Lawrence Block - A Stab in the Dark

"Hates me ?"

"Uh-huh. I wondered why. In fact I wanted to meet you mostly to find out what kind of man would inspire such a strong reaction in my father. You see, if it weren't for you he wouldn't have been given that piece of information about his sainted daughter. If he hadn't hired you, and if you hadn't talked to Doug — you did talk to Doug, I assume?"

"I met him. At the store in Hicksville."

"If you hadn't, he wouldn't have told my father something my father emphatically did not want to be told. I think he'd prefer to believe that both of his daughters are virgins. Well, he may not care so much about me. I had the temerity to get divorced so that makes me beyond redemption. He'd be sick if I got into an interracial romance, because after all there's a limit, but I don't think he cares if I have affairs. I'm already damaged goods." Her voice was flat, less bitter than the words she was speaking. "But Barbara was a saint. If I got killed he wouldn't hire you in the first place, but if he did he wouldn't care what you found. With Barbara it's a different story altogether."

"Was she a saint?"

"We weren't that close." She looked away, picked up a pencil from the desk top. "She was my big sister. I put her on a pedestal and wound up seeing her feet of clay, and I went through a period of holier-than-thou contempt for her. I might have outgrown that but then she was killed, so I had all that guilt over the way I'd felt about her." She looked at me. "This is one of the things I've been working on in therapy."

"Was she having an affair while she was married to Ettinger?"

"She wouldn't have told me if she had been. The one thing she did tell me was that he was playing around. She said he made passes at their friends and that he was screwing his welfare clients. I don't know if that was true or not. He never made a pass at me."

She said that last as if it was one more item on a long list of resentments. I talked with her for another ten minutes and didn't learn anything beyond the fact that Barbara Ettinger's death had had an impact on her sister's life, and that wasn't news. I wondered how different Lynn had been nine years ago, and how different she might have turned out if Barbara had lived. Perhaps it was all there already, all locked in place, the bitterness, the emotional armor. I wondered — although I could probably have guessed — what Lynn's own marriage had been like. Would she have married the same man if Barbara had been alive? Would she have divorced him if she did?

I left there with a useless photograph and a head full of irrelevant — or unanswerable — questions. I left, too, glad to escape from the woman's cramped personality. Dan Lynch's bar was just a couple blocks uptown, and I turned toward it, remembering the dark wood, the warmth, the boozy, beery aroma.

They were all afraid I'd dig her up, I thought, and it was impossible because she was buried impossibly deep. The bit of poetry Jan had read came to mind and I tried to recall just how it went. Deep with the first dead ? Was that right?

I decided I wanted the exact wording. More than that, I wanted the whole poem. I had a vague recollection of a branch library somewhere around there on Second Avenue. I walked a block north, didn't find it, turned around and walked downtown. There was indeed a library, right where I'd remembered it, a squarish three-story building with a nicely ornamented marble facade. A sign in the door gave the hours, and they were closed on Wednesdays.

All of the branch libraries have cut back on their hours, added closed days. Part of the financial pinch. The city can't afford anything, and the administration goes around like an old miser closing off unused rooms in a sprawling old house. The police force is ten thousand men below what it used to be. Everything drops but the rents and the crime rate.

I walked another block and hit St. Marks Place and knew there'd be a bookstore around, and one that would most likely have a poetry section. The busiest commercial block of St. Marks Place, and as trendy a block as the East Village possesses, runs between Second and Third Avenues. I turned right and walked toward Third, and two-thirds of the way down the block I found a bookstore. They had a paperback edition of the collected poems of Dylan Thomas. I had to go through it a couple of times before I spotted the poem I was looking for, but it was there and I read it all the way through. "A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London" was the title. There were parts I didn't think I understood, but I liked the sound of them anyway, the weight and shape of the words.

The poem was long enough to discourage me from trying to copy it into my notebook. Besides, maybe I'd want to look at some of the other poems. I paid for the book and slipped it into my pocket.

Funny how little things nudge you in one direction or another. I had tired myself with all the walking I'd done. I wanted to catch a subway home, but I also wanted a drink and I stood for a moment on the sidewalk in front of the bookstore, trying to decide what to do and where to go. While I was standing there, two patrolmen walked by in uniform. Both of them looked impossibly young, and one was so fresh-faced his uniform looked like a costume.

Across the street, a shop sign read "Haberman's." I don't know what they sold there.

I thought of Burton Havermeyer. I might have thought of him without having seen the cop or having my memory jostled by a name not unlike his. In any event I thought of him, and remembered that he had once lived on this street, that his wife still lived here. I couldn't remember the address, but it was still in my notebook. 212 St. Marks Place, along with the telephone number.

There was still no reason to go look at the building she lived in. He wasn't even part of the case I was working on, because my meeting with Louis Pinell had satisfied me that the little psychopath had killed Susan Potowski and had not killed Barbara Ettinger. But Havermeyer's life had been changed, and in a way that interested me, a way not unlike that in which mine had been changed by another death.

St. Marks Place starts at Third Avenue and the numbers get higher as you go eastward. The block between Second and First was more residential and less commercial. A couple of the row houses had ornate windows and letterboards near the entrance to indicate that they were churches. There was a Ukrainian church, a Polish Catholic church.

I walked to First Avenue, waited for the light, walked on across. I made my way down a quiet block, its houses less prepossessing and in poorer repair than on the preceding block. One of a group of parked cars I passed was a derelict, stripped of tires and hubcaps, the radio pulled out, the interior gutted. On the other side of the street three bearded and longhaired men in Hell's Angels colors were trying to get a motorcycle started.

The last number on the block was 132. The street deadended at the corner, where Avenue A formed the western boundary of Tompkins Square Park. I stood there looking at the house number, then at the park, first at one and then at the other.

From Avenue A east to the river are the blocks they call Alphabet City. The population runs to junkies and muggers and crazies. Nobody decent lives there on purpose, not if they can afford to live anywhere else.

I dragged out my notebook. The address was still the same, 212 St. Marks Place.

I walked through Tompkins Square and across Avenue B. On my way through the park, drug dealers offered to sell me dope and pills and acid. Either I didn't look like a cop to them or they just didn't care.

On the other side of Avenue B, the numbers started at 300. And the street signs didn't call it St. Marks Place. It was East Eighth Street there.

I went back through the park again. At 130 St. Marks Place there was a bar called Blanche's Tavern. I went in. The place was a broken-down bucket of blood that smelled of stale beer and stale urine and bodies that needed washing. Perhaps a dozen of the bodies were there, most of them at the bar, a couple at tables. The place went dead silent when I walked into it. I guess I didn't look as though I belonged there, and I hope to God I never do.