Out the Window is a terrific Matt Scudder short by Lawrence Block. Scudder is a former NYPD detective who tried to stop a robbery when he was off duty, but his shot went wide of the target and ended a nine year old girl's journey through life. Scudder fell apart, lost his family, made friends with a bottle of scotch and then another bottle of scotch. He picks up cases as a private op here and there.
In this story, he frequents a bar where Paula works, Paula who sometimes walked through her shift "like a ghost through walls." Sometimes she had a brittle smile with tabs of amphetamines behind it. This career probably wasn't why she came to New York: "You no more set out to be a waitress in a Ninth Avenue gin mill than you intentionally become an ex-cop coasting through the months on bourbon and coffee."

Paula lived on the seventeenth floor and sometime after four she swung out of a high window and four seconds later there wasn't enough left of her to perform an autopsy on. "They scooped her up with a spatula and a sponge and then they hosed it all down."

With her apartment locked and the chain on, the cops call it suicide, but her sister doesn't like it and hires Scudder to investigate.

Yes, it's a locked room mystery, but it is told with wit and depth and good old fashioned storytelling skills. Bring on some more of this stuff. ( )

This is a self-contained short story featuring troubled private investigator Matt Scudder, who is one of Block’s best creations. The story is set back in the day, during Matt’s heavy drinking sessions and long before the advent of the mobile phone or internet. So it’s very much a traditional murder-mystery investigation, although initially it appears not to be a murder at all…

Scudder is in between jobs when a female acquaintance apparently commits suicide by jumping out of a window from her high-rise apartment. Her sister is convinced she didn’t take her own life but was murdered instead. Scudder takes on the case, which turns out to be a neat twist on a traditional locked-room murder.

As ever, Block’s writing is crisp and classy. This is pure pulp fiction: there’s no faffing around with detailed back story or sprawling social commentary.

There's more background info and thoughts on the story at:
http://murdermayhemandmore.wordpress.com/2014/07/27/out-the-window-pure-pulp-fic...

If you’ve enjoyed the full-length Matt Scudder books already then grabbing this short story is a no-brainer. It’s a refreshing interlude back to the days when Matt was a hard-faced man whose soul came close to drowning in a whisky bottle.

If you’ve not tried any of the Scudder stories before then this *might* work as an intro – it’s a satisfying little mystery all right. But it doesn’t have the power and depth of Block’s full-length books so don’t view it as entirely typical. It’s more like a taster before you plunge into the 17 full-length Scudder novels, and it’s also one of a dozen Scudder stories compiled into The Night and The Music anthology.

7/10
( )