Some questions obviously had to be asked.
It was close to 7:30; both men were exhausted. They agreed between them that the questions could wait until morning, and Carella called the squadroom to say they were signing off. Detective Meyer Meyer, who was catching, said, “Short day today?” — which was what he usually said no matter what time anyone called in to check out.
His day was just beginning.
The woman had been stabbed.
It wasn’t such an exciting stabbing, no exotic sexy stuff or anything like that, just a bread knife stuck in her chest, that’s all. She was wearing all her clothes, it was really a pretty routine stabbing. The bread knife had entered at an uptilted angle just below her left breast, the assailant apparently wielding the weapon underhanded rather than attacking with a downward slash. There was a lot of blood all over the kitchen floor (she was lying on her back in front of the sink) and a few broken dishes (apparently her attacker had surprised her in the middle of cleaning up), but it was a pretty run-of-the-mill stabbing, the kind you might expect to get on a Monday night, nothing bizarre or outstanding about it, just a knife sticking out of a dead woman lying on the floor in blood and broken crockery.
Meyer Meyer got to the apartment at three minutes past midnight.
The cop on the beat, a patrolman named Stuart Collister, had phoned in the squeal at 11:55 p.m. after being accosted by a man on the street who said to him, “Officer, excuse me for breaking your ear, but there’s a dead bird upstairs.” The dead bird was the lady with the knife in her chest. Such a bird, she wasn’t. She was all of fifty years old, with large brown eyes that stared up at the ceiling and a generous mouth artfully reduced by the line of her carefully applied lipstick. She was wearing a black dress and a string of pearls and black pumps and black net stockings and she stank to high heaven because she had been dead for some little while. Her color wasn’t too pretty either, because the apartment was a very warm one, with the radiators going full blast, and putrefaction had begun, was in fact well along, so everything smelled and looked terrible, a routine stabbing.
Meyer went outside to talk to the Homicide cops, and then he chatted with the photographer a while, and then he got around to Patrolman Collister, who had held for further questioning the man who’d stopped him on the street.
The man looked too hip for his age; Meyer guessed he was in his early sixties. He was wearing a double-vented blue blazer with brass buttons, beige pipestem slacks, a pale-blue turtleneck sweater, and brown buckskin desert boots. His hair was white, and he combed it the way Julius Caesar must have before he started going bald and took to wearing laurel wreaths. His name was Barnabas Coe, and he was more than eager to tell Meyer exactly how he had discovered the body.
“What’s her name, to begin with?” Meyer asked.
“Margie Ryder. Marguerite.”
“How old is she?”
“Fifty-two, I think.”
“Is this her apartment?”
“Yes.”
“All right, let’s hear it.”
They stood together just outside the front door of the apartment, the laboratory technicians walking in and out of the place with their equipment now, the medical examiner arriving and saying hello to everyone, the photographer coming out into the hall again to get some more flashbulbs from a leather bag on the corridor floor, the DA’s man arriving and saying hello to Meyer and then going over to where the Homicide dicks were telling stories about Stabbings They Had Known. Meyer was a tall man with blue eyes and a bald head, burly in a light-gray topcoat, hatless. The top of Coe’s emperor cut was level with Meyer’s chin. He kept staring up into Meyer’s face as he talked, his head bobbing in emphasis, his blue eyes glowing.
“Margie and I were real tight,” he said, “used to have pads across the hall from each other down in The Quarter, this was, oh, 1960, 1961. Never made it, you understand, but were tight, man, tight. Crazy bird, that Margie, I really dug her. She finally had to move because the loot was running out; up here, the tab’s a lot cheaper.”
“The loot?”
“The insurance loot. Her husband dropped dead just after the war. The real war.”
“How’d he die?” Meyer asked suspiciously.
“Lung cancer,” Coe said, and paused. “Never smoked in his life.”
Meyer nodded. He kept staring at Coe in fascination, studying the hip clothes and hairdo, listening to the jargon, wondering when Coe would reach up to peel off the sixty-year-old rubber mask he was surely wearing, revealing his true teenybopper face.
“Anyway,” Coe said, “we kept the lines open even after she moved. Which is odd, I think, and kind of rare because, whereas The Quarter may not be a garden spot, up here is really the asshole, am I right? I mean, man, cheap is cheap, who wants to live like pigs?”
“Nobody,” Meyer said, and kept staring at the seamed and tired face, the wrinkled flesh around blue eyes that glowed with excitement as Coe told his story.
“Not that she lived like a pig,” Coe said. “That’s a nice pad in there.” He gestured with his head toward the open doorway. “For here,” he amended.
“Yes,” Meyer said.
“She used to come downtown every now and then, and I’d pop in here whenever I was in the neighborhood. She developed a new bag after she moved, writing poetry. Wild, huh?”
“Yeah, wild,” Meyer said.
“She used to read me her stuff whenever I stopped by. ‘Oh great mother city, I spit out your naked tits and suck bilge from your sewers instead.’ That was one of her lines. Tough, huh?”
“Yeah, tough,” Meyer said. “How’d you—?”
“Well, tonight I had a date with a little Puerto Rican bird who lives on Ainsley, sweet oh sweet, these great big marvelous brown eyes and this lovely tight little bod, oh sweet, man.”
“Yeah,” Meyer said.
“Had to get her home by eleven-thirty, though, very strict parents, I’m surprised they didn’t send a dueña along. Well, she’s only nineteen, I guess you’ve got to expect that kind of thing with señoritas.” Coe winked and smiled. Meyer almost winked back at him.
“So I had time to burn, so I decided to hit Margie’s pad, see how she was getting along, maybe listen to some more of her poetry. ‘Your hairy incubus startles me,’ that was another of her lines. Crazy, huh?”
“Yeah, crazy. So what happened when you got here?”
“I knocked on the door, and there was no answer. So I knocked again, and still no answer. Then, I don’t know, I tried the knob. I don’t know why I tried it, I just did. Usually, you knock on a door, nobody answers, you figure the party’s out, am I right?”
“Right.”
“Instead, I tried the knob, and the door opened. So I called out her name, Margie, I said, and still there was no answer. So I looked in. The place reeked. I couldn’t understand that, because Margie always kept everything so neat and clean, you know, almost compulsive. So I went in. And there she was, laying on the kitchen floor in basic black and pearls, and there’s a blade in her chest.”
“What’d you do?”