Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

In high school physics they teach you that falling bodies accelerate at a speed of thirty-two feet per second. So she would have fallen thirty-two feet in the first second, another sixty-four feet the next second, then ninety-six feet in the third. Since she fell something like two hundred feet, I don’t suppose she could have spent more than four seconds in the actual act of falling.

It must have seemed a lot longer than that.

I got uparound ten, ten-thirty. When I stopped at the desk for my mail Vinnie told me they’d had a jumper across the street during the night. “A dame,” he said, which is a word you don’t hear much anymore. “She went out without a stitch on. You could catch your death that way.”

I looked at him.

“Landed in the street, just missed somebody’s Caddy. How’d you like to find something like that for a hood ornament? I wonder if your insurance would cover that. What do you call it, act of God?” He came out from behind the desk and walked with me to the door. “Over there,” he said, pointing. “The florist’s van there is covering the spot where she flopped. Nothing to see anyway. They scooped her up with a spatula and a sponge and then they hosed it all down. By the time I came on duty there wasn’t a trace left.”

“Who was she?”

“Who knows?”

I had things to do that morning, and as I did them I thought from time to time of the jumper. They’re not that rare and they usually do the deed in the hours before dawn. They say it’s always darkest then.

Sometime in the early afternoon I was passing Armstrong’s and stopped in for a short one. I stood at the bar and looked around to say hello to Paula but she wasn’t there. A doughy redhead named Rita was taking her shift.

Dean was behind the bar. I asked him where Paula was. “She skipping school today?”

“You didn’t hear?”

“Jimmy fired her?”

He shook his head, and before I could venture any further guesses he told me.

I drank mydrink. I had an appointment to see somebody about something, but suddenly it ceased to seem important. I put a dime in the phone and canceled my appointment and came back and had another drink. My hand was trembling slightly when I picked up the glass. It was a little steadier when I set it down.

I crossed Ninth Avenue and sat in St. Paul’s for a while. Ten, twenty minutes. Something like that. I lit a candle for Paula and a few other candles for a few other corpses, and I sat there and thought about life and death and high windows. Around the time I left the police force I discovered that churches were very good places for thinking about that sort of thing.

After a while I walked over to her building and stood on the pavement in front of it. The florist’s truck had moved on and I examined the street where she’d landed. There was, as Vinnie had assured me, no trace of what had happened. I tilted my head back and looked up, wondering what window she might have fallen from, and then I looked down at the pavement and then up again, and a sudden rush of vertigo made my head spin. In the course of all this I managed to attract the attention of the building’s doorman and he came out to the curb anxious to talk about the former tenant. He was a black man about my age and he looked as proud of his uniform as the guy in the Marine Corps recruiting poster. It was a good-looking uniform, shades of brown, epaulets, gleaming brass buttons.

“Terrible thing,” he said. “A young girl like that with her whole life ahead of her.”

“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 MatthewScudder?”

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.”