Scudder 03 - Time to Murder and Create by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-03-12T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

By the time I got off the subway at Broadway and One Hundred Tenth, I was a lot less impressed by the coincidence I had turned up. If Prager had decided to kill me, either directly or through hirelings, there was no particular reason why he would have stolen a car two blocks away from his daughter's apartment. It looked at first glance as though it ought to add up to something, but I wasn't sure that it did.

Of course, if Stacy Prager had a boyfriend, and if he turned out to be the Marlboro man…

It looked to be worth a try. I found her building, a five-story brownstone which now held four apartments to a floor. I rang her bell, and there was no answer. I rang a couple of other bells on the top floor-it's surprising how often people buzz you in that way-but no one was home, and the vestibule lock looked very easy. I used a pick on it, and I couldn't have opened it much faster with a key. I climbed three steep flights of stairs and knocked on the door of 4-C. I waited and knocked again, and then I opened both the locks on her door and made myself at home.

There was one fairly large room with a convertible sofa and a sprinkling of Salvation Army furniture. I checked the closet and the dresser, and all I learned was that if Stacy had a boyfriend he lived elsewhere. There was no signs of male occupancy.

I gave the place a very casual toss, just trying to get some sense of the person who lived there. There were a lot of books, most of them paperbacks, most of them dealing with some aspect of psychology. There was a stack of magazines: New York and Psychology Today and Intellectual Digest. There was nothing stronger than aspirin in the medicine chest. Stacy kept her apartment in good order, and it in turn gave the impression that her life was also in good order. I felt a violator standing there in her apartment, scanning the titles of her books, rummaging through the clothes in her closet. I grew increasingly uncomfortable in the role, and my failure to find anything to justify my presence augmented the feeling. I got out of there and closed up after myself. I locked one of the locks; the other had to be locked with a key, and I figured she would simply decide she had failed to lock it on the way out.

I could have found a nice framed photo of the Marlboro man. That would have been handy, but it just hadn't happened. I left the building and went around the corner and had a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Prager and Ethridge and Huysendahl, and one of them had killed Spinner and had tried to kill me, and I didn't seem to be getting anywhere.

Suppose it was Prager. Things seemed to form a pattern, and although they didn't really lock in place, they had the right sort of feel to them.

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