I took the elevator back down, again waiting at least three minutes for it, and returned to the lobby. I had been gone about ten minutes, mostly because of the elevator. I went up to the glass. “You didn’t see them, did you?”

“I saw the man,” he said. “He came in right after you left and went up to his room.”

“Shit. Came in? You mean, he didn’t go out? And the girl wasn’t with him?”

“Yeah, he came in. And no girl.”

“So he went up to his room. That’s excellent. What’s his room number?”

“Fuck you.”

“I need to talk to this guy,” I said. “I’m a good person. I’m looking for this young girl for her family. I’m not going to make any trouble.”

“Fuck you.”

I took out another twenty and slid it through.

“Sixty-three,” he said.

I waited nearly five minutes for the elevator and thought of walking up the stairs, but then kept on waiting. Finally, it came. I went up to the sixth floor, another long ride. I knocked at sixty-three and got no response. I could hear the TV playing inside, and playing in the other rooms on the hall. I knocked again, but with more force. I said, through the door, “I have a note for you from G.” I thought that might rouse him. I waited. I put my ear against the door and didn’t hear any movement. I tried the knob. Vincent Ettin was not big on locking doors. I let myself in. He was lying on the big queen-size bed, his arms splayed out. There was a band of rubber wrapped around Vincent’s right arm and there was a needle still in his left hand.

I had never seen a dead body in my forty-two years and Vincent Ettin was my first.

Near a deli on Seventh Avenue and Twenty-eighth was a pay phone. It didn’t work. I walked a few blocks south and found one that did work. It had been years since I used a pay phone. I called 911 and reported a dead body in the Senton Hotel on Twenty-eighth Street, room sixty-three. The operator wanted my name and I hung up. I called 911 again, spoke to a different operator, and told that person the same thing and hung up. I wanted to make sure they got it right.

Fifteen minutes before those phone calls, I had been in his room, just staring at the body, terrified and disbelieving, but then I’d had the presence of mind to close the door and I got on the bed right next to him. I cursed myself for not knowing CPR. Do I pinch his nostrils and blow into his mouth? Do I pound on his chest? His eyes were open, but they were like the eyes of a doll. I felt his neck for a pulse, feeling the skin beneath the tattoo, which was some obscure Asian markings, and there wasn’t anything there, no pulse, no life. Then I put my head against his chest and I couldn’t hear anything. But I opened his lips, anyway, and held his nose shut—it’s what I had seen on TV—and I suppressed a scream of terror and blew air into him. I thought I might be sick. I did it for maybe twenty seconds and it had no effect. I pulled away. My first animal instinct had been correct—he was dead.