He said, “Thing is, Scudder, we more or less put that one out of the way. It’s in an open file. You know how it works. If we get new information, fine, but in the meantime I don’t sit up nights thinking about it.”
“I just wanted to see what you had.”
“Well, I’m kind of tight for time, if you know what I mean. My own personal time, I set a certain store by my own time.”
“I can understand that.”
“You probably got some relative of the deceased for a client. Wants to find out who’d do such a terrible thing to poor old Cousin Mary. Naturally you’re interested because it’s a chance to make a buck and a man’s gotta make a living. Whether a man’s a cop or a civilian he’s gotta make a buck, right?”
Uh-huh. I seem to remember that we were subtler in my day, but perhaps that’s just age talking. I thought of telling him that I didn’t have a client but why should he believe me? He didn’t know me. If there was nothing in it for him, why should he bother?
So I said, “You know, we’re just a couple weeks away from Memorial Day.”
“Yeah, I’ll buy a poppy from a Legionnaire. So what else is new?”
“Memorial Day’s when women start wearing white shoes and men put straw hats on their heads. You got a new hat for the summer season, Andersen? Because you could use one.”
“A man can always use a new hat,” he said.
A hat is cop talk for twenty-five dollars. By the time I left the precinct house Andersen had two tens and a five of Mary Alice Redfield’s bequest to me and I had all the data that had turned up to date.
I think Andersen won that one. I now knew that the murder weapon had been a kitchen knife with a blade approximately seven and a half inches long. That one of the stab wounds had found the heart and had probably caused death instantaneously. That it was impossible to determine whether strangulation had taken place before or after death. That should have been possible to determine — maybe the medical examiner hadn’t wasted too much time checking her out, or maybe he had been reluctant to commit himself. She’d been dead a few hours when they found her — the estimate was that she’d died around midnight and the body wasn’t reported until half-past five. That wouldn’t have ripened her all that much, not in winter weather, but most likely her personal hygiene was nothing to boast about, and she was just a shopping bag lady and you couldn’t bring her back to life, so why knock yourself out running tests on her malodorous corpse?
I learned a few other things. The landlady’s name. The name of the off-duty bartender, heading home after a nightcap at the neighborhood after-hours joint, who’d happened on the body and who had been drunk enough or sober enough to take the trouble to report it. And I learned the sort of negative facts that turn up in a police report when the case is headed for an open file — the handful of non-leads that led nowhere, the witnesses who had nothing to contribute, the routine matters routinely handled. They hadn’t knocked themselves out, Andersen and his partner, but would I have handled it any differently? Why knock yourself out chasing a murderer you didn’t stand much chance of catching?
In the theater, SRO is good news. It means a sellout performance, standing room only. But once you get out of the theater district it means single room occupancy, and the designation is invariably applied to a hotel or apartment house which has seen better days.
Mary Alice Redfield’s home for the last six or seven years of her life had started out as an old Rent Law tenement, built around the turn of the century, six stories tall, faced in red-brown brick, with four apartments to the floor. Now all of those little apartments had been carved into single rooms as if they were election districts gerrymandered by a maniac. There was a communal bathroom on each floor and you didn’t need a map to find it.
The manager was a Mrs. Larkin. Her blue eyes had lost most of their color and half her hair had gone from black to gray but she was still pert. If she’s reincarnated as a bird she’ll be a house wren.
She said, “Oh, poor Mary. We’re none of us safe, are we, with the streets full of monsters? I was born in this neighborhood and I’ll die in it, but please God that’ll be of natural causes. Poor Mary. There’s some said she should have been locked up, but Jesus, she got along. She lived her life. And she had her check coming in every month and paid her rent on time. She had her own money, you know. She wasn’t living off the public like some I could name but won’t.”
“I know.”
“Do you want to see her room? I rented it twice since then. The first one was a young man and he didn’t stay. He looked all right but when he left me I was just as glad. He said he was a sailor off a ship and when he left he said he’d got on with another ship and was on his way to Hong Kong or some such place, but I’ve had no end of sailors and he didn’t walk like a sailor so I don’t know what he was after doing. Then I could have rented it twelve times but didn’t because I won’t rent to colored or Spanish. I’ve nothing against them but I won’t have them in the house. The owner says to me, Mrs. Larkin he says, my instructions are to rent to anybody regardless of race or creed or color, but if you was to use your own judgment I wouldn’t have to know about it. In other words he don’t want them either but he’s after covering himself.”
“I suppose he has to.”
“Oh, with all the laws, but I’ve had no trouble.” She laid a forefinger alongside her nose. It’s a gesture you don’t see too much these days. “Then I rented poor Mary’s room two weeks ago to a very nice woman, a widow. She likes her beer, she does, but why shouldn’t she have it? I keep my eye on her and she’s making no trouble, and if she wants an old jar now and then whose business is it but her own?” She fixed her blue-gray eyes on me. “You like your drink,” she said.
“Is it on my breath?”
“No, but I can see it in your face. Larkin liked his drink and there’s some say it killed him but he liked it and a man has a right to live what life he wants. And he was never a hard man when he drank, never cursed or fought or beat a woman as some I could name but won’t. Mrs. Shepard’s out now. That’s the one took poor Mary’s room, and I’ll show it to you if you want.”
So I saw the room. It was kept neat.
“She keeps it tidier than poor Mary,” Mrs. Larkin said. “Now Mary wasn’t dirty, you understand, but she had all her belongings. Her shopping bags and other things that she kept in her room. She made a mare’s nest of the place, and all the years she lived here, you see, it wasn’t tidy. I would keep her bed made but she didn’t want me touching her things and so I let it be cluttered as she wanted it. She paid her rent on time and made no trouble otherwise. She had money, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“She left some to a woman on the fourth floor. A much younger woman, she’d only moved here three months before Mary was killed, and if she exchanged a word with Mary I couldn’t swear to it, but Mary left her almost a thousand dollars. Now Mrs. Klein across the hall lived here since before Mary ever moved in and the two old things always had a good word for each other, and all Mrs. Klein has is the welfare and she could have made good use of a couple of dollars, but Mary left her money instead to Miss Strom.” She raised her eyebrows to show bewilderment. “Now Mrs. Klein said nothing, and I don’t even know if she’s had the thought that Mary might have mentioned her in her will, but Miss Strom said she didn’t know what to make of it. She just couldn’t understand it at all, and what I told her was you can’t figure out a woman like poor Mary who never had both her feet on the pavement. Troubled as she was, daft as she was, who’s to say what she might have had on her mind?”