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

There was an unvoiced challenge in his words. I had quit the department, but not because I’d seen little men. One night some years ago I broke up a bar holdup and went into the street after the pair who’d killed the bartender. One of my shots went wide and a little girl died. After that I didn’t see little men or hear voices exactly, but I did leave my wife and kids and quit the force and started drinking on a more serious level. But maybe it would have happened that way even if I’d never killed Estrellita Rivera. People go through changes and life does the damnedest things to us all.

“It was just a thought,” I said. “The sister thinks it’s murder, so I was looking for a way for her to be right.”

“Forget it.”

“I suppose. I wonder why she did it.”

“Do they even need a reason? I went in the bathroom and she had a medicine cabinet like a drugstore. Ups, downs, sideways. Maybe she was so stoned she thought she could fly. That would explain her being naked. You don’t fly with your clothes on. Everybody knows that.”

I nodded. “Did they find drugs in her system?”

“Drugs in her — oh, come on, Matt. She came down seventeen flights and she came down fast.”

“Under four seconds.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing,” I said. “No autopsy?”

“Of course not. You’ve seen jumpers. You were in the department a lot of years, you know what a person looks like after a drop like that. You want to be technical, there coulda been a bullet in her and nobody was gonna go and look for it. Cause of death was falling from a great height. That’s what it says and that’s what it was, and don’t ask me was she stoned or was she pregnant or any of those questions because who the hell knows?”

“How’d you even know it was her?”

“We got a positive I.D. from the sister.”

I shook my head. “I mean how did you know what apartment to go to? She was naked, so she didn’t have any identification on her. Did the doorman recognize her?”

“Are you kidding? He wouldn’t go close enough to look. He was alongside the building throwing up a few pints of cheap wine. He couldn’t have identified his own ass.”

“Then how’d you know who she was?”

“The window.” I looked at him. “Hers was the only window that was open more than a couple of inches, Matt. Plus her lights were on. That made it easy.”

“I didn’t think of that.”

“Yeah, well, I was there, and we just looked up and there was an open window and a light behind it, and that was the first place we went to. You’da thought of it if you were there.”

“I suppose.”

He finished his wine. “It was suicide,” he said. “You can tell the sister as much.”

“I will. Is it okay if I look at the apartment?”

“Wittlauer’s apartment? We didn’t seal it, if that’s what you mean. You oughta be able to con the super out of a key.”

“Ruth Wittlauer gave me a key.”

“Then there you go. There’s no department seal on the door. You want to look around?”

“So I can tell the sister I was there.”

“Yeah. Maybe you’ll come across a suicide note. That’s what I was looking for. You turn up something like that and it clears up doubts for the friends and relatives. If it was up to me, I’d get a law passed. No suicide without a note.”

“Be hard to enforce.”

“Simple,” he said. “If you don’t leave a note, you gotta come back and be alive again.” He laughed. “That’d start ’em scribbling away. Count on it.”

The doorman was the same man I’d talked to the day before. It never occurred to him to ask me my business. I rode up in the elevator and walked along the corridor to 17-G. The key Ruth Wittlauer had given me opened the door. There was just the one lock. That’s the way it usually is in highrises. A doorman, however slipshod he may be, endows tenants with a sense of security. The residents of unserviced walkups affix three or four extra locks to their doors and still cower behind them.

The apartment had an unfinished air about it, and I sensed that Paula had lived there for a few months without ever making the place her own. There were no rugs on the wood parquet floor. The walls were decorated with a few unframed posters held up by scraps of red Mystik tape. The apartment was an L-shaped studio with a platform bed occupying the foot of the L. There were newspapers and magazines scattered around the place, but no books. I noticed copies of Variety and Rolling Stone and People and the Village Voice.

The television set was a tiny Sony perched on top of a chest of drawers. There was no stereo, but there were a dozen records, mostly classical with a sprinkling of folk music — Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and Dave Van Ronk. There was a dust-free rectangle on top of the dresser next to the Sony.

I looked through the drawers and closets. A lot of Paula’s clothes. I recognized some of the outfits, or thought I did.