Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“If I had the price of a hat, maybe I’d go out and get one.”

“You got it,” I said.

He nodded and we told Birnbaum we wouldn’t be long. I walked with Guzik around the corner to the Eighteenth. On the way I palmed him two tens and a five, twenty-five dollars, the price of a hat in police parlance. He made the bills disappear.

I waited at his desk while he pulled the Paula Wittlauer file. There were about a dozen black-and-white prints, eight by tens, high-contrast glossies. Perhaps half of them showed Paula’s corpse from various angles. I had no interest in these but I made myself look at them as a sort of reinforcement, so I wouldn’t forget what I was doing on the case.

The other pictures were interior shots of the L-shaped apartment. I noted the wide-open window, the dresser with the stereo sitting on it, the chair with her clothing piled haphazardly upon it. I separated the interior pictures from the ones showing the corpse and told Guzik I wanted to keep them for the time being. He didn’t mind.

He cocked his head and looked at me. “You got something, Matt?”

“Nothing worth talking about.”

“If you ever do, I’ll want to hear about it.”

“Sure.”

“You like the life you’re leading? Working private, scuffling around?”

“It seems to suit me.”

He thought it over, nodded. Then he started for the stairs and I followed after him.

Later that eveningI managed to reach Ruth Wittlauer. I bundled the stereo into a cab and took it to her place. She lived in a well-kept brownstone a block and a half from Gramercy Park. Her apartment was inexpensively furnished but the pieces looked to have been chosen with care. The place was clean and neat. Her clock radio was tuned to an FM station that was playing chamber music. She had coffee made and I accepted a cup and sipped it while I told her about recovering the stereo from Cary McCloud.

“I wasn’t sure whether you could use it,” I said, “but I couldn’t see any reason why he should keep it. You can always sell it.”

“No, I’ll keep it. I just have a twenty-dollar record player that I bought on Fourteenth Street. Paula’s stereo cost a couple of hundred dollars.” She managed a smile. “So you’ve already more than earned what I gave you. Did he kill her?”

“No.”

“You’re sure of that?”

I nodded. “He’d kill if he had a reason but I don’t think he did. And if he did kill her he’d never have taken the stereo or the drugs, and he wouldn’t have acted the way he did. There was never a moment when I had the feeling that he’d killed her. And you have to follow your instincts in this kind of situation. Once they point things out to you, then you can usually find the facts to go with them.”

“And you’re sure my sister killed herself?”

“No. I’m pretty sure someone gave her a hand.”

Her eyes widened.

I said, “It’s mostly intuition. But there are a few facts to support it.” I told her about the chain bolt, how it had proved to the police that Paula’d killed herself, how my experiment had shown it could have been fastened from the corridor. Ruth got very excited at this but I explained that it didn’t prove anything in and of itself, only that suicide remained a theoretical possibility.

Then I showed her the pictures I’d obtained from Guzik. I selected one shot which showed the chair with Paula’s clothing without showing too much of the window. I didn’t want to make Ruth look at the window.

“The chair,” I said, pointing to it. “I noticed this when I was in your sister’s apartment. I wanted to see a photograph taken at the time to make sure things hadn’t been rearranged by the cops or McCloud or somebody else. But that clothing’s exactly the way it was when I saw it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The supposition is that Paula got undressed, put her clothes on the chair, then went to the window and jumped.” Her lip was trembling but she was holding herself together and I went right on talking. “Or she’d taken her clothes off earlier and maybe she took a shower or a nap and then came back and jumped. But look at the chair. She didn’t fold her clothes neatly, she didn’t put them away. And she didn’t just drop them on the floor, either. I’m no authority on the way women get undressed but I don’t think many people would do it that way.”

Ruth nodded. Her face was thoughtful.

“That wouldn’t mean very much by itself. If she were upset or stoned or confused she might have thrown things on the chair as she took them off. But that’s not what happened. The order of the clothing is all wrong. The bra’s underneath the blouse, the panty hose is underneath the skirt. She took her bra off after she took her blouse off, obviously, so it should have wound up on top of the blouse, not under it.”

“Of course.”

I held up a hand. “It’s nothing like proof, Ruth. There are any number of other explanations. Maybe she knocked the stuff onto the floor and then picked it up and the order of the garments got switched around. Maybe one of the cops went through the clothing before the photographer came around with his camera. I don’t really have anything terribly strong to go on.”

“But you think she was murdered.”

“Yes, I guess I do.”

“That’s what I thought all along. Of course I had a reason to think so.”

“Maybe I’ve got one, too. I don’t know.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I think I’ll poke around a little. I don’t know much about Paula’s life. I’ll have to learn more if I’m going to find out who killed her. But it’s up to you to decide whether you want me to stay with it.”

“Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because it probably won’t lead anywhere. Suppose she was upset after her conversation with McCloud and she picked up a stranger and took him home with her and he killed her. If that’s the case we’ll never know who he was.”

“You’re going to stay with it, aren’t you?”

“I suppose I want to.”

“It’ll be complicated, though. It’ll take you some time. I suppose you’ll want more money.” Her gaze was very direct. “I gave you two hundred dollars. I have three hundred more that I can afford to pay. I don’t mind paying it, Mr. Scudder. I already got... I got my money’s worth for the first two hundred, didn’t I? The stereo. When the three hundred runs out, well, you can tell me if you think it’s worth staying with the case. I couldn’t afford more cash right away, but I could arrange to pay you later on or something like that.”

I shook my head. “It won’t come to more than that,” I said. “No matter how much time I spend on it. And you keep the three hundred for the time being, all right? I’ll take it from you later on. If I need it, and if I’ve earned it.”

“That doesn’t seem right.”

“It seems right to me,” I said. “And don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m being charitable.”

“But your time’s valuable.”

I shook my head. “Not to me it isn’t.”

I spent thenext five days picking the scabs off Paula Wittlauer’s life. It kept turning out to be a waste of time but the time’s always gone before you realize you’ve wasted it. And I’d been telling the truth when I said my time wasn’t valuable. I had nothing better to do, and my peeks into the corners of Paula’s world kept me busy.

Her life involved more than a saloon on Ninth Avenue and an apartment on Fifty-seventh Street, more than serving drinks and sharing a bed with Cary McCloud. She did other things. She went one evening a week to group therapy on West Seventy-ninth Street. She took voice lessons every Tuesday morning on Amsterdam Avenue. She had an ex-boyfriend she saw once in a while. She hung out in a couple of bars in the neighborhood and a couple of others in the Village. She did this, she did that, she went here, she went there, and I kept busy dragging myself around town and talking to all sorts of people, and I managed to learn quite a bit about the person she’d been and the life she’d led without learning anything at all about the person who’d put her on the pavement.