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

I don’t know who put it up, Paula or a previous tenant or someone on the building staff, but that chain bolt had been as much protection as the Sanitized wrapper on a motel toilet seat. As evidence that Paula’d been alone when she went out the window, it wasn’t worth a thing.

I replaced the original chain bolt, put the new one in my pocket, returned to the basement, and gave back the screwdriver. The man I returned it to seemed surprised to get it back.

It took me a couple of hours to find Cary McCloud. I’d learned that he tended bar evenings at a club in the West Village called the Spider’s Web. I got down there around five. The guy behind the bar had knobby wrists and an underslung jaw and he wasn’t Cary McCloud. “He doesn’t come on till eight,” he told me, “and he’s off tonight anyway.” I asked where I could find McCloud. “Sometimes he’s here afternoons but he hasn’t been in today. As far as where you could look for him, that I couldn’t tell you.”

A lot of people couldn’t tell me, but eventually I ran across someone who could. You can quit the police force but you can’t stop looking and sounding like a cop, and while that’s a hindrance in some situations it’s a help in others. Ultimately I found a man in a bar down the block from the Spider’s Web who’d learned it was best to cooperate with the police if it didn’t cost you anything. He gave me an address on Barrow Street and told me which bell to ring.

I went to the building but I rang several other bells until somebody buzzed me through the downstairs door. I didn’t want Cary to know he had company coming. I climbed two flights of stairs to the apartment he was supposed to be occupying. The bell downstairs hadn’t had his name on it. It hadn’t had any name at all.

Loud rock music was coming through his door. I stood in front of it for a minute, then hammered on it loud enough to make myself heard over the electric guitars. After a moment the music dropped in volume. I pounded on the door again and a male voice asked who I was.

I said, “Police. Open up.” That’s a misdemeanor, but I didn’t expect to get in trouble for it.

“What’s it about?”

“Open up, McCloud!”

“Oh, God,” he said. He sounded tired, aggravated. “How did you find me anyway? Give me a minute, huh? I want to put some clothes on.”

Sometimes that’s what they say while they’re putting a clip into an automatic. Then they pump a handful of shots through the door and into you if you’re still standing behind it. But his voice didn’t have that kind of edge to it and I couldn’t summon up enough anxiety to get out of the way. Instead I put my ear against the door and heard whispering within. I couldn’t make out what they were whispering about or get any sense of the person who was with him. The music was down in volume but there was still enough of it to cover their conversation.

The door opened. He was tall and thin, with hollow cheeks and prominent eyebrows and a worn wasted look to him. He must have been in his early thirties and he didn’t really look much older than that, but you sensed that in another ten years he’d look twenty years older. If he lived that long. He wore patched jeans and a T-shirt with Spider’s Web silkscreened on it. Beneath the legend there was a sketch of a web. A macho spider stood at one end of it, grinning, extending two of his eight arms to welcome a hesitant girlish fly.

He noticed me noticing the shirt and managed a grin. “Place where I work,” he said.

“I know.”

“So come into my parlor. It’s not much but it’s home.”

I followed him inside and drew the door shut after me. The room was about fifteen feet square and held nothing you could call furniture. There was a mattress on the floor in one corner and a couple of cardboard cartons alongside it. The music was coming from a stereo, turntable and tuner and two speakers all in a row along the far wall. There was a closed door over on the right. I figured it led to the bathroom, and that there was a woman on the’ other side of it.

“I guess this is about Paula,” he said. I nodded. “I’ve been over this with you guys,” he said. “I was nowhere near there when it happened. The last I saw her was five, six hours before she killed herself. I was working at the Web and she came down and sat at the bar. I gave her a couple of drinks and she split.”

“And you went on working.”

“Until I closed up. I kicked everybody out a little after three and it was close to four by the time I had the place swept up and the garbage on the street and the window gates locked. Then I came over here and picked up Sunny and we went up to the place on 53rd.”

“And you got there when?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I wear a watch but I don’t look at it every damn minute. I suppose it took five minutes to walk here and then Sunny and I hopped in a cab and we were at Patsy’s in ten minutes at the outside. That’s the after-hours place. I told you people all of this, I really wish you would talk to each other and leave me the hell alone.”