The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [9]
I don’t know who put it up, Paula or a previous tenant or someone on the building staff, but that chain bolt had been as much protection as the Sanitized wrapper on a motel toilet seat. As evidence that Paula’d been alone when she went out the window, well, it wasn’t worth a thing.
I replaced the original chain bolt, put the new one in my pocket, returned to the elevator, and gave back the screwdriver. The man I returned it to seemed surprised to get it back.
It took me a couple of hours to find Cary McCloud. I’d learned that he tended bar evenings at a club in the West Village called The Spider’s Web. I got down there around five. The guy behind the bar had knobby wrists and an underslung jaw and he wasn’t Cary McCloud. “He don’t come on till eight,” he told me, “and he’s off tonight anyway.” I asked where I could find McCloud. “Sometimes he’s here afternoons but he ain’t been in today. As far as where you could look for him, that I couldn’t tell you.”
A lot of people couldn’t tell me but eventually I ran across someone who could. You can quit the police force but you can’t stop looking and sounding like a cop, and while that’s a hindrance in some situations it’s a help in others. Ultimately I found a man in a bar down the block from The Spider’s Web who’d learned it was best to cooperate with the police if it didn’t cost you anything. He gave me an address on Barrow Street and told me which bell to ring.
I went to the building but I rang several other bells until somebody buzzed me through the downstairs door. I didn’t want Cary to know he had company coming. I climbed two flights of stairs to the apartment he was supposed to be occupying. The bell downstairs hadn’t had his name on it. It hadn’t had any name at all.
Loud rock music was coming through his door. I stood in front of it for a minute, then hammered on it loud enough to make myself heard over the electric guitars. After a moment the music dropped in volume. I pounded on the door again and a male voice asked who I was.
I said, “Police. Open up.” That’s a misdemeanor but I didn’t expect to get in trouble for it.
“What’s it about?”
“Open up, McCloud.”
“Oh, Jesus,” he said. He sounded tired, aggravated. “How did you find me, anyway? Give me a minute, huh? I want to put some clothes on.”
Sometimes that’s what they say while they’re putting a clip into an automatic. Then they pump a handful of shots through the door and into you if you’re still standing behind it. But his voice didn’t have that kind of edge to it and I couldn’t summon up enough anxiety to get out of the way. Instead I put my ear against the door and heard whispering within. I couldn’t make out what they were whispering about or get any sense of the person who was with him. The music was down in volume but there was still enough of it to cover their conversation.
The door opened. He was tall and thin, with hollow cheeks and prominent eyebrows and a worn, wasted look to him. He must have been in his early thirties and he didn’t really look much older than that but you sensed that in another ten years he’d look twenty years older. If he lived that long. He wore patched jeans and a T-shirt with The Spider’s Web silkscreened on it. Beneath the legend there was a sketch of a web. A macho spider stood at one end of it, grinning, extending two of his eight arms to welcome a hesitant girlish fly.
He noticed me noticing the shirt and managed a grin. “Place where I work,” he said.
“I know.”
“So come into my parlor. It ain’t much but it’s home.”
I followed him inside, drew the door shut after me. The room was about fifteen feet square and held nothing you could call furniture. There was a mattress on the floor in one corner and a couple of cardboard cartons alongside