A Stab in the Dark: A Matthew Scudder Novel

by Lawrence Block Narrated by William Roberts

Overview

Nine long years have passed since the killer last struck-nine years since eight helpless young women were brutally slaughtered by an icepick-wielding maniac. The trail grew cold, and the book was unofficially closed on a serial killer who stopped killing. But now the "Icepick Prowler" has confessed-but only to seven of the killings. Not only does he deny the eighth but he also has an airtight alibi.

Barbara Ettinger's family had almost come to accept that the young woman was the victim of a random killing. Now they must grapple with the shocking revelation that not only was her death disguised to look like the serial killer's work but her murderer may have been someone she knew and trusted.

Matthew Scudder has been hired to finally bring her slayer to justice, setting the relentless detective on the trail of a death almost a decade old, searching for a vicious murderer who is either long gone, long dead-or patiently waiting to kill again.

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

Former New York City detective and now informal P.I. Matthew Scudder appears in the precursor to Eight Million Ways To Die (Audio Reviews, LJ 6/1/98). Scudder investigates the death of Barbara Ettinger, thought to be a victim of an ice pick-wielding serial killer. Caught nine years after the last murder, the killer confessed to all but Ettinger's death. Through considerable legwork and discussion with a range of characters, Scudder locates the true killer. However, as with Eight Million Ways To Die, the more interesting aspect of the work is Scudder's alcoholism. Not yet bottomed out, he engages in morning eye-openers and all-day benders and attacks a possible mugger. Though his lover enters Alcoholics Anonymous at the end of the work, Scudder continues his heavy drinking. William Roberts's reading of the story is quite good. A required purchase for all detective story collections.--Stephen L. Hupp, Urbana Univ., OH

Newgate Callendar

Mr. Block's style, for ''A Stab in the Dark'' is unusually well written....Among the virtues of the book is its complete lack of sentimentality. The author is a deft surgeon, spare and economical, with no wasted motion, sure and precise in his technique. -- New York Times

Marilyn Stasio

The murders are as savage as they come, their horrific nature intensified by the clarity of Mr. Block's pristine prose....He has a fine nose for the pungencies of New York's after-dark street life, and he gives his hero wonderful opportunities to swap syllables with the city's most articulate riffraff.

New York Times

Among the virtues of the book is its complete lack of sentimentality. The author is a deft surgeon, spare and economical, with no wasted motion, sure and precise in his technique.”

Jonathan Kellerman

Lawrence Block is a master…The Matthew Scudder novels are among the finest detective books penned in this century.”

AudioFile

This is a Scudder mystery, and listeners will enjoy his relentless investigation into the brutal nine-year-old murder of a pregnant woman. The novel is early in the Scudder series, by the way, and an important stepping-stone on his way to sobriety.”

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169579963
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	12/01/2011
Series:	Matthew Scudder Series , #4
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

I didn't see him coming. I was in Armstrong's at my usual table in the rear. The lunch crowd had thinned out and the noise level had dropped. There was classical music on the radio and you could hear it now without straining. It was a gray day out, a mean wind blowing, the air holding a promise of rain. A good day to be stuck in a Ninth Avenue saloon, drinking bourbon-spiked coffee and reading the Post's story about some madman slashing passersby on First Avenue.

“Mr. Scudder?”

Sixty or thereabouts. High forehead, rimless eye-glasses over pale blue eyes. Graying blond hair combed to lie flat on the scalp. Say five-nine or -ten. Say a hundred seventy pounds. Light complexion. Cleanshaven. Narrow nose. Small thin-lipped mouth. Gray suit, white shirt, tie striped in red and black and gold. Briefcase in one hand, umbrella in the other.

“May I sit down?”

I nodded at the chair opposite mine. He took it, drew a wallet from his breast pocket and handed me a card. His hands were small and he was wearing a Masonic ring.

I glanced at the card, handed it back. “Sorry,” I said.

“But--”

“I don't want any insurance,” I said. “And you wouldn't want to sell me any. I'm a bad risk.”

He made a sound that might have been nervous laughter. “God,” he said. “Of course you'd think that, wouldn't you? I didn't come to sell you anything. I can't remember the last time I wrote an individual policy. My area's group policies for corporations.” He placed the card on the blue-checked cloth betweenus. “Please,” he said.

The card identified him as Charles F. London, a general agent with Mutual Life of New Hampshire. The address shown was 42 Pine Street, downtown in the financial district.

There were two telephone numbers, one local, the other with a 914 area code. The northern suburbs, that would be. Westchester County, probably.

I was still holding his card when Trina came over to take our order. He asked for Dewar's and soda. I had half a cup of coffee left. When she was out of earshot he said, “Francis Fitzroy recommended you.”

“Francis Fitzroy.”

“Detective Fitzroy. Eighteenth Precinct.”

“Oh, Frank,” I said. “I haven't seen him in a while. I didn't even know he was at the Eighteenth now.”

“I saw him yesterday afternoon.” He took off his glasses, polished their lenses with his napkin. “He recommended you, as I said, and I decided I wanted to sleep on it. I didn't sleep much. I had appointments this morning, and then I went to your hotel, and they said I might find you here.”

I waited.

“Do you know who I am, Mr. Scudder?”

“No.”

“I'm Barbara Ettinger's father.”

“Barbara Ettinger. I don't -- wait a minute.”

Trina brought his drink, set it down, slipped wordlessly away. His fingers curled around the glass but he didn't lift it from the table.

I said, “The Icepick Prowler. Is that how I know the name?”

“That's right.”

“Must have been ten years ago.”

“Nine.”

“She was one of the victims. I was working over in Brooklyn at the time. The Seventy-eighth Precinct, Bergen and Flatbush. Barbara Ettinger. That was our case, wasn't it?”

“Yes.”

I closed my eyes, letting the memory come back. “She was one of the last victims. The fifth or sixth, she must have been.”

“The sixth.”

“And there were two more after her, and then he went out of business. Barbara Ettinger. She was a schoolteacher. No, but it was something like that. A day-care center. She worked at a day-care center.”

“You have a good memory.”

“It could be better. I just had the case long enough to determine it was the Icepick Prowler again. At that point we turned it over to whoever had been working that case all along. Midtown North, I think it was. In fact I think Frank Fitzroy was at Midtown North at the time.”

“That's correct.”

I had a sudden rush of sense memory. I remembered a kitchen in Brooklyn, cooking smells overladen with the reek of recent death. A young woman lay on the linoleum, her clothing disarrayed, innumerable wounds in her flesh. I had no memory of what she looked like, only that she was dead.

I finished my coffee, wishing it were straight bourbon. Across the table from me, Charles London was taking a small tentative sip of his scotch. I looked at the Masonic symbols on his gold ring and wondered what they were supposed to mean, and what they meant to him.

I said, “He killed eight women within a period of a couple months. Used the same M.O. throughout, attacked them in their own homes during daylight hours. Multiple stab wounds with an icepick. Struck eight times and then went out of business.”

He didn't say anything.

“Then nine years later they catch him. When was it? Two weeks ago?”

“Almost three weeks.”

I hadn't paid too much attention to the newspaper coverage. A couple of patrolmen on the Upper West Side had stopped a suspicious character on the streets, and a frisk turned up an icepick. They took him into the station house and ran a check on him, and it turned out he was back on the streets after an extended confinement in Manhattan State Hospital. Somebody took the trouble to ask him why he was toting an icepick, and they got lucky the way you sometimes do. Before anybody knew what was happening he'd confessed to a whole list of unsolved homicides.

“They ran his picture,” I said. “A little guy, wasn't he? I don't remember the name.”

“Louis Pinell.”

I glanced at him. His hands rested on the table, fingertips just touching, and he...

A Stab in the Dark. Copyright © by Lawrence Block. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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