least it never was for me.'
'You make it sound almost as though there's a psychic element to the process.'
'Well, I can't read palms or see the future. But maybe there is.' I sipped Scotch. It had that medicinal taste that Scotch has but I didn't mind it as much as I usually do. It was one of the heavier Scotches, dark and peaty. Teacher's, I think it was. 'I want to get out to Sheepshead Bay next,' I said.
'Now?'
'Tomorrow. That's where the fourth Icepick killing took place, and that was the one that's supposed to have spooked Barbara Ettinger.'
'You think the same person-'
'Louis Pinell admits to the Sheepshead Bay murder. Of course that doesn't prove anything, either. I'm not sure why I want to go out there. I guess I want to talk to somebody who was on the scene, someone who saw the body. There were some physical details about the killings that were held back from the press coverage, and they were duplicated in Barbara's murder. Imperfectly duplicated, and I want to know if there was any parallel in the other Brooklyn homicide.'
'And if there was, what would it prove? That there was a second killer, a maniac who confined himself to Brooklyn?'
'And who conveniently stopped at two killings. It's possible. It wouldn't even rule out someone with a motive for killing Barbara. Say her husband decided to kill her, but he realized the Icepick Prowler hadn't been to Brooklyn yet, so he killed some stranger in Sheepshead Bay first to establish a pattern.'
'Do people do things like that?'
'There's nothing you can imagine that somebody hasn't done at one time or another. Maybe somebody had a motive for killing the woman in Sheepshead Bay. Then he was worried that the murder would stand out as the only one of its kind in Brooklyn, so he went after Barbara. Or maybe that was just his excuse. Maybe he killed a second time because he'd found out that he enjoyed it.'
'God.' She drank vodka. 'What was the physical detail?'
'You don't want to know about it.'
'You protecting the little woman from the awful truth?'
'The victims were stabbed through the eyes. An icepick, right through the eyeballs.'
'Jesus. And the … what did you call it? Imperfect duplication?'
'Barbara Ettinger just got it in one eye.'
'Like a wink.' She sat for a long moment, then looked down at her glass and noticed that it was empty.
She went to the bar and came back with both bottles. After she'd filled our glasses she left the bottles on the slate-topped table.
'I wonder why he would do a thing like that,' she said.
'That's another reason I'd like to see Pinell,' I said. 'To ask him.'
THE conversation turned this way and that. At one point she asked whether she should call me Matt or Matthew. I told her it didn't matter to me. She said it mattered to her that I call her not Janice but Jan.
'Unless you're uncomfortable calling murder suspects by their first names.'
When I was a cop I learned always to call suspects by their first names. It gave you a certain amount of psychological leverage. I told her she wasn't a suspect.
'I was at the Happy Hours all that afternoon,' she said. 'Of course it would be hard to prove after all these years. At the time it would have been easy. Alibis must be harder to come by for people who live alone.'
'You live alone here?'
'Unless you count the cats. They're hiding somewhere. They steer clear of strangers. Showing them your ID wouldn't impress them much.'
'Real hard-liners.'
'Uh-huh. I've always lived alone. Since I left Eddie, that is. I've been in relationships but I always lived alone.'
'Unless we count the cats.'
'Unless we count the cats. I never thought at the time that I'd be living by myself for the next eight years. I thought a relationship with a woman might be different in some fundamental way. See, back then was consciousness-raising time. I decided the problem was men.'
'And it wasn't?'
'Well, it may have been one of the problems. Women turned out to be another problem. For a while I decided I was one of those fortunate people who are capable of relationships with both sexes.'
'Just for a while?'
'Uh-huh. Because what I discovered next was that I may be capable of relationships with men and women, but what I mostly am is not very good at relationships.'
'Well, I can relate to that.'
'I figured you probably could. You live alone, don't you, Matthew?'
'For a while now.'
