A Stab in the Dark

Page 4

 

  The building where Barbara Ettinger had lived and died was on Wyckoff Street between Nevins and Bond. It was a brick tenement, five stories tall with four small apartments on each floor, and it had thus escaped the conversion that had already turned many of the brownstones back into the one-family houses they had originally been. Still, the building had been spruced up some. I stood in the vestibule and checked the names on the mailboxes, comparing them to those Id copied from an old city directory. Of the twenty apartments, only six held tenants whod been there at the time of the murder.

  Except you cant go by names on mailboxes. People get married or unmarried and their names change. An apartment gets sublet to keep the landlord from raising the rent, and the name of a long-dead tenant stays on the lease and on the mailbox for ages. A roommate moves in, then stays on when the original leaseholder moves out. There are no shortcuts. You have to knock on all the doors.

  I rang a bell, got buzzed in, went to the top floor and worked my way down. Its a little easier when you have a badge to flash but the manners more important than the ID, and I couldnt lose the manner if I tried. I didnt tell anyone I was a cop, but neither did I try to keep anyone from making the assumption.

  The first person I talked to was a young mother in one of the rear apartments on the top floor. Her baby cried in the next room while we talked. Shed moved in within the past year, she told me, and she didnt know anything about a murder nine years previously. She asked anxiously if it had taken place in that very apartment, and seemed at once relieved and disappointed to learn it had not.

  A Slavic woman, her hands liver-spotted and twisted with arthritis, gave me a cup of coffee in her fourth-floor front apartment. She put me on the couch and turned her own chair to face me. It had been positioned so she could watch the street.

  Shed been in that apartment for almost forty years, she told me. Up until four years ago her husband had been there, but now he was gone and she was alone. The neighborhood, she said, was getting better. "But the old people are going. Places I shopped for years are gone. And the price of everything! I dont believe the prices. "

  She remembered the icepick murder, though she was surprised it had been nine years. It didnt seem that long to her. The woman who was killed was a nice woman, she said. "Only nice people get killed. "

  She didnt seem to remember much about Barbara Ettinger beyond her niceness. She didnt know if she had been especially friendly or unfriendly with any of the other neighbors, if shed gotten on well or poorly with her husband. I wondered if she even remembered what the woman had looked like, and wished I had a picture to show her. I might have asked London for one if Id thought of it.

  Another woman on the fourth floor, a Miss Wicker, was the only person to ask for identification. I told her I wasnt a policeman, and she left the chain lock on the door and spoke to me through a two-inch opening, which didnt strike me as unreasonable. Shed only been in the building a few years, did know about the murder and that the Icepick Prowler had been recently apprehended, but that was the extent of her information.

  "People let anyone in," she said. "We have an intercom here but people just buzz you in without determining who you are. People talk about crime but they never believe it can happen to them, and then it does. " I thought of telling her how easy it would be to snap her chain lock with a bolt cutter, but I decided her anxiety level was high enough already.

  A lot of the tenants were out for the day. On the third floor, Barbara Ettingers floor, I got no response from one of the rear apartments, then paused in front of the adjoining door. The pulse of disco music came through it. I knocked, and after a moment the door was opened by a man in his late twenties. He had short hair and a mustache, and he was wearing nothing but a pair of blue-striped white gym shorts. His body was well-muscled, and his tanned skin glistened with a light coating of sweat.

  I told him my name and that Id like to ask him a few questions. He led me inside, closed the door, then moved past me and crossed the room to the radio. He lowered the volume about halfway, paused, turned it off altogether.

  There was a large mat in the center of the uncarpeted parquet floor. A barbell and a pair of dumbbells reposed on it, and a jump rope lay curled on the floor alongside. "I was just working out," he said. "Wont you sit down? That chairs the comfortable one. The others nice to visit but you wouldnt want to live there. "

  I took the chair while he sat on the mat and folded his legs tailor-fashion. His eyes brightened with recognition when I mentioned the murder in 3-A. "Donald told me," he said. "Ive only been here a little over a year but Donalds been living here for ages. Hes watched the neighborhood become positively chic around him. Fortunately this particular building retains its essential tackiness. Youll probably want to talk to Donald but he wont be home from work until six or six thirty. "

  "Whats Donalds last name?"

  "Gilman. " He spelled it. "And Im Rolfe Waggoner. Thats Rolfe with an e. I was just reading about the Icepick Prowler. Of course I dont remember the case. I was in high school then. That was back home in Indiana-Muncie, Indiana-and that was a long ways from here. " He thought for a moment. "In more ways than one," he said.

  "Was Mr. Gilman friendly with the Ettingers?"

  "He could answer that better than I can. Youve caught the man who did it, havent you? I read that he was in a mental hospital for years and nobody ever knew he killed anybody, and then he was released and they caught him and he confessed or something?"

  "Something like that. "

  "And now you want to make sure you have a good case against him. " He smiled. He had a nice open face and he seemed quite at ease, sitting on a mat in his gym shorts. Gay men used to be so much more defensive, especially around cops. "It must be complicated with something that happened so many years ago. Have you talked with Judy? Judy Fairborn, shes in the apartment where the Ettingers used to live. She works nights, shes a waitress, so shell be home now unless shes at an audition or a dance class or shopping or-well, shell be home unless shes out, but thats always the case, isnt it?" He smiled again, showing me perfectly even teeth. "But maybe youve already spoken with her. "

  "Not yet. "

  "Shes new. I think she moved in about six months ago. Would you want to talk to her anyway?"

  "Yes. "

  He uncoiled, sprang lightly to his feet. "Ill introduce you," he said. "Just let me put some clothes on. I wont be a minute. "

  He reappeared wearing jeans and a flannel shirt and running shoes without socks. We crossed the hall and he knocked on the door of Apartment 3-A. There was silence, then footsteps and a womans voice asking who it was.

  "Just Rolfe," he said. "In the company of a policeman whod like to grill you, Ms. Fairborn. "

  "Huh?" she said, and opened the door. She might have been Rolfes sister, with the same light brown hair, the same regular features, the same open Midwestern countenance. She wore jeans, too, and a sweater and penny loafers. Rolfe introduced us and she stepped aside and motioned us in. She didnt know anything about the Ettingers, and her knowledge of the murder was limited to the fact that it had taken place there. "Im glad I didnt know before I moved in," she said, "because I might have let it spook me, and that would have been silly, wouldnt it? Apartments are too hard to find. Who can afford to be superstitious?"

  "Nobody," Rolfe said. "Not in this market. "

  They talked about the First Avenue Slasher, and about a recent wave of local burglaries, including one a week ago on the first floor. I asked if I could have a look at the kitchen. I was on my way there as I asked the question. I think Id have remembered the layout anyway, but Id already been in other apartments in the building and they were all the same.

  Judy said, "Is this where it happened? Here in the kitchen?"

  "Where did you think?" Rolfe asked her. "The bedroom?"

  "I guess I didnt think about it. "

  "You didnt even wonder? Sounds like repression. "

  "Maybe. "
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  I tuned out their conversation. I tried to remember the room, tried to peel off nine years and be there once again, standing over Barbara Ettingers body. Shed been near the stove then, her legs extending into the center of the small room, her head turned toward the living room. There had been linoleum on the floor and that was gone, the original wood floor restored and glossy with polyurethane. And the stove looked new, and plaster had been removed to expose the brick exterior wall. I couldnt be sure the brick hadnt been exposed previously, nor could I know how much of my mental picture was real. The memory is a cooperative animal, eager to please; what it cannot supply it occasionally invents, sketching carefully to fill in the blanks.

  Why the kitchen? The door led into the living room, and shed let him in either because she knew who he was or in spite of the fact that she didnt, and then what? He drew the icepick and she tried to get away from him? Caught her heel in the linoleum and went sprawling, and then he was on her with the pick?

  The kitchen was the middle room, separating the living room and bedroom. Maybe he was a lover and they were on their way to bed when he surprised her with a few inches of pointed steel. But wouldnt he wait until they got where they were going?

  Maybe she had something on the stove. Maybe she was fixing him a cup of coffee. The kitchen was too small to eat in but more than large enough for two people to stand comfortably waiting for water to boil.

  Then a hand over her mouth to muffle her cries and a thrust into her heart to kill her. Then enough other thrusts of the icepick to make it look like the Icepick Prowlers work.

  Had the first wound killed her? I remembered beads of blood. Dead bodies dont bleed freely, but neither do most puncture wounds. The autopsy had indicated a wound in the heart that had been more or less instantly fatal. It might have been the first wound inflicted or the last, for all Id seen in the Medical Examiners report.

  Judy Fairborn filled a teakettle, lit the stove with a wooden match, and poured three cups of instant coffee when the water boiled. Id have liked bourbon in mine, or instead of mine, but nobody suggested it. We carried our cups into the living room and she said, "You looked as though you saw a ghost. No, Im wrong. You looked as though you were looking for one. "

  "Maybe thats what I was doing. "

  "Im not sure if I believe in them or not. Theyre supposed to be more common in cases of sudden death when the victim didnt expect what happened. The theory is that the soul doesnt realize it died, so it hangs around because it doesnt know to pass on to the next plane of existence. "

  "I thought it walked the floors crying out for vengeance," Rolfe said. "You know, dragging chains, making the boards creak. "

  "No, it just doesnt know any better. What you do, you get somebody to lay the ghost. "

  "Im not going to touch that line," Rolfe said.

  "Im proud of you. You get high marks for restraint. Thats what its called, laying the ghost. Its a sort of exorcism. The ghost expert, or whatever you call him, communicates with the ghost and lets him know what happened, and that hes supposed to pass on. And then the spirit can go wherever spirits go. "