Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“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 Wittlauerhit 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?”