Read Online The Night and The Music by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online

nothing to deserve it. It had been left to me by a poor little rich woman whose name I’d not even known.
    It had never occurred to me to refuse the dough. Very early in my career as a cop I’d learned an important precept. When someone put money in your hand you closed your fingers around it and put it in your pocket. I learned that lesson well and never had cause to regret its application. I didn’t walk around with my hand out and I never took drug or homicide money but I certainly grabbed all the clean graft that came my way and a certain amount that wouldn’t have stood a white glove inspection. If Mary Alice thought I merited twelve hundred dollars, who was I to argue?
    Ah, but it didn’t quite work that way. Because somehow the money gnawed at me.
    After breakfast I went to St. Paul’s but there was a service going on, a priest saying Mass, so I didn’t stay. I walked down to St. Benedict the Moor’s on Fifty-third Street and sat for a few minutes in a pew at the rear. I go to churches to try to think, and I gave it a shot but my mind didn’t know where to go.
    I slipped six twenties into the poor box. I tithe. It’s a habit I got into after I left the department and I still don’t know why I do it. God knows. Or maybe He’s as mystified as I am. This time, though, there was a certain balance in the act. Mary Alice Redfield had given me twelve hundred dollars for no reason I could comprehend. I was passing on a ten percent commission to the church for no better reason.
    I stopped on the way out and lit a couple of candles for various people who weren’t alive anymore. One of them was for the bag lady. I didn’t see how it could do her any good, but I couldn’t imagine how it could harm her, either.
    I had read some press coverage of the killing when it happened. I generally keep up with crime stories. Part of me evidently never stopped being a policeman. Now I went down to the Forty-second Street library to refresh my memory.
    The Times had run a pair of brief back-page items, the first a report of the killing of an unidentified female derelict, the second a follow-up giving her name and age. She’d been forty-seven, I learned. This surprised me, and then I realized that any specific number would have come as a surprise. Bums and bag ladies are ageless. Mary Alice Redfield could have been thirty or sixty or anywhere in between.
    The News had run a more extended article than the Times, enumerating the stab wounds — twenty-six of them — and described the scarf wound about her throat — blue and white, a designer print, but tattered at its edges and evidently somebody’s castoff. It was this article that I remembered having read.
    But the Post had really played the story. It had appeared shortly after the new owner took over the paper and the editors were going all out for human interest, which always translates out as sex and violence. The brutal killing of a woman touches both of those bases, and this had the added kick that she was a character. If they’d ever learned she was an heiress it would have been page three material, but even without that knowledge they did all right by her.
    The first story they ran was straight news reporting, albeit embellished with reports on the blood, the clothes she was wearing, the litter in the alley where she was found, and all that sort of thing. The next day a reporter pushed the pathos button and tapped out a story featuring capsule interviews with people in the neighborhood. Only a few of them were identified by name and I came away with the feeling that he’d made up some peachy quotes and attributed them to unnamed nonexistent hangers-on. As a sidebar to that story, another reporter speculated on the possibility of a whole string of bag lady murders, a speculation which happily had turned out to be off the mark. The clown had presumably gone around the West Side asking shopping bag ladies if they were afraid of being the killer’s next victim. I hope he