Time to Murder and Create (10 page)

"Nothing."

"How does a stolen car tie into Spinner Jablon?"

"Spinner? Oh, the guy they took out of the river. No connection."

"Because you were just looking for this woman's husband." I saw my slip then, but waited to see if he'd caught it, and he had. "It was his girlfriend looking for him last time I heard it. You're being awful cute with me, Matt."

I didn't say anything. He picked his cigar out of the ashtray and studied it, then leaned over and dropped it in his wastebasket. He straightened up and looked at me, then away, then at me again.

"What are you holding out?

"Nothing you have to know."

"How do you get tied into Spinner Jablon?"

"It's not important."

"And what's with the car?"

"That's not important either." I straightened up. "Spinner got dropped in the East River, and the car sheared off a parking meter on Ninth between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth. And the car was stolen uptown, so none of this has been going on in the Sixth Precinct. There's nothing you've got to know, Eddie."

"Who killed Spinner?"

"I don't know."

"Is that straight?"

"Of course it's straight."

"Are you playing tag with somebody?"

"Not exactly."

"Jesus Christ, Matt."

I wanted to get out of there. I wasn't holding out anything he had a claim on, and I really couldn't give him or anybody else what I had. But I was playing a lone hand and ducking his questions, and I could hardly expect him to like it.

"Who's your client, Matt?"

Spinner was my client, but I could see no profit in saying so. "I don't have one," I said.

"Then what's your angle?"

"I'm not sure I have an angle, either."

"I hear things to the effect that Spinner was in the dollars lately."

"He was well dressed the last time I saw him."

"That so?"

"His suit set him back three hundred and twenty dollars. He happened to mention it."

He looked at me until I averted my own gaze. In a low voice he said, "Matt, you don't want people driving cars at you. It's unhealthy. You sure you don't want to lay it all out for me?"

"As soon as it's time, Eddie."

"And you're sure it's not time yet?"

I took my time answering. I remembered the feel of that car rolling at me, remembered what actually happened, and then remembered how I dreamed it, with the driver taking the big car all the way to the wall.

"I'm sure," I said.

AT the Lion's Head I had a hamburger and some bourbon and coffee. I was a little surprised that the car had been stolen so far uptown. They could have picked it up early on and parked it in my neighborhood, or the Marlboro man could have made a phone call between the time I left Polly's and the time he found his way into Armstrong's. Which would mean there were at least two people in the thing, which I had already decided on the basis of the voice I'd heard over the telephone.

Or he could have--

No, it was pointless. There were too many possible scenarios I could write for myself, and none of them was going to get me anywhere but confused.

I signaled for another cup of coffee and another shot, mixed them together, and worked on it. The tail end of my conversation with Eddie had gotten in the way. There was something I had learned from him, but the problem was that I didn't know that I knew it. He had said something that had rung a very muted bell, and I couldn't get it to ring again.

I got a dollar's worth of change and went over to the phone. Jersey Information gave me William Raiken's number in Upper Montclair. I called it and told Mrs. Raiken I was from the Auto Theft Squad, and she said was surprised we had recovered her car so soon and did I happen to know if it was at all damaged.

I said, "I'm afraid we haven't recovered your car yet, Mrs. Raiken."

"Oh."

"I just wanted to get some details. Your car was parked at Broadway and One Hundred Fourteenth Street?"

"That's right. On One Hundred Fourteenth, not on Broadway."

"I see. Now, our records indicate that you reported the theft at approximately two a.m. Was that immediately after you noticed the car was missing.

"Yes. Well, just about. I went to where I parked the car and it wasn't there, of course, and my first thought was it was towed away. I was parked legally, but sometimes there are signs you don't see, different regulations, but anyway they don't do any towing that far uptown, do they?"

"Not above Eighty-sixth Street."

"That's what I thought, although I always manage to find a legal space. Then I thought maybe I'd made a mistake and I actually left the car on a Hundred Thirteenth, so I went and checked, but of course it wasn't there either, so then I called my husband to have him pick me up, and he said to report the theft, so that was when I called you. Maybe there was fifteen or twenty minutes between when I missed the car and when I actually placed the call."

"I see." I was sorry now that I'd asked. "And when did you park the car, Mrs.

Raiken?"

"Let me see. I had the two classes, an eight o'clock short-story workshop and a ten o'clock course in Renaissance history, but I was a little early, so I guess I parked a little after seven. Is that important?"

"Well, it won't aid in recovering the vehicle, Mrs. Raiken, but we try to develop data to pinpoint the times when various crimes are likely to occur."

"That's interesting," she said. "What good does that do?"

I had always wondered that myself. I told her it was part of the overall crime picture, which is what I generally had been told when I'd asked similar questions. I thanked her and assured her that her car would probably be recovered shortly, and she thanked me, and we said good-bye to each other and I went back to the bar.

I tried to determine what I'd learned from her and decided I'd learned nothing. My mind wandered, and I found myself wondering just what Mrs. Raiken had been doing on the Upper West Side in the middle of the night. She hadn't been with her husband, and her last class must have let out around eleven. Maybe she'd just had a few beers at the West End or one of the other bars around Columbia.

Quite a few beers, maybe, which would explain why she'd walked around the block looking for her car. Not that it mattered if she'd had enough beer to float a battleship, because Mrs. Raiken didn't have a whole hell of a lot to do with Spinner Jablon or anybody else, and whether or not she had anything to do with Mr. Raiken was their business and none of my own, and--

Columbia.

Columbia is at One Hundred Sixteenth and Broadway, so that's where she would have been taking courses. And someone else was studying at Columbia, taking graduate courses in psychology and planning to work with retarded children.

I checked the phone book. No Prager, Stacy, because single women know better than to put their first names in telephone books. But there was a Prager, S., on West One Hundred Twelfth between Broadway and Riverside.

I went back and finished my coffee. I left a bill on the bar. At the doorway I changed my mind, looked up Prager, S., again, and made a note of the address and phone number. On the chance that S. stood for Seymour or anything other than Stacy, I dropped a dime in the slot and dialed the number. I let it ring seven times, then hung up and retrieved my dime. There were two other dimes with it.

Some days you get lucky.

By the time I got off the subway at Broadway and One Hundred Tenth, I was a lot less impressed by the coincidence I had turned up. If Prager had decided to kill me, either directly or through hirelings, there was no particular reason why he would have stolen a car two blocks away from his daughter's apartment. It looked at first glance as though it ought to add up to something, but I wasn't sure that it did.

Of course, if Stacy Prager had a boyfriend, and if he turned out to be the Marlboro man...

It looked to be worth a try. I found her building, a five-story brownstone which now held four apartments to a floor. I rang her bell, and there was no answer. I rang a couple of other bells on the top floor--it's surprising how often people buzz you in that way--but no one was home, and the vestibule lock looked very easy. I used a pick on it, and I couldn't have opened it much faster with a key.

I climbed three steep flights of stairs and knocked on the door of 4-C. I waited and knocked again, and then I opened both the locks on her door and made myself at home.

There was one fairly large room with a convertible sofa and a sprinkling of Salvation Army furniture. I checked the closet and the dresser, and all I learned was that if Stacy had a boyfriend he lived elsewhere.

There was no signs of male occupancy.

I gave the place a very casual toss, just trying to get some sense of the person who lived there. There were a lot of books, most of them paperbacks, most of them dealing with some aspect of psychology.

There was a stack of magazines: New York and Psychology Today and Intellectual Digest. There was nothing stronger than aspirin in the medicine chest.

Stacy kept her apartment in good order, and it in turn gave the impression that her life was also in good order. I felt a violator standing there in her apartment, scanning the titles of her books, rummaging through the clothes in her closet. I grew increasingly uncomfortable in the role, and my failure to find anything to justify my presence augmented the feeling. I got out of there and closed up after myself. I locked one of the locks; the other had to be locked with a key, and I figured she would simply decide she had failed to lock it on the way out.

I could have found a nice framed photo of the Marlboro man. That would have been handy, but it just

hadn't happened. I left the building and went around the corner and had a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Prager and Ethridge and Huysendahl, and one of them had killed Spinner and had tried to kill me, and I didn't seem to be getting anywhere.

Suppose it was Prager. Things seemed to form a pattern, and although they didn't really lock in place, they had the right sort of feel to them. He was on the hook in the first place because of a hit-and-run case, and so far a car had been used twice. Spinner's letter mentioned a car jumping a curb at him, and one had certainly taken a shot at me last night. And he was the one who seemed to be feeling the bite financially. Beverly Ethridge was stalling for time, Theodore Huysendahl had agreed to my price, and Prager said he didn't know how he could raise the money.

So suppose it was him. If so, he had just tried to commit murder, and he hadn't made it work, and he was probably a little shaky about it. If it was him, now was a good time to rattle the bars of his cage. And if it wasn't him, I'd be in a better position to know it if I dropped in on him.

I paid for my coffee and went out and flagged a cab.

The black girl looked up at me when I entered his office. It took her a second or two to place me, and then her dark eyes took on a wary expression.

"Matthew Scudder," I said.

"For Mr. Prager?"

"That's right."

"Is he expecting you, Mr. Scudder?"

"I think he'll want to see me, Shari."

She seemed startled that I remembered her name. She got hesitantly to her feet and stepped out from behind the U-shaped desk.

"I'll tell him you're here," she said.

"You do that."

She slipped through Prager's door, drawing it swiftly shut behind her. I sat on the vinyl couch and looked at Mrs. Prager's seascape. I decided that the men were vomiting over the sides of the boat. There was no question about it.

The door opened and she returned to the reception room, again closing the door after her. "He'll see you in about five minutes," she said.

"All right."

"I guess you got important business with him."

"Fairly important."

"I just hope things go right. That man has not been himself lately. It just seems the harder a man works and the more successful he grows, that's all the more pressure he has bearing down upon him."

"I guess he's been under a lot of pressure lately."

"He has been under a strain," she said. Her eyes challenged me, holding me responsible for Prager's difficulty. It was a charge I could not deny.

"Maybe things will clear up soon," I suggested.

"I truly hope so."

"I suppose he's a good man to work for?"

"A very good man. He has always been--"

But she didn't get to finish the sentence, because just then there was the sound of a truck backfiring, except trucks do that at ground level, not on the twenty-second floor. She had been standing beside her desk, and she stayed frozen there for a moment, eyes wide, the back of her hand pressed to her mouth.

She held the pose long enough for me to get out of my chair and beat her to his door.

I yanked it open, and Henry Prager was seated at his desk, and of course it had not been a truck backfiring. It had been a gun. A small gun, .22 or .25 caliber from the look of it, but when you put the barrel in your mouth and tilt it up toward the brain, a small gun is all you really need.

I stood in the doorway, trying to block it, and she was at my shoulder, small hands hammering at my back. For a moment I didn't yield, and then it seemed to me that she had at least as much right as I to look at him. I took a step into the room and she followed me and saw what she'd known she was going to see.

Then she started to scream.

If Shari hadn't known my name, I might have left. Perhaps not; cop instincts die hard if they die at all, and I had spent too many years despising those reluctant witnesses who slipped off into the shadows to feel comfortable playing the role myself. Nor would it have sat well to duck out on a girl in her condition.