Time to Murder and Create (12 page)

The bourbon kept refusing to do its job. I moved around a lot, because every bar I hit had one person in it whose company put me on edge. I kept seeing him in the mirror and taking him with me wherever I went. The activity and the nervous energy probably burned off a lot of the alcohol before it had a chance to get to me, and the time I spent walking around was time I could have more profitably spent sitting in one place and drinking.

The kind of bars I chose had something to do with keeping me relatively sober. I usually drink in dark quiet places where a shot is two ounces, three if they know you. Tonight I was hitting Blarney Stones and White Roses. The prices were considerably lower but the shot glasses were small, and when you paid for an ounce that's what you got, and even so it was apt to be about 30 percent water.

At one place on Broadway they had the basketball game on. I watched the last quarter on a big color set. The Knicks were down by a point when the quarter started, and wound up dropping it by twelve or thirteen. That was the fourth game for the Celtics.

The guy next to me said, "And next year they lose Lucas and DeBusschere, and Reed's knees are still gonna be shit, and Clyde can't do it all, so where the fuck are we?"

I nodded. What he said sounded reasonable to me.

"Even at the end of three, dead even for three periods, and they got Cowens and What's-his-name with five fouls, and then they can't find the basket. I mean, they don't fucking try, you know?"

"Must be my fault," I said.

"Huh?"

"They started falling apart when I started watching. It must be my fault."

He looked me over and backed off a step. He said, "Easy, guy. I didn't mean nothing."

But he'd read me wrong. I'd been absolutely serious.

I wound up at Armstrong's, where they pour perfectly fine drinks, but by then I'd lost my taste for it. I sat in the corner with a cup of coffee. It was a quiet night, and Trina had time to join me.

"I kept a weather eye open," she said, "but saw of him neither hide nor hair."

"How's that?"

"The cowboy. Just my cute little way of saying he hasn't been around tonight. Wasn't I supposed to keep watch, like a good Junior G-Man?"

"Oh, the Marlboro man. I thought I saw him tonight."

"Here?"

"No, earlier. I've been seeing a lot of shadows tonight."

"Is something wrong?"

"Yeah."

"Hey." She covered my hand with one of hers. "What's the matter, baby?"

"I keep finding new people to light candles for."

"I don't get you. You're not drunk, are you, Matt?"

"No, but not for lack of trying. I have had better days." I sipped coffee, put the cup down on the checkered cloth. I took out Spinner's silver dollar--correction, my dollar, I'd bought and paid for it--and I gave it a spin. I said, "Last night somebody tried to kill me."

"God! Around here?"

"A few doors down the block."

"No wonder you're--"

"No, that's not it. This afternoon I got even. I killed a man." I thought she would take her hand from atop mine, but she didn't. "I didn't exactly kill him. He stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. A little Spanish gun, they truck them in by the ton from the Carolinas."

"Why do you say you killed him?"

"Because I put him in a room and the gun was the only door out of it. I boxed him in."

She looked at her watch. "Fuck it," she said. "I can leave early for a change.

If Jimmie wants to sue me for half an hour, then the hell with him." She reached behind her neck with both hands to unfasten her apron. The movement emphasized the swell of her breasts.

She said, "Like to walk me home, Matt?"

We had used each other a few times over the months to keep the lonelies away. We liked each other in and out of bed, and both of us had the vital security of knowing it could never lead to anything.

"Matt?"

"I couldn't do you much good tonight, kid."

"You could keep me from getting mugged on the way home."

"You know what I mean."

"Yeah, Mr. Detective, but you don't know what I mean." She touched my cheek with her forefinger. "I wouldn't let you near me tonight anyway. You need a shave." Her face softened into a smile. "I was offering a little coffee and company," she said. "I think you could use it."

"Maybe I could."

"Plain old coffee and company."

"All right."

"Not tea and sympathy, nothing like that."

"Just coffee and company."

"Uh-huh. Now tell me it's the best offer you've had all day."

"It is," I said. "But that's not saying a hell of a lot."

* * *

SHE made good coffee, and she managed to come up with a pint of Harper's to flavor it with. By the time I was done talking, the pint had gone from mostly full to mostly empty.

I told her most of it. I left out anything that would make Ethridge or Huysendahl identifiable, and I didn't spell out Henry Prager's smarmy little secret. I didn't mention his name, either, although she figured to dope it out for herself if she bothered to read the morning papers.

When I was finished she sat there for a few minutes, head tilted to one side, eyes half lidded, smoke drifting upward from her cigarette. At length she said she didn't see how I could have done things differently.

"Because suppose you managed to let him know that you weren't a blackmailer, Matt. Suppose you got a little more evidence together and went to him. You would have exposed him, wouldn't you?"

"One way or another."

"He killed himself because he was afraid of exposure, and that was while he thought you were a blackmailer. If he knew you were going to hand him over to the cops, wouldn't he have done the same thing?"

"He might not have had the chance."

"Well, maybe he was better off having the chance. Nobody forced him to take it, it was his decision."

I thought it over. "There's still something wrong."

"What?"

"I don't exactly know. Something doesn't fit together the way it should."

"You just have to have something to feel guilty about." I guess the line hit home enough to show in my face, because she blanched. "I'm sorry," she said.

"Matt, I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"I was just, you know, being cute."

"Many a true word is et cetera." I stood up. "It'll look better in the morning.

Things generally do."

"Don't leave."

"I had the coffee and company, and thanks for both. Now I'd better get on home."

She was shaking her head. "Stay over."

"I told you before, Trina--"

"I know you did. I don't particularly want to fuck either, as a matter of fact.

But I really don't want to sleep alone."

"I don't know if I can sleep."

"Then hold me until I fall asleep. Please, baby?"

We went to bed together and held each other. Maybe the bourbon finally got around to working, or maybe I was more exhausted than I'd realized, but I fell asleep like that, holding her.

I woke up with my head throbbing and a liverish taste in the back of my throat. A note on her pillow advised me to help myself to breakfast. The only breakfast I could face was in the bottle of Harper's, and I helped myself to it, and, along with a couple of aspirins from her medicine cabinet and a cup of lousy coffee from the deli downstairs, it took some of the edge off the way I felt.

The weather was good and the air pollution lighter than usual. You could actually see the sky. I headed back to the hotel, picking up a paper on the way. It was almost noon. I don't usually get that much sleep.

I would have to call them, Beverly Ethridge and Theodore Huysendahl. I had to let them know that they were off the hook, that in fact they'd never actually been on it in the first place. I wondered what their reactions would be. Probably a combination of relief and some indignation about having been gulled.

Well, that would be their problem. I had enough of my own.

I'd have to see them in person, obviously. I couldn't manage it over the phone. I didn't look forward to it, but did look forward to having it behind me. Two brief phone calls and two brief meetings and I would never have to see either of them again.

I stopped at the desk. There was no mail for me, but there was a phone message. Miss Stacy Prager had called. There was a number where I was to call her as soon as possible. It was the number I had dialed from the Lion's Head.

In my room I checked through the Times. Prager was on the obit page under a two-column headline.

Just his obituary, with the statement that he had died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. It was apparent, all right. I was not mentioned in the article. I'd thought that was how his daughter might have gotten my name. Then I looked at the message slip again. She had called around nine the night before, and the first edition of the Times wouldn't have hit the street before eleven or twelve.

So that meant she'd learned my name from the police. Or that she had heard it earlier, from her father.

I picked up the phone, then put it down again. I did not much want to talk to Stacy Prager. I couldn't imagine that there was anything I wanted to hear from her, and I knew there was nothing I wanted to say to her. The fact that her father was a murderer was not something she would learn from me, nor would anyone else.

Spinner Jablon had had the revenge he'd purchased from me. So far as the rest of the world was concerned, his case could remain in the Open file forever. The police didn't care who had killed him, and I didn't feel obliged to tell them.

I picked up the phone again and called Beverly Ethridge. The line was busy.

I broke the connection and tried Huysendahl's office. He was out to lunch. I waited a few minutes and tried the Ethridge number again, and it was still busy. I stretched out on the bed and closed my eyes, and the phone rang.

"Mr. Scudder? My name is Stacy Prager." A young and earnest voice. "I'm sorry I haven't been in. After I called last night I wound up taking the train so I could be with my mother."

"I just got your message a few minutes ago."

"I see. Well, would it be possible for me to talk with you? I'm at Grand Central, I could come to your hotel or meet you wherever you say."

"I'm not sure how I could help you."

There was a pause. Then she said, "Maybe you can't. I don't know. But you were the last person to see my father alive, and I--"

"I didn't even see him yesterday, Miss Prager. I was waiting to see him at the time it happened."

"Yes, that's right. But the thing is... listen, I'd really like to meet with you, if that's all right."

"If there's anything I could help you with over the telephone--"

"Couldn't I meet you?"

I asked her if she knew where my hotel was. She said she did, and that she could be there in ten or twenty minutes and she would phone me from the lobby. I hung up and wondered how she had known how to reach me. I'm not in the telephone book. And I wondered if she'd known about Spinner Jablon, and if she'd known about me. If the Marlboro man was her boyfriend, and if she'd been in on the planning...

If so, it was logical to believe that she'd hold me responsible for her father's death. I couldn't even argue the point--I felt responsible myself. But I couldn't really believe she'd have a cute little gun in her handbag. I'd ragged Heaney about watching television. I don't watch all that much television myself.

It took her fifteen minutes, during which time I tried Beverly Ethridge again and got another busy signal.

Then Stacy called from the lobby, and I went downstairs to meet her.

Long dark hair, straight, parted in the middle. A tall, slender girl with a long, narrow face and dark, bottomless eyes. She wore clean well-tailored blue jeans and a lime-green cardigan sweater over a simple white blouse. Her handbag had been made by cutting the legs off another pair of jeans. I decided it was highly unlikely there was a gun in it.

We confirmed that I was Matthew Scudder and she was Stacy Prager. I suggested coffee, and we went to the Red Flame and took a booth. After they gave us the coffee, I told her I was very sorry about her father but that I still couldn't imagine why she wanted to see me.

"I don't know why he killed himself," she said.

"Neither do I."

"Don't you?" Her eyes searched my face. I tried to imagine her as she had been a few years ago, smoking grass and dropping pills, running down a child and freaking out sufficiently to drive away from what she'd done. That image failed to jibe with the girl seated across the Formica table from me. She now seemed alert and aware and responsible, wounded by her father's death but strong enough to ride it out.

She said, "You're a detective."

"More or less."

"What does that mean?"

"I do some private work on a free-lance basis. None of it as interesting as it may sound."

"And you were working for my father?"

I shook my head. "I'd seen him once last week," I said, and went on to repeat the cover story I'd given Jim Heaney. "So I really didn't know your father at all."

"That's very strange," she said.

She stirred her coffee, added more sugar, stirred it again. She took a sip and put the cup back in the saucer. I asked her why it was strange.

She said, "I saw my father the night before last. He was waiting at my apartment when I got home from classes. He took me out for dinner. He does that--did that--once or twice a week. But usually he would call me first to arrange it. He said he just had the impulse and took the chance that I'd be coming home."

"I see."

"He was very upset. Is that the right word? He was agitated, he was unsettled about something. He was always inclined to be a moody man, very exuberant when things were going right, very depressed when they weren't. When I was first getting into Abnormal Psych and studied the manic-depressive syndrome I got tremendous echoes of my father. I don't mean that he was insane in any sense of the word, but that he had the same kind of mood swings. They didn't interfere with his life, it was just that he had that type of personality."