'You got enough?' she said. 'I want to get back to what I was doing.' She flexed her fingers, indicating an impatience to return them to the clay.
I told her she had been very helpful.
'I don't see that I told you anything much.'
'There's something more you could tell me.'
'What?'
'You didn't know them, either of them, and I realize you don't take much interest in the people in the building. But everybody invariably forms an impression of people they see frequently over an extended period of time. You must have had some sort of image of the two of them, some feeling that extended beyond your hard factual knowledge of them. That's probably been shifted out of position by what's happened in the past week, what you've learned about them, but I'd like to know what your impression of them was.'
'What good would that do you?'
'It would tell me what they looked like to human eyes. And you're an artist, you've got sensibilities.'
She gnawed at a fingernail. 'Yeah, I see what you mean,' she said after a moment. 'I just can't find where to pick up on it.'
'You were surprised when he killed her.'
'Anybody'd be surprised.'
'Because it changed how you saw them. How did you see them?'
'Just as tenants, just ordinary-wait a minute. All right, you jarred something loose. I never even put words to the tune before, but you know how I thought of them? As brother and sister.'
'Brother and sister?'
'Right.'
'Why?'
She closed her eyes, frowned. 'I can't say exactly,' she said. 'Maybe the way they acted when they were together. Not anything they did. Just the vibrations they gave off, the sense you got of them when they were walking along. The sense of how they related to each other.'
I waited.
'Another thing. I didn't dwell on this, I mean I didn't give it any thought to speak of, but I sort of took it for granted that he was gay.'
'Why?'
She had been sitting. She got up now and walked to one of her creations, a gunmetal-colored mound of convex planes taller and wider than herself. She faced away from me, tracing a curved surface with her stubby fingers.
'Physical type, I suppose. Mannerisms. He was tall and slender, he had a way of speaking. You'd think I would know better than to think in those terms.
With my figure and short hair, and working with my hands, and being good with electrical and mechanical things. People generally assume I'm a lesbian.'
She turned around, and her eyes challenged me. 'I'm not,' she said.
'Was Wendy Hanniford?'
'How would I know?'
'You guessed Vanderpoel might be gay. Did you make the same guess about her?'
'Oh. I thought- No, I'm sure she wasn't. I generally know if a woman is gay by the way she relates to me. No, I assumed she was straight.'
'And you assumed he wasn't.'
'Right.' She looked up at me. 'You want to know something? I still think he was a faggot.'
Chapter 4
I had some dinner in an Italian place on Greenwich Avenue, then hit a couple of bars before I took a cab over to Johnny Joyce's. I told the bartender I was looking for Lewis Pankow, and he pointed me toward a booth in the back.
I could have found him without help. He was tall and rangy and towheaded, with an open face and a recent shave. He stood up when I approached him. He was in civilian clothes, a gray glen-plaid suit that couldn't have cost him much, a pale blue shirt, a striped tie. I said I was Scudder, and he said he was Pankow, and he put out his hand, so I shook it. I sat down opposite him and ordered a double bourbon when the waiter came around. Pankow still had half a beer left in front of him.
He said, 'The lieutenant said you wanted to see me. I guess it's about the Hanniford murder?'
I nodded. 'Hell of a good collar for you.'
'I was lucky. The right place at the right time.'
'It'll look good on your record.'
He flushed.
