The Night and The Music (3 page)

“She didn’t kill herself.”

“Well, suppose I wind up thinking that she did.”

She thought it over. “I still wouldn’t have to believe it.”

“No,” I agreed. “We get to choose what we believe.”

“I have some money.” She put her purse on the table. “I’m the straight sister, I have an office job, I save money. I have five hundred dollars with me.”

“That’s too much to carry in this neighborhood.”

“Is it enough to hire you?”

I didn’t want to take her money. She had five hundred dollars and a dead sister, and parting with one wouldn’t bring the other back to life. I’d have worked for nothing but that wouldn’t have been good because neither of us would have taken it seriously enough.

And I have rent to pay and two sons to support, and Armstrong’s charges for the coffee and the bourbon. I took four fifty-dollar bills from her and told her I’d do my best to earn them.

After Paula Wittlauer
hit the pavement, a black-and-white from the Eighteenth Precinct caught the squeal and took charge of the case. One of the cops in the car was a guy named Guzik. I hadn’t known him when I was on the force but we’d met since then. I didn’t like him and I don’t think he cared for me either, but he was reasonably honest and had struck me as competent. I got him on the phone the next morning and offered to buy him a lunch.

We met at an Italian place on Fifty-sixth Street. He had veal and peppers and a couple glasses of red wine. I wasn’t hungry but I made myself eat a small steak.

Between bites of veal he said, “The kid sister, huh? I talked to her, you know. She’s so clean and so pretty it could break your heart if you let it. And of course she don’t want to believe sis did the Dutch act. I asked is she Catholic because then there’s the religious angle but that wasn’t it. Anyway your average priest’ll stretch a point. They’re the best lawyers going, the hell, two thousand years of practice, they oughta be good. I took that attitude myself. I said, ‘Look, there’s all these pills. Let’s say your sister had herself some pills and drank a little wine and smoked a little pot and then she went to the window for some fresh air. So she got a little dizzy and maybe she blacked out and most likely she never knew what was happening.’ Because there’s no question of insurance, Matt, so if she wants to think it’s an accident I’m not gonna shout suicide in her ear. But that’s what it says in the file.”

“You close it out?”

“Sure. No question.”

“She thinks murder.”

He nodded. “Tell me something I don’t know. She says this McCloud killed sis. McCloud’s the boyfriend. Thing is he was at an after-hours club at Fifty-third and Twelfth about the time sis was going skydiving.”

“You confirm that?”

He shrugged. “It ain’t airtight. He was in and out of the place, he coulda doubled back and all, but there was the whole business with the door.”

“What business?”

“She didn’t tell you? Paula Wittlauer’s apartment was locked and the chain bolt was on. The super unlocked the door for us but we had to send him back to the basement for a bolt cutter so’s we could get through the chain bolt. You can only fasten the chain bolt from inside and you can only open the door a few inches with it on, so either Wittlauer launched her own self out the window or she was shoved out by Plastic Man, and then he went and slithered out the door without unhooking the chain bolt.”

“Or the killer never left the apartment.”

“Huh?”

“Did you search the apartment after the super came back and cut the chain for you?”

“We looked around, of course. There was an open window, there was a pile of clothes next to it. You know she went out naked, don’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“There was no burly killer crouching in the shrubbery, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“You checked the place carefully?”

“We did our job.”

“Uh-huh. Look under the bed?”

“It was a platform bed. No crawl space under it.”

“Closets?”

He drank some wine, put the glass down hard, glared at me. “What the hell are you getting at? You got reason to believe there was somebody in the apartment when we went in there?”

“Just exploring the possibilities.”

“Jesus. You honestly think somebody’s gonna be stupid enough to stay in the apartment after shoving her out of it? She musta been on the street ten minutes before we hit the building. If somebody did kill her, which never happened, but if they did they coulda been halfway to Texas by the time we hit the door, and don’t that make more sense than jumping in the closet and hiding behind the coats?”

“Unless the killer didn’t want to pass the doorman.”

“So he’s still got the whole building to hide in. Just the one man on the front door is the only security the building’s got, anyway, and what does he amount to? And suppose he hides in the apartment and we happen to spot him. Then where is he? With his neck in the noose, that’s where he is.”

“Except you didn’t spot him.”

“Because he wasn’t there, and when I start seeing little men who aren’t there is when I put in my papers and quit the department.”

There was an unvoiced challenge in his words. I had quit the department, but not because I’d seen little men. One night some years ago I broke up a bar holdup and went into the street after the pair who’d killed the bartender. One of my shots went wide and a little girl died, and after that I didn’t see little men or hear voices, not exactly, but I did leave my wife and kids and quit the force and start drinking on a more serious level. But maybe it all would have happened just that way even if I’d never killed Estrellita Rivera. People go through changes and life does the damnedest things to us all.

“It was just a thought,” I said. “The sister thinks it’s murder so I was looking for a way for her to be right.”

“Forget it.”

“I suppose. I wonder why she did it.”

“Do they even need a reason? I went in the bathroom and she had a medicine cabinet like a drugstore. Ups, downs, sideways. Maybe she was so stoned she thought she could fly. That would explain her being naked. You don’t fly with your clothes on. Everybody knows that.”

I nodded. “They find drugs in her system?”

“Drugs in her…oh, Jesus, Matt. She came down seventeen flights and she came down fast.”

“Under four seconds.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing,” I said. I didn’t bother telling him about high school physics and falling bodies. “No autopsy?”

“Of course not. You’ve seen jumpers. You were in the department a lot of years, you know what a person looks like after a drop like that. You want to be technical, there coulda been a bullet in her and nobody was gonna go and look for it. Cause of death was falling from a great height. That’s what it says and that’s what it was, and don’t ask me was she stoned or was she pregnant or any of those questions because who the hell knows and who the hell cares, right?”

“How’d you even know it was her?”

“We got a positive ID from the sister.”

I shook my head. “I mean how did you know what apartment to go to? She was naked so she didn’t have any identification on her. Did the doorman recognize her?”

“You kidding? He wouldn’t go close enough to look. He was alongside the building throwing up a few pints of cheap wine. He couldn’t have identified his own ass.”

“Then how’d you know who she was?”

“The window.” I looked at him. “Hers was the only window that was open more than a couple of inches, Matt. Plus her lights were on. That made it easy.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“Yeah, well, I was there, and we just looked up and there was an open window and a light behind it, and that was the first place we went to. You’da thought of it if you were there.”

“I suppose.”

He finished his wine, burped delicately against the back of his hand. “It’s suicide,” he said. “You can tell the sister as much.”

“I will. Okay if I look at the apartment?”

“Wittlauer’s apartment? We didn’t seal it, if that’s what you mean. You oughta be able to con the super out of a key.”

“Ruth Wittlauer gave me a key.”

“Then there you go. There’s no department seal on the door. You want to look around?”

“So I can tell the sister I was there.”

“Yeah. Maybe you’ll come across a suicide note. That’s what I was looking for, a note. You turn up something like that and it clears up doubts for the friends and relatives. If it was up to me I’d get a law passed. No suicide without a note.”

“Be hard to enforce.”

“Simple,” he said. “If you don’t leave a note you gotta come back and be alive again.” He laughed. “That’d start ‘em scribbling away. Count on it.”

The doorman was
the same man I’d talked to the day before. It never occurred to him to ask me my business. I rode up in the elevator and walked along the corridor to 17G. The key Ruth Wittlauer had given me opened the door. There was just the one lock. That’s the way it usually is in high-rises. A doorman, however slipshod he may be, endows tenants with a sense of security. The residents of un-serviced walk-ups affix three or four extra locks to their doors and still cower behind them.

The apartment had an unfinished air about it, and I sensed that Paula had lived there for a few months without making the place her own. There were no rugs on the wood parquet floor. The walls were decorated with a few unframed posters held up by scraps of red Mystik tape. The apartment was an L-shaped studio with a platform bed occupying the foot of the L. There were newspapers and magazines scattered around the place but no books. I noticed copies of
Variety
and
Rolling Stone
and
People
and
The Village Voice
.

The television set was a tiny Sony perched on top of a chest of drawers. There was no stereo, but there were a few dozen records, mostly classical with a sprinkling of folk music, Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and Dave Van Ronk. There was a dust-free rectangle on top of the dresser next to the Sony.

I looked through the drawers and closets. A lot of Paula’s clothes. I recognized some of the outfits, or thought I did.

Someone had closed the window. There were two windows that opened, one in the sleeping alcove, the other in the living room section, but a row of undisturbed potted plants in front of the bedroom window made it evident she’d gone out of the other one. I wondered why anyone had bothered to close it. In case of rain, I supposed. That was only sensible. But I suspect the gesture must have been less calculated than that, a reflexive act akin to tugging a sheet over the face of a corpse.

I went into the bathroom. A killer could have hidden in the stall shower. If there’d been a killer.

Why was I still thinking in terms of a killer?

I checked the medicine cabinet. There were little tubes and vials of cosmetics, though only a handful compared with the array on one of the bedside tables. Here were containers of aspirin and other headache remedies, a tube of antibiotic ointment, several prescriptions and nonprescription hay fever preparations, a cardboard packet of Band-Aids, a roll of adhesive tape, a box of gauze pads. Some Q-tips, a hairbrush, a couple of combs. A toothbrush in the holder.

There were no footprints on the floor of the stall shower. Of course he could have been barefoot. Or he could have run water and washed away the traces of his presence before he left.

I went over and examined the windowsill. I hadn’t asked Guzik if they’d dusted for prints and I was reasonably certain no one had bothered. I wouldn’t have taken the trouble in their position. I couldn’t learn anything looking at the sill. I opened the window a foot or so and stuck my head out, but when I looked down the vertigo was extremely unpleasant and I drew my head back inside at once. I left the window open, though. The room could stand a change of air.

There were four folding chairs in the room, two of them closed and leaning against a wall, one near the bed, the fourth alongside the window. They were royal blue and made of high-impact plastic. The one by the window had her clothes piled on it. I went through the stack. She’d placed them deliberately on the chair but hadn’t bothered folding them.

You never know what suicides will do. One man will put on a tuxedo before blowing his brains out. Another one will take off everything. Naked I came into the world and naked will I go out of it, something like that.

A skirt. Beneath it a pair of panty hose. Then a blouse, and under it a bra with two small, lightly padded cups, I put the clothing back as I had found it, feeling like a violator of the dead.

The bed was unmade. I sat on the edge of it and looked across the room at a poster of Mick Jagger. I don’t know how long I sat there. Ten minutes, maybe.

On the way out I looked at the chain bolt. I hadn’t even noticed it when I came in. The chain had been neatly severed. Half of it was still in the slot on the door while the other half hung from its mounting on the jamb. I closed the door and fitted the two halves together, then released them and let them dangle. Then I touched their ends together again. I unhooked the end of the chain from the slot and went to the bathroom for the roll of adhesive tape. I brought the tape back with me, tore off a piece, and used it to fasten the chain back together again. Then I let myself out of the apartment and tried to engage the chain bolt from outside, but the tape slipped whenever I put any pressure on it.