Out on the Cutting Edge

"My guess is you had a sexual hold on him, but it could have been anything. He was just starting to get sober and he wasn't a model of mental health at the time. And you're pretty good at getting people to do what you want them to do. You probably convinced Eddie he'd be doing the old lady a favor. I've heard you rap on the subject, how nobody should have to grow old that way. And she'd never know what happened to her, the drug would keep her from waking up, and so she'd never feel a thing. All he had to do was go out his window, climb up a flight, and stick a knife into a sleeping woman."

"Why wouldn't I just knife her myself? If I was already in her apartment and I got her to drink a dose of chloral."

"You wanted it to go in the books as a burglary. Eddie could make it a lot more convincing. He could lock her door from the inside and put the chain latch on before he went back out the window. I saw the police report. They had to break the door down. That was a nice touch, made it look a lot less like a possible inside job."

"Why would I want her dead?"

"That's easy. You wanted her apartment."

"Look around you," she said. "I've already got an apartment.

Ground floor, no stairs to climb. What did I need with hers?"

"I spent a lot of time downtown today. Most of the morning and a good part of the afternoon. It's hard to chase things through the municipal record system, but if you know how to do it and what you're looking for, there's a lot you can find out. I found out who owns this building. An outfit called Daskap Realty Corp."

"I could have told you that."

"I also found out who owns Daskap. A woman named Wilma Rosser. I don't suppose it would be terribly hard to prove that Wilma Rosser and Willa Rossiter are the same person. You bought the building and moved in, but you told everybody that you were just the super, that you got the apartment in return for your services."

"You have to do that," she said. "No landlord can live on the premises unless you hide the fact from your tenants. Otherwise they're after you all the time for one thing or another. I had to be able to shrug and say the landlord says no or I can't reach the landlord or whatever I had to say."

"It must have been tough," I said. "Trying to generate a positive cash flow here, with all of the tenants paying rent way below market."

"It is tough," she admitted. "The woman you mentioned, Gertrude Grod. She was rent-controlled, of course. Her annual rent came to less than what it cost to heat her place during the winter. But you can't believe I'd kill her because of that."

"Her among others. You don't own just this building. You're the principal in two other corporations besides Daskap. One of them, also owned ultimately by Wilma Rosser, owns the building next door.

Another, owned by W. P. Taggart, owns two buildings across the street, the ones where you're the superintendent. Wilma P. Rosser was divorced from Elroy Hugh Taggart three years ago in New Mexico."

"I got in the habit of using different names. My political background and all."

"The buildings across the street have been a very unsafe place to live since you bought them. Five people have died over there in the past year and a half. One was a suicide. They found her with her head in the oven. The rest all died of natural causes. Heart attacks, respiratory failure. When frail old people die alone, no one looks too hard to see what did it. You can smother an old man in his sleep, you can haul an old lady across the floor and leave her with her head in the gas oven.

That's a little dangerous because there's always the possibility of an explosion, and you wouldn't want to blow up the building just to kill a tenant. That's probably why you only used that method once."

"There's no evidence of any of this," she said. "Old people die all the time. It's not my fault if the actuarial tables caught up with some of my tenants."

"They were all full of chloral hydrate, Willa."

She started to say something. Her mouth opened, but something stopped the words. She breathed heavily, in and out, and then her hand moved to her mouth and her index finger rubbed at the gum above the two false teeth, replacements for the ones she'd lost in Chicago. She sighed again, heavily, and something went out of her face and the set of her shoulders.

She picked up her coffee cup, took it over to the sink and emptied it. She got the bottle of Teacher's from the cabinet and filled the cup. She drank deeply and shuddered. "God," she said, "you must miss this stuff."

"Sometimes."

"I'd miss it. Matt, they were just waiting to die, just hanging on and hanging on."

"And you were doing them a favor."

"I was doing everybody a favor, myself included. There are twenty-four apartments in this building, all with pretty much the same layout. Renovated and sold as co-ops, every apartment in the building would bring a minimum of a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.