A Drop of the Hard Stuff: A Matthew Scudder Novel

by Lawrence Block

I waited, and he returned to report that nobody else knew anything about Ellery’s leavings. I said maybe the super had kept them and made up a story. More likely he threw everything out, Redmond said, because there was nothing there to keep. He tossed it, and to avoid getting bawled out he blamed it on the cops.

  “Which we ought to be used to,” he said. “You know, I was hoping you had something better than a question.”

  “Like what?”

  “I figured maybe your conscience was troubling you and you wanted to tell me how you shot your old childhood pal.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I just said. Because your conscience—”

  “Why would I shoot him?”

  “How do I know? You’re the one with the guilty conscience. Maybe he stole a baseball card from you a hundred years ago in the Bronx, and you just realized it was the one that’s worth a fortune. I forget who’s on it.”

  “I can’t help you there.”

  “Honus Wagner. So who needs your help? You didn’t do it, huh?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Just my luck. Hey, you’re not fucking around with the case, are you? Playing detective?”

  “No.”

  “You want to say that a little more convincingly? Never mind. I’d caution you about getting in our way, but the caseload we’ve got, your pal Ellery’s not getting a lot of our time. You run across anything, you know where to bring it.”

  That was Tuesday. Thursday morning I was reading the paper while I had my breakfast. There was a back-page item I barely registered, a man killed on the street near Gramercy Park, apparently during a mugging. I was several pages past the story when something clicked, and I went back and looked at the victim’s name, and right away I knew which Mark it was who’d been trying to call me.

  XXX

  MARK SATTENSTEIN,” Joe Durkin said. “Killed shortly after midnight within three blocks of his home, death the result of multiple blows to the head. Went out for a couple of drinks at a bar with an Irish name, if you can believe such a place exists. They know him there, not a regular, not a heavy drinker, but he’ll come in now and then for a beer. Well, not anymore, he won’t. Not the first mugging in that neighborhood, not even the first this month, and it’s still early in the month. Wallet gone, watch gone, pockets turned inside out—what’s it sound like to you, Matt?”

  “Robbery with violence.”

  “It does sound like robbery, and there’s no question about the violence. Which leaves me with two questions. How’s this anything other than what it looks like? And, while I’m at it, what’s it to you?”

  “I knew him.”

  “Yeah? Old friend?”

  No, I thought. That was the other dead guy. I said, “I only met him once. I was looking into a matter for a friend, and I had some questions for Sattenstein. I went to his apartment, talked with him for an hour tops.”

  “Learn anything?”

  “Enough to rule him out.”

  “Out of what?”

  “Out of the picture,” I said. “I don’t want to go into detail here, but he was one direction I could go, and after I talked to him I realized that would be a dead end.”

  He looked at me, thought about it. “And this was recent?”

  “Within the past couple of weeks.”

  “And now he’s dead, and you figure it can’t be a coincidence.”

  “No,” I said, “I figure it’s almost certainly a coincidence. But I figure it’s worth the price of a hat to rule out the possibility that it’s not.”

  A hat, in police parlance, is twenty-five dollars. A coat is a hundred. I have no idea what a hat actually costs these days, I can’t remember the last time I went out and bought one, but argot outlasts its origins. A pound is five dollars, and once upon a time that’s what a British pound sterling was worth in American money. I don’t suppose you can get much of a hat for five pounds.

  And a hat was what I’d be buying Joe Durkin. He was a detective at Midtown North, on West Fifty-fourth, and Gramercy Park was well out of his range, but I didn’t know anybody in the precinct where Sattenstein had lived and died, and didn’t want to draw attention by making myself known to whoever had caught the case. Easier to ring Joe and get him to make a couple of phone calls.

  Which had led to my sitting across a Formica-topped table from him in a coffee shop on Eighth Avenue. He was there because he was doing me a favor, but we both knew it was the sort of favor a person got paid for.

  “For the sake of argument,” he said, “let’s say it wasn’t a coincidence, and whoever killed him had a reason. What would that reason be?”

  To keep him from telling me something, I thought. Which he might have been ready to do, if I’d had the brains to call him back.

  I said, “No idea, Joe.”

  “None at all?”

  “Well, he had a history. I don’t know if he’s got a yellow sheet, and my guess is he doesn’t, but for a period of time he was a receiver.”

  “Not on the Jets, I don’t suppose.”

  “I don’t know if you’re familiar with a man named Selig Wolf, but—”

  “Jesus, of course I am. A wide receiver if there ever was one.”

  “Well, Mark’s uncle Selig taught him the business.”

  “Selig was his uncle?”

  “His mother’s brother. Younger or older, I forget which.”

  “Woman’s got a brother, he would pretty much have to be younger or older.”

  “He could be a twin.”

  “One’s born first, even with twins. Why are we even having this conversation? Jesus, Selig Wolf. You couldn’t want a better teacher.”

  “So I gather. He followed in his uncle’s footsteps for a few years, he got wiped out in a burglary, and the whole mess had the effect of scaring him straight.”

  “And at the time of his death he was teaching mentally challenged children how to tie their shoes. A tough way to make a living, but a noble calling indeed.”

  “No, he was working as a bookkeeper for a couple of small firms.”

  “And cooking the books for them.”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “You gotta love this city. You really do. He told you all this in an hour?”

  “So? I just told you the whole thing in about ten minutes.”

  “But that he went and opened up about it.” He shrugged. “So maybe you’re not bad at what you do. You know, if he never took a bust, odds are there’s nobody in the One-Three that knows he was a fencing master. I might feel obliged to pass the word.”

  “You wouldn’t have to say where you heard it.”

  “A snitch,” he said. “A generally reliable source.”

  “That’s me, all right.” I passed him the two bills I’d palmed earlier, a five and a twenty. “I appreciate this, Joe. And you could use a new hat.”

  “Hats I got a whole rack of. What I could use is a coat. Oh, man, the look on your face! Worth the price of admission right there. I’m glad to have the hat, my friend, and glad for the chance to sit down with you for a couple of minutes. Things working out for you?”

  “I get by.”

  “All we can ask,” he said. “All anybody can ask.”

  I was back in my room, running it through my mind, when the phone rang. It was Joe, resuming our conversation as if it had never ended. “This Sattenstein,” he said. “Perp might have sized him up as a soft target. On account of he had a bandaged hand.”

  “It was like that when I saw him.”

  “You spot a man with a bandaged hand, you’re not worried he’ll fight back. But how’d he hurt the hand? Maybe he hit somebody. So maybe he’s a man with a short fuse, type who’d be apt to take a swing at a guy tries to hold him up.”

  “With his other hand.”

  “Whatever. So the perp slams him with whatever he brought along to hit people with. Your traditional blunt instrument.”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “You just thought this up?” />
  “I picked up the phone and passed on the word about the vic’s famous uncle Selig. Which was news to all concerned, and my guy there showed his appreciation by mentioning the bandaged hand. A little quid for the old pro quo. I’d say one hand washes the other, but the bandage would get in the way.”

  So Sattenstein’s sitting home and brooding over the woman who decided she was a lesbian, and the walls are closing in on him and he forgot to pick up a six-pack earlier, so if he wants a beer he has to leave the house. And why not walk a few blocks and drink it in the good company a saloon can provide? And who knows, maybe he’ll get lucky. You never know.

  And there he is, drinking with his left hand because his right hand’s still bandaged. And somebody spots him, tags him when he leaves. Hits him too hard.

  Why not?

  Because I really wanted that to be how it played out. That way it was sheer coincidence. Fate, kismet, karma. Dumb luck. And if it was any of those things, then it wasn’t my fault.

  I sat in my room and looked up his telephone number and tried to decide if it looked familiar, if it had been written on the message slip I’d crumpled and tossed. If it looked familiar, it wasn’t because I’d seen it written out, but because I’d dialed it several times when I was first trying to reach the man.

  I dialed it now, and the machine picked up. I listened to a dead man’s voice. I hung up, wondering how long it would be before someone unplugged the machine, how long before the telephone company cut off the phone service.

  You don’t die all at once. Not anymore. These days you die a little at a time.

  I don’t know how long I sat there, but eventually the thought came to me that I ought to go to a meeting, and I looked at my watch and saw I was too late for any of the noon meetings. It was past two already, and I hadn’t been to a meeting or eaten anything since breakfast.

  Call your sponsor, a little voice murmured, and I picked up the phone, and when I had the number half dialed I realized I was calling his home number, and he’d be at his shop. I tried his work number and got it wrong, some woman answered, and I apologized and looked up the number, and got a busy signal.

  I called Jan. The phone rang twice, and I rang off before she could answer.

  I called Greg. The machine picked up, and I rang off. I’d left him enough messages.

  But something made me dial the number again, and this time when the machine picked up I let the message play through to the end. After he’d invited me to leave a message after the beep, a mechanical voice cut in to inform me that the message tape was full.

  Well, that explained why he hadn’t returned my calls. He hadn’t returned anybody’s calls. Out of town, most likely, and not checking his messages, and—

  I rushed out of there. When I got to the street, there was an eastbound cab discharging a passenger in front of the big apartment building across the street. I yelled out, ran across the street, dodged traffic.

  “You could get killed like that,” the driver said. “What’s the big hurry?”

  I didn’t remember his address. I knew he was on Ninety-ninth between First and Second, and on the uptown side of the street near the middle of the block. There were four houses in a row that looked about the same, and it could have been any of them, but the first one I tried was the second from the right, and I spotted his name on one of the buttons. I pushed it and didn’t get a response, but then I hadn’t been expecting one.

  There was a button at the bottom of the column marked Sput, which suggested that the building had a dyslexic superintendent. I rang it, and when nothing happened I rang it again. No response.

  I rang a couple of apartments on the third floor, and eventually somebody answered and wanted to know who I was and what I wanted. I remembered the smell of mice. “Exterminator,” I said, and the buzzer let me in.

  I climbed the stairs. The mouse smell was faint, and I doubt I’d have noticed it if I hadn’t remembered our conversation. Mice, cabbage, wet dog with garlic. At the third-floor landing a woman stood in a doorway, frowning at me. If I was an exterminator, why was I empty-handed? Where were my work clothes?

  Before she could say anything, I drew out my wallet, flipped it open. I extended a forefinger, pointed upstairs. She shrugged, sighed, returned to her apartment, and I heard the bolt shoot home as she locked her door.

  I climbed three more flights of stairs and went to Greg’s door. I rang the bell and heard the chimes sound within, and when all was still I knocked on the door. As if that would accomplish anything.

  I tried the knob. The door was locked. Well, of course it would be locked. It was too late in the year for him to be at Fire Island, but there were enough other places for a week’s vacation, Key West or South Beach or some modest but genteel resort in the Caymans or the Bahamas. And he’d certainly lock up before he left, and what was I doing here anyway? I hadn’t returned a telephone call, which may have been from some other Mark and not the one who’d been killed in a street mugging, and to compensate I’d rushed uptown and flimflammed my way into his building, and wasn’t it time for me to turn around and go home?

  I tried a credit card on the lock. If it wasn’t bolted, if the spring lock was all that was keeping me out, I might be able to loid my way in. I spent a couple of minutes establishing that such was not the case. The door was locked, and I couldn’t open it, short of kicking it in.

  It seemed to me that I could sense something. It seemed to me that I could feel it.

  I got down on one knee, lowered my face to floor level. There was a space of perhaps a quarter of an inch beneath the bottom of the door. Enough to show light, if there’d been a light on within the apartment.

  I didn’t smell mice, or cabbage. Or wet dog with garlic. What I did smell sent me out of the building and down the street, looking for a working pay phone.

  XXXI

  YOU SEE SOMETHING like that,” Redmond said, “you want to cut him down. It’s heartless, somehow, leaving him like that. But you do the humane thing and you catch hell from the crime lab crew. Just opening a window pisses them off, but that’s just too fucking bad.”

  He’d opened all the windows, and that was a help. The odor I’d caught a whiff of in the hallway hit us in the face when the super opened the door for us, and we walked into a stench that made me grateful I’d skipped lunch.

  Aside from the smell, the living room was as I remembered it, and in perfect order. The kitchen was immaculate, but for a half-finished cup of coffee in its matching saucer.

  In the bedroom, wearing nothing but a pair of blue-and-white-striped boxer shorts, Greg Stillman had a black leather belt looped around his neck, the wide brass buckle mostly hidden by his swollen throat. The other end of the belt disappeared over the top of the closet door, which had been closed to anchor it there. A folding step stool lay on its side, where it would have landed when he kicked it away.

  “Nobody would ever do this,” Redmond said, “if they had the faintest fucking idea what they’d wind up looking like. Or what they’d smell like.”

  The head swells, the neck stretches, the face blackens. The bowels and bladder empty themselves. Noxious gases form in the internal organs and find their way out. Flesh rots.

  “The poor son of a bitch,” Redmond said. “You hate to leave him hanging there. But a fat lot of good it’d do him to cut him down.”

  The man from the medical examiner’s office thought it was a very bad way to kill yourself. “Because you’re a long time dying,” he said. “And you’re conscious. You flop around like a trout on a line, and it’s too late to change your mind. Look here, on the door. Scuff marks from kicking. There’s pills you can take, you just go to sleep and you don’t wake up. And if you have second thoughts after you swallow them, well, you’ve generally got time to get over to the emergency room and have your stomach pumped.”

  “Or you eat your gun and at least it’s quick.”

  “Makes a goddam mess, though,” the ME told him. “But you’re not the one h
as to clean it up, so what do you care?”

  “Me?” Redmond said. “Let’s leave me out of it, huh? I’m not about to eat my gun.”

  He said, “You don’t smoke, do you? I quit years ago, but whenever I walk in on something like that, I wish I still smoked and I wish I had a cigar. One about a foot long and an inch thick. Something to smell instead of what we had to smell in there.”

  We were in the Emerald Star, a Second Avenue bar I’d noticed on my first visit to Greg’s apartment. The bartender was a gaunt Hispanic with long sideburns and a pencil-line mustache. Redmond, who’d had whiskey and water when I met him at the Minstrel Boy, said he’d have a double Cutty Sark, neat, no ice.

  I thought that sounded like a very sensible choice. But what I ordered was a Coke.

  “My first partner,” I said, “was addicted to those little Italian cigars that look like pieces of twisted rope. They came in a little cardboard box, five or six to the box. I think the brand was De Nobili, but Mahaffey always called them guinea stinkers.”

  “Nowadays they’d write him up for uttering an ethnic slur.”

  “They might, and he wouldn’t care. I hated the smell of the things, but when we walked in on something like just now, he’d light one up and he’d give me one, and I’d light it and smoke it.”

  “And be glad for it, I’ll bet.”

  “It helped,” I said.

  He picked up his glass, looked through it at the overhead light. I wondered why he did that. I’d done it often enough myself, and never knew why.

  “No note,” he said.

  “No.”

  “My impression of him was that he’d be the type to leave a note. You knew him better than I did.”

  “My impression,” I said, “was he wasn’t the type to kill himself.”

  “Everybody’s the type,” he said. “The miracle is there’s so many of us who never get around to it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “My father killed himself. You know what that means?” I did, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “Means my odds aren’t good. I forget the numbers, but the sons of suicides are thus and so many times as likely to kill themselves as the rest of the world.”