months and months ago. And Toni Cleary, who'd had the bad judgment to go out for a hamburger with me.
He must have followed us that night. Could he have trailed us all the way out to Richmond Hill? It seemed impossible. Maybe he'd just been in the neighborhood, lurking, and he picked us up on our way to Armstrong's, or walking toward her place.
I kept walking around, trying to sort it out.
I packed it in, finally, went back to my hotel room and hung my wet clothes up to dry. It had turned cold out there and I had paid as little heed to that as to the rain, and I was chilled to the bone. I stood under a hot shower and then crawled into bed.
Lying there, I had a thought, or skirted close to the edge of one. He was out there, menacing all of these
women who used to be mine, and here I was, running around like a juggler trying to keep all the balls in the air. Trying to save them, trying to protect them, Elaine and Anita and Jan, and in the process trying to hold on to them. Trying, in a sense, to confirm their status as what he labeled them— my women, mine.
Trying in the process to deny the truth, to turn a blind eye on reality. To overlook the bitter fact that these women were not mine, and probably never had been mine. That I didn't have anybody, and likely never would.
That I was all alone.
In daylight you could see the bloodstains, although you would have had to be looking for them to know what they were. I went over there with Joe Durkin, and the doorman pointed out Toni's landing site.
It was on the side street, perhaps twenty yards west of the building's entrance.
The doorman was an Hispanic kid, his shoulders too narrow for the jacket of his uniform, his mustache sparse and tentative. He'd had Sunday off but I showed him the sketch of Motley anyway. He looked at it and shook his head.
Durkin got a passkey and we went upstairs and let ourselves into her apartment. No one had troubled to close the window and it had rained in some the previous day. I leaned out over the sill and tried to see the spot where she came down. I couldn't see anything, and a rush of vertigo made me pull my head in and straighten up.
Durkin went over to the bed. It was made, and some clothing was folded neatly at its foot. A navy skirt, an off-white blouse, a dark gray cable-knit cardigan. A pair of lacy white panties. A bra, also white, with large cups.
He picked up the bra, examined it, put it back.
'Big girl,' he said, and glanced my way to check my reaction. I don't suppose I showed much. He lit a cigarette, shook out the match, and looked around for an ashtray. There weren't any. He blew on the match to make sure it was cool and set it down carefully on the edge of the night table.
'Your guy said he killed her,' he said. 'That right?'
'That's what he told Elaine.'
'Elaine's the witness against him? That's twelve years back when all this shit started?'
'That's right.'
'You don't think he's like some of these Arab terrorists, do you?
Plane comes down, they're on the phone claiming credit for it.'
'I don't think so.'
He drew on his cigarette and blew out smoke. 'No, I guess not,' he said. 'Well, it could have been murder. I don't see how you can rule it out. Somebody goes out a high window, how are you going to say whose idea it was?' He walked over to the door. 'She had this locked, had the deadbolt on. What's that prove either way? Doesn't make a locked-room case out of it. You can engage the deadbolt from inside by turning this thing here, or you can do it when you leave by locking it with the key.
He puts her out the window, he picks up a key, he locks up after himself on his way out. Proves nothing.'
'No.'
'Of course there's no note. I never like a suicide without a note.
There ought to be a law.'
'What would you have for a penalty?'
'You've gotta come back and live.' He looked around reflexively for an ashtray, then flicked ashes on the parquet floor. 'Used to be a crime to attempt suicide, though I never heard of anyone prosecuted for it. Idiot statute. Makes it a crime to attempt something that's not a crime if you succeed at it. Here's one for you, the kind of dimwit question turns up on the sergeants' exam. Say she falls out the window and hits the Fitzroy kid. He dies but he breaks her fall and she lives. What's she guilty of?'
'I don't know.'
'I suppose it's either criminally negligent homicide or manslaughter two. And there's been incidents like that. Not from twenty-odd stories up, but when someone jumps from say four stories up. You never get a prosecution, though.'
'No.'
'Unsound mind'd be a pretty good defense, I would think. What I'll do, I'll call and get a lab crew in here. Be a gift from God to find some of his prints on the window frame, wouldn't it now?'
'Or anywhere in the apartment.'
'Anywhere,' he agreed. 'But I don't think we'll get lucky that way, do you?'
'No.'
