The Night and The Music

by Lawrence Block

  “And you dropped her out and closed the window.” He nodded. “And if her neck was broken it was something that happened in the fall. And whatever drugs were in her system was just something she’d taken by herself, and they’d never do an autopsy anyway. And you were home free.”

  “I didn’t hurt her,” he said. “I was just protecting myself.”

  “Do you really believe that, Lane?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not a doctor. Maybe she was dead when you threw her out the window. Maybe she wasn’t.”

  “There was no pulse!”

  “You couldn’t find a pulse. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t any. Did you try artificial respiration? Do you know if there was any brain activity? No, of course not. All you know was that you looked for a pulse and you couldn’t find one.”

  “Her neck was broken.”

  “Maybe. How many broken necks have you had occasion to diagnose? And people sometimes break their necks and live anyway. The point is that you couldn’t have known she was dead and you were too worried about your own skin to do what you should have done. You should have phoned for an ambulance. You know that’s what you should have done and you knew it at the time but you wanted to stay out of it. I’ve known junkies who left their buddies to die of overdoses because they didn’t want to get involved. You went them one better. You put her out a window and let her fall twenty-one stories so that you wouldn’t get involved, and for all you know she was alive when you let go of her.”

  “No,” he said. “No. She was dead.”

  I’d told Ruth Wittlauer she could wind up believing whatever she wanted. People believe what they want to believe. It was just as true for Lane Posmantur.

  “Maybe she was dead,” I said. “Maybe that’s your fault, too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You said you slapped her to bring her around. What kind of a slap, Lane?”

  “I just tapped her on the face.”

  “Just a brisk slap to straighten her out.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Oh, hell, Lane. Who knows how hard you hit her? Who knows whether you may not have given her a shove? She wasn’t the only one on pills. You said she was flying. Well, I think maybe you were doing a little flying yourself. And you’d been sleepy and you were groggy and she was buzzing around the room and being a general pain in the ass, and you gave her a slap and a shove and another slap and another shove and — ”

  “No!”

  “And she fell down.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “It always is.”

  “I didn’t hurt her. I liked her. She was a good kid, we got on fine, I didn’t hurt her, I—”

  “Put your shoes on, Lane.”

  “What for?”

  “I’m taking you to the police station. It’s a few blocks from here, not very far at all.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “I’m not a policeman.” I’d never gotten around to saying who I was and he’d never thought to ask. “My name’s Scudder, I’m working for Paula’s sister. I suppose you’re under citizen’s arrest. I want you to come to the precinct house with me. There’s a cop named Guzik there and you can talk to him.”

  “I don’t have to say anything,” he said. He thought for a moment. “You’re not a cop.”

  “No.”

  “What I said to you doesn’t mean a thing.” He took a breath, straightened up a little in his chair. “You can’t prove a thing,” he said. “Not a thing.”

  “Maybe I can and maybe I can’t. You probably left prints in Paula’s apartment. I had them seal the place a while ago and maybe they’ll find traces of your presence. I don’t know if Paula left any prints here or not. You probably scrubbed them up. But there may be neighbors who know you were sleeping with her, and someone may have noticed you scampering back and forth between the apartments that night, and it’s even possible a neighbor heard the two of you struggling in here just before she went out the window. When the cops know what to look for, Lane, they usually find it sooner or later. It’s knowing what you’re after that’s the hard part.

  “But that’s not even the point. Put your shoes on, Lane. That’s right. Now we’re going to go see Guzik, that’s his name, and he’s going to advise you of your rights. He’ll tell you that you have a right to remain silent, and that’s the truth, Lane, that’s a right that you have. And if you remain silent and if you get a decent lawyer and do what he tells you I think you can beat this charge, Lane. I really do.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Why?” I was starting to feel tired, drained, but I kept on with it. “Because the worst thing you could do is remain silent, Lane. Believe me, that’s the worst thing you could do. If you’re smart you’ll tell Guzik everything you remember. You’ll make a complete voluntary statement and you’ll read it over when they type it up and you’ll sign your name on the bottom.

  “Because you’re not really a killer, Lane. It doesn’t come easily to you. If Cary McCloud had killed her he’d never lose a night’s sleep over it. But you’re not a sociopath. You were drugged and half-crazy and terrified and you did something wrong and it’s eating you up. Your face fell apart the minute I walked in here tonight. You could play it cute and beat this charge, Lane, but all you’d wind up doing is beating yourself.

  “Because you live on a high floor, Lane, and the ground’s only four seconds away. And if you squirm off the hook you’ll never get it out of your head, you’ll never be able to mark it Paid in Full, and one day or night you’ll open the window and you’ll go out of it, Lane. You’ll remember the sound her body made when she hit the street — ”

  “No!”

  I took his arm. “Come on,” I said. “We’ll go see Guzik.”

  He was a thin young man in a blue pinstripe suit. His shirt was white with a button-down collar. His glasses had oval lenses in brown tortoiseshell frames. His hair was a dark brown, short but not severely so, neatly combed, parted on the right. I saw him come in and watched him ask a question at the bar. Billie was working afternoons that week. I watched as he nodded at the young man, then swung his sleepy eyes over in my direction. I lowered my own eyes and looked at a cup of coffee laced with bourbon while the fellow walked over to my table.

  “Matthew Scudder?” I looked up at him, nodded. “I’m Aaron Creighton. I looked for you at your hotel. The fellow on the desk told me I might find you here.”

  Here was Armstrong’s, a Ninth Avenue saloon around the corner from my Fifty-seventh Street hotel. The lunch crowd was gone except for a couple of stragglers in front whose voices were starting to thicken with alcohol. The streets outside were full of May sunshine. The winter had been cold and deep and long. I couldn’t recall a more welcome spring.

  “I called you a couple times last week, Mr. Scudder. I guess you didn’t get my messages.”

  I’d gotten two of them and ignored them, not knowing who he was or what he wanted and unwilling to spend a dime for the answer. But I went along with the fiction. “It’s a cheap hotel,” I said. “They’re not always too good about messages.”

  “I can imagine. Uh. Is there someplace we can talk?”

  “How about right here?”

  He looked around. I don’t suppose he was used to conducting his business in bars but he evidently decided it would be all right to make an exception. He set his briefcase on the floor and seated himself across the table from me. Angela, the new day-shift waitress, hurried over to get his order. He glanced at my cup and said he’d have coffee, too.

  “I’m an attorney,” he said. My first thought was that he didn’t look like a lawyer, but then I realized he probably dealt with civil cases. My experience as a cop had given me a lot of experience with criminal lawyers. The breed ran to several types, none of them his.

  I waited for him to tell me why he wanted to hire me. But he crossed me up.

  “I’m handling an estate,” he said, and
paused, and gave what seemed a calculated if well-intentioned smile. “It’s my pleasant duty to tell you you’ve come into a small legacy, Mr. Scudder.”

  “Someone’s left me money?”

  “Twelve hundred dollars.”

  Who could have died? I’d lost touch long since with any of my relatives. My parents went years ago and we’d never been close with the rest of the family.

  I said, “Who — ?”

  “Mary Alice Redfield.”

  I repeated the name aloud. It was not entirely unfamiliar but I had no idea who Mary Alice Redfield might be. I looked at Aaron Creighton. I couldn’t make out his eyes behind the glasses but there was a smile’s ghost on his thin lips, as if my reaction was not unexpected.

  “She’s dead?”

  “Almost three months ago.”

  “I didn’t know her.”

  “She knew you. You probably knew her, Mr. Scudder. Perhaps you didn’t know her by name.” His smile deepened. Angela had brought his coffee. He stirred milk and sugar into it, took a careful sip, nodded his approval. “Miss Redfield was murdered.” He said this as if he’d had practice uttering a phrase which did not come naturally to him. “She was killed quite brutally in late February for no apparent reason, another innocent victim of street crime.”

  “She lived in New York?”

  “Oh, yes. In this neighborhood.”

  “And she was killed around here?”

  “On West Fifty-fifth Street between Ninth and Tenth avenues. Her body was found in an alleyway. She’d been stabbed repeatedly and strangled with the scarf she had been wearing.”

  Late February. Mary Alice Redfield. West Fifty-fifth between Ninth and Tenth. Murder most foul. Stabbed and strangled, a dead woman in an alleyway. I usually kept track of murders, perhaps out of a vestige of professionalism, perhaps because I couldn’t cease to be fascinated by man’s inhumanity to man. Mary Alice Redfield had willed me twelve hundred dollars. And someone had knifed and strangled her, and —

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said. “The shopping bag lady.”

  Aaron Creighton nodded.

  New York is full of them. East Side, West Side, each neighborhood has its own supply of bag women. Some of them are alcoholic but most of them have gone mad without any help from drink. They walk the streets, huddle on stoops or in doorways. They find sermons in stones and treasures in trash cans. They talk to themselves, to passersby, to God. Sometimes they mumble. Now and then they shriek.

  They carry things around with them, the bag women. The shopping bags supply their generic name and their chief common denominator. Most of them seem to be paranoid, and their madness convinces them that their possessions are very valuable, that their enemies covet them. So their shopping bags are never out of their sight.

  There used to be a colony of these ladies who lived in Grand Central Station. They would sit up all night in the waiting room, taking turns waddling off to the lavatory from time to time. They rarely talked to each other but some herd instinct made them comfortable with one another. But they were not comfortable enough to trust their precious bags to one another’s safekeeping, and each sad crazy lady always toted her shopping bags to and from the ladies’ room.

  Mary Alice Redfield had been a shopping bag lady. I don’t know when she set up shop in the neighborhood. I’d been living in the same hotel ever since I resigned from the NYPD and separated from my wife and sons, and that was getting to be quite a few years now. Had Miss Redfield been on the scene that long ago? I couldn’t remember her first appearance. Like so many of the neighborhood fixtures, she had been part of the scenery. Had her death not been violent and abrupt I might never have noticed she was gone. I’d never known her name. But she had evidently known mine, and had felt something for me that prompted her to leave money to me. How had she come to have money to leave?

  She’d had a business of sorts. She would sit on a wooden soft drink case, surrounded by three or four shopping bags, and she would sell newspapers. There’s an all-night newsstand at the corner of Fifty-seventh and Eighth, and she would buy a few dozen papers there, carry them a block west to the corner of Ninth, and set up shop in a doorway. She sold the papers at retail, though I suppose some people tipped her a few cents. I could remember a few occasions when I’d bought a paper and waved away change from a dollar bill. Bread upon the waters, perhaps, if that was what had moved her to leave me the money.

  I closed my eyes, brought her image into focus. A thick-set woman, stocky rather than fat. Five-three or -four. Dressed usually in shapeless clothing, colorless gray and black garments, layers of clothing that varied with the season. I remembered that she would sometimes wear a hat, an old straw affair with paper and plastic flowers poked into it. And I remembered her eyes, large guileless blue eyes that were many years younger than the rest of her.

  Mary Alice Redfield.

  “Family money,” Aaron Creighton was saying. “She wasn’t wealthy but she had come from a family that was comfortably fixed. A bank in Baltimore handled her funds. That’s where she was from originally, Baltimore, though she’d lived in New York for as long as anyone can remember. The bank sent her a check every month. Not very much, a couple of hundred dollars, but she hardly spent anything. She paid her rent — ”

  “I thought she lived on the street.”

  “No, she had a furnished room a few doors down the street from where she was killed. She lived in another rooming house on Tenth Avenue before that but moved when the building was sold. That was six or seven years ago and she lived on Fifty-fifth Street from then until her death. Her room cost her eighty dollars a month. She spent a few dollars on food. I don’t know what she did with the rest. The only money in her room was a coffee can full of pennies. I’ve been checking the banks and there’s no record of a savings account. I suppose she may have spent it or lost it or given it away. She wasn’t very firmly grounded in reality.”

  “No, I don’t suppose she was.”

  He sipped at his coffee. “She probably belonged in an institution,” he said. “At least that’s what people would say, but she got along in the outside world, she functioned well enough. I don’t know if she kept herself clean and I don’t know anything about how her mind worked but I think she must have been happier than she would have been in an institution. Don’t you think?”

  “Probably.”

  “Of course she wasn’t safe, not as it turned out, but anybody can get killed on the streets of New York.” He frowned briefly, caught up in a private thought. Then he said, “She came to our office ten years ago. That was before my time.” He told me the name of his firm, a string of Anglo-Saxon surnames. “She wanted to draw a will. The original will was a very simple document leaving everything to her sister. Then over the years she would come in from time to time to add codicils leaving specific sums to various persons. She had made a total of thirty-two bequests by the time she died. One was for twenty dollars — that was to a man named John Johnson whom we haven’t been able to locate. The remainder all ranged from five hundred to two thousand dollars.” He smiled. “I’ve been given the task of running down the heirs.”

  “When did she put me into her will?”

  “Two years ago in April.”

  I tried to think what I might have done for her then, how I might have brushed her life with mine. Nothing.

  “Of course the will could be contested, Mr. Scudder. It would be easy to challenge Miss Redfield’s competence and any relative could almost certainly get it set aside. But no one wishes to challenge it. The total amount involved is slightly in excess of a quarter of a million dollars — ”

  “That much.”

  “Yes. Miss Redfield received substantially less than the income which her holdings drew over the years, so the principal kept growing during her lifetime. Now the specific bequests she made total thirty-eight thousand dollars, give or take a few hundred, and the residue goes to Miss Redfield’s sister. The sister — her name is Mrs. Palmer — is a widow with grown c
hildren. She’s hospitalized with cancer and heart trouble and I believe diabetic complications and she hasn’t long to live. Her children would like to see the estate settled before their mother dies, and they have enough local prominence to hurry the will through probate. So I’m authorized to tender checks for the full amount of the specific bequests on the condition that the legatees sign quit-claims acknowledging that this payment discharges in full the estate’s indebtedness to them.”

  There was more legalese of less importance. Then he gave me papers to sign and the whole procedure ended with a check on the table. It was payable to me and in the amount of twelve hundred dollars and no cents.

  I told Creighton I’d pay for his coffee.

  I had time to buy myself another drink and still get to my bank before the windows closed. I put a little of Mary Alice Redfield’s legacy in my savings account, took some in cash, and sent a money order to Anita and my sons. I stopped at my hotel to check for messages. There weren’t any. I had a drink at McGovern’s and crossed the street to have another at Polly’s Cage. It wasn’t five o’clock yet but the bar was doing good business already.

  It turned into a funny night. I had dinner at the Greek place and read the Post, spent a little time at Joey Farrell’s on Fifty-eighth Street, then wound up getting to Armstrong’s around ten-thirty or thereabouts. I spent part of the evening alone at my usual table and part of it in conversation at the bar. I made a point of stretching my drinks, mixing my bourbon with coffee, making a cup last a while, taking a glass of plain water from time to time.

  But that never really works. If you’re going to get drunk you’ll manage it somehow. The obstacles I placed in my path just kept me up later. By two-thirty I’d done what I had set out to do. I’d made my load and I could go home and sleep it off.