Right.

I wondered what Bogart would do.

In the past fifteen days I had watched thirty movies, all of them either starring or featuring Humphrey Bogart. Some of them were films that everybody knows, like The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca and The African Queen, and others were movies that nobody’s ever heard of, like Invisible Stripes and Men Are Such Fools. My companion at these outings, sitting beside me and sharing my popcorn, seemed to believe that the Bogart on-screen persona would tell you all you needed to know to cope with life. And who was I to say her nay?

But I couldn’t think of anything better for Bogart to do than the course I’d chosen for myself, which was an essentially passive one. I was waiting for something to happen. Maybe Bogart would have taken the bit in his teeth and the bull by the horns and made something happen, but it seemed to me that he was most apt to do that when he had a gun in his fist. I didn’t even have my fucking attaché case. All I could lay my hands on was a coat hanger.

Outside my door, activity seemed to have resumed, but of a different sort. They were walking about now, and carrying on an audible if incomprehensible conversation.

And then there was a loud sound, and something or someone bumped into the closet door, and then there was silence. Seconds later a door opened-not, thank God, the closet door, but what sounded like the front door. Then it closed. Then more silence.

And then, finally, I heard the sound that had started the whole thing, a key in a lock. Whoever it was must have walked halfway to the elevator before deciding to come back and lock up. Maybe the afterthought was prompted by natural tidiness, or maybe the door-locker figured this way it would take them longer to discover the body.