The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [27]
“Could be.”
“There’s no other reason, is there? She musta been killed because she was a bag lady, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, Jesus Christ, Matt. What other reason would anybody have for killing her?”
The law firm where Aaron Creighton worked had offices on the seventh floor of the Flatiron Building. In addition to the four partners, eleven other lawyers had their names painted on the frosted glass door. Aaron Creighton’s came second from the bottom. Well, he was young.
He was also surprised to see me, and when I told him what I wanted he said it was irregular.
“Matter of public record, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes,” he said. “That means you can find the information. It doesn’t mean we’re obliged to furnish it to you.”
For an instant I thought I was back at the Eighteenth Precinct and a cop was trying to hustle me for the price of a new hat. But Creighton’s reservations were ethical. I wanted a list of Mary Alice Redfield’s beneficiaries, including the amounts they’d received and the dates they’d been added to her will. He wasn’t sure where his duty lay.
“I’d like to be helpful,” he said. “Perhaps you could tell me just what your interest is.”
“I’m not sure.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I don’t know why I’m playing with this one. I used to be a cop, Mr. Creighton. Now I’m a sort of unofficial detective. I don’t carry a license but I do things for people and I wind up making enough that way to keep a roof overhead.”
His eyes were wary. I guess he was trying to guess how I intended to earn myself a fee out of this.
“I got twelve hundred dollars out of the blue. It was left to me by a woman I didn’t really know and who didn’t really know me. I can’t seem to slough off the feeling that I got the money for a reason. That I’ve been paid in advance.”
“Paid for what?”
“To try and find out who killed her.”
“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”
“I don’t want to get the heirs together to challenge the will, if that was what was bothering you. And I can’t quite make myself suspect that one of her beneficiaries killed her for the money she was leaving him. For one thing, she doesn’t seem to have told people they were named in her will. She never said anything to me or to the two people I’ve spoken with thus far. For another, it wasn’t the sort of murder that gets committed for gain. It was deliberately brutal.”
“Then why do you want to know who the other beneficiaries are?”
“I don’t know. Part of it’s cop training. When you’ve got any specific leads, any hard facts, you run them down before you cast a wider net. That’s only part of it. I suppose I want to get more of a sense of the woman. That’s probably all I can realistically hope to get, anyway. I don’t stand much chance of tracking her killer.”
“The police don’t seem to have gotten very far.”
I nodded. “I don’t think they tried too hard. And I don’t think they knew she had an estate. I talked to one of the cops on the case and if he had known that he’d have mentioned it to me. There was nothing in her file. My guess is they waited for her killer to run a string of murders so they’d have something more concrete to work with. It’s the kind of senseless crime that usually gets repeated.” I closed my eyes for a moment, reaching for an errant thought. “But he didn’t repeat,” I said. “So they put it on a back burner and then they took it off the stove altogether.”
“I don’t know much about police work. I’m involved largely with estates and trusts.” He tried a smile. “Most of my clients die of natural causes. Murder’s an exception. ”
“It generally is. I’ll probably never find him. I certainly don’t expect to find him. Just killing her and moving on, hell, and it was all those months ago. He could have been a sailor off a ship, got tanked up and went nuts and he’s in Macao or Port-au-Prince by now. No witnesses and no clues and no suspects and the trail’s three months cold by now, and it’s a fair bet the killer doesn’t remember what he did. So many murders take place in blackout, you know.”
“Blackout?” He frowned. “You don’t mean in the dark?