Keith Prosser

The alarm clock in Jocasta Smith's apartment beeped from 6 a.m. to 7 a.m. every morning for three weeks before the tenant next door found the nerve to knock on my door and ask me to check it out.

I've been a building manager long enough to know this can't be good.

"Sorry, what was that Edith?"

She stares up at me like a mouse asking a cat to pass the cheese.

"I said, at first I thought maybe someone was just on vacation? And forgot to shut off their alarm? But then I thought, what if something's wrong?"

Edith Brennan moved into the bachelor suite next to Jocasta's just under two months ago. I have never heard her speak in more than a breathy whisper. Every time I talk to her I start wondering if there's something wrong with my hearing. She also tends to end her sentences on a higher pitch, as though she's asking a question.

She looks like she's waiting for a signal to leave, standing there fidgeting with her sleeves.

"Don't worry," I sigh. "I'll check it out. I'm sure it's nothing."

Edith murmurs something that could be 'thank you' and scurries back to her apartment. I take a deep breath and follow her down the hall.

I've had this gig for five years now. I can handle the plugged toilets, the dripping ceilings, the periodic battles with roaches and ants. I can play the heavy when the rent's overdue and I can coax old Tony Tsui, who owns the building, to spring for a new dryer when the old one stops working. But oh God, I do not want to deal with this.

I lived in an apartment as a tenant once where someone died. The dead man's apartment and the two next to it were roped off as a biohazard. The next-door tenants were put up in a hotel for a month while all three suites were scoured clean by men and women in yellow hazmat suits.

The smell didn't respect the yellow tape. I don't know how far gone the body was. The sweet rot smell crawled into your nose and down your throat. If you breathed through your mouth you tasted it on your tongue. It's impossible to describe just how revolting it was. The reaction to the smell is hardwired into us: stay away, don't come close.

I'm at Jocasta's door. I knock, because despite all I am an optimist. Predictably, there is no answer. I sniff the air ... if Jocasta is in there, she's not ripe yet. There's a faint smell of cooking bacon and, oddly, cat piss. No pets here. One more thing to check out.

Enough delay.

I knock once more, for form, and turn the key in the door. I'm sweating and cold. The hair is standing up on my forearms.

"Jocasta? Are you here?"

But there's nothing. No one around. The apartment is immaculate except for one meal's worth of dishes drying in the sink and two wine-stained glasses resting on coasters on the coffeetable. I walk into her bedroom and turn off the alarm.

I wipe the sweat off my face with a sleeve and heave a big sigh. No calling hazmat this time.

Then it hits me: the door was unlocked. Who goes away for three weeks and doesn't lock her apartment? Who does all the dishes except for a couple of wine glasses, and yet uses coasters?

Not hazmat. Police. Damn.