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

some impression, but I couldn't remember him at all.
    Perhaps he'd been in the bedroom when I was there, talking with another detective or with one of the patrolmen who'd been first on the scene. Maybe I'd never laid eyes on him, or maybe we'd spoken and I'd forgotten him altogether. I had by that time spent quite a few years seeing any number of recently bereaved. They couldn't all stand out in sharp relief in the cluttered warehouse of memory.
    Well, I'd see him soon enough. My client hadn't said whom he suspected, and I hadn't asked, but it stood to reason that Barbara's husband headed the list. London wouldn't be all that upset by the possibility that she'd died at the hands of someone he didn't even know, some friend or lover who meant nothing to him. But for her to have been killed by her own husband, a man London knew, a man who had been present years later at London's wife's funeral-
    There's a phone in my room but the calls go through the switchboard, and it's a nuisance placing them that way even when I don't care if the operator listens in. I went down to the lobby and dialed my client's number in Hastings. He answered on the third ring.
    "Scudder," I said. "I could use a picture of your daughter. Anything as long as it's a good likeness."
    "I took albums full of pictures. But most of them were of Barbara as a child. You would want a late photograph, I suppose?"
    "As late as possible. How about a wedding picture?"
    "Oh," he said. "Of course. There's a very good picture of the two of them, it's in a silver frame on a table in the living room. I suppose I could have it copied. Do you want me to do that?"
    "If it's not too much trouble."
    He asked if he should mail it and I suggested he bring it to his office Monday. I said I'd call and arrange to pick it up. He asked if I'd had a chance to begin the investigation yet and I told him I'd spent the day in Brooklyn. I tried him on a couple of names-Donald Gilman, Janice Corwin. Neither meant anything to him. He asked, tentatively, if I had any leads.
    "It's a pretty cold trail," I said.
    I rang off without asking him who he suspected. I felt restless and went around the corner to Armstrong's. On the way I wished I'd taken the time to go back to my room for my coat. It was colder, and the wind had an edge to it.
    I sat at the bar with a couple of nurses from Roosevelt. One of them, Terry, was just finishing up her third week in Pediatrics. "I thought I'd like the duty," she said, "but I can't stand it. Little kids, it's so much worse when you lose one. Some of them are so brave it breaks your heart. I can't handle it, I really can't."
    Estrellita Rivera's image flashed in my mind and was gone. I didn't try to hold onto it. The other nurse, glass in hand, was saying that all in all she thought she preferred Sambucca to Amaretto. Or maybe it was the other way around.
    I made it an early night.

    Chapter 6
    Even if I couldn't recall meeting Douglas Ettinger, I had a picture of him in my mind. Tall and raw-boned, dark hair, pallid skin, knobby wrists, Lincolnesque features. A prominent Adam's apple.
    I woke up Saturday morning with his image firmly in mind, as if it had been imprinted there during an unremembered dream. After a quick breakfast I went down to Penn Station and caught a Long Island Railroad local to Hicksville. A phone call to his house in Mineola had established that Ettinger was working at the Hicksville store, and it turned out to be a $2.25 cab ride from the station.
    In an aisle lined with squash and racquet-ball equipment I asked a clerk if Mr. Ettinger was in. "I'm Doug Ettinger," he said. "What can I do for you?"
    He was about five-eight, a chunky one-seventy. Tightly curled light brown hair with red highlights.
    The plump cheeks and alert brown eyes of a squirrel. Large white teeth, with the upper incisors slightly bucked, consistent with the squirrel image. He didn't look remotely familiar, nor did he bear any resemblance whatsoever to the rail-splitter