“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’d 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 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 that 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 redbrown 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 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. “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 it wasn’t tidy. I would keep her bed made, but she didn’t want me touching her things, and so I left the rest cluttered. 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. 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—all Mrs. Klein has is the welfare, and she could have made good use of a couple of dollars, but Mary left her money to Miss Strom instead.” She raised her eyebrows to show her 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 what 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 not get a look in reply, but even on those days she was someone familiar, 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. It’s 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 Redfi
eld 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?”
I made the bars that night, but drinking didn’t have the urgency it had possessed the night before. I was able to keep it in proportion and to know that I’d wake up the next morning with my memory intact. In the course of things, I dropped over to the newsstand a little past midnight and talked with Eddie Halloran. He was looking good and I said as much. I remembered him when he’d gone to work for Sid three years ago. He’d been drawn then, and shaky, and his eyes always moved off to the side of whatever he was looking at. Now there was confidence in his stance and he looked years younger, though it hadn’t all come back to him and maybe some of it was lost forever. I guess the booze had him pretty good before he got it kicked once and for all.
We talked about the bag lady. He said, “Know what I think it is? Somebody’s sweeping the streets.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“A clean-up campaign. A few years back, Matt, there was this gang of kids found a new way to amuse theirselves. Pick up a can of gasoline, find some bum down on the Bowery, pour the gas on him, and throw a lit match at him. You remember?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Those kids thought they were patriots. They thought they deserved a medal. They were cleaning up the neighborhood, getting drunken bums off the streets. You know, Matt, people don’t like to look at a derelict. That building up the block, the Towers? There’s this grating there where the heating system’s vented. You remember how the guys would sleep there in the winter. It was warm, it was comfortable, it was free, and two or three guys would be there every night catching some z’s and getting warm. Remember?”
“Uh-huh. Then they fenced it.”
“Right. Because the tenants complained. It didn’t hurt them any, it was just the local bums sleeping it off, but the tenants pay a lot of rent and they don’t like to look at bums on their way in or out of their building. The bums were outside and not bothering anybody, but it was the sight of them, you know, so the owners went to the expense of putting up cyclone fencing around where they used to sleep. It looks ugly as hell, and all it does is keep the bums out, but that’s all it’s supposed to do.”
“That’s human beings for you.”
He nodded, then turned aside to sell somebody a Daily News and a Racing Form. Then he said, “I don’t know what it is exactly. I was a bum, Matt. I got pretty far down. You probably don’t know how far. I got as far as the Bowery. I panhandled and slept in my clothes on a bench or in a doorway. You look at men like that and you think they’re just waiting to die, and they are, but some of them come back. And you can’t tell for sure who’s gonna come back and who’s not. Somebody coulda poured gas on me, set me on fire. Sweet Jesus.”
“The shopping bag lady—”
“You’ll look at a bum and you’ll say to yourself, Maybe I could get like that and I don’t wanta think about it. Or you’ll look at somebody like the shopping bag lady and say, I could go nutsy like her, so get her out of my sight. And you get people who think like Nazis—you know, take all the cripples and the lunatics and the retarded kids and give ’em an injection and Goodbye, Charlie.”
“You think that’s what happened to her?”
“What else?”
“But whoever did it stopped at one, Eddie.”
He frowned. “Don’t make sense,” he said. “Unless he did the one job and the next day he got run down by a Ninth Avenue bus, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Or he got scared. All that blood and it was more than he figured on. Or he left town. Could be anything like that.”
“Could be.”
“There’s no other reason, is there? She musta been killed because she was a bag lady, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, Jesus Christ, Matt. What other reason would anybody have for killing her?”
THE LAW FIRM where Aaron Creighton worked had offices on the seventh floor of the Flatiron Building. In addition to the four partners, eleven other lawyers had their names painted on the frosted glass door. Aaron Creighton’s came second from the bottom. Well, he was young.
He was surprised to see me, and when I told him what I wanted, he said it was irregular.
“It’s a matter of public record, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes,” he said. “That means you can find the information. It doesn’t mean we’re obliged to furnish it to you.”
For an instant I thought I was back at the Eighteenth Precinct and a cop was trying to hustle me for the price of a new hat. But Creighton’s reservations were ethical. I wanted a list of Mary Alice Redfield’s beneficiaries, including the amounts they’d received and the dates they’d been added to her will. He wasn’t sure where his duty lay.
“I’d like to be helpful,” he said. “Perhaps you could tell me just what your interest is.”
“I’m not sure.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I don’t know why I’m playing with this one. I used to be a cop, Mr. Creighton. Now I’m a sort of unofficial detective. I don’t carry a license, but I do things for people and I wind up making enough that way to keep a roof overhead.”
His eyes were wary. I guess he was trying to guess how I intended to earn myself a fee out of this.
“I got twelve hundred dollars out of the blue. It was left to me by a woman I didn’t really know and who didn’t really know me. I can’t seem to slough off the feeling that I got the money for a reason. That I’ve been paid in advance.”
“Paid for what?”
“To try and find out who killed her.”
“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”
“I don’t want to get the heirs together to challenge the will, if that was what was bothering you. And I can’t quite make myself suspect that one of her beneficiaries killed her for the money she was leaving him. For one thing, she doesn’t seem to have told people they were named in her will. She never said anything to me or to the two people I’ve spoken with thus far. For another, it wasn’t the sort of murder that gets committed for gain. It was deliberately brutal.”
“Then why do you want to know who the other beneficiaries are?”
“I don’t know. Part of it’s cop training. When you’ve got any specific leads, any hard facts, you run them down before you cast a wider net. That’s only part of it. I suppose I want to get more of a sense of the woman. That’s probably all I can realistically hope to get, anyway. I don’t stand much chance of tracking her killer.”
“The police don’t seem to have gotten very far.”
I nodded. “I don’t think they tried too hard. And I don’t think they knew she had an estate. I talked to one of the cops on the case, and if he had known that, he’d have mentioned it to me. There was nothing in her file. My guess is that they waited for her killer to run a string of murders so they’d have something more concrete to work with. It’s the kind of senseless crime that usually gets repeated.” I closed my eyes for a moment, reaching for an errant thought. “But he didn’t repeat,” I said. “So they put it on a back burner, and then they took it off the stove altogether.”
“I don’t know much about police work. I’m involved largely with estates and trusts.” He tried a smile. “Most of my clients die of natural causes. Murder’s an exception.”
“It generally is. I’ll probably never find him. I certainly don’t expect to find him. Hell, it was all those months ago. He could have been a sailor off a ship, got tanked up and went nuts and he’s in Macao or Port-au-Prince by now. No witnesses and no clues and no suspects and the trail’s three months cold by now, and it’s a fair bet the killer doesn’t remember what he did. So many murders take place in blackout.”
“Blackout?” He frowned. “You don’t mean in the dark?”
“Alcoholic blackout. The prisons are full
of men who got drunk and shot their wives or their best friends. Now they’re serving twenty-to-life for something they don’t recollect at all.”
The idea unsettled him, and he looked especially young now. “That’s terrifying,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I originally gave some thought to criminal law. My uncle Jack talked me out of it. He said you either starve or you spend your time helping professional criminals beat the system. He said that was the only way you made good money out of a criminal practice, and what you wound up doing was unpleasant and basically immoral. Of course, there are a couple of superstar criminal lawyers, the hotshots everybody knows, but the other ninety-nine percent fit what Uncle Jack said.”
“I would think so, yes.”
“I guess I made the right decision.” He took his glasses off, inspected them, decided they were clean, put them back on again. “Sometimes I’m not so sure,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder. I’ll get that list for you. I should probably check with someone to make sure it’s all right, but I’m not going to bother. You know lawyers. If you ask them whether it’s all right to do something, they’ll automatically say no. Because inaction is always safer than action, and they can’t get in trouble for giving you bad advice if they tell you to sit on your hands and do nothing. I’m going overboard. Most of the time I like what I do and I’m proud of my profession. This’ll take me a few minutes. Do you want some coffee in the meantime?”
I let him have his girl bring me a cup, black, no sugar. By the time I was done with the coffee, he had the list ready.
“If there’s anything else I can do—”
I told him I’d let him know. He walked out to the elevator with me, waited for the cage to come wheezing up, and shook my hand. I watched him turn and head back to his office, and I had the feeling he’d have preferred to come along with me. In a day or so he’d change his mind, but right now he didn’t seem too crazy about his job.
THE NEXT WEEK I worked my way through the list Aaron Creighton had given me, knowing what I was doing was essentially purposeless but compulsive about doing it all the same.
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