A Stab in the Dark
Page 10

"Matthew Scudder."
She repeated it. Then she said, "Barbara Ettinger. Oh, if you knew how that name takes me back. I have a feeling I'm going to be sorry I answered the phone. Well, Mr. Scudder, I'll be seeing you in an hour."
Chapter 8
Lispenard is a block below Canal Street, which puts it in that section known as Tribeca. Tribeca is a geographical acronym for Triangle Below Canal, just as SoHo derives from South of Houston Street. There was a time when artists began moving into the blocks south of the Village, living in violation of the housing code in spacious and inexpensive lofts. The code had since been modified to permit residential loft dwelling and SoHo had turned chic and expensive, which led loft seekers further south to Tribeca. The rents aren't cheap there either now, but the streets still have the deserted quality of SoHo ten or twelve years ago.
I stuck to a well-lighted street. I walked near the curb, not close to buildings, and I did my best to move quickly and give an impression of alertness. Confrontations were easily avoided in those empty streets.
Janice Keane's address turned out to be a six-story loft building, a narrow structure fitted in between two taller, wider and more modern buildings. It looked cramped, like a little man on a crowded subway. Floor-to-ceiling windows ran the width of the facade on each of its floors. On the ground floor, shuttered for the weekend, was a wholesaler of plumber's supplies.
I went into a claustrophobic hallway, found a bell marked Keane, rang it two long and three short. I went out to the sidewalk, stood at the curb looking up at all those windows.
She called down from one of them, asking my name. I couldn't see anything in that light. I gave my name, and something small whistled down through the air and jangled on the pavement beside me. "Fifth floor," she said. "There's an elevator."
There was indeed, and it could have accommodated a grand piano. I rode it to the fifth floor and stepped out into a spacious loft. There were a lot of plants, all deep green and thriving, and relatively little in the way of furniture. The doors were oak, buffed to a high sheen. The walls were exposed brick. Overhead track lighting provided illumination.
She said, "You're right on time. The place is a mess but I won't apologize. There's coffee."
"If it's no trouble."
"None at all. I'm going to have a cup myself. Just let me steer you to a place to sit and I'll be a proper hostess. Milk? Sugar?"
"Just black."
She left me in an area with a couch and a pair of chairs grouped around a high-pile rug with an abstract design. A couple of eight-foot-tall bookcases reached a little more than halfway to the ceiling and helped screen the space from the rest of the loft. I walked over to the window and looked down at Lispenard Street but there wasn't a whole lot to see.
There was one piece of sculpture in the room and I was standing in front of it when she came back with the coffee. It was the head of a woman. Her hair was a nest of snakes, her face a high-cheekboned, broad-browed mask of unutterable disappointment.
"That's my Medusa," she said. "Don't meet her eyes. Her gaze turns men to stone."
"She's very good."
"Thank you."
"She looks so disappointed."
"That's the quality," she agreed. "I didn't know that until I'd finished her, and then I saw it for myself. You've got a pretty good eye."
"For disappointment, anyway."
She was an attractive woman. Medium height, a little more well-fleshed than was strictly fashionable. She wore faded Levi's and a slate-blue chamois shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. Her face was heart-shaped, its contours accentuated by a sharply defined widow's peak. Her hair, dark brown salted with gray, hung almost to her shoulders. Her gray eyes were large and well-spaced, and a touch of mascara around them was the only makeup she wore.
We sat in a pair of chairs at right angles to one another and set our coffee mugs on a table made from a section of tree trunk and a slab of slate. She asked if I'd had trouble finding her address and I said I hadn't. Then she said, "Well, shall we talk about Barb Ettinger? Maybe you can start by telling me why you're interested in her after all these years."
SHE'D missed the media coverage of Louis Pinell's arrest. It was news to her that the Icepick Prowler was in custody, so it was also news that her former employee had been killed by someone else.
"So for the first time you're looking for a killer with a motive," she said. "If you'd looked at the time-"
"It might have been easier. Yes."
"And it might be easier now just to look the other way. I don't remember her father. I must have met him, after the murder if not before, but I don't have any recollection of him. I remember her sister. Have you met her?"
"Not yet."
"I don't know what she's like now, but she struck me as a snotty little bitch. But I didn't know her well, and anyway it was nine years ago. That's what I keep coming back to. Everything was nine years ago."
"How did you meet Barbara Ettinger?"
"We ran into each other in the neighborhood. Shopping at the Grand Union, going to the candy store for a paper. Maybe I mentioned that I was running a day-care center. Maybe she heard it from someone else. Either way, one morning she walked into the Happy Hours and asked if I needed any help."
"And you hired her right away?"
"I told her I couldn't pay her much. The place was just about making expenses. I started it for a dumb reason-there was no convenient day-care center in the neighborhood, and I needed a place to dump my own kids, so I found a partner and we opened the Happy Hours, and instead of dumping my kids I was watching them and everybody else's, and of course my partner came to her senses about the time the ink was dry on the lease, and she backed out and I was running the whole show myself. I told Barb I needed her but I couldn't afford her, and she said she mostly wanted something to do and she'd work cheap. I forget what I paid her but it wasn't a whole lot."
"Was she good at her work?"
"It was essentially baby-sitting. There's a limit to how good you can be at it." She thought for a moment. "It's hard to remember. Nine years ago, so I was twenty-nine at the time, and she was a few years younger."
"She was twenty-six when she died."
"Jesus, that's not very old, is it?" She closed her eyes, wincing at early death. "She was a big help to me, and I guess she was good enough at what she did. She seemed to enjoy it most of the time. She'd have enjoyed it more if she'd been a more contented woman generally."
"She was discontented?"
"I don't know if that's the right word." She turned to glance at her bust of Medusa. "Disappointed? You got the feeling that Barb's life wasn't quite what she'd had in mind for herself. Everything was okay, her husband was okay, her apartment was okay, but she'd hoped for something more than just okay, and she didn't have it."
"Someone described her as restless."
"Restless." She tasted the word. "That fits her well enough. Of course that was a time for women to be restless. Sexual roles were pretty confused and confusing."
"Aren't they still?"
"Maybe they always will be. But I think things are a little more settled now than they were for a while there. She was restless, though. Definitely restless."
"Her marriage was a disappointment?"
"Most of them are, aren't they? I don't suppose it would have lasted, but we'll never know, will we? Is he still with the Welfare Department?"
I brought her up to date on Douglas Ettinger.
"I didn't know him too well," she said. "Barb seemed to feel he wasn't good enough for her. At least I got that impression. His background was low-rent compared to hers. Not that she grew up with the Vanderbilts, but I gather she had a proper suburban childhood and a fancy education. He worked long hours and he had a dead-end job. And yes, there was one other thing wrong with him."
"What was that?"
"He fucked around."
"Did he really or did she just think so?"
"He made a pass at me. Oh, it was no big deal, just a casual, offhand sort of proposition. I was not greatly interested. The man looked like a chipmunk. I wasn't much flattered, either, because one sensed he did this sort of thing a lot and that it didn't mean I was irresistible. Of course I didn't say anything to Barb, but she had evidence of her own. She caught him once at a party, necking in the kitchen with the hostess. And I gather he was dipping into his welfare clients."
"What about his wife?"
"I gather he was dipping into her, too. I don't-"
"Was she having an affair with anybody?"
She leaned forward, took hold of her coffee mug. Her hands were large for a woman, their nails clipped short. I suppose long nails would be an impossible hindrance for a sculptor.
She said, "I was paying her a very low salary. You could almost call it a token salary. I mean, high-school kids got a better hourly rate for baby-sitting, and Barb didn't even get to raid the refrigerator. So if she wanted time off, all she did was take it."
"Did she take a lot of time off?"
"Not all that much, but I had the impression that she was taking an occasional afternoon or part of an afternoon for something more exciting than a visit to the dentist. A woman has a different air about her when she's off to meet a lover."
"Did she have that air the day she was killed?"
"I wished you'd asked me nine years ago. I'd have had a better chance of remembering. I know she left early that day but I don't have any memory of the details. You think she met a lover and he killed her?"
"I don't think anything special at this stage. Her husband said she was nervous about the Icepick Prowler."
"I don't think… wait a minute. I remember thinking about that afterward, after she'd been killed. That she'd been talking about the danger of living in the city. I don't know if she said anything specific about the Icepick killings, but there was something about feeling as though she was being watched or followed. I interpreted it as a kind of premonition of her own death."
"Maybe it was."
"Or maybe she was being watched and followed. What is it they say? 'Paranoiacs have enemies, too.' Maybe she really sensed something."
"Would she let a stranger into the apartment?"
"I wondered about that at the time. If she was on guard to begin with-"
She broke off suddenly. I asked her what was the matter.
"Nothing."
"I'm a stranger and you let me into your apartment."
"It's a loft. As if it makes a difference. I-"
I took out my wallet and tossed it onto the table between us. "Look through it," I said. "There's an ID in it. It'll match the name I gave you over the phone, and I think there's something with a photograph on it."
"That's not necessary."
"Look it over anyway. You're not going to be very useful as a subject of interrogation if you're anxious about getting killed. The ID won't prove I'm not a rapist or a murderer, but rapists and murderers don't usually give you their right names ahead of time. Go ahead, pick it up."