The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [5]
“What do the police say?”
“Suicide. They say she killed herself.” She drew on the cigarette. “But they don’t know her, they never knew her. If Paula wanted to kill herself she would have taken pills. She liked pills.”
“I figured she took ups.”
“Ups, tranquilizers, ludes, barbiturates. And she liked grass and she liked to drink.” She lowered her eyes. My hand was still on top of hers and she looked at our two hands and I removed mine. “I don’t do any of those things. I drink coffee, that’s my one vice, and I don’t even do that much because it makes me jittery. It’s the coffee that’s making me nervous tonight. Not…all of this.”
“Okay.”
“She was twenty-four. I’m twenty. Baby sister, square baby sister, except that was always how she wanted me to be. She did all these things and at the same time she told me not to do them, that it was a bad scene. I think she kept me straight. I really do. Not so much because of what she was saying as that I looked at the way she was living and what it was doing to her and I didn’t want that for myself. I thought it was crazy, what she was doing to herself, but at the same time I guess I worshiped her, she was always my heroine. I loved her, God, I really did, I’m just starting to realize how much, and she’s dead and he killed her, I know he killed her, I just know it.”
After a while I asked her what she wanted me to do.
“You’re a detective.”
“Not in an official sense. I used to be a cop.”
“Could you…find out what happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“I tried talking to the police. It was like talking to the wall. I can’t just turn around and do nothing. Do you understand me?”
“I think so. Suppose I look into it and it still looks like suicide?”
“She didn’t kill herself.”
“Well, suppose I wind up thinking that she did.”
She thought it over. “I still wouldn’t have to believe it.”
“No,” I agreed. “We get to choose what we believe.”
“I have some money.” She put her purse on the table. “I’m the straight sister, I have an office job, I save money. I have five hundred dollars with me.”
“That’s too much to carry in this neighborhood.”
“Is it enough to hire you?”
I didn’t want to take her money. She had five hundred dollars and a dead sister, and parting with one wouldn’t bring the other back to life. I’d have worked for nothing but that wouldn’t have been good because neither of us would have taken it seriously enough.
And I have rent to pay and two sons to support, and Armstrong’s charges for the coffee and the bourbon. I took four fifty-dollar bills from her and told her I’d do my best to earn them.
After Paula Wittlauer hit the pavement, a black-and-white from the Eighteenth Precinct caught the squeal and took charge of the case. One of the cops in the car was a guy named Guzik. I hadn’t known him when I was on the force but we’d met since then. I didn’t like him and I don’t think he cared for me either, but he was reasonably honest and had struck me as competent. I got him on the phone the next morning and offered to buy him a lunch.
We met at an Italian place on Fifty-sixth Street. He had veal and peppers and a couple glasses of red wine. I wasn’t hungry but I made myself eat a small steak.
Between bites of veal he said, “The kid sister, huh? I talked to her, you know. She’s so clean and so pretty it could break your heart if you let it. And of course she don’t want to believe sis did the Dutch act. I asked is she Catholic because then there’s the religious angle but that wasn’t it. Anyway your average priest’ll stretch a point. They’re the best lawyers going, the hell, two thousand years of practice, they oughta be good. I took that attitude myself. I said, ‘Look, there’s all these pills. Let’s say your sister had herself some pills and drank a little wine and smoked a little pot and then she went to the window for some fresh air. So she got a little dizzy and maybe she blacked out and