“Did you know her well?”
He shook his head. “She would give me a smile, always say hello, always call me by name. Always in a hurry, rushing in, rushing out again. You wouldn’t think she had a care in the world. But you never know.”
“You never do.”
“She lived on the seventeenth floor. I wouldn’t live that high above the ground if you gave me the place rent-free.”
“Heights bother you?”
I don’t know if he heard the question. “I live up one flight of stairs. That’s just fine for me. No elevator and no, no high window.” His brow clouded and he looked on the verge of saying something else, but then someone started to enter his building’s lobby and he moved to intercept him. I looked up again, trying to count windows to the seventeenth floor, but the vertigo returned and I gave it up.
“Are you Matthew Scudder?”
I looked up. The girl who’d asked the question was very young, with long straight brown hair and enormous light brown eyes. Her face was open and defenseless and her lower lip was quivering. I said I was Matthew Scudder and pointed at the chair opposite mine. She remained on her feet.
“I’m Ruth Wittlauer,” she said.
The name didn’t register until she said, “Paula’s sister.” Then I nodded and studied her face for signs of a family resemblance. If they were there I couldn’t find them. It was ten in the evening and Paula Wittlauer had been dead for eighteen hours and her sister was standing expectantly before me, her face a curious blend of determination and uncertainty.
I said, “I’m sorry. Won’t you sit down? And will you have something to drink?”
“I don’t drink.”
“Coffee?”
“I’ve been drinking coffee all day. I’m shaky from all the damn coffee. Do I have to order something?”
She was on the edge, all right. I said, “No, of course not. You don’t have to order anything.” And I caught Trina’s eye and warned her off and she nodded shortly and let us alone. I sipped my own coffee and watched Ruth Wittlauer over the brim of the cup.
“You knew my sister, Mr. Scudder.”
“In a superficial way, as a customer knows a waitress.”
“The police say she killed herself.”
“And you don’t think so?”
“I know she didn’t.”
I watched her eyes while she spoke and I was willing to believe she meant what she said. She didn’t believe that Paula went out the window of her own accord, not for a moment. Of course, that didn’t mean she was right.
“What do you think happened?”
“She was murdered.” She made the statement quite matter-of-factly. “I know she was murdered. I think I know who did it.”
“Who?”
“Cary McCloud.”
“I don’t know him.”
“But it may have been somebody else,” she went on. She lit a cigarette, smoked for a few moments in silence. “I’m pretty sure it was Cary,” she said.
“Why?”
“They were living together.” She frowned, as if in recognition of the fact that cohabitation was small evidence of murder. “He could do it,” she said carefully. “That’s why I think he did. I don’t think just anyone could commit murder. In the heat of the moment, sure, I guess people fly off the handle, but to do it deliberately and throw someone out of a, out of a, to just deliberately throw someone out of a — ”
I put my hand on top of hers. She had long small-boned hands and her skin was cool and dry to the touch. I thought she was going to cry or break or something but she didn’t. It was just not going to be possible for her to say the word window and she would stall every time she came to it.
“What do the police say?”
“Suicide. They say she killed herself.” She drew on the cigarette. “But they don’t know her, they never knew her. If Paula wanted to kill herself she would have taken pills. She liked pills.”
“I figured she took ups.”
“Ups, tranquilizers, ludes, barbiturates. And she liked grass and she liked to drink.” She lowered her eyes. My hand was still on top of hers and she looked at our two hands and I removed mine. “I don’t do any of those things. I drink coffee, that’s my one vice, and I don’t even do that much because it makes me jittery. It’s the coffee that’s making me nervous tonight. Not…all of this.”
“Okay.”
“She was twenty-four. I’m twenty. Baby sister, square baby sister, except that was always how she wanted me to be. She did all these things and at the same time she told me not to do them, that it was a bad scene. I think she kept me straight. I really do. Not so much because of what she was saying as that I looked at the way she was living and what it was doing to her and I didn’t want that for myself. I thought it was crazy, what she was doing to herself, but at the same time I guess I worshiped her, she was always my heroine. I loved her, God, I really did, I’m just starting to realize how much, and she’s dead and he killed her, I know he killed her, I just know it.”
After a while I asked her what she wanted me to do.
“You’re a detective.”
“Not in an official sense. I used to be a cop.”
“Could you…find out what happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“I tried talking to the police. It was like talking to the wall. I can’t just turn around and do nothing. Do you understand me?”
“I think so. Suppose I look into it and it still looks like suicide?”
“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.