A Stab in the Dark (3 page)

They're psychos without the imagination to think up their own numbers so they hitch a ride on somebody else's craziness. Some loony watched the six o'clock news and went out and bought an icepick."

"And happened to get her in the eye by chance?"

"Possible. Could be. Or it could be it just struck him as a good idea, same as it did Pinell. Or something leaked."

"That's what I was thinking."

"Far as I can remember, there was nothing in the papers or on the news. Nothing about the eye wounds, I mean. But maybe there was and then we squelched it but not before this psycho read it or heard it and it made an impression. Or maybe it never got into the media but the word was around. You got a few hundred cops who know something, plus everybody who's around for the postmortems, plus everybody who sees the records, all the clerks and all, and each of them tells three people and those people all talk, and how long does it take before a lot of people know about it?"

"I see what you mean."

"If anything, the business with the eyes makes it look like it was just a psycho. A guy who tried it once for a thrill and then let it go."

"How do you figure that, Frank?"

He leaned back, interlaced his fingers behind his head. "Well, say it's the husband," he said. "Say he wants to kill her because she's fucking the mailman, and he wants to make it look like the Icepick Prowler so he won't carry the can for it himself. If he knows about the eyes, he's gonna do both of them, right? He's not taking any chances. A nut, he's something else again. He does one eye because it's something to do, and then maybe he's bored with it so he doesn't do the other one. Who knows what goes through their fucking heads?"

"If it's a psycho, then there's no way to tag him."

"Of course there isn't. Nine years later and you're looking for a killer without a motive? That's a needle in a haystack when the needle's not even there. But that's all right. You take this and play with it, and after you've run the string you just tellLondon it must have been a psycho. Believe me, he'll be happy to hear it."

"Why?"

"Because that's what he thought nine years ago, and he got used to the idea. He accepted it. Now he's afraid it's somebody he knows and that's driving him crazy, so you'll investigate it all for him and tell him everything's okay, the sun still comes up in the east every morning and his daughter was still killed by a fucking Act of God. He can relax again and go back to his life. He'll get his money's worth."

"You're probably right."

"Course I'm right. You could even save yourself running around and just sit on your ass for a week and then tell him what you'll wind up telling him anyway. But I don't suppose you'll do that, will you?"

"No, I'll give it my best shot."

"I figured you'd at least go through the motions. What it is, you're still a cop, aren't you, Matt?"

"I suppose so. In a way. Whatever that means."

"You don't have anything steady, huh? You just catch a piece of work like this when it comes along?"

"Right."

"You ever think about coming back?"

"To the department? Not very often. And never very seriously."

He hesitated. There were questions he wanted to ask, things he wanted to say to me, but he decided to leave them unsaid. I was grateful for that. He got to his feet and so did I. I thanked him for the time and the information and he said an old friend was an old friend and it was a pleasure to be able to help a pal out. Neither of us mentioned the hundred dollars that had changed hands. Why should we? He'd been glad to get it and I was glad to give it. A favor's no good unless you pay for it. One way or the other, you always do.

It had rained a little while I was with Fitzroy. It wasn't raining when I got back outside, but it didn't feel as though it was through for the day. I had a drink around the corner onThird Avenue and watched part of the newscast. They showed the police artist's sketch of the Slasher, the same drawing that was on the front page of the Post. It showed a round-faced black man with a trimmed beard and a cap on his head. Mad zeal glinted in his large almond-shaped eyes.

"Imagine that comin' up the street at you," the bartender said. "I'll tell you, there's a lot of guys gettin'

pistol permits on the strength of this one. I'm thinkin' about fillin'

out an application myself."

I remember the day I stopped carrying a gun. It was the same day I turned in my shield. I'd had a stretch of feeling terribly vulnerable without that iron on my hip, and now I could hardly recall how it had felt to walk around armed in the first place.

I finished my drink and left. Would the bartender get a gun?

Probably not. More people talked about it than did it. But whenever there's the right kind of nut making headlines, a Slasher or an Icepick Prowler, a certain number of people get pistol permits and a certain number of others buy illegal guns.

Then some of them get drunk and shoot their wives. None of them ever seems to wind up nailing the Slasher.

I walked uptown, stopped at an Italian place along the way for dinner, then spent a couple of hours at the main library onForty-second Street , dividing my time between old newspapers on microfilm and new and old Polk city directories. I made some notes, but not many. I was mostly trying to let myself sink into the case, to take a few steps backward in time.

By the time I got out of there it was raining. I took a cab to Armstrong's, got a stool at the bar and settled in. There were people to talk to and bourbon to drink, with enough coffee to keep fatigue at bay.

I didn't hit it very hard, just coasted along, getting by, getting through. You'd be surprised what a person can get through.

* * *

THE next day was Friday. I read a paper with breakfast. There'd been no slashings the previous night, but neither had there been any progress in the case. InEcuador , a few hundred people had died in an earthquake. There seemed to be more of those lately, or I was more aware of them.

I went to my bank, put Charles London's check in my savings account, drew out some cash and a money order for five hundred dollars.

They gave me an envelope to go with the money order and I addressed it to Ms. Anita Scudder in Syosset. I stood at the counter for a few minutes with the bank's pen in my hand, trying to think of a note to include, and wound up sending the money order all by itself. After I'd mailed it I thought about calling to tell her it was in the mail, but that seemed like even more of a chore than thinking of something to put in a note.

It wasn't a bad day. Clouds obscured the sun, but there were patches of blue overhead and the air had a tang to it. I stopped at Armstrong's to cover my marker and left without having anything. It was a little early for the day's first drink. I left, walked east a long block toColumbus Circle , and caught a train.

I rode the D to Smith andBergen and came out into sunshine. For a while I walked around, trying to get my bearings. The Seventy-eighth Precinct, where I'd served a brief hitch, was only six or seven blocks to the east, but that had been a long time ago and I'd spent little time inBrooklyn since. Nothing looked even faintly familiar. I was in a part of the borough that hadn't had a name until fairly recently. Now a part of it was called Cobble Hill and another chunk was called Boerum Hill and both of them were participating wholeheartedly in the brownstone renaissance. Neighborhoods don't seem to stand still inNew York . They either improve or deteriorate. Most of the city seemed to be crumbling.

The whole South Bronx was block after block of burned-out buildings, and in Brooklyn the same process was eroding Bushwick andBrownsville .

These blocks were going in the other direction. I walked up one street and down another and found myself becoming aware of changes.

There were trees on every block, most of them planted within the past few years. While some of the brownstones and brickfronts were in disrepair, more sported freshly painted trim. The shops reflected the changes that had been going on. A health food store onSmith Street , a boutique at the corner of Warren and Bond, little up-scale restaurants tucked in all over the place.

The building where Barbara Ettinger had lived and died was onWyckoff 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 I'd copied from an old city directory. Of the twenty apartments, only six held tenants who'd been there at the time of the murder.

Except you can't 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. It's a little easier when you have a badge to flash but the manner's more important than the ID, and I couldn't lose the manner if I tried. I didn't 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. She'd moved in within the past year, she told me, and she didn't 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.

She'd 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 don't believe the prices."

She remembered the icepick murder, though she was surprised it had been nine years. It didn't seem that long to her. The woman who was killed was a nice woman, she said. "Only nice people get killed."

She didn't seem to remember much about Barbara Ettinger beyond her niceness. She didn't know if she had been especially friendly or unfriendly with any of the other neighbors, if she'd 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 I'd thought of it.

Another woman on the fourth floor, a Miss Wicker, was the only person to ask for identification. I told her I wasn't a policeman, and she left the chain lock on the door and spoke to me through a two-inch opening, which didn't strike me as unreasonable. She'd 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 Ettinger's 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 I'd 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.

"Won't you sit down? That chair's the comfortable one. The other's nice to visit but you wouldn't 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. "I've only been here a little over a year but Donald's been living here for ages. He's watched the neighborhood become positively chic around him. Fortunately this particular building retains its essential tackiness. You'll probably want to talk to Donald but he won't be home from work until six or six thirty."

"What's Donald's last name?"

"Gilman." He spelled it. "And I'm Rolfe Waggoner. That's Rolfe with an e. I was just reading about the Icepick Prowler. Of course I don't 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. You've caught the man who did it, haven't 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?"