Lawrence Block - A Stab in the Dark

I found the right building and rang the right bell and climbed four flights of stairs. He was waiting for me in the doorway of one of the back apartments. He said, "Scudder?" and I nodded. "Burt Havermeyer," he said. "Come on in."

I followed him into a fair-sized studio with a Pullman kitchen. The overhead light fixture was a bare bulb in one of those Japanese paper shades. The walls were due for paint. I took a seat on the couch and accepted the can of beer he handed me. He popped one for himself, then moved to turn off the television set, a black and white portable perched on top of an orange crate that held paperback books on its lower two shelves.

He pulled up a chair for himself, crossed his legs. He looked to be in his early thirties, five-eight or — nine, pale complected, with narrow shoulders and a beer gut. He wore brown gabardine slacks and a brown and beige patterned sportshirt. He had deep-set brown eyes, heavy jowls and slicked-down dark brown hair, and he hadn't shaved that morning. Neither, come to think of it, had I.

"About nine years ago," I said. "A woman named Susan Potowski."

"I knew it."

"Oh?"

"I hung up and I thought, why's anybody want to talk with me about some case nine or ten years old? Then I figured it had to be the icepick thing. I read the papers. They got the guy, right? They made a lap and he fell in it."

"That's about it." I explained how Louis Pinell had denied a role in the death of Barbara Ettinger and how the facts appeared to bear him out.

"I don't get it," he said. "That still leaves something like eight killings, doesn't it? Isn't that enough to put him away?"

"It's not enough for the Ettinger woman's father. He wants to know who killed his daughter."

"And that's your job." He whistled softly. "Lucky you."

"That's about it." I drank a little beer from the can. "I don't suppose there's any connection between the Potowski killing and the one I'm investigating, but they're both in Brooklyn and maybe Pinell didn't do either of them. You were the first police officer on the scene. You remember that day pretty well?"

"Jesus," he said. "I ought to."

"Oh?"

"I left the force because of it. But I suppose they told you that out in Sheepshead Bay."

"All they said was unspecified personal reasons."

"That right?" He held his beer can in both hands and sat with his head bowed, looking down at it. "I remember how her kids screamed," he said. "I remember knowing I was going to walk in on something really bad, and then the next memory I have is I'm in her kitchen looking down at the body. One of the kids is hanging onto my pants leg the way kids do, you know how they do, and I'm looking down at her and I close my eyes and open 'em again and the picture doesn't change. She was in a whatchacallit, a housecoat. It had like Japanese writing on it and a picture of a bird, Japanese-style art. A kimono? I guess you call it a kimono. I remember the color. Orange, with black trim.

He looked up at me, then dropped his eyes again. "The housecoat was open. The kimono. Partially open. There were these dots all over her body, like punctuation marks. Where he got her with the icepick. Mostly the torso. She had very nice breasts. That's a terrible thing to remember but how do you quit remembering? Standing there noticing all the wounds in her breasts, and she's dead, and still noticing that she's got a first-rate pair of tits. And hating yourself for thinking it."

"It happens."

"I know, I know, but it sticks in your mind like a bone caught in your throat. And the kids wailing, and noises outside. At first I don't hear any of the noise because the sight of her just blocks everything else. Like it deafens you, knocks out the other senses. Do you know what I mean?"

"Yes."

"Then the sound comes up, and the kid's still hanging on my pants leg, and if he lives to be a hundred that's how he's gonna remember his mother. Myself, I never saw her before in my life, and I couldn't get that picture out of my head. It repeated on me night and day. When I slept it got in my nightmares and during the day it would come into my mind at odd moments. I didn't want to go in anyplace. I didn't want to risk coming up on another dead body. And it dawned on me finally that I didn't want to stay in a line of work where when people get killed it's up to you to deal with it. 'Unspecified personal reasons.' Well, I just specified. I gave it a little time and it didn't wear off and I quit."

"What do you do now?"

"Security guard." He named a midtown store. "I tried a couple of other things but I've had this job for seven years now. I wear a uniform and I even have a gun on my hip. Job I had before this, you wore a gun but it wasn't loaded. That drove me nuts. I said I'd carry a gun or not carry a gun, it didn't matter to me, but don't give me an unloaded gun because then the bad guys think you're armed but you can't defend yourself. Now I got a loaded gun and it hasn't been out of the holster in seven years and that's the way I like it. I'm a deterrent to robbery and shoplifting. Not as much of a deterrent to shoplifting as we'd like. Boosters can be pretty slick."

"I can imagine."

"It's dull work. I like that. I like knowing I don't have to walk into somebody's kitchen and there's death on the floor. I joke with other people on the job, I hook a shoplifter now and then, and the whole thing's nice and steady. I got a simple life, you know what I mean? I like it that way."

"A question about the murder scene."

"Sure."

"The woman's eyes."

"Oh, Christ," he said. "You had to remind me."

"Tell me."

"Her eyes were open. He stabbed all the victims in the eyes. I didn't know that. It was kept out of the papers, the way they'll hold something back, you know? But when the detectives got there they saw it right away and that cinched it, you know, that it wasn't our case and we could buck it on up to some other precinct. I forget which one."

"Midtown South."

"If you say so." He closed his eyes for a moment. "Did I say her eyes were open? Staring up at the ceiling. But they were like ovals of blood."

"Both eyes?"

"Pardon?"

"Were both of her eyes the same?"

He nodded. "Why?"

"Barbara Ettinger was only stabbed in one eye."

"It make a difference?"

"I don't know."

"If somebody was going to copy the killer, they'd copy him completely, wouldn't they?"

"You'd think so."

"Unless it was him and he was rushed for a change. Who knows with a crazy person, anyway? Maybe this time God told him only stab one eye. Who knows?"

He went for another beer and offered me one but I passed. I didn't want to hang around long enough to drink it. I had really only had one question to ask him and his answer had done nothing but confirm the medical report. I suppose I could have asked it over the phone, but then I wouldn't have had the same chance to probe his memory and get a real sense of what he'd found in that kitchen. No question now that he'd gone back in time and seen Susan Potowski's body all over again. He wasn't guessing that she'd been stabbed in both eyes. He had closed his own eyes and seen the wounds.

He said, "Sometimes I wonder. Well, when I read about them arresting this Pinell, and now with you coming over here. Suppose I wasn't the one walked in on the Potowski woman? Or suppose it happened three years later when I had that much more experience? I can see how my whole life might have been different."

"You might have stayed on the force."

"It's possible, right? I don't know if I really liked being a cop or if I was any good at it. I liked the classes at the Academy. I liked wearing the uniform. I liked walking the beat and saying hello to people and having them say hello back. Actual police work, I don't know how much I liked it. Maybe if I was really cut out for it I wouldn't have been thrown for a loop by what I saw in that kitchen. Or I would have toughed it out and gotten over it eventually. You were a cop yourself and you quit, right?"