A Stab in the Dark

She went through the wallet quickly, then handed it back to me. I returned it to my pocket. "That's a lousy picture of you," she said. "But I guess it's you, all right. I don't think she'd let a stranger into her apartment. She'd let a lover in, though. Or a husband."



"You think her husband killed her?"



"Married people always kill one another. Sometimes it takes them fifty years."



"Any idea who her lover may have been?"



"It may not have been just one person. I'm just guessing, but she could have had an itch to experiment. And she was pregnant so it was safe."



She laughed. I asked her what was so funny.



"I was trying to think where she would have met someone. A neighbor, maybe, or the male half of some couple she and her husband saw socially. It's not as though she could have met men on the job. We had plenty of males there, but unfortunately none of them were over eight years old."



"Not very promising."



"Except that's not altogether true. Sometimes fathers would bring the kids in, or pick them up after work. There are situations more conducive to flirtation, but I had daddies come on to me while they collected their children, and it probably happened to Barbara. She was very attractive, you know. And she didn't wrap herself up in an old Mother Hubbard when she came to work at the Happy Hours. She had a good figure and she dressed to show it off."



The conversation went on a little longer before I got a handle on the question. Then I said, "Did you and Barbara ever become lovers?"



I was watching her eyes when I asked the question, and they widened in response. "Jesus Christ," she said.



I waited her out.



"I'm just wondering where the question came from," she said. "Did somebody say we were lovers? Or am I an obvious dyke or something?"



"I was told you left your husband for another woman."



"Well, that's close. I left my husband for thirty or forty reasons, I suppose. And the first relationship I had after I left him was with a woman. Who told you? Not Doug Ettinger. He'd moved out of the neighborhood before that particular shit hit the fan. Unless he happened to talk to somebody. Maybe he and Eddie got together and cried on each other's shoulder about how women are no good, they either get stabbed or they run off with each other. Was it Doug?"



"No. It was a woman who lived in your building on Wyckoff Street."



"Someone in the building. Oh, it must have been Maisie! Except that's not her name. Give me a minute. Mitzi! It was Mitzi Pomerance, wasn't it?"



"I didn't get her first name. I just spoke with her on the telephone."



"Little Mitzi Pomerance. Are they still married? Of course, they'd have to be. Unless he left, but nothing would propel her away from hearth and home. She'd insist her marriage was heaven even if it meant systematically denying every negative emotion that ever threatened to come to the surface. The worst thing about going back to visit the kids was the look on that twit's face when we passed on the stairs." She sighed and shook her head at the memory. "I never had anything going with Barbara. Strangely enough, I never had anything going with anybody, male or female, before I split with Eddie. And the woman I got together with afterward was the first woman I ever slept with in my life."



"But you were attracted to Barbara Ettinger."



"Was I? I recognized that she was attractive. That's not the same thing. Was I specifically attracted to her?" She weighed the notion. "Maybe," she conceded. "Not on any conscious level, I don't think. And when I did begin to consider the possibility that I might find it, oh, interesting to go to bed with a woman, I don't think I had any particular woman in mind. As a matter of fact, I don't even think I entertained the fantasy while Barbara was alive."



"I have to ask these personal questions."



"You don't have to apologize. Jesus, Mitzi Pomerance. I'll bet she's fat, I'll bet she's a plump little piglet by now. But you only spoke to her over the phone."



"That's right."



"Is she still living in the same place? She must be. You wouldn't get them out of there with a crowbar."



"Somebody did. A buyer converted the house to one-family."



"They must have been sick. Did they stay in the neighborhood?"



"More or less. They moved to Carroll Street."



"Well, I hope they're happy. Mitzi and Gordon." She leaned forward, searched my face with her gray eyes. "You drink," she said. "Right?"



"Pardon?"



"You're a drunk, aren't you?"



"I suppose you could call me a drinking man."



The words sounded stiff, even to me. They hung in the air for a moment and then her laughter cut in, full-bodied and rich. " 'I suppose you could call me a drinking man.' Jesus, that's wonderful. Well, I suppose you could call me a drinking woman, Mr. Scudder. People have called me a good deal worse, and it's been a long day and a dry one. How about a little something to cut the dust?"



"That's not a bad idea."



"What'll it be?"



"Do you have bourbon?"



"I don't think so." The bar was behind a pair of sliding doors in one of the bookcases. "Scotch or vodka," she announced.



"Scotch."



"Rocks? Water? What?"



"Just straight."



"The way God made it, huh?" She brought back a pair of rocks glasses filled about halfway, one with Scotch, the other with vodka. She gave me mine, looked into her own. She had the air of someone trying to select a toast, but evidently she couldn't think of one. "Oh, what the hell," she said, and took a drink.



"WHO do you think killed her?"



"Too early to tell. It could have been somebody I haven't heard of yet. Or it could have been Pinell. I'd like ten minutes with him."



"You think you could refresh his memory?"



I shook my head. "I think I might get some sense of him. So much detection is intuitive. You gather details and soak up impressions, and then the answer pops into your mind out of nowhere. It's not like Sherlock Holmes, at least it never was for me."



"You make it sound almost as though there's a psychic element to the process."



"Well, I can't read palms or see the future. But maybe there is." I sipped Scotch. It had that medicinal taste that Scotch has but I didn't mind it as much as I usually do. It was one of the heavier Scotches, dark and peaty. Teacher's, I think it was. "I want to get out to Sheepshead Bay next," I said.



"Now?"



"Tomorrow. That's where the fourth Icepick killing took place, and that was the one that's supposed to have spooked Barbara Ettinger."



"You think the same person-"



"Louis Pinell admits to the Sheepshead Bay murder. Of course that doesn't prove anything, either. I'm not sure why I want to go out there. I guess I want to talk to somebody who was on the scene, someone who saw the body. There were some physical details about the killings that were held back from the press coverage, and they were duplicated in Barbara's murder. Imperfectly duplicated, and I want to know if there was any parallel in the other Brooklyn homicide."



"And if there was, what would it prove? That there was a second killer, a maniac who confined himself to Brooklyn?"



"And who conveniently stopped at two killings. It's possible. It wouldn't even rule out someone with a motive for killing Barbara. Say her husband decided to kill her, but he realized the Icepick Prowler hadn't been to Brooklyn yet, so he killed some stranger in Sheepshead Bay first to establish a pattern."



"Do people do things like that?"



"There's nothing you can imagine that somebody hasn't done at one time or another. Maybe somebody had a motive for killing the woman in Sheepshead Bay. Then he was worried that the murder would stand out as the only one of its kind in Brooklyn, so he went after Barbara. Or maybe that was just his excuse. Maybe he killed a second time because he'd found out that he enjoyed it."



"God." She drank vodka. "What was the physical detail?"



"You don't want to know about it."



"You protecting the little woman from the awful truth?"



"The victims were stabbed through the eyes. An icepick, right through the eyeballs."



"Jesus. And the… what did you call it? Imperfect duplication?"



"Barbara Ettinger just got it in one eye."



"Like a wink." She sat for a long moment, then looked down at her glass and noticed that it was empty. She went to the bar and came back with both bottles. After she'd filled our glasses she left the bottles on the slate-topped table.



"I wonder why he would do a thing like that," she said.



"That's another reason I'd like to see Pinell," I said. "To ask him."



THE conversation turned this way and that. At one point she asked whether she should call me Matt or Matthew. I told her it didn't matter to me. She said it mattered to her that I call her not Janice but Jan.



"Unless you're uncomfortable calling murder suspects by their first names."



When I was a cop I learned always to call suspects by their first names. It gave you a certain amount of psychological leverage. I told her she wasn't a suspect.



"I was at the Happy Hours all that afternoon," she said. "Of course it would be hard to prove after all these years. At the time it would have been easy. Alibis must be harder to come by for people who live alone."



"You live alone here?"



"Unless you count the cats. They're hiding somewhere. They steer clear of strangers. Showing them your ID wouldn't impress them much."



"Real hard-liners."



"Uh-huh. I've always lived alone. Since I left Eddie, that is. I've been in relationships but I always lived alone."



"Unless we count the cats."



"Unless we count the cats. I never thought at the time that I'd be living by myself for the next eight years. I thought a relationship with a woman might be different in some fundamental way. See, back then was consciousness-raising time. I decided the problem was men."



"And it wasn't?"



"Well, it may have been one of the problems. Women turned out to be another problem. For a while I decided I was one of those fortunate people who are capable of relationships with both sexes."



"Just for a while?"



"Uh-huh. Because what I discovered next was that I may be capable of relationships with men and women, but what I mostly am is not very good at relationships."



"Well, I can relate to that."



"I figured you probably could. You live alone, don't you, Matthew?"



"For a while now."



"Your sons are with your wife? I'm not psychic. There's a picture of them in your wallet."



"Oh, that. It's an old picture."



"They're handsome boys."



"They're good kids, too." I added a little Scotch to my glass. "They live out in Syosset. They'll take the train in now and then and we catch a ball game together, or maybe a fight at the Garden."



"They must enjoy that."



"I know I enjoy it."



"You must have moved out a while ago."