“Could I see Miss Strom?”
“That would be for her to say, but she’s not home from work yet. She works part-time in the afternoons. She’s a close one, not that she hasn’t the right to be, and she’s never said what it is that she does. But she’s a decent sort. This is a decent house.”
“I’m sure it is.”
“It’s single rooms and they don’t cost much so you know you’re not at the Ritz Hotel, but there’s decent people here and I keep it as clean as a person can. When there’s not but one toilet on the floor it’s a struggle. But it’s decent.”
“Yes.”
“Poor Mary. Why’d anyone kill her? Was it sex, do you know? Not that you could imagine anyone wanting her, the old thing, but try to figure out a madman and you’ll go mad your own self. Was she molested?”
“No.”
“Just killed, then. Oh, God save us all. I gave her a home for almost seven years. Which it was no more than my job to do, not making it out to be charity on my part. But I had her here all that time and of course I never knew her, you couldn’t get to know a poor old soul like that, but I got used to her. Do you know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“I got used to having her about. I might say Hello and Good morning and Isn’t it a nice day and not get a look in reply, but even on those days she was someone familiar to say something to. And she’s gone now and we’re all of us older, aren’t we?”
“We are.”
“The poor old thing. How could anyone do it, will you tell me that? How could anyone murder her?”
I don’t think she expected an answer. Just as well. I didn’t have one.
After dinner I returned for a few minutes of conversation with Genevieve Strom. She had no idea why Miss Redfield had left her the money. She’d received $880 and she was glad to get it because she could use it, but the whole thing puzzled her. “I hardly knew her,” she said more than once. “I keep thinking I ought to do something special with the money, but what?”
I made the bars that night but drinking didn’t have the urgency it had possessed the night before. I was able to keep it in proportion and to know that I’d wake up the next morning with my memory intact. In the course of things I dropped over to the newsstand a little past midnight and talked with Eddie Halloran. He was looking good and I said as much. I remembered him when he’d gone to work for Sid three years ago. He’d been drawn then, and shaky, and his eyes always moved off to the side of whatever he was looking at. Now there was confidence in his stance and he looked years younger. It hadn’t all come back to him and maybe some of it was lost forever. I guess the booze had him pretty good before he kicked it once and for all.
We talked about the bag lady. He said, “Know what I think it is? Somebody’s sweeping the streets.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“A cleanup campaign. Few years back, Matt, there was this gang of kids found a new way to amuse theirselves. Pick up a can of gasoline, find some bum down on the Bowery, pour the gas on him, and throw a lit match at him. You remember?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Those kids thought they were patriots. Thought they deserved a medal. They were cleaning up the neighborhood, getting drunken bums off the streets. You know, Matt, people don’t like to look at a derelict. That building up the block, the Towers? There’s this grating there where the heating system’s vented. You remember how the guys would sleep there in the winter. It was warm, it was comfortable, it was free, and two or three guys would be there every night catching some Z’s and getting warm. Remember?”
“Uh-huh. Then they fenced it.”
“Right. Because the tenants complained. It didn’t hurt them any, it was just the local bums sleeping it off, but the tenants pay a lot of rent and they don’t like to look at bums on their way in or out of their building. The bums were outside and not bothering anybody but it was the sight of them, you know, so the owners went to the expense of putting up cyclone fencing around where they used to sleep. It looks ugly as hell and all it does is keep the bums out but that’s all it’s supposed to do.”
“That’s human beings for you.”
He nodded, then turned aside to sell somebody a Daily News and a Racing Form. Then he said, “I don’t know what it is exactly. I was a bum, Matt. I got pretty far down. You probably don’t know how far. I got as far as the Bowery. I panhandled, I slept in my clothes on a bench or in a doorway. You look at men like that and you think they’re just waiting to die, and they are, but some of them come back. And you can’t tell for sure who’s gonna come back and who’s not. Somebody coulda poured gas on me, set me on fire. Sweet Jesus.”
“The shopping bag lady—”
“You’ll look at a bum and you’ll say to yourself, ‘Maybe I could get like that and I don’t wanta think about it.’ Or you’ll look at somebody like the shopping bag lady and say, ‘I could go nutsy like her so get her out of my sight.’ And you get people who think like Nazis. You know, take all the cripples and the lunatics and the retarded kids and all and give ’em an injection and Good-bye, Charlie.”
“You think that’s what happened to her?”
“What else?”
“But whoever did it stopped at one, Eddie.”
He frowned. “Don’t make sense,” he said. “Unless he did the one job and the next day he got run down by a Ninth Avenue bus, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Or he got scared. All that blood and it was more than he figured on. Or he left town. Could be anything like that.”
“Could be.”
“There’s no other reason, is there? She musta been killed because she was a bag lady, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, Jesus Christ, Matt. What other reason would anybody have for killing her?”
The law firm where Aaron Creighton worked had offices on the seventh floor of the Flatiron Building. In addition to the four partners, eleven other lawyers had their names painted on the frosted glass door. Aaron Creighton’s came second from the bottom. Well, he was young.
He was also surprised to see me, and when I told him what I wanted he said it was irregular.
“Matter of public record, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes,” he said. “That means you can find the information. It doesn’t mean we’re obliged to furnish it to you.”
For an instant I thought I was back at the Eighteenth Precinct and a cop was trying to hustle me for the price of a new hat. But Creighton’s reservations were ethical. I wanted a list of Mary Alice Redfield’s beneficiaries, including the amounts they’d received and the dates they’d been added to her will. He wasn’t sure where his duty lay.
“I’d like to be helpful,” he said. “Perhaps you could tell me just what your interest is.”
“I’m not sure.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I don’t know why I’m playing with this one. I used to be a cop, Mr. Creighton. Now I’m a sort of unofficial detective. I don’t carry a license but I do things for people and I wind up making enough that way to keep a roof overhead.”
His eyes were wary. I guess he was trying to guess how I intended to earn myself a fee out of this.
“I got twelve hundred dollars out of the blue. It was left to me by a woman I didn’t really know and who didn’t really know me. I can’t seem to slough off the feeling that I got the money for a reason. That I’ve been paid in advance.”
“Paid for what?”
“To try and find out who killed her.”