by Ed McBain
His day was just beginning.
The woman had been stabbed.
It wasn’t such an exciting stabbing, no exotic sexy stuff or anything like that, just a bread knife stuck in her chest, that’s all. She was wearing all her clothes, it was really a pretty routine stabbing. The bread knife had entered at an uptilted angle just below her left breast, the assailant apparently wielding the weapon underhanded rather than attacking with a downward slash. There was a lot of blood all over the kitchen floor (she was lying on her back in front of the sink) and a few broken dishes (apparently her attacker had surprised her in the middle of cleaning up), but it was a pretty run-of-the-mill stabbing, the kind you might expect to get on a Monday night, nothing bizarre or outstanding about it, just a knife sticking out of a dead woman lying on the floor in blood and broken crockery.
Meyer Meyer got to the apartment at three minutes past midnight.
The cop on the beat, a patrolman named Stuart Collister, had phoned in the squeal at 11:55 p.m. after being accosted by a man on the street who said to him, “Officer, excuse me for breaking your ear, but there’s a dead bird upstairs.” The dead bird was the lady with the knife in her chest. Such a bird, she wasn’t. She was all of fifty years old, with large brown eyes that stared up at the ceiling and a generous mouth artfully reduced by the line of her carefully applied lipstick. She was wearing a black dress and a string of pearls and black pumps and black net stockings and she stank to high heaven because she had been dead for some little while. Her color wasn’t too pretty either, because the apartment was a very warm one, with the radiators going full blast, and putrefaction had begun, was in fact well along, so everything smelled and looked terrible, a routine stabbing.
Meyer went outside to talk to the Homicide cops, and then he chatted with the photographer a while, and then he got around to Patrolman Collister, who had held for further questioning the man who’d stopped him on the street.
The man looked too hip for his age; Meyer guessed he was in his early sixties. He was wearing a double-vented blue blazer with brass buttons, beige pipestem slacks, a pale-blue turtleneck sweater, and brown buckskin desert boots. His hair was white, and he combed it the way Julius Caesar must have before he started going bald and took to wearing laurel wreaths. His name was Barnabas Coe, and he was more than eager to tell Meyer exactly how he had discovered the body.
“What’s her name, to begin with?” Meyer asked.
“Margie Ryder. Marguerite.”
“How old is she?”
“Fifty-two, I think.”
“Is this her apartment?”
“Yes.”
“All right, let’s hear it.”
They stood together just outside the front door of the apartment, the laboratory technicians walking in and out of the place with their equipment now, the medical examiner arriving and saying hello to everyone, the photographer coming out into the hall again to get some more flashbulbs from a leather bag on the corridor floor, the DA’s man arriving and saying hello to Meyer and then going over to where the Homicide dicks were telling stories about Stabbings They Had Known. Meyer was a tall man with blue eyes and a bald head, burly in a light-gray topcoat, hatless. The top of Coe’s emperor cut was level with Meyer’s chin. He kept staring up into Meyer’s face as he talked, his head bobbing in emphasis, his blue eyes glowing.
“Margie and I were real tight,” he said, “used to have pads across the hall from each other down in The Quarter, this was, oh, 1960, 1961. Never made it, you understand, but were tight, man, tight. Crazy bird, that Margie, I really dug her. She finally had to move because the loot was running out; up here, the tab’s a lot cheaper.”
“The loot?”
“The insurance loot. Her husband dropped dead just after the war. The real war.”
“How’d he die?” Meyer asked suspiciously.
“Lung cancer,” Coe said, and paused. “Never smoked in his life.”
Meyer nodded. He kept staring at Coe in fascination, studying the hip clothes and hairdo, listening to the jargon, wondering when Coe would reach up to peel off the sixty-year-old rubber mask he was surely wearing, revealing his true teenybopper face.
“Anyway,” Coe said, “we kept the lines open even after she moved. Which is odd, I think, and kind of rare because, whereas The Quarter may not be a garden spot, up here is really the asshole, am I right? I mean, man, cheap is cheap, who wants to live like pigs?”
“Nobody,” Meyer said, and kept staring at the seamed and tired face, the wrinkled flesh around blue eyes that glowed with excitement as Coe told his story.
“Not that she lived like a pig,” Coe said. “That’s a nice pad in there.” He gestured with his head toward the open doorway. “For here,” he amended.
“Yes,” Meyer said.
“She used to come downtown every now and then, and I’d pop in here whenever I was in the neighborhood. She developed a new bag after she moved, writing poetry. Wild, huh?”
“Yeah, wild,” Meyer said.
“She used to read me her stuff whenever I stopped by. ‘Oh great mother city, I spit out your naked tits and suck bilge from your sewers instead.’ That was one of her lines. Tough, huh?”
“Yeah, tough,” Meyer said. “How’d you—?”
“Well, tonight I had a date with a little Puerto Rican bird who lives on Ainsley, sweet oh sweet, these great big marvelous brown eyes and this lovely tight little bod, oh sweet, man.”
“Yeah,” Meyer said.
“Had to get her home by eleven-thirty, though, very strict parents, I’m surprised they didn’t send a dueña along. Well, she’s only nineteen, I guess you’ve got to expect that kind of thing with señoritas.” Coe winked and smiled. Meyer almost winked back at him.
“So I had time to burn, so I decided to hit Margie’s pad, see how she was getting along, maybe listen to some more of her poetry. ‘Your hairy incubus startles me,’ that was another of her lines. Crazy, huh?”
“Yeah, crazy. So what happened when you got here?”
“I knocked on the door, and there was no answer. So I knocked again, and still no answer. Then, I don’t know, I tried the knob. I don’t know why I tried it, I just did. Usually, you knock on a door, nobody answers, you figure the party’s out, am I right?”
“Right.”
“Instead, I tried the knob, and the door opened. So I called out her name, Margie, I said, and still there was no answer. So I looked in. The place reeked. I couldn’t understand that, because Margie always kept everything so neat and clean, you know, almost compulsive. So I went in. And there she was, laying on the kitchen floor in basic black and pearls, and there’s a blade in her chest.”
“What’d you do?”
“I screamed.”
“Then what?”
“I ran downstairs.”
“And then?”
“I found the local fuzz and told him there was a dead bird up here. Margie. I told him she was dead.” Coe paused. “You want the señorita’s name?” he asked.
“What for?”
“Check out my story,” Coe said, and shrugged. “Make sure I really was with her tonight, instead of up here doing poor Margie.”
“From the looks of poor Margie,” Meyer said, “I’d be more interested in knowing where you were a week ago.”
Well, his estimate was a bit off.
He wasn’t a medical examiner, he was just a flatfoot, and the look he’d had of Margie Ryder on the kitchen floor seemed to indicate she’d been dead and gone for at least a week.
Not so, the man who did the autopsy reported. The apartment had been very warm, the man said, a condition rare for a slum dwelling in the month of October, most slum landlords preferring to save their thermal output for the dog days of January and February, and being very chary with the heat before the turn of the year. But of course all the windows
were closed tight and there had been no traffic in or out of the apartment since the time of the murder, which meant that whatever heat did come up in the radiators had been contained and had therefore speeded up the putrefaction and decomposition of poor Margie Ryder.
Friday night was what the medical examiner reported.
Friday night was when the poor bird had been done in, give or take several hours in consideration of human error in trying to deal with variables like heat in slum apartments. Meyer wondered how the city ever hoped to handle the population explosion when all a slum dweller could do after 11:00 on any winter’s night was crawl into bed to seek a little body warmth? He then wondered whether or not Margie Ryder had sought a little body warmth last Friday night, and put the question to the medical examiner, who promptly reported that they’d found no trace of semen in the vaginal vault. Besides, the poor bird had been found fully dressed, her clothing neither torn nor disarrayed; somebody had just stuck a knife in her, that’s all, a routine stabbing.
Meyer said good-bye to the medical examiner. He had come on duty at 4:00 P.M. that Tuesday afternoon, and it was now 4:30, and he figured he’d better get cracking on the case. So he buzzed the lieutenant’s office and asked Byrnes who’d be working it with him, and Byrnes said Cotton Hawes. They were about to leave the squadroom to head for the Ryder apartment, when a man appeared at the slatted wooden railing that divided the squadroom from the corridor outside.
“I want to talk to whoever’s handling the Margie Ryder case,” he said.
“I’m handling it,” Meyer answered.
“Can I come in?”
“Sure,” Meyer said, and rose to open the gate for him. The man was carrying a topcoat over his arm, and he held a gray fedora in his hand. He looked ill at ease in a blue business suit, as though he had dressed especially for his visit to the police station and would have been more comfortable in a sports jacket or a sweater. He took the chair Meyer offered him, and then watched Hawes as he pulled another chair over to the desk.
“I’m Detective Meyer,” Meyer said. “This is Detective Hawes. We’re working the case together.”
“I’m Jim Martin,” the man said. He was a big man, with broad shoulders and a square, craggy face, brown hair worn in a severe military cut, eyes so dark they seemed black, huge-knuckled hands, the hands of a street brawler. He was sitting beside Hawes, who was six feet two inches tall and weighed 200 pounds, and yet he seemed to dwarf him, seemed ready to bulge free of his tightly restraining blue confirmation suit, explode muscularly into the squadroom or perhaps the entire building. There was a nervous undercurrent to this man, the way he clenched and unclenched his enormous hands, the way he kept wetting his lips, his dark eyes darting from Hawes to Meyer, as though uncertain to whom he would tell his story. The detectives waited patiently. At last, Meyer said, “Yes, Mr. Martin?”
“I knew her,” Martin said.
“You knew Mrs. Ryder?”
“I didn’t know she was married,” Martin said.
“A widow. Her husband died shortly after the war.”
“I didn’t know that.”
He fell silent again. He clenched his right hand and then his left. His fedora dropped to the floor, and he picked it up and then looked apologetically at Hawes, who was watching him intently.
“You knew her,” Meyer prompted.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“I’m a bartender.”
Meyer nodded. “Where do you work, Mr. Martin?”
“Over at Perry’s. Do you know it? It’s on DeBeck.”
“Yes, we’re familiar with it,” Hawes said.
“I read in the paper this morning that somebody stabbed her,” Martin said, and again dropped his hat. Hawes retrieved it for him, and he mumbled a “Thank you,” and then turned to Meyer again. “I don’t want to get anybody in trouble,” he said.
The detectives waited.
“But she was a nice lady, Margie, and I can’t see how anyone who knew her could have done a thing like this.”
“Yes?” Meyer said.
“I know you guys don’t need any help from me, I’m just a bartender. I never even read a mystery in my entire life.”
“Go on,” Meyer said.
“But…well, look, the newspaper this morning said nothing was touched in the apartment, so that lets out a burglar. And whoever stabbed her, he didn’t…well, somebody on the scene said it didn’t look like rape had been the motive, I forget who said it, somebody from the District Attorney’s office. So what I mean is this wasn’t somebody who broke into her apartment, you know what I mean? If it wasn’t burglary, and it wasn’t rape, then—”
“Yes, we’re following you, Mr. Martin.”
“Well, if it wasn’t a criminal, if it wasn’t somebody who broke in to do some criminal thing, then it had to be somebody she knew, right?”
“Go on.”
“Well, anybody who really knew Margie would never do a thing like this. She was a sweet, decent person that if you knew her you couldn’t think of ever harming her. She was a lady,” Martin said.
“So what do you think?”
“I think it had to be somebody who didn’t know her.”
“But you said—”
“I mean didn’t know her good. A stranger.”
“I see.”
“A stranger,” Martin repeated, and fell silent again. “Jesus, I hate to get anybody in trouble, I mean it. I may be all wet about this.”
“What’s your idea?”
“Well…a guy came in the bar Friday night, this must’ve been about midnight, I don’t know, around then sometime.”
“Yes, go on.”
“He was pretty wound up, you know, his hands shaking and all that. He had maybe two or three drinks, I don’t remember, sitting at the bar, just putting them away and looking as if…I don’t know…as if somebody was after him or something. You know, he’d look up at the clock, and then he’d turn to look at the door, nervous, you know? Very nervous.” Martin took a deep breath. “So Margie, being the type of person she was, being a really decent human being, she got him talking, and pretty soon he seemed more relaxed. I mean, he wasn’t exactly calm, but he was more relaxed than when he came in. They talked together a long time. He didn’t leave until we closed.”
“What time was that?”
“Two o’clock.”
“He left alone?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Mr. Martin, how do you connect—?
“He came back. It must’ve been about four by then, I was still cleaning up the place. There’s lots of things to do after a bar closes, you know. I usually don’t get out of there till maybe five, five-thirty on a Friday night.”
“What’d he want?”
“He wanted to know Margie’s last name.”
“Did you give it to him?”
“No.”
“Then—”
“He begged me to tell him. He said he knew what it was, she’d told it to him while they were talking, but he’d forgotten it in all the excitement, and now he had to talk to her again, and would I please give him her name. I told him it was four o’clock in the morning, it was too late to talk to her. I told him to come back tomorrow, she usually stopped in after supper, he could talk to her then. So he said, no, he had to talk to her right then, and I told him to buzz off before he got me sore. I’m a pretty big guy, you know. I…I don’t like to shove my weight around, I don’t think I’ve been in a fight since I was twelve years old, I mean it, but this guy was beginning to get on my nerves. What the hell, it was four in the morning, what did he need to talk to Margie for? I told him if he needed a broad, he was barking up the wrong tree, he should go take a walk up Culver Avenue, he’d find a hundred hookers prowling around there.” Martin paused. “I’m sorry, I know you guys do your best, but it
’s the truth.”
“Go on, Mr. Martin.”
“Well, that’s it, I guess. He finally left.”
“What time?”
“Musta been about four-thirty.”
“But you didn’t give him Mrs. Ryder’s last name?”
“No.”
“Or her address?”
“No, of course not.”
“What was his name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t you hear him talking?”
“I was pretty busy Friday night.”
“You didn’t hear any of his conversation with Mrs. Ryder?”
“No.”
“Do you think she really told him her name?”
“I guess so. People usually tell each other what their names are, don’t they?”
“But he’d said he’d forgotten it.”
“Yes.”
“In all the excitement.”
“Yes.”
“What excitement?”
“I don’t know. I guess he meant talking to her. I don’t know.”
“What makes you think he finally located her?”
“Well, he might have remembered her name, and then looked up her address in the phone book. She’s listed. I already checked that before I come here.”
“So you think he may have looked her up in the phone book, and then gone to her apartment?”
“Yes.”
“At four-thirty in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“To talk to her?”
“To lay her,” Martin said, and actually blushed.
Bert Kling had come to the apartment to make love.
It was his day off, and that was what he wanted to do. He had been thinking about it all afternoon, in fact, and had finally come over to the apartment at 4:30, letting himself in with the key Cindy had given him long ago, and then sitting in the darkening living room, waiting for her return.