After the First Death - Lawrence Block [42]
It was a combination of a number of things, I think, that ultimately got to me. The newspaper article, and the reality of the near capture in Larchmont left me very shaky. I was afraid to leave the room and at the same time found myself developing an unaccustomed sense of claustrophobia, as though the room were a cul-de-sac in which I could be easily captured at any moment I had nothing specific to do, and wanted more than ever to do something. Around eleven o’clock I left the hotel and wandered over to Times Square.
The girls were out already on Seventh Avenue, though not in full force. They mostly walked, although a few lurked in doorways or pretended to study movie posters. A collection of immaculately dressed Negro pimps grouped in front of the Forty-seventh Street Whelan’s and defined the word cool. Uniformed cops oversaw and ignored everything. A pair of sailors picked up a pair of hookers. I kept in the shadows, had a papaya drink at the Elpine stand, worked my way through a pack of cigarettes.
I was afraid to work into the scene. The girls who were here now had very probably been on the street Saturday night. They probably knew Robin, and some of them may have seen me pick her up. They could recognize me. The cops—and there were usually plainclothes bulls on that stretch, along with the ones in uniform—would be more tuned to my picture and description than the average cop in another part of the city. It was a dangerous place for me, and yet it exerted a special fascination.
I was halfway back to my hotel before I figured out why.
I was coming at things from the wrong direction. I was getting nowhere because I was looking for motive, and as a result was flying blind. There was more to it than motive. There was fact, there was empirical observation, there was the gradual compilation of important data. I had passed up all of that by concentrating on theory. I had spent all my time trying to reason out who might have wanted to frame me for murder, when I might better have worked with clean facts to find out who actually did the job on me.
Those whores and those pimps knew Robin. Those whores and those pimps could have seen me pick her up.
And they could have seen him, too. They could have seen him following me, and following Robin and me to the Maxfield. They could know what he looked like, how he was dressed.
That was the sort of knowledge I had to tap. The police could have gotten it themselves if they hadn’t closed the books on the case almost before it opened. But, convinced beyond doubt that I was the killer, they had no reason to look any further. And whores and pimps and junkies do not seek out police with their information. If they did know about the other man, that knowledge would remain hidden. I could be arrested and tried and convicted and executed, and no one would rush forward to tell the court that I was innocent, that another man had trailed us both and used the knife on Robin’s throat.
They wouldn’t tell the police, because the police would never think to ask them.
But they might tell me—
I thought of moths and flames. If there was one part of New York that was dramatically unsafe for me, it was those few blocks. The idea of approaching a girl, of starting to ask questions, was absolutely terrifying. She would run, or shriek, and the police would move in, and the game would be over. PLAYGIRL SLAYER CAUGHT ON THIRD TRY, the tabloids would jubilantly announce, and crime reporters would murmur darkly about killers returning to the scenes of past crimes, while somewhere a two-time murderer would relax and grin while the noose tightened around my neck.
If only I had a ticket to that world. If only I knew someone, so that I could come on like something other than a John.
I found a phone, and a phone book. There was no listing for Williams, Turk. His straight name was Eugene, and there were around fifteen Eugene Williamses