Robert Alter - 100 Malicious Little Mysteries

“Robbery, perhaps,” the sergeant suggested, but Miss Mackey would have none of it.

“Nonsense! As the janitor of this building he had keys to every apartment, and he knew that I go to my book club every Tuesday afternoon without fail, and buy my groceries every Friday morning, so he had plenty of opportunity to come in if he simply wanted to take something.” She shook her little white head decisively. “No, Sergeant, carnal appetite was his problem, and guilt was what did him in. When I saw him and screamed, he turned and climbed out of the window as though he had taken leave of his senses. He was the very picture of a guilt-ridden man.”

It was one more delight that Miss Mackey saw nothing strange in Mr. Higgins choosing to spy on her instead of on one of the younger women who lived in the building, the sergeant decided. He put aside the tea regretfully. “Well, I won’t bother you any longer,” he said. “You’ve been very kind and helpful, and I’m sure you’re tired after your bad experience. Thank you for the tea.”

She followed him to the door. “You are not at all the way one usually imagines a detective to be,” she said. “You’re very young. And you have a certain — grace.”

The sergeant stiffened for a moment. How his parents would have roared at that, how his brothers and sisters would have jeered! Grace, he thought, and then decided he liked the sound of it as long as no one else had heard.

Westerberg was waiting in the lobby. “Well?” he asked.

“An elegant old lady.”

“Who pushes janitors out of windows.”

The sergeant led the way to the car, feeling very much on the defensive. “So a few people heard her scolding him for reading dirty books,” he said grumpily. “So this makes her a killer? She admits she spoke to him about it — for his own good. She thought she was doing her duty.”

“She threatened him,” Westerberg said patiently. “He told people in the apartment about it, thought it was a joke. She told him he’d be punished if he kept up his sinful ways, that his evil thoughts were showing in his face. She sounds like a nut.”

“She’s a nice old lady trying to set the world straight,” the sergeant told him. “Anybody who wants to magnify that into a criminal act is going to have his hands full.”

He thought about Miss Mackey while he shaved, mentioned her guardedly to his date at dinner, and that night he dreamt he was fighting a duel under an oak tree that was festooned with Spanish moss.

In the morning there was a report on his desk at the station, and Westerberg was waiting in the chair by the window, a cup of coffee in his hands. When he had finished reading the report, the sergeant sat for a long time staring at the crack that marred the brown-egg wall in front of him.

“I was never as young as you are when I was as young as you are,” Westerberg said finally, when the coffee was gone and the silence had become too oppressive to be borne. “Do you want me to go get the old lady while you patch up your shattered illusions?”

“Go get her!” the sergeant repeated sharply. “Why should you get her? You want to send her to the chair because this damn sheet says someone died in the last apartment she lived in, too?”

“Not just someone.” Westerberg set the coffee cup on the windowsill, adjusting its position slightly to coincide with the stains already there. “A window-washer; a wholesome, clean-living fellow who supported a wife, a mother, a sister, and the sister’s two kids. Been washing windows for seventeen years, and there was never a complaint about him not minding his own business until Miss Mackey moved into the building. She reported him twice as a peeping torn — and the third time he was doing her windows he fell seven stories to the ground and broke his neck.”

The sergeant slouched in his chair and thought of gallantry in the shade of a giant oak. “You can’t arrest a nice old lady for being around when two people died,” he said, “whether she happened to like them or not.”

“Tell me one thing,” Westerberg said with irritating gentleness. “Did the nice old lady mention the window-washer to you? Did she tell you Mr. Higgins was the second man to leave her elegant presence in a great big hurry?”

The sergeant looked at him with something close to hate. “No,” he said. “She didn’t happen to mention it. She probably assumed we’d look at it the same way she did — as a nasty coincidence.”

“Good grief!” Westerberg said, but he didn’t go on with the discussion.

They spent the rest of the day talking to residents of the apartment building. Most of them had known Mr. Higgins casually; none of them had thought there was anything odd about him, though they all agreed that he had been seen with lurid paperbacks in his hands and was always well-informed about, and eager to discuss, the latest sensational murder. Three residents reported having received anonymous letters in the last couple of months: a bachelor who had a painting of a nude delivered to his apartment; a model who had posed in a bikini for a slick magazine; and a young actress who had been accused in her letter of letting a man stay overnight in her apartment. Each of the letters had been a warning of punishment to come; none of them had been taken seriously. The recipients remembered that they were written on pale gray, tissue-thin paper in fine script.

As he looked over his notes, the sergeant wondered why he found it impossible to believe anything bad of Miss Mackey. Who was to say, actually, that her righteous innocence did not become a twisted, perverted passion behind those bright blue eyes? His mind simply would not accept it. He moved angrily through the long day, and at the end of it he visited her again, wondering at his own sense of homecoming as he sat down in the parlor.

Parlor, he thought. The word prompted a picture of plush and velour and china figurines; a Seth Thomas clock; books bound in muted leather, stillness tucked protectively around every object. Then he remembered that when he was twelve he had asked his seventh-grade teacher a question about Browning and, in an ecstasy of gratitude — how many seventh graders had ever asked her about Browning? — she had invited him to stop in at her home that evening and pick up a book.

The house was a treasure of towering gingerbread where she had lived first with her parents and then alone. The boy had entered into a dream when he stepped through its door. The crowded kitchen, center of life at home, had faded from his consciousness as if it had never been, and with it the bursts of laughter, the slaps, the curses, the tears that were the music he lived by. Dignity, dry wit, and, most of all, orderliness were what he found in the teacher’s old house, and he had gone back again and again making mental lists of subjects to ask about the next time as his eyes moved over the ceiling-high shelves of books.

“You look tired. Sergeant.” There was a tiny crease of concern between Miss Mackey’s eyes. “I don’t think I’ll offer you tea this time. I have a better idea.” She crossed the room to a glass-doored cabinet and took from its glittering depths a crystal decanter and two glasses on a tray. The glass was like a small bubble in his hand; he held it gingerly and let the brandy restore him.

“How is your case developing?” she asked as he settled back in his chair. “Have you learned what you needed to know about that unfortunate man?” She might have been asking about the weather, or his indigestion, or where he was going to go on his vacation.

“Well,” he said, “it seems to be getting more complicated instead of less so. We’re beginning to wonder whether there’s some connection between Mr. Higgins’ death and another one that occurred some time ago.”