"Call Me Back if He's Dead" (2/15/04)

There was never any noise coming from Mr. Heckles' apartment; no television blaring, no radio playing, no phone ringing, no vacuum cleaner running. Ever. He never even turned any lights on after dark, which is why I immediately knew the alarm going off in his apartment that morning wasn't one that could be turned off by a snooze button. Had he fallen and couldn't get up? Whatever the alarm was for, it had been going off for a while; it sounded as if the batteries were almost out of juice. Even more disturbing was the running water-- a LOT of water-- I heard when I knocked on the door to see if everything was okay. I wasn't expecting an answer, considering he had chased away the nephew who showed up to check on him the week before, but I found the persistent, blaring noise disturbing enough to warrant a call to the police.

A pair of cops sauntered up to the third floor about 1/2 an hour later, joking as they ascended the stairs that there was indeed a strange noise coming from the upstairs apartment. My roommate and I invited them in, explaining that we were worried by the noise and that we wanted them to check on Mr. Heckles because he was old and lived by himself. When they asked us how old we thought he was, we just looked at each other, then back at the cops, chiming "old" in near-perfect unison. The cops shook their heads at us, then knocked on the door and, getting no answer, chastised us for calling them instead of our landlords... I thought an old man might be hurt, and they wanted me to call my landlord!?! Incredible.

So they wandered through our place while we rummaged through our files, raising their eyebrows at the empty wine glasses left over from a dinner party we had hosted the night before. I found our landlord's cell number and reluctantly made the call. I apologized profusely for calling before 8:00 a.m. on a Sunday, then explained that the police were there to check on the old man across the hall, but they didn't seem concerned enough to break in, and instead wanted the landlords to come over and let them in. At this point, the male officer took the phone from me, and once he learned that my landlords were still 20 minutes out, he ordered his partner to stay in the apartment with us while he went out for coffee. He made it clear that we had interrupted their breakfast, and that they weren't even supposed to be responding to our call; their beat was south of Montrose and we lived one block north. As he left our apartment, the officer sarcastically said to his partner, "call me back if he's dead!" His name was Sarge.

The officer who remained seemed quite nervous, saying she didn't have a good feeling about the situation. She then excused herself to take a giant dump in our bathroom. It was awful; we were gagging and our eyes were watering, but we had no discreet way to light a match or a candle, and couldn't very well open the window, because it was FEBRUARY! Thankfully, our landlord showed up a few minutes later, but explained that he couldn't get into the apartment either; apparently Mr. Heckles had been holed up in that third-floor apartment for decades, and that he had come with the building; letting him be was one of the conditions of sale when my landlords purchased the property the year before.

The lonely, eccentric man who lived across the hall was not really named Mr. Heckles, but we called him that because of his eerie resemblance to the disheveled, bath-robed character who lived downstairs from Monica and Rachel on Friends. Turns out he was more paranoid than we realized; we knew the "Beware of Dog" sign and the security alarm sticker on the back door were fake, and quickly learned our landlord's key was insufficient because there were floor-to-ceiling locks on both of his doors. Miraculously, though, the back window was not latched, and the landlord used one of our screwdrivers to jimmy the window open.

Just as he was poised to climb through the open window, the rookie cop sprang into action, saying that, since she was the police officer, she should go first. Before she disappeared into the apartment, she turned to my landlord and asked him to hold her belt, passing him her entire holster, with the gun still inside. My roommate and I stood in our doorway, shivering and gaping at our landlord-- who is a very nice man but, to those who don't know him, could easily pass as an Eastern European mobster-- adorned in hefty gold rings and chains, smoking a cigarette, and holding a gun on our back porch. Something tells me that Sarge would not have approved.

Once they were both inside Mr. Heckles' apartment, we closed the back door, only to hear a knock at our front door a moment later. It was our landlord, ashen but (thankfully) unarmed, and he told us that Mr. Heckles was dead.

The next few hours were a blur of activity; detectives, police, paramedics, and medical examiners descended upon our quiet street corner. Sarge came back and praised us for being good neighbors, telling us we did the right thing by calling 911, and never to hesitate to call the police, because after all, it was their job to serve and protect. Funny, but his words rang a little hollow. Since they couldn't get all the door locks open right away, people were trudging through our apartment to gain entry next door. I was not about to let them carry a dead guy through our place and was fully prepared to tell them as much, but thankfully, they managed to get Mr. Heckles' other door unlocked before it came to that.

Once all the activity was contained to the apartment next door, we were shaken, but thought it best to try and carry out our plans for the day. We had been looking forward to trying a new recipe for sformato, which is a mashed-potato pie. We came up a little short on the onion puree, but figured it wouldn't matter much, and neither of us wanted to run to the store at that moment. It was well past 1:00 p.m. by the time it was finished, and as we sat down to eat, we heard a commotion in the hallway. They were removing the body.

Unfortunately, the recipe proportions were a little more crucial than we realized, and the sformato was a little dense, a little dry. As I tried to masticate that first bite, I had a horrible thought, and one look at my roommate told me she was thinking the same thing-- it was just so... fleshy. We dashed to the garbage can, spit out two wet, colorless lumps of food, and tried not to retch as we dumped the entire dish into the trash. We hid in the kitchen until we heard the detectives leave and the corpse-mobile drive away, then we sprinted out the back door and went out for pizza.

Before the police left, the rookie cop came over to update us on the situation. The death had been ruled "natural", and our landlord had confirmed that Mr. Heckles was a "very sick man"; we suspect he had end-stage cancer of some sort. He was found in the bathroom, naked, as if he was getting ready to take a shower and start his day, which explains the running water I heard. The alarm was not a medic alert, but the smoke detector, which, oddly enough was sitting on the table. Perhaps he needed to change the battery? Perhaps he knew he would need to get our attention?!?

Then she told us that they knew he was alive as of 12:08 the day before, because he kept a little book by the front window and recorded peoples' comings and goings (anyone else see the Friends reference here? "9:42-- Noisy girls across the hall made too much noise again..." Yikes!) and the mail had been delivered at 12:08 on Saturday. It turns out that the mailman was his only friend; he left his most treasured belongings to the mailman in the makeshift will he had scribbled into his notebook. I feel bad that I never got to know Mr. Heckles, but am almost certain that he did not want to be known, that he preferred to keep to himself. Still, I find it sad that the brief, fleeting glimpse we got into the window of his life happened after his death, a view that was abruptly cut off the moment his apartment was sealed, orders of the Cook County Medical Examiner.