“I don’t think so. Was she? It wasn’t really about her, you know. It was inspired by her story but I didn’t know her and I never knew anything about her. The past few days I’ve been paying a lot of attention to bag ladies, though. And other street people.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Are there more of them in New York or is it just that they’re so much more visible here? In California everybody drives, you don’t see people on the street. I’m from Canada, rural Ontario, and the first city I ever spent much time in was Toronto, and there are crazy people on the streets there but it’s nothing like New York. Does the city drive them crazy or does it just tend to draw crazy people?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe they’re not crazy. Maybe they just hear a different drummer. I wonder who killed her.”
“We’ll probably never know.”
“What I really wonder is why she was killed. In my song I made up some reason. That somebody wanted what was in her bags. I think it works as a song that way but I don’t think there’s much chance that it happened like that. Why would anyone kill the poor thing?”
“I don’t know.”
“They say she left people money. People she hardly knew. Is that the truth?” I nodded. “And she left me a song. I don’t even feel that I wrote it. I woke up with it. I never set eyes on her and she touched my life. That’s strange, isn’t it?”
Everything was strange. The strangest part of all was the way it ended.
It was a Monday night. The Mets were at Shea and I’d taken my sons to a game. The Dodgers were in for a three-game series which they eventually swept as they’d been sweeping everything lately. The boys and I got to watch them knock Jon Matlack out of the box and go on to shell his several replacements. The final count was something like 13–4. We stayed in our seats until the last out. Then I saw them home and caught a train back to the city.
So it was past midnight when I reached Armstrong’s. Trina brought me a large double and a mug of coffee without being asked. I knocked back half of the bourbon and was dumping the rest into my coffee when she told me somebody’d been looking for me earlier. “He was in three times in the past two hours,” she said. “A wiry guy, high forehead, bushy eyebrows, sort of a bulldog jaw. I guess the word for it is underslung.”
“Perfectly good word.”
“I said you’d probably get here sooner or later.”
“I always do. Sooner or later.”
“Uh-huh. You okay, Matt?”
“The Mets lost a close one.”
“I heard it was thirteen to four.”
“That’s close for them these days. Did he say what it was about?”
He hadn’t, but within the half hour he came in again and I was there to be found. I recognized him from Trina’s description as soon as he came through the door. He looked faintly familiar but he was nobody I knew. I suppose I’d seen him around the neighborhood.
Evidently he knew me by sight because he found his way to my table without asking directions and took a chair without being invited to sit. He didn’t say anything for a while and neither did I. I had a fresh bourbon and coffee in front of me and I took a sip and looked him over.
He was under thirty. His cheeks were hollow and the flesh of his face was stretched over his skull like leather that had shrunk upon drying. He wore a forest green work shirt and a pair of khaki pants. He needed a shave.
Finally he pointed at my cup and asked me what I was drinking. When I told him he said all he drank was beer.
“They have beer here,” I said.
“Maybe I’ll have what you’re drinking.” He turned in his chair and waved for Trina. When she came over he said he’d have bourbon and coffee, the same as I was having. He didn’t say anything more until she brought the drink. Then, after he had spent quite some time stirring it, he took a sip. “Well,” he said, “that’s not so bad. That’s okay.”
“Glad you like it.”
“I don’t know if I’d order it again, but at least now I know what it’s like.”
“That’s something.”
“I seen you around. Matt Scudder. Used to be a cop, private eye now, blah blah blah. Right?”
“Close enough.”
“My name’s Floyd. I never liked it but I’m stuck with it, right? I could change it but who’m I kidding? Right?”
“If you say so.”
“If I don’t somebody else will. Floyd Karp, that’s the full name. I didn’t tell you my last name, did I? That’s it, Floyd Karp.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, okay, okay.” He pursed his lips, blew out air in a silent whistle. “What do we do now, Matt? Huh? That’s what I want to know.”
“I’m not sure what you mean, Floyd.”
“Oh, you know what I’m getting at, driving at, getting at. You know, don’t you?”
By this time I suppose I did.
“I killed that old lady. Took her life, stabbed her with my knife.” He flashed the saddest smile. “Steee-rangled her with her skeeee-arf. Hoist her with her own whatchacallit, petard. What’s a petard, Matt?”
“I don’t know, Floyd. Why’d you kill her?”
He looked at me, he looked at his coffee, he looked at me again.
He said, “Had to.”
“Why?”
“Same as the bourbon and coffee. Had to see. Had to taste it and find out what it was like.” His eyes met mine. His were very large, hollow, empty. I fancied I could see right through them to the blackness at the back of his skull. “I couldn’t get my mind away from murder,” he said. His voice was more sober now, the mocking playful quality gone from it. “I tried. I just couldn’t do it. It was on my mind all the time and I was afraid of what I might do. I couldn’t function, I couldn’t think, I just saw blood and death all the time. I was afraid to close my eyes for fear of what I might see. I would just stay up, days it seemed, and then I’d be tired enough to pass out the minute I closed my eyes. I stopped eating. I used to be fairly heavy and the weight just fell off of me.”
“When did all this happen, Floyd?”
“I don’t know. All winter. And I thought if I went and did it once I would know if I was a man or a monster or what. And I got this knife, and I went out a couple nights but lost my nerve, and then one night — I don’t want to talk about that part of it now.”
“All right.”
“I almost couldn’t do it, but I couldn’t not do it, and then I was doing it and it went on forever. It was horrible.”
“Why didn’t you stop?”
“I don’t know. I think I was afraid to stop. That doesn’t make any sense, does it? I just don’t know. It was all crazy, insane, like being in a movie and being in the audience at the same time. Watching myself.”
“No one saw you do it?”
“No. I threw the knife down a sewer. I went home. I put all my clothes in the incinerator, the ones I was wearing. I kept throwing up. All that night I would throw up even when my stomach was empty. Dry heaves, Department of Dry Heaves. And then I guess I fell asleep, I don’t know when or how but I did, and the next day I woke up and thought I dreamed it. But of course I didn’t.”
“No.”
“And what I did think was that it was over. I did it and I knew I’d never want to do it again. It was something crazy that happened and I could forget about it. And I thought that was what happened.”
“That you managed to forget about it?”
A nod. “But I guess I didn’t. And now everybody’s talking about her. Mary Alice Redfield, I killed her without knowing her name. Nobody knew her name and now everybody knows it and it’s all back in my mind. And I heard you were looking for me, and I guess, I guess...” He frowned, chasing a thought around in his mind like a dog trying to capture his tail. Then he gave it up and looked at me. “So here I am,” he said. “So here I am.”