Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense (30 page)

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.” 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.

A
NOTHER 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.”

“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, and 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 me,” 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
.”

“Does 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 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. Afterward I was sitting and drinking with some people, and somebody was talking about the shopping bag lady, and I'd had enough Amaretto to be maudlin on the subject. I woke up Wednesday morning with the first verse of the song buzzing in my splitting head, and immediately wrote it down. 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 Christmas time, and I'd only 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 or 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?”

“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 the reason that somebody wanted what was in her bags. I think that works in the song, but I don't think there's much chance it happened like that.”

“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?”

E
VERYTHING 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 that 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 to 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. Are you OK, 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?”

He hadn't, but within the half hour he came in again and I was there to be found. I recognized him from Trina's description as soon as he came through the door. He looked faintly familiar, but he was nobody I knew. I suppose I'd seen him around the neighborhood.

Evidently he knew me by sight, because he found his way to my table without asking directions and took a chair without being invited to sit. He didn't say anything for a while and neither did I. I had a fresh bourbon and coffee in front of me, and I took a sip and looked him over.

He was under thirty. His cheeks were hollow, and the flesh of his face was stretched over his skull like leather that had shrunk upon drying. He wore a forest-green work shirt and a pair of khaki pants. He needed a shave.

Finally he pointed at my cup and asked me what I was drinking. When I told him, he said all he drank was beer.

“They have beer here,” I said.

“Maybe I'll have what you're drinking.” He turned in his chair and waved for Trina. When she came over he said he'd have bourbon and coffee, the same as I was having. He didn't say anything more until she brought the drink. Then, after he had spent quite some time stirring it, he took a sip. “Well,” he said, “that's not so bad. That's OK.”

“Glad you like it.”

“I don't know if I'd order it again, but at least now I know what it's like.”

“That's something.”

“I seen you around. Matt Scudder. Used to be a cop, private eye now, blah blah blah. Right?”

“Close enough.”

“My name's Floyd. I never liked it, but I'm stuck with it, right? I could change it, but who'm I kidding? Right?”

“If you say so.”

“If I don't somebody else will. Floyd Karp, that's the full name. I didn't tell you my last name, did I? That's it, Floyd Karp.”

“OK.”

“OK, OK, OK.” He pursed his lips, blew out air in a silent whistle. “What do we do now, Matt, huh? That's what I want to know.”

“I'm not sure what you mean, Floyd.”

“Oh, you know what I'm getting at, driving at, getting at. You know, don't you?”

By this time I suppose I did.

“I killed that old lady. I took her life, stabbed her with my knife.” He flashed the saddest smile. “Steee-rangled her with her skeeee-arf. Hoist her with her own whatchacallit, petard. What's a petard?”

“I don't know, Floyd. Why'd you kill her?”

He looked at me, he looked at his coffee, he looked at me again.

He said, “Had to.”

“Why?”

“Same as the bourbon and coffee. Had to see. Had to taste it and find out what it was like.” His eyes met mine. His were very large, hollow, empty. I fancied I could see right through them to the blackness at the back of his skull. “I couldn't get my mind away from murder,” he said. His voice was more sober now, the mocking playful quality gone from it. “I tried. I just couldn't do it. It was on my mind all the time, and I was afraid of what I might do. I couldn't function, I couldn't think, I just saw blood and death all the time. I was afraid to close my eyes for fear of what I might see. I would just stay up, days it seemed, and then I'd be tired enough to pass out the minute I closed my eyes. I stopped eating. I used to be fairly heavy, and the weight just fell off of me.”

“When did all this happen?”

“I don't know. All winter. And I thought if I went and did it once, I would know if I was a man or a monster or what. So I got this knife, and I went out a couple nights but lost my nerve. Then one night—almost couldn't do it, but I couldn't
not
do it, and then I was doing it and it went on forever. It was horrible.”

“Why didn't you stop?”

“I don't know. I think I was afraid to stop. That doesn't make any sense, does it? I just don't know. It was insane, like being in a movie and being in the audience at the same time. Watching myself.”