It had rained a little while I was with Fitzroy. It wasn’t raining when I got back outside, but it didn’t feel as though it was through for the day. I had a drink around the corner on Third Avenue and watched part of the newscast. They showed the police artist’s sketch of the Slasher, the same drawing that was on the front page of the Post. It showed a round-faced black man with a trimmed beard and a cap on his head. Mad zeal glinted in his large almond-shaped eyes.

“Imagine that comin’ up the street at you,” the bartender said. “I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of guys gettin’ pistol permits on the strength of this one. I’m thinkin’ about fillin’ out an application myself.”

I remember the day I stopped carrying a gun. It was the same day I turned in my shield. I’d had a stretch of feeling terribly vulnerable without that iron on my hip, and now I could hardly recall how it had felt to walk around armed in the first place.

I finished my drink and left. Would the bartender get a gun? Probably not. More people talked about it than did it. But whenever there’s the right kind of nut making headlines, a Slasher or an Icepick Prowler, a certain number of people get pistol permits and a certain number of others buy illegal guns. Then some of them get drunk and shoot their wives. None of them ever seems to wind up nailing the Slasher.

I walked uptown, stopped at an Italian place along the way for dinner, then spent a couple of hours at the main library on Forty-second Street, dividing my time between old newspapers on microfilm and new and old Polk city directories. I made some notes, but not many. I was mostly trying to let myself sink into the case, to take a few steps backward in time.

By the time I got out of there it was raining. I took a cab to Armstrong’s, got a stool at the bar and settled in. There were people to talk to and bourbon to drink, with enough coffee to keep fatigue at bay. I didn’t hit it very hard, just coasted along, getting by, getting through. You’d be surprised what a person can get through.

* * *

THE next day was Friday. I read a paper with breakfast. There’d been no slashings the previous night, but neither had there been any progress in the case. In Ecuador, a few hundred people had died in an earthquake. There seemed to be more of those lately, or I was more aware of them.

I went to my bank, put Charles London’s check in my savings account, drew out some cash and a money order for five hundred dollars. They gave me an envelope to go with the money order and I addressed it to Ms. Anita Scudder in Syosset. I stood at the counter for a few minutes with the bank’s pen in my hand, trying to think of a note to include, and wound up sending the money order all by itself. After I’d mailed it I thought about calling to tell her it was in the mail, but that seemed like even more of a chore than thinking of something to put in a note.

It wasn’t a bad day. Clouds obscured the sun, but there were patches of blue overhead and the air had a tang to it. I stopped at Armstrong’s to cover my marker and left without having anything. It was a little early for the day’s first drink. I left, walked east a long block to Columbus Circle, and caught a train.

I rode the D to Smith and Bergen and came out into sunshine. For a while I walked around, trying to get my bearings. The Seventy-eighth Precinct, where I’d served a brief hitch, was only six or seven blocks to the east, but that had been a long time ago and I’d spent little time in Brooklyn since. Nothing looked even faintly familiar. I was in a part of the borough that hadn’t had a name until fairly recently. Now a part of it was called Cobble Hill and another chunk was called Boerum Hill and both of them were participating wholeheartedly in the brownstone renaissance. Neighborhoods don’t seem to stand still in New York. They either improve or deteriorate. Most of the city seemed to be crumbling. The whole South Bronx was block after block of burned-out buildings, and in Brooklyn the same process was eroding Bushwick and Brownsville.

These blocks were going in the other direction. I walked up one street and down another and found myself becoming aware of changes. There were trees on every block, most of them planted within the past few years. While some of the brownstones and brickfronts were in disrepair, more sported freshly painted trim. The shops reflected the changes that had been going on. A health food store on Smith Street, a boutique at the corner of Warren and Bond, little up-scale restaurants tucked in all over the place.

The building where Barbara Ettinger had lived and died was on Wyckoff Street between Nevins and Bond. It was a brick tenement, five stories tall with four small apartments on each floor, and it had thus escaped the conversion that had already turned many of the brownstones back into the one-family houses they had originally been. Still, the building had been spruced up some. I stood in the vestibule and checked the names on the mailboxes, comparing them to those I’d copied from an old city directory. Of the twenty apartments, only six held tenants who’d been there at the time of the murder.

Except you can’t go by names on mailboxes. People get married or unmarried and their names change. An apartment gets sublet to keep the landlord from raising the rent, and the name of a long-dead tenant stays on the lease and on the mailbox for ages. A roommate moves in, then stays on when the original leaseholder moves out. There are no shortcuts. You have to knock on all the doors.

I rang a bell, got buzzed in, went to the top floor and worked my way down. It’s a little easier when you have a badge to flash but the manner’s more important than the ID, and I couldn’t lose the manner if I tried. I didn’t tell anyone I was a cop, but neither did I try to keep anyone from making the assumption.

The first person I talked to was a young mother in one of the rear apartments on the top floor. Her baby cried in the next room while we talked. She’d moved in within the past year, she told me, and she didn’t know anything about a murder nine years previously. She asked anxiously if it had taken place in that very apartment, and seemed at once relieved and disappointed to learn it had not.

A Slavic woman, her hands liver-spotted and twisted with arthritis, gave me a cup of coffee in her fourth-floor front apartment. She put me on the couch and turned her own chair to face me. It had been positioned so she could watch the street.

She’d been in that apartment for almost forty years, she told me. Up until four years ago her husband had been there, but now he was gone and she was alone. The neighborhood, she said, was getting better. “But the old people are going. Places I shopped for years are gone. And the price of everything! I don’t believe the prices.”

She remembered the icepick murder, though she was surprised it had been nine years. It didn’t seem that long to her. The woman who was killed was a nice woman, she said. “Only nice people get killed.”

She didn’t seem to remember much about Barbara Ettinger beyond her niceness. She didn’t know if she had been especially friendly or unfriendly with any of the other neighbors, if she’d gotten on well or poorly with her husband. I wondered if she even remembered what the woman had looked like, and wished I had a picture to show her. I might have asked London for one if I’d thought of it.

Another woman on the fourth floor, a Miss Wicker, was the only person to ask for identification. I told her I wasn’t a policeman, and she left the chain lock on the door and spoke to me through a two-inch opening, which didn’t strike me as unreasonable. She’d only been in the building a few years, did know about the murder and that the Icepick Prowler had been recently apprehended, but that was the extent of her information.

“People let anyone in,” she said. “We have an intercom here but people just buzz you in without determining who you are. People talk about crime but they never believe it can happen to them, and then it does.” I thought of telling her how easy it would be to snap her chain lock with a bolt cutter, but I decided her anxiety level was high enough already.

A lot of the tenants were out for the day. On the third floor, Barbara Ettinger’s floor, I got no response from one of the rear apartments, then paused in front of the adjoining door. The pulse of disco music came through it. I knocked, and after a moment the door was opened by a man in his late twenties. He had short hair and a mustache, and he was wearing nothing but a pair of blue-striped white gym shorts. His body was well-muscled, and his tanned skin glistened with a light coating of sweat.

I told him my name and that I’d like to ask him a few questions. He led me inside, closed the door, then moved past me and crossed the room to the radio. He lowered the volume about halfway, paused, turned it off altogether.

There was a large mat in the center of the uncarpeted parquet floor. A barbell and a pair of dumbbells reposed on it, and a jump rope lay curled on the floor alongside. “I was just working out,” he said. “Won’t you sit down? That chair’s the comfortable one. The other’s nice to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there.”

I took the chair while he sat on the mat and folded his legs tailor-fashion. His eyes brightened with recognition when I mentioned the murder in 3-A. “Donald told me,” he said. “I’ve only been here a little over a year but Donald’s been living here for ages. He’s watched the neighborhood become positively chic around him. Fortunately this particular building retains its essential tackiness. You’ll probably want to talk to Donald but he won’t be home from work until six or six thirty.”

“What’s Donald’s last name?”

“Gilman.” He spelled it. “And I’m Rolfe Waggoner. That’s Rolfe with an e. I was just reading about the Icepick Prowler. Of course I don’t remember the case. I was in high school then. That was back home in Indiana—Muncie, Indiana—and that was a long ways from here.” He thought for a moment. “In more ways than one,” he said.

“Was Mr. Gilman friendly with the Ettingers?”

“He could answer that better than I can. You’ve caught the man who did it, haven’t you? I read that he was in a mental hospital for years and nobody ever knew he killed anybody, and then he was released and they caught him and he confessed or something?”

“Something like that.”

“And now you want to make sure you have a good case against him.” He smiled. He had a nice open face and he seemed quite at ease, sitting on a mat in his gym shorts. Gay men used to be so much more defensive, especially around cops. “It must be complicated with something that happened so many years ago. Have you talked with Judy? Judy Fairborn, she’s in the apartment where the Ettingers used to live. She works nights, she’s a waitress, so she’ll be home now unless she’s at an audition or a dance class or shopping or—well, she’ll be home unless she’s out, but that’s always the case, isn’t it?” He smiled again, showing me perfectly even teeth. “But maybe you’ve already spoken with her.”

“Not yet.”

“She’s new. I think she moved in about six months ago. Would you want to talk to her anyway?”

“Yes.”

He uncoiled, sprang lightly to his feet. “I’ll introduce you,” he said. “Just let me put some clothes on. I won’t be a minute.”

He reappeared wearing jeans and a flannel shirt and running shoes without socks. We crossed the hall and he knocked on the door of Apartment 3-A. There was silence, then footsteps and a woman’s voice asking who it was.

“Just Rolfe,” he said. “In the company of a policeman who’d like to grill you, Ms. Fairborn.”

“Huh?” she said, and opened the door. She might have been Rolfe’s sister, with the same light brown hair, the same regular features, the same open Midwestern countenance. She wore jeans, too, and a sweater and penny loafers. Rolfe introduced us and she stepped aside and motioned us in. She didn’t know anything about the Ettingers, and her knowledge of the murder was limited to the fact that it had taken place there. “I’m glad I didn’t know before I moved in,” she said, “because I might have let it spook me, and that would have been silly, wouldn’t it? Apartments are too hard to find. Who can afford to be superstitious?”

“Nobody,” Rolfe said. “Not in this market.”

They talked about the First Avenue Slasher, and about a recent wave of local burglaries, including one a week ago on the first floor. I asked if I could have a look at the kitchen. I was on my way there as I asked the question. I think I’d have remembered the layout anyway, but I’d already been in other apartments in the building and they were all the same.

Judy said, “Is this where it happened? Here in the kitchen?”

“Where did you think?” Rolfe asked her. “The bedroom?”

“I guess I didn’t think about it.”

“You didn’t even wonder? Sounds like repression.”

“Maybe.”

I tuned out their conversation. I tried to remember the room, tried to peel off nine years and be there once again, standing over Barbara Ettinger’s body. She’d been near the stove then, her legs extending into the center of the small room, her head turned toward the living room. There had been linoleum on the floor and that was gone, the original wood floor restored and glossy with polyurethane. And the stove looked new, and plaster had been removed to expose the brick exterior wall. I couldn’t be sure the brick hadn’t been exposed previously, nor could I know how much of my mental picture was real. The memory is a cooperative animal, eager to please; what it cannot supply it occasionally invents, sketching carefully to fill in the blanks.

Why the kitchen? The door led into the living room, and she’d let him in either because she knew who he was or in spite of the fact that she didn’t, and then what? He drew the icepick and she tried to get away from him? Caught her heel in the linoleum and went sprawling, and then he was on her with the pick?

The kitchen was the middle room, separating the living room and bedroom. Maybe he was a lover and they were on their way to bed when he surprised her with a few inches of pointed steel. But wouldn’t he wait until they got where they were going?

Maybe she had something on the stove. Maybe she was fixing him a cup of coffee. The kitchen was too small to eat in but more than large enough for two people to stand comfortably waiting for water to boil.

Then a hand over her mouth to muffle her cries and a thrust into her heart to kill her. Then enough other thrusts of the icepick to make it look like the Icepick Prowler’s work.

Had the first wound killed her? I remembered beads of blood. Dead bodies don’t bleed freely, but neither do most puncture wounds. The autopsy had indicated a wound in the heart that had been more or less instantly fatal. It might have been the first wound inflicted or the last, for all I’d seen in the Medical Examiner’s report.

Judy Fairborn filled a teakettle, lit the stove with a wooden match, and poured three cups of instant coffee when the water boiled. I’d have liked bourbon in mine, or instead of mine, but nobody suggested it. We carried our cups into the living room and she said, “You looked as though you saw a ghost. No, I’m wrong. You looked as though you were looking for one.”

“Maybe that’s what I was doing.”

“I’m not sure if I believe in them or not. They’re supposed to be more common in cases of sudden death when the victim didn’t expect what happened. The theory is that the soul doesn’t realize it died, so it hangs around because it doesn’t know to pass on to the next plane of existence.”

“I thought it walked the floors crying out for vengeance,” Rolfe said. “You know, dragging chains, making the boards creak.”

“No, it just doesn’t know any better. What you do, you get somebody to lay the ghost.”

“I’m not going to touch that line,” Rolfe said.

“I’m proud of you. You get high marks for restraint. That’s what it’s called, laying the ghost. It’s a sort of exorcism. The ghost expert, or whatever you call him, communicates with the ghost and lets him know what happened, and that he’s supposed to pass on. And then the spirit can go wherever spirits go.”

“You really believe all this?”

“I’m not sure what I believe,” she said. She uncrossed her legs, then recrossed them. “If Barbara’s haunting this apartment, she’s being very restrained about it. No creaking boards, no midnight apparitions.”

“Your basic low-profile ghost,” he said.

“I’ll have nightmares tonight,” she said. “If I sleep at all.”

* * *

I knocked on all the doors on the two lower floors without getting much response. The tenants were either out or had nothing useful to tell me. The building’s superintendent had a basement apartment in a similar building on the next block, but I didn’t see the point in looking him up. He’d only been on the job for a matter of months, and the old woman in the fourth-floor-front apartment had told me there had been four or five supers in the past nine years.

By the time I got out of the building I was glad for the fresh air, glad to be on the street again. I’d felt something in Judy Fairborn’s kitchen, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a ghost. But it had felt as though something from years past was pulling at me, trying to drag me down and under.

Whether it was Barbara Ettinger’s past or my own was something I couldn’t say.

I stopped at a bar on the corner of Dean and Smith. They had sandwiches and a microwave oven to heat them in but I wasn’t hungry. I had a quick drink and sipped a short beer chaser. The bartender sat on a high stool drinking a large glass of what looked like vodka. The other two customers, black men about my age, were at the far end of the bar watching a game show on TV. From time to time one of them was talking back to the set.

I flipped a few pages in my notebook, went to the phone and looked through the Brooklyn book. The day-care center where Barbara Ettinger had worked didn’t seem to be in business. I checked the Yellow Pages to see if there was anything listed under another name at the same address. There wasn’t.

The address was on Clinton Street, and I’d been away from the neighborhood long enough so that I had to ask directions, but once I’d done so it was only a walk of a few blocks. The boundaries of Brooklyn neighborhoods aren’t usually too well defined—the neighborhoods themselves are often largely the invention of realtors—but when I crossed Court Street I was leaving Boerum Hill for Cobble Hill, and the change wasn’t difficult to see. Cobble Hill was a shade or two tonier. More trees, a higher percentage of brownstones, a greater proportion of white faces on the street.

I found the number I was seeking on Clinton between Pacific and Amity. There was no day-care center there. The ground floor storefront offered supplies for knitting and needlepoint. The proprietor, a plump Earth Mother with a gold incisor, didn’t know anything about a day-care center. She’d moved in a year and a half ago after a health food restaurant had gone out of business. “I ate there once,” she said, “and they deserved to go out of business. Believe me.”

She gave me the landlord’s name and number. I tried him from the corner and kept getting a busy signal so I walked over to Court Street and climbed a flight of stairs. There was just one person in the office, a young man with his sleeves rolled up and a large round ashtray full of cigarette butts on the desk in front of him. He chainsmoked while he talked on the phone. The windows were closed and the room was as thick with smoke as a nightclub at four in the morning.

When he got off the phone I caught him before it could ring again. His own memory went back beyond the health food restaurant to a children’s clothing store that had also failed in the same location. “Now we got needlepoint,” he said. “If I were gonna guess I’d say she’ll be out in another year. How much can you make selling yarn? What happens, somebody has a hobby, an interest, so they open up a business. Health food, needlepoint, whatever it is, but they don’t know shit about business and they’re down and out in a year or two. She breaks the lease, we’ll rent it in a month for twice what she pays. It’s a renter’s market in an upscale neighborhood.” He reached for the phone. “Sorry I can’t help you,” he said.

“Check your records,” I said.

He told me he had lots of important things to do, but halfway through the statement changed from an assertion to a whine. I sat in an old oak swivel chair and let him fumble around in his files. He opened and closed half a dozen drawers before he came up with a folder and slapped it down on his desk.

“Here we go,” he said. “Happy Hours Child Care Center. Some name, huh?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Happy hour’s in a bar when the drinks are half price. Hell of a thing to call a place for the kiddies, don’t you think?” He shook his head. “Then they wonder why they go out of business.”

I didn’t see anything the matter with the name.

“Leaseholder was a Mrs. Corwin. Janice Corwin. Took the place on a five-year lease, gave it up after four years. Quit the premises eight years ago in March.” That would have been a year after Barbara Ettinger’s death. “Jesus, you look at the rent and you can’t believe it. You know what she was paying?”

I shook my head.

“Well, you saw the place. Name a figure.” I looked at him. He stubbed out a cigarette and lit another. “One and a quarter. Hundred and twenty-five dollars a month. Goes for six now and it’s going up the minute the needlework lady goes out, or when her lease is up. Whichever comes first.”

“You have a forwarding address for Corwin?”

He shook his head. “I got a residential address. Want it?” He read off a number on Wyckoff Street. It was just a few doors from the Ettingers’ building. I wrote down the address. He read off a phone number and I jotted that down, too.

His phone rang. He picked it up, said hello, listened for a few minutes, then talked in monosyllables. “Listen, I got someone here,” he said after a moment. “I’ll get back to you in a minute, okay?”

He hung up and asked me if that was all. I couldn’t think of anything else. He hefted the file. “Four years she had the place,” he said. “Most places drop dead in the first year. Make it through a year you got a chance. Get through two years and you got a good chance. You know what’s the problem?”

“What?”

“Women,” he said. “They’re amateurs. They got no need to make a go of it. They open a business like they try on a dress. Take it off if they don’t like the color. If that does it, I got calls to make.”

I thanked him for his help.

“Listen,” he said, “I always cooperate. It’s my nature.”

I tried the number he gave me and got a woman who spoke Spanish. She didn’t know anything about anybody named Janice Corwin and didn’t stay on the line long enough for me to ask her much of anything. I dropped another dime and dialed again on the chance that I’d misdialed the first time. When the same woman answered I broke the connection.

When they disconnect a phone it’s close to a year before they reassign the number. Of course Mrs. Corwin could have changed her number without moving from the Wyckoff Street address. People, especially women, do that frequently enough to shake off obscene callers.

Still, I figured she’d moved. I figured everyone had moved, out of Brooklyn, out of the five boroughs, out of the state. I started to walk back toward Wyckoff Street, covered half a block, turned, retraced my steps, started to turn again.

I made myself stop. I had an anxious sensation in my chest and stomach. I was blaming myself for wasting time and starting to wonder why I’d taken London’s check in the first place. His daughter was nine years in the grave, and whoever killed her had probably long since started a brand-new life in Australia. All I was doing was spinning my goddamned wheels.

I stood there until the intensity of the feeling wound itself down, knowing that I didn’t want to go back to Wyckoff Street. I’d go there later, when Donald Gilman got home from work, and I could check Corwin’s address then. Until then I couldn’t think of anything I felt like doing about the Ettinger murder. But there was something I could do about the anxiety.

ONE thing about Brooklyn—you never have to walk very far before you encounter a church. They’re all over the place throughout the borough.

The one I found was at the corner of Court and Congress. The church itself was closed and the iron gate locked, but a sign directed me to St. Elizabeth Seton’s Chapel right around the corner. A gateway led to a one-story chapel tucked in between the church and the rectory. I walked through an ivy-planted courtyard which a plaque proclaimed to be the burial site of Cornelius Heeney. I didn’t bother reading who he was or why they’d planted him there. I walked between rows of white statues and into the little chapel. The only other person in it was a frail Irishwoman kneeling in a front pew. I took a seat toward the back.

It’s hard to remember just when I started hanging out in churches. It happened sometime after I left the force, sometime after I moved out of the house in Syosset and away from Anita and the boys and into a hotel on West Fifty-seventh. I guess I found them to be citadels of peace and quiet, two commodities hard to come by in New York.

I sat in this one for fifteen or twenty minutes. It was peaceful, and just sitting there I lost some of what I’d been feeling earlier.

Before I left I counted out a hundred fifty dollars, and on my way out I slipped the money into a slot marked “FOR THE POOR.” I started tithing not long after I began spending odd moments in churches, and I don’t know why I started or why I’ve never stopped. The question doesn’t plague me much. There are no end of things I do without knowing the reason why.

I don’t know what they do with the money. I don’t much care. Charles London had given me fifteen hundred dollars, an act which didn’t seem to make much more sense than my passing on a tenth of that sum to the unspecified poor.

There was a shelf of votive candles, and I stopped to light a couple of them. One for Barbara London Ettinger, who had been dead a long time, if not so long as old Cornelius Heeney. Another for Estrellita Rivera, a little girl who had been dead almost as long as Barbara Ettinger.

I didn’t say any prayers. I never do.