A Stab in the Dark (Matthew Scudder #4)

A Stab in the Dark (Matthew Scudder #4) Page 20

"I think I saw a picture of him in the paper."

"You don't get the full effect from a photograph. Pinell's the kind of person you don't notice. You see guys like him delivering lunches, taking tickets in a movie theater. Slight build, furtive manner, and a face that just won't stay in your memory."

" 'The Banality of Evil.' "

"What's that?"

She repeated the phrase. "It's the title of an essay about Adolf Eichmann."

"I don't know that Pinell's evil. He's crazy. Maybe evil's a form of insanity. Anyway, you don't need a psychiatrist's report to know he's crazy. It's right there in his eyes. Speaking of eyes, that's another thing I wanted to ask him."

"What?"

"If he stabbed them all in both eyes. He said he did. He did that right away, before he went to work turning their bodies into pincushions."

She shuddered. "Why?"

"That was the other thing I wanted to ask him. Why the eyes? It turned out he had a perfectly logical reason. He did it to avoid detection."

"I don't follow you."

"He thought a dead person's eyes would retain the last image they perceived before death. If that were the case you could obtain a picture of the murderer by scanning the victim's retina. He was just guarding against this possibility by destroying their eyes."

"Jesus."

"The funny thing is that he's not the first person to have that theory. During the last century some criminologists believed the same thing Pinell hit on. They just figured it was a matter of time before the necessary technology existed for recovering the image from the retina. And who knows that it won't be possible someday? A doctor could give you all sorts of reasons why it'll never be physiologically possible, but look at all the things that would have seemed at least as farfetched a hundred years ago. Or even twenty years ago."

"So Pinell's just a little ahead of his time, is that it?" She got up, carried my empty glass to the bar. She filled it and poured a glass of vodka for herself. "I do believe that calls for a drink. 'Here's looking at you, kid.' That's as close as I can come to an imitation of Humphrey Bogart. I do better with clay."

She sat down and said, "I wasn't going to drink anything today. Well, what the hell."

"I want to go fairly light myself."

She nodded, her eyes aimed at the glass in her hand. "I was glad when you called, Matthew. I didn't think you were going to."

"I tried to get you last night. I kept getting a busy signal."

"I had the phone off the hook."

"I know."

"You had them check it? I just wanted to keep the world away last night. When I'm in here with the door locked and the phone off the hook and the shades down, that's when I'm really safe. Do you know what I mean?"

"I think so."

"See, I didn't wake up with a clear head Sunday morning. I got drunk Sunday night. And then I got drunk again last night."

"Oh."

"And then I got up this morning and took a pill to stop the shakes and decided I'd stay away from it for a day or two. Just to get off the roller-coaster, you know?"

"Sure."

"And here I am with a glass in my hand. Isn't that a surprise?"

"You should have said something, Jan. I wouldn't have brought the vodka."

"It's no big deal."

"I wouldn't have brought the Scotch, either. I had too much to drink last night myself. We could be together tonight without drinking."

"You really think so?"

"Of course."

Her large gray eyes looked quite bottomless. She stared sadly at me for a long moment, then brightened. "Well, it's too late to test that hypothesis right now, isn't it? Why don't we just make the best of what we have?"

We didn't do all that much drinking. She had enough vodka to catch up with me and then we both coasted. She played some records and we sat together on the couch and listened to them, not talking much. We started making love on the couch and then went into the bedroom to finish the job.

We were good together, better than we'd been Saturday night. Novelty is a spice, but when the chemistry is good between lovers, familiarity enhances their lovemaking. I got out of myself some, and felt a little of what she felt.

Afterward we went back to the couch and I started talking about the murder of Barbara Ettinger. "She's buried so goddamn deep," I said. "It's not just the amount of time that's gone by. Nine years is a long time, but there are people who died nine years ago and you could walk through their lives and find everything pretty much as they left it. The same people in the houses next door and everybody leading the same kind of life.

"With Barbara, everybody's gone through a seachange. You closed the day-care center and left your husband and moved here. Your husband took the kids and beat it to California. I was one of the first cops on the scene, and God knows my life turned upside down since then. There were three cops who investigated the case in Sheepshead Bay, or started to. Two of them are dead and one left the force and his wife and lives in a furnished room and stands guard in a department store."

"And Doug Ettinger's remarried and selling sporting goods."

I nodded. "And Lynn London's been married and divorced, and half the neighbors on Wyckoff Street have moved somewhere or other. It's as though every wind on earth's been busy blowing sand on top of her grave. I know Americans lead mobile lives. I read somewhere that every year twenty percent of the country changes its place of residence. Even so, it's as though every wind on earth's been busy blowing sand on top of her grave. It's like digging for Troy."

" 'Deep with the first dead.' "

"How's that?"

"I don't know if I remember it right. Just a second." She crossed the room, searched the bookshelves, removed a slim volume and paged through it. "It's Dylan Thomas," she said, "and it's in here somewhere. Where the hell is it? I'm sure it's in here. Here it is."

She read:

"Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,

Robed in the long friends,

The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,

Secret by the unmourning water

Of the riding Thames.

After the first death, there is no other."

"London's daughter," I said.

"As in the city of London. But that must be what made me think of it. Deep with the first dead lies Charles London's daughter."

"Read it again."

She did.

"Except there's a door there somewhere if I could just find the handle to it. It wasn't some nut that killed her. It was someone with a reason, someone she knew. Someone who purposely made it look like Pinell's handiwork. And the killer's still around. He didn't die or drop out of sight. He's still around. I don't have any grounds to believe that but it's a feeling I can't shake."

"You think it's Doug?"

"If I don't, I'm the only one who doesn't. Even his wife thinks he did it. She may not know that's what she thinks, but why else is she scared of what I'll find?"

"But you think it's somebody else?"

"I think an awful lot of lives changed radically after her death. Maybe her dying had something to do with those changes. With some of them, anyway."

"Doug's obviously. Whether he killed her or not."

"Maybe it affected other lives, too."

"Like a stone in a pond? The ripple effect?"

"Maybe. I don't know just what happened or how. I told you, it's a matter of a hunch, a feeling. Nothing concrete that I can point at."

"Your cop instincts, is that it?"

I laughed. She asked what was funny. I said, "It's not so funny. I've had all day to wonder about the validity of my cop instincts."

"How do you mean?"

And so I wound up telling her more than I'd planned. About everything from Anita's phone call to a kid with a gravity knife. Two nights ago I'd found out what a good listener she was, and she was no worse at it this time around.

When I was done she said, "I don't know why you're down on yourself. You could have been killed."

"If it was really a mugging attempt."

"What were you supposed to do, wait until he stuck a knife into you? And why was he carrying a knife in the first place? I don't know what a gravity knife is, but it doesn't sound like something you carry around in case you need to cut a piece of string."

"He could have been carrying it for protection."

"And the roll of money? It sounds to me as though he's one of those closet cases who pick up gay men and rob them, and sometimes beat them up or kill them while they're at it to prove how straight they are. And you're worrying because you gave a kid like that a bloody lip?"

I shook my head. "I'm worrying because my judgment wasn't sound."

"Because you were drunk."

"And didn't even know it."

"Was your judgment off the night you shot the two holdup men? The night that Puerto Rican girl got killed?"

"You're a pretty sharp lady, aren't you?"

"A fucking genius."

"That's the question, I guess. And the answer is no, it wasn't. I hadn't had much to drink and I wasn't feeling it. But-"

"But you got echoes just the same."

"Right."

"And didn't want to look straight at them, any more than Karen Ettinger wants to look straight at the fact that she thinks her husband might have murdered his first wife."

"A very sharp lady."

"They don't come any sharper. Feel better now?"

"Uh-huh."

"Talking helps. But you kept it so far inside you didn't even know it was there." She yawned. "Being a sharp lady is tiring work."

"I can believe it."

"Want to go to bed?"

"Sure."

BUT I didn't stay the night. I thought I might, but I was still awake when her breathing changed to indicate that she was sleeping. I lay first on one side and then on the other, and it was clear I wasn't ready to sleep. I got out of bed and padded quietly into the other room.

I dressed, then stood at the window and looked out at Lispenard Street. There was plenty of Scotch left but I didn't want to drink any of it.

I let myself out. A block away on Canal Street I managed to flag a cab. I got uptown in time to catch the last half-hour or so at Armstrong's, but I said the hell with it and went straight to my room.

I got to sleep eventually.

Chapter 14

I had a night of dreams and shallow sleep. The dog, Bandy, turned up in one of the dreams. He wasn't really dead. His death had been faked as part of some elaborate scam. He told me all this, told me too that he'd always been able to talk but had been afraid to disclose this talent. "If I'd only known," I marveled, "what conversations we could have had!"

I awoke refreshed and clearheaded and fiercely hungry. I had bacon and eggs and home fries at the Red Flame and read the News. They'd caught the First Avenue Slasher, or at the least had arrested someone they said was the Slasher. A photograph of the suspect bore a startling resemblance to the police artist's sketch that had run earlier. That doesn't happen too often.

I was on my second cup of coffee when Vinnie slid into the booth across from me. "Woman in the lobby," he said.