On the sidewalk in front of her apartment house, Susan Weiner’s perfect little life drained away in a widening red pool.
8
It is an old-fashioned hue and cry, the kind of thing that isn’t supposed to happen in New York anymore because people don’t care. The man in the blue shirt runs south on Hudson and turns east on Christopher, heading for the twisty little streets and alleys of the West Village. A half-dozen people run after him, shouting. The amazed faces of the tourist couple flash by his eyes as he runs, clutching the handbag under his arm like a football.
The block of Christopher east of Hudson is a short one. The man cuts sharply across the street, runs down Bedford, and turns east on Barrow. If he can get under cover before his pursuers reach the corner of Barrow and Bedford, he might be safe. A sunken courtyard at 58 Barrow catches his eye, and he dashes down its steps. There is a restaurant built partially out over the courtyard, casting it into deep shade. Two doors lead from the courtyard. He chooses the one on the right and pounds on it.
A young man opens the door. He is an actor expecting a delivery of moo goo gai pan from a nearby Chinese take-out. He smiles and says, “Hi. What do I owe you?” The killer pushes by him and runs through the small apartment. He is no longer thinking very clearly, or even as clearly as he normally does, which is not with any particular depth or lucidity. The idea of escape fills his entire mind. Here fortune favors him. There is a door opening into the interior of the building, and he goes through it and up two flights to where the stairs end in a small landing, under a skylight.
By now he is exhausted. He rests for a moment, panting, and rummages through the handbag. He tears a thin sheaf of currency from the wallet he finds there, seven dollars in all, and thrusts it into his pocket. He tosses the knife and the bag into a corner of the stairwell. He listens; the building remains silent. He begins to walk quietly down the stairs and stops, because he has just had a thought. He strips off his blue shirt and throws it into a corner with the other stuff. He is wearing a bright red T-shirt underneath it.
The killer walks down the stairs, past the door to the young man’s apartment, and down a dimly lit corridor. He sees a door, opens it, and finds himself again in the courtyard. The young actor is standing there. He has gathered around him a crowd of people, the remains of the crowd who had chased the man in the blue shirt from Hudson Street. They are exchanging experiences. The young man looks up, sees the killer, and shouts. The killer darts back through the door.
Continuing along the corridor, he finds the building’s boiler room, stifling hot and black as midnight. He lights a match. There are some large pieces of cardboard lying about. He uses these to make a nest for himself in the space under the boiler, and lies down in it, carefully pulling the cardboard around him.
The first officer to reach the crime scene was patrolman Ray Thornby, a sturdy black man in his fifth year on the force. He summoned a patrol car on his portable radio, and in a few minutes the dying young woman had been whisked away. Members of the crowd that had gathered vied to describe the assailant and the direction he had gone.
A thin young man on a bicycle came to a screeching halt at the edge of the crowd and shouted, “They got him!”
“Where?” asked Thornby.
“Building at 58 Barrow. He’s in the basement.”
Thornby follows the bike rider to 58 Barrow. He sees that there is a crowd, an angry one, in the center of which is the young actor. The actor approaches the cop, introduces himself as Jerry Shelton, and explains what has occurred. A patrol car rushes up to a halt at the curb, and a sergeant and a patrolman get out. The three policemen learn that the actor was the only one who had actually seen the fugitive.
“This man actually came through your place?” asks Thornby.
“Yes! He pushed right by me like a madman, ran through my apartment, and out the front door.”
“What, this door?”
“No, the back door. It leads to a hallway and the stairs. There’s no way out of the building from it except back through the courtyard. Then I saw him again, over there.” He points at the basement door, across the courtyard. The crowd murmurs assent.
“What did he look like?” Thornby asks.
“Around thirty, I’d say-not a kid. Shortish hair. About five-ten, maybe one-seventy.”
“What was he wearing?” asks Thornby.
“Oh, let me see-blue, I have a blue picture. It all went so fast. A dark blue shirt and jeans, or some kind of work pants. Sneakers. No hat or anything. He was carrying something too. I thought it was my lunch.”
“Race?” asks Thornby mildly. In the West Village you had to pry it out of them, especially if you were a black cop.
“Oh! He was black,” says the actor, reddening.
“Dark complexion? Light? Darker than me or not as dark?”
“About like you.”
“You’re sure he’s in the basement?”
“Yes, I told you, I just saw him,” says Shelton. The crowd murmurs assent again, although most of them have seen nothing.
The sergeant goes back to the patrol car to call for backup, and Thornby and the other patrolman enter the basement.
Karp got the call eighteen minutes after Susan Weiner had been pronounced D.O.A. at St. Vincent’s. Fifteen minutes thereafter, he was at the crime scene on Hudson, talking with the detective in charge, a short, saturnine man out of Zone One named Charlie Cimella.
Karp stared for a moment at the stain on the pavement.
“Who was she?”
Cimella said, “Woman named Susan Weiner. This is where she lived. The super ID’d her. She had a date with her hubby for lunch. Nice. Guy showed up just after it went down.”
“Witnesses?”
“Yeah, a couple of out-of-towners saw the whole thing. And a bunch of folks chased the guy around the corner. I got the word out to the portables to round them up.”
“Okay, when you get them, take them over to the Six. I’ll interview them there. Any chance we’ll pick up the perp?”
Cimella shrugged. “We could get lucky.” He looked at the bloodstain too. “Hell of a thing. Nice neighborhood, nice building. Pretty kid, young. The papers, TV’ll go batshit.”
Karp nodded and went back to his car. Susan Weiner. The name stirred a memory, but he couldn’t place it. A not uncommon name in the City. Maybe he had gone to school with a Susan Weiner. He told the driver to make for the Sixth.
In the lightless, sweltering boiler room of number 58 Barrow Street, Ray Thornby gets lucky. He checks the room with his flashlight beam and is about to leave when he spots the cardboard sticking out from under the boiler. He draws his pistol, kneels down, and tugs at the sneakered foot he finds resting on the cardboard. Slowly a man rolls out from under the boiler, blinking in the flashlight’s glare. Thornby backs away and points his gun.
“Get up and put your hands against the wall!” he orders.
A high, whining voice comes from the man: “Hey, wha’? Hey, man, ’m just sackin’ out, y’know? My daughter, she kicked me out-”
“Up!” says Thornby. The man staggers out and braces his hands against the wall, spreading his legs as he does so. An experienced mutt, thinks the policeman as he pats the man down and goes through the pockets of his grubby jeans.
No ID. Nothing but a crumpled wad of paper money, two singles and a five. And something else: a VISA counterfoil from Bloomingdale’s with today’s date made out to S. WEINER, crumpled up between the bills. Thornby puts the receipt in his own pocket and gives the money back to the man. At this time he does not know the name of the vic, but he knows it was a woman, and that Bloomingdale’s is a high-end women’s clothing store, and that the odds are long indeed that this man he has found under a boiler has just come from a spree in Better Dresses.