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 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.