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

by Lawrence Block

  “THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE”

  Berry was out of town when the letter landed on Marty McGraw’s desk. He was in Omaha, leading a massive protest against an abortion clinic. “I am doing God’s work,” he told the TV cameras. “It’s His will that I continue, and I’ll stack that up against the so-called will of the people any day.” He told another interviewer that whatever business Will had with him would have to wait until he returned to New York, and he expected to be in Omaha for some time to come.

  God’s will. In AA, we’re advised to pray only for knowledge of His will, and the power to carry it out. My sponsor, Jim Faber, has said that it’s the easiest thing in the world to know God’s will. You just wait and see what happens, and that’s it.

  It may indeed have been God’s work that Roswell Berry was doing, but it evidently wasn’t God’s will that he continue. He stayed in Omaha, just as he said he would, but when he returned to New York it was in a box.

  The maid found him in his room at the Omaha Hilton. His killer, not without a sense of humor, had left him with a coat hanger wrapped around his neck.

  It was the Omaha Police Department’s case, of course, but they welcomed the two NYPD detectives who flew out to consult with them and exchange information. There was no evidence to link Berry’s murder with the killings of Vollmer and Salerno, none aside from Will’s having singled him out in his open letter, and this left room for speculation that some native Omahan, spurred perhaps by Will’s suggestion, had handled the matter on a local level.

  Will’s next communication—sent, like all the others, to Marty McGraw—addressed that notion. “Did I go off to Omaha to settle accounts with Mr. Berry? Or did some citizen of Omaha, outraged at having to put up with Roswell Berry’s disruption of that fair city’s urban equilibrium, take matters into his own hands?

  “My friend, what on earth does it matter? What difference can it possibly make? I myself am nothing, as someone is purported to have said in a slightly different context. It is the will of the people that acts through me. If indeed another pair of hands than mine stuck the knife in Roswell Berry’s pitiless heart before girdling his neck with a coat hanger, it is as moot to ponder my own responsibility in the matter as it is to wonder how much your own writing gave rise to my actions. Each of us, alone or in concert, helps to express

  “THE PEOPLE’S WILL”

  It was cleverly done. Will wouldn’t say whether he’d gone to Omaha, arguing that it didn’t matter one way or another. At the same time, he pretty much settled the matter by alluding to the fact that Berry had been stabbed. The Omaha authorities had suppressed this. (They would have liked to suppress the coat hanger as well, but it leaked, and the symbolism was just too good to expect the press to keep it under wraps. It was easier to hold back the knife work, because it hadn’t shown up until they had Roswell Berry on the autopsy table. He’d been killed with a single stab wound to the heart, inflicted with one stroke of a narrow-bladed knife or dagger. Death was virtually instantaneous and there was no bleeding to speak of, which is why the stabbing wasn’t noticed at first, and why it managed to stay out of the papers.)

  Roswell Berry had looked like a difficult target. He’d been more than halfway across the country, staying in a hotel with a good security setup, and escorted at all times by a cadre of loyal bodyguards, broad-shouldered young men in chinos and short-sleeved white shirts, with buzz haircuts and unsmiling faces. (“Thugs for Jesus,” one commentator had styled them.) There was plenty of speculation as to how Will had managed to slip through their ranks and get in and out of their leader’s hotel room.

  “WILL-O’-THE-WISP?” the Post wondered on its front page.

  But if Berry was a hard man to kill, Will’s next pick was clearly impossible.

  “An Open Letter to Julian Rashid” was the heading on his next letter to McGraw, mailed some ten days after his ambiguous response to Berry’s death. In it, he charged the black supremacist with fomenting racial hatred for purposes of self-aggrandizement. “You have created a fiefdom of a people’s discontent,” he wrote. “Your power feeds upon the hatred and bitterness you create. You have called out for violence, and the society you vilify is at last prepared to turn that violence upon you.”

  Rashid first landed in the spotlight as a tenured professor of economics at Queens College. His name back then was Wilbur Julian, but he dropped the Wilbur and tacked on the Rashid around the time he began formulating his theories. The name change was not part of a conversion to Islam, but merely represented his admiration for the legendary Haroun-al-Rashid.

  His theories, which he expounded in the classroom in spite of the fact that they had little demonstrable connection to economics, contended that the black race was the original human race, that blacks had founded the lost civilizations of Atlantis and Lemuria, that it was this race of black men who were the elders revered in the prehistory of societies throughout the world. They were the builders of Stonehenge, of the heads on Easter Island.

  Then white men had arisen as some sort of genetic sport, a mutation of the pure black race. Just as their skins lacked melanin, so were their spirits lacking in true humanity. Their bodies were similarly stunted; they could not run as fast or as far, could not jump as high, and lacked that primal connection to the very pulse of the earth, which is to say that they didn’t have rhythm. Perversely, however, they were able to prevail because of their inhuman nature, which led them to overwhelm and betray and subvert the black man whenever the two races met. In particular, it was a late offshoot of the white subrace whose special role it was to serve as architects of the white subjugation of the black race. These mongrel dogs at the heart of it all were, surprisingly enough, the Jews.

  “If it turns out there’s life on Saturn,” Elaine said, “and we go there, we’ll find out that they’ve got three sets of eyes, and five sexes, and something against the Jews.”

  Whenever he was given the opportunity, according to Rashid, the black man showed his natural superiority—in track and field, in baseball and football and basketball, and even in what he labeled “Jewish” sports—golf and tennis and bowling. (There were few great black equestrians, he explained, because that too involved subjugation and domination, of the horse by the rider.) Chess, for which he apparently had a passion, provided further proof of black superiority; a game of the intellect, it was studied out of books by the Jews and their followers, while black children took to it naturally and played it well without having to study it.

  It was now the black man’s burden—his phrase—to separate himself entirely from white society, and to establish his innate supremacy in every area of human endeavor, exerting dominion over and, yes, enslaving whites if need be, in order to usher in the new millennium with the black-run human civilization that was essential if the planet itself was to survive.

  Predictably enough, there was a strong move to oust him from his sinecure at Queens College. (Ray Gruliow represented him in his successful battle to hang on to his academic tenure, and insisted that he liked Rashid personally. “I don’t know how much of that horseshit he believes,” he once told me. “It hasn’t kept him from hiring a Jewish lawyer.”) He won in court, then resigned dramatically and announced he was starting his own academic institution. His supporters had managed to get title to a full square block in the St. Albans section of Queens, and there they constructed a walled compound to house the new black university and the greater portion of its students and faculty.

  Julian Rashid lived there, with his two wives and several children. (Although the inevitable rumors had circulated of a passion for white women, both wives were dark-skinned, with African features. They looked enough alike, in fact, to give rise to another rumor to the effect that they were sisters, or even twins.) A guard was posted around the clock outside of Rashid’s living quarters, and a phalanx of armed men in khaki uniforms accompanied him whenever he left the compound, which in turn was fortified and guarded twenty-four hours a day.

  At a press
conference shortly after the news broke of Will’s latest open letter, Rashid announced that he welcomed the challenge. “Let him come. It is true that he embodies the will of his people. They have always hated us, and now that they can no longer dominate us they wish to annihilate us. So let him come to me, and let the will of the white race break itself upon the rock of black will. We shall see whose will is stronger.”

  Nothing happened for a week. Then the police were summoned to the St. Albans compound, where they had never previously dared attempt entry. A group of his followers, some of them members of the uniformed bodyguard, others weeping youths and children, led the way to Rashid’s private quarters and into his bedroom. Rashid was in his bed, or rather his body was. His head had been placed upon a small devotional altar he had built at the far end of the room, and stared out from among a group of wooden carvings and strings of trading beads. He had been beheaded, a medical examination determined, with a single stroke of a ceremonial ax, itself a highly prized artifact of the Senufo tribe of the Ivory Coast.

  How could Will have managed it? How could he penetrate the compound’s airtight security, slipping in and out like a ghost? Theories abounded. Will was black himself, one contingent maintained, and a comparative linguistics graduate student at Columbia was quick to buttress that argument with an analysis of Will’s letters, purportedly proving an African origin for their author. Someone else suggested that Will had disguised himself as a black man, darkening his face like a player in a minstrel show. The political rectitude of each position was held up to scrutiny. Was it racist to assume the killer was white? Was it more racist to assume he was black? The Senufo ax was not the only one around; everybody, it seemed, had an ax of his own to grind.

  The debate was just warming up when the police announced the arrest of Marion Scipio, a trusted associate of Rashid’s and a member of his inner circle. Scipio (né Marion Simmons; Rashid had suggested the change with a nod to Scipio Africanus) had broken down under police interrogation and admitted he’d seized the opportunity of Will’s open letter to right a longstanding injury. Apparently Rashid’s libido had not been slaked by his two official wives, sisters or twins or whatever they were, and he’d had a fling with Scipio’s wife. Scipio only had one wife, and he’d taken this the wrong way. When his chance came around, he took the Senufo ax down from the wall and made Rashid a head shorter.

  Will was so pleased you’d have thought he did it himself. His next letter, posted hours after Scipio’s arrest and confession became public knowledge, restated the theme of his letter upon the death of Roswell Berry. The people’s will had found expression. What did it matter who swung the ax?

  And there he’d let it lie for the ten days or so since. There were other voices—letters and phone calls purporting to be from Will, but clearly not, a couple of anonymous bomb threats, one of which cleared a midtown office building. McGraw got a handwritten letter, “An Open Letter to the So-called Marry McGraw,” whose semi-literate author blamed him for Will’s reign of terror. “You’ll pay for this in your own blood, asshole,” the letter concluded, and it was signed with a large red X that covered half the page. (A lab analysis quickly established that the X was not in fact blood, but red Magic Marker.)

  It took the cops just two days to pick up Mr. X, who turned out to be an unemployed construction worker who’d written the letter on a dare and then boasted about it in a saloon. “He thinks he’s hot shit,” he said of McGraw, but outside of that he didn’t really have anything against him, and certainly planned him no harm. The poor son of a bitch was charged with menacing and coercion in the first degree, the latter a Class D felony. They’d probably let him plead to a misdemeanor and my guess was he’d get off with probation, but in the meantime he was out on bail and not feeling terribly proud of himself.

  And the city went on speculating about Will. There was a new joke about him every day. (Publicist to client: “I’ve got good news and bad news for you. The good news is you’re the subject of a column in tomorrow’s Daily News. The bad news is Marty McGraw’s writing it.”) He kept winding up in your conversation, as had happened at least once that very evening, when TJ assured me that computers would ultimately reveal Will’s true identity. There was, of course, no end of guesswork about the sort of person he was and the sort of life he was likely to be leading. There was guesswork, too, as to who would next draw his attention. One shock jock had invited his listeners to submit names for Will’s consideration. “We’ll see who gets the most votes,” he told his unseen drive-time audience, “and I’ll announce your top choices over the air. I mean, who knows? Maybe he’s a listener. Maybe he’s a big fan.”

  “If he’s listening,” purred the fellow’s female sidekick, “you better hope he’s a fan.”

  That was on a Friday. When he returned to the air on Monday morning, he’d had a change of heart. “We got lots of letters,” he said, “but you know what? I’m not announcing the results. In fact I’m not even tabulating them. I decided the whole thing’s sick, not just the poll but the whole Will fever that’s gripping the city. Talk about everybody’s baser instincts. You wouldn’t believe some of the jokes that are going around, they are truly sick and disgusting.” And, to prove the point, he told four of them, one right after the other.

  The police, of course, were under enormous pressure to find the guy and close the case. But the sense of urgency was very different from that surrounding Son of Sam, or any of the other serial killers who had cropped up over the years. You weren’t afraid to walk the streets, not for fear of Will stalking you and gunning you down. The average person had nothing to fear, because Will didn’t target average people. On the contrary, he took aim only at the prominent, and more specifically at the notorious. Look at his list of victims—Richie Vollmer, Patsy Salerno, Roswell Berry, and, if indirectly, Julian Rashid. Wherever you stood in the social and political spectrum, your response to each of Will’s executions was apt to be that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

  And now he’d set his sights on Adrian Whitfield.

  3

  “I’ll tell you,” he said, “I just don’t know what to make of it. One minute I’m laughing over the latest Will joke. Next thing you know I find out that I’m the latest Will joke, and you want to know something? All of a sudden it’s not so funny.”

  We were in his apartment on the twenty-first floor of a prewar apartment building on Park Avenue and Eighty-fourth Street. He was a tall man, around six two, lean and trim, with patrician good looks. His dark hair had gone mostly gray, and that just enhanced the commanding presence that stood him in good stead in a courtroom. He was still wearing a suit but he’d taken off his tie and opened his collar.

  He was at the serving bar now, using tongs to fill a tall glass with ice cubes. He added club soda and set it down, then dropped a couple of ice cubes in a shorter glass and filled it with a single-malt scotch. I got a whiff of it as he was pouring it, strong and smoky, like wet tweed drying alongside an open wood fire.

  He gave me the tall glass and kept the short one for himself. “You don’t drink,” he said. “Neither do I.” My face must have shown something. “Ha!” he said, and looked at the glass in his hand. “What I mean to say,” he said, “is that I don’t drink like I used to. I drank a lot more when I was living in Connecticut, but I think that’s because everybody in that crowd used to hit it pretty good. One small scotch before dinner is generally as much as I have these days. Tonight’s an exception.”

  “I can see where it would be.”

  “When I left the office,” he said, “after I got rid of those cops, I stopped at the bar down the block and had a quick one before I went and hailed a cab. I can’t remember the last time I did that. I never even tasted it. I threw it down and walked right on out again. And I had another when I walked in the door, I went over and poured it without thinking about it.” He looked at the glass he was holding. “And then I called you,” he said.

  “And here I am.”

/>   “And here you are, and this will be my last drink of the night, and I’m not even sure I’ll finish it. ‘An Open Letter to Adrian Whitfield.’ You want to know the most distressing thing about it?”

  “The company you’re in.”

  “That’s it exactly. Now how the hell did you know I was going to say that? That’s the clarity of club soda talking.”