How about a little something to cut the dust?"
"That's not a bad idea."
"What'll it be?"
"Do you have bourbon?"
"I don't think so." The bar was behind a pair of sliding doors in one of the bookcases. "Scotch or vodka," she announced.
"Scotch."
"Rocks? Water? What?"
"Just straight."
"The way God made it, huh?" She brought back a pair of rocks glasses filled about halfway, one with Scotch, the other with vodka. She gave me mine, looked into her own. She had the air of someone trying to select a toast, but evidently she couldn't think of one. "Oh, what the hell," she said, and took a drink.
"WHO do you think killed her?"
"Too early to tell. It could have been somebody I haven't heard of yet. Or it could have been Pinell. I'd like ten minutes with him."
"You think you could refresh his memory?"
I shook my head. "I think I might get some sense of him. So much detection is intuitive. You gather details and soak up impressions, and then the answer pops into your mind out of nowhere. It's not like Sherlock Holmes, at least it never was for me."
"You make it sound almost as though there's a psychic element to the process."
"Well, I can't read palms or see the future. But maybe there is." I sipped Scotch. It had that medicinal taste that Scotch has but I didn't mind it as much as I usually do. It was one of the heavier Scotches, dark and peaty. Teacher's, I think it was. "I want to get out to Sheepshead Bay next," I said.
"Now?"
"Tomorrow. That's where the fourth Icepick killing took place, and that was the one that's supposed to have spooked Barbara Ettinger."
"You think the same person-"
"Louis Pinell admits to the Sheepshead Bay murder. Of course that doesn't prove anything, either. I'm not sure why I want to go out there. I guess I want to talk to somebody who was on the scene, someone who saw the body. There were some physical details about the killings that were held back from the press coverage, and they were duplicated in Barbara's murder. Imperfectly duplicated, and I want to know if there was any parallel in the other Brooklyn homicide."
"And if there was, what would it prove? That there was a second killer, a maniac who confined himself to Brooklyn?"
"And who conveniently stopped at two killings. It's possible. It wouldn't even rule out someone with a motive for killing Barbara. Say her husband decided to kill her, but he realized the Icepick Prowler hadn't been to Brooklyn yet, so he killed some stranger in Sheepshead Bay first to establish a pattern."
"Do people do things like that?"
"There's nothing you can imagine that somebody hasn't done at one time or another. Maybe somebody had a motive for killing the woman in Sheepshead Bay. Then he was worried that the murder would stand out as the only one of its kind in Brooklyn, so he went after Barbara. Or maybe that was just his excuse. Maybe he killed a second time because he'd found out that he enjoyed it."
"God." She drank vodka. "What was the physical detail?"
"You don't want to know about it."
"You protecting the little woman from the awful truth?"
"The victims were stabbed through the eyes. An icepick, right through the eyeballs."
"Jesus. And the … what did you call it? Imperfect duplication?"
"Barbara Ettinger just got it in one eye."
"Like a wink." She sat for a long moment, then looked down at her glass and noticed that it was empty.
She went to the bar and came back with both bottles. After she'd filled our glasses she left the bottles on the slate-topped table.
"I wonder why he would do a thing like that," she said.
"That's another reason I'd like to see Pinell," I said. "To ask him."
THE conversation turned this way and that. At one point she asked whether she should call me Matt or Matthew. I told her it didn't matter to me. She said it mattered to her that I call her not Janice but Jan.
"Unless you're uncomfortable calling murder suspects by their first names."
When I was a cop I learned always to call suspects by their first names. It gave you a certain amount of psychological leverage. I told her she wasn't a suspect.
"I was at the Happy Hours all that afternoon," she said. "Of course it would be hard to prove after all these years. At the time it would have been easy. Alibis must be harder to come by for people who live alone."
"You live alone here?"
"Unless you count the cats. They're hiding somewhere. They steer clear of strangers. Showing them your ID wouldn't impress them much."
"Real hard-liners."
"Uh-huh. I've always lived alone. Since I left Eddie, that is. I've been in relationships but I always lived alone."
"Unless we count the cats."
"Unless we count the cats. I never thought at the time that I'd be living by myself for the next eight years. I thought a relationship with a woman might be different in some fundamental way. See, back then was consciousness-raising time. I decided the problem was men."
"And it wasn't?"
"Well, it may have been one of the problems. Women turned out to be another problem. For a while I decided I was one of those fortunate people who are capable of relationships with both sexes."
"Just for a while?"
"Uh-huh. Because what I discovered next was that I may be capable of relationships with men and women, but what I mostly am is not very good at relationships."
"Well, I can relate to that."
"I figured you probably could. You live alone, don't you, Matthew?"
"For a while now."
"Your sons are with your wife? I'm not psychic. There's a picture of them in your wallet."
"Oh, that. It's an old picture."
"They're handsome boys."
"They're good kids, too." I added a little Scotch to my glass. "They live out in Syosset. They'll take the train in now and then and we catch a ball game together, or maybe a fight at the Garden."
"They must enjoy that."
"I know I enjoy it."
"You must have moved out a while ago."
I nodded. "Around the time I left the cops."
"Same reason?"
I shrugged.
"How come you quit the cops? Was it this stuff?"
"What stuff?"
She waved a hand at the bottles. "You know. The booze."
"Oh, hell, no," I said. "I wasn't even that heavy a hitter at the time.
I just reached a point where I didn't feel like being a cop anymore."
"What did it? Disillusionment? A lack of faith in the criminal justice system? Disgust with corruption?"
I shook my head. "I lost my illusions early in the game and I never had much faith in the criminal justice system. It's a terrible system and the cops just do what they can. As far as corruption goes, I was never enough of an idealist to be bothered by it."
"What then? Mid-life crisis?"
"You could call it that."
"Well, we won't talk about it if you don't want to."
We fell silent for a moment. She drank and then I drank, and then I put my glass down and said, "Well, it's no secret. It's just not something I talk about a lot. I was in a tavern up in Washington Heights one night.
It was a place where cops could drink on the arm. The owner liked having us around so you could run a tab and never be asked for payment.
I had every right to be there. I was off-duty and I wanted to unwind a little before I drove back out to the island."
Or maybe I wouldn't have gone home that night anyway. I didn't always. Sometimes I caught a few hours' sleep in a hotel room to save driving back and forth. Sometimes I didn't have to get a hotel room.
"Two punks held up the place," I went on. "They got what was in the register and shot the bartender on the way out, shot him dead just for the hell of it. I ran out into the street after them. I was in plainclothes but of course I was carrying a gun. You always carry it.
"I emptied the gun at them. I got them both. I killed one of them and crippled the other. Left him paralyzed from the waist down. Two things he'll never do again are walk and fuck."