Shotgun

4

234 South 2nd Street was a corner building, a red-brick tenement that at one time must have been very posh. Gargoyles still leered into the street from each floor, and even the entrance doorway was decorated with a sculpted keystone, a woman’s head with the nose gone and the word SUCK painted in blue across her mouth. Two men were standing on the front stoop when Carella and Kling entered the building. Instantly smelling fuzz, they watched as the two cops studied the mailboxes in the foyer. Neither of them said a word.

The mailboxes listed a W. Damascus for apartment 31.

There were slum smells on the stairwell, slum sounds in the halls and behind closed doors and in the airshaft between the building and the one adjacent. There was a sense of life contained and concealed, a teeming, tumultuous life breeding in the cracks of poverty, eating and mating and sleeping and excreting, an animalistic substructure dwelling in a multilayered cave that stank of piss and frying fat. On the second floor, a rat the size of an alley cat stared at Carella and Kling with eyes that glittered in the refracted airshaft light pouring through the stairwell window. Carella, who had already drawn his revolver, almost fired in reflex. Boldly, the rat held his ground and continued to stare at them. They sidled past him, close to the banister, and the rat’s head turned, nose twitching, alert, watching. Carella was sweating when they reached the third floor.

Apartment 31 was in the middle of the hallway, next to 32, and facing 33. Kling listened at the door, shook his head, and then backed off against the opposite wall. Carella moved to the side of the door, revolver in hand, finger inside the trigger guard. Kling raised his knee, shoved himself off the opposite wall, and piston-kicked the flat of his foot against the door, as high as he could, as close to the lock and the jamb as he could. The lock sprang, the door swung inward on its hinges. Kling followed the door into the room, and Carella peeled off like the wingman in a fighter squadron, crouching low, gun in hand, immediately behind Kling.

The room was empty.

They fanned out immediately, going through all the rooms in succession. The bathroom door was closed. Carella slowly turned the knob with his left hand, flipped the door suddenly open, and entered the tiny room gun-first. It, too, was empty.

“You’d better get the super up here,” he said to Kling. “I’ll take a look around.”

The apartment was small and determinedly filthy. The door Kling had kicked in opened on a living room furnished with a three-piece “suite” (one armchair upholstered in gold, another in blue, the sofa in maroon) clustered around a television set in the corner. A picture of a smiling peasant puffing on a pipe, neo-Rembrandt, was hanging over the television set. An open edition of the city’s only morning tabloid lay on the sofa. The date on the paper was September 9. There were empty beer cans and full ashtrays on the floor. In the kitchen, dishes caked with the leftovers of a week’s meals were stacked in the sink, and used breakfast dishes were still on the table. Judging from the dry and moldy cornflakes still clinging to the bottom of the bowl, the last breakfast Damascus had eaten here could easily have been close to two months ago, the date on the living-room newspaper. A September issue of Life was on the bathroom floor, near the toilet bowl. A man’s safety razor was on the sink, and patches of dried, hair-clogged shaving cream clung to the sloping tile sides. Wherever Damascus had gone, he had not bothered to take his razor with him. Two small scraps of toilet tissue were near the cold-water faucet, each with small smears of blood on them. It was reasonable to assume that Damascus had cut himself while shaving, and had used the toilet tissue to blot the blood. A grimy ring circled the bathtub. A sliver of Ivory soap and a swirl of hair were caught in the open drain. Near one claw leg of the old-fashioned tub, a man’s striped undershorts were wadded in a ball. There were cockroaches nesting behind a tube of toothpaste on the sink, and tile lice wiggled on the floor. It was altogether the most charming room in the place.

The bedroom ran a close second.

The bed had been slept in and left unmade. There were grease stains on the pillow, and the sheets were splotched here and there with what might have been semen stains. Alongside the bed, on the nightstand, there was an open box of Trojans. According to the printing on the box, there should have been three contraceptives in it. Carella shook them out onto the bed. There were only two condoms in the box. The bed stank of sweat and God knew what. The entire room stank. Carella went to the window and opened it wide. On the fire escape outside, there was an empty milk bottle and an empty graham-cracker carton. In the apartment across the airshaft, a young housewife in a flowered dress was busily cleaning her kitchen and singing “Penny Lane.” Carella took a deep breath and turned away from the window.

The only closet in the room contained a pile of dirty shirts and underwear on the floor, and a brown suit hanging on the clothes bar. Carella checked the label and was surprised to discover the suit had come from one of the more exclusive men’s shops in town. A gray fedora rested on the shelf over the clothes bar. In the far corner of the shelf, Carella found an open box containing an Iver Johnson .22-caliber revolver and seventeen Peters .22-caliber cartridges.

A bottle with perhaps three fingers of scotch left in it was on the bedroom dresser. Two glasses were beside it. One had lipstick stains on the rim. A matchbook carrying advertising for the A&P was on the dresser top, together with a crumpled Winston cigarette package. Carella was opening the top dresser drawer when Kling came in with the superintendent of the building.

The super was a Negro, perhaps forty-five years old, with a clubfoot and suspicious brown eyes. He wore work denims and a black cardigan sweater. The expression on his face clearly stated that he resented having been born black with the additional handicap of a clubfoot. He did not like white people, and he did not like healthy people, and he did not like cops, and here he was in a stinking tenement flat about to be questioned by two men who were white healthy cops.

“This is the super,” Kling said. “His name’s Henry Yancy.”

“How do you do, Mr. Yancy?” Carella said. “I’m Detective Carella and this is my partner, Detective Kling.”

“I already met your partner,” Yancy said.

“We’d like to ask you a few questions, if we may.”

“Do I have a choice?” Yancy said.

“We simply want to know a few things about the occupant of this apartment.”

“What do you want to know?” Yancy said. “Make it fast because I got to go down and take in the garbage cans before I get a ticket from the cop on the beat.”

“We’ll try to be brief,” Carella said. “Who rents this apartment?”

“Walter Damascus.”

“How long has he lived here?”

“Must be three, four years.”

“Is he married?”

“No.”

“Does he live here alone?”

“Well,” Yancy said, and shrugged. “He lives here alone, but he has women coming in whenever he’s here.”

“Isn’t he here all the time?”

“Not too much.”

“How often is he here?”

“He’s in and out, on and off. I don’t ask nobody nothing long as they pay their rent.”

“Does he pay his rent?”

“The owner of the building never said nothing about him, so I guess he pays his rent. I’m just the super here.”

“When’s the last time you saw him?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Was it recently?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Would it have been in September sometime?”

“I told you I don’t recall.”

“Mr. Yancy, we’d hate to have to bother all the people on this floor, just to find out when Damascus was here last.”

“That’s your job, ain’t it?” Yancy said, and paused. “Bothering people?”

“Our job right now,” Kling said flatly, “is trying to locate the suspect in a murder case. That’s our job.”

“Who got killed?” Yancy asked.

“Why should that matter to you?” Carella said.

“It don’t,” Yancy answered, and shrugged.

“Try to remember when you saw Damascus last, will you?”

“After the summer sometime.”

“Before Labor Day?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“At the beginning of September, then?”

“I guess so.”

“Have you seen him since?”

“I ain’t even sure I seen him then.”

“Did you see him at all this month?”

“No.”

“Not at any time during the month of October, is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“But you did see him in September, and you think it was sometime before Labor Day.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Was he alone?”

“There was a woman with him.”

“Do you know who she was?”

“No. He always has a different woman with him.”

“Had you ever seen this one before?”

“Once or twice.”

“But you don’t know her name.”

“No.”

“What’d she look like?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Was she white or black?”

“White,” Yancy said.

“What color hair?”

“Red.”

“Eyes?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Was she pretty?”

“For a white woman,” Yancy said.

“How old would you say she was?”

“Thirty, something like that.”

“Is she from the neighborhood?”

“I don’t think so. Only time I ever seen her was when Damascus brought her around.”

“Which was often, you said.”

“Well, a few times, anyway.”

“How old is Damascus?”

“In his forties,” Yancy said.

“What does he look like?”

“Oh, he’s about your height, six feet or so, dark hair and blue eyes, nice-looking fellow.”

“You getting this, Bert?” Carella asked.

“Mm-huh,” Kling said, without looking up from his pad.

“Is he white?” Carella asked.

“He’s white,” Yancy said.

“What kind of complexion?”

“I told you. White.”

“Pale, dark, fair, sallow?”

“Fair, I guess.”

“How is he built?”

“About like your partner here.”

“Does he have a mustache or a beard?”

“No.”

“Any scars?”

“No scars.”

“Tattoos?”

“No tattoos.”

“Any sort of distinctive mark?”

“No sort of marks,” Yancy said.

“Is he deformed in any way?”

“You mean does he have a clubfoot?” Yancy asked.

“That’s not what I meant, sir,” Carella said, refusing to flinch.

“No, he isn’t deformed,” Yancy said.

“What about his voice? What kind of voice does he have?”

“I don’t know.”

“Gruff, soft, refined, effeminate?”

“He’s not a fairy.”

“Does he lisp or stutter?”

“No, he talks straight out. Soft, I guess you would say. And fast. He talks very fast.”

“Bert?” Carella said. “Anything else?”

“Jewelry.”

“Does he habitually wear rings or other jewelry?” Carella asked.

“He’s got a ring with his initial on it,” Yancy said.

“Which initial? W or D?”

“W.”

“Does he wear it on his right hand or his left?”

“His right, I think.”

“Any other jewelry?”

“An ID bracelet, I think.”

“Gold or silver?”

“Silver.”

“With his name on it?”

“I never saw it close up,” Yancy said.

“Would you know whether or not Damascus is employed?”

“I don’t know. I’m just the super here.”

“You’re doing very well, Mr. Yancy,” Carella said.

“You’ve given us an excellent description so far,” Kling said.

Yancy looked at them suspiciously. He was used to all sorts of bullshit from Whitey, and he nodded skeptically now, letting the detectives know he wasn’t about to be that easily flattered.

“I still got to get my garbage cans off the sidewalk,” he said flatly.

“We’ll straighten out any problems with the cop on the beat,” Carella promised.

“Sure. You’ll pay the fine, too, I suppose.”

“There won’t be any fine, Mr. Yancy. Try to remember whether or not Damascus leaves the house and returns at any regularly set times, would you?”

“When he’s here, do you mean?”

“Yes.”

“If he’s got a job, it must be nights,” Yancy said. “Only time I ever seen him around was during the day.”

“He leaves the apartment at night?”

“I guess so.”

“What time?”

“Eight, nine o’clock, something like that.”

“But you wouldn’t know where he goes?”

“No.”

“Thank you, Mr. Yancy.”

“That it?”

“That’s it, thank you.”

They watched as he limped toward the doorway. At the door, he turned and said, “Ain’t nothing wrong with my eyes.”

“What?” Carella said.

“The description,” Yancy answered, and went out.

Carella went to the dresser. In the top drawer, in a box containing tie clasps and cuff links, he found an uncanceled check made out to Walter Damascus for $110.79. The check was drawn to the account of The Cozy Corners and signed by someone named Daniel Cudahy.

“Something?” Kling asked.

“I think so,” Carella answered.

The Cozy Corners was a bar-cum-nightclub on Dover Plains Avenue in Riverhead. The owner’s name was Daniel Cudahy, and when Carella and Kling got there at 5:00 in the afternoon, he was eating his dinner.

“In this crazy racket,” he said, “you got to eat when you get a chance. It starts becoming a madhouse around here in a little while.”

Cudahy was a diminutive man with a balding head and a broken nose. There was a knife scar on his right temple, and his right eye twitched spasmodically as though in memory of how close the knife had come to gouging it. He sat at a table near the bar, eating a minute steak and French fries, sipping a bottle of Heineken’s beer. The decor of the place was cozy-cute, with checkerboard tablecloths and wood paneling and phony electric candlesticks on each table. A small dance floor was at one end of the room, a piano, a set of drums, and three music stands behind it. The name of the band performing — according to what was lettered on the bass drum — was KEN MURPHY’S MARAUDERS. The detectives sat at Cudahy’s invitation and watched him demolish the steak. Between mouthfuls, he said, “Sure, I know Wally. Where the hell is that bum?”

“He works for you, does he?”

“He’s my bouncer,” Cudahy said.

“Does he work full-time?”

“Every night except Sunday. We’re closed Sunday.”

“When’d you see him last, Mr. Cudahy?”

“Friday night. He was supposed to come in Saturday night, and never showed. I’m expecting him tonight, but who the hell knows?”

“Did he call in?”

“Nope.”

“Did you call him?”

“He hasn’t got a phone.”

“No place you can reach him?”

“He lives in Isola someplace, some crumby neighborhood. I wouldn’t go down there personally if you gave me a million dollars.”

“He lives on South Second, isn’t that right?”

“Yeah, somewhere down there. All full of spies and niggers,” Cudahy said. “I wouldn’t go down there with the National Guard.”

“And he has no phone?”

“No phone.”

“How come?”

“What do you mean, how come?”

“Almost everybody has a phone.”

“Well, he’s hardly ever there, what the hell does he need a phone for?”

“If he’s not there, where is he?” Kling asked.

“Who knows? He works for me, that’s all. His private life is his own business. I pay him seventy-five bucks a week, and he throws out anybody causing a disturbance. That’s our agreement. He can live wherever the hell he wants, in the park if he wants, on a park bench, it don’t matter to me.”

“Is he married, would you know?”

“If he is, he’s sure got it going for him six ways.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he’s always got broads hanging on him. He’s a real handsome guy, you know. I think he wanted to be an actor onetime.”

“Has he ever mentioned a wife to you?”

“Naw, I think he’s single, actually. A guy who looks like he does, why would he want to get married?”

“He was here Friday night, you said?”

“Yeah.”

“From when to when?”

“Got here at nine, left at closing time.”

“Which was when?”

“Two o’clock. We’re open till one every weekday night except Friday. Friday it’s two, Saturday it’s three, and Sunday we’re closed. That’s it.”

“So he left here at two.”

“That’s right. I paid him and he took off.”

“Is this the check you gave him?” Carella asked, and took the check from his wallet.

“That’s it. I pay every two weeks. That’s for two weeks’ salary less social security, disability, and federal and state withholding. It comes to one hundred ten dollars and seventy-nine cents.”

“Which means he’s been to that apartment sometime between Friday night and today,” Kling said.

“Huh?” Cudahy asked.

“We’re just thinking out loud,” Carella said.

“Oh,” Cudahy said, and poured more beer from the bottle into his glass. “You guys want a drink or something?”

“No, thanks,” Kling said.

“Too early for you?”

“We’re not allowed,” Carella said.

“Yeah, sure. I wish I had a nickel for every cop who ain’t allowed to drink on duty who comes in here and knocks off three shots in a row. Especially in the wintertime.”

“Well,” Carella said, and shrugged.

“What do you want Wally for? Did he do something?”

“Maybe.”

“Will you let us know if he comes in?” Kling said.

“Sure. What’d he do?”

“He might have killed a few people.”

Cudahy whistled softly and then swallowed some beer.

“Ever see him with a gun?” Kling asked.

“Nope.”

“Didn’t wear one on the job, huh?”

“Nope.”

“We’re thinking of an Iver Johnson .22,” Carella said.

“I wouldn’t know an Iver Johnson .22 from a 1937 Packard,” Cudahy said, and grinned. “Is that what he killed somebody with?”

“No,” Carella said, and frowned.

“When’s he supposed to have done it?” Cudahy asked.

“Friday night sometime.”

“After he left here?”

“Looks like it.”

“You got the wrong man,” Cudahy said flatly.

“What makes you think so?”

“Unless she was in it with him.”

“Who?”

“The broad.”

“What broad?”

“He left here Friday night with some broad.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know her name. I seen her around here before, though. She comes pick him up every now and then. She drives a big yellow Buick.”

“What does she look like?”

“A good-looking tomato,” Cudahy said. “Red hair, green eyes, everything in the right places.”

“You say she left here with him Friday night?”

“Yeah.”

“At two in the morning?”

“Yep.”

“Did she have the Buick with her?”

“Yeah, she’s always got that submarine with her. I think she goes to bed with that goddamn submarine.”

“Did Damascus say where they were going?”

“Where would you go with a gorgeous redhead at two o’clock in the morning?” Cudahy asked.

The drive downtown to South Second took exactly forty-two minutes. They made the drive carefully, observing all the speed limits, and then subtracted ten minutes from the total in allowance for what would have been lighter traffic at two o’clock in the morning. This meant that it would have taken Damascus and the redheaded girl approximately a half hour to get from The Cozy Corners in Riverhead to the apartment on South Second Street. They would have arrived there if that’s where they’d been headed, at about 2:30. The possibility existed, of course, that they had gone instead to the girl’s apartment. Or perhaps they had gone directly to the Leyden apartment, where Damascus had pumped four shots into Rose and Andrew — while the girl watched? It sounded incredible, but Carella and Kling were both experienced cops who knew that nothing was incredible where murder was concerned.

Henry Yancy was nowhere in sight. They climbed the steps to the third floor and knocked on the door to apartment 33.

“Who is it?” a woman’s voice called.

“Police,” Carella said.

“Oh, shit,” the woman answered.

They waited. They heard footsteps approaching the door, heard a chain being removed from its slotted track, heard the lock being turned. The door opened. The woman was perhaps forty years old, her hair up in curlers and covered with a kerchief. She was wearing a blue apron, and holding a wooden spoon in her hand.

“What is it?” she asked. “I’m making supper.”

Carella flashed the tin and said, “We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“What about? Nobody in this house done nothing.”

“Were you in your apartment on Friday night?”

“We were in all night Friday, my husband and me both. If it’s something happened someplace Friday night, we had nothing to do with it.”

“Were you awake at two-thirty?”

“No.”

“Did you hear anyone coming in across the hall at that time?”

“I told you we were asleep.”

“You didn’t hear anything in the hall?” Kling asked.

“Do you hear things when you’re sleeping?” the woman asked.

“Thank you,” Kling said, and the woman slammed the door.

“I keep wondering why he went out to buy a shotgun when he had a perfectly good .22 in his closet,” Carella said.

“I keep wondering a lot of things,” Kling said. “Let’s hit this other apartment, huh?”

The woman in apartment 32 told them she had gone to an American Legion affair on Friday night. She and her husband had not come home until 3:30 in the morning. She said she’d heard nothing unusual in the apartment next door.

“Did you hear anything at all?” Carella asked.

“No,” she said. “Nothing.”

“Can you usually hear what goes on in there?”

“Well,” she said, “the walls are very thin, you know.”

“Do you think anyone was in there?”

“No. Why, what is it? Was there a burglary? There’s been a lot of burglaries in this building lately.”

“No, not a burglary,” Kling said. “We’re trying to find out whether Walter Damascus was in his apartment when you got home Friday night.”

“Well, how could he be?” the woman said.

“What do you mean?”

“He was downstairs.”

“Doing what?” Carella asked immediately.

“Getting into a yellow automobile,” the woman said.

So they drove uptown again — this was a day for driving, all right — and they discovered that it took them twenty minutes to get from South Second to the Leyden apartment on South Engels Street, which (again deducting ten minutes for lighter early-morning traffic) meant that Damascus could have left his own apartment at 3:30, after approximately an hour of dalliance with the unidentified redhead, to arrive at the Leyden apartment by 3:40. Add five minutes for taking the elevator or climbing the steps to the tenth floor, and you had an estimated time of 3:45 A.M. for the murders. Four shotgun blasts in the dead of night, and nobody reporting them to the police.

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?”

“I screamed.”

“Then what?”

“I ran downstairs.”

“And then?”

“I found the local fuzz and told him there was a dead bird up here. Margie. I told him she was dead.” Coe paused. “You want the señorita’s name?” he asked.

“What for?”

“Check out my story,” Coe said, and shrugged. “Make sure I really was with her tonight, instead of up here doing poor Margie.”

“From the looks of poor Margie,” Meyer said, “I’d be more interested in knowing where you were a week ago.”