A Stab in the Dark (8 page)

I tried marriage licenses first, and when that failed to pan out I had a shot at birth certificates. Mrs.

Pomerance had been a little hazy on the names and ages of the Corwin children, but she was pretty sure the youngest's name was Kelly and that she'd been five or six when her mother left. She'd been seven, it turned out; she'd be around fifteen now. Her father was Edward Francis Corwin, her mother the former Janice Elizabeth Keane.

I wrote the name in my notebook with a sense of triumph. Not that there was much likelihood that it would slip my mind, but as a symbol of accomplishment. I couldn't prove that I was an inch closer to Barbara Ettinger's killer than I'd been when Charles London sat down across from me at Armstrong's, but I'd done some detecting and it felt good. It was plodding work, generally pointless work, but it let me use muscles I didn't get to use all that often and they tingled from the exertion.

A couple of blocks from there I found a Blarney Stone with a steam table. I had a hot pastrami sandwich and drank a beer or two with it. There was a big color set mounted over the bar. It was tuned to one of those sports anthology shows they have on Saturday afternoons. A couple of guys were doing something with logs in a fast-moving stream.

Riding them, I think. Nobody in the place was paying much attention to their efforts. By the time I was done with my sandwich the log-riders were through and a stock-car race had replaced them. Nobody paid any attention to the stock cars, either.

I called Lynn London again. This time when her machine picked up I waited for the beep and left my name and number. Then I checked the phone book.

No Janice Keanes in Manhattan. Half a dozen Keanes with the initial J. Plenty of other variations of the name-Keene, Keen, Kean. I thought of that old radio show, Mr. Keene, Tracer of Lost Persons. I couldn't remember how he spelled it.

I tried all the J. Keanes. I got two that failed to answer, one persistent busy signal, and three people who denied knowing a Janice Keane. The busy signal lived on East Seventy-third Street and I decided that was no address for a lesbian sculptor from Boerum Hill. I dialed Directory Assistance, all set to go through my routine again for the other four boroughs, but something stopped me.

She was in Manhattan. Damn it, I knew she was in Manhattan.

I asked for a Janice Keane in Manhattan, spelled the last name, waited a minute, and was told the only listing in Manhattan under that name and with that spelling was unpublished. I hung up, called back again to get a different operator, and went through the little ritual that a cop uses to obtain an unlisted number. I identified myself as Detective Francis Fitzroy, of the Eighteenth Precinct. I called it the One-Eight Precinct because, although cops don't invariably talk that way, civilians invariably think they do.

I got the address while I was at it. She was on Lispenard Street, and that was a perfectly logical place for a sculptor to be living, and not too long a walk from where I was.

I had another dime in my hand. I put it back in my pocket and went back to the bar. The stock cars had given way to the feature of the program, a couple of black junior-middleweights topping a fight card in some unlikely place. Phoenix, I think it was. I don't know what a junior-middleweight is. They've added all these intermediate weight classes so that they can have more championship fights. Some of the patrons who'd passed up the log-rollers and the stock cars were watching these two boys hit each other, which was something they weren't doing very often. I sat through a few rounds and drank some coffee with bourbon in it.

Because I thought it would help if I had some idea how I was going to approach this woman. I'd been tracking her spoor through books and files and phone wires, as if she held the secret to the Ettinger murder, and for all I knew Barbara Ettinger was nothing to her beyond a faceless lump who put the alphabet blocks away when the kids were done playing with them.

Or she was Barbara's best friend. Or her lover-I remembered Mrs.

Pomerance's questions: "She was a friend of the Corwins? Were they that way?"

Maybe she had killed Barbara. Could they have both left the day-care center early? Was that even possible, let alone likely?

I was spinning my wheels and I knew it but I let them spin for a while anyway. On the television screen, the kid with the white stripe on his trunks was finally beginning to use his jab to set up right hands to the body. It didn't look as though he was going to take his man out in the handful of rounds remaining, not like that, but he seemed a safe shot for the decision. He was wearing his opponent down, grinding away at him.

Jabbing with the left, hooking the right hand to the rib section. The other boy couldn't seem to find a defense that worked.

I knew how both of them felt.

I thought about Douglas Ettinger. I decided he didn't kill his wife, and I tried to figure out how I knew that, and I decided I knew it the same way I'd known Janice Keane was in Manhattan. Chalk it up to divine inspiration.

Ettinger was right, I decided. Louis Pinell killed Barbara Ettinger, just as he'd killed the other seven women. Barbara had thought some nut was stalking her and she was right.

Then why'd she let the nut into her apartment?

In the tenth round, the kid who'd been getting his ribs barbecued summoned up some reserve of strength and put a couple of combinations together. He had the kid with the stripe on his trunks reeling, but the flurry wasn't enough to end it and the kid with the stripe hung on and got the decision. The crowd booed. I don't know what fight they thought they were watching. The crowd in Phoenix, that is.

My companions in the Blarney Stone weren't that involved emotionally.

The hell with it. I went and made my phone call.

IT rang four or five times before she answered it. I said, "Janice Keane, please," and she said she was Janice Keane.

I said, "My name's Matthew Scudder, Ms. Keane. I'd like to ask you some questions."

"Oh?"

"About a woman named Barbara Ettinger."

"Jesus." A pause. "What about her?"

"I'm investigating her death. I'd like to come over and talk with you."

"You're investigating her death? That was ages ago. It must have been ten years."

"Nine years."

"I thought it was the Mounties who never gave up. I never heard that about New York's Finest. You're a policeman?"

I was about to say yes, but heard myself say, "I used to be."

"What are you now?"

"A private citizen. I'm working for Charles London. Mrs. Ettinger's father."

"That's right, her maiden name was London." She had a good telephone voice, low-pitched and throaty.

"I can't make out why you're starting an investigation now. And what could I possibly contribute to it?"

"Maybe I could explain that in person," I said. "I'm just a few minutes away from you now. Would it be all right if I come over?"

"Jesus. What's today, Saturday? And what time is it? I've been working and I tend to lose track of the time. I've got six o'clock. Is that right?"

"That's right."

"I'd better fix something to eat. And I have to clean up. Give me an hour, okay?"

"I'll be there at seven."

"You know the address?" I read it off as I'd received it from Information. "That's it. That's between Church and Broadway, and you ring the bell and then stand at the curb so I can see you and I'll throw the key down. Ring two long and three short, okay?"

"Two long and three short."

"Then I'll know it's you. Not that you're anything to me but a voice on the phone. How'd you get this number? It's supposed to be unlisted."

"I used to be a cop."

"Right, so you said. So much for unlisted numbers, huh? Tell me your name again."

"Matthew Scudder."

She repeated it. Then she said, "Barbara Ettinger. Oh, if you knew how that name takes me back. I have a feeling I'm going to be sorry I answered the phone. Well, Mr. Scudder, I'll be seeing you in an hour."

Lispenard is a block below Canal Street, which puts it in that section known as Tribeca. Tribeca is a geographical acronym for Triangle Below Canal, just as SoHo derives from South of Houston Street.

There was a time when artists began moving into the blocks south of the Village, living in violation of the housing code in spacious and inexpensive lofts. The code had since been modified to permit residential loft dwelling and SoHo had turned chic and expensive, which led loft seekers further south to Tribeca. The rents aren't cheap there either now, but the streets still have the deserted quality of SoHo ten or twelve years ago.

I stuck to a well-lighted street. I walked near the curb, not close to buildings, and I did my best to move quickly and give an impression of alertness. Confrontations were easily avoided in those empty streets.

Janice Keane's address turned out to be a six-story loft building, a narrow structure fitted in between two taller, wider and more modern buildings. It looked cramped, like a little man on a crowded subway.

Floor-to-ceiling windows ran the width of the facade on each of its floors. On the ground floor, shuttered for the weekend, was a wholesaler of plumber's supplies.

I went into a claustrophobic hallway, found a bell marked Keane, rang it two long and three short. I went out to the sidewalk, stood at the curb looking up at all those windows.

She called down from one of them, asking my name. I couldn't see anything in that light. I gave my name, and something small whistled down through the air and jangled on the pavement beside me.

"Fifth floor," she said. "There's an elevator."

There was indeed, and it could have accommodated a grand piano.

I rode it to the fifth floor and stepped out into a spacious loft. There were a lot of plants, all deep green and thriving, and relatively little in the way of furniture. The doors were oak, buffed to a high sheen. The walls were exposed brick. Overhead track lighting provided illumination.

She said, "You're right on time. The place is a mess but I won't apologize. There's coffee."

"If it's no trouble."

"None at all. I'm going to have a cup myself. Just let me steer you to a place to sit and I'll be a proper hostess. Milk? Sugar?"

"Just black."

She left me in an area with a couch and a pair of chairs grouped around a high-pile rug with an abstract design. A couple of eight-foot-tall bookcases reached a little more than halfway to the ceiling and helped screen the space from the rest of the loft. I walked over to the window and looked down at Lispenard Street but there wasn't a whole lot to see.

There was one piece of sculpture in the room and I was standing in front of it when she came back with the coffee. It was the head of a woman. Her hair was a nest of snakes, her face a high-cheekboned, broad-browed mask of unutterable disappointment.

"That's my Medusa," she said. "Don't meet her eyes. Her gaze turns men to stone."

"She's very good."

"Thank you."

"She looks so disappointed."

"That's the quality," she agreed. "I didn't know that until I'd finished her, and then I saw it for myself.

You've got a pretty good eye."

"For disappointment, anyway."

She was an attractive woman. Medium height, a little more well-fleshed than was strictly fashionable.

She wore faded Levi's and a slate-blue chamois shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. Her face was heart-shaped, its contours accentuated by a sharply defined widow's peak. Her hair, dark brown salted with gray, hung almost to her shoulders. Her gray eyes were large and well-spaced, and a touch of mascara around them was the only makeup she wore.

We sat in a pair of chairs at right angles to one another and set our coffee mugs on a table made from a section of tree trunk and a slab of slate. She asked if I'd had trouble finding her address and I said I hadn't.

Then she said, "Well, shall we talk about Barb Ettinger? Maybe you can start by telling me why you're interested in her after all these years."

SHE'D missed the media coverage of Louis Pinell's arrest. It was news to her that the Icepick Prowler was in custody, so it was also news that her former employee had been killed by someone else.

"So for the first time you're looking for a killer with a motive," she said. "If you'd looked at the time-"

"It might have been easier. Yes."

"And it might be easier now just to look the other way. I don't remember her father. I must have met him, after the murder if not before, but I don't have any recollection of him. I remember her sister.

Have you met her?"

"Not yet."

"I don't know what she's like now, but she struck me as a snotty little bitch. But I didn't know her well, and anyway it was nine years ago. That's what I keep coming back to. Everything was nine years ago."

"How did you meet Barbara Ettinger?"

"We ran into each other in the neighborhood. Shopping at the Grand Union, going to the candy store for a paper. Maybe I mentioned that I was running a day-care center. Maybe she heard it from someone else. Either way, one morning she walked into the Happy Hours and asked if I needed any help."

"And you hired her right away?"

"I told her I couldn't pay her much. The place was just about making expenses. I started it for a dumb reason-there was no convenient day-care center in the neighborhood, and I needed a place to dump my own kids, so I found a partner and we opened the Happy Hours, and instead of dumping my kids I was watching them and everybody else's, and of course my partner came to her senses about the time the ink was dry on the lease, and she backed out and I was running the whole show myself. I told Barb I needed her but I couldn't afford her, and she said she mostly wanted something to do and she'd work cheap. I forget what I paid her but it wasn't a whole lot."