arranged at sixteen-inch intervals along the wall. Between each stud, insulation material had been installed, more to deaden sounds between the two apartments than for thermal purposes.
Technically, this was a violation of the Philadelphia building code, which requires that living areas be separated by a firewall, either of concrete or cement blocks. The building inspector somehow missed this violation. Over the years, a number of Philadelphia building inspectors have been found guilty of accepting donations from building contractors for overlooking violations of the building code.
Many-perhaps most-of these corrupt civil servants have been found guilty and fined or sentenced to prison, or both, but it was obviously difficult for the city to reinspect every structure examined and passed by the inspector caught not looking, and it wasn’t done.
The stud moved, not far, but far enough to strike the back of the mirror on the McGrorys’ wall. The mirror bent, then cracked, and then a large, roughly triangular piece of it slid out of the frame and crashed onto the floor.
The noise woke Mrs. Joanne McGrory, a short, rather plump thirty-six-year-old, who was in bed with her husband, who was tall, rather plump, and thirty-eight years old.
She sat up in the bed and exclaimed, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!”