It was still racing eight lots later when the second stamp, Martinique #17, went on the block. It had a lower Scott value than #2, and was estimated lower in the Bulger & Calthorpe sales catalog, and the starting bid was lower, too, at an even $6000.
And then, remarkably, it had wound up sailing all the way to $21,250 before Keller prevailed over another phone bidder. (Or the same one, irritated at having lost #2 and unwilling to miss out on #17.) That was too much, it was three times the Scott value, but what could you do? He wanted the stamp, and he could afford it, and when would he get a chance at another one like it?
With buyer’s commission, the two lots had cost him $43,725.
He admired the stamp through his magnifier. It looked beautiful to him, although he couldn’t say why; aesthetically, it wasn’t discernibly different from other Martinique overprints worth less than twenty dollars. Carefully, he cut a mount to size, slipped the stamp into it, and secured it in his album.
Not for the first time, he thought of the little man at the OTB parlor. Keller hadn’t seen him since that afternoon, and doubted he’d ever cross paths with him again. He remembered the fellow’s excitement, and how impressed he’d been by Keller’s own coolness.
Cool? Naturally he’d been cool. Either way he won. If he didn’t cash the winning tickets on Kissimmee Dudley, he’d do just about as well when he punched Alvie Jurado’s ticket. It was interesting, waiting to see how the photo came out, but he couldn’t say it was all that nerve-wracking.
Not when you compared it to sitting in a hotel suite in Omaha, waiting for hours while lot after lot was auctioned off, until finally the stamps you’d been waiting for came up for bids. And then sitting there with your pencil lifted to indicate you were bidding, sitting there while the price climbed higher and higher, not knowing where it would stop, not knowing if you had enough cash in the belt around your waist. How high would you have to go for the first lot? And would you have enough left for the other one? And what was the matter with that phone bidder? Would the man never quit?
Now that was excitement, he thought, as he cut a second mount for Martinique #17. That was true edge-of-the-chair tension, unlike anything those Jerry Orbach lookalikes in the OTB parlor would ever know.
He felt sorry for them.
What difference did it make, really, how the photo-finish turned out? What did he care who won the race? If Kissimmee Dudley held on to win by a nose or a nose hair, it was up to Keller to work out a tax-free way to cash twenty $100 tickets. If Steward’s Folly made it home first, Alvie Jurado moved to the top of Keller’s list of Things to Make and Do. Whichever chore Keller wound up with, he had to pull it off in a hurry; he had to have his money in hand — or, more accurately, in belt — when his flight took off for Omaha.
And now it was over, and he’d done what he had to, so did it matter what it was he’d done?
Hell, no. He had the stamps.
Out the Window
There was nothing special about her last day. She seemed a little jittery, preoccupied with something or with nothing at all. But this was nothing new for Paula.
She was never much of a waitress in the three months she spent at Armstrong’s. She’d forget some orders and mix up others, and when you wanted the check or another round of drinks you could go crazy trying to attract her attention. There were days when she walked through her shift like a ghost through walls, and it was as though she had perfected some arcane technique of astral projection, sending her mind out for a walk while her long lean body went on serving food and drinks and wiping down empty tables.
She did make an effort, though. She damn well tried. She could always manage a smile. Sometimes it was the brave smile of the walking wounded and other times it was a tight-jawed, brittle grin with a couple tabs of amphetamine behind it, but you take what you can to get through the days and any smile is better than none at all. She knew most of Armstrong’s regulars by name and her greeting always made you feel as though you’d come home. When that’s all the home you have, you tend to appreciate that sort of thing.
And if the career wasn’t perfect for her, well, it certainly hadn’t been what she’d had in mind when she came to New York in the first place. You no more set out to be a waitress in a Ninth Avenue gin mill than you intentionally become an ex-cop coasting through the months on bourbon and coffee. We have that sort of greatness thrust upon us. When you’re as young as Paula Wittlauer you hang in there, knowing things are going to get better. When you’re my age you just hope they don’t get too much worse.
She worked the early shift, noon to eight, Tuesday through Saturday. Trina came on at six so there were two girls on the floor during the dinner rush. At eight Paula would go wherever she went and Trina would keep on bringing cups of coffee and glasses of bourbon for another six hours or so.
Paula’s last day was a Thursday in late September. The heat of the summer was starting to break up. There was a cooling rain that morning and the sun never did show its face. I wandered in around four in the afternoon with a copy of the Post and read through it while I had my first drink of the day. At eight o’clock I was talking with a couple of nurses from Roosevelt Hospital who wanted to grouse about a resident surgeon with a Messiah complex. I was making sympathetic noises when Paula swept past our table and told me to have a good evening.
I said, “You too, kid.” Did I look up? Did we smile at each other? Hell, I don’t remember.
“See you tomorrow, Matt.”
“Right,” I said. “God willing.”
But He evidently wasn’t. Around three Justin closed up and I went around the block to my hotel. It didn’t take long for the coffee and bourbon to cancel each other out. I got into bed and slept.
My hotel is on Fifty-seventh Street between Eighth and Ninth. It’s on the uptown side of the block and my window is on the street side looking south. I can see the World Trade Center at the tip of Manhattan from my window.
I can also see Paula’s building. It’s on the other side of Fifty-seventh Street a hundred yards or so to the east, a towering high-rise that, had it been directly across from me, would have blocked my view of the trade center.
She lived on the seventeenth floor. Sometime after four she went out a high window. She swung out past the sidewalk and landed in the street a few feet from the curb, touching down between a couple of parked cars.
In high school physics they teach you that falling bodies accelerate at a speed of thirty-two feet per second. So she would have fallen thirty-two feet in the first second, another sixty-four feet the next second, then ninety-six feet in the third. Since she fell something like two hundred feet, I don’t suppose she could have spent more than four seconds in the actual act of falling.
It must have seemed a lot longer than that.
I got up around ten, ten-thirty. When I stopped at the desk for my mail Vinnie told me they’d had a jumper across the street during the night. “A dame,” he said, which is a word you don’t hear much anymore. “She went out without a stitch on. You could catch your death that way.”
I looked at him.
“Landed in the street, just missed somebody’s Caddy. How’d you like to find something like that for a hood ornament? I wonder if your insurance would cover that. What do you call it, act of God?” He came out from behind the desk and walked with me to the door. “Over there,” he said, pointing. “The florist’s van there is covering the spot where she flopped. Nothing to see anyway. They scooped her up with a spatula and a sponge and then they hosed it all down. By the time I came on duty there wasn’t a trace left.”
“Who was she?”
“Who knows?”
I had things to do that morning, and as I did them I thought from time to time of the jumper. They’re not that rare and they usually do the deed in the hours before dawn. They say it’s always darkest then.
Sometime in the early afternoon I was passing Armstrong’s and stopped in for a short one. I stood at the bar and looked around to say he
llo to Paula but she wasn’t there. A doughy redhead named Rita was taking her shift.
Dean was behind the bar. I asked him where Paula was. “She skipping school today?”
“You didn’t hear?”
“Jimmy fired her?”
He shook his head, and before I could venture any further guesses he told me.
I drank my drink. I had an appointment to see somebody about something, but suddenly it ceased to seem important. I put a dime in the phone and canceled my appointment and came back and had another drink. My hand was trembling slightly when I picked up the glass. It was a little steadier when I set it down.
I crossed Ninth Avenue and sat in St. Paul’s for a while. Ten, twenty minutes. Something like that. I lit a candle for Paula and a few other candles for a few other corpses, and I sat there and thought about life and death and high windows. Around the time I left the police force I discovered that churches were very good places for thinking about that sort of thing.
After a while I walked over to her building and stood on the pavement in front of it. The florist’s truck had moved on and I examined the street where she’d landed. There was, as Vinnie had assured me, no trace of what had happened. I tilted my head back and looked up, wondering what window she might have fallen from, and then I looked down at the pavement and then up again, and a sudden rush of vertigo made my head spin. In the course of all this I managed to attract the attention of the building’s doorman and he came out to the curb anxious to talk about the former tenant. He was a black man about my age and he looked as proud of his uniform as the guy in the Marine Corps recruiting poster. It was a good-looking uniform, shades of brown, epaulets, gleaming brass buttons.
“Terrible thing,” he said. “A young girl like that with her whole life ahead of her.”
“Did you know her well?”
He shook his head. “She would give me a smile, always say hello, always call me by name. Always in a hurry, rushing in, rushing out again. You wouldn’t think she had a care in the world. But you never know.”
“You never do.”
“She lived on the seventeenth floor. I wouldn’t live that high above the ground if you gave me the place rent-free.”
“Heights bother you?”
I don’t know if he heard the question. “I live up one flight of stairs. That’s just fine for me. No elevator and no, no high window.” His brow clouded and he looked on the verge of saying something else, but then someone started to enter his building’s lobby and he moved to intercept him. I looked up again, trying to count windows to the seventeenth floor, but the vertigo returned and I gave it up.
“Are you Matthew Scudder?”
I looked up. The girl who’d asked the question was very young, with long straight brown hair and enormous light brown eyes. Her face was open and defenseless and her lower lip was quivering. I said I was Matthew Scudder and pointed at the chair opposite mine. She remained on her feet.
“I’m Ruth Wittlauer,” she said.
The name didn’t register until she said, “Paula’s sister.” Then I nodded and studied her face for signs of a family resemblance. If they were there I couldn’t find them. It was ten in the evening and Paula Wittlauer had been dead for eighteen hours and her sister was standing expectantly before me, her face a curious blend of determination and uncertainty.
I said, “I’m sorry. Won’t you sit down? And will you have something to drink?”
“I don’t drink.”
“Coffee?”
“I’ve been drinking coffee all day. I’m shaky from all the damn coffee. Do I have to order something?”
She was on the edge, all right. I said, “No, of course not. You don’t have to order anything.” And I caught Trina’s eye and warned her off and she nodded shortly and let us alone. I sipped my own coffee and watched Ruth Wittlauer over the brim of the cup.
“You knew my sister, Mr. Scudder.”
“In a superficial way, as a customer knows a waitress.”
“The police say she killed herself.”
“And you don’t think so?”
“I know she didn’t.”
I watched her eyes while she spoke and I was willing to believe she meant what she said. She didn’t believe that Paula went out the window of her own accord, not for a moment. Of course, that didn’t mean she was right.
“What do you think happened?”
“She was murdered.” She made the statement quite matter-of-factly. “I know she was murdered. I think I know who did it.”
“Who?”
“Cary McCloud.”
“I don’t know him.”
“But it may have been somebody else,” she went on. She lit a cigarette, smoked for a few moments in silence. “I’m pretty sure it was Cary,” she said.
“Why?”
“They were living together.” She frowned, as if in recognition of the fact that cohabitation was small evidence of murder. “He could do it,” she said carefully. “That’s why I think he did. I don’t think just anyone could commit murder. In the heat of the moment, sure, I guess people fly off the handle, but to do it deliberately and throw someone out of a, out of a, to just deliberately throw someone out of a—”
I put my hand on top of hers. She had long small-boned hands and her skin was cool and dry to the touch. I thought she was going to cry or break or something but she didn’t. It was just not going to be possible for her to say the word window and she would stall every time she came to it.
“What do the police say?”
“Suicide. They say she killed herself.” She drew on the cigarette. “But they don’t know her, they never knew her. If Paula wanted to kill herself she would have taken pills. She liked pills.”
“I figured she took ups.”
“Ups, tranquilizers, ludes, barbiturates. And she liked grass and she liked to drink.” She lowered her eyes. My hand was still on top of hers and she looked at our two hands and I removed mine. “I don’t do any of those things. I drink coffee, that’s my one vice, and I don’t even do that much because it makes me jittery. It’s the coffee that’s making me nervous tonight. Not . . . all of this.”
“Okay.”
“She was twenty-four. I’m twenty. Baby sister, square baby sister, except that was always how she wanted me to be. She did all these things and at the same time she told me not to do them, that it was a bad scene. I think she kept me straight. I really do. Not so much because of what she was saying as that I looked at the way she was living and what it was doing to her and I didn’t want that for myself. I thought it was crazy, what she was doing to herself, but at the same time I guess I worshiped her, she was always my heroine. I loved her, God, I really did, I’m just starting to realize how much, and she’s dead and he killed her, I know he killed her, I just know it.”
After a while I asked her what she wanted me to do.
“You’re a detective.”
“Not in an official sense. I used to be a cop.”
“Could you . . . find out what happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“I tried talking to the police. It was like talking to the wall. I can’t just turn around and do nothing. Do you understand me?”
“I think so. Suppose I look into it and it still looks like suicide?”
“She didn’t kill herself.”
“Well, suppose I wind up thinking that she did.”
She thought it over. “I still wouldn’t have to believe it.”
“No,” I agreed. “We get to choose what we believe.”
“I have some money.” She put her purse on the table. “I’m the straight sister, I have an office job, I save money. I have five hundred dollars with me.”
“That’s too much to carry in this neighborhood.”
“Is it enough to hire you?”
I didn’t want to take her money. She had five hundred dollars and a dead sister, and parting with one wouldn’t bring the other back to life. I’d have worked for nothing but t
hat wouldn’t have been good because neither of us would have taken it seriously enough.
And I have rent to pay and two sons to support, and Armstrong’s charges for the coffee and the bourbon. I took four fifty-dollar bills from her and told her I’d do my best to earn them.
After Paula Wittlauer hit the pavement, a black-and-white from the Eighteenth Precinct caught the squeal and took charge of the case. One of the cops in the car was a guy named Guzik. I hadn’t known him when I was on the force but we’d met since then. I didn’t like him and I don’t think he cared for me either, but he was reasonably honest and had struck me as competent. I got him on the phone the next morning and offered to buy him a lunch.
We met at an Italian place on Fifty-sixth Street. He had veal and peppers and a couple glasses of red wine. I wasn’t hungry but I made myself eat a small steak.
Between bites of veal he said, “The kid sister, huh? I talked to her, you know. She’s so clean and so pretty it could break your heart if you let it. And of course she don’t want to believe sis did the Dutch act. I asked is she Catholic because then there’s the religious angle but that wasn’t it. Anyway your average priest’ll stretch a point. They’re the best lawyers going, the hell, two thousand years of practice, they oughta be good. I took that attitude myself. I said, ‘Look, there’s all these pills. Let’s say your sister had herself some pills and drank a little wine and smoked a little pot and then she went to the window for some fresh air. So she got a little dizzy and maybe she blacked out and most likely she never knew what was happening.’ Because there’s no question of insurance, Matt, so if she wants to think it’s an accident I’m not gonna shout suicide in her ear. But that’s what it says in the file.”
“You close it out?”
“Sure. No question.”
Enough Rope Page 96
