Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“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 wasthe 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 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.

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.