Even the Wicked: A Matthew Scudder Novel (Matthew Scudder Mysteries)

by Lawrence Block

  I had done some work for Whitfield on Ray Gruliow’s recommendation, running checks on witnesses and potential jurors, and I liked him well enough to hope to do more. It was a little late for him to be calling me on business, but the nature of the business is such that you get calls at all hours. I didn’t mind the interruption, especially if it meant work. It had been a slow summer thus far. That wasn’t all bad, Elaine and I had been able to get away for some long weekends in the country, but I was beginning to get rusty. The signs were there in the way I read the morning papers, obsessively interested in the local crime news and itching to get mixed up in it.

  I took the phone in the kitchen and said, “Matthew Scudder,” announcing myself to whoever had placed the call for him.

  But he’d made it himself. “Matt,” he said. “Adrian Whitfield. I hope I didn’t get you at a bad time.”

  “I was watching two fellows hitting each other,” I said. “Without much enthusiasm, on my part or theirs. What can I do for you?”

  “That’s a good question. Tell me something, would you? How do I sound?”

  “How do you sound?”

  “My voice isn’t shaky, is it?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think it was,” he said, “but it ought to be. I got a phone call a little while ago.”

  “Oh?”

  “From that idiot with the News, but perhaps I shouldn’t call him that. For all I know he’s a friend of yours.”

  I knew a few people at the Daily News. “Who?”

  “Marty McGraw.”

  “Hardly a friend,” I said. “I met him once or twice, but neither of us had much of a chance to make an impression on the other. I doubt he’d remember, and the only reason I remember is I’ve been reading his column twice a week for I don’t know how many years.”

  “Isn’t he in there three times a week?”

  “Well, I don’t usually read the News on Sundays.”

  “Got your hands full with the Times, I suppose.”

  “Full of ink, generally.”

  “Isn’t that something? You’d think they could print the damned newspaper so it doesn’t come off on your hands.”

  “‘If they can put a man on the moon…’”

  “You said it. Can you believe there’s a newsstand in Grand Central sells disposable white Pliofilm gloves to wear while you read the damn thing?” He drew a breath. “Matt, I’m avoiding the point, and my guess is you already know what the point is.”

  I had a pretty good idea. “I suppose he got another of those letters. From Will.”

  “From Will, yes. And the subject of that letter?”

  “It would have to be one of your clients,” I said, “but I wouldn’t want to try to guess which one.”

  “Because they’re all such estimable men?”

  “I just wouldn’t have a clue,” I said. “I haven’t followed your cases that closely, except for the couple I’ve worked on. And I don’t know how Will’s mind works, anyway.”

  “Oh, it’s an interesting mind. I would say it works very well, certainly well enough for the purpose at hand.” He paused, and I knew what he was going to say an instant before he said it. “He wasn’t writing about one of my clients. He was writing about me.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Oh, lots of things,” he said. “I could read it to you.”

  “You’ve got the letter?”

  “A copy of it. McGraw faxed it to me. He called me first, before he called the cops, and he faxed me a copy of the letter. That was actually damned considerate of him. I shouldn’t have called him a jerk.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “When I first brought his name up, I said—”

  “You called him an idiot.”

  “You’re right at that. Well, I don’t suppose he’s either one, or if he is he’s a considerate specimen of the breed. You asked what Will said. ‘An Open Letter to Adrian Whitfield.’ Let’s see. ‘You have devoted your life to keeping guilty men out of prison.’ Well, he’s wrong about that. They’re all innocent until proven guilty, and whenever guilt was proved to the satisfaction of a jury, they went to prison. And stayed there, unless I could get a reversal on appeal. In another sense, of course, he’s quite correct. Most of the men and women I’ve represented did what they were accused of doing, and I guess that’s enough to make them guilty in the eyes of Will.”

  “What’s his beef with you, exactly? Doesn’t he think the accused are entitled to a defense?”

  “Well, I don’t want to read you the whole thing,” he said, “and his position’s hard to state with precision, but you could say he takes exception to the fact that I’m good at what I do.”

  “That’s all?”

  “It’s funny,” he said. “He doesn’t even mention Richie Vollmer, and that’s what got him started.”

  “That’s right, you were Vollmer’s attorney.”

  “I was indeed, and I got my share of hate mail when he managed to dodge the wheels of Justice, but there’s nothing in here about my role in getting him off. Let’s what he says. He says I put the police on trial, which is hardly unique on my part. Our mutual friend Gruliow does that all the time. It’s often the best strategy with a minority defendant. He also says I put the victim on trial. I think he’s talking about Naomi Tarloff.’

  “Probably.’

  “It might surprise you to know I’ve had some second thoughts about that case. But that’s neither here nor there. I defended the Ellsworth boy the best I knew how, and even so I didn’t get him off. The jury convicted the little son of a bitch. He’s upstate serving fifteen-to-twenty-five, but that’s nothing to the sentence our friend Will has imposed. He says he’s going to kill me.”

  I said, “I assume McGraw went straight to the cops.”

  “With the briefest pause to ring me up and then fax me the thing. As a matter of fact he made a Xerox copy and faxed that. He didn’t want to screw up any physical evidence by running the original through his fax machine. Then he called the cops, and then I heard from them. I had two detectives over here for an hour, and I can call them idiots without regard to the possibility that they’re friends of yours. Did I have any enemies? Were there clients who were bitter about my efforts on their behalf? For Christ’s sake, the only embittered clients I’ve got are the ones behind bars, where nobody has to worry about them, least of all myself.”

  “They have to ask.”

  “I suppose so,” he said, “but isn’t it fairly obvious that this isn’t a guy with a personal motive? He’s already killed four people, and he nailed the first one because Marty McGraw told him to. I don’t know what earned me a place on his shit list, but it’s not because he thought I charged him too much for keeping him out of jail.”

  “Did they offer you protection?”

  “They talked about posting a guard in my outer office. I can’t see what good that’s going to do.”

  “It couldn’t hurt.”

  “No, but it couldn’t help all that much either. I need to know what to do, Matt. I’ve got no experience in this area. Nobody ever tried to kill me. The closest I’ve come to this was five or six years ago when a man named Paul Masland offered to punch me in the nose.”

  “A disaffected client?”

  “Uh-uh. A stockbroker with a snootful. He accused me of fucking his wife. Jesus, I was one of the few men in western Connecticut who hadn’t had a shot at her.”

  “What happened?”

  “He swung and missed, and a couple of guys grabbed his arms, and I said the hell with it and went home. The next time I ran into him we both acted like nothing had ever happened. Or maybe he wasn’t acting, because he’d been pretty drunk that night. It’s possible he didn’t remember a thing. You think I should have told the two detectives about Paul?”

  “If you think there’s a chance he could have written that letter.”

  “It’d be a neat trick,” he said, “because the poor bastard’s been dead for a year and a
half. A stroke or a heart attack, I forget which, but he went in a minute, whichever it was. Son of a bitch never knew what hit him. Not like our friend Will. He’s a fucking rattlesnake, isn’t he? Warning you first, letting you know what’s coming. Matt, tell me what I should do.”

  “What you should do? You should leave the country.”

  “You’re not serious, are you? Even if you are it’s out of the question.”

  That didn’t surprise me. I said, “Where are you? At your office?”

  “No, I got out of there once I got rid of the cops. I’m at my apartment. You’ve never been here, have you? We always met downtown. I live at…Jesus, I was wondering if I should say it over the phone. But if he’s got the phone tapped he’d have to know where it’s installed, wouldn’t you say?”

  Early on, he’d asked if his voice was shaky. It hadn’t been and it still wasn’t, but his anxiety was apparent in the way his conversation was becoming increasingly disjointed.

  He told me the address and I copied it down. “Don’t go anywhere,” I said. “Call your doorman and tell him you’re expecting a visitor named Matthew Scudder, and not to let me up until after I’ve shown him photo ID. And tell him I’m the only visitor you’re expecting, and not to let anybody else up. And tell him that includes the police.”

  “All right.”

  “Let your machine screen your phone calls. Don’t pick up unless you recognize the caller. I’ll be right over.”

  * * *

  By the time I was off the phone there were two different fighters in the ring, a pair of sluggish heavyweights. I asked how the other bout had turned out.

  “Went the distance,” TJ said. “Check it out—for a minute or two I thought I knew how to speak Spanish.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The ring announcer. He’s talkin’ away, and I’m understandin’ every word, and I’m thinkin’ it’s a miracle and next time you gonna see me’s on ‘Un-solved Mysteries.’”

  “The fight’s being held in Mississippi,” I said. “The ring announcer was speaking English.”

  “Yeah, well, I knows that. It slipped my mind is all, hearing all that Spanish from the announcers. And then when I did hear the English, I just thought it was Spanish and I was understandin’ it.” He shrugged. “Young dude got the decision.”

  “It figured.”

  “These two don’t look to be in a hurry. They just takin’ their time.”

  “They’ll have to do it without me,” I said. “I have to go out for a while.”

  “Some kind of business?”

  “Some kind.”

  “Want me to tag along, maybe watch your back?”

  “Not tonight.”

  He shrugged. “You be thinkin’ ‘bout that computer, though.”

  “I’ll give it some thought.”

  “Ain’t got much time, if we’s gonna join the twentieth century.”

  “I’d hate to miss it.”

  “That’ how they gonna catch Will, you know. Computers.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Put all the letters the fool writes into the computer, press the right keys, an’ it’ll analyze the words he uses and tell you the sucker’s a forty-two-year-old white male of Scandinavian ancestry. He be missin’ two toes on the right foot, an’ he a big Jets and Rangers fan, an’ when he a child his mama whupped him for wettin’ the bed.”

  “And they’ll get all this from the computer.”

  “All that an’ more,” he said, grinning. “How you think they gonna get him?”

  “Forensics,” I said. “Lab work at the crime scenes and on the letters he writes. I’m sure they’ll use computers to process the data. They use them for everything these days.”

  “Everybody does. Everybody but us.”

  “And they’ll follow up a ton of leads,” I said, “and knock on a lot of doors and ask a lot of questions, most of them pointless. And eventually he’ll make a mistake, or they’ll get lucky, or both. And they’ll land on him.”

  “I guess.”

  “The only thing is,” I said, “I hope they don’t let it go too long. I’d like to see them hurry up and get this guy.”

  2

  One newspaper column started the whole thing. It was Marty McGraw’s, of course, and it ran in the Daily News on a Thursday in early June. McGraw’s column, “Since You Asked,” appeared in that newspaper every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. It had been a fixture in New York tabloid journalism for ten years or more, always with the same title, though not always on the same days, or even with the same paper. McGraw had jumped ship a few times over the years, moving from the News to the Post and back again, with an intermediate stop at Newsday.

  “An Open Letter to Richard Vollmer” was what McGraw called this particular column, and that’s what it was. Vollmer was an Albany native in his early forties with a long sheet of arrests for minor sex offenses. Then a few years back he’d been sent away for child molestation. He did well in therapy and his counselor wrote a favorable report for his parole board, and Vollmer returned to society, sworn to behave himself and devote his life to helping others.

  He’d been corresponding with a woman on the outside. She’d answered a personal ad of his. I don’t know what kind of woman thinks it’s a good idea to exchange letters with a convict, but God seems to have made a lot of them. Elaine says they combine low self-esteem with a messiah complex; also, she says, it’s a way for them to feel sexy without ever having to put out, because the guy’s locked away where he can’t get at them.

  Frances Neagley’s pen pal did get out, however, and there was nothing in Albany he wanted to get back to, so he came to New York and looked her up. Franny was a thirtyish nurse’s aide who’d been living alone on Haven Avenue in Washington Heights since her mother died. She walked to work at Columbia Presbyterian, volunteered her services at church and block-association fund-raisers, fed and fussed over three cats, and wrote love letters to upstanding citizens like Richie Vollmer.

  She abandoned her correspondence when Vollmer moved in with her. He insisted on being the only felon in her life. Before long she didn’t have much time for the church or the block association. She still took good care of the cats. Richie liked the cats, and all three of them were crazy about him. Franny said as much to a co-worker who’d been alarmed at her friendship with an ex-prisoner. “You know cats,” she crowed, “and what a good judge of character they are. And they absolutely love him.”

  So did Franny, who was about as good a judge of character as her cats. Remarkably enough, jail-house therapy hadn’t changed her man’s sexual orientation, and he went right back to the seduction of the innocent. He started by luring teenage boys to the Haven Avenue apartment with the promise of sex with Franny, showing them nude Polaroids of her as an enticement. (There was a slump to her shoulders and a bovine cast to her features, but otherwise she was a not-unattractive woman, with large breasts and generous hips.)

  She gave the boys what Richie had promised them, whether grudgingly or enthusiastically. Some of her guests were very likely enthusiastic themselves when Richie joined the party and sodomized them. Others were not, but what recourse did they have? Richie was a hulking, powerful man, physically capable of taking what he wanted, and afterward the boys were compromised by having been eager participants in the first stage of the proceedings.

  Things escalated. Franny emptied her savings account and bought a van. The neighbors grew used to the sight of Richie washing and polishing it on the street in front of the apartment house, clearly proud of his new toy. They didn’t see how he’d tricked it out on the inside, with a mattress on the floor and restraints attached to the side panels. They would drive around town, and when they got to a likely spot, Franny would drive while Richie lurked in the back. Then Franny would find a child and persuade him (or her, it didn’t matter) to get into the van.

  They would let the kids go when they were finished. Until one day there was a little girl who wouldn’t stop crying
. Richie found a way to stop her, and they left the body in a thickly wooded section of Inwood Hill Park.

  “That was the best ever,” he told her. “That rounds it out, it’s like dessert after a meal. We should have been finishing them off all along.”

  “Well, from now on,” she said.

  “The look in her eyes right at the end,” he said. “Jesus.”