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

I spent the next five days picking the scabs off Paula Wittlauer’s life. It kept turning out to be a waste of time, but the time’s always gone before you realize you’ve wasted it. And I’d been telling the truth when I said my time wasn’t valuable. I had nothing better to do, and my peeks into the corners of Paula’s world kept me busy.

Her life involved more than a saloon on Ninth Avenue and an apartment on 57th Street, more than serving drinks and sharing a bed with Cary McCloud. She did other things. She went one evening a week to group therapy on West 79th Street. She took voice lessons every Tuesday morning on Amsterdam Avenue. She had an ex-boyfriend she saw once in awhile. She hung out in a couple of bars in the neighborhood and a couple of others in the Village. She did this, she did that, she went here, she went there, and I kept busy dragging myself around town and talking to all sorts of people, and managed to learn quite a bit about the person she’d been and the life she’d led without learning anything at all about the person who’d put her on the pavement.

At the same time, I tried to track her movements on the final night of her life. She’d evidently gone more or less directly to the Spider’s Web after finishing her shift at Armstrong’s. Maybe she’d stopped at her apartment for a shower and a change of clothes, but without further ado she’d headed downtown. Somewhere around ten she left the Web, and I traced her from there to a couple of other Village bars. She hadn’t stayed at either of them long, taking a quick drink or two and moving on. She’d left alone as far as anyone seemed to remember. This didn’t prove a thing because she could have stopped elsewhere before continuing uptown, or she could have picked someone up on the street, which I’d learned was something she’d done more than once in her young life. She could have found her killer loitering on a street corner or she could have phoned him and arranged to meet him at her apartment.

Her apartment. The doorman changed off at midnight, but it was impossible to determine whether she’d returned before or after the changing of the guard. She’d lived there, she was a regular tenant, and when she entered or left the building it was not a noteworthy occasion. It was something she did every night, so when she came home for the final time the man at the door had no reason to know it was the final time and thus no reason to take note.

Had she come in alone or with a companion? No one could say, which did suggest that she’d come in alone — if she’d been with someone her entrance would have been a shade more memorable. But this also proved nothing, because I stood on the other side of 57th Street one night and watched the doorway of her building, and the doorman didn’t take the pride in his position that the afternoon doorman had shown. He was away from the door almost as often as he was on it. She could have walked in flanked by six Turkish sailors and there was a chance no one would have seen her.

The doorman who’d been on duty when she went out the window was a rheumy-eyed Irishman with liver-spotted hands. He hadn’t actually seen her land. He’d been in the lobby, keeping himself out of the wind, and then he came rushing out when he heard the impact of the body on the street.

He couldn’t get over the sound she made.

“All of a sudden there was this noise,” he said. “Just out of the blue there was this noise and it must be it’s my imagination but I swear I felt it in my feet. I swear she shook the earth. I had no idea what it was, and then I came rushing out and Jesus God there she was.”

“Didn’t you hear a scream?”

“The street was empty just then. This side, anyway. There was nobody around to scream.”

“Didn’t she scream, on the way down?”

“Did somebody say she screamed? I never heard it.”

Do people scream as they fall? They generally do in films and on television. During my days on the force I saw several of them after they jumped, but by the time I got to them there were no screams echoing in the air. And a few times I’d been on hand while they talked someone in off a ledge, but in each instance the talking was successful and I didn’t have to watch a falling body accelerate according to the immutable laws of physics.

Could you get much of a scream out in four seconds?

I stood in the street where she’d fallen and I looked up toward her window. I counted off four seconds in my mind. A voice shrieked in my brain. It was Thursday night — actually, Friday morning. One o’clock — time I got myself around the corner to Armstrong’s, because in another couple of hours Justin would be closing for the night and I’d want to be drunk enough to sleep.

And an hour or so after that, she’d be one week dead.