He cocked his head and looked at me. “You got something, Matt?”
“Nothing worth talking about.”
“If you ever do, I’ll want to hear about it.”
“Sure.”
“You like the life you’re leading? Working private, scuffling around?”
“It seems to suit me.”
He thought it over, nodded. Then he started for the stairs and I followed after him.
Later that evening I managed to reach Ruth Wittlauer. I bundled the stereo into a cab and took it to her place. She lived in a well-kept brownstone a block and a half from Gramercy Park. Her apartment was inexpensively furnished but the pieces looked to have been chosen with care. The place was clean and neat. Her clock radio was tuned to an FM station that was playing chamber music. She had coffee made and I accepted a cup and sipped it while I told her about recovering the stereo from Cary McCloud.
“I wasn’t sure whether you could use it,” I said, “but I couldn’t see any reason why he should keep it. You can always sell it.”
“No, I’ll keep it. I just have a twenty-dollar record player that I bought on Fourteenth Street. Paula’s stereo cost a couple of hundred dollars.” She managed a smile. “So you’ve already more than earned what I gave you. Did he kill her?”
“No.”
“You’re sure of that?”
I nodded. “He’d kill if he had a reason but I don’t think he did. And if he did kill her he’d never have taken the stereo or the drugs, and he wouldn’t have acted the way he did. There was never a moment when I had the feeling that he’d killed her. And you have to follow your instincts in this kind of situation. Once they point things out to you, then you can usually find the facts to go with them.”
“And you’re sure my sister killed herself?”
“No. I’m pretty sure someone gave her a hand.”
Her eyes widened.
I said, “It’s mostly intuition. But there are a few facts to support it.” I told her about the chain bolt, how it had proved to the police that Paula’d killed herself, how my experiment had shown it could have been fastened from the corridor. Ruth got very excited at this but I explained that it didn’t prove anything in and of itself, only that suicide remained a theoretical possibility.
Then I showed her the pictures I’d obtained from Guzik. I selected one shot which showed the chair with Paula’s clothing without showing too much of the window. I didn’t want to make Ruth look at the window.
“The chair,” I said, pointing to it. “I noticed this when I was in your sister’s apartment. I wanted to see a photograph taken at the time to make sure things hadn’t been rearranged by the cops or McCloud or somebody else. But that clothing’s exactly the way it was when I saw it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The supposition is that Paula got undressed, put her clothes on the chair, then went to the window and jumped.” Her lip was trembling but she was holding herself together and I went right on talking. “Or she’d taken her clothes off earlier and maybe she took a shower or a nap and then came back and jumped. But look at the chair. She didn’t fold her clothes neatly, she didn’t put them away. And she didn’t just drop them on the floor, either. I’m no authority on the way women get undressed but I don’t think many people would do it that way.”
Ruth nodded. Her face was thoughtful.
“That wouldn’t mean very much by itself. If she were upset or stoned or confused she might have thrown things on the chair as she took them off. But that’s not what happened. The order of the clothing is all wrong. The bra’s underneath the blouse, the panty hose is underneath the skirt. She took her bra off after she took her blouse off, obviously, so it should have wound up on top of the blouse, not under it.”
“Of course.”
I held up a hand. “It’s nothing like proof, Ruth. There are any number of other explanations. Maybe she knocked the stuff onto the floor and then picked it up and the order of the garments got switched around. Maybe one of the cops went through the clothing before the photographer came around with his camera. I don’t really have anything terribly strong to go on.”
“But you think she was murdered.”
“Yes, I guess I do.”
“That’s what I thought all along. Of course I had a reason to think so.”
“Maybe I’ve got one, too. I don’t know.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I think I’ll poke around a little. I don’t know much about Paula’s life. I’ll have to learn more if I’m going to find out who killed her. But it’s up to you to decide whether you want me to stay with it.”
“Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because it probably won’t lead anywhere. Suppose she was upset after her conversation with McCloud and she picked up a stranger and took him home with her and he killed her. If that’s the case we’ll never know who he was.”
“You’re going to stay with it, aren’t you?”
“I suppose I want to.”
“It’ll be complicated, though. It’ll take you some time. I suppose you’ll want more money.” Her gaze was very direct. “I gave you two hundred dollars. I have three hundred more that I can afford to pay. I don’t mind paying it, Mr. Scudder. I already got . . . I got my money’s worth for the first two hundred, didn’t I? The stereo. When the three hundred runs out, well, you can tell me if you think it’s worth staying with the case. I couldn’t afford more cash right away, but I could arrange to pay you later on or something like that.”
I shook my head. “It won’t come to more than that,” I said. “No matter how much time I spend on it. And you keep the three hundred for the time being, all right? I’ll take it from you later on. If I need it, and if I’ve earned it.”
“That doesn’t seem right.”
“It seems right to me,” I said. “And don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m being charitable.”
“But your time’s valuable.”
I shook my head. “Not to me it isn’t.”
I spent the next five days picking the scabs off Paula Wittlauer’s life. It kept turning out to be a waste of time but the time’s always gone before you realize you’ve wasted it. And I’d been telling the truth when I said my time wasn’t valuable. I had nothing better to do, and my peeks into the corners of Paula’s world kept me busy.
Her life involved more than a saloon on Ninth Avenue and an apartment on Fifty-seventh Street, more than serving drinks and sharing a bed with Cary McCloud. She did other things. She went one evening a week to group therapy on West Seventy-ninth Street. She took voice lessons every Tuesday morning on Amsterdam Avenue. She had an ex-boyfriend she saw once in a while. She hung out in a couple of bars in the neighborhood and a couple of others in the Village. She did this, she did that, she went here, she went there, and I kept busy dragging myself around town and talking to all sorts of people, and I managed to learn quite a bit about the person she’d been and the life she’d led without learning anything at all about the person who’d put her on the pavement.
At the same time, I tried to track her movements on the final night of her life. She’d evidently gone more or less directly to The Spider’s Web after finishing her shift at Armstrong’s. Maybe she’d stopped at her apartment for a shower and a change of clothes, but without further ado she’d headed downtown. Somewhere around ten she left the Web, and I traced her from there to a couple of other Village bars. She hadn’t stayed at either of them long, taking a quick drink or two and moving on. She’d left alone as far as anyone seemed to remember. This didn’t prove a thing because she could have stopped elsewhere before continuing uptown, or she could have picked someone up on the street, which I’d learned was something she’d done more than once in her young life. She could have found her killer loitering on a street corner or she could have phoned him and arranged to meet him at her apartment.
Her apartment. The doormen changed off at midnight, but it was impossible to
determine whether she’d returned before or after the changing of the guard. She’d lived there, she was a regular tenant, and when she entered or left the building it was not a noteworthy occasion. It was something she did every night, so when she came home for the final time the man at the door had no reason to know it was the final time and thus no reason to take mental notes.
Had she come in alone or with a companion? No one could say, which did suggest that she’d come in alone. If she’d been with someone her entrance would have been a shade more memorable. But this also proved nothing, because I stood on the other side of Fifty-seventh Street one night and watched the doorway of her building, and the doorman didn’t take the pride in his position that the afternoon doorman had shown. He was away from the door almost as often as he was on it.
She could have walked in flanked by six Turkish sailors and there was a chance no one would have seen her.
The doorman who’d been on duty when she went out the window was a rheumy-eyed Irishman with liver-spotted hands. He hadn’t actually seen her land. He’d been in the lobby, keeping himself out of the wind, and then he came rushing out when he heard the impact of the body on the street.
He couldn’t get over the sound she made.
“All of a sudden there was this noise,” he said. “Just out of the blue there was this noise and it must be it’s my imagination but I swear I felt it in my feet. I swear she shook the earth. I had no idea what it was, and then I came rushing out, and Jesus God, there she was.”
“Didn’t you hear a scream?”
“Street was empty just then. This side, anyway. Nobody around to scream.”
“Didn’t she scream on the way down?”
“Did somebody say she screamed? I never heard it.”
Do people scream as they fall? They generally do in films and on television. During my days on the force I saw several of them after they jumped, and by the time I got to them there were no screams echoing in the air. And a few times I’d been on hand while they talked someone in off a ledge, but in each instance the talking was successful and I didn’t have to watch a falling body accelerate according to the immutable laws of physics.
Could you get much of a scream out in four seconds?
I stood in the street where she’d fallen and I looked up toward her window. I counted off four seconds in my mind. A voice shrieked in my brain. It was Thursday night, actually Friday morning, one o’clock. Time I got myself around the corner to Armstrong’s, because in another couple of hours Justin would be closing for the night and I’d want to be drunk enough to sleep.
And an hour or so after that she’d be one week dead.
I’d worked myself into a reasonably bleak mood by the time I got to Armstrong’s. I skipped the coffee and crawled straight into the bourbon bottle, and before long it began to do what it was supposed to do. It blurred the corners of the mind so I couldn’t see the bad dark things that lurked there.
When Trina finished for the night she joined me and I bought her a couple of drinks. I don’t remember what we talked about. Some but by no means all of our conversation touched upon Paula Wittlauer. Trina hadn’t known Paula terribly well — their contact had been largely limited to the two hours a day when their shifts overlapped — but she knew a little about the sort of life Paula had been leading. There’d been a year or two when her own life had not been terribly different from Paula’s. Now she had things more or less under control, and maybe there would have come a time when Paula would have taken charge of her life, but that was something we’d never know now.
I suppose it was close to three when I walked Trina home. Our conversation had turned thoughtful and reflective. On the street she said it was a lousy night for being alone. I thought of high windows and evil shapes in dark corners and took her hand in mine.
She lives on Fifty-sixth between Ninth and Tenth. While we waited for the light to change at Fifty-seventh Street I looked over at Paula’s building. We were far enough away to look at the high floors. Only a couple of windows were lighted.
That was when I got it.
I’ve never understood how people think of things, how little perceptions trigger greater insights. Thoughts just seem to come to me. I had it now, and something clicked within me and a source of tension unwound itself.
I said something to that effect to Trina.
“You know who killed her?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “But I know how to find out. And it can wait until tomorrow.”
The light changed and we crossed the street.
She was still sleeping when I left. I got out of bed and dressed in silence, then let myself out of her apartment. I had some coffee and a toasted English muffin at the Red Flame. Then I went across the street to Paula’s building. I started on the tenth floor and worked my way up, checking the three or four possible apartments on each floor. A lot of people weren’t home. I worked my way clear to the top floor, the twenty-fourth, and by the time I was done I had three possibles listed in my notebook and a list of over a dozen apartments I’d have to check that evening.
At eight-thirty that night I rang the bell of Apartment 21G. It was directly in line with Paula’s apartment and four flights above it. The man who answered the bell wore a pair of Lee corduroy slacks and a shirt with a blue vertical stripe on a white background. His socks were dark blue and he wasn’t wearing shoes.
I said, “I want to talk with you about Paula Wittlauer.”
His face fell apart and I forgot my three possibles forever because he was the man I wanted. He just stood there. I pushed the door open and stepped forward and he moved back automatically to make room for me. I drew the door shut after me and walked around him, crossing the room to the window. There wasn’t a speck of dust or soot on the sill. It was immaculate, as well-scrubbed as Lady Macbeth’s hands.
I turned to him. His name was Lane Posmantur and I suppose he was around forty, thickening at the waist, his dark hair starting to go thin on top. His glasses were thick and it was hard to read his eyes through them but it didn’t matter. I didn’t need to see his eyes.
“She went out this window,” I said. “Didn’t she?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Do you want to know what triggered it for me, Mr. Posmantur? I was thinking of all the things nobody noticed. No one saw her enter the building. Neither doorman remembered it because it wasn’t something they’d be likely to remember. Nobody saw her go out the window. The cops had to look for an open window in order to know who the hell she was. They backtracked her from the window she fell out of.
“And nobody saw the killer leave the building. Now that’s the one thing that would have been noticed, and that’s the point that occurred to me. It wasn’t that significant by itself but it made me dig a little deeper. The doorman was alert once her body hit the street. He’d remember who went in or out of the building from that point on. So it occurred to me that maybe the killer was still inside the building, and then I got the idea that she was killed by someone who lived in the building, and from that point on it was just a question of finding you because all of a sudden it all made sense.”
I told him about the clothes on the chair. “She didn’t take them off and pile them up like that. Her killer put her clothes like that, and he dumped them on the chair so that it would look as though she undressed in her apartment, and so that it would be assumed she’d gone out of her own window.
“But she went out of your window, didn’t she?”
He looked at me. After a moment he said he thought he’d better sit down. He went to an armchair and sat in it. I stayed on my feet.
I said, “She came here. I guess she took off her clothes and you went to bed with her. Is that right?”
He hesitated, then nodded.
“What made you decide to kill her?”
“I didn’t.”
I looked at him. He looked away, then met my gaze, then avoided my eyes again. “Tell me about it,”
I suggested. He looked away again and a minute went by and then he started to talk.
It was about what I’d figured. She was living with Cary McCloud but she and Lane Posmantur would get together now and then for a quickie. He was a lab technician at Roosevelt and he brought home drugs from time to time and perhaps that was part of his attraction for her. She’d turned up that night a little after two and they went to bed. She was really flying, he said, and he’d been taking pills himself, it was something he’d begun doing lately, maybe seeing her had something to do with it.
They went to bed and did the dirty deed, and then maybe they slept for an hour, something like that, and then she was awake and coming unglued, getting really hysterical, and he tried to settle her down and he gave her a couple of slaps to bring her around, except they didn’t bring her around, and she was staggering and she tripped over the coffee table and fell funny, and by the time he sorted himself out and went to her she was lying with her head at a crazy angle and he knew her neck was broken and when he tried for a pulse there was no pulse to be found.
“All I could think of was she was dead in my apartment and full of drugs and I was in trouble.”
“So you put her out the window.”
“I was going to take her back to her own apartment. I started to dress her but it was impossible. And even with her clothes on I couldn’t risk running into somebody in the hallway or on the elevator. It was crazy.
“I left her here and went to her apartment. I thought maybe Cary would help me. I rang the bell and nobody answered and I used her key and the chain bolt was on. Then I remembered she used to fasten it from outside. She’d showed me how she could do that. I tried with mine but it was installed properly and there’s not enough play in the chain. I unhooked her bolt and went inside.
“Then I got the idea. I went back to my apartment and got her clothes and I rushed back and put them on her chair. I opened her window wide. On my way out the door I put her lights on and hooked the chain bolt again.
“I came back here to my own apartment. I took her pulse again and she was dead, she hadn’t moved or anything, and I couldn’t do anything for her, all I could do was stay out of it, and I, I turned off the lights here, and I opened my own window and dragged her body over to it, and, oh, God in heaven, God, I almost couldn’t make myself do it but it was an accident that she was dead and I was so damned afraid — ”
The Night and The Music Page 4