“Yes.”
“Well, Mr. Martin, how do you connect—?
“He came back. It must’ve been about four by then, I was still cleaning up the place. There’s lots of things to do after a bar closes, you know. I usually don’t get out of there till maybe five, five-thirty on a Friday night.”
“What’d he want?”
“He wanted to know Margie’s last name.”
“Did you give it to him?”
“No.”
“Then—”
“He begged me to tell him. He said he knew what it was, she’d told it to him while they were talking, but he’d forgotten it in all the excitement, and now he had to talk to her again, and would I please give him her name. I told him it was four o’clock in the morning, it was too late to talk to her. I told him to come back tomorrow, she usually stopped in after supper, he could talk to her then. So he said, no, he had to talk to her right then, and I told him to buzz off before he got me sore. I’m a pretty big guy, you know. I... I don’t like to shove my weight around, I don’t think I’ve been in a fight since I was twelve years old, I mean it, but this guy was beginning to get on my nerves. What the hell, it was four in the morning, what did he need to talk to Margie for? I told him if he needed a broad, he was barking up the wrong tree, he should go take a walk up Culver Avenue, he’d find a hundred hookers prowling around there.” Martin paused. “I’m sorry, I know you guys do your best, but it’s the truth.”
“Go on, Mr. Martin.”
“Well, that’s it, I guess. He finally left.”
“What time?”
“Musta been about four-thirty.”
“But you didn’t give him Mrs. Ryder’s last name?”
“No.”
“Or her address?”
“No, of course not.”
“What was his name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t you hear him talking?”
“I was pretty busy Friday night.”
“You didn’t hear any of his conversation with Mrs. Ryder?”
“No.”
“Do you think she really told him her name?”
“I guess so. People usually tell each other what their names are, don’t they?”
“But he’d said he’d forgotten it.”
“Yes.”
“In all the excitement.”
“Yes.”
“What excitement?”
“I don’t know. I guess he meant talking to her. I don’t know.”
“What makes you think he finally located her?”
“Well, he might have remembered her name, and then looked up her address in the phone book. She’s listed. I already checked that before I come here.”
“So you think he may have looked her up in the phone book, and then gone to her apartment?”
“Yes.”
“At four-thirty in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“To talk to her?”
“To lay her,” Martin said, and actually blushed.
Bert Kling had come to the apartment to make love.
It was his day off, and that was what he wanted to do. He had been thinking about it all afternoon, in fact, and had finally come over to the apartment at 4:30, letting himself in with the key Cindy had given him long ago, and then sitting in the darkening living room, waiting for her return.
The city outside was unwinding at day’s end, dusk softening her pace, slowing her step. Kling sat in an armchair near the window, watching the sky turn blood-red and then purple and then deepening to a grape-stained silky blackness. The apartment was very still.
Somewhere out there in that city of ten million people, there was a man named Walter Damascus and he had killed Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Leyden, had killed them brutally and viciously, pumping two shotgun blasts into each of their faces.
Kling wanted very much to go to bed with Cindy Forrest.
He did not move when he heard her key in the latch. He sat in the dark with a smile on his face, and then suddenly realized he might frighten her, and moved belatedly to turn on the table lamp. He was too late, she saw or sensed movement in the darkness. He heard her gasp, and immediately said, “It’s me, Cind.”
“Wow, you scared hell out of me,” she said, and turned on the foyer light. “What are you doing here so early? You said—”
“I felt like coming over,” Kling said, and smiled.
“Yeah?”
“Mmm.”
She put her bag down on the hall table, wiggled out of her pumps, and came into the living room.
“Don’t you want a light?” she asked.
“No, it’s all right.”
“Pretty out there.”
“Mmm.”
“I love that tower. See it there?”
“Yes.”
She stared through the window a moment longer, bent to kiss him fleetingly, and then said, “Make yourself a drink, why don’t you?”
“You want one, too?”
“Yes. I’m exhausted,” Cindy said, and sighed, and padded softly into the bathroom. He heard the water running. He rose, turned on the lamp, and then went to where she kept her liquor in a drop-leaf desk. She was out of bourbon.
“No bourbon,” he said.
“What?”
“No bourbon. You’re out of bourbon,” he shouted.
“Oh, okay, I’ll have a little scotch.”
“What?” he shouted.
“Scotch,” Cindy shouted. “A little scotch.”
“Okay.”
“What?”
“I said okay.”
“Okay,” she said.
He smiled and carried the scotch bottle into the small kitchenette. He took two short glasses down from the cabinet, poured a liberal hooker into each glass, and then nearly broke his wrist trying to dislodge the ice-cube tray from the freezer compartment. He finally chipped the accumulated frost away with a butter knife, dropped two cubes into each glass, and then carried the drinks into the bedroom. Cindy was standing at the closet in half-slip and bra, reaching for a robe. With her back to him, she said, “I think I know what I’m going to write for my thesis, Bert.”
“What’s that?” he said. “Here’s your drink.”
“Thank you,” she said. Turning, she accepted the drink and tossed her robe onto the bed. She took a long sip, said, “Ahhh,” put the glass on the dresser, and then said, “I’ll be getting my master’s next June, you know. It’s time I began thinking about that doctorate.”
“Um-huh,” Kling said.
“You know what I’d like to do the thesis on?” she asked, and reached behind her to unclasp her bra.
“No, what?”
“The Detective as Voyeur,” she said.
He thought she was kidding, of course, because as she said the words her breasts simultaneously came free of the restraining bra, and he was, in that moment, very much the detective as voyeur. But she stepped out of her slip and panties without so much as cracking a smile, and then went to the bed to pick up the robe and put it on. As she was belting it, she said, “What do you think?”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, of course,” she said, looking at him with a somewhat puzzled expression. “Of course I’m serious. Why would I joke about something as important as my thesis?”
“Well, I don’t know, I just thought—”
“Of course I’m serious,” she repeated, more strongly this time. She was frowning as she picked up her drink again. “Why? Don’t you think it’s a good idea?”
“I don’t know what you have in mind,” Kling said. “You gave me the title, but—”
“Well, I don’t know if that’d be the exact title,” Cindy said, annoyed. She sipped some more scotch and then said, “Let’s go into the living room, huh?”
“Why don’t we stay in here a while?” Kling said.
Cindy looked at him. He shrugged and then tried a smile.