Lawrence Block - Out on the Cutting Edge

“And the reason you didn’t say anything—”

“Was because I thought I’d killed him! I thought the dose I gave him made him drowsy, and then as a result he lost consciousness while he was half strangling himself, and that was why he died. And by this time you and I were sleeping together, and I was terrified you’d hold it against me, I knew what a fanatic you are about sobriety, and I couldn’t see what purpose it would serve to admit that I’d done something that might have contributed to his death.” She held her hands at her sides. “That may make me guilty of something, Matt. But it doesn’t mean I killed him.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Do you see, darling? Do you see what—”

“What I’m beginning to see is how good you are at improvisation. I suppose you had good training, living under false colors for all those years, putting up one front after another for your neighbors and co-workers. It must have been a great education.”

“You’re talking about the lies I told earlier. I’m not proud of that but I guess it’s true. I guess I’ve learned to lie as a reflex. And now I have to learn a new way of behavior, now that I’m involved with someone who’s really important to me. It’s a different ball game now, isn’t it, and I—”

“Cut the shit, Willa.”

She recoiled as if from a blow. “It won’t work,” I told her. “You didn’t just slip him a Mickey. You knotted the clothesline around the neck and hanged him from the pipe. It wouldn’t have been hard for you to do. You’re a big strong woman and he was a little guy, and he wouldn’t have put up a fight once you’d knocked him out with the chloral. You set the stage nicely, you stripped him, you put a couple of bondage magazines where they’d tell a good story. Where did you buy the magazines? Times Square?”

“I didn’t buy the magazines. I didn’t do any of the things you just said.”

“One of the clerks down there might remember you. You’re a striking woman, and they don’t get that many female customers in the first place. I don’t suppose it would take a whole lot of legwork to turn up a clerk who remembers you.”

“Matt, if you could hear yourself. The awful things you’re accusing me of. I know you’re tired, I know the kind of day you’ve had, but—”

“I told you to cut the crap. I know you killed him, Willa. You closed the windows to hold the smell in a little longer, to make the medical evidence a little less precise. Then you waited for someone to notice the stench and report it, to you or to the cops. You were in no hurry. You didn’t really care how long it took before the body was discovered. What mattered was that he was dead. That way his secret could die with him.”

“What secret?”

“The one he had trouble living with. The one you didn’t dare let him tell me. About all the other people you killed.”

I said, “Poor Mrs. Mangan. All her old friends are dying while she sits around waiting for her own death. And the ones who don’t die are moving away. There was a landlord around the corner who moved junkies into the building so that they would terrorize his rent-controlled tenants. He got fined for it. He should have gone to jail, the son of a bitch.”

She looked right at me. It was hard to read her face, hard to guess what was going on behind it.

“But a lot of people have been moving out of the neighborhood willingly,” I went on. “Their landlords buy them out, offer them five or ten or twenty thousand dollars to give up their apartments. It must confuse the hell out of them, to get offered more to vacate an apartment than they’ve paid all their lives to live in it. Of course, once they take the money, they can’t find a place they can afford to live in.”

“That’s the system.”

“It’s a funny system. You pay steady rent on a couple of rooms for twenty or thirty years and the guy who owns the building pays a small fortune to get rid of you. You’d think he’d want to hang on to a good steady tenant, but then the same kind of thing happens in business. Companies pay their best employees big bonuses to take early retirement and get the hell out. That way they can replace them with young kids who’ll work for lower salaries. You wouldn’t think it would work that way, but it does.”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“Don’t you? I managed to get hold of the autopsy report on Gertrude Grod. She had the apartment directly above Eddie’s, and she died right around the time he was starting to get sober. She had just about as much chloral hydrate in her as Eddie did. And her physician never prescribed the drug for her, and neither did anyone on staff at Roosevelt or St. Clare’s. I figure you knocked on her door and got her to invite you in for a cup of tea, and when she was looking the other way you dosed her cup. On your way out you could have made sure the window gates were unlocked, so that Eddie could slip in a few hours later with a knife.”

“Why would he do this for me?”

“My guess is you had a sexual hold on him, but it could have been anything. He was just starting to get sober and he wasn’t a model of mental health at the time. And you’re pretty good at getting people to do what you want them to do. You probably convinced Eddie he’d be doing the old lady a favor. I’ve heard you rap on the subject, how nobody should have to grow old that way. And she’d never know what happened to her, the drug would keep her from waking up, and so she’d never feel a thing. All he had to do was go out his window, climb up a flight, and stick a knife into a sleeping woman.”

“Why wouldn’t I just knife her myself? If I was already in her apartment and I got her to drink a dose of chloral.”

“You wanted it to go in the books as a burglary. Eddie could make it a lot more convincing. He could lock her door from the inside and put the chain latch on before he went back out the window. I saw the police report. They had to break the door down. That was a nice touch, made it look a lot less like a possible inside job.”

“Why would I want her dead?”

“That’s easy. You wanted her apartment.”

“Look around you,” she said. “I’ve already got an apartment. Ground floor, no stairs to climb. What did I need with hers?”

“I spent a lot of time downtown today. Most of the morning and a good part of the afternoon. It’s hard to chase things through the municipal record system, but if you know how to do it and what you’re looking for, there’s a lot you can find out. I found out who owns this building. An outfit called Daskap Realty Corp.”

“I could have told you that.”

“I also found out who owns Daskap. A woman named Wilma Rosser. I don’t suppose it would be terribly hard to prove that Wilma Rosser and Willa Rossiter are the same person. You bought the building and moved in, but you told everybody that you were just the super, that you got the apartment in return for your services.”

“You have to do that,” she said. “No landlord can live on the premises unless you hide the fact from your tenants. Otherwise they’re after you all the time for one thing or another. I had to be able to shrug and say the landlord says no or I can’t reach the landlord or whatever I had to say.”

“It must have been tough,” I said. “Trying to generate a positive cash flow here, with all of the tenants paying rent way below market.”

“It is tough,” she admitted. “The woman you mentioned, Gertrude Grod. She was rent-controlled, of course. Her annual rent came to less than what it cost to heat her place during the winter. But you can’t believe I’d kill her because of that.”

“Her among others. You don’t own just this building. You’re the principal in two other corporations besides Daskap. One of them, also owned ultimately by Wilma Rosser, owns the building next door. Another, owned by W. P. Taggart, owns two buildings across the street, the ones where you’re the superintendent. Wilma P. Rosser was divorced from Elroy Hugh Taggart three years ago in New Mexico.”