Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

Paula’s last day was a Thursday in late September. The heat of the summer was starting to break up. There was a cooling rain that morning and the sun never did show its face. I wandered in around four in the afternoon with a copy of the Post and read through it while I had my first drink of the day. At eight o’clock I was talking with a couple of nurses from Roosevelt Hospital who wanted to grouse about a resident surgeon with a Messiah complex. I was making sympathetic noises when Paula swept past our table and told me to have a good evening.

I said, “You too, kid.” Did I look up? Did we smile at each other? Hell, I don’t remember.

“See you tomorrow, Matt.”

“Right,” I said. “God willing.”

But He evidently wasn’t. Around three Justin closed up and I went around the block to my hotel. It didn’t take long for the coffee and bourbon to cancel each other out. I got into bed and slept.

My hotel is on 57th Street between Eighth and Ninth. It’s on the uptown side of the block, and my window is on the street side looking south. I can see the World Trade Center at the tip of Manhattan from my window.

I can also see Paula’s building. It’s on the other side of 57th Street a hundred yards or so to the east, a towering highrise that, had it been directly across from me, would have blocked my view of the Trade Center.

She lived on the seventeenth floor. Sometime after four she went out a high window. She swung out past the sidewalk and landed in the street a few feet from the curb, between a couple of parked cars.

In high school physics they teach you that falling bodies accelerate at a speed of thirty-two feet per second per second. So she would have fallen thirty-two feet in the first second, another sixty-four feet the next second, then ninety-six feet in the third. Since she fell something like two hundred feet, I don’t suppose she could have spent more than four seconds in the actual act of falling.

I got up around ten thirty. When I stopped at the desk for my mail, Vinnie told me they’d had a jumper across the street during the night. “A dame,” he said, which is a word you don’t hear much any more. “She went out without a stitch on. You could catch your death that way.”

I looked at him.

“Landed in the street, just missed somebody’s Caddy. How’d you like to find something like that for a hood ornament? I wonder if your insurance would cover that — what do you call it, act of God?” He came out from behind the desk and walked with me to the door. “Over there,” he said, pointing. “Where the florist’s van is where she flopped. Nothing to see anyway. By the time I came on duty there wasn’t a trace left.”

“Who was she?”

“Who knows?”

I had things to do that morning, and as I did them I thought from time to time of the jumper. They’re not that rare and they usually do the deed in the hours before dawn. They say it’s always darkest then.

Sometime in the early afternoon I was passing Armstrong’s and stopped in for a short one. I stood at the bar and looked around to say hello to Paula but she wasn’t there. A doughy redhead named Rita was taking her shift.

Dean was behind the bar. I asked him where Paula was. “She skipping school today?”

“You didn’t hear?”

“Jimmy fired her?”

He shook his head, and before I could venture any further guesses he told me.

I drank my drink. I had an appointment to see somebody about something, but suddenly it ceased to seem important. I put a dime in the phone and cancelled my appointment and came back and had another drink. My hand was trembling slightly when I picked up the glass. It was a little steadier when I set it down.

I crossed Ninth Avenue and sat in St. Paul’s for awhile. Ten, twenty minutes, something like that. I lit a candle for Paula and a few other candles for a few other corpses, and I sat and thought about life and death and high windows. Around the time I left the police force I discovered that churches were very good places for thinking about that sort of thing.

After a while I walked over to her building and stood on the pavement in front of it. The florist’s truck had moved on, and I examined the street where she’d landed. There was, as Vinnie had assured me, no trace of what had happened. I tilted my head back and looked up, wondering what window she might have fallen from, then looked down at the pavement and up again, and a sudden rush of vertigo made my head spin. In the course of all this I managed to attract the attention of the building’s doorman and he came out to the curb, anxious to talk about the former tenant. He was a black man about my age and he looked as proud of his uniform as the guy in the Marine Corps recruiting poster. It was a goodlooking uniform — shades of brown, epaulets, gleaming brass buttons.

“Terrible thing,” he said, “a young girl like that with her whole life ahead of her.”

“Did you know her well?”