Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense (27 page)

“I can imagine. Uh—is there someplace we can talk?”

“How about right here?”

He looked around. I don't suppose he was used to conducting his business in bars, but he evidently decided it would be all right to make an exception. He set his briefcase on the floor and seated himself across the table from me. Angela, the new day-shift waitress, hurried over to get his order. He glanced at my cup and said he'd have coffee, too.

“I'm an attorney,” he said. My first thought was that he didn't look like a lawyer, but then I realized he probably dealt with civil cases. My experience as a cop had given me a lot of experience with criminal lawyers. The breed runs to several types, none of them his.

I waited for him to tell me why he wanted to hire me. But he crossed me up.

“I'm handling an estate,” he said, and paused, and gave what seemed a calculated if well-intentioned smile. “It's my pleasant duty to tell you you've come into a small legacy, Mr. Scudder.”

“Someone's left me money?”

“Twelve hundred dollars.”

Who could have died? I'd lost touch long since with any of my relatives. My parents went years ago, and we'd never been close with the rest of the family.

I said, “Who—?”

“Mary Alice Redfield.”

I repeated the name aloud. It was not entirely unfamiliar, but I had no idea who Mary Alice Redfield might be. I looked at Aaron Creighton. I couldn't make out his eyes behind the glasses but there was a smile's ghost on his thin lips, as if my reaction was not unexpected.

“She's dead?”

“Almost three months ago.”

“I didn't know her.”

“She knew you. You probably did know her, Mr. Scudder. Perhaps you didn't know her by name.” His smile deepened. Angela had brought his coffee. He stirred milk and sugar into it, took a careful sip, nodded his approval. “Miss Redfield was murdered.” He said this as if he'd had practice uttering a phrase that did not come naturally to him. “She was killed quite brutally in late February for no apparent reason, another innocent victim of street crime.”

“She lived in New York?”

“Oh, yes. In this neighborhood.”

“And she was killed around here?”

“On West Fifty-fifth Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. Her body was found in an alleyway. She'd been stabbed repeatedly and strangled with the scarf she had been wearing.”

Late February. Mary Alice Redfield. West Fifty-fifth between Ninth and Tenth. Murder most foul. Stabbed and strangled, a dead woman in an alleyway. I usually kept track of murders, perhaps out of a vestige of professionalism, perhaps because I couldn't cease to be fascinated by man's inhumanity to man. Mary Alice Redfield had willed me twelve hundred dollars. And someone had knifed and strangled her, and—

“Oh, Jesus,” I said. “The shopping bag lady.”

Aaron Creighton nodded.

N
EW
Y
ORK IS
full of them. East Side, West Side, each neighborhood has its own supply of bag women. Some of them are alcoholic, but most of them have gone mad without any help from drink. They walk the streets, huddle on stoops or in doorways. They find sermons in stones and treasures in trash cans. They talk to themselves, to passers-by, to God. Sometimes they mumble. Now and then they shriek.

They carry things around with them. The shopping bags supply their generic name and their chief common denominator. Most of them seem to be paranoid, and their madness convinces them that their possessions are very valuable, that their enemies covet them. So their shopping bags are never out of their sight.

There used to be a colony of these ladies who lived in Grand Central Station. They would sit up all night in the waiting room, taking turns waddling off to the lavatory from time to time. They rarely talked to each other, but some herd instinct made them comfortable with one another. But they were not comfortable enough to trust their precious bags to one another's safekeeping, and each sad crazy lady always toted her shopping bags to and from the ladies' room.

Mary Alice Redfield had been a shopping bag lady. I don't know when she set up shop in the neighborhood. I'd been living in the same hotel ever since I resigned from the NYPD and separated from my wife and sons, and that was getting to be quite a few years now. Had Miss Redfield been on the scene that long ago? I couldn't remember her first appearance. Like so many of the neighborhood fixtures, she had been part of the scenery. Had her death not been violent and abrupt, I might never have noticed she was gone.

I'd never known her name. But she had evidently known mine, and had felt something for me that prompted her to leave money to me. How had she come to have money to leave?

She'd had a business of sorts. She would sit on a wooden softdrink case, surrounded by three or four shopping bags, and she would sell newspapers. There's an all-night newsstand at the corner of Fifty-seventh and Eighth, and she would buy a few dozen papers there, carry them a block west to the corner of Ninth, and set up shop in a doorway. She sold the papers at retail, though I suppose some people tipped her a few cents. I could remember a few occasions when I'd bought a paper and waved away change from a dollar bill. Bread upon the waters, perhaps, if that was what had moved her to leave me the money.

I closed my eyes, brought her image into focus. A thick-set woman, stocky rather than fat. Five-three or four. Dressed usually in shapeless clothing, colorless gray and black garments, layers of clothing that varied with the season. I remembered that she sometimes wore a hat, an old straw affair with paper and plastic flowers poked into it. And I remembered her eyes—large, guileless blue eyes that were many years younger than the rest of her.

Mary Alice Redfield.

“F
AMILY MONEY,”
Aaron Creighton was saying. “She wasn't wealthy but she had come from a family that was comfortably fixed. A bank in Baltimore handled her funds. That's where she was from originally, Baltimore, though she'd lived in New York for as long as anyone can remember. The bank sent her a check every month. Not very much, a couple of hundred dollars, but she hardly spent anything. She paid her rent—”

“I thought she lived on the street.”

“No, she had a furnished room a few doors down the street from where she was killed. She lived in another rooming house on Tenth Avenue before that but moved when the building was sold. That was six or seven years ago and she lived on Fifty-fifth Street from then until her death. Her room cost her eighty dollars a month. She spent a few dollars on food. I don't know what she did with the rest. The only money in her room was a coffee can full of pennies. I've been checking the banks, and there's no record of a savings account. I suppose she may have spent it or lost it or given it away. She wasn't very firmly grounded in reality.”

He sipped at his coffee. “She probably belonged in an institution,” he said. “But she got along in the outside world, she functioned well enough. I don't know if she kept herself clean, and I don't know anything about how her mind worked, but I think she must have been happier than she would have been in an institution. Don't you think?”

“Probably.”

“Of course she wasn't safe, not as it turned out, but anybody can get killed on the streets of New York.” He frowned briefly, caught up in a private thought. Then he said, “She came to our office ten years ago. That was before my time.” He told me the name of his firm, a string of Anglo-Saxon surnames. “She wanted to draw a will. The original will was a very simple document leaving everything to her sister. Then over the years she would come in from time to time to add codicils leaving specific sums to various persons. She had made a total of thirty-two bequests by the time she died. One was for twenty dollars—that was to a man named John Johnson, whom we haven't been able to locate. The remainder all ranged from five hundred to two thousand dollars.” He smiled. “I've been given the task of running down the heirs.”

“When did she put me into her will?”

“Two years ago in April.”

I tried to think what I might have done for her then, how I might have brushed her life with mine. Nothing.

“Of course the will could be contested, Mr. Scudder. It would be easy to challenge Miss Redfield's competence, and any relative could almost certainly get it set aside. But no one wishes to challenge it. The total amount involved is slightly in excess of a quarter of a million dollars—”

“That much.”

“Yes. Miss Redfield received substantially less than the income that her holdings drew over the years, so the principal kept growing during her lifetime. Now the specific bequests she made total thirty-eight thousand dollars, give or take a few hundred, and the residue goes to Miss Redfield's sister. The sister, her name is Mrs. Palmer, is a widow with grown children. She's hospitalized with cancer and heart trouble and I believe diabetic complications, and she hasn't long to live. Her children would like to see the estate settled before their mother dies, and they have enough local prominence to hurry the will through probate. So I'm authorized to tender checks for the full amount of the specific bequests on the condition that the legatees sign quitclaims acknowledging that this payment discharges in full the estate's indebtedness to them.”

There was more legalese of less importance. Then he gave me papers to sign, and the whole procedure ended with a check on the table. It was payable to me and in the amount of twelve hundred dollars and no cents.

I told Creighton I'd pay for his coffee.

I
HAD TIME
to buy myself another drink and still get to my bank before the windows closed. I put a little of Mary Alice Redfield's legacy in my savings account, took some in cash, and sent a money order to Anita and the boys. I stopped at my hotel to check for messages. There weren't any. I had a drink at McGovern's and crossed the street to have another at Polly's Cage. It wasn't five o'clock yet, but the bar was doing good business already.

It turned into a funny night. I had dinner at the Greek place and read the
Post
, spent a little time at Joey Farrell's on Fifty-eighth Street, then wound up getting to Armstrong's around ten thirty or thereabouts. I spent part of the evening alone at my usual table and part of it in conversation at the bar. I made a point of stretching my drinks, mixing my bourbon with coffee, making a cup last awhile, taking a glass of plain water from time to time.

But that never really works. If you're going to get drunk, you'll manage it somehow. The obstacles I placed in my path just kept me up later. By two thirty I'd done what I had set out to do. I'd made my load, and I could go home and sleep it off.

I woke around ten with less of a hangover than I'd earned and no memory of anything after I'd left Armstrong's. I was in my own bed in my own hotel room. And my clothes were hung neatly in the closet, always a good sign on a morning after. So I must have been in fairly good shape. But a certain amount of time was lost to memory, blacked out, gone.

When that first started happening I tended to worry about it. But it's the sort of thing you can get used to.

I
T WAS THE
money, the twelve hundred bucks. I couldn't understand the money. I had done nothing to deserve it. It had been left to me by a poor little rich woman whose name I'd not even known.

It had never occurred to me to refuse the dough. Very early in my career as a cop I'd learned an important precept. When someone put money in your hand, you closed your fingers around it and put it in your pocket. I learned that lesson well and never had cause to regret its application. I didn't walk around with my hand out, and I never took drug or homicide money, but I grabbed all the clean graft that came my way and a certain amount that wouldn't have stood a white-glove inspection. If Mary Alice thought I merited twelve hundred dollars, who was I to argue?

Ah, but it didn't quite work that way. Because somehow the money gnawed at me.

After breakfast I went to St. Paul's, but there was a service going on, a priest saying Mass, so I didn't stay. I walked down to St. Benedict the Moor's on Fifty-third Street and sat for a few minutes in a pew at the rear. I go to churches to try to think, and I gave it a shot, but my mind didn't know where to go.

I slipped six twenties into the poor box. I tithe. It's a habit I got into after I left the department, and I still don't know why I do it. God knows. Or maybe He's as mystified as I am. This time, though, there was a certain balance in the act. Mary Alice Redfield had given me twelve hundred dollars for no reason I could comprehend. I was passing on a ten percent commission to the church for no better reason.

I stopped on the way out and lit a couple of candles for various people who weren't alive anymore. One of them was for the bag lady. I didn't see how it could do her any good, but I couldn't imagine how it could harm her either.

I
HAD READ
some press coverage of the killing when it happened. I generally keep up with crime stories. Part of me evidently never stopped being a policeman. Now I went down to the Forty-second Street library to refresh my memory.

The
Times
had run a pair of brief back-page items, the first a report of the killing of an unidentified female derelict, the second a follow-up giving her name and age. She'd been forty-seven, I learned. This surprised me, and then I realized that any specific number would have come as a surprise. Bums and bag ladies are ageless. Mary Alice Redfield could have been thirty or sixty or anywhere in between.

The
News
had run a more extended article than the
Times
, enumerating the stab wounds—twenty-six of them—and describing the scarf wound about her throat—blue and white, a designer print, but tattered at its edges and evidently somebody's castoff. It was this article that I remembered having read.