The Night and The Music

by Lawrence Block

  I woke around ten with less of a hangover than I’d earned and no memory of anything after I’d left Armstrong’s. I was in my own bed in my own hotel room. And my clothes were hung neatly in the closet, always a good sign on a morning after. So I must have been in fairly good shape. But a certain amount of time was lost to memory, blacked out, gone.

  When that first started happening I tended to worry about it. But it’s the sort of thing you can get used to.

  It was the money, the twelve hundred bucks. I couldn’t understand the money. I had done nothing to deserve it. It had been left to me by a poor little rich woman whose name I’d not even known.

  It had never occurred to me to refuse the dough. Very early in my career as a cop I’d learned an important precept. When someone put money in your hand you closed your fingers around it and put it in your pocket. I learned that lesson well and never had cause to regret its application. I didn’t walk around with my hand out and I never took drug or homicide money but I certainly grabbed all the clean graft that came my way and a certain amount that wouldn’t have stood a white glove inspection. If Mary Alice thought I merited twelve hundred dollars, who was I to argue?

  Ah, but it didn’t quite work that way. Because somehow the money gnawed at me.

  After breakfast I went to St. Paul’s but there was a service going on, a priest saying Mass, so I didn’t stay. I walked down to St. Benedict the Moor’s on Fifty-third Street and sat for a few minutes in a pew at the rear. I go to churches to try to think, and I gave it a shot but my mind didn’t know where to go.

  I slipped six twenties into the poor box. I tithe. It’s a habit I got into after I left the department and I still don’t know why I do it. God knows. Or maybe He’s as mystified as I am. This time, though, there was a certain balance in the act. Mary Alice Redfield had given me twelve hundred dollars for no reason I could comprehend. I was passing on a ten percent commission to the church for no better reason.

  I stopped on the way out and lit a couple of candles for various people who weren’t alive anymore. One of them was for the bag lady. I didn’t see how it could do her any good, but I couldn’t imagine how it could harm her, either.

  I had read some press coverage of the killing when it happened. I generally keep up with crime stories. Part of me evidently never stopped being a policeman. Now I went down to the Forty-second Street library to refresh my memory.

  The Times had run a pair of brief back-page items, the first a report of the killing of an unidentified female derelict, the second a follow-up giving her name and age. She’d been forty-seven, I learned. This surprised me, and then I realized that any specific number would have come as a surprise. Bums and bag ladies are ageless. Mary Alice Redfield could have been thirty or sixty or anywhere in between.

  The News had run a more extended article than the Times, enumerating the stab wounds — twenty-six of them — and described the scarf wound about her throat — blue and white, a designer print, but tattered at its edges and evidently somebody’s castoff. It was this article that I remembered having read.

  But the Post had really played the story. It had appeared shortly after the new owner took over the paper and the editors were going all out for human interest, which always translates out as sex and violence. The brutal killing of a woman touches both of those bases, and this had the added kick that she was a character. If they’d ever learned she was an heiress it would have been page three material, but even without that knowledge they did all right by her.

  The first story they ran was straight news reporting, albeit embellished with reports on the blood, the clothes she was wearing, the litter in the alley where she was found, and all that sort of thing. The next day a reporter pushed the pathos button and tapped out a story featuring capsule interviews with people in the neighborhood. Only a few of them were identified by name and I came away with the feeling that he’d made up some peachy quotes and attributed them to unnamed nonexistent hangers-on. As a sidebar to that story, another reporter speculated on the possibility of a whole string of bag lady murders, a speculation which happily had turned out to be off the mark. The clown had presumably gone around the West Side asking shopping bag ladies if they were afraid of being the killer’s next victim. I hope he faked the piece and let the ladies alone.

  And that was about it. When the killer failed to strike again the newspapers hung up on the story. Good news is no news.

  I walked back from the library. It was fine weather. The winds had blown all the crap out of the sky and there was nothing but blue overhead. The air actually had some air in it for a change. I walked west on Forty-second Street and north on Broadway, and I started noticing the number of street people, the drunks and the crazies and the unclassifiable derelicts. By the time I got within a few blocks of Fifty-seventh Street I was recognizing a large percentage of them. Each mini-neighborhood has its own human flotsam and jetsam and they’re a lot more noticeable come springtime. Winter sends some of them south and others to shelter, and there’s a certain percentage who die of exposure, but when the sun warms the pavement it brings most of them out again.

  When I stopped for a paper at the corner of Eighth Avenue I got the bag lady into the conversation. The newsie clucked his tongue and shook his head. “The damnedest thing. Just the damnedest thing.”

  “Murder never makes much sense.”

  “The hell with murder. You know what she did? You know Eddie, works for me midnight to eight? Guy with the one droopy eyelid? Now he wasn’t the guy used to sell her the stack of papers. Matter of fact that was usually me. She’d come by during the late morning or early afternoon and she’d take fifteen or twenty papers and pay me for ‘em, and then she’d sit on her crate down the next corner and she’d sell as many as she could, and then she’d bring ‘em back and I’d give her a refund on what she didn’t sell.”

  “What did she pay for them?”

  “Full price. And that’s what she sold ‘em for. The hell, I can’t discount on papers. You know the margin we got. I’m not even supposed to take ‘em back, but what difference does it make? It gave the poor woman something to do is my theory. She was important, she was a businesswoman. Sits there charging a quarter for something she just paid a quarter for, it’s no way to get rich, but you know something? She had money. Lived like a pig but she had money.”

  “So I understand.”

  “She left Eddie seven-twenty. You believe that? Seven hundred and twenty dollars, she willed it to him, there was this lawyer come around two, three weeks ago with a check. Eddie Halloran. Pay to the order of. You believe that? She never had dealings with him. I sold her the papers, I bought ‘em back from her. Not that I’m complaining, not that I want the woman’s money, but I ask you this: Why Eddie? He don’t know her. He can’t believe she knows his name, Eddie Halloran. Why’d she leave it to him? He tells this lawyer, he says maybe she’s got some other Eddie Halloran in mind. It’s a common Irish name and the neighborhood’s full of the Irish. I’m thinking to myself, Eddie, schmuck, take the money and shut up, but it’s him all right because it says in the will. Eddie Halloran the newsdealer is what it says. So that’s him, right? But why Eddie?”

  Why me? “Maybe she liked the way he smiled.”

  “Yeah, maybe. Or the way he combed his hair. Listen, it’s money in his pocket. I worried he’d go on a toot, drink it up, but he says money’s no temptation. He says he’s always got the price of a drink in his jeans and there’s a bar on every block but he can walk right past ‘em, so why worry about a few hundred dollars? You know something? That crazy woman, I’ll tell you something, I miss her. She’d come, crazy hat on her head, spacy look in her eyes, she’d buy her stack of papers and waddle off all businesslike, then she’d bring the leftovers and cash ‘em in, and I’d make a joke about her when she was out of earshot, but I miss her.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “She never hurt nobody,” he said. “She never hurt a soul.”

  “Ma
ry Alice Redfield. Yeah, the multiple stabbing and strangulation.” He shifted a cud-sized wad of gum from one side of his mouth to the other, pushed a lock of hair off his forehead, and yawned. “What have you got, some new information?”

  “Nothing. I wanted to find out what you had.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  He worked on the chewing gum. He was a patrolman named Andersen who worked out of the Eighteenth. Another cop, a detective named Guzik, had learned that Andersen had caught the Redfield case and had taken the trouble to introduce the two of us. I hadn’t known Andersen when I was on the force. He was younger than I, but then most people are nowadays.

  He said, “Thing is, Scudder, we more or less put that one out of the way. It’s in an open file. You know how it works. If we get new information, fine, but in the meantime I don’t sit up nights thinking about it.”

  “I just wanted to see what you had.”

  “Well, I’m kind of tight for time, if you know what I mean. My own personal time, I set a certain store by my own time.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “You probably got some relative of the deceased for a client. Wants to find out who’d do such a terrible thing to poor old Cousin Mary. Naturally you’re interested because it’s a chance to make a buck and a man’s gotta make a living. Whether a man’s a cop or a civilian he’s gotta make a buck, right?”

  Uh-huh. I seem to remember that we were subtler in my day, but perhaps that’s just age talking. I thought of telling him that I didn’t have a client but why should he believe me? He didn’t know me. If there was nothing in it for him, why should he bother?

  So I said, “You know, we’re just a couple weeks away from Memorial Day.”

  “Yeah, I’ll buy a poppy from a Legionnaire. So what else is new?”

  “Memorial Day’s when women start wearing white shoes and men put straw hats on their heads. You got a new hat for the summer season, Andersen? Because you could use one.”

  “A man can always use a new hat,” he said.

  A hat is cop talk for twenty-five dollars. By the time I left the precinct house Andersen had two tens and a five of Mary Alice Redfield’s bequest to me and I had all the data that had turned up to date.

  I think Andersen won that one. I now knew that the murder weapon had been a kitchen knife with a blade approximately seven and a half inches long. That one of the stab wounds had found the heart and had probably caused death instantaneously. That it was impossible to determine whether strangulation had taken place before or after death. That should have been possible to determine — maybe the medical examiner hadn’t wasted too much time checking her out, or maybe he had been reluctant to commit himself. She’d been dead a few hours when they found her — the estimate was that she’d died around midnight and the body wasn’t reported until half-past five. That wouldn’t have ripened her all that much, not in winter weather, but most likely her personal hygiene was nothing to boast about, and she was just a shopping bag lady and you couldn’t bring her back to life, so why knock yourself out running tests on her malodorous corpse?

  I learned a few other things. The landlady’s name. The name of the off-duty bartender, heading home after a nightcap at the neighborhood after-hours joint, who’d happened on the body and who had been drunk enough or sober enough to take the trouble to report it. And I learned the sort of negative facts that turn up in a police report when the case is headed for an open file — the handful of non-leads that led nowhere, the witnesses who had nothing to contribute, the routine matters routinely handled. They hadn’t knocked themselves out, Andersen and his partner, but would I have handled it any differently? Why knock yourself out chasing a murderer you didn’t stand much chance of catching?

  In the theater, SRO is good news. It means a sellout performance, standing room only. But once you get out of the theater district it means single room occupancy, and the designation is invariably applied to a hotel or apartment house which has seen better days.

  Mary Alice Redfield’s home for the last six or seven years of her life had started out as an old Rent Law tenement, built around the turn of the century, six stories tall, faced in red-brown brick, with four apartments to the floor. Now all of those little apartments had been carved into single rooms as if they were election districts gerrymandered by a maniac. There was a communal bathroom on each floor and you didn’t need a map to find it.

  The manager was a Mrs. Larkin. Her blue eyes had lost most of their color and half her hair had gone from black to gray but she was still pert. If she’s reincarnated as a bird she’ll be a house wren.

  She said, “Oh, poor Mary. We’re none of us safe, are we, with the streets full of monsters? I was born in this neighborhood and I’ll die in it, but please God that’ll be of natural causes. Poor Mary. There’s some said she should have been locked up, but Jesus, she got along. She lived her life. And she had her check coming in every month and paid her rent on time. She had her own money, you know. She wasn’t living off the public like some I could name but won’t.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you want to see her room? I rented it twice since then. The first one was a young man and he didn’t stay. He looked all right but when he left me I was just as glad. He said he was a sailor off a ship and when he left he said he’d got on with another ship and was on his way to Hong Kong or some such place, but I’ve had no end of sailors and he didn’t walk like a sailor so I don’t know what he was after doing. Then I could have rented it twelve times but didn’t because I won’t rent to colored or Spanish. I’ve nothing against them but I won’t have them in the house. The owner says to me, Mrs. Larkin he says, my instructions are to rent to anybody regardless of race or creed or color, but if you was to use your own judgment I wouldn’t have to know about it. In other words he don’t want them either but he’s after covering himself.”

  “I suppose he has to.”

  “Oh, with all the laws, but I’ve had no trouble.” She laid a forefinger alongside her nose. It’s a gesture you don’t see too much these days. “Then I rented poor Mary’s room two weeks ago to a very nice woman, a widow. She likes her beer, she does, but why shouldn’t she have it? I keep my eye on her and she’s making no trouble, and if she wants an old jar now and then whose business is it but her own?” She fixed her blue-gray eyes on me. “You like your drink,” she said.

  “Is it on my breath?”

  “No, but I can see it in your face. Larkin liked his drink and there’s some say it killed him but he liked it and a man has a right to live what life he wants. And he was never a hard man when he drank, never cursed or fought or beat a woman as some I could name but won’t. Mrs. Shepard’s out now. That’s the one took poor Mary’s room, and I’ll show it to you if you want.”

  So I saw the room. It was kept neat.

  “She keeps it tidier than poor Mary,” Mrs. Larkin said. “Now Mary wasn’t dirty, you understand, but she had all her belongings. Her shopping bags and other things that she kept in her room. She made a mare’s nest of the place, and all the years she lived here, you see, it wasn’t tidy. I would keep her bed made but she didn’t want me touching her things and so I let it be cluttered as she wanted it. She paid her rent on time and made no trouble otherwise. She had money, you know.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “She left some to a woman on the fourth floor. A much younger woman, she’d only moved here three months before Mary was killed, and if she exchanged a word with Mary I couldn’t swear to it, but Mary left her almost a thousand dollars. Now Mrs. Klein across the hall lived here since before Mary ever moved in and the two old things always had a good word for each other, and all Mrs. Klein has is the welfare and she could have made good use of a couple of dollars, but Mary left her money instead to Miss Strom.” She raised her eyebrows to show bewilderment. “Now Mrs. Klein said nothing, and I don’t even know if she’s had the thought that Mary might have mentioned her in her will, but Miss Strom said she didn’t know wh
at to make of it. She just couldn’t understand it at all, and what I told her was you can’t figure out a woman like poor Mary who never had both her feet on the pavement. Troubled as she was, daft as she was, who’s to say what she might have had on her mind?”

  “Could I see Miss Strom?”

  “That would be for her to say, but she’s not home from work yet. She works part-time in the afternoons. She’s a close one, not that she hasn’t the right to be, and she’s never said what it is that she does. But she’s a decent sort. This is a decent house.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  “It’s single rooms and they don’t cost much so you know you’re not at the Ritz Hotel, but there’s decent people here and I keep it as clean as a person can. When there’s not but one toilet on the floor it’s a struggle. But it’s decent.”

  “Yes.”

  “Poor Mary. Why’d anyone kill her? Was it sex, do you know? Not that you could imagine anyone wanting her, the old thing, but try to figure out a madman and you’ll go mad your own self. Was she molested?”

  “No.”

  “Just killed, then. Oh, God save us all. I gave her a home for almost seven years. Which it was no more than my job to do, not making it out to be charity on my part. But I had her here all that time and of course I never knew her, you couldn’t get to know a poor old soul like that, but I got used to her. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  “I got used to having her about. I might say Hello and Good morning and Isn’t it a nice day and not get a look in reply, but even on those days she was someone familiar to say something to. And she’s gone now and we’re all of us older, aren’t we?”

  “We are.”

  “The poor old thing. How could anyone do it, will you tell me that? How could anyone murder her?”

  I don’t think she expected an answer. Just as well. I didn’t have one.

  After dinner I returned for a few minutes of conversation with Genevieve Strom. She had no idea why Miss Redfield had left her the money. She’d received $880 and she was glad to get it because she could use it, but the whole thing puzzled her. “I hardly knew her,” she said more than once. “I keep thinking I ought to do something special with the money, but what?”