'I thought it walked the floors crying out for vengeance,' Rolfe said. 'You know, dragging chains, making the boards creak.'
'No, it just doesn't know any better. What you do, you get somebody to lay the ghost.'
'I'm not going to touch that line,' Rolfe said.
'I'm proud of you. You get high marks for restraint. That's what it's called, laying the ghost. It's a sort of exorcism. The ghost expert, or whatever you call him, communicates with the ghost and lets him know what happened, and that he's supposed to pass on. And then the spirit can go wherever spirits go.'
'You really believe all this?'
'I'm not sure what I believe,' she said. She uncrossed her legs, then recrossed them. 'If Barbara's haunting this apartment, she's being very restrained about it. No creaking boards, no midnight apparitions.'
'Your basic low-profile ghost,' he said.
'I'll have nightmares tonight,' she said. 'If I sleep at all.'
* * *
I knocked on all the doors on the two lower floors without getting much response. The tenants were either out or had nothing useful to tell me. The building's superintendent had a basement apartment in a similar building on the next block, but I didn't see the point in looking him up.
He'd only been on the job for a matter of months, and the old woman in the fourth-floor-front apartment had told me there had been four or five supers in the past nine years.
By the time I got out of the building I was glad for the fresh air, glad to be on the street again. I'd felt something in Judy Fairborn's kitchen, though I wouldn't go so far as to call it a ghost. But it had felt as though something from years past was pulling at me, trying to drag me down and under.
Whether it was Barbara Ettinger's past or my own was something I couldn't say.
I stopped at a bar on the corner of Dean and Smith. They had sandwiches and a microwave oven to heat them in but I wasn't hungry. I had a quick drink and sipped a short beer chaser. The bartender sat on a high stool drinking a large glass of what looked like vodka. The other two customers, black men about my age, were at the far end of the bar watching a game show on TV. From time to time one of them was talking back to the set.
I flipped a few pages in my notebook, went to the phone and looked through the Brooklyn book. The day-care center where Barbara Ettinger had worked didn't seem to be in business. I checked the Yellow Pages to see if there was anything listed under another name at the same address. There wasn't.
The address was on Clinton Street, and I'd been away from the neighborhood long enough so that I had to ask directions, but once I'd done so it was only a walk of a few blocks. The boundaries of Brooklyn neighborhoods aren't usually too well defined-the neighborhoods themselves are often largely the invention of realtors-but when I crossed Court Street I was leaving Boerum Hill for Cobble Hill, and the change wasn't difficult to see. Cobble Hill was a shade or two tonier. More trees, a higher percentage of brownstones, a greater proportion of white faces on the street.
I found the number I was seeking on Clinton between Pacific and Amity. There was no day-care center there. The ground floor storefront offered supplies for knitting and needlepoint. The proprietor, a plump Earth Mother with a gold incisor, didn't know anything about a day-care center. She'd moved in a year and a half ago after a health food restaurant had gone out of business. 'I ate there once,' she said, 'and they deserved to go out of business. Believe me.'
She gave me the landlord's name and number. I tried him from the corner and kept getting a busy signal so I walked over to Court Street and climbed a flight of stairs. There was just one person in the office, a young man with his sleeves rolled up and a large round ashtray full of cigarette butts on the desk in front of him. He chainsmoked while he talked on the phone. The windows were closed and the room was as thick with smoke as a nightclub at four in the morning.
When he got off the phone I caught him before it could ring again.
His own memory went back beyond the health food restaurant to a children's clothing store that had also failed in the same location. 'Now we got needlepoint,' he said. 'If I were gonna guess I'd say she'll be out in another year. How much can you make selling yarn? What happens, somebody has a hobby, an interest, so they open up a business. Health food, needlepoint, whatever it is, but they don't know shit about business and they're down and out in a year or two. She breaks the lease, we'll rent it in a month for twice what she pays.
It's a renter's market in an upscale neighborhood.' He reached for the phone. 'Sorry I can't help you,'
he said.
'Check your records,' I said.
He told me he had lots of important things to do, but halfway through the statement changed from an assertion to a whine. I sat in an old oak swivel chair and let him fumble around in his files. He opened and closed half a dozen drawers before he came up with a folder and slapped it down on his desk.
'Here we go,' he said. 'Happy Hours Child Care Center. Some name, huh?'
'What's wrong with it?'
'Happy hour's in a bar when the drinks are half price. Hell of a thing to call a place for the kiddies, don't you think?' He shook his head.
'Then they wonder why they go out of business.'
I didn't see anything the matter with the name.
'Leaseholder was a Mrs. Corwin. Janice Corwin. Took the place on a five-year lease, gave it up after four years. Quit the premises eight years ago in March.' That would have been a year after Barbara Ettinger's death. 'Jesus, you look at the rent and you can't believe it. You know what she was paying?'
I shook my head.
