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"Why would I want her dead?"
"That's easy You wanted her apartot an apartment Ground floor, no stairs to climb What did I need with hers?"
"I spent a lot of tiood part of the afternoon It's hard to chase things through the municipal record syste for, there's a lot you can find out I found out ns this building An outfit called Daskap Realty Corp"
"I could have told you that"
"I also found out ns Daskap A woman named Wilma Rosser I don't suppose it would be terribly hard to prove that Wilht 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 ti and say the landlord says no or I can't reach the landlord or whatever I had to say"
"It enerate a positive cash flow here, with all of the tenants paying rent way below h," she admitted "The woman you mentioned, Gertrude Grod She was rent-controlled, of course Her annual rent ca the winter But you can't believe I'd kill her because of that"
"Her a You're the principal in two other corporations besides Daskap One of the next door Another, owned by W P Taggart, oo buildings across the street, the ones where you're the superintendent Wilart three years ago in New Mexico"
"I got in the habit of using different nas 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 tiht up with some of my tenants"
"They were all full of chloral hydrate, Willa"
She started to say so stopped the words She breathed heavily, in and out, and then her hand um above the two false teeth, replaceain, heavily, and so went out of her face and the set of her shoulders
She picked up her coffee cup, took it over to the sink and eot 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"
"So to die, just hanging on and hanging on"
"And you were doing the everybody a favor, myself included There are twenty-four apart, all with pretty much the same layout Renovated and sold as co-ops, every apart a minimum of a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars You could probably get a little more for the front ones They're a little nicer, they're airier, the light's better Maybe you could up the numbers a little if you did a really nice renovation Do you knohat that comes to?"
"TwoBuying them cost ed to the hilt The rent roll barely covers payments and taxes andwho are paying close to s Matt, do you think it's fair that a landlord has to subsidize tenants by letting the on to an apartment for a tenth of what it's worth?"
"Of course not The fair thing is for them to die and for you tothat e of vacant aparts to so coether the way it should, "
"So you'll s I'm not sure, I haven't decided But either way I'll make a lot of money"
"It sounds like a lot to me"
"It's actually less than it sounds like A millionaire used to be a really rich person Nohen the top prize in a lottery is a million dollars it's considered small-time But I could live nicely on a couple of million dollars"
"It's a shame you won't be able to"
"Why won't I?" She reached out and took y "Matt, there won't be any o"
"A tenant in this building died not two ? Matt, that was Carl White, he died of cancer, for God's sake!"
"He was full of chloral, Willa"