He could have been. The times were vague, and whoever Sunny turned out to be, the odds were good that she’d have no more time sense than a koala bear. There were any number of ways he could have found a few minutes to go up to Fifty-seventh Street and heave Paula out a window, but it didn’t add up that way and he just didn’t feel like a killer to me. I knew what Ruth meant and I agreed with her that he was capable of murder but I don’t think he’d been capable of this particular murder.
I said, “When did you go back to the apartment?”
“Who said I did?”
“You picked up your clothes, Cary.”
“That was yesterday afternoon. The hell, I needed my clothes and stuff.”
“How long were you living there?”
He hedged. “I wasn’t exactly living there.”
“Where were you exactly living?”
“I wasn’t exactly living anywhere. I kept most of my stuff at Paula’s place and I stayed with her most of the time but it wasn’t as serious as actual living together. We were both too loose for anything like that. Anyway, the thing with Paula, it was pretty much winding itself down. She was a little too crazy for me.” He smiled with his mouth. “They have to be a little crazy,” he said, “but when they’re too crazy it gets to be too much of a hassle.”
Oh, he could have killed her. He could kill anyone if he had to, if someone was making too much of a hassle. But if he were to kill cleverly, faking the suicide in such an artful fashion, fastening the chain bolt on his way out, he’d pick a time when he had a solid alibi. He was not the sort to be so precise and so slipshod all at the same time.
“So you went and picked up your stuff.”
“Right.”
“Including the stereo and records.”
“The stereo was mine. The records, I left the folk music and the classical shit because that belonged to Paula. I just took my records.”
“And the stereo.”
“Right.”
“You got a bill of sale for it, I suppose.”
“Who keeps that crap?”
“What if I said Paula kept the bill of sale? What if I said it was in with her papers and canceled checks?”
“You’re fishing.”
“You sure of that?”
“Nope. But if you did say that, I suppose I’d say the stereo was a gift from her to me. You’re not really gonna charge me with stealing a stereo, are you?”
“Why should I? Robbing the dead’s a sacred tradition. You took the drugs, too, didn’t you? Her medicine cabinet used to look like a drugstore but there was nothing stronger than Excedrin when I took a look. That’s why Sunny’s in the bathroom. If I hit the door all the pretty little pills go down the toilet.”
“I guess you can think that if you want.”
“And I can come back with a warrant if I want.”
“That’s the idea.”
“I ought to rap on the door just to do you out of the drugs but it doesn’t seem worth the trouble. That’s Paula Wittlauer’s stereo. I suppose it’s worth a couple hundred dollars. And you’re not her heir. Unplug that thing and wrap it up, McCloud. I’m taking it with me.”
“The hell you are.”
“The hell I’m not.”
“You want to take anything but your own ass out of here, you come back with a warrant. Then we’ll talk about it.”
“I don’t need a warrant.”
“You can’t—”
“I don’t need a warrant because I’m not a cop. I’m a detective, McCloud, I’m private, and I’m working for Ruth Wittlauer, and that’s who’s getting the stereo. I don’t know if she wants it or not, but that’s her problem. She doesn’t want Paula’s pills so you can pop them yourself or give them to your girlfriend. You can shove ’em up your ass for all I care. But I’m walking out of here with that stereo and I’ll walk through you if I have to, and don’t think I wouldn’t enjoy it.”
“You’re not even a cop.”
“Right.”
“You got no authority at all.” He spoke in tones of wonder. “You said you were a cop.”
“You can always sue me.”
“You can’t take that stereo. You can’t even be in this room.”
“That’s right.” I was itching for him. I could feel my blood in my veins. “I’m bigger than you,” I said, “and I’m a whole lot harder, and I’d get a certain amount of satisfaction in beating the crap out of you. I don’t like you. It bothers me that you didn’t kill her because somebody did and it would be a pleasure to hang it on you. But you didn’t do it. Unplug the stereo and pack it up so I can carry it or I’m going to take you apart.”
I meant it and he realized as much. He thought about taking a shot at me and he decided it wasn’t worth it. Maybe it wasn’t all that much of a stereo. While he was unhooking it I dumped a carton of his clothes on the floor and we packed the stereo in it. On my way out the door he said he could always go to the cops and tell them what I’d done.
“I don’t think you want to do that,” I said.
“You said somebody killed her.”
“That’s right.”
“You just making noise?”
“No.”
“You’re serious?” I nodded. “She didn’t kill herself? I thought it was open and shut, from what the cops said. It’s interesting. In a way, I guess you could say it’s a load off my mind.”
“How do you figure that?”
He shrugged. “I thought, you know, maybe she was upset it wasn’t working out between us. At the Web the vibes were on the heavy side, if you follow me. Our thing was falling apart and I was seeing Sunny and she was seeing other guys and I thought maybe that was what did it for her. I suppose I blamed myself, like.”
“I can see it was eating away at you.”
“I just said it was on my mind.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Man,” he said, “nothing eats away at me. You let things get to you that way and it’s death.”
I shouldered the carton and headed on down the stairs.
Ruth Wittlauer had supplied me with an Irving Place address and a GRamercy 5 telephone number. I called the number and didn’t get an answer, so I walked over to Hudson and caught a northbound cab. There were no messages for me at the hotel desk. I put Paula’s stereo in my room, tried Ruth’s number again, then walked over to the Eighteenth Precinct. Guzik had gone off duty but the desk man told me to try a restaurant around the corner, and I found him there drinking draft Heinekens with another cop, named Birnbaum. I sat at their table and ordered bourbon for myself and another round for the two of them.
I said, “I have a favor to ask. I’d like you to seal Paula Wittlauer’s apartment.”
“We closed that out,” Guzik reminded me.
“I know, and the boyfriend closed out the dead girl’s stereo.” I told him how I’d reclaimed the unit from Cary McCloud. “I’m working for Ruth, Paula’s sister. The least I can do is make sure she gets what’s coming to her. She’s not up to cleaning out the apartment now and it’s rented through the first of October. McCloud’s got a key and God knows how many other people have keys. If you slap a seal on the door it’d keep the grave robbers away.”
“I guess we can do that. Tomorrow all right?”
“Tonight would be better.”
“What’s there to steal? You got the stereo out of there and I didn’t see anything else around that was worth much.”
“Things have a sentimental value.”
He eyed me, frowned. “I’ll make a phone call,” he said. He went to the booth in the back and I jawed with Birnbaum until he came back and told me it was all taken care of.
I said, “Another thing I was wondering. You must have had a photographer on the scene. Somebody to take pictures of the body and all that.”
“Sure. That’s routine.”
“Did he go up to the apartment while he was at it? Take a roll of interior shots?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I
thought maybe I could have a look at them.”
“What for?”
“You never know. The reason I knew it was Paula’s stereo in McCloud’s apartment was I could see the pattern in the dust on top of the dresser where it had been. If you’ve got interior pictures maybe I’ll see something else that’s not there anymore and I can lean on McCloud a little and recover it for my client.”
“And that’s why you’d like to see the pictures.”
“Right.”
He gave me a look. “That door was bolted from the inside, Matt. With a chain bolt.”
“I know.”
“And there was no one in the apartment when we went in there.”
“I know that, too.”
“You’re still barking up the murder tree, aren’t you? Jesus, the case is closed and the reason it’s closed is the ditzy broad killed herself. What are you making waves for?”
“I’m not. I just wanted to see the pictures.”
“To see if somebody stole her diaphragm or something.”
“Something like that.” I drank what remained of my drink. “You need a new hat anyway, Guzik. The weather’s turning and a fellow like you needs a hat for fall.”
“If I had the price of a hat, maybe I’d go out and get one.”
“You got it,” I said.
He nodded and we told Birnbaum we wouldn’t be long. I walked with Guzik around the corner to the Eighteenth. On the way I palmed him two tens and a five, twenty-five dollars, the price of a hat in police parlance. He made the bills disappear.
I waited at his desk while he pulled the Paula Wittlauer file. There were about a dozen black-and-white prints, eight by tens, high-contrast glossies. Perhaps half of them showed Paula’s corpse from various angles. I had no interest in these but I made myself look at them as a sort of reinforcement, so I wouldn’t forget what I was doing on the case.
The other pictures were interior shots of the L-shaped apartment. I noted the wide-open window, the dresser with the stereo sitting on it, the chair with her clothing piled haphazardly upon it. I separated the interior pictures from the ones showing the corpse and told Guzik I wanted to keep them for the time being. He didn’t mind.
He cocked his head and looked at me. “You got something, Matt?”
“Nothing worth talking about.”
“If you ever do, I’ll want to hear about it.”
“Sure.”
“You like the life you’re leading? Working private, scuffling around?”
“It seems to suit me.”
He thought it over, nodded. Then he started for the stairs and I followed after him.
Later that evening I managed to reach Ruth Wittlauer. I bundled the stereo into a cab and took it to her place. She lived in a well-kept brownstone a block and a half from Gramercy Park. Her apartment was inexpensively furnished but the pieces looked to have been chosen with care. The place was clean and neat. Her clock radio was tuned to an FM station that was playing chamber music. She had coffee made and I accepted a cup and sipped it while I told her about recovering the stereo from Cary McCloud.
“I wasn’t sure whether you could use it,” I said, “but I couldn’t see any reason why he should keep it. You can always sell it.”
“No, I’ll keep it. I just have a twenty-dollar record player that I bought on Fourteenth Street. Paula’s stereo cost a couple of hundred dollars.” She managed a smile. “So you’ve already more than earned what I gave you. Did he kill her?”
“No.”
“You’re sure of that?”
I nodded. “He’d kill if he had a reason but I don’t think he did. And if he did kill her he’d never have taken the stereo or the drugs, and he wouldn’t have acted the way he did. There was never a moment when I had the feeling that he’d killed her. And you have to follow your instincts in this kind of situation. Once they point things out to you, then you can usually find the facts to go with them.”
“And you’re sure my sister killed herself?”
“No. I’m pretty sure someone gave her a hand.”
Her eyes widened.
I said, “It’s mostly intuition. But there are a few facts to support it.” I told her about the chain bolt, how it had proved to the police that Paula’d killed herself, how my experiment had shown it could have been fastened from the corridor. Ruth got very excited at this but I explained that it didn’t prove anything in and of itself, only that suicide remained a theoretical possibility.
Then I showed her the pictures I’d obtained from Guzik. I selected one shot which showed the chair with Paula’s clothing without showing too much of the window. I didn’t want to make Ruth look at the window.
“The chair,” I said, pointing to it. “I noticed this when I was in your sister’s apartment. I wanted to see a photograph taken at the time to make sure things hadn’t been rearranged by the cops or McCloud or somebody else. But that clothing’s exactly the way it was when I saw it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The supposition is that Paula got undressed, put her clothes on the chair, then went to the window and jumped.” Her lip was trembling but she was holding herself together and I went right on talking. “Or she’d taken her clothes off earlier and maybe she took a shower or a nap and then came back and jumped. But look at the chair. She didn’t fold her clothes neatly, she didn’t put them away. And she didn’t just drop them on the floor, either. I’m no authority on the way women get undressed but I don’t think many people would do it that way.”
Ruth nodded. Her face was thoughtful.
“That wouldn’t mean very much by itself. If she were upset or stoned or confused she might have thrown things on the chair as she took them off. But that’s not what happened. The order of the clothing is all wrong. The bra’s underneath the blouse, the panty hose is underneath the skirt. She took her bra off after she took her blouse off, obviously, so it should have wound up on top of the blouse, not under it.”
“Of course.”
I held up a hand. “It’s nothing like proof, Ruth. There are any number of other explanations. Maybe she knocked the stuff onto the floor and then picked it up and the order of the garments got switched around. Maybe one of the cops went through the clothing before the photographer came around with his camera. I don’t really have anything terribly strong to go on.”
“But you think she was murdered.”
“Yes, I guess I do.”
“That’s what I thought all along. Of course I had a reason to think so.”
“Maybe I’ve got one, too. I don’t know.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I think I’ll poke around a little. I don’t know much about Paula’s life. I’ll have to learn more if I’m going to find out who killed her. But it’s up to you to decide whether you want me to stay with it.”
“Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because it probably won’t lead anywhere. Suppose she was upset after her conversation with McCloud and she picked up a stranger and took him home with her and he killed her. If that’s the case we’ll never know who he was.”
“You’re going to stay with it, aren’t you?”
“I suppose I want to.”
“It’ll be complicated, though. It’ll take you some time. I suppose you’ll want more money.” Her gaze was very direct. “I gave you two hundred dollars. I have three hundred more that I can afford to pay. I don’t mind paying it, Mr. Scudder. I already got . . . I got my money’s worth for the first two hundred, didn’t I? The stereo. When the three hundred runs out, well, you can tell me if you think it’s worth staying with the case. I couldn’t afford more cash right away, but I could arrange to pay you later on or something like that.”
I shook my head. “It won’t come to more than that,” I said. “No matter how much time I spend on it. And you keep the three hundred for the time being, all right? I’ll take it from you later on. If I need it, and if I’ve earned it.”
??
?That doesn’t seem right.”
“It seems right to me,” I said. “And don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m being charitable.”
“But your time’s valuable.”
I shook my head. “Not to me it isn’t.”
I spent the next five days picking the scabs off Paula Wittlauer’s life. It kept turning out to be a waste of time but the time’s always gone before you realize you’ve wasted it. And I’d been telling the truth when I said my time wasn’t valuable. I had nothing better to do, and my peeks into the corners of Paula’s world kept me busy.
Her life involved more than a saloon on Ninth Avenue and an apartment on Fifty-seventh Street, more than serving drinks and sharing a bed with Cary McCloud. She did other things. She went one evening a week to group therapy on West Seventy-ninth Street. She took voice lessons every Tuesday morning on Amsterdam Avenue. She had an ex-boyfriend she saw once in a while. She hung out in a couple of bars in the neighborhood and a couple of others in the Village. She did this, she did that, she went here, she went there, and I kept busy dragging myself around town and talking to all sorts of people, and I managed to learn quite a bit about the person she’d been and the life she’d led without learning anything at all about the person who’d put her on the pavement.
At the same time, I tried to track her movements on the final night of her life. She’d evidently gone more or less directly to The Spider’s Web after finishing her shift at Armstrong’s. Maybe she’d stopped at her apartment for a shower and a change of clothes, but without further ado she’d headed downtown. Somewhere around ten she left the Web, and I traced her from there to a couple of other Village bars. She hadn’t stayed at either of them long, taking a quick drink or two and moving on. She’d left alone as far as anyone seemed to remember. This didn’t prove a thing because she could have stopped elsewhere before continuing uptown, or she could have picked someone up on the street, which I’d learned was something she’d done more than once in her young life. She could have found her killer loitering on a street corner or she could have phoned him and arranged to meet him at her apartment.
Her apartment. The doormen changed off at midnight, but it was impossible to determine whether she’d returned before or after the changing of the guard. She’d lived there, she was a regular tenant, and when she entered or left the building it was not a noteworthy occasion. It was something she did every night, so when she came home for the final time the man at the door had no reason to know it was the final time and thus no reason to take mental notes.