Avoid confrontations. Muggers want to size you up and see if you'll be easy. They ask you the time, ask for directions. Don't let them take advantage of you.
It's wonderful how the quality of urban life keeps getting better.
"Pardon me, sir, but could you tell me how to get to the Empire State Building?" "Fuck off, you creep." Manners for a modern city.
The train took forever. It always felt a little strange going out to Long Island. Hicksville was nowhere near where Anita and the boys lived but Long Island is Long Island and I got the vaguely uncomfortable feeling I always get when I go there. I was glad to get to Penn Station.
By then it was time for a drink, and I had a quick one in a commuters' bar right there in the station.
Saturday might be a busy day for Douglas Ettinger but it was a slow one for the bartender at the Iron Horse. All his weekday customers must have been out in Hicksville buying pup tents and basketball shoes.
The sun was out when I hit the street. I walked across Thirty-fourth, then headed up Fifth to the library.
Nobody asked me what time it was, or how to get to the Holland Tunnel.
BEFORE I went into the library I stopped at a pay phone and called Lynn London. Her father had given me her number and I checked my notebook and dialed it. I got an answering machine with a message that began by repeating the last four digits of the number, announced that no one could come to the phone, and invited me to leave my name.
The voice was female, very precise, just the slightest bit nasal, and I supposed it belonged to Barbara's sister. I rang off without leaving a message.
In the library I got the same Polk directory for Brooklyn that I'd used earlier. This time I looked up a different building on Wyckoff Street. It had held four apartments then, and one of them had been rented to a Mr. and Mrs. Edward Corwin.
That gave me a way to spend the afternoon. In a bar on Forty-first and Madison I ordered a cup of coffee and a shot of bourbon to pour into it and changed a dollar into dimes. I started on the Manhattan book, where I found two Edward Corwins, an E. Corwin, an E. J. Corwin, and an E. V. Corwin. When none of those panned out I used Directory Assistance, getting the Brooklyn listings first, then moving on to Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. Some of the numbers I dialed were busy, and I had to try them four or five times before I got through.
Others didn't answer.
I wound up getting more dimes and trying all the J. Corwins in the five boroughs. Somewhere in the course of this I had a second cup of coffee with a second shot of bourbon in it. I used up quite a few dimes to no discernible purpose, but most investigatory work is like that. If she just roots around enough, even a blind sow gets an acorn now and then.
Or so they tell me.
By the time I left the bar, some two-thirds of my phone numbers had check marks next to them indicating I'd reached the party and he or she was not the Corwin I was looking for. I'd call the rest of them in due course if I had to, but I didn't feel very hopeful about them. Janice Corwin had closed a business and given up an apartment. She might have moved to Seattle while she was at it. Or she and her husband could be somewhere in Westchester or Jersey or Connecticut, or out in Hicksville pricing tennis rackets. There was a limit to how much walking my fingers could do, in the white or yellow pages.
I went back to the library. I knew when she'd closed up shop at the Happy Hours Child Care Center; I'd learned that much from her landlord. Had she and her husband moved out of Boerum Hill at about the same time?
I worked year by year through the Polk directories and found the year the Corwins dropped out of the brick building on Wyckoff Street.
The timing was right. She had probably closed the day-care center as a prelude to moving. Maybe they'd gone to the suburbs, or his company transferred him to Atlanta. Or they split up and went separate ways.
I put the directory back, then got an intelligent thought for a change and went back to reclaim it. There were three other tenants in the building who'd remained there for a few years after the Corwins moved out. I copied their names in my notebook.
This time I made my calls from a bar on Forty-second Street, and I bypassed the Manhattan book and went straight to Brooklyn information. I got lucky right away with the Gordon Pomerances, who had stayed in Brooklyn when the Wyckoff Street building was sold out from under them. They'd moved a short mile to Carroll Street.
Mrs. Pomerance answered the phone. I gave my name and said I was trying to reach the Corwins. She knew at once who I was talking about but had no idea how I could reach them.
"We didn't keep in touch. He was a nice fellow, Eddie, and he used to bring the children over for dinner after she moved out, but then when he moved we lost contact. It's been so many years. I'm sure we had his address at one point but I can't even remember the city he moved to. It was in California, I think Southern California."
"But she moved out first?"
"You didn't know that? She left him, left him flat with the two kids. She closed the whatchamacallit, the day-care center, and the next thing you know he's got to find a day-care center for his own children.
I'm sorry, but I can't imagine a mother walking out on her own children."
"Do you know where she might have gone?"
"Greenwich Village, I suppose. To pursue her art. Among other things."
"Her art?"
"She fancied herself a sculptor. I never saw her work so for all I know she may have had some talent.
I'd be surprised if she did, though. There was a woman who had everything. A nice apartment, a husband who was an awfully sweet guy, two beautiful children, and she even had a business that wasn't doing too badly. And she walked away from it, turned her back and walked away."
I tried a long shot. "Did you happen to know a friend of hers named Barbara Ettinger?"
"I didn't know her that well. What was that name? Ettinger? Why is that name familiar to me?"
"A Barbara Ettinger was murdered down the block from where you lived."
"Just before we moved in. Of course. I remember now. I never knew her, naturally, because as I said it was just before we moved in.
She was a friend of the Corwins?"
"She worked for Mrs. Corwin."
"Were they that way?"
"What way?"
"There was a lot of talk about the murder. It made me nervous about moving in. My husband and I told each other we didn't have to worry about lightning striking twice in the same place, but privately I was still worried. Then those killings just stopped, didn't they?"
"Yes. You never knew the Ettingers?"
"No, I told you."
An artist in Greenwich Village. A sculptor. Of the J. Corwins I'd been unable to reach, had any lived in the Village? I didn't think so.
I said, "Would you happen to remember Mrs. Corwin's maiden name?"
"Remember it? I don't think I ever knew it in the first place. Why?"
"I was thinking she might have resumed it if she's pursuing an artistic career."
"I'm sure she did. Artistic career or not, she'd want her own name back. But I couldn't tell you what it was."
"Of course she could have remarried by now-"
"Oh, I wouldn't count on it."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I don't think she remarried," Mrs. Pomerance said. There was a sharpness to her tone and I wondered at it. I asked her what made her say that.
"Put it this way," she said. "Sculpture or no sculpture, she'd probably live in Greenwich Village."
"I don't understand."
"You don't?" She clicked her tongue, impatient with my obtuseness. "She left her husband-and two children-but not to run off with another man. She left him for another woman."
JANICE Corwin's maiden name was Keane. It took a subway ride to Chambers Street and a couple of hours in various offices of the Department of Records and Information Services to supply this kernel of information. Most of the time was spent getting clearance. I kept needing the permission of someone who didn't come in on Saturdays.