“Why should they come to this city and start throwing garbage out the windows, and start living like pigs, and taking dope, and selling their sisters, and causing trouble everyplace? Why should that be?”
“Maybe they’re better hosts than we are,” Carella said.
“Huh?”
“Maybe if we made them feel safe, things would be a little different.”
“Well, anyway,” Pimm said dubiously, “it’s a beautiful island.”
“Tell them about El Junque,” Jeanine suggested.
“Oh, yeah, El Junque, that’s the rain forest. You go into this enormous forest—”
“A jungle, really,” Jeanine said.
“Right, a jungle,” Pimm said, “this is the forest primeval,” he quoted, “and—”
“Mr. Pimm,” Carella said, “I know you’re anxious to get on with your unpacking, and this is probably an inconvenient time—”
“No, no, not at all,” Pimm said, “we can unpack while we talk, can’t we, Jeanine?”
“Oh, sure, there isn’t much more to do, anyway.”
“Well, we don’t want to take up too much of your time,” Carella said. “We were wondering if you’d heard anything about the Leyden murders while you were south.”
“Yes, it was in the newspapers. Terrible thing,” Pimm said.
“Terrible,” Jeanine repeated.
“Did you know them well?”
“As well as you get to know anybody in an apartment house,” Pimm said. “You know the old cliché. People can live next door to each other for years without ever knowing each other’s names.”
“Yes, but you did know the Leydens?”
“Never been in there, if that’s what you mean,” Pimm said.
“Well, George, we’ve only lived in the building a year.”
“Little more than a year,” Pimm said.
“And you’ve never been inside the Leyden apartment?”
“No, never.”
“Well, I was in there once,” Jeanine said.
“When was that?”
“She was sick one morning. I met her downstairs doing the laundry. In the basement. She looked awfully pale, I thought she might faint or something. So I came upstairs with her into the apartment. She got sick in the bathroom.”
“When was this, Mrs. Pimm?”
“In April, I think it was. Yes, it was a little after the beginning of April.”
“When you say she got ‘sick’ in the bathroom, do you mean—?”
“Yes, she threw up.”
“She was pregnant, wasn’t she?” Pimm asked. “Isn’t that what Mrs. Leibowitz said?”
“Yes, later on we found out she was pregnant. Mrs. Leibowitz told us she lost the baby. That’s our next-door neighbor.”
“Yes, we’ve met her,” Kling said.
“A nice lady,” Pimm said.
“She’s deaf,” Jeanine said.
“Well, a little hard of hearing,” Pimm said.
“But aside from that one time in the apartment—”
“That’s right,” Jeanine said.
“... you were never in there, never really friendly?”
“That’s right.”
“Nor did she visit you.”
“Well, they kept to themselves, you know. He was on the road a lot, he’s a traveling salesman, you know... ”
“Yes.”
“... sells heavy machinery, I think.”
“Tractors,” Jeanine said.
“That’s right.”
“Yes.”
“So he was hardly ever around, you know, gone for months at a time.”
“I’d see her down in the basement every now and then,” Jeanine said. “Or in the elevator. You know. Like that.”
“She was a nice girl,” Pimm said. “Seemed to be, anyway.”
“Yes,” Jeanine said.
“Introduced me to her brother once,” Pimm said. “Nice fellow, too. Met them coming out of the apartment one day.”
“Her brother?” Carella said. He had just remembered with a chilling suddenness that Gloria Leyden had described her daughter-in-law as an only child. She was an only child herself, you know, but she had these thousands of cousins scattered all over the countryside.
“That’s right, her brother,” Pimm said.
“What’d he look like?”
“Tall fellow, very good-looking. Blue eyes, dark hair. Nice fellow.”
“What was his name? Did she say?”
“Harry, I think.”
“No,” Jeanine said.
“Wasn’t it Harry?” Pimm asked.
“Wally,” Jeanine said. “It was Wally.”
So now the closet door was open, and as usual there was a skeleton hanging in it. The skeleton was a familiar one, it bored Carella and Kling to tears. Oh, how they hoped for an original slaying once in a while, a well-conceived murder instead of these sloppy run-of-the-mill crimes of passion that were constantly being dumped into their laps. Oh, how they longed for a killer who would knock off somebody with a rare untraceable poison. Oh, how they wished they might find a body in a locked windowless room. Oh, how they wanted somebody to scheme and plot for months on end and then commit the perfect homicide that everyone would think was suicide or something. Instead, what did they get? They got Andrew Leyden, cuckold of the month, working his little heart out in California and environs while Rosie dallied with her lover. They got Walter Damascus, womanizer supreme, with his Mandy downtown and his Rosie uptown, who for whatever twisted reasons of his own decided he would knock off both his uptown mistress and her husband. Walter Damascus, who had committed murder crudely and brutally and then oh so cleverly rigged the second murder to look like suicide — a clumsy ruse that would be detected the moment any apprentice cop found the ejected shotgun shell. That was what they got. They got a crazy bastard who made love to Mandy downtown in his pigsty apartment, asked her to drive him uptown to his “poker game,” blasted Rosie and Andy, and then went into the john to shave with the dead man’s razor.
They never got the interesting cases.
Meyer and Hawes got all the interesting cases.
The interesting thing about the Margie Ryder case was that there seemed to be no motive. The other interesting thing was that it was very neat for a stabbing. When somebody starts stabbing another person, there’s a certain je ne sais quoi that takes over, a rhythm that’s established, a compulsive need to plunge the blade again and again, so it shouldn’t be a total loss. It is not uncommon in stabbings to find a corpse with anywhere from a dozen to a hundred wounds, that’s the thing about stabbings.
Margie Ryder was stabbed only once.
Once is enough, you may say, because after all if you’ve seen one kitchen knife being plunged into your chest, you’ve seen them all. But it was this very lack of multiple wounds that ran contrary to what the police had come to expect in all the dreary little knifings they encountered every day of the week.
Nothing had been stolen from the Ryder apartment, nor had the woman been molested. Discounting burglary then, and discounting rape, the bartender Jim Martin seemed to have a point when he suggested that the killer had to be somebody Margie knew. Well, most of the people she’d known had been at a party thrown by the guitarist Luis-Josafat Garzon, and she had left that party alone, and had then proceeded to Perry’s Bar & Grille on DeBeck Avenue where, according to Martin’s volunteered information, she had been in conversation half the night with a stranger. That stranger had returned later to ask her name, and then might (oh boy, what a big might) have remembered it, and gone to her apartment, and been let in by Margie, and had stabbed her. Why had he forgotten her name to begin with? And what caused him to remember it again? And why had she let him in at four in the morning? Interesting, right? Meyer and Hawes got all the interesting ones.