“He wrote a nice hand,” I said, handing the note back. Padillo nodded and passed the note to Gothar who read it and gave it to his sister. While she was reading it, Gothar said, “Well?”
Padillo shook his head. “I’m not that sentimental, Walter. Maybe if your brother hadn’t been, he’d still be alive.”
“We don’t need him, Walter,” Wanda Gothar said.
The tall man with the too young face jerked his head in another of his neck-cricking nods and moved to the door, holding it open for his sister. She swept through it with what I thought was a fair amount of disdain. Gothar paused to look at Padillo thoughtfully. “We won’t beg,” he said, “but should you change your mind, one of us will be at the Hay-Adams.”
“I won’t change my mind,” Padillo said. “Besides, I think you’re badmouthing yourselves. You don’t really need me.”
“That is something that the next few days will determine,” Gothar said, turning to leave.
“Good luck,” Padillo said.
Gothar paused once more to give Padillo a cold stare. “In our business, Padillo, luck plays a very small role,” he said and then he was gone.
“You want a drink?” I said, picking up the phone.
“A martini.”
I dialed a single number and ordered. “Why didn’t you lend a hand?” I said. “It was a nice note.”
Padillo smiled slightly. “There was only one thing wrong with it,” he said.
“What?”
“Paul Gothar couldn’t read or write English.”
4
I MAY be one of the last persons in Washington to walk its streets late at night. I do so because I like to and because of a perverse conviction that the city’s sidewalks were built to be used twenty-four hours a day, just as they are used in such cities as London and Paris and Rome.
I’ve had some trouble a couple of times, but that’s largely my lookout. Once it was a trio of young hoods who thought a fight might be fun and then whimpered when they found that it wasn’t. The other time was when two muggers decided that they had need of my watch and wallet, but crawled off down an alley without them. I wrote both incidents off as my contribution to law and order. In New York, of course, I take cabs. I’m not a complete fool.
It was usually a little after midnight when I got home, which was on the eighth floor of an apartment building located just south of Dupont Circle. If the neighborhood wasn’t as fashionable as Georgetown, it had more flavor, and that’s what city living supposedly is all about. Within a one-block radius, I needed no more than three minutes to contract for either a bag of heroin or an angel food cake and that must have been what the apartment’s management meant when it advertised the place as being convenient to fine shopping.
I walked home later than usual the Tuesday night that the Gothar twins called on Padillo. It had been one of those relatively rare spring days in Washington when even the three-packs-a-day boys can smell the magnolias. The dinner trade had been particularly good, the chef had been sober, the annual income tax nick promised to be less traumatic than usual, and nothing but mild guilt would prevent me from sleeping till noon.
The editors at House Beautiful would have blanched at our two-bedroom apartment because it was furnished with the disparate possessions of two persons who’ve married a little late in life and whose tastes have already been shaped and molded into what some might regard as prejudice. We usually agreed on paintings, but when it came to furniture Fredl favored what I regarded as unhappy Hepplewhite while she more than once had accused me of trying to turn the place into the Senior Members’ Room at the Racquet Club. There had been a series of painfully negotiated compromises, but I’d drawn the line at The Chair.
I had won it with three of a kind in college and it had crossed the Atlantic twice and if its leather was a bit worn and the springs sagged a little, it was still The Chair and I’d read some fine books in it and used it to doze away some dull afternoons and even made some big plans in it, and if they hadn’t quite materialized, it wasn’t The Chair’s fault.
When I arrived home that night and opened the door and switched on the light, I knew what Papa Bear must have felt like because someone had been sitting in my chair—was still sitting in it, in fact, sprawled in it really, his head back, his hands in his lap, and his feet stuck straight out in front of him. His eyes were open and so was his mouth and his tongue, dark and swollen, bulged out of it. Two white plastic bicycle handlebar grips lay on his chest on top of a broad green and gray foulard tie. The grips were attached to the piano wire that had been used to choke the life out of Walter Gothar.
He may have put up some kind of a struggle, but there was no sign of it. No lamps were knocked over. The ashtrays, full as usual, were neatly in place. So perhaps all he had done was to claw at the wire that bit into his neck while he drummed his heels on the carpet. It was a rotten way to die because it took so long—possibly two minutes depending on the skill and the strength of the garroter.
I crossed the room and picked up the phone and dialed 444-1111 and when the man’s voice said, “Police emergency,” I gave him my name and address, told him that a man had been killed in my apartment, and then hung up. I dialed another number and when Padillo answered, I said, “Your friend Walter Gothar.”
“What about him?”
“He’s dead.”
“Where?”
“In my chair. Somebody garroted him. Piano wire and plastic handlebar grips. I think it’s piano wire.”
“Cops on the way?”
“I just called them.”
“I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“If they get here first, is there anything you want me not to tell them?”
Padillo was silent for a moment until he said, “No. Nothing.”
“Then I might try the truth.”
“They might even believe you,” he said and hung up.
I understand that you’re not supposed to touch anything, but I had a small bar in one corner so I went over and poured myself a Scotch, reasoning that the killer might not have liked the brand, or perhaps hadn’t wanted to hang around leaving fingerprints all over a glass while he toasted his handiwork.
Holding the drink, I stood there in the center of the living room and stared at the dead body of Walter Gothar and wondered why he had wanted to see me, and how he’d got into my apartment, and whether he had known the person who had produced the wire and looped it around his neck, pulling it tight from behind until the spinal cord went or until lack of oxygen destroyed the brain. Either way, Walter Gothar was thoroughly dead so I stood there and wondered what that was like until Padillo knocked at the door.
He came in and crossed over to Gothar’s body and quickly went through the pockets. He took nothing and replaced everything carefully, using his coat sleeve to wipe away or smear his fingerprints. When he was through he straightened and stared down at the dead man.
“Not pretty anymore, is he?”
“Not very,” I said. “Did you call his sister?”
Padillo shook his head and moved over to the bar. “I’ll let the cops do that.”
“Find anything in his pockets?”
“He has an interesting set of keys.”
After Padillo poured his own drink we continued to stand in the center of the living room, like two persons who don’t know anybody else at a chairless cocktail party. We stood there, not saying much, until the police arrived. After that we both found plenty to talk about.
Counting manslaughters, there had been 327 murders in the Washington area during the past year and the two homicide squad cops who’d drawn the Gothar death looked as if they had been stuck with at least half of them. The two cops were black and white and they didn’t seem to care much for each other and not at all for Padillo and me.