She did not have a purse. There was eighty-six cents in change in one of the pockets of her coat, plus a lipstick and a tiny chain with three keys. Two of the keys would be for the place on Perry Street, one for the main entrance and the other for the apartment. The third was for a mailbox lock.
Her wallet was in her other pocket. She had twenty-four dollars in bills and an uncashed paycheck from the publishing house. There was a driver’s license still made out to Mrs. Catherine Fannin, a beat-up birth certificate for Catherine June Hawes, female, and a single ticket for Row E at the Cherry Lane Theater dated for a week from that night. There were folded sales slips from Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue and two deposit slips from her bank for small amounts. These said Catherine Hawes. There was a snapshot of me.
I left everything. I went into the bathroom. I washed quickly, scrubbing the blood from my hands, shaved fast, brushed my teeth. I went into the bedroom, took off the G.I. slacks, changed into a tan suit. I took the modified sportsman’s Luger out of the bottom dresser drawer, removed it from its pocket holster, checked it, put it back in the sheath, clipped the whole thing over my belt and into my right rear pocket. I called Dan Abraham.
It rang three times. His wife took it.
“Sorry,” I said. “Wake him for me, will you, Helen?”
“Harry?”
“Yes.”
“Must I?”
“Yes.”
There was a minute and then I could hear him groaning. He was an old Army friend and the only P.I. in town I trusted enough to ring in on it. We worked with each other from time to time when one or the other of us had a job too big to handle alone. He was still making unhappy noises when he found the mouthpiece.
“It isn’t bad enough that I’m in the racket myself,” he said. “I’ve got to have friends in it, too. Why don’t we take up something where they let you sleep, Harry? Maybe I’ll try out for concert violinist someplace. You know anybody needs a good concert violinist who can move to his left? How about Kansas City? Sure. Hell, they got holes all over the infield—”
“Dan, I’ve got a dead one.”
He took his head out of the quilt then. “Yeah? You getting trigger-happy in your old age or did somebody dump it on your doorstep?”
“Doorstep is close enough. It’s Cathy, Dan.”
“Oh, no, Harry—”
I could hear him telling Helen. We had spent ten or a dozen evenings together the year before. I heard Helen cry out.
“Listen, Dan—”
“Right here. Where are you?”
“Home. Look, I’m going out on it. The girl she’d been living with just called me, worried about her. That’s all I’ve got.”
“You want me to take it from over there?”
“Right. Everything’ll be just the way it happened. Roughly 3:30, give or take five. Somebody knifed her on the street but she made it up. Give me an hour or so and then try to get Nate Brannigan at Homicide. Rouse him up if he’s off, his home number’s in the book on my desk. He’ll ride with me longer than most. I’ll call you when I get a chance. Up till then you don’t know where I am.”
“You haven’t told me anyhow.”
“And, Dan, if you see anything that doesn’t look kosher, you might square it away before they start pulling up the floor boards.”
“Harry, you haven’t been seeing her lately?”
I didn’t answer him. He knew better than that.
“Delete that,” he said then. “Be on my way in six minutes. You going to leave it open?”
“I’ll stick an extra set of keys under the mat in the outside hall.”
“Right. And Harry—”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry, fella. If there’s anything else you want me to do? Or Helen maybe—”
“Thanks, Dan. Nothing. I’ll leave the lights on. You’ll trip over her if you’re not looking.”
I cradled it, went back into the living room, glanced at everything except Cathy. The two bourbons I’d poured were still sitting on the stand next to the chair. It would be a dumb sort of thing to have to explain, pouring one of them for an unidentified female sot who took five or seven minutes getting up the stairs and then turned out dead. I carried them into the kitchen, dumped them, washed the glasses. The bottle was still out but the cops would find that quick enough anyhow.
I took the extra set of keys out of the desk. It had been Cathy’s set. I looked at her then, thinking it was probably for the last time. It was all there again. I bit down hard on it and went out.
It followed me down. She’d be stiff before Dan got there. I was thinking about that and I was outside before I remembered I was holding the extra keys. I told myself to quit it. I turned back, opened the outside door and edged the two keys under the rubber.
It was twenty-five minutes since I’d spoken to Sally Kline. It would probably take the night man ten more to unshuffle my Chevy from the loft in the garage around the corner, and I did not see a cab. I had promised the girl I’d be there in forty. I wondered if Mr. Adam Moss of West 113th Street would mind if I borrowed the MG. I wondered who Mr. Adam Moss was. I expected to find out soon.
I was just contorting my hundred and ninety-seven pounds below the low wheel when she came around the corner. I got out again, fast, because this time it wasn’t any drunk’s mating call I heard. The cry was sick with agony or horror or both.
She started to run toward me. She was an old woman and her hair was disheveled and it didn’t matter to her that her housecoat was flapping loose from the flimsy white nightgown she wore under it. She lost a slipper but she couldn’t bend for it, not with what she was carrying pressed against her breast.
It was swaddled in a white blanket. The blanket had blood on it.
I jerked open the door on the sidewalk side of the MG. “Here!” I told her. “Quick!”
“Oh, thank the Lord, thank the Lord! Any hospital, any hospital at all. She fell out of the window. On the fourth floor. She—”
There was no movement in the blanket, no sound. “She what?”
The woman had started to get into the car. “Why, she’s always out there at night,” she said. “She was just playing. She—”
I had taken her by the elbow. I eased her around firmly before she could get seated and lifted a corner of the blanket. The cat was an expensive angora. Its head was bloodied up some but it had a good seven or eight other lives ahead of it. I kept propelling the woman around until I could swing the door shut. Then I ducked around to the other side of the car.
“But—” The woman was gaping at me. “You mean you won’t—” She was sputtering. I choked the car and she was shocked. When I released the handbrake she was outraged.
New York at night. You think anybody sleeps? The loonies in Bellevue, maybe they sleep.
The woman stuck her tongue out at me. “Get a rickshaw at the corner, lady,” I told her. I heard the cat yowl once and then saw it racing along the sidewalk as I pulled out. I went over to Second Avenue and straight down.
Around midtown I remembered Cathy’s mother and sister.
That did not make the night any better. Someone was going to have to tell them and I didn’t much want it to be any tactful plainclothes cop working overtime with a hangover.
I liked them both. Mrs. Hawes was over sixty and stone deaf. She had taken to me and had been broken up when things did not work out for us. She had not understood Cathy, but then who had?
Estelle was thirty-six or so. She taught grammar school and you wouldn’t mistake her for Moll Flanders in the darkest bedroom in town. She wore steel-rimmed glasses and straight plain dresses that had gone out with the N.R.A. I had always suspected that buried under that Iowa-spinster get-up she had a shape something like Cathy’s, but she did as much with it as a baker does with last Tuesday’s bagels. It was as if she had given up all hope of ever getting a man and did not much care. Or probably she was frigid and had found that out somewhere along the line and did not care about that either. But she worried about Cathy and I was not ecstatic knowing I would have to break it to her and the old woman.