“Twenty-five minutes past eleven.”
“How do you…?”
“I looked at my watch.”
“He came flying out the window…”
“Naked.”
“Almost hit you…”
“Almost. But not.”
“At twenty-five past eleven.”
“Exact.”
“You looked at your watch.”
“Yes.”
“What time did you leave for the movie?”
“It started at nine.”
“So from nine till…”
“No, we left before nine. To get there. The movie house is just around the corner. We left here at about a quarter till nine. Me and my wife.”
“What time did you get back here?”
“About a quarter past eleven.”
“Just in time for him to almost hit you on the head.”
“Well, a little before. Klara went inside, I stayed out to take some air.”
“So from a quarter to nine till a quarter past eleven, you couldn’t have seen anyone going in or coming out of the building.”
“That’s right.”
So what the fuck good are you? Jabeem wondered.
“How about afterward?” Carella asked. “Did you see anyone coming out of the building after Mr. Madden’s fall?”
“There was a lot of confusion. Police, ambulances…”
“Before the confusion,” Carella said. “What’d you do right after the body came down?”
“I went inside to phone the police.”
“Nine-one-one clocked the call at eleven-thirty,” Biggs told Carella.
“Then what?”
“I came out again to wait for them.”
“Blues responded at eleven thirty-seven,” Biggs told Carella. “We got here ten minutes after that.”
“So you weren’t out here for a good seven, eight minutes,” Carella said.
“That’s right,” Seifert said.
“So during that time, you couldn’t have seen anyone leaving the building.”
“That’s right.”
So what the fuck good are you? Jabeem wondered again.
“But there were other persons here,” Seifert said. “When I came out again, there was already a big crowd.”
All of them staring at the mess on the sidewalk here, Jabeem figured, none of them noticing anybody coming out of the building. All four detectives were silent for a moment.
Carella was wondering why Madden had taken off all his clothes before jumping out the window.
Biggs was wondering the same thing
Kling was wondering if Madden had been dragged into the living room, and hoisted up onto the windowsill, and then shoved out the window.
Jabeem was wondering — just supposing now — if somebody had shoved Madden out that window, would who — ever’d done it come marching out the front door of the building?
“Any other way out of the building?” he asked.
“Yes,” Seifert said.
“Where?”
“There’s a door in the basement. Near the laundry room.”
“Where does it go?”
“To the backyard.”
And clear into the big bad city, Jabeem thought.
Two technicians from the mobile crime unit were working the apartment when they got back upstairs. They had found dried stains on the sheets and one of them was taking sample cuttings which would be sent to the lab for analysis. Biggs asked if they might be semen stains.
“That’s a possibility, who knows?” the tech said.
The other tech was on his hands and knees, going over every inch of the floor.
“You get lots of guys knock off a quickie before they do the Dutch,” he said.
“Why’s that?” his partner asked.
“Cause it’s always nice to knock off a quickie.”
“Those two glasses look like there might’ve been a girl in here with him,” Biggs said.
“We’ll be takin them with us, too,” the first tech said.
The other tech was approaching the bed now, still on his hands and knees.
“Could be his hand was the girl,” Jabeem said.
“They’ll be testing those stains for her, too, won’t they?” Biggs asked.
“If there was a her,” Jabeem insisted.
“Yeah, the usual vaginal shit,” the second tech said, and poked his head under the bed.
“Maybe that’s why all his clothes were off,” Kling suggested. “A girl.”
“Sure would account for those glasses either side the bed,” Biggs said.
“Could be a party happened last week,” Jabeem said pessimistically.
“Hello, hello, hello,” the second tech said from under the bed.
They all turned to him as he backed himself out.
He was holding in his gloved right hand a ruby-red earring that glowed like a werewolf’s eye.
The assistant stage manager, a young black man who introduced himself as Kirby Rawlings, told them the only people here right now were him and the understudies, who he was running through the second act. In show business, apparently, everything was business as usual — even if your stage manager had thrown himself out a window the night before.
“We’re all on a lunch break right now, though,” Rawlings said.
“When’s Josie Beales coming in?” Carella asked.
“Not till two o’clock.”
“Know where we can find Mr. Greenbaum?”
“I think he went next door for a sandwich.”
“Have I got time to make a call?” Kling asked.
“Sure, go ahead,” Carella said.
He phoned Sharyn from the pay phone near the stage door entrance. The former boxer, Torey Andrews, sitting on his high stool, watched him as he dialed. This was one of Sharyn’s days in the Diamondback office. The woman who answered the phone said she was in with a patient.
“This is Detective Kling,” he told her, turning his back to Torey.
“Is this police business?” she asked.
“No, it’s personal,” he said.
He liked that. Saying it was personal.
“Just a minute, please.”
Sharyn came on the line a moment later.
“Hi,” she said.
“We’ve got to talk to a guy here,” he said, “and then I can come uptown if you’re free for lunch.”
“It’ll have to be a quick one,” she said, “I’m really jammed today.”
“I have to be back down here by two, anyway.”
“I’ll be waiting,” she said.
They found Jerry Greenbaum sitting against the whitewashed brick wall in the alley where Michelle had first been stabbed. He was eating a sandwich he’d bought at the deli opposite the theater, washing it down with Pepsi-Cola he sipped through a straw. He looked up when they approached, brown eyes alert in a narrow face, curly black hair giving him the look of a dark cherub. They told him they’d found a manuscript for a play titled…
“Wench, yeah,“ he said.
“Actually, The Wench Is…“
“Dead, yeah,” he said. “It’s from Marlowe.”
“Philip?” Kling asked.
“Christopher,” Jerry said, and quoted, “ ‘But that was in another country, and besides the wench is dead.’ The Jew of Malta, 1589.”
“We gather from the title page…”
“Yeah, Chuck and I were writing it together.”
“How come?”
“We started tossing around ideas during rehearsal one day, and decided we ought to write a play,” Jerry said, and shrugged. “We figured if Freddie can get his shit produced, then anybody can.”
“When was this?”
“That we decided to do it? A few weeks ago.”
“Wrote twenty pages since then, huh?”