A Stab in the Dark by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online Page A

to eat. I had Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes and green beans and made myself eat everything. It wasn't bad. I drank two cups of so-so coffee and paused on my way out to look up Corwin in the phone book. There were two dozen Corwins in Brooklyn, including a J.
    Corwin with an address that looked to be in Bay Ridge or Bensonhurst. I tried the number but nobody answered.
    No reason to think she'd be in Brooklyn. No reason to think she'd be listed under her own name, and I didn't know her husband's name.
    No point checking the post office. They don't hold address changes longer than a year, and the building on Wyckoff Street had changed hands longer ago than that. But there would be ways to trace the Corwins. There generally are.
    I paid the check and left a tip. According to the counterman, the nearest subway was a couple blocks away on Fulton Street. I was on the train heading for Manhattan before I realized that I hadn't even bothered to walk over to Bergen and Flatbush and take a look at the station house of the Seventy-eighth Precinct. Somehow I hadn't thought of it.

    Chapter 5
    I stopped at the desk when I got back to my hotel. No mail, no messages. Upstairs in my room I cracked the seal on a bottle of bourbon and poured a few fingers into a glass. I sat there for a while skipping around in a paperback edition of The Lives of the Saints. The martyrs held a curious fascination for me. They'd found such a rich variety of ways of dying.
    Couple of days earlier there'd been an item in the paper, a back-pages squib about a suspect arrested for the year-old murder of two women in their East Harlem apartment. The victims, a mother and daughter, had been found in their bedroom, each with a bullet behind the ear. The report said the cops had stayed on the case because of the unusual brutality of the murders. Now they'd made an arrest, taking a fourteen-year-old boy into custody. He'd have been thirteen when the women were killed.
    According to the story's last paragraph, five other persons had been killed in or around the victims'
    building in the year since their murder. There'd been no indication whether those five murders were solved, or whether the kid in custody was suspected of them.
    I let my mind slip off on tangents. Now and again I'd put the book aside and find myself thinking about Barbara Ettinger. Donald Gilman had started to say that her father probably suspected someone, then caught himself and left the name unsaid.
    The husband, probably. The spouse is always the first suspect. If Barbara hadn't apparently been one of a series of victims, Douglas Ettinger would have been grilled six ways and backwards. As it was, he'd been interrogated automatically by detectives from Midtown North.
    They could hardly have done otherwise. He was not only the husband.
    He was also the person who had discovered the body, coming upon her corpse in the kitchen upon returning from work.
    I'd read a report of the interrogation. The man who conducted it had already taken it for granted that the killing was the work of the Icepick Prowler, so his questions had concentrated on Barbara's schedule, on her possible propensity for opening the door for strangers, on whether she might have mentioned anyone following her or behaving suspiciously. Had she been bothered recently by obscene telephone calls? People hanging up without speaking? Suspicious wrong numbers?
    The questioning had essentially assumed the subject's innocence, and the assumption had certainly been logical enough at the time.
    Evidently there had been nothing in Douglas Ettinger's manner to arouse suspicion.
    I tried, not for the first time, to summon up a memory of Ettinger.
    It seemed to me that I must have met him. We were on the scene before Midtown North came to take the case away from us, and he'd have had to be somewhere around while I was standing in that kitchen eyeing the body sprawled on the linoleum. I might have tried to offer a word of comfort, might have formed