“A woman at the curb outside, who seems a leader, sort of very cool, is calling directions to them how to move it, close beside her is another woman, like her assistant or gopher maybe. The leader’s calling out directions, like I say, in a hushed voice, and the other women are watching, but they’re all very quiet, like you’d expect people to be at that hour of the morning, sober people at any rate, not wanting to wake the neighbors.
“Well, the kid’s looking all around, every which way, trying ,to take in everything—there was a lot of interesting stuff to see, I gather, and more inside—when the gopher lady comes over and hunkers down beside him—he was a runt, that newsboy was, and ugly too—and wants to buy a morning paper. He hauls it out for her and she gives him a five-dollar bill and tells him to keep the change. He’s sort of embarrassed by that and drops his eyes, but she tells him not to mind, he’s a handsome boy and a good hardworking one, she wished she had one like him, and he deserves everything he gets, and she puts an arm around him and draws him close and all of a sudden his downcast eyes are looking inside her blouse front and he’s getting the most amazing anatomy lesson you could imagine.
“He has some idea that they’re getting the dolly clear by now and that the other women are moving, but she’s going on whispering in his ear, her breath’s like steam, what a good boy he is and how grateful his parents must be, and his only worry, she’ll hug him so tight he won’t be able to look down her blouse.
“After a bit she ends his anatomy lesson with a kiss that almost smothers him and then stands up. The women are all gone and the dolly’s vanishing around the next corner. Before she hurries after it, she says, ‘So long, kid. You got your bonus. Now deliver your papers.’
“Which, after he got over his daze, is what he did, he said.
“Well, of course, as soon as he mentioned the big television and player, I flashed on what I’d been missing all yesterday, though it was right in front of my eyes if I’d just looked. Why they’d been swarming on Three, why they rushed the guy from Seven and then lost interest in him when he took off his hat and they saw his hair was black dyed (instead of frizzy blonde), and why the hookers’ convention wasn’t still going on today. All that loot could have only come from one place—Stensor’s. In spite of him being so respectable, he’d been running a string of call girls all the time so that when he ran out on them owing them all money (I flashed on that at the same time), they’d collected the best way they knew how.
“I ran to his apartment, and you know the door wasn’t even locked—one of them must have had a key to it too. Of course the place was stripped and of course no sign of Stensor.
“Then I did call the police of course but not until I’d checked the basement. His black Continental was gone, but there was no way of telling for sure whether he’d taken it or the gals had got that too.
“It surprised me how fast the police came and how many of them there were, but it showed they must have had an eye on him already, which maybe explained why he left so sudden without taking his things. They asked a lot of questions and came back more than once, were in and out for a few days. I got to know one of the detectives, he lived locally, we had a drink together once or twice, and he told me they were really after Stensor for drug dealing, he was handling cocaine back in those days when it was first getting to be the classy thing, they weren’t interested in his call girls except as he might have used them as pushers. They never did turn him up though, far as I know, and there wasn’t even a line in the papers about the whole business.”
“So that was the end of your one-day hooker invasion?” Ryker commented, chuckling rather dutifully.
“Not quite,” Clancy said, and hesitated. Then with a “What-difference-can-it-make?” shrug, he went on, “Well, yes, there was a sort of funny follow-up but it didn’t amount to much. You see, the story of Stensor and the hookers eventually got around to most of the tenants in the building, as such things will, though some of them got it garbled, as you can imagine happens, that he was a patron and maybe somehow victim of call girls instead of running them. Well, anyhow, after a bit, we (the Mrs. mostly) began to get these tenant reports of a girl—a young woman—seen waiting outside the door to Stensor’s apartment, or wandering around in other parts of the building, but mostly waiting at Stensor’s door. And this was after there were other tenants in that apartment. A sad-looking girl.”
“Like, out of all those hookers,” Ryker said, “she was the only one who really loved him and waited for him. A sort of leftover.”
“Yeah, or the only one who hadn’t got her split of the loot,” Clancy said. “Or maybe he owed her more than the others. I never saw her myself, although I went chasing after her a couple of times when tenants reported her. I wouldn’t have taken any stock in her except the descriptions did seem to hang together. A college-type girl, they’d say, and mostly wearing black. And sort of sad. I told the detective I knew, but he didn’t seem to make anything out of it. They never did pick up any of the women, he said, far as he knew. Well, that’s all there is to the follow-up—like I said, nothing much. And after two or three months tenants stopped seeing her.”
He broke off, eyeing Ryker just a little doubtfully.
“But it stuck in your mind,” that one observed, “for all these years, so that when I told you about seeing a woman in black near the same door, you rushed off to check up on her, just on the chance? Though you’d never seen her yourself, even once?”
Clancy’s expression became a shade unhappy. “Well, no,” he admitted, glancing up and down the hall, as though hoping someone would come along and save him from answering. “There was a little more than that,” he continued uneasily, “though I wouldn’t want anyone making too much of it, or telling the Mrs. I told them.
“But then, Mr. Ryker, you’re not the one to be gossipping or getting the wind up, are you?” he continued more easily, giving his tenant a hopeful look.
“No, of course I’m not,” Ryker responded, a little more casually than he felt. “What was it?”
“Well, about four years ago we had another disappearance here, a single man living alone and getting on in years but still active. He didn’t own any of the furniture, his possessions were few, nothing at all fancy like Stensor’s, no friends or relations we knew of, and he came to us from a building that knew no more; in fact we didn’t realize he was gone until the time for paying the rent came round. And it wasn’t until then that I recalled that the last time or two I spoke to him he’d mentioned something about a woman in an upstairs hall, wondering if she’d found the people or the apartment number she seemed to be looking for. Not making a complaint, you see, just mentioning, just idly wondering, so that it wasn’t until he disappeared that I thought of connecting it up with Stensor’s girl at all.”
“He say if she was young?” Ryker asked.
“He wasn’t sure. She was wearing a black outside coat and hat or scarf of something that hid her face, and she made a point of not noticing him when he looked at her and thought of asking if she needed help. He did say she was thin, though, I remember.”
Ryker nodded.
Clancy continued, “And then a few years ago there was this couple on Nine that had a son living with them, a big fat lug who looked older than he was and was always being complained about whether he did anything or not. One of the old ladies in the apartment next to their bathroom used to kick to us about him running water for baths at two or three in the morning. And he had the nerve to complain to us about them, claiming they pulled the elevator away from him when he wanted to get it, or made it go in the opposite direction to what he wanted when he was in it. I laughed in his pimply face at that. Not that those two old biddies wouldn’t have done it to him if they’d figured a way and they’d got the chance.