A Stab in the Dark (4 page)

"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, she's in the apartment where the Ettingers used to live. She works nights, she's a waitress, so she'll be home now unless she's at an audition or a dance class or shopping or-well, she'll be home unless she's out, but that's always the case, isn't it?" He smiled again, showing me perfectly even teeth. "But maybe you've already spoken with her."

"Not yet."

"She's 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. "I'll introduce you," he said.

"Just let me put some clothes on. I won't 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 woman's voice asking who it was.

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

"Huh?" she said, and opened the door. She might have been Rolfe's 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 didn't know anything about the Ettingers, and her knowledge of the murder was limited to the fact that it had taken place there. "I'm glad I didn't know before I moved in," she said, "because I might have let it spook me, and that would have been silly, wouldn't 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 I'd have remembered the layout anyway, but I'd 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 didn't think about it."

"You didn't even wonder? Sounds like repression."

"Maybe."

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 Ettinger's body. She'd 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 couldn't be sure the brick hadn't 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 she'd let him in either because she knew who he was or in spite of the fact that she didn't, 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 wouldn't 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 Prowler's work.

Had the first wound killed her? I remembered beads of blood.

Dead bodies don't 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 I'd seen in the Medical Examiner's report.

Judy Fairborn filled a teakettle, lit the stove with a wooden match, and poured three cups of instant coffee when the water boiled. I'd 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, I'm wrong. You looked as though you were looking for one."

"Maybe that's what I was doing."

"I'm not sure if I believe in them or not. They're supposed to be more common in cases of sudden death when the victim didn't expect what happened. The theory is that the soul doesn't realize it died, so it hangs around because it doesn't 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 doesn't know any better. What you do, you get somebody to lay the ghost."

"I'm not going to touch that line," Rolfe said.

"I'm proud of you. You get high marks for restraint. That's what it's called, laying the ghost. It's a sort of exorcism. The ghost expert, or whatever you call him, communicates with the ghost and lets him know what happened, and that he's supposed to pass on. And then the spirit can go wherever spirits go."

"You really believe all this?"

"I'm not sure what I believe," she said. She uncrossed her legs, then recrossed them. "If Barbara's haunting this apartment, she's being very restrained about it. No creaking boards, no midnight apparitions."

"Your basic low-profile ghost," he said.

"I'll have nightmares tonight," she said. "If I sleep at all."

* * *

I knocked on all the doors on the two lower floors without getting much response. The tenants were either out or had nothing useful to tell me. The building's superintendent had a basement apartment in a similar building on the next block, but I didn't see the point in looking him up.

He'd only been on the job for a matter of months, and the old woman in the fourth-floor-front apartment had told me there had been four or five supers in the past nine years.

By the time I got out of the building I was glad for the fresh air, glad to be on the street again. I'd felt something in Judy Fairborn's kitchen, though I wouldn't go so far as to call it a ghost. But it had felt as though something from years past was pulling at me, trying to drag me down and under.

Whether it was Barbara Ettinger's past or my own was something I couldn't say.

I stopped at a bar on the corner of Dean and Smith. They had sandwiches and a microwave oven to heat them in but I wasn't hungry. I had a quick drink and sipped a short beer chaser. The bartender sat on a high stool drinking a large glass of what looked like vodka. The other two customers, black men about my age, were at the far end of the bar watching a game show on TV. From time to time one of them was talking back to the set.

I flipped a few pages in my notebook, went to the phone and looked through the Brooklyn book. The day-care center where Barbara Ettinger had worked didn't seem to be in business. I checked the Yellow Pages to see if there was anything listed under another name at the same address. There wasn't.

The address was on Clinton Street, and I'd been away from the neighborhood long enough so that I had to ask directions, but once I'd done so it was only a walk of a few blocks. The boundaries of Brooklyn neighborhoods aren't usually too well defined-the neighborhoods themselves are often largely the invention of realtors-but when I crossed Court Street I was leaving Boerum Hill for Cobble Hill, and the change wasn't difficult to see. Cobble Hill was a shade or two tonier. More trees, a higher percentage of brownstones, a greater proportion of white faces on the street.

I found the number I was seeking on Clinton between Pacific and Amity. There was no day-care center there. The ground floor storefront offered supplies for knitting and needlepoint. The proprietor, a plump Earth Mother with a gold incisor, didn't know anything about a day-care center. She'd moved in a year and a half ago after a health food restaurant had gone out of business. "I ate there once," she said, "and they deserved to go out of business. Believe me."

She gave me the landlord's name and number. I tried him from the corner and kept getting a busy signal so I walked over to Court Street and climbed a flight of stairs. There was just one person in the office, a young man with his sleeves rolled up and a large round ashtray full of cigarette butts on the desk in front of him. He chainsmoked while he talked on the phone. The windows were closed and the room was as thick with smoke as a nightclub at four in the morning.

When he got off the phone I caught him before it could ring again.

His own memory went back beyond the health food restaurant to a children's clothing store that had also failed in the same location. "Now we got needlepoint," he said. "If I were gonna guess I'd say she'll be out in another year. How much can you make selling yarn? What happens, somebody has a hobby, an interest, so they open up a business. Health food, needlepoint, whatever it is, but they don't know shit about business and they're down and out in a year or two. She breaks the lease, we'll rent it in a month for twice what she pays.

It's a renter's market in an upscale neighborhood." He reached for the phone. "Sorry I can't help you,"

he said.

"Check your records," I said.

He told me he had lots of important things to do, but halfway through the statement changed from an assertion to a whine. I sat in an old oak swivel chair and let him fumble around in his files. He opened and closed half a dozen drawers before he came up with a folder and slapped it down on his desk.

"Here we go," he said. "Happy Hours Child Care Center. Some name, huh?"

"What's wrong with it?"

"Happy hour's in a bar when the drinks are half price. Hell of a thing to call a place for the kiddies, don't you think?" He shook his head.

"Then they wonder why they go out of business."

I didn't see anything the matter with the name.

"Leaseholder was a Mrs. Corwin. Janice Corwin. Took the place on a five-year lease, gave it up after four years. Quit the premises eight years ago in March." That would have been a year after Barbara Ettinger's death. "Jesus, you look at the rent and you can't believe it. You know what she was paying?"

I shook my head.

"Well, you saw the place. Name a figure." I looked at him. He stubbed out a cigarette and lit another.

"One and a quarter. Hundred and twenty-five dollars a month.

Goes for six now and it's going up the minute the needlework lady goes out, or when her lease is up. Whichever comes first."

"You have a forwarding address for Corwin?"

He shook his head. "I got a residential address. Want it?" He read off a number on Wyckoff Street. It was just a few doors from the Ettingers' building. I wrote down the address. He read off a phone number and I jotted that down, too.

His phone rang. He picked it up, said hello, listened for a few minutes, then talked in monosyllables.

"Listen, I got someone here," he said after a moment. "I'll get back to you in a minute, okay?"

He hung up and asked me if that was all. I couldn't think of anything else. He hefted the file. "Four years she had the place," he said.

"Most places drop dead in the first year. Make it through a year you got a chance. Get through two years and you got a good chance. You know what's the problem?"

"What?"

"Women," he said. "They're amateurs. They got no need to make a go of it. They open a business like they try on a dress. Take it off if they don't like the color. If that does it, I got calls to make."

I thanked him for his help.

"Listen," he said, "I always cooperate. It's my nature."

I tried the number he gave me and got a woman who spoke Spanish. She didn't know anything about anybody named Janice Corwin and didn't stay on the line long enough for me to ask her much of anything. I dropped another dime and dialed again on the chance that I'd misdialed the first time. When the same woman answered I broke the connection.

When they disconnect a phone it's close to a year before they reassign the number. Of course Mrs.

Corwin could have changed her number without moving from the Wyckoff Street address. People, especially women, do that frequently enough to shake off obscene callers.

Still, I figured she'd moved. I figured everyone had moved, out of Brooklyn, out of the five boroughs, out of the state. I started to walk back toward Wyckoff Street, covered half a block, turned, retraced my steps, started to turn again.

I made myself stop. I had an anxious sensation in my chest and stomach. I was blaming myself for wasting time and starting to wonder why I'd taken London's check in the first place. His daughter was nine years in the grave, and whoever killed her had probably long since started a brand-new life in Australia. All I was doing was spinning my goddamned wheels.

I stood there until the intensity of the feeling wound itself down, knowing that I didn't want to go back to Wyckoff Street. I'd go there later, when Donald Gilman got home from work, and I could check Corwin's address then. Until then I couldn't think of anything I felt like doing about the Ettinger murder. But there was something I could do about the anxiety.