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

and strangulation.” He shifted a cud-sized wad of gum from one side of his mouth to the other, pushed a lock of hair off his forehead, and yawned. “What have you got, some new information?”
    “Nothing. I wanted to find out what you had.”
    “Yeah, right.”
    He worked on the chewing gum. He was a patrolman named Andersen who worked out of the Eighteenth. Another cop, a detective named Guzik, had learned that Andersen had caught the Redfield case and had taken the trouble to introduce the two of us. I hadn’t known Andersen when I was on the force. He was younger than I, but then most people are nowadays.
    He said, “Thing is, Scudder, we more or less put that one out of the way. It’s in an open file. You know how it works. If we get new information, fine, but in the meantime I don’t sit up nights thinking about it.”
    “I just wanted to see what you had.”
    “Well, I’m kind of tight for time, if you know what I mean. My own personal time, I set a certain store by my own time.”
    “I can understand that.”
    “You probably got some relative of the deceased for a client. Wants to find out who’d do such a terrible thing to poor old Cousin Mary. Naturally you’re interested because it’s a chance to make a buck and a man’s gotta make a living. Whether a man’s a cop or a civilian he’s gotta make a buck, right?”
    Uh-huh. I seem to remember that we were subtler in my day, but perhaps that’s just age talking. I thought of telling him that I didn’t have a client but why should he believe me? He didn’t know me. If there was nothing in it for him, why should he bother?
    So I said, “You know, we’re just a couple weeks away from Memorial Day.”
    “Yeah, I’ll buy a poppy from a Legionnaire. So what else is new?”
    “Memorial Day’s when women start wearing white shoes and men put straw hats on their heads. You got a new hat for the summer season, Andersen? Because you could use one.”
    “A man can always use a new hat,” he said.
    A hat is cop talk for twenty-five dollars. By the time I left the precinct house Andersen had two tens and a five of Mary Alice Redfield’s bequest to me and I had all the data that had turned up to date.
    I think Andersen won that one. I now knew that the murder weapon had been a kitchen knife with a blade approximately seven and a half inches long. That one of the stab wounds had found the heart and had probably caused death instantaneously. That it was impossible to determine whether strangulation had taken place before or after death. That should have been possible to determine — maybe the medical examiner hadn’t wasted too much time checking her out, or maybe he had been reluctant to commit himself. She’d been dead a few hours when they found her — the estimate was that she’d died around midnight and the body wasn’t reported until half-past five. That wouldn’t have ripened her all that much, not in winter weather, but most likely her personal hygiene was nothing to boast about, and she was just a shopping bag lady and you couldn’t bring her back to life, so why knock yourself out running tests on her malodorous corpse?
    I learned a few other things. The landlady’s name. The name of the off-duty bartender, heading home after a nightcap at the neighborhood after-hours joint, who’d happened on the body and who had been drunk enough or sober enough to take the trouble to report it. And I learned the sort of negative facts that turn up in a police report when the case is headed for an open file — the handful of non-leads that led nowhere, the witnesses who had nothing to contribute, the routine matters routinely handled. They hadn’t knocked themselves out, Andersen and his partner, but would I have handled it any differently? Why knock yourself out chasing a murderer you didn’t stand much chance of catching?
    In the theater, SRO is good news. It means a sellout performance, standing room only. But once you get out of the theater