It was cold out. I walked a few blocks, then caught a bus.
Jacob was on duty, and he told me I'd had some phone calls. I glanced at my box. There was nothing in it.
'She didn't leave a message.'
'It was a woman?'
'Believe so. Same one each time, asked for you, said she would call back. Seems like she calls every fifteen, twenty minutes.'
I went upstairs and called Elaine, but it hadn't been her. We talked for a few minutes. Then I hung up and the phone rang.
The voice was a rich contralto. Without preamble she said, 'I'm taking a big chance.'
'How?'
'If he knew about this,' she said, 'I'd be dead. He's a killer.'
'Who is?'
'You ought to know. Your name is Scudder, isn't it? Aren't you the man's been showing his picture all over the street?'
'I'm the man.'
There was a stretch of silence. I could tell she hadn't hung up, but I wondered if she might have set the phone down and walked away. Then, her voice little more than a whisper, she said, 'I can't talk now.
Stay where you are. I'll call back in ten minutes.'
It was more like fifteen. This time she said, 'I'm scared, man. He'd kill me in a hot second.'
'Then why call me?'
' 'Cause he might kill me anyway.'
'Just tell me where I can find him. It won't get back to you.'
'Yeah?' She considered this. 'You got to meet me,' she said.
'All right.'
'We got to talk, you know? Before I tell you anything.'
'All right. Pick a time and a place.'
'Shit. What time is it now? Close to eleven. Meet me at midnight.
Can you do that?'
'Where?'
'You know the Lower East Side?'
'I can find my way around.'
'Meet me at— shit, I'm crazy to do this.' I waited her out. 'Place called the Garden Grill. That's on Ridge Street just below Stanton. You know where that is?'
'I'll find it.'
'It's on the right-hand side of the street if you're going downtown.
And there's steps leading down from the street. If you're not looking for it you could miss it.'
'I'll find it. You said midnight? How will I know you?'
'Look for me at the bar. Long legs and auburn hair, and I'll be drinking a Rob Roy straight up.' A throaty chuckle. 'You could buy me a refill.'
Ridge Street runs south from Houston Street seven or eight blocks east of First Avenue. It's not a good neighborhood, but then it never was.
Over a century ago the narrow streets began filling up with mean tenements, thrown up in a hurry to house the mob of immigrants arriving from Eastern Europe. The buildings left a lot to be desired when they were new, and the years have not been good to them.
Many of them are gone. Stretches of the Lower East Side have seen the tenements give way to low-income housing projects, which have arguably become worse places to live than the hovels they replaced. Ridge Street, though, remained an unbroken double row of five-story tenements, with an occasional gap in the form of a rubble- strewn lot where someone had torn down a building after someone else had burned it out.
My cab dropped me at the corner of Ridge and Houston a few minutes before twelve. I stood there while the driver made a quick U-turn and looked for greener pastures. The streets were empty, and of course all of the shops on Houston were dark, and most of them shuttered, their corrugated-steel shutters black with undecipherable graffiti.
I walked south on Ridge. On the other side of the street a woman was berating a child in Spanish. A few houses further on, a trio of youths in leather jackets looked me over and evidently decided I was more trouble than I was worth.
I crossed Stanton Street. The Garden Grill, not all that hard to find if you were looking for it, was in the fourth building from the corner. A scrap of neon in an otherwise opaque window announced its name. I walked a dozen yards past it and checked to see if I was attracting any attention. I didn't seem to be.
I retraced my steps and descended a half-flight of stairs to a heavy door with steel mesh over its window. The
