Ruth nodded. Her face was thoughtful.
“That wouldn’t mean very much by itself. If she were upset or stoned or confused, she might have thrown things on the chair as she took them off. But that’s not what happened. The order is all wrong. The bra’s underneath the blouse, the pantyhose are underneath the skirt. She took her bra off after she took her blouse off, obviously, so it should have wound up on top of the blouse, not under it.”
“Of course.”
I held up a hand. “It’s nothing like proof, Ruth. There are any number of explanations. Maybe she knocked the stuff onto the floor and then picked it up and the order of the garments got switched around. Maybe one of the cops went through the clothing before the photographer came in with his camera.”
“But you think she was murdered.”
“Yes, I guess I do.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I think I’ll poke around a little. I don’t know much about Paula’s life. I’ll have to learn more if I’m going to find out who killed her. But it’s up to you to decide whether you want me to stay with it.”
“Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because it probably won’t lead anywhere. Suppose she was upset after her conversation with McCloud and she picked up a stranger and took him home with her and he killed her. If that’s the case, we’ll never know who he was.”
“It’ll take you some time. I suppose you’ll want more money.” Her gaze was very direct. “I gave you two hundred dollars. I have three hundred more I can afford to pay. When the three hundred runs out, you can tell me if you think it’s worth staying with the case. I couldn’t afford any more cash right away, but I could arrange to pay you later on or something like that.”
I shook my head. “It won’t come to more than that,” I said, “no matter how much time I spend on it. And you keep the three hundred for the time being, all right? I’ll take it from you later on if I need it, and if I feel I’ve earned it.”
“That doesn’t seem right.”
“It seems right to me,” I said. “And don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m being charitable.”
“But your time’s valuable.”
I shook my head. “Not to me it isn’t.”
I spent the next five days picking the scabs off Paula Wittlauer’s life. It kept turning out to be a waste of time, but the time’s always gone before you realize you’ve wasted it. And I’d been telling the truth when I said my time wasn’t valuable. I had nothing better to do, and my peeks into the corners of Paula’s world kept me busy.
Her life involved more than a saloon on Ninth Avenue and an apartment on 57th Street, more than serving drinks and sharing a bed with Cary McCloud. She did other things. She went one evening a week to group therapy on West 79th Street. She took voice lessons every Tuesday morning on Amsterdam Avenue. She had an ex-boyfriend she saw once in awhile. She hung out in a couple of bars in the neighborhood and a couple of others in the Village. She did this, she did that, she went here, she went there, and I kept busy dragging myself around town and talking to all sorts of people, and managed to learn quite a bit about the person she’d been and the life she’d led without learning anything at all about the person who’d put her on the pavement.
At the same time, I tried to track her movements on the final night of her life. She’d evidently gone more or less directly to the Spider’s Web after finishing her shift at Armstrong’s. Maybe she’d stopped at her apartment for a shower and a change of clothes, but without further ado she’d headed downtown. Somewhere around ten she left the Web, and I traced her from there to a couple of other Village bars. She hadn’t stayed at either of them long, taking a quick drink or two and moving on. She’d left alone as far as anyone seemed to remember. This didn’t prove a thing because she could have stopped elsewhere before continuing uptown, or she could have picked someone up on the street, which I’d learned was something she’d done more than once in her young life. She could have found her killer loitering on a street corner or she could have phoned him and arranged to meet him at her apartment.
Her apartment. The doorman changed off at midnight, but it was impossible to determine whether she’d returned before or after the changing of the guard. She’d lived there, she was a regular tenant, and when she entered or left the building it was not a noteworthy occasion. It was something she did every night, so when she came home for the final time the man at the door had no reason to know it was the final time and thus no reason to take note.
Had she come in alone or with a companion? No one could say, which did suggest that she’d come in alone — if she’d been with someone her entrance would have been a shade more memorable. But this also proved nothing, because I stood on the other side of 57th Street one night and watched the doorway of her building, and the doorman didn’t take the pride in his position that the afternoon doorman had shown. He was away from the door almost as often as he was on it. She could have walked in flanked by six Turkish sailors and there was a chance no one would have seen her.
The doorman who’d been on duty when she went out the window was a rheumy-eyed Irishman with liver-spotted hands. He hadn’t actually seen her land. He’d been in the lobby, keeping himself out of the wind, and then he came rushing out when he heard the impact of the body on the street.
He couldn’t get over the sound she made.
“All of a sudden there was this noise,” he said. “Just out of the blue there was this noise and it must be it’s my imagination but I swear I felt it in my feet. I swear she shook the earth. I had no idea what it was, and then I came rushing out and Jesus God there she was.”
“Didn’t you hear a scream?”
“The street was empty just then. This side, anyway. There was nobody around to scream.”
“Didn’t she scream, on the way down?”
“Did somebody say she screamed? I never heard it.”
Do people scream as they fall? They generally do in films and on television. During my days on the force I saw several of them after they jumped, but by the time I got to them there were no screams echoing in the air. And a few times I’d been on hand while they talked someone in off a ledge, but in each instance the talking was successful and I didn’t have to watch a falling body accelerate according to the immutable laws of physics.
Could you get much of a scream out in four seconds?
I stood in the street where she’d fallen and I looked up toward her window. I counted off four seconds in my mind. A voice shrieked in my brain. It was Thursday night — actually, Friday morning. One o’clock — time I got myself around the corner to Armstrong’s, because in another couple of hours Justin would be closing for the night and I’d want to be drunk enough to sleep.
And an hour or so after that, she’d be one week dead.
I’d worked myself into a reasonably bleak mood by the time I got to Armstrong’s. I skipped the coffee and crawled straight into the bourbon bottle, and before long it began to do what it was supposed to do. It blurred the edges of thought so I couldn’t see the bad dark things that lurked there.
When Trina finished for the night, she joined me and I bought her a couple of drinks. I don’t remember what we talked about. Some but by no means all of our conversation touched upon Paula Wittlauer. Trina hadn’t known Paula terribly well — their contact had been largely limited to the two hours a day when their shifts overlapped — but she knew a little about the sort of life Paula had been leading. There had been a year or two when her own life had not been terribly different from Paula’s. Now she had things more or less under control, and maybe there would have come a time when Paula would have taken charge of her life, but that was something we’d never know.