A Ticket to the Boneyard (Matthew Scudder #8)

All your women, Scudder. Jesus, a madman wanted to take from me women I didn't have. I had barely known Connie Cooperman and hadn't thought of her in years. And who were his other targets? Elaine, who played a shopworn Lady of Shalott to my corroded Lancelot. Anita, my wife years and years ago, and Jan, my girlfriend 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."

"Be sweet if we did. Couple of uniforms from our house were first on the scene, so if there's a case it's our case, and I'd fucking love to hang it on your guy's neck. But everything says this is a guy who doesn't leave prints. He called her twice, right? First time he whispered."

"That's right."

"And that's what you got on tape, an unidentified male whispering and saying he sent flowers. And a vague threat, says it's not her turn yet but doesn't say her turn for what. Try making a case out of that."

He looked for someplace to get rid of his cigarette. His eyes went to the floor, then to the open window. He went instead to the kitchen sink and held the cigarette under the tap, then dropped the butt in the trash.

He said, "Then when he does threaten her and talks in a normal voice it's after he tells her to turn off the machine, and of course she does what he says and turns it off. So we got her word he threatened her, and her word that he confessed to killing Cleary and Fitzroy. And even that's thin, because he didn't say exactly what he did or mention anybody by name."

"Right."

"So unless we've got some physical evidence, I don't see that we've got a thing. I'll copy that sketch and we'll try it on the doorman, the guy who was on that morning, and the rest of the crew, too, just in case somebody spotted him lurking around the premises the past few days. I wouldn't expect much, though. And placing him in the area, or even in the building, is a long way from convicting him of her murder. First you've got to establish that there's been a murder, and I don't know how you can do that."

"What about the medical evidence?"

"What about it?"

"What was the cause of death?"

He looked at me.

"Wasn't there an autopsy?"

"It's required. You know that. But you also know what they look like after they fall that far. You want medical evidence? Cleary fell headfirst, and her head collided with Fitzroy's head. Don't even think about the odds of that, but it happened. You know what both their heads look like? Long as the ME doesn't find a bullet in her, he's going to put down that she died from injuries sustained in the fall. You're thinking he may have killed her first."

"It seems likely."

"Yeah, but go prove it. It's just as likely he knocked her out and tossed her out unconscious. What are you going to find, marks on her throat? Evidence of a blow to the head?"

"How about semen? He left some in the woman in Ohio."

"Yeah, and they couldn't even say whose it was. I'll tell you something, Matt, if they find semen in Cleary it could even be Fitzroy's, the way the two of them shared their last moments and all. And say it's Motley's, what does that prove? It's not against the law to go to bed with a woman. It's not even against the law to fuck her in the ass." He reached for another cigarette, changed his mind. "I'll tell you," he said, "we're not gonna get this guy for Cleary. Not without very strong fingerprint evidence, and probably not even with that. Placing him on the scene, even in the room with her, doesn't make it a murder or him a murderer."

"What does?" He looked at me. "Just what do we have to do, wait for a corpse with his signature on it?"

"He'll fuck up, Matt."

"Maybe," I said. "I don't know that I can wait."

Durkin was good. He might not believe the case had a chance of amounting to anything but he went through the motions all the same, and without wasting time. He got some lab techs over there right away, and that afternoon he called me with a report.

The bad news was that they hadn't turned up a single print of Motley's anywhere in the Cleary apartment. The good news, if you wanted to call it that, was the lack of prints at strategic spots on the frame and sill of the window she went out of, which tended to indicate that someone had either taken care not to leave prints or had wiped them away after the body cleared the window. You couldn't call it evidence, people don't leave a print every time they touch a surface, but it helped confirm for us something we already knew. That Toni Cleary hadn't killed herself. That she had help.

All I could think of to do was what I'd already been doing. Talking to people. Knocking on doors. Showing his sketch around, and passing out copies of it, along with cards from my diminishing supply.

That made me think of Jim Faber, who'd printed them as a gift to me. Call your sponsor- that's what you heard all the time in meetings. Don't drink, go to meetings, read the Big Book, call your sponsor. I wasn't drinking and I'd been going to meetings. I couldn't think what the Big Book might have to say about playing hide-and-seek with a vengeful psychopath, nor did I figure Jim was an authority on the subject. I called him anyway.

"Maybe there's nothing you can do," he said.

"That's a helpful thought."

"I don't know if it's helpful or not. It's probably not very encouraging."

"Not very, no."

"But maybe it is. Maybe it's just a way of acknowledging that you're already taking all the appropriate actions. Finding a man who doesn't want to be found in a city the size of New York must be like finding the proverbial needle in the equally proverbial haystack."

"Something like that."

"Of course, if you could involve the police-"

"I've been trying. There's a limit to what they can do at this stage."

"So it sounds as though you're doing everything you can, and beating yourself up because you can't do more. And worrying because the whole thing's out of your control."

"Well, it is."

"Of course it is. We can't control how things turn out. You know that. All we can do is take the action and turn over the results."

"Just take your best shot and walk away from it."

"That's right."

I thought about it. "If my best shot's not good enough, other people get it in the neck."

"I get it. You can't let go of the controls because the stakes are too high."

"Well-"

"You remember the Third Step?" I did, of course, but he felt compelled to quote it anyway. " 'Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God, as we understood Him.' You can turn over the small stuff, but when it's nitty-gritty time you have to take control of it yourself."