“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 unserviced 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 ever 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 undistu
rbed 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.
I went inside again and studied the chain bolt. I decided I was behaving erratically, that Paula Wittlauer had gone out the window of her own accord. I looked at the windowsill again. The light dusting of soot didn’t tell me anything one way or the other. New York’s air is filthy and the accumulation of soot could have been deposited in a couple of hours, even with the window shut. It didn’t mean anything.
I looked at the heap of clothes on the chair, and I looked again at the chain bolt, and I rode the elevator to the basement and found either the superintendent or one of his assistants. I asked to borrow a screwdriver. He gave me a long screwdriver with an amber plastic grip. He didn’t ask me who I was or what I wanted it for.
I returned to Paula Wittlauer’s apartment and removed the chain bolt from its moorings on the door and jamb. I left the building and walked around the corner to a hardware store on Ninth Avenue. They had a good selection of chain bolts but I wanted one identical to the one I’d removed and I had to walk down Ninth Avenue as far as Fiftieth Street and check four stores before I found what I was looking for.
Back in Paula’s apartment I mounted the new chain bolt, using the holes in which the original had been mounted. I tightened the screws with the super’s screwdriver and stood out in the corridor and played with the chain. My hands are large and not terribly skillful, but even so I was able to lock and unlock the chain bolt from outside the apartment.
I don’t know who put it up, Paula or a previous tenant or someone on the building staff, but that chain bolt had been as much protection as the Sanitized wrapper on a motel toilet seat. As evidence that Paula’d been alone when she went out the window, well, it wasn’t worth a thing.
I replaced the original chain bolt, put the new one in my pocket, returned to the elevator, and gave back the screwdriver. The man I returned it to seemed surprised to get it back.
It took me a couple of hours to find Cary McCloud. I’d learned that he tended bar evenings at a club in the West Village called The Spider’s Web. I got down there around five. The guy behind the bar had knobby wrists and an underslung jaw and he wasn’t Cary McCloud. “He don’t come on till eight,” he told me, “and he’s off tonight anyway.” I asked where I could find McCloud. “Sometimes he’s here afternoons but he ain’t been in today. As far as where you could look for him, that I couldn’t tell you.”
A lot of people couldn’t tell me but eventually I ran across someone who could. You can quit the police force but you can’t stop looking and sounding like a cop, and while that’s a hindrance in some situations it’s a help in others. Ultimately I found a man in a bar down the block from The Spider’s Web who’d learned it was best to cooperate with the police if it didn’t cost you anything. He gave me an address on Barrow Street and told me which bell to ring.
I went to the building but I rang several other bells until somebody buzzed me through the downstairs door. I didn’t want Cary to know he had company coming. I climbed two flights of stairs to the apartment he was supposed to be occupying. The bell downstairs hadn’t had his name on it. It hadn’t had any name at all.
Loud rock music was coming through his door. I stood in front of it for a minute, then hammered on it loud enough to make myself heard over the electric guitars. After a moment the music dropped in volume. I pounded on the door again and a male voice asked who I was.
I said, “Police. Open up.” That’s a misdemeanor but I didn’t expect to get in trouble for it.
“What’s it about?”
“Open up, McCloud.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he said. He sounded tired, aggravated. “How did you find me, anyway? Give me a minute, huh? I want to put some clothes on.”
Sometimes that’s what they say while they’re putting a clip into an automatic. Then they pump a handful of shots through the door and into you if you’re still standing behind it. But his voice didn’t have that kind of edge to it and I couldn’t summon up enough anxiety to get out of the way. Instead I put my ear against the door and heard whispering within. I couldn’t make out what they were whispering about or get any sense of the person who was with him. The music was down in volume but there was still enough of it to cover their conversation.
The door opened. He was tall and thin, with hollow cheeks and prominent eyebrows and a worn, wasted look to him. He must have been in his early thirties and he didn’t really look much older than that but you sensed that in another ten years he’d look twenty years older. If he lived that long. He wore patched jeans and a T-shirt with The Spider’s Web silkscreened on it. Beneath the legend there was a sketch of a web. A macho spider stood at one end of it, grinning, extending two of his eight arms to welcome a hesitant girlish fly.
He noticed me noticing the shirt and managed a grin. “Place where I work,” he said.
“I know.”
“So come into my parlor. It ain’t much but it’s home.”
I followed him inside, drew the door sh
ut after me. The room was about fifteen feet square and held nothing you could call furniture. There was a mattress on the floor in one corner and a couple of cardboard cartons alongside it. The music was coming from a stereo, turntable and tuner and two speakers all in a row along the far wall. There was a closed door over on the right. I figured it led to the bathroom, and that there was a woman on the other side of it.
“I guess this is about Paula,” he said. I nodded. “I been over this with you guys,” he said. “I was nowhere near there when it happened. The last I saw her was five, six hours before she killed herself. I was working at the Web and she came down and sat at the bar. I gave her a couple of drinks and she split.”
“And you went on working.”
“Until I closed up. I kicked everybody out a little after three and it was close to four by the time I had the place swept up and the garbage on the street and the window gates locked. Then I came over here and picked up Sunny and we went up to the place on Fifty-third.”
“And you got there when?”
“Hell, I don’t know. I wear a watch but I don’t look at it every damn minute. I suppose it took five minutes to walk here and then Sunny and I hopped right in a cab and we were at Patsy’s in ten minutes at the outside, that’s the after-hours place, I told you people all of this, I really wish you would talk to each other and leave me the hell alone.”
“Why doesn’t Sunny come out and tell me about it?” I nodded at the bathroom door. “Maybe she can remember the time a little more clearly.”
“Sunny? She stepped out a little while ago.”
“She’s not in the bathroom?”
“Nope. Nobody’s in the bathroom.”
“Mind if I see for myself?”
“Not if you can show me a warrant.”
We looked at each other. I told him I figured I could take his word for it. He said he could always be trusted to tell the truth. I said I sensed as much about him.
He said, “What’s the hassle, huh? I know you guys got forms to fill out, but why not give me a break? She killed herself and I wasn’t anywhere near her when it happened.”