Out on the Cutting Edge (27 page)

"I just knew it was something to take to go to sleep. I didn't know the name of it."

"It was typed right on the label."

"Maybe I never read it properly in the first place. Maybe it never registered, maybe I haven't got a mind for that kind of detail."

"You? The woman who knew what Paris green was? The woman who would know how to poison a municipal water system if the word came down from the party leadership?"

"Then maybe it was just a slip of the tongue."

"Just a slip of the tongue. And then, the next time I looked, the bottle was gone from the medicine cabinet."

She sighed. "I can explain. It's going to make me sound stupid, but I can explain."

"Let's hear it."

"I gave him the chloral hydrate. I didn't know any reason not to, for God's sake. He came in to talk and he wasn't going to have any coffee because he told me he was having a terrible time sleeping. I guess there was something on his mind, the same thing he was going to tell you about, but he didn't give any indication what it was."

"And?"

"I told him decaf wouldn't keep him awake, and that this particular brand seemed to help people to sleep, at least it had that effect on me.

And then I put a couple of drops of the chloral hydrate in his cup but didn't let him know what I was doing. And he drank it right down and went up to bed, and the next time I saw him was when I walked in there with you and he was dead."

"And the reason you didn't say anything--"

"Was because I thought I'd killed him! I thought the dose I gave him made him drowsy, and then as a result he lost consciousness while he was half strangling himself, and that was why he died. And by this time you and I were sleeping together, and I was terrified you'd hold it against me, I knew what a fanatic you are about sobriety, and I couldn't see what purpose it would serve to admit that I'd done something that might have contributed to his death." She held her hands at her sides.

"That may make me guilty of something, Matt. But it doesn't mean I killed him."

"Jesus," I said.

"Do you see, darling? Do you see what--"

"What I'm beginning to see is how good you are at improvisation. I suppose you had good training, living under false colors for all those years, putting up one front after another for your neighbors and co-workers. It must have been a great education."

"You're talking about the lies I told earlier. I'm not proud of that but I guess it's true. I guess I've learned to lie as a reflex. And now I have to learn a new way of behavior, now that I'm involved with someone who's really important to me. It's a different ball game now, isn't it, and I--"

"Cut the shit, Willa."

She recoiled as if from a blow. "It won't work," I told her. "You didn't just slip him a Mickey. You knotted the clothesline around the neck and hanged him from the pipe. It wouldn't have been hard for you to do. You're a big strong woman and he was a little guy, and he wouldn't have put up a fight once you'd knocked him out with the chloral. You set the stage nicely, you stripped him, you put a couple of bondage magazines where they'd tell a good story. Where did you buy the magazines? Times Square?"

"I didn't buy the magazines. I didn't do any of the things you just said."

"One of the clerks down there might remember you. You're a striking woman, and they don't get that many female customers in the first place. I don't suppose it would take a whole lot of legwork to turn up a clerk who remembers you."

"Matt, if you could hear yourself. The awful things you're accusing me of. I know you're tired, I know the kind of day you've had, but--"

"I told you to cut the crap. I know you killed him, Willa. You closed the windows to hold the smell in a

little longer, to make the medical evidence a little less precise.

Then you waited for someone to notice the stench and report it, to you or to the cops. You were in no hurry. You didn't really care how long it took before the body was discovered. What mattered was that he was dead. That way his secret could die with him."

"What secret?"

"The one he had trouble living with. The one you didn't dare let him tell me. About all the other people you killed."

I said, "Poor Mrs. Mangan. All her old friends are dying while she sits around waiting for her own death.

And the ones who don't die are moving away. There was a landlord around the corner who moved junkies into the building so that they would terrorize his rent-controlled tenants. He got fined for it. He should have gone to jail, the son of a bitch."

She looked right at me. It was hard to read her face, hard to guess what was going on behind it.

"But a lot of people have been moving out of the neighborhood willingly," I went on. "Their landlords buy them out, offer them five or ten or twenty thousand dollars to give up their apartments. It must confuse the hell out of them, to get offered more to vacate an apartment than they've paid all their lives to live in it.

Of course, once they take the money, they can't find a place they can afford to live in."

"That's the system."

"It's a funny system. You pay steady rent on a couple of rooms for twenty or thirty years and the guy who owns the building pays a small fortune to get rid of you. You'd think he'd want to hang on to a good steady tenant, but then the same kind of thing happens in business.

Companies pay their best employees big bonuses to take early retirement and get the hell out. That way they can replace them with young kids who'll work for lower salaries. You wouldn't think it would work that way, but it does."

"I don't know what you're getting at."

"Don't you? I managed to get hold of the autopsy report on Gertrude Grod. She had the apartment

directly above Eddie's, and she died right around the time he was starting to get sober. She had just about as much chloral hydrate in her as Eddie did. And her physician never prescribed the drug for her, and neither did anyone on staff at Roosevelt or St. Clare's. I figure you knocked on her door and got her to invite you in for a cup of tea, and when she was looking the other way you dosed her cup. On your way out you could have made sure the window gates were unlocked, so that Eddie could slip in a few hours later with a knife."

"Why would he do this for me?"

"My guess is you had a sexual hold on him, but it could have been anything. He was just starting to get sober and he wasn't a model of mental health at the time. And you're pretty good at getting people to do what you want them to do. You probably convinced Eddie he'd be doing the old lady a favor. I've heard you rap on the subject, how nobody should have to grow old that way. And she'd never know what happened to her, the drug would keep her from waking up, and so she'd never feel a thing. All he had to do was go out his window, climb up a flight, and stick a knife into a sleeping woman."

"Why wouldn't I just knife her myself? If I was already in her apartment and I got her to drink a dose of chloral."

"You wanted it to go in the books as a burglary. Eddie could make it a lot more convincing. He could lock her door from the inside and put the chain latch on before he went back out the window. I saw the police report. They had to break the door down. That was a nice touch, made it look a lot less like a possible inside job."

"Why would I want her dead?"

"That's easy. You wanted her apartment."

"Look around you," she said. "I've already got an apartment.

Ground floor, no stairs to climb. What did I need with hers?"

"I spent a lot of time downtown today. Most of the morning and a good part of the afternoon. It's hard to chase things through the municipal record system, but if you know how to do it and what you're looking for, there's a lot you can find out. I found out who owns this building. An outfit called Daskap Realty Corp."

"I could have told you that."

"I also found out who owns Daskap. A woman named Wilma Rosser. I don't suppose it would be terribly hard to prove that Wilma Rosser and Willa Rossiter are the same person. You bought the building and moved in, but you told everybody that you were just the super, that you got the apartment in return for your services."

"You have to do that," she said. "No landlord can live on the premises unless you hide the fact from your tenants. Otherwise they're after you all the time for one thing or another. I had to be able to shrug and say the landlord says no or I can't reach the landlord or whatever I had to say."

"It must have been tough," I said. "Trying to generate a positive cash flow here, with all of the tenants paying rent way below market."

"It is tough," she admitted. "The woman you mentioned, Gertrude Grod. She was rent-controlled, of course. Her annual rent came to less than what it cost to heat her place during the winter. But you can't believe I'd kill her because of that."

"Her among others. You don't own just this building. You're the principal in two other corporations besides Daskap. One of them, also owned ultimately by Wilma Rosser, owns the building next door.

Another, owned by W. P. Taggart, owns two buildings across the street, the ones where you're the superintendent. Wilma P. Rosser was divorced from Elroy Hugh Taggart three years ago in New Mexico."

"I got in the habit of using different names. My political background and all."

"The buildings across the street have been a very unsafe place to live since you bought them. Five people have died over there in the past year and a half. One was a suicide. They found her with her head in the oven. The rest all died of natural causes. Heart attacks, respiratory failure. When frail old people die alone, no one looks too hard to see what did it. You can smother an old man in his sleep, you can haul an old lady across the floor and leave her with her head in the gas oven.

That's a little dangerous because there's always the possibility of an explosion, and you wouldn't want to blow up the building just to kill a tenant. That's probably why you only used that method once."

"There's no evidence of any of this," she said. "Old people die all the time. It's not my fault if the actuarial tables caught up with some of my tenants."

"They were all full of chloral hydrate, Willa."

She started to say something. Her mouth opened, but something stopped the words. She breathed heavily, in and out, and then her hand moved to her mouth and her index finger rubbed at the gum above the two false teeth, replacements for the ones she'd lost in Chicago. She sighed again, heavily, and something went out of her face and the set of her shoulders.

She picked up her coffee cup, took it over to the sink and emptied it. She got the bottle of Teacher's from the cabinet and filled the cup. She drank deeply and shuddered. "God," she said, "you must miss this stuff."

"Sometimes."

"I'd miss it. Matt, they were just waiting to die, just hanging on and hanging on."

"And you were doing them a favor."

"I was doing everybody a favor, myself included. There are twenty-four apartments in this building, all with pretty much the same layout. Renovated and sold as co-ops, every apartment in the building would bring a minimum of a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.

You could probably get a little more for the front ones. They're a little nicer, they're airier, the light's better. Maybe you could up the numbers a little if you did a really nice renovation. Do you know what that comes to?"

"Two million dollars?"

"Closer to three. That's for each building. Buying them cost me every cent I inherited from my parents, and they're mortgaged to the hilt.

The rent roll barely covers payments and taxes and maintenance. I have a few tenants in each building who are paying close to market, and otherwise I couldn't keep the

buildings. Matt, do you think it's fair that a landlord has to subsidize tenants by letting them hang on to an apartment for a tenth of what it's worth?"

"Of course not. The fair thing is for them to die and for you to make twelve million dollars."

"I wouldn't be making that much. Once I've got a large percentage of vacant apartments I can sell the buildings to somebody who specializes in co-op conversions. If everything comes together the way it should, my profit will be about a million dollars a building."

"So you'll make four million."

"I might hang on to one of the buildings. I'm not sure, I haven't decided. But either way I'll make a lot of money."

"It sounds like a lot to me."

"It's actually less than it sounds like. A millionaire used to be a really rich person. Now when the top prize in a lottery is a million dollars it's considered small-time. But I could live nicely on a couple of million dollars."

"It's a shame you won't be able to."

"Why won't I?" She reached out and took my hand, and I felt her energy. "Matt, there won't be any more killings. That ended a long time ago."

"A tenant in this building died not two months ago."

"In this building? Matt, that was Carl White, he died of cancer, for God's sake!"

"He was full of chloral, Willa."

Her shoulders sagged. "He was dying of cancer," she said. "He would have died of his own accord in another month or two. He was in pain all the time." She raised her eyes to mine. "You can believe what you want about me, Matt. You can think I'm the reincarnation of Lucrezia Borgia, but you really can't turn Carl White's death into a murder for gain. All I did was lose whatever rent he would have paid in however many months of life he'd have had left to him."

"Then why did you kill him?"

"You'll try to find a way to twist this, but it was an act of mercy."

"What about Eddie Dunphy? Was that an act of mercy?"

"Oh, God," she said. "That was the only one I regret. The others were people who would have killed themselves if they'd had the wit to think of it. No, Eddie wasn't an act of mercy. Killing him was an act of self-preservation."