You Could Call It Murder

by Lawrence Block

  We sat there and finished our drinks. It took me that long to remember what time it was. It was very late.

  I stood up.

  “Where are you going, Roy?”

  “Back to my hotel. It’s late. We both need our sleep.”

  “Don’t go, Roy.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t want you to.”

  Maybe it was too late for me. I was thick-headed, more so than usually. I stood looking at her while she stood up and moved closer to me.

  “I don’t want to stay here alone,” she said.

  “Frightened?”

  She nodded.

  “I suppose I could sleep on the couch,” I suggested, idiotically. “I’d be right here then. In case you wanted me for anything.”

  She laughed, a sweet girlish laugh. She came close to me and was all at once in my arms, her face pressed against my chest. My arms went around her at once and I held her close. I may have been an idiot, but there are limits.

  I tilted her face up and found her mouth with my own. I kissed her. Her lips were sweet. Her own arms went around my neck and her soft young body was tight against me.

  “You silly man,” she was whispering. “You’re not going to sleep on the couch. You’re going to sleep in the bed, you silly old thing, and so am I. And that way you’ll be right there when I need you. And I’ll need you.”

  And then she kissed me again.

  We moved softly through the apartment, turning off lights and discarding articles of clothing. We found Carole’s bedroom in the darkness, and we found her bed in the darkness, and, finally, we found each other in the darkness.

  There were violins and muted trumpets and crashing cymbals and all the other orchestral paraphernalia one reads about in cheap novels. There were her breasts, firm and full and sweet, offering their young freshness to me. There was her soft and wonderful body, and there was her small animal voice at my ear making small animal noises.

  Then, afterward, there was sleep.

  When I awoke I was the only one in the bed. It was bitterly disappointing. I called her name once or twice, fumbled my way out of the bed and into my clothing. Then I found her note. It was pinned to her pillow, and I should have seen it in the first place.

  Roy darling, it read. A working girl must work. I’m off to the typing pool at Midtown Life. I hope I don’t drown in it. I get finished with work at five and I’ll come right back here. Please be here when I get here. You have the only key, and I’d feel silly as sin cooling my heels in the hallway.

  By the way, your “friend” who lives here has funny taste in clothes. I borrowed one of her dresses. By the way, I think I’m jealous . . .

  There was more, but it was a little too personal to repeat. It was also too personal to leave lying around. I read it, smiled a silly smile, and shredded it. I threw the pieces into the toilet and flushed them away.

  My watch told me that it was ten-thirty. I found a small restaurant on Hudson Street which was open. Most restaurants in the Village begin serving breakfast at noon—which, when you stop to think about it, makes a considerable amount of sense. Ten-thirty is altogether too early an hour for a civilized man to be awake. I went into the restaurant and ate orange juice, toast, and coffee. It wasn’t much but it appeased the inner man.

  It was then time to begin annoying the police.

  I went to the Homicide division. My boon companion Hanovan wasn’t around but he had left word to the effect that I was an abominable nuisance who had to be tolerated. They tolerated me. Someone brought me a copy of the medical examiner’s report on Barbara Taft.

  I read it carefully, which was only a waste of time. It said essentially what Hanovan had told me a night ago—death had occurred roughly three to five days ago, death had been caused by drowning, and no supplementary injuries were described. There were contusions here and there upon the body of the corpse but they were interpreted as having been caused while the body was in the water. None were on the head, which seemed to kill the notion that she’d been knocked unconscious before being dumped into the river.

  I put the report back and asked to see the criminal records of everybody named Dautch. This jarred them a little. They asked why and I told them it was none of their business, which may have been stretching things a bit. But the orders to humor this British idiot had evidently been firm ones indeed. A uniformed policeman brought me a tray filled with cards. There were fourteen of them in all. Who would have suspected that that many persons named Dautch had criminal records in New York City?

  I looked through the cards. Four of the men were obviously out of the picture. They were all over fifty, white-haired and feeble. Five more were currently serving sentences in one prison or another. Of the five who remained, one was nineteen years old, two were tall and blond, one was a Negro. The final “suspect,” if you want to call him that, just didn’t seem to fit the mold. He was a former bank teller who had been convicted once of minor embezzlement and who was now working as a shoe salesman in Washington Heights. I couldn’t picture him as the heavy type who’d been giving Linda such a bad time.

  I sighed. I lighted a cigarette and returned the tray of cards to the long-suffering policeman. There seemed to be no additional way to bother him, so I left the station.

  There was a public telephone booth on the street corner. I went into it and called my answering service. There had been half a dozen calls since I spoke to them last. I jotted down names and numbers on a slip of paper, thanked the properly honey-voiced girl on the other end of the line, and caught a cab back to the Commodore.

  It is hard to say which I needed more, the shower or the shave. I had both and felt human again. I put on clean clothes, went to the phone and began calling the names and numbers on the piece of paper.

  Dean Helen MacIlhenny came first. She’d had a roundabout report of what had happened and wanted to check it with me. I confirmed what she had heard.

  “A terrible thing,” she said. “I feared this, of course. It’s a dreadful thing when a student ends his or her life.”

  “You were afraid it would happen?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Weren’t you, Mr. Markham? Neither of us suggested the possibility, of course. One never does. But one always fears suicide when a moody youngster is missing. It’s one of the less pleasant facts of life. Or of death.”

  I agreed that it was unpleasant.

  “And it happens once or twice a year,” she went on. “Even at a small college like Radbourne. You can count on it—one, two suicides each year. It’s awful that it had to happen to someone like Barbara. I thought a great deal of the girl. Difficult to handle but worth the handling.”

  We talked some more, then ended it. I told her I might be coming up to Cliff’s End soon to round out the case. She assured me that I should always be welcome there and that she’d do anything she could to assist me.

  I made three more calls, none of them having anything to do with Barbara Taft. One was to a tailor who had a suit ready for a preliminary fitting. I told him I was damnably busy and made an appointment for a week later. My bank had a check of mine that I’d written standing up. The signature was different from normal and they wanted to check with me before honoring it. I told them to go ahead. Another number turned out to belong to a man who wanted to sell me some life insurance. When I found out what he wanted I told him that it was sneaky of him to leave a number with no explanation. Then I told him to go to the devil and rang off on him.

  That left two calls to make. One was to a tabloid newspaper. A reporter with gravel in his throat asked me if I had any statement to make in regard to my role in “the Taft case.” I told him I’d been retained by Edgar Taft. He asked me what else I had to say. I said that was all and rang off.

  Then I called Edgar Taft himself.

  “Just wanted to check with you,” he said. “Got anything

  yet?”

  “Not yet.
”

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Listen, they think she killed herself. They think she drove all the way from New Hampshire to New York just to throw herself into the Hudson. That make any goddamned sense to you?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Hell,” he said. “Think about it, Roy. Now let’s forget about the kind of girl Barb was. I say she wouldn’t have killed herself in a million years, but let’s forget that for a minute. Suppose she wanted to do it, she was depressed, maybe she was a little sick in the head. Okay?”

  “All right. But—”

  “Let me finish,” he said. “Now, wouldn’t she just go ahead and kill herself there in Radbourne? Or maybe race her car and crack it up on the road? Hell, why should she drive all the way into New York, go straight into the city without even stopping at home, then park the car neat as you please and take a jump in the river? It doesn’t add up.”

  “Unless she wanted to see somebody here first.”

  “You mean some guy?”

  “A man or a woman. Anyone.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. “Maybe,” he said. “I guess it could have been that way. But I can’t see it, Roy. I know somebody killed her.”

  He paused. “You’ll really work on it, won’t you? That cop sounded so goddamned sure of himself I think he was measuring me for a padded cell of my own. Don’t just play along with me, Roy. Don’t just humor me. If you don’t want to work for me, tell me. I can get somebody else.”

  “I want to work for you, Edgar.” I wasn’t lying. There were too many loose ends for me to accept the suicide pitch that easily. “I think there’s a lot in what you’ve just said. I don’t know what I can accomplish, but I want to work on it.”

  “That’s all I wanted you to say.” He laughed mirthlessly. “I’m a pest,” he went on. “I’ll probably call you once a day. Ignore me, Roy. I’m used to yelling at people until I get results. Just do what you have to do and ignore me.”

  I wanted to tell him it would be as easy to ignore a tornado. Instead I repeated that I’d do what I could. Then I replaced the receiver and left the hotel.

  That afternoon was a painful process of calling people and checking leads that didn’t even begin to develop. All I succeeded in obtaining were some negative results. A friend in the newspaper morgue at the Times brought me what copy had appeared concerning Barbara Taft. There was next to nothing, and none of it helped.

  I ran through other sources and drew other blanks. I managed, in short, to kill a batch of hours until all at once it was five o’clock. That made it time to go back to Horatio Street. I had to be there when Linda arrived. After all, I didn’t want her to cool her heels in the hallway, as she had put it.

  I caught a cab and let my driver worry about the rush hour traffic. He sweated and cursed his way to Horatio Street. I got out of his taxi, paid him, tipped him, and went into the building.

  I walked into the vestibule, stuck my key in the door. I opened it and started inside.

  Some sixth sense warned me. It warned me just in time, and I stepped back quickly.

  The sap whistled past my ear.

  I caught the hand that held it, twisted quickly and moved forward. My man spun around. I let go of him and sank a fist into his middle. He folded up and I hit him in the face.

  But there was another one. He had a sap, too, and he hit me on the head with it. The world spun around and I got a glimpse or two of celestial bodies. I recognized Mars and Saturn. And a boatload of miscellaneous stars.

  I went down to one knee. The first one—the one I had belted, the one who had missed me with his blackjack—was standing against one wall, doubled up in pain and looking unhappy. The other one was ready to hit me over the head again.

  I rolled out of the way. He missed me—evidently neither of them could do much against a moving target. I picked myself up and threw myself at him and we both went down to the floor with me on top. I took one hand and hit him in the face with it. The room was still rocky and my head hurt horribly, so I took my hand and hit him again.

  It was a mistake.

  Because, while I was busy lying there and pounding one clown in the face, the other clown had time to make a partial recovery. I remembered him a little too late. I started to get out of the way but this time, by God, he knew how to nail a moving target.

  The sap crashed over the back of my head and I flopped onto the floor as a fish flops into the bottom of a boat. The whole bloody galaxy paraded itself in front of my eyes this time. I even saw Uranus.

  Then all the stars and planets winked and were gone. The world turned black and grew quiet.

  And that was that.

  Five

  FIRST I heard voices.

  The voices were high and soft and gentle, and for an unhappy moment or two I thought I had died and gone to heaven. Then reality returned; no angels possessed such thick accents, such ear-bending overtones of native New York. Angels, of course, speak the Queen’s English—or what’s a heaven for?

  “He must be dead, Bernie,” one of the angels was saying. “Lookit the guy. He ain’t moving.”

  “He ain’t dead,” Bernie said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who says?”

  A superior snort from Bernie. “You’re a stupid lug, Arnie. You ain’t looked at him, you lug. He’s breathin’.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Silence for a moment. The one named Bernie seemed to be right. I was alive. I could tell because I could feel my head. I didn’t really want to but I couldn’t help it. It felt as though someone had dropped a pneumatic hammer upon it. I began to remember the pair of clowns who had waited for me, the sap that had put me out of the picture.

  “You’re full of it, Bernie. He’s dead.”

  “Wanta bet?”

  “How much?”

  Difficult as it was, I rolled over a bit and opened an eye or two. The light was a shaft of yellow pain that burned straight through my brain. “Hello,” I said pleasantly. “Hello, Bernard. Hello, Arnold. You’d better save your money, Arnold. I’m not dead yet. Almost, but not quite.”

  “Jeez!”

  “Precisely,” I said. “That’s it exactly.” I made the mistake of trying to stand up. It didn’t seem to work. My legs tried their best but proved unequal to their task. The room rocked and I sat down again. I was still in the hallway of Carole’s building on Horatio Street and it was beginning to look as though I’d be there until the end of time.

  “Bernard,” I said. He stepped forward. I reached into my jacket pocket and found that they’d left me with my wallet I took it out and found a dollar bill in it. I folded the dollar crisply and passed it to Bernard.

  “What’s that for, Mister?”

  “For being a good boy,” I said. “For running to the nearest drugstore and bringing Uncle Roy a triple Bromo Seltzer.”

  “Who’s Uncle Roy?”

  “I am,” I said. “Now get that Bromo, will you?”

  He gave me an uncertain nod. He punched Arnie in the arm and they took off, heading out of the building and down the street. I wondered if I would ever see them again. Probably not, I decided. When you’re fool enough to give a twelve year old child a dollar, you shouldn’t expect to see him again.

  I tried to get up again. This time it worked, even though it felt miserable. I stumbled through the vestibule and sat down outside on the stoop in front of the building with my head in my hand. A passing couple stared at me oddly. I didn’t blame them in the least. I shook a cigarette free from the crumpled pack in my pocket and managed to get it lighted. I sucked harsh smoke into my lungs, coughed, then took another drag from the cigarette. The world swam around for a few seconds and came back into focus. My head still ached.

  It would probably be doing that for awhile.

  I didn’t remember Linda until I glanced at my watch. It was six-thirty. I had been unconscious for about an hour, and during that time Lind
a must have returned from work. I thought about the welcome the pair of thugs must have given her and my stomach started to turn over.

  They had her now. And I had a headache and a bad conscience. I wondered where they had taken her, what they had done or were going to do with her.

  Dautch had her, of course. But how the hell he managed to pick her up was beyond me. I was fairly certain they hadn’t managed to follow us the night before. Our cab driver had been a master, and he had lost them neatly. They could have picked up her trail at her office, of course. If they knew she worked for Midtown Life, they could have watched the building and followed her home.

  But they were there before she arrived. Before I arrived, for that matter.

  Which meant they must have recognized me. They must have seen me in the cab with Linda, must have known who I was. Then they picked me up at the Commodore during the day and followed me and—

  Fine.

  But how did the bloody bastards manage to get back to Carole’s apartment building before I did?

  “Hey, mister—”

  I looked up, and my faith in America’s youth was restored. Bernie and Arnie stood before me. Bernie was holding out two large paper cups, one filled with water, the other with Bromo powder. I took them from him, poured the water into the Bromo, and watched it fizz the way it does in the television commercials. Then I drank it down, and it tasted horrible.

  But it helped. I took a deep breath, dragged once more on my cigarette, and got to my feet.

  “Here’s your change, mister.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “That’s yours.”

  “Yeah?”

  “A birthday present from your Uncle Roy,” I said.

  “It ain’t our birthday.”

  “A Christmas present,” I said. “Christmas comes soon, you know.”

  “We know,” Arnie said. “Mister, listen. Bernie and me hang around here almost all the time. You ever want a favor, you just ask us. We’ll help you out.”

  I patted them on the head and told them that was fine. I walked away, wondering what possible help two twelve-year-olds could possibly be to me. Perhaps they could fetch me another bromo the next time I walked into a cosh. That was something.