The Night and The Music by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online

there. I pushed the door open and stepped forward and he moved back automatically to make room for me. I drew the door shut after me and walked around him, crossing the room to the window. There wasn’t a speck of dust or soot on the sill. It was immaculate, as well-scrubbed as Lady Macbeth’s hands.
    I turned to him. His name was Lane Posmantur and I suppose he was around forty, thickening at the waist, his dark hair starting to go thin on top. His glasses were thick and it was hard to read his eyes through them but it didn’t matter. I didn’t need to see his eyes.
    “She went out this window,” I said. “Didn’t she?”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “Do you want to know what triggered it for me, Mr. Posmantur? I was thinking of all the things nobody noticed. No one saw her enter the building. Neither doorman remembered it because it wasn’t something they’d be likely to remember. Nobody saw her go out the window. The cops had to look for an open window in order to know who the hell she was. They backtracked her from the window she fell out of.
    “And nobody saw the killer leave the building. Now that’s the one thing that would have been noticed, and that’s the point that occurred to me. It wasn’t that significant by itself but it made me dig a little deeper. The doorman was alert once her body hit the street. He’d remember who went in or out of the building from that point on. So it occurred to me that maybe the killer was still inside the building, and then I got the idea that she was killed by someone who lived in the building, and from that point on it was just a question of finding you because all of a sudden it all made sense.”
    I told him about the clothes on the chair. “She didn’t take them off and pile them up like that. Her killer put her clothes like that, and he dumped them on the chair so that it would look as though she undressed in her apartment, and so that it would be assumed she’d gone out of her own window.
    “But she went out of your window, didn’t she?”
    He looked at me. After a moment he said he thought he’d better sit down. He went to an armchair and sat in it. I stayed on my feet.
    I said, “She came here. I guess she took off her clothes and you went to bed with her. Is that right?”
    He hesitated, then nodded.
    “What made you decide to kill her?”
    “I didn’t.”
    I looked at him. He looked away, then met my gaze, then avoided my eyes again. “Tell me about it,” I suggested. He looked away again and a minute went by and then he started to talk.
    It was about what I’d figured. She was living with Cary McCloud but she and Lane Posmantur would get together now and then for a quickie. He was a lab technician at Roosevelt and he brought home drugs from time to time and perhaps that was part of his attraction for her. She’d turned up that night a little after two and they went to bed. She was really flying, he said, and he’d been taking pills himself, it was something he’d begun doing lately, maybe seeing her had something to do with it.
    They went to bed and did the dirty deed, and then maybe they slept for an hour, something like that, and then she was awake and coming unglued, getting really hysterical, and he tried to settle her down and he gave her a couple of slaps to bring her around, except they didn’t bring her around, and she was staggering and she tripped over the coffee table and fell funny, and by the time he sorted himself out and went to her she was lying with her head at a crazy angle and he knew her neck was broken and when he tried for a pulse there was no pulse to be found.
    “All I could think of was she was dead in my apartment and full of drugs and I was in trouble.”
    “So you put her out the window.”
    “I was going to take her back to her own apartment. I started to dress her but it was impossible. And even with her clothes on I couldn’t risk running into somebody in the hallway or on the