Time to Murder and Create

Chapter 11

By the time I got off the subway at Broadway and One Hundred Tenth, I was a lot less impressed by the coincidence I had turned up. If Prager had decided to kill me, either directly or through hirelings, there was no particular reason why he would have stolen a car two blocks away from his daughter’s apartment. It looked at first glance as though it ought to add up to something, but I wasn’t sure that it did.

Of course, if Stacy Prager had a boyfriend, and if he turned out to be the Marlboro man…

It looked to be worth a try. I found her building, a five-story brownstone which now held four apartments to a floor. I rang her bell, and there was no answer. I rang a couple of other bells on the top floor — it’s surprising how often people buzz you in that way — but no one was home, and the vestibule lock looked very easy. I used a pick on it, and I couldn’t have opened it much faster with a key. I climbed three steep flights of stairs and knocked on the door of 4-C. I waited and knocked again, and then I opened both the locks on her door and made myself at home.

There was one fairly large room with a convertible sofa and a sprinkling of Salvation Army furniture. I checked the closet and the dresser, and all I learned was that if Stacy had a boyfriend he lived elsewhere. There was no signs of male occupancy.

I gave the place a very casual toss, just trying to get some sense of the person who lived there. There were a lot of books, most of them paperbacks, most of them dealing with some aspect of psychology. There was a stack of magazines: New York and Psychology Today and Intellectual Digest. There was nothing stronger than aspirin in the medicine chest. Stacy kept her apartment in good order, and it in turn gave the impression that her life was also in good order. I felt a violator standing there in her apartment, scanning the titles of her books, rummaging through the clothes in her closet. I grew increasingly uncomfortable in the role, and my failure to find anything to justify my presence augmented the feeling. I got out of there and closed up after myself. I locked one of the locks; the other had to be locked with a key, and I figured she would simply decide she had failed to lock it on the way out.

I could have found a nice framed photo of the Marlboro man. That would have been handy, but it just hadn’t happened. I left the building and went around the corner and had a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Prager and Ethridge and Huysendahl, and one of them had killed Spinner and had tried to kill me, and I didn’t seem to be getting anywhere.

Suppose it was Prager. Things seemed to form a pattern, and although they didn’t really lock in place, they had the right sort of feel to them. He was on the hook in the first place because of a hit-and-run case, and so far a car had been used twice. Spinner’s letter mentioned a car jumping a curb at him, and one had certainly taken a shot at me last night. And he was the one who seemed to be feeling the bite financially. Beverly Ethridge was stalling for time, Theodore Huysendahl had agreed to my price, and Prager said he didn’t know how he could raise the money.

So suppose it was him. If so, he had just tried to commit murder, and he hadn’t made it work, and he was probably a little shaky about it. If it was him, now was a good time to rattle the bars of his cage. And if it wasn’t him, I’d be in a better position to know it if I dropped in on him.

I paid for my coffee and went out and flagged a cab.

The black girl looked up at me when I entered his office. It took her a second or two to place me, and then her dark eyes took on a wary expression.

“Matthew Scudder,” I said.

“For Mr. Prager?”

“That’s right.”

“Is he expecting you, Mr. Scudder?”

“I think he’ll want to see me, Shari.”

She seemed startled that I remembered her name. She got hesitantly to her feet and stepped out from behind the U-shaped desk.

“I’ll tell him you’re here,” she said.

“You do that.”

She slipped through Prager’s door, drawing it swiftly shut behind her. I sat on the vinyl couch and looked at Mrs. Prager’s seascape. I decided that the men were vomiting over the sides of the boat. There was no question about it.

The door opened and she returned to the reception room, again closing the door after her. “He’ll see you in about five minutes,” she said.

“All right.”

“I guess you got important business with him.”

“Fairly important.”

“I just hope things go right. That man has not been himself lately. It just seems the harder a man works and the more successful he grows, that’s all the more pressure he has bearing down upon him.”

“I guess he’s been under a lot of pressure lately.”

“He has been under a strain,” she said. Her eyes challenged me, holding me responsible for Prager’s difficulty. It was a charge I could not deny.

“Maybe things will clear up soon,” I suggested.

“I truly hope so.”

“I suppose he’s a good man to work for?”

“A very good man. He has always been—”

But she didn’t get to finish the sentence, because just then there was the sound of a truck backfiring, except trucks do that at ground level, not on the twenty-second floor. She had been standing beside her desk, and she stayed frozen there for a moment, eyes wide, the back of her hand pressed to her mouth. She held the pose long enough for me to get out of my chair and beat her to his door.

I yanked it open, and Henry Prager was seated at his desk, and of course it had not been a truck backfiring. It had been a gun. A small gun, 22 or.25 caliber from the look of it, but when you put the barrel in your mouth and tilt it up toward the brain, a small gun is all you really need.

I stood in the doorway, trying to block it, and she was at my shoulder, small hands hammering at my back. For a moment I didn’t yield, and then it seemed to me that she had at least as much right as I to look at him. I took a step into the room and she followed me and saw what she’d known she was going to see.

Then she started to scream.