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Now what?
I looked down and a wave of vertigo hit me. I thought of all the drug labels with their warnings about driving or operating machinery. If drowsiness occurs, stay off rickety fire escapes.
I took another look. Below me, the fire escape terminated in a courtyard walled off on all three sides. I might get into the basement, but there was sure to be a cop posted downstairs, most likely a fat one who hadn’t wanted to climb up two flights in the first place.
So I started up the fire escape, up past the fourth floor and on to the roof. Someone had built a redwood sundeck up there, and there were trees and shrubs in large redwood planters. It was all very lovely, but there was one trouble with it-I couldn’t get off it. The adjoining buildings were both a hundred or more feet taller than the one I was standing on, and the heavy fire door leading back into the building couldn’t be opened without a key. This wouldn’t have been a problem if I’d had my tools along, but who figured I’d need them?
Back down the fire escape. I paused at the fourth-floor landing, trying to decide if I wanted to take my chances with whoever was posted at ground level. I could always break into the basement and just hide there in the boiler room until the heat died down, but did I really want to do that? For that matter, did I want to scurry past the bedroom window of the Porlock apartment when the police were most likely already in there?
I took a moment to check the two fourth-floor apartments. The one on the right-4-D, I suppose, directly above the Porlock place-had its shade drawn. I pressed my ear to the windowpane and caught Brady Bunch reruns on the television set. The shade was drawn a few yards to the left at 4-C, but I couldn’t hear anything inside, nor could I see any light around the edges of the window shade.
Of course the window was locked.
If I’d had a glass cutter I could have drawn a neat freehand circle on the appropriate pane of glass, reached in and turned the window lock. If I’d had some tape I could have broken any pane I wanted with no more noise than you’d make snapping a dry twig. If I’d had…
If wishes were horses, burglars would ride. I kicked in a pane of glass and closed my eyes until the tinkling stopped. I put my ear to the opening I’d created and listened for a moment or two, then unlocked the window, raised it, and stepped through it.
A few minutes later I left that apartment in a more conventional ma
I asked one what the trouble was. He jutted out his chin at me and told me it was just routine. I nodded, reassured, and went down the other two flights and out.
I wanted to go home. It may or may not be where the heart is but it’s where the burglar’s tools are, and a burglar, like a workman, is only as good as his tools, and I felt naked without mine. I wasn’t sure if the cops had a make on me yet. They’d get one before long, I was fairly sure of that, but I didn’t doubt my ability to get in and out of my apartment before they set about looking for me. I had my tools there, I had cash there, and I would have liked to make a quick pit stop and equip myself for whatever lay ahead.
Because what lay ahead didn’t look too good from where I sat. Madeleine Porlock had been left with more than the traditional number of holes in her head, and my fingerprints were undoubtedly plastered all over that apartment-on the cup I’d been drinking from, on the glass-topped table, and God knows where else. The same criminal genius that had wrapped my inert fingers around the murder gun would have seen to that.
The police would have a lot of questions for me, and they wouldn’t even pay attention to my answers. I, on the other hand, had some hard questions of my own.
Who was Madeleine Porlock? How did she fit into the whole business? Why had she drugged me, and where had her killer come from, and why had he murdered her?
Whatever had become of Rudyard Whelkin?
And, finally, how did the Sikh fit into all of this?
The last question was no more easily answered than the others, but it made me realize I couldn’t go home. By now the Sikh and whoever had sent him would know they’d been hoodwinked, which meant I had to avoid whatever places they might logically expect to find me. The store was out, obviously, and so was the apartment, since anyone with access to a Manhattan phone book can ferret out my address.
I flagged a cab heading downtown on Second Avenue. The driver was young and Hispanic, with alert eyes. Were those eyes registering me even as he asked my destination?
“The Village,” I said.
“What part of it?”
“ Sheridan Square.”
He nodded shortly and away we went.
Carolyn Kaiser’s apartment was on Arbor Court, one of those side-goggled Village lanes I can only find if I start out from the right place. Sheridan Square was the wrong place, so I had to walk up to Greenwich Avenue and then west and south until I hit it. I didn’t remember which building was hers, so I went into the vestibules of several until I found her name on a mailbox and rang her bell.
Nobody home. I’d have called first but I didn’t have her number with me and it was unlisted, and it’s easier to pass a needle through the eye of a camel than to get an unlisted number out of an Information operator. It’s hard enough to get listed numbers. I rang a couple of top-floor bells until someone buzzed me into the building. Carolyn lived on the first floor. I took one look at the locks on her door and turned around and left.
I checked a couple of hardware stores on Hudson. All closed. There was a locksmith, but could I really ask him to sell me burglar’s tools? I didn’t even try. I went to a drugstore and bought masking tape and paper clips and hairpins and a couple of nail files. At the tobacco counter I added a pipesmoker’s gizmo equipped with different doohickeys for tamping, reaming, probing, and otherwise mistreating a pipe. It looked to be made of pretty decent steel.
I went back to Carolyn’s building and a
With my ring of picks and probes, the operation wouldn’t have taken five minutes. With makeshift tools from the drugstore it took closer to ten, during which time two persons entered the building and one left it. If any of them took any notice of me they were too polite to make a scene, and I finished the task at hand and let myself into her place.
Cozy. Very Village, really. One room about fifteen feet square with a teensy lavatory added on in back, so small that your knees nudged the door when you sat on the potty. The bathtub, a large claw-footed relic, was over in the kitchen area with the sink and stove and fridge; Carolyn had had a plywood cover cut to fit it so that she could use it for chopping up vegetables. The walls were painted blue, a deep rich tone, and the window frames and exposed plumbing were a bright yellow.
I used the loo, lit a fire under the leftover coffee (with a match, the pilot didn’t work), and let one of the cats check me out. He was a Burmese and nothing intimidated him. His buddy, a wary-eyed Russian Blue, reposed on the double bed, where he tried to blend with the patchwork quilt. I scratched the Burmese behind the ear and he made that bizarre sound they make and rubbed his head against my ankle. I guess I passed inspection.
The coffee boiled. I poured a cup, took a taste, and got flashes of the mug of doctored coffee Madeleine Porlock had given me. I poured it out, heated some water and made some tea, and fortified the brew with an authoritative slug of California brandy from a bottle I found on the shelf over the sink.