Lawrence Block - A Stab in the Dark

"What?"

"I was relieved. Part of me was glad they were going, because you wouldn't believe what it was like, traipsing out there on the subway once a week, sitting in the apartment with them or walking around Boerum Hill and always risking blank stares from Maisie Pomerance. Goddamn it, why can't I even get that goddamned woman's name right? Mitzi!"

"I've got her number written down. You could always call her up and tell her off."

She laughed. "Oh, Jesus," she said. "I gotta pee. I'll be right back."

When she came back she sat on the couch. Without preamble she said, "You know what we are? Me with my sculpture and you with your existential angst, and what we are is a couple of drunks who copped out. That's all."

"If you say so."

"Don't patronize me. Let's face it. We're both alcoholics."

"I'm a heavy drinker. There's a difference."

"What's the difference?"

"I could stop anytime I want to."

"Then why don't you?"

"Why should I?"

Instead of answering the question she leaned forward to fill her glass. "I stopped for a while," she said. "I quit cold for two months. More than two months."

"You just up and quit?"

"I went to A.A."

"Oh."

"You ever been?"

I shook my head. "I don't think it would work for me."

"But you could stop anytime you want."

"Yeah, if I wanted."

"And anyway you're not an alcoholic."

I didn't say anything at first. Then I said, "I suppose it depends on how you define the word. Anyway, all it is is a label."

"They say you decide for yourself if you're an alcoholic."

"Well, I'm deciding that I'm not."

"I decided I was. And it worked for me. The thing is, they say it works best if you don't drink."

"I can see where that might make a difference."

"I don't know why I got on this subject." She drained her glass, looked at me over its rim. "I didn't mean to get on this goddamned subject. First my kids and then my drinking, what a fucking down."

"It's all right."

"I'm sorry, Matthew."

"Forget it."

"Sit next to me and help me forget it."

I joined her on the couch and ran a hand over her fine hair. The sprinkling of gray hair enhanced its attractiveness. She looked at me for a moment out of those bottomless gray eyes, then let the lids drop. I kissed her and she clung to me.

We necked some. I touched her breasts, kissed her throat. Her strong hands worked the muscles in my back and shoulders like modeling clay.

"You'll stay over," she said.

"I'd like that."

"So would I."

I freshened both our drinks.

I awakened with church bells pealing in the distance. My head was clear and I felt good. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and met the eyes of a long-haired cat curled up at the foot of the bed on the other side. He looked me over, then tucked his head in and resumed napping. Sleep with the lady of the house and the cats accept you.

I got dressed and found Jan in the kitchen. She was drinking a glass of pale orange juice. I figured there was something in it to take the edge off her hangover. She'd made coffee in a Chemex filter pot and poured me a cup. I stood by the window and drank it.

We didn't talk. The church bells had taken a break and the Sunday morning silence stretched out. It was a bright day out, the sun burning away in a cloudless sky. I looked down and couldn't see a single sign of life, not a person on the street, not a car moving.

I finished my coffee and added the cup to the dirty dishes in the stainless-steel sink. Jan used a key to bring the elevator to the floor. She asked if I was going out to Sheepshead Bay and I said I guessed I was. We held onto each other for a moment. I felt the warmth of her fine body through the robe she was wearing.

"I'll call you," I said, and rode the oversized elevator to the ground.

An Officer O'Byrne gave me directions over the phone. I followed them, riding the BMT Brighton Line to Gravesend Neck Road. The train came up above ground level at some point after it crossed into Brooklyn, and we rode through some neighborhoods of detached houses with yards that didn't look like New York at all.

The station house for the Sixty-first Precinct was on Coney Island Avenue and I managed to find it without too much trouble. In the squad room I played do-you-know with a wiry, long-jawed detective named Antonelli. We knew enough of the same people for him to relax with me. I told him what I was working on and mentioned that Frank Fitzroy had steered it my way. He knew Frank, too, though I didn't get the impression that they were crazy about each other.

"I'll see what our file looks like," he said. "But you probably saw copies of our reports in the file Fitzroy showed you."

"What I mostly want is to talk with somebody who looked at the body."

"Wouldn't the names of officers on the scene be in the file you saw in Manhattan?"

I'd thought of that myself. Maybe I could have managed all this without coming out to the ass end of Brooklyn. But when you go out and look for something you occasionally find more than you knew you were looking for.

"Well, maybe I can find that file," he said, and left me at an old wooden desk scarred with cigarette burns along its edges. Two desks over, a black detective with his sleeves rolled up was talking on the phone. It sounded as though he was talking to a woman, and it didn't sound much like police business. At another desk along the far wall a pair of cops, one uniformed and one in a suit, were questioning a teenager with a mop of unruly yellow hair. I couldn't hear what they were saying.

Antonelli came back with a slim file and dropped it on the desk in front of me. I went through it, pausing now and then to make a note in my notebook. The victim, I learned, was a Susan Potowski of 2705 Haring Street. She'd been a twenty-nine-year-old mother of two, separated from her husband, a construction laborer. She lived with her kids in the lower flat of a two-family semi-detached house, and she'd been killed around two o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon.

Her kids found her. They came home from school together around three thirty, a boy of eight and a girl of ten, and they found their mother on the kitchen floor, her clothing partly removed, her body covered with stab wounds. They ran around the street screaming until the beat cop turned up.

"Finding anything?"

"Maybe," I said. I copied down the name of the first cop on the scene, added those of two detectives from the Six-One who'd gone to the Haring Street house before switching the case to Midtown North. I showed the three names to Antonelli. "Any of these guys still work out of here?"

"Patrolman Burton Havermeyer, Detective Third-Grade Kenneth Allgood, Detective First-Grade Michael Quinn. Mick Quinn died two, maybe three years ago. Line of duty. He and a partner had a liquor store staked out on Avenue W and there were shots exchanged and he was killed. Terrible thing. Lost a wife to cancer two years before that, so he left four kids all alone in the world, the oldest just starting college. You must have read about it."

"I think I did."

"Guys who shot him pulled good long time. But they're alive and he's dead, so go figure. The other two, Allgood and Havermeyer, I don't even know the names, so they've been off the Six-One since before my time, which is what? Five years? Something like that."

"Can you find out where they went?"

"I can probably find out something. What do you want to ask 'em, anyway?"

"If she was stabbed in both eyes."

"Wasn't there an M.E.'s report in the file whats-his-name showed you? Fitzroy?"

I nodded. "Both eyes."

"So?"

"Remember that case some years ago? They pulled some woman out of the Hudson, called it death by drowning? Then some genius in the Medical Examiner's office took the skull and started using it for a paperweight, and there was a scandal about that, and because of all the heat somebody finally took a good look at the skull for the first time and found a bullet hole in it."