I put my own lock over his, walked to the office, and I called the police, because twenty-odd years running a lot teaches you that a smell like that and a shape under a sheet are not things you handle with a flashlight and a brave face. You call people whose job it is.
They came within the hour. I gave them the gate logs, the after-midnight visits, the cash on the first, all of it. Then an officer cut my lock and his, and lifted that door, and I stood back in the lot with my heart going hard.
It was not what the smell and the dark had built in my mind. It was sadder than that, and gentler.
The man had been living in that unit, quietly, for the better part of two years, and some weeks before, alone in the dark of it, his tired heart had simply stopped.
The shape under the sheet was a chair, and the man in it, and the sheet he had pulled over himself against the cold. He had come in only at night because he was ashamed for anyone to see how far he had fallen. He paid cash because cash asks no questions. And when he stopped paying, it was not because he skipped town. It was because he was gone.
I felt an awful weight, thinking of him six blocks from a warm office, freezing and ashamed, and me never once knocking to ask if he was all right.
The police found his name, and from his name, a son, two states away, who had not heard from his father in three years and had feared exactly this without ever being able to prove it.
The son came. He was a wreck, and then, going through what little his father had kept in that unit, he was undone all over again, because it was not junk. It was him. Every school photo, every clipping about the sons life, a shoebox of birthday cards the son had mailed as a boy and the father had carried through every hard year.
The man had lost everything but the record of the one thing he was proud of, and he had guarded it in the dark to the end.
The son buried his father proper, with a stone and a preacher, and he thanked me, of all things, for putting my lock over the door and calling the right people instead of just hauling it to auction like the law would have let me.
I do things different now. When somebody rents the back units for cash and only comes at night, I make a point to knock now and then, just to say hello, just to ask if they need anything. Because the worst thing I found in that unit was not a body. It was a lonely man who thought nobody would come, and I never want to prove another one right.