A Candle for the Bag Lady (Matthew Scudder Book 2), Page 3

  “Paid for what?”

  “To try and find out who killed her.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh.”

  “I don’t want to get the heirs together to challenge the will, if that was what was bothering you. And I can’t quite make myself suspect that one of her beneficiaries killed her for the money she was leaving him. For one thing, she doesn’t seem to have told people they were named in her will. She never said anything to me or to the two people I’ve spoken with thus far. For another, it wasn’t the sort of murder that gets committed for gain. It was deliberately brutal.”

  “Then why do you want to know who the other beneficiaries are?”

  “I don’t know. Part of it’s cop training. When you’ve got any specific leads, any hard facts, you run them down before you cast a wider net. That’s only part of it. I suppose I want to get more of a sense of the woman. That’s probably all I can realistically hope to get, anyway. I don’t stand much chance of tracking her killer.”

  “The police don’t seem to have gotten very far.”

  I nodded. “I don’t think they tried too hard. And I don’t think they knew she had an estate. I talked to one of the cops on the case and if he had known that he’d have mentioned it to me. There was nothing in her file. My guess is they waited for her killer to run a string of murders so they’d have something more concrete to work with. It’s the kind of senseless crime that usually gets repeated.” I closed my eyes for a moment, reaching for an errant thought. “But he didn’t repeat,” I said. “So they put it on a back burner and then they took it off the stove altogether.”

  “I don’t know much about police work. I’m involved largely with estates and trusts.” He tried a smile. “Most of my clients die of natural causes. Murder’s an exception.”

  “It generally is. I’ll probably never find him. I certainly don’t expect to find him. Just killing her and moving on, hell, and it was all those months ago. He could have been a sailor off a ship, got tanked up and went nuts and he’s in Macao or Port-au-Prince by now. No witnesses and no clues and no suspects and the trail’s three months cold by now, and it’s a fair bet the killer doesn’t remember what he did. So many murders take place in blackout, you know.”

  “Blackout?” He frowned. “You don’t mean in the dark?”

  “Alcoholic blackout. The prisons are full of men who got drunk and shot their wives or their best friends. Now they’re serving twenty-to-life for something they don’t remember. No recollection at all.”

  The idea unsettled him, and he looked especially young now. “That’s frightening,” he said. “Really terrifying.”

  “Yes.”

  “I originally gave some thought to criminal law. My Uncle Jack talked me out of it. He said you either starve or you spend your time helping professional criminals beat the system. He said that was the only way you made good money out of a criminal practice and what you wound up doing was unpleasant and basically immoral. Of course there are a couple of superstar criminal lawyers, the hotshots everybody knows, but the other ninety-nine percent fit what Uncle Jack said.”

  “I would think so, yes.”

  “I guess I made the right decision.” He took his glasses off, inspected them, decided they were clean, put them back on again. “Sometimes I’m not so sure,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder. I’ll get that list for you. I should probably check with someone to make sure it’s all right but I’m not going to bother. You know lawyers. If you ask them whether it’s all right to do something they’ll automatically say no. Because inaction is always safer than action and they can’t get in trouble for giving you bad advice if they tell you to sit on your hands and do nothing. I’m going overboard. Most of the time I like what I do and I’m proud of my profession. This’ll take me a few minutes. Do you want some coffee in the meantime?”

  His girl brought me a cup, black, no sugar. No bourbon, either. By the time I was done with the coffee he had the list ready.

  “If there’s anything else I can do—”

  I told him I’d let him know. He walked out to the elevator with me, waited for the cage to come wheezing up, shook my hand. I watched him turn and head back to his office and I had the feeling he’d have preferred to come along with me. In a day or so he’d change his mind, but right now he didn’t seem too crazy about his job.

  The next week was a curious one. I worked my way through the list Aaron Creighton had given me, knowing what I was doing was essentially purposeless but compulsive about doing it all the same.

  There were thirty-two names on the list. I checked off my own and Eddie Halloran and Genevieve Strom. I put additional check marks next to six people who lived outside of New York. Then I had a go at the remaining twenty-three names. Creighton had done most of the spadework for me, finding addresses to match most of the names. He’d included the date each of the thirty-two codicils had been drawn, and that enabled me to attack the list in reverse chronological order, starting with those persons who’d been made beneficiaries most recently. If this was a method, there was madness to it; it was based on the notion that a person added recently to the will would be more likely to commit homicide for gain, and I’d already decided this wasn’t that kind of a killing to begin with.

  Well, it gave me something to do. And it led to some interesting conversations. If the people Mary Alice Redfield had chosen to remember ran to any type, my mind wasn’t subtle enough to discern it. They ranged in age, in ethnic background, in gender and sexual orientation, in economic status. Most of them were as mystified as Eddie and Genevieve and I about the bag lady’s largesse, but once in a while I’d encounter someone who attributed it to some act of kindness he’d performed, and there was a young man named Jerry Forgash who was in no doubt whatsoever. He was some form of Jesus freak and he’d given poor Mary a couple of tracts and a Get Smart–Get Saved button, presumably a twin to the one he wore on the breast pocket of his chambray shirt. I suppose she put his gifts in one of her shopping bags.

  “I told her Jesus loved her,” he said, “and I suppose it won her soul for Christ. So of course she was grateful. Cast your bread upon the waters, Mr. Scudder. Brother Matthew. You know there was a disciple of Christ named Matthew.”

  “I know.”

  He told me Jesus loved me and that I should get smart and get saved. I managed not to get a button but I had to take a couple of tracts from him. I didn’t have a shopping bag so I stuck them in my pocket, and a couple of nights later I read them before I went to bed. They didn’t win my soul for Christ but you never know.

  I didn’t run the whole list. People were hard to find and I wasn’t in any big rush to find them. It wasn’t that kind of a case. It wasn’t a case at all, really, merely an obsession, and there was surely no need to race the clock. Or the calendar. If anything, I was probably reluctant to finish up the names on the list. Once I ran out of them I’d have to find some other way to approach the woman’s murder and I was damned if I knew where to start.

  While I was doing all this, an odd thing happened. The word got around that I was investigating the woman’s death, and the whole neighborhood became very much aware of Mary Alice Redfield. People began to seek me out. Ostensibly they had information to give me or theories to advance, but neither the information nor the theories ever seemed to amount to anything substantial, and I came to see that they were merely there as a prelude to conversation. Someone would start off by saying he’d seen Mary selling the Post the afternoon before she was killed, and that would serve as the opening wedge of a discussion of the bag woman, or bag women in general, or various qualities of the neighborhood, or violence in American life, or whatever.

  A lot of people started off talking about the bag lady and wound up talking about themselves. I guess most conversations work out that way.

  A nurse from Roosevelt said she never saw a shopping bag lady without hearing an inner voice say There but for the grace of God. And she was not the only woman who confessed she worried about ending
up that way. I guess it’s a specter that haunts women who live alone, just as the vision of the Bowery derelict clouds the peripheral vision of hard-drinking men.

  Genevieve Strom turned up at Armstrong’s one night. We talked briefly about the bag lady. Two nights later she came back again and we took turns spending our inheritances on rounds of drinks. The drinks hit her with some force and a little past midnight she decided it was time to go. I said I’d see her home. At the corner of Fifty-seventh Street she stopped in her tracks and said, “No men in the room. That’s one of Mrs. Larkin’s rules.”

  “Old-fashioned, isn’t she?”

  “She runs a daycent establishment.” Her mock-Irish accent was heavier than the landlady’s. Her eyes, hard to read in the lamplight, raised to meet mine. “Take me someplace.”

  I took her to my hotel, a less decent establishment than Mrs. Larkin’s. We did each other little good but no harm, and it beat being alone.

  Another night I ran into Barry Mosedale at Polly’s Cage. He told me there was a singer at Kid Gloves who was doing a number about the bag lady. “I can find out how you can reach him,” he offered.

  “Is he there now?”

  He nodded and checked his watch. “He goes on in fifteen minutes. But you don’t want to go there, do you?”

  “Why not?”

  “Hardly your sort of crowd, Matt.”

  “Cops go anywhere.”

  “Indeed they do, and they’re welcome wherever they go, aren’t they? Just let me drink this and I’ll accompany you, if that’s all right. You need someone to lend you immoral support.”

  Kid Gloves is a gay bar on Fifty-sixth west of Ninth. The decor is just a little aggressively gay lib. There’s a small raised stage, a scattering of tables, a piano, a loud jukebox. Barry Mosedale and I stood at the bar. I’d been there before and knew better than to order their coffee. I had straight bourbon. Barry had his on ice with a splash of soda.

  Halfway through the drink Gordon Lurie was introduced. He wore tight jeans and a flowered shirt, sat on stage on a folding chair, sang ballads he’d written himself with his own guitar for accompaniment. I don’t know if he was any good or not. It sounded to me as though all the songs had the same melody, but that may just have been a similarity of style. I don’t have much of an ear.

  After a song about a summer romance in Amsterdam, Gordon Lurie announced that the next number was dedicated to the memory of Mary Alice Redfield. Then he sang:

  “She’s a shopping bag lady who lives on

  the sidewalks of Broadway

  Wearing all of her clothes and her years

  on her back

  Toting dead dreams in an old paper sack

  Searching the trash cans for something

  she lost here on Broadway—

  Shopping bag lady…

  “You’d never know but she once was an

  actress on Broadway

  Speaking the words that they stuffed in

  her head

  Reciting the lines of the life that she led

  Thrilling her fans and her friends and her

  lovers on Broadway—

  Shopping bag lady…

  “There are demons who lurk in the corners

  of minds and of Broadway

  And after the omens and portents and

  signs

  Came the day she forgot to remember her

  lines

  Put her life on a leash and took it out

  walking on Broadway—

  Shopping bag lady…”

  There were a couple more verses and the shopping bag lady in the song wound up murdered in a doorway, dying in defense of the “tattered old treasures she mined in the trash cans of Broadway.” The song went over well and got a bigger hand than any of the ones that had preceded it.

  I asked Barry who Gordon Lurie was.

  “You know very nearly as much as I,” he said. “He started here Tuesday. I find him whelming, personally. Neither overwhelming nor underwhelming but somewhere in the middle.”

  “Mary Alice never spent much time on Broadway. I never saw her more than a block from Ninth Avenue.”

  “Poetic license, I’m sure. The song would lack a certain something if you substituted Ninth Avenue for Broadway. As it stands it sounds a little like ‘Rhinestone Cowboy.’”

  “Lurie live around here?”

  “I don’t know where he lives. I have the feeling he’s Canadian. So many people are nowadays. It used to be that no one was Canadian and now simply everybody is. I’m sure it must be a virus.”

  We listened to the rest of Gordon Lurie’s act. Then Barry leaned forward and chatted with the bartender to find out how I could get backstage. I found my way to what passed for a dressing room at Kid Gloves. It must have been a ladies’ lavatory in a prior incarnation.

  I went in there thinking I’d made a breakthrough, that Lurie had killed her and now he was dealing with his guilt by singing about her. I don’t think I really believed this but it supplied me with direction and momentum.

  I told him my name and that I was interested in his act. He wanted to know if I was from a record company. “Am I on the threshold of a great opportunity? Am I about to become an overnight success after years of travail?”

  We got out of the tiny room and left the club through a side door. Three doors down the block we sat in a cramped booth at a coffee shop. He ordered a Greek salad and we both had coffee.

  I told him I was interested in his song about the bag lady.

  He brightened. “Oh, do you like it? Personally I think it’s the best thing I’ve written. I just wrote it a couple of days ago. I opened next door Tuesday night. I got to New York three weeks ago and I had a two-week booking in the West Village. A place called David’s Table. Do you know it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Another stop on the K-Y circuit. Either there aren’t any straight people in New York or they don’t go to nightclubs. But I was there two weeks, and then I opened at Kid Gloves, and afterward I was sitting and drinking with some people and somebody was talking about the shopping bag lady and I had had enough Amaretto to be maudlin on the subject. I woke up Wednesday morning with a splitting headache and the first verse of the song buzzing in my splitting head, and I sat up immediately and wrote it down, and as I was writing one verse the next would come bubbling to the surface, and before I knew it I had all six verses.” He took a cigarette, then paused in the act of lighting it to fix his eyes on me. “You told me your name,” he said, “but I don’t remember it.”

  “Matthew Scudder.”

  “Yes. You’re the person investigating her murder.”

  “I’m not sure that’s the right word. I’ve been talking to people, seeing what I can come up with. Did you know her before she was killed?”

  He shook his head. “I was never even in this neighborhood before. Oh. I’m not a suspect, am I? Because I haven’t been in New York since the fall. I haven’t bothered to figure out where I was when she was killed but I was in California at Christmastime and I’d gotten as far east as Chicago in early March, so I do have a fairly solid alibi.”

  “I never really suspected you. I think I just wanted to hear your song.” I sipped some coffee. “Where did you get the facts of her life? Was she an actress?”

  “I don’t think so. Was she? It wasn’t really about her, you know. It was inspired by her story but I didn’t know her and I never knew anything about her. The past few days I’ve been paying a lot of attention to bag ladies, though. And other street people.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Are there more of them in New York or is it just that they’re so much more visible here? In California everybody drives, you don’t see people on the street. I’m from Canada, rural Ontario, and the first city I ever spent much time in was Toronto, and there are crazy people on the streets there but it’s nothing like New York. Does the city drive them crazy or does it just tend to draw crazy people?”

&nbs
p; “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe they’re not crazy. Maybe they just hear a different drummer. I wonder who killed her.”

  “We’ll probably never know.”

  “What I really wonder is why she was killed. In my song I made up some reason. That somebody wanted what was in her bags. I think it works as a song that way but I don’t think there’s much chance that it happened like that. Why would anyone kill the poor thing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They say she left people money. People she hardly knew. Is that the truth?” I nodded. “And she left me a song. I don’t even feel that I wrote it. I woke up with it. I never set eyes on her and she touched my life. That’s strange, isn’t it?”

  Everything was strange. The strangest part of all was the way it ended.

  It was a Monday night. The Mets were at Shea and I’d taken my sons to a game. The Dodgers were in for a three-game series which they eventually swept as they’d been sweeping everything lately. The boys and I got to watch them knock Jon Matlack out of the box and go on to shell his several replacements. The final count was something like 13–4. We stayed in our seats until the last out. Then I saw them home and caught a train back to the city.

  So it was past midnight when I reached Armstrong’s. Trina brought me a large double and a mug of coffee without being asked. I knocked back half of the bourbon and was dumping the rest into my coffee when she told me somebody’d been looking for me earlier. “He was in three times in the past two hours,” she said. “A wiry guy, high forehead, bushy eyebrows, sort of a bulldog jaw. I guess the word for it is underslung.”

  “Perfectly good word.”

  “I said you’d probably get here sooner or later.”

  “I always do. Sooner or later.”

  “Uh-huh. You okay, Matt?”

  “The Mets lost a close one.”

  “I heard it was thirteen to four.”

  “That’s close for them these days. Did he say what it was about?”