A Drop of the Hard Stuff: A Matthew Scudder Novel

by Lawrence Block

  “And here I thought mine was minimalist,” he said. “Nothing but your name and your number, and I already had ’em both.” He tucked the card away. “But I’ll keep it. A man gives you his card, you keep it. Be bad manners not to. But wait a minute, give me my card back, will you?”

  I did, and he uncapped a pen and printed SCOOTER WILLIAMS on the back of the card in tiny block capitals, then consulted a little memo book and added an address and phone number. The book was bound in black calf, and matched the card case.

  “There you go,” he said. “You see him, won’t take you ten minutes to rule him out.”

  I thanked him, glanced at what he’d written. The address was on Ludlow Street, so Scooter still had his cheap apartment in a bad neighborhood. I looked across at Steffens, and wondered what he expected in return.

  He answered the question before I could ask it. “You can pay for my drinks,” he said, “and that’ll do me fine. I’m a machine pol in fucking Jersey City, for Chrissake. Doing favors for people is part of my job description, right up there with pigging out at the public trough. Someday you’ll do me a favor back.”

  “I don’t know what it might be, Vann. They won’t let me vote in Jersey City.”

  He laughed. “Oh, don’t you be so sure of that, my friend. You come see me on Election Day, and I’ll guarantee you get to vote at least once in every precinct. I’ll tell you what. I’ll have one more drink on your tab, and you can tell me why you give a damn who put the two bullets in Jack Ellery.”

  I told him more than I’d planned. He was a good listener, nodding in the right places, stirring the pot with a question or an observation now and then. He’d seemed like a blowhard at first, but I warmed to him over the course of the hour or so we spent together. Maybe his manner softened when he felt less need to impress me. Maybe I became more at ease in Armstrong’s—which might or might not be a good thing.

  I took care of the check, and on the way out I remembered something. “You know everything,” I said. “Maybe you’ll know this.”

  “If it’s a state capital, forget it. I’m lousy on state capitals.”

  “High-Low Jack,” I said. “You happen to know why they called him that?”

  “I didn’t even know that they called him that. High-Low Jack? It’s a new one on me.”

  “Not important,” I said. “I just thought you might know.”

  “Damn, I hate to disappoint a new friend.” He snapped his fingers. “You know, I just might know after all. I bet it’s because Scooter was already taken.”

  XXI

  HEY, MAN!” Big smile, showing teeth that hadn’t seen a dentist in a while. “You’re the guy who called, right? You told me your name but that doesn’t mean I can remember it.”

  “Matthew Scudder.”

  “Right, right. Well, come on in, Matthew. Sorry about the place. The cleaning girl’s coming first thing tomorrow morning.”

  Magazines were heaped on a floral-patterned armchair. He scooped them up, motioned for me to take their place. He stacked the magazines on a low table made from a door and pulled up a folding chair for himself.

  “I was joking about the cleaning girl,” he said. “Around here, I’m the closest I’ve got to household help. The good news is I don’t cost much.”

  The apartment wasn’t really that messy, and for a pot-smoker’s Lower East Side premises it probably ranked within a few points of the top. As far as I could tell, it was clean enough underneath the clutter.

  I’d called him the morning after my late night with Vann Steffens. Before I dialed the number I checked the white pages, and there he was, Williams, Robt P., with the same phone number and same Ludlow Street address Vann had given me. He could have saved himself all that meticulous printing and told me to look in the book, but he’d said favors were his stock-in-trade, and that one was easily performed.

  The phone rang a few times, and when Williams picked up he was out of breath, as if he’d hurried to pick up before the machine could take the call. I gave my name and said I’d like to talk to him about Jack Ellery, and he repeated Jack’s name a couple of times, and then he said, “Oh, fuck, I heard about that. What a terrible thing, huh? First I heard he killed himself, and that didn’t make sense. I mean people do it all the time and it never makes sense, but he wasn’t the type. Did you know him, man?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Yeah, me too. But what I heard next was someone killed him, and that didn’t make sense either, because why in the hell would anybody want to kill Jack? Wha’d they do, shoot him?”

  I said someone did just that, and he said that was what somebody had said, and it was amazing, just amazing. I asked if I could come over and talk to him, and he said sure, why not, he’d be hanging around the place all day. When did I want to come? Sometime in the afternoon?

  I had breakfast first, and caught a noon meeting at Fireside, and took the F Train to its last stop in Manhattan. I’d checked a map first, and was thus able to walk directly to Ludlow Street, and by 2:30 I was sitting in that armchair. The arms showed wear and the springs were shot, but it was holding me as comfortably as it had held the magazines.

  The cooking smells in the building’s halls and stairwell had been a mix of Latin and Asian, but the smell in Scooter Williams’s apartment was predominantly herbal. A lot of marijuana had been smoked in those three little rooms, and its aroma had seeped into the walls and floorboards, even as it had taken Scooter’s life and put it permanently on Hold.

  He had to be somewhere in his middle forties, but managed to look both older and younger than his years. His full head of dark brown hair was shaggy, and looked as though he might have cut it himself. He had a droopy mustache, irregularly trimmed, and hadn’t shaved in a couple of days.

  He wore a maroon solid-color sport shirt with long sleeves and long collar points, and over that he wore one of those khaki vests with twenty pockets. Photographers’ vests, I think they call them, although how anybody could remember which pocket he’d put his film in was beyond me. His blue jeans had bell-bottoms, which you didn’t see much anymore, and they were frayed at the cuffs and worn through at the knees.

  He talked for a while about something he’d seen on television, some science-fiction program that impressed him from a philosophical standpoint. I didn’t pay much attention, just let him ramble, then tuned in again when he said Jack’s name.

  “Out of the blue,” he said. “Hadn’t heard from him in years, hadn’t thought of him in years, and the phone rings and it’s Jack. Can he come over? Well, sure. I’m in the same place. I been here since, wow, since I ditched college. Moved in and never moved out, and can you believe it’s more’n twenty years?”

  “And he came over?”

  “Couple hours after he phones, the bell rings and it’s him. You know what I figured, don’t you? Can you guess? I figured he was looking to cop.”

  “To buy, uh—”

  “Herb,” he said. “Kills me when I hear people call it a gateway drug. Man, I never got out of the gate. Started NYU in September, and before the month was done my roomie turned me on with what was probably a pretty lame joint, but I took a deep drag and you know what happened?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing whatsoever. I smoked the whole thing and nothing, zip, zero. But I felt the tiniest little bit hungry, you know, so I got this jar of peanut butter from my desk and started eating it off a spoon. And it was the most amazing taste, like I’m suddenly noticing all the subtleties of the peanut butter, the total mystical dimension of the taste of it, and it dawns on me that I’m stoned out of my fucking mind.”

  He finished the jar of peanut butter, and long before it was gone he knew what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to spend it feeling just like that.

  “For a while,” he said, “you chase higher highs, but eventually you tip to the sheer futility of it. And you don’t have to get higher and higher. Just high is high enough, you know?”

  He never had
any interest in other drugs—uppers, downers, psychedelics. He tried mushrooms once and mescaline once and acid twice, just to know what they were about, but as far as he was concerned there was nothing like good dope. He smoked every day, and he sold enough so it didn’t cost him, and maybe he even came out a few dollars ahead.

  “Never been busted,” he said, “which is probably a record, or close to it. But I only sell to people I know, and the cops around here know me and know what I do, and they know I’m not hurting anybody, or doing any kind of volume, so I don’t get hassled. I always get by, and I always stay high, and there’s a song lyric hiding in there somewhere, can you dig it?”

  “But Jack wasn’t looking to cop,” I said.

  “Oh, wow. Got a ways off track, didn’t we? No, he wasn’t. I offered, you know, like did he want a taste? And before I could finish the sentence he’s telling me how he’s an alcoholic, except he doesn’t drink, and that means he can’t do anything. Dope, pills, anything at all; if it does anything good for your head, he can’t have any part of it. I couldn’t figure out why at first, but he put it so I could understand it.”

  “ ‘You can’t be high and sober at the same time,’ ” I said.

  “That’s it! His words exactly, and when he put it that way I could dig it. So I didn’t offer him anything except an orange soda, which I’ve been meaning to offer you, because I figure you and him were in the same club. I’m gonna have one, and can I bring you one?”

  We drank our orange sodas out of the can. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had one, and decided I was willing to go that long before I had another.

  “You’re an orange soda guy, you know what he came for.”

  “I think so.”

  “Amends, he called it. He was going through his life, trying to make up for everything bad he ever did. You do that yourself?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Man, I was never a drinker, you know? Day I graduated Pembroke High I hit all the parties and came home shit-faced drunk. Fell into bed with my clothes on, and the room started spinning. Leaned over, puked on the carpet, and passed out. Woke up and said I’m never doing that again, and I never did.”

  Until he got to the last four words, his story was one I’d heard more times than I could count.

  “Amends,” he said, in something approaching wonder. “What did he ever do to me that he’s got to make amends? Me and Jack, we knew each other for a few years there. Worked a few moving jobs together, smoked a little dope together, hung out some. Only thing came to mind, he tried to get me to tip him to some people who’d be good pickings. You know, people I moved, and they had good stuff, and I’d get a cut of what he got from ripping them off.”

  “But you weren’t interested.”

  “No way, man!” He shook his head. “Man, run a little scam on the Welfare Department, get a check I got no right to? Go up to Klein’s, boost some socks and a shirt? Okay, why not? I’m no saint, I’m cool with shit like that. But stealing from human beings? People I met, people who paid me to take good care of their stuff, people who gave me tips? Not my scene.” He took a long drink of soda. “But where’s the amends come in? I, like, turned him down flat on that one. Never even tempted. Didn’t judge the man, just said no, not my scene. Matter of fact—”

  “What?”

  “Well, just thinking about it now, maybe I was the one owed him an amends. ’Cause what I did, a couple of the moving companies I worked for, I sort of told them not to hire him no more. Didn’t say why. Just, like, he’s not the most reliable cat to work with, he don’t pull his weight, he slacks off. Nothing to get him banned or give him a bad name, just enough so he’s the last one hired. Here I’m his friend and I’m keeping him from getting work, so maybe…”

  His voice trailed off, and I could see him running the question in his mind. He looked to be capable of devoting the next hour to its philosophical implications.

  I said, “But that wasn’t what was on his mind.”

  “Oh,” he said. “No, nothing like that. It was loose.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Loosey-goosey. Luce. Lucille, man. My old lady.” He looked off to the side, smiled at a memory. “Years back, this was. Not my old lady anymore. Been a few of them since her. My experience, they tend to come and go. You know what’s funny?”

  “What?”

  “They’re always around the same age. The ones that move all the way in, I mean. A chick who’s in my life for, like, fifteen minutes, she could be any age. But the ones who move in and park their shoes under the bed, they’re always twenty-four, twenty-five years old. When I was nineteen I had an old lady six years older’n me, and now I’m what, forty-seven? And the last old lady I had, like she moved out a year ago, and she was twenty years younger’n me. Man, Picture of Dorian Gray? Can you dig it?” He frowned. “Except not exactly Dorian Gray, but you see what I’m getting at, don’t you?”

  “Lucille,” I said.

  “Oh, right. Man, she was choice. Out of her fucking mind, but sweet. Had some fucked-up childhood.” He moved a hand to wave the past away. “Jack comes here, tells me how he was balling her. Him and Lucille, going at it like, I don’t know, mink? Man, he thinks he has to make amends to me for that?”

  “You already knew about it?”

  “I took it for fucking granted, man! Lucille, she was balling everybody. It didn’t take us more than a couple of months to get way past the whole fidelity number. We went to a few parties where everybody just did anybody who was handy. Man, after you watch your woman getting fucked by a stranger, you either let go of jealousy or you put her clothes in a box and set it out by the curb. I told him, I said, Jack, if this is keeping you up nights, man, let go of it. ‘But you were my friend and I betrayed you.’ By fucking Lucille? You want to make amends for that, go get in line, and it’s a long line.”

  “Wasn’t there something about a child?”

  “Oh, right. He thought he knocked her up. Well, somebody did. She was pregnant a couple of times while we were together. First time she had an abortion and the second time she waited too long and decided she’d have the baby. Then she winds up having a miscarriage, which was like good news and bad news, you know?” He looked off to the side again. “Makes you wonder.”

  “Oh?”

  “Say she had the kid. I mean, is that gonna keep us together? She could have had triplets and we’re still gonna split the blanket when the time comes. You can start thinking, Oh, we have a kid, I go to work for IBM, we get ourselves a split-level in Tarrytown, but none of that’s gonna happen. If she had a kid all it woulda meant is she’d have had one more thing to carry when she took off. Or she’d have left me with the kid, and what am I gonna do? Wrap it up and leave it outside a convent?”

  I had this sudden unbidden image: my sons, Mike and Andy, standing at a locked iron gate, waiting to be taken in by the Little Sisters of the Poor. I took a deep breath and blinked it away.

  “I wonder where she is now,” he was saying. “Last I heard she was in San Francisco. She could have a kid or two by now. Not mine, though. Not Jack’s either.” He had that faraway look again. “I might have a kid out there somewhere. That I had with somebody else, that I never knew about.”

  XXII

  THEN IT LOOKS as though we’re done,” Greg Stillman said. “They’re all in the clear.”

  “You sound disappointed.”

  “Not exactly. I had a problem and now it’s been resolved, and I’m grateful to you for resolving it. But—”

  “But it feels incomplete. Unfinished.”

  “Yes, of course. How do you feel, Matt? You’re the one who’s been out there doing the work. All I did was pick up the tab.”

  And all I’d done was go through the motions. I was in my hotel room with a cup of coffee from the deli downstairs, looking across the rooftops at some lighted offices all the way downtown. I’d decided I could make my final report over the phone. There was no real need to sit in another coffee shop
while I told my client we were out of suspects.

  “I feel all right,” I said. “I’d like it better if I’d managed to crack the case, but that’s not what you hired me for. That’s a police matter anyway.”

  “But they won’t do anything.”

  “We don’t know that. It’ll be an open file, and when some new information comes their way, they’ll pick it up and work it. Greg, you wanted to be sure you weren’t holding out on them. Well, you’re not. Whoever killed your sponsee, it wasn’t one of the five people on his Eighth Step list.”

  “The man in prison—”

  “Piper MacLeish.”

  “Obviously he couldn’t have done it. Unless they give you a weekend pass so that you can even an old score. But couldn’t he pass the word to somebody outside?”

  “He’d have had to get the word himself. There’s nothing to indicate that Jack ever visited him, or even wrote to him. And it doesn’t really add up emotionally anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Say you’re in prison, serving a long sentence for something you did. ‘Hi, remember me? Say, I want to apologize because I’m the guy who ratted you out, and you wouldn’t have wound up in the joint if it wasn’t for me.’ ”

  “What a marvelous Ninth Step declaration.”

  “Well, he might have worded it differently, but that would be the gist of it. And what’s MacLeish’s reaction? ‘That son of a bitch, he did this to me, I’d better call in a favor and have him killed.’ No, we already crossed the Piper off the list, and I think we can leave it that way.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “I was a cop for a lot of years,” I said, “and I wasn’t the NYPD equivalent of a Step Nazi. I learned how to overlook things, and sometimes I profited financially from what I overlooked. But homicide was always different. When somebody got killed and it landed on my desk, I wanted to clear the case.

  “That didn’t necessarily mean that anybody wound up going away for it. That was the goal, but it didn’t always work out that way. Sometimes I knew who did it but couldn’t make a case that would stand up. But I’d done what I could, and the case was solved, so my work was done.”