The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [14]
I shook my head. “It won’t come to more than that,” I said. “No matter how much time I spend on it. And you keep the three hundred for the time being, all right? I’ll take it from you later on. If I need it, and if I’ve earned it.”
“That doesn’t seem right.”
“It seems right to me,” I said. “And don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m being charitable.”
“But your time’s valuable.”
I shook my head. “Not to me it isn’t.”
I spent the next five days picking the scabs off Paula Wittlauer’s life. It kept turning out to be a waste of time but the time’s always gone before you realize you’ve wasted it. And I’d been telling the truth when I said my time wasn’t valuable. I had nothing better to do, and my peeks into the corners of Paula’s world kept me busy.
Her life involved more than a saloon on Ninth Avenue and an apartment on Fifty-seventh Street, more than serving drinks and sharing a bed with Cary McCloud. She did other things. She went one evening a week to group therapy on West Seventy-ninth Street. She took voice lessons every Tuesday morning on Amsterdam Avenue. She had an ex-boyfriend she saw once in a while. She hung out in a couple of bars in the neighborhood and a couple of others in the Village. She did this, she did that, she went here, she went there, and I kept busy dragging myself around town and talking to all sorts of people, and I managed to learn quite a bit about the person she’d been and the life she’d led without learning anything at all about the person who’d put her on the pavement.
At the same time, I tried to track her movements on the final night of her life. She’d evidently gone more or less directly to The Spider’s Web after finishing her shift at Armstrong’s. Maybe she’d stopped at her apartment for a shower and a change of clothes, but without further ado she’d headed downtown. Somewhere around ten she left the Web, and I traced her from there to a couple of other Village bars. She hadn’t stayed at either of them long, taking a quick drink or two and moving on. She’d left alone as far as anyone seemed to remember. This didn’t prove a thing because she could have stopped elsewhere before continuing uptown, or she could have picked someone up on the street, which I’d learned was something she’d done more than once in her young life. She could have found her killer loitering on a street corner or she could have phoned him and arranged to meet him at her apartment.
Her apartment. The doormen changed off at midnight, but it was impossible to determine whether she’d returned before or after the changing of the guard. She’d lived there, she was a regular tenant, and when she entered or left the building it was not a noteworthy occasion. It was something she did every night, so when she came home for the final time the man at the door had no reason to know it was the final time and thus no reason to take mental notes.
Had she come in alone or with a companion? No one could say, which did suggest that she’d come in alone. If she’d been with someone her entrance would have been a shade more memorable. But this also proved nothing, because I stood on the other side of Fifty-seventh Street one night and watched the doorway of her building, and the doorman didn’t take the pride in his position that the afternoon doorman had shown. He was away from the door almost as often as he was on it.
She could have walked in flanked by six Turkish sailors and there was a chance no one would have seen her.
The doorman who’d been on duty when she went out the window was a rheumy-eyed Irishman with liver-spotted hands. He hadn’t actually seen her land. He’d been in the lobby, keeping himself out of the wind, and then he came rushing out when he heard the impact of the body on the street.
He couldn’t get over the sound she made.
“All of a sudden there was