'Well, you saw the place. Name a figure.' I looked at him. He stubbed out a cigarette and lit another.
'One and a quarter. Hundred and twenty-five dollars a month.
Goes for six now and it's going up the minute the needlework lady goes out, or when her lease is up. Whichever comes first.'
'You have a forwarding address for Corwin?'
He shook his head. 'I got a residential address. Want it?' He read off a number on Wyckoff Street. It was just a few doors from the Ettingers' building. I wrote down the address. He read off a phone number and I jotted that down, too.
His phone rang. He picked it up, said hello, listened for a few minutes, then talked in monosyllables.
'Listen, I got someone here,' he said after a moment. 'I'll get back to you in a minute, okay?'
He hung up and asked me if that was all. I couldn't think of anything else. He hefted the file. 'Four years she had the place,' he said.
'Most places drop dead in the first year. Make it through a year you got a chance. Get through two years and you got a good chance. You know what's the problem?'
'What?'
'Women,' he said. 'They're amateurs. They got no need to make a go of it. They open a business like they try on a dress. Take it off if they don't like the color. If that does it, I got calls to make.'
I thanked him for his help.
'Listen,' he said, 'I always cooperate. It's my nature.'
I tried the number he gave me and got a woman who spoke Spanish. She didn't know anything about anybody named Janice Corwin and didn't stay on the line long enough for me to ask her much of anything. I dropped another dime and dialed again on the chance that I'd misdialed the first time. When the same woman answered I broke the connection.
When they disconnect a phone it's close to a year before they reassign the number. Of course Mrs.
Corwin could have changed her number without moving from the Wyckoff Street address. People, especially women, do that frequently enough to shake off obscene callers.
Still, I figured she'd moved. I figured everyone had moved, out of Brooklyn, out of the five boroughs, out of the state. I started to walk back toward Wyckoff Street, covered half a block, turned, retraced my steps, started to turn again.
I made myself stop. I had an anxious sensation in my chest and stomach. I was blaming myself for wasting time and starting to wonder why I'd taken London's check in the first place. His daughter was nine years in the grave, and whoever killed her had probably long since started a brand-new life in Australia. All I was doing was spinning my goddamned wheels.
I stood there until the intensity of the feeling wound itself down, knowing that I didn't want to go back to Wyckoff Street. I'd go there later, when Donald Gilman got home from work, and I could check Corwin's address then. Until then I couldn't think of anything I felt like doing about the Ettinger murder. But there was something I could do about the anxiety.
ONE thing about Brooklyn-you never have to walk very far before you encounter a church. They're all over the place throughout the borough.
The one I found was at the corner of Court and Congress. The church itself was closed and the iron gate locked, but a sign directed me to St. Elizabeth Seton's Chapel right around the corner. A gateway led to a one-story chapel tucked in between the church and the rectory. I walked through an ivy-planted courtyard which a plaque proclaimed to be the burial site of Cornelius Heeney. I didn't bother reading who he was or why they'd planted him there. I walked between rows of white statues and into the little chapel. The only other person in it was a frail Irishwoman kneeling in a front pew. I took a seat toward the back.
It's hard to remember just when I started hanging out in churches.
It happened sometime after I left the force, sometime after I moved out of the house in Syosset and away from Anita and the boys and into a hotel on West Fifty-seventh. I guess I found them to be citadels of peace and quiet, two commodities hard to come by in New York.
I sat in this one for fifteen or twenty minutes. It was peaceful, and just sitting there I lost some of what I'd been feeling earlier.
Before I left I counted out a hundred fifty dollars, and on my way out I slipped the money into a slot marked 'FOR THE POOR.' I started tithing not long after I began spending odd moments in churches, and I don't know why I started or why I've never stopped. The question doesn't plague me much. There are no end of things I do without knowing the reason why.
I don't know what they do with the money. I don't much care.
Charles London had given me fifteen hundred dollars, an act which didn't seem to make much more sense than my passing on a tenth of that sum to the unspecified poor.
There was a shelf of votive candles, and I stopped to light a couple of them. One for Barbara London Ettinger, who had been dead a long time, if not so long as old Cornelius Heeney. Another for Estrellita Rivera, a little girl who had been dead almost as long as Barbara Ettinger.
I didn't say any prayers. I never do.
Chapter 4
Donald Gilman was twelve or fifteen years older than his roommate, and I don't suppose he put in as many hours with the dumbbells and the jump rope. His neatly combed hair was a sandy brown, his eyes a cool blue through heavy horn-rimmed glasses. He was wearing suit pants and a white shirt and tie. His suit jacket was
