A Time to Scatter Stones

by Lawrence Block

  “The two-person threesome? Now there’s a surprise. Whoever could have guessed you’d think of that? And what exactly were you thinking?”

  “That she didn’t have to prove anything to me. That I already knew she was a sexy lady, because I remembered all the stuff she did with such enthusiasm. And then I had to remind myself that she hadn’t done anything because she wasn’t even in the room.”

  AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE the next morning Elaine announced that she was on her way to a yoga class. Did she look all right?

  She was wearing a tailored jacket in Black Watch plaid over a blue silk top and a pair of black jeans.

  I said, “For yoga class? That’s a big step up from baggy sweat pants and a Mötley Crüe T-shirt.”

  She held up her gym bag, a carry-on from a defunct airline. “Sweats and a top,” she said. “They’re not that baggy.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I don’t even own a Mötley Crüe shirt. The closest I come is The Bad Plus T-shirt you insisted on buying for me when we saw them at the Vanguard. And it’s in the wash.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “After yoga,” she said, “I have to meet with a priest.”

  “If you actually confess everything—”

  “A Croatian priest.”

  “Oh.”

  “What we decided at yesterday’s meeting,” she said, “is our Tuesday noon meeting isn’t enough. We’d like to schedule an evening meeting.”

  “In the same church.”

  “If they’ve got the space available. We’re trying for Fridays, but we’ll take Thursdays if we have to.”

  “Friday would be good,” I said.

  “Not too close to Tuesday. Plus from a purely selfish point of view, that’s when you’ve got your regular meeting at St. Paul’s.”

  “Two birds,” I said.

  “Well, a bird for each of us. So that’d be two birds and two stones. I’ll have an hour between yoga and when I’m supposed to meet Marjorie on the corner. Then we walk to the church and meet with Father Tomislav. And then we’ll probably have lunch. I’ll let you know if I’m going to be late.” She made a face. “You know what? This blouse is wrong.”

  “What’s the matter with it?”

  “It’s too blue,” she said, “and too clingy.”

  She went to change and I took what was left of my coffee into the living room. I was looking at Ray’s sketch of Ellen’s stalker—a photocopy, the original pencil sketch was safely tucked away—when she returned, the blue silk blouse replaced by an Oxford cloth shirt with a button-down collar.

  “Still blue,” I pointed out.

  “But not too blue. Do I look okay?”

  “To meet a priest? Perfect, I’d say. You look like an altar boy.”

  SHE LEFT, AND HALF an hour later so did I. It had rained some during the night, but now the sun was out. I caught the southbound One train at Columbus Circle and got off at Twenty-Eighth Street and Seventh Avenue. That put me just one block north of Ellen’s apartment, but a good half-mile west of it.

  I took my time walking across town. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been in that part of the city, and for years I’d taken pride in how well I knew the town, how frequently I walked its streets. Not too many years ago, unless I was in a hurry I might have skipped the subway and walked the whole way. A couple of miles on a perfect fall morning? Why not?

  Well, my knee was one answer to that question, but not the only one. It would take me longer these days, because my pace is slower than it used to be. And it would take energy, of which I seem to have a finite supply. I’d find places to stop along the way. A bench in Bryant Park, if my route took me there. A coffee shop, a pizza stand.

  And I wasn’t just taking the air, or walking for exercise, or killing time. I had a job to do. I had a client, I was working.

  Or going through the motions. Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

  UNTIL SHE FLED, FIRST to a hotel and then to an Upper West Side sublet, Ellen Lipscomb had lived in a six-story limestone-front building on the south side of East 27th Street between Third and Lexington. The front door was up a half-flight of concrete steps, and opened into a vestibule. I went in and had a look at the double column of buttons on my left. Each had a slot next to it for the tenant’s name. Three or four of them had elected to remain anonymous, while the rest ranged from embossed labels available from locksmith shops to printed names cut from business cards, all the way down to hand-lettered scraps of paper like the one next to button 4-B. No first name, not even an initial: LIPSCOMB.

  I rang the bell. I didn’t expect a response, and didn’t get one. I counted buttons and did the math, and determined what I’d already suspected: that there were four apartments to a floor. 4-B would be either right front or left rear.

  The label for the twenty-fifth bell, at the very bottom of the second column, was professionally made. It read SUPERINTENDANT, which looked wrong, but if you look at any word long enough it looks to be misspelled. I let my finger hover over the button, then withdrew it.

  Outside, I walked the rest of the way to Third Avenue, crossed to the north side, and walked back to Cuppa, a non-Starbucks coffee bar I’d noticed earlier. There were three tables opposite the service counter, two empty and the third occupied by a young woman typing furiously on a laptop. There was also a butcher-block counter in the front window, with three unoccupied stools. I got a small black coffee from the mixed-race barista. A Vietnamese mother, I decided, and an African-American serviceman father. I carried my coffee to the counter in front, picked the stool farthest to the right, because that gave me the best view of Ellen’s building, though I’d have been hard put to tell you why I felt the need to gaze at it.

  I decided it was probably sexist or racist or something of the sort to assume it was the mother who was Vietnamese, the father a black American. I ran possibilities through my mind, and I got as far as anyone could without sending the young woman’s DNA to a lab, and at that point I asked myself what the hell I thought I was doing.

  I took out my phone. No texts, no messages. I opened the Google app and typed in superintendant, and Google confirmed what I’d suspected, that the correct spelling was superintendent. Then I typed in attendent, which didn’t look right, and it wasn’t. Attendant, Google told me.

  How the hell is anyone supposed to learn this fucking language?

  I TOOK OUT THE sketch, looked at it. Looked out the window, as if the son of a bitch would be there to be seen, skulking in doorways and eyeballing her building.

  When I got to the bottom of my cup of coffee, I quit stalling. I showed the sketch to the barista, who wanted to know who he was and what he’d done. “We’ve had reports,” I said.

  “Reports?”

  “Complaints, you might say.”

  She hadn’t seen him. I handed her a card, one that had only my name and cellphone number on it. Would she take another look at the sketch, just to fix it in her mind? And would she call me if she saw him?

  The woman with the laptop had curly red hair and a pointed chin. She also had a lot of questions: Who was he? What had he done? And who was I, and what was my interest in the matter? He’d been bothering women, I admitted, and there was a good possibility he was dangerous.

  “Well, I’m not afraid of him,” she said. She took my card, promised she’d call.

  I WORKED BOTH SIDES of the block, stopped in every commercial establishment. A dry cleaner, an Indo-Pak grocery, a bodega, a wine bar. At a corner diner, the cashier said he looked familiar, but she saw hundreds of people every day, and they all looked familiar. The counterman looked at the sketch, frowned, and said, “Oh, sure.”

  “You know him?”

  “I’m good at faces. Ask anybody.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. When did you see him?”

  “Dates and times,” he said, “I ain’t so good at. He was here twice, sat on that stool one time and that one the other. Or maybe it was the other way around.”
>
  “But you don’t know when this was.”

  “Well, I come on at noon, and I’m out of here by ten. As far as when, I’d say within the past week or so. Wasn’t today, wasn’t yesterday. I’m not much help, am I?”

  “You’re doing okay.”

  “I can tell you what he ordered,” he said. “Same thing both times. A tuna melt and well-done fries. That help?”

  I KNEW WHAT TO do. And I knew I was stalling, because I was an old man with a bad knee and all I was fit for these days was thinking of things for other people to do.

  Back in the day, I’d have given a copy of the sketch to TJ and posted him where he could keep an eye on Ellen’s building. When I’d chummed the waters enough to draw Paul, TJ could have followed him, learned who he was and where he lived and worked.

  Then I could have set the hook and reeled him in.

  Back in the day, once he was in the boat, once I’d landed him, I’d have had Mick with me to use the muscle I’d let go soft—and the mental resolve, which had just as irreversibly gone to fat.

  Back in the day.

  But that was then and this was now, and I could see what I had to do, and that I had to do it all by myself.

  BACK AT ELLEN’S BUILDING, I entered the vestibule and rang the super’s bell. I was about to ring it again when a voice over the intercom fought its way through the static to ask who I was and what I wanted. I matched the static myself with a garbled response that included the words your tenant and police matter. It was a legal way to say something without saying anything, and it drew in response a heavy sigh—clear as a bell, static or no—and, a beat later, “Be right up.”

  A few minutes later he stepped through the door to join me in the vestibule. He was a black man, and I thought immediately of the barista and wondered if he’d left a Vietnamese wife in their basement apartment.

  But he wasn’t old enough for Vietnam. He was around fifty, maybe fifty-five, my height, and he was balding and beginning to show the years. He was wearing medium-gray coveralls, and he had big shoulders, but he also had a gut on him, too, and the way he moved suggested this was a recent addition and he couldn’t figure out where it could have come from.

  I showed him Ray’s sketch, asked him if he’d seen its subject.

  He took a long thoughtful look, then shook his head. “Never seen him,” he said.

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Good. I’d known halfway through the long look that he’d lie about it, and that Absolutely of his sealed the deal. “Mr. Simpson, how do you plead to the homicide charges?” “Absolutely positively one hundred percent not guilty.”

  Right.

  So he had something to lie about, and he was no good at lying. I couldn’t have had better news.

  “Take another look,” I suggested. “It’s evident that he came here within the past few days asking about a tenant of yours.”

  “I would remember,” he said.

  “And I think you will, when I tell you the tenant in question was a young woman named Ellen Lipscomb.”

  “I think she moved out.”

  “Oh?”

  “Her rent’s paid through the first of the month, so no problem, but I haven’t seen her in a while.”

  “Why does that make you think she moved out?”

  “Well, you know—”

  “What happens when one of your tenants flies home to Ohio for Thanksgiving? Or heads out to the Hamptons for a week? Do you call the landlord, tell him to list the apartment?”

  He let out a sigh a few pounds heavier than the one that had come through the intercom. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” he said. “Is she all right? Miss Lipscomb?”

  “What makes you ask?”

  “You, you’re what makes me ask. Showing me that picture.” He reached out, moved the sketch to see it better. “Is this a photograph? It looks like a drawing.”

  “It’s a photocopy of a portrait,” I said, truthfully enough. “And you recognize it, don’t you?”

  “It’s her brother.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “That’s what he said. He was her brother, she’d gone missing, the family was worried about her. He’s not her brother, is he?”

  “Not even close.”

  “Did he—”

  “What?”

  “Hurt her?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  I watched as pain and fear came into his eyes. Showing, not for the first time, that a bad liar is often a good man.

  “He said he was her brother, her older brother, and he said he was working with the police. But both of those things—”

  “Weren’t true.”

  “He said she had a mental condition, that’s what he called it, a condition. And that was why she saw men for money. That part’s true, isn’t it?”

  “That she had a mental condition?”

  “That she saw men for money. I got that impression, the visitors I’d see coming down from her apartment. And Christmas.”

  “Christmas?”

  “The tips she’d give me,” he said, “were the highest of anybody in the building. Everybody knows working girls are the best tippers.”

  “Let’s get back to our friend here,” I said. “How’d he find you?”

  “He rang the bell. I came upstairs. He wasn’t out here, he was in the hallway. Either he had a key or somebody held the door for him. They’re not supposed to do that, but it’s human, you know? You don’t want to insult a man by shutting the door in his face. And he was dressed nice, suit and tie.”

  “So he didn’t look like a junkie, there to steal a TV set.”

  “No, he looked respectable.”

  “You never saw him before?”

  “When would I see him? Oh, he was here before? He was her—”

  “Client, yes.”

  “My God,” he said. “I let him into her apartment. I waited for him while he went around, opening drawers, touching her things.” He looked at me. “He acted like he had the right. Do you know what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  “And he gave me money. Not like, ‘Here’s a hundred bucks if you’ll let me into her apartment.’ More like the family wanted him to check on her, because of her situation, and taking his wallet out of his breast pocket while he’s talking, and he takes out the bill and folds it and says, ‘Something for your trouble,’ and tucks it into my hand.”

  Yes, that would be how he would do it.

  “Did he say his name?”

  “Lipscomb, the same as hers. But if he wasn’t her brother—”

  “Then his name probably wasn’t Lipscomb. No first name?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “He would have wanted you to get in touch with him,” I suggested. “To let him know if she came back.”

  “He had this little notebook, wrote something and folded it and slipped it into my palm the same way he gave me the money for my troubles.” He frowned at the phrase. “A name and a phone number. I thought, No, sir. I’m not about to call you.”

  “This was after he’d been in her apartment.”

  He nodded. “I stayed there, and we walked out together, and I locked up. And then he gave me that slip of paper.”

  “You still have it?”

  “No way I was gonna call that man.”

  “But you kept the paper.”

  “I believe I’ve still got it. If I threw it out I’d remember, wouldn’t I?”

  WE WALKED THE LENGTH of the hallway and took the flight of stairs that led down into the basement. Because the first floor was half a flight up from sidewalk level, the basement got a certain amount of light from the street. He was evidently a good super, he kept it neat, and his apartment was a comfortable one, and nicely furnished.

  In my experience, superintendents generally had decent furniture. Tenants moved out and left things, and the supers got first choice.

  If there was a wife in the apartment, Vietnamese or otherwi
se, she kept out of sight and silent. But his place looked like that of a neat man who lived alone. He offered me a chair, which I didn’t take, and asked if I wanted a glass of water or something. I said I was fine.

  “It’s here somewhere,” he said, as if unsure exactly where, and then went unerringly to a desk, opened the top drawer on the right, and drew out a folded 3x5 sheet of ruled paper. He opened it, gave it a quick read, then refolded it and handed it to me.

  Paul Lipscomb, I read, and a phone number.

  It couldn’t be that easy, I thought, and I drew out my own notebook and found the right page. If he’d given the super his home number, or the number of his personal cell phone, then I had him. Five minutes in front of my computer and I’d know everything I needed to know about the son of a bitch.

  But, as it turned out, it really couldn’t be that easy. The number he’d written down, next to the name that wasn’t his, was in fact the same burner he’d used for his calls to Ellen.

  I folded the slip and found a spot for it in my wallet. He looked as though he might have wanted it back, but didn’t know how to ask for it.

  I said, “You won’t be calling him.”

  “Of course not. Can I ask you something? Did you used to be a cop?”

  “Years ago.”

  “Thought so. You got the manner, but—”

  “But I’m a few years past retirement age. I’m working private now.” I found a business card. “Matthew Scudder,” I said.

  He repeated my name, told me his was Henry Loudon. I wrote that down, and asked him his phone number, and wrote that down, too. “He might call,” I said.

  “He hasn’t so far,” he said. “If he does, well, any number I don’t know pops up, I let it go straight to voice mail.”

  “It’s also possible he’ll show up.”

  “That man rings my buzzer, I’m in the middle of a furnace repair.”

  “Good,” I said, and got out my own wallet, and found a hundred-dollar bill of my own. He didn’t want to take it, insisted it wasn’t necessary.

  I insisted it was, told him he’d helped me and saved me a lot of time. And that he had my card, and if our friend got in touch, I wanted him to let me know right away.