to imagine her with a note pad and a faint Viennese accent, asking me about my dreams. Had she had an office elsewhere? The Victorian love seat was a far cry from the traditional analyst’s couch.
Maybe Whelkin was her patient. He told her all about his scheme to gain possession of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow, and then she hypnotized him and got him to make the call to me, and then he got unhypnotized and killed her and took the book back, and…
I called the Times, got through to someone in the city room. I explained I was Art Matlovich of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. We thought the Porlock woman might be a former resident of Cleveland, and did they have anything on her besides what they’d run in the paper?
What they had was mostly negative. No information about next of kin. No clue as to where she’d lived before taking the Sixty-sixth Street apartment fourteen months ago. If she’d ever been in Cleveland, or even flown over the State of Ohio, they didn’t know anything about it.
The same call to the News was about as unproductive. The man I talked to said he didn’t know where the Times got off calling Porlock a psychotherapist, that he had the impression she was somebody’s mistress, but that they weren’t really digging into it because all she was was the victim of an open-and-shut burglary turned homicide. “It’s not much of a story for us,” he said. “Only reason we played it at all is it’s the Upper East Side. See, that’s a posh neighborhood and all. I don’t know what the equivalent would be in Cleveland.”
Neither did I, so I let it pass.
“This Rhodenbarr,” the News man went on. “They’ll pick him up tomorrow or the next day and that’s the end of the story. No sex angle, nothing colorful like that. He’s just a burglar.”
“Just a burglar,” I echoed.
“Only this time he killed somebody. They’ll throw the key away on him this time. He’s a guy had his name in the papers before. In connection with homicide committed during a job he was pulling. Up to now he always managed to weasel out of it, but this time he’s got his dick in the wringer.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” I said.
“Huh?”
“I mean you never know,” I said quickly. “The way criminals manage to slip through cracks in the criminal-justice apparatus these days.”
“Jesus,” he said. “You sound like you been writin’ our editorials.”
I no sooner hung up the phone than it started ringing. I put up a fresh pot of coffee. The phone stopped ringing. I went over to it, about to make a call, and it rang again. I waited it out, then used it to call the police. This time I said I was Phil Urbanik of the Minneapolis Tribune. I was tired of Cleveland for the time being. I got bounced from one cop to another, spending a lot of time on Hold in the process, before I managed to establish that nobody around the squad-room knew more about Madeleine Porlock than that she was dead. The last cop I spoke with was sure of one other thing, too.
“No question,” he said. “Rhodenbarr killed her. One bullet, close range, smack in the forehead. M.E.’s report says death was instantaneous, which you don’t have to be a doctor to tell. He left prints in both apartments.”
“He must have been careless,” I suggested.
“Getting old and sloppy. Losing his touch. Here’s a guy, his usual M.O.’s to wear rubber gloves with the palms cut out so he don’t leave a print anywhere.”
“You know him?”
“No, but I seen his sheet. You’d figure him to be pretty slick, plus he always stayed away from violence, and here he’s sloppy enough to leave prints and he went and killed a woman. You know what I figure? What I figure is drugs.”
“He’s involved with drugs?”
“I think he musta been high on them. You get hopped up and you’re capable of anything.”
“How about the gun? Was it his?”
“Maybe he found it there. We didn’t trace it yet. Could be the Porlock woman had it for protection. It wasn’t registered, but what does that mean? Maybe he stole it upstairs. The couple up there said no, but if it was an unregistered weapon they’d deny it. What’s your interest in the gun, anyway?”
“Just making conversation.”
“Minneapolis, you said?”
“That’s right,” I said smoothly. “Well, I guess that gives us a good hometown angle on the story. All