going to get me anywhere but confused.
I signaled for another cup of coffee and another shot, mixed them together, and worked on it. The tail end of my conversation with Eddie had gotten in the way. There was something I had learned from him, but the problem was that I didn't know that I knew it. He had said something that had rung a very muted bell, and I couldn't get it to ring again.
I got a dollar's worth of change and went over to the phone. Jersey Information gave me William Raiken's number in Upper Montclair. I called it and told Mrs. Raiken I was from the Auto Theft Squad, and she said was surprised we had recovered her car so soon and did I happen to know if it was at all damaged.
I said, 'I'm afraid we haven't recovered your car yet, Mrs. Raiken.'
'Oh.'
'I just wanted to get some details. Your car was parked at Broadway and One Hundred Fourteenth Street?'
'That's right. On One Hundred Fourteenth, not on Broadway.'
'I see. Now, our records indicate that you reported the theft at approximately two a.m. Was that immediately after you noticed the car was missing.
'Yes. Well, just about. I went to where I parked the car and it wasn't there, of course, and my first thought was it was towed away. I was parked legally, but sometimes there are signs you don't see, different regulations, but anyway they don't do any towing that far uptown, do they?'
'Not above Eighty-sixth Street.'
'That's what I thought, although I always manage to find a legal space. Then I thought maybe I'd made a mistake and I actually left the car on a Hundred Thirteenth, so I went and checked, but of course it wasn't there either, so then I called my husband to have him pick me up, and he said to report the theft, so that was when I called you. Maybe there was fifteen or twenty minutes between when I missed the car and when I actually placed the call.'
'I see.' I was sorry now that I'd asked. 'And when did you park the car, Mrs.
Raiken?'
'Let me see. I had the two classes, an eight o'clock short-story workshop and a ten o'clock course in Renaissance history, but I was a little early, so I guess I parked a little after seven. Is that important?'
'Well, it won't aid in recovering the vehicle, Mrs. Raiken, but we try to develop data to pinpoint the times when various crimes are likely to occur.'
'That's interesting,' she said. 'What good does that do?'
I had always wondered that myself. I told her it was part of the overall crime picture, which is what I generally had been told when I'd asked similar questions. I thanked her and assured her that her car would probably be recovered shortly, and she thanked me, and we said good-bye to each other and I went back to the bar.
I tried to determine what I'd learned from her and decided I'd learned nothing. My mind wandered, and I found myself wondering just what Mrs. Raiken had been doing on the Upper West Side in the middle of the night. She hadn't been with her husband, and her last class must have let out around eleven. Maybe she'd just had a few beers at the West End or one of the other bars around Columbia.
Quite a few beers, maybe, which would explain why she'd walked around the block looking for her car. Not that it mattered if she'd had enough beer to float a battleship, because Mrs. Raiken didn't have a whole hell of a lot to do with Spinner Jablon or anybody else, and whether or not she had anything to do with Mr. Raiken was their business and none of my own, and—
Columbia.
Columbia is at One Hundred Sixteenth and Broadway, so that's where she would have been taking courses. And someone else was studying at Columbia, taking graduate courses in psychology and planning to work with retarded children.
I checked the phone book. No Prager, Stacy, because single women know better than to put their first names in telephone books. But there was a Prager, S., on West One Hundred Twelfth between Broadway and Riverside.
I went back and finished my coffee. I left a bill on the bar. At the doorway I changed my mind, looked up Prager, S., again, and made a note of the address and phone number. On the chance that S. stood for Seymour or anything other than Stacy, I dropped a dime in the slot and dialed the number. I let it ring seven times, then hung up and retrieved my dime. There were two other dimes with it.
Some days you get lucky.
Chapter 11
By the time I got off the subway at Broadway and One Hundred Tenth, I was a lot less impressed by the coincidence I had turned up. If Prager had decided to kill me, either directly or through hirelings, there was no particular reason why he would have stolen a car two blocks away from his daughter's apartment. It looked at first glance as though it ought to add up to something, but I wasn't sure that it did.
Of course, if Stacy Prager had a boyfriend, and if he turned out to be the Marlboro man…
It looked to be worth a try. I found her building, a five-story brownstone which now held four apartments to a floor. I rang her bell, and there was no answer. I rang a couple of other bells on the top floor—it's surprising how often people buzz you in that way—but no one was home, and the vestibule lock looked very easy. I used a pick on it, and I couldn't have opened it much faster with a key.
I climbed three steep flights of stairs and knocked on the door of 4-C. I waited and knocked again, and then I opened both the locks on her door and made myself at home.
There was one fairly large room with a convertible sofa and a sprinkling of Salvation Army furniture. I checked the closet and the dresser, and all I learned was that if Stacy had a boyfriend he lived elsewhere.
