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

by Lawrence Block

“Fulfilling?”

  “Be fillin’ me full,” he said, pushing his plate away. “What kind of work you got for me?”

  “Nothing we could use a computer for,” I said, and told him what I knew about Byron Leopold and the manner of his death.

  “Legwork time,” he said. “Knockin’ on do’s and talkin’ to ho’s.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “We on the clock?”

  “You are,” I said.

  “Means you payin’ me, but who be payin’ you?”

  “Peter’s paying me,” I said, “while I try to find out what happened to Paul.”

  “Think you lost me ’round the turn, Vern.”

  “I have a client,” I said. “Adrian Whitfield.”

  “Lawyer dude. Got his self on Will’s list.”

  “That s right.”

  “How’s he hooked up with Byron?”

  “He’s not,” I said, and explained Whitfield’s theory.

  “Thinks Will’s runnin’ warm-up sessions,” he said. “Make sense to you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Me neither,” he said. “What for’s he need to practice? He doin’ fine.”

  Suppose Byron Leopold’s murder was a street crime. Maybe he’d been killed out of anger at something he’d said or done. Maybe he’d witnessed a crime, maybe he’d seen something from his window or heard something from his park bench. Maybe he’d been mistaken for somebody who’d burned the shooter on a drug sale, or made a pass at the shooter’s lover.

  If it was anything of that sort, there was a chance the word would get around on the street, and I sent TJ off to look for it. He could get more that way than I could.

  Meanwhile, I could look for the motive in Byron’s life.

  I picked up the phone and called Ginnie. “Tell me about him,” I said.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “There are things that don’t add up. He was a rent-stabilized tenant with a decent apartment in a good building that went co-op a little over twelve years ago. It was a noneviction plan, which meant the tenants could either buy in at the insider’s price or stay on as rental tenants. That’s what he did, he went on paying rent.”

  “He was shooting half a dozen bags of heroin at the time,” she said. “Junkies don’t generally make the best investment decisions. He said he wished he’d bought the apartment when he had the chance, but it never even seemed like an option at the time.”

  “What’s surprising,” I said, “is that he managed to keep the place at all. If he was a junkie—”

  “He had the habit but not the lifestyle, Matt. He was a Wall Street junkie.”

  “You don’t mean he was addicted to the stock market.”

  “No, he was addicted to heroin and alcohol. But he worked on Wall Street. It was a low-level position, he was some sort of order clerk in a brokerage house, but he put in his nine-to-five and didn’t take too many sick days. He kept his job and he paid his rent and he never lost his apartment.”

  “I know there are people who manage to pull that off.”

  “Drunks do it all the time. When you hear the word heroin you automatically think of criminals.”

  “Well, buying it’s a criminal transaction to start with.”

  “And a heavy habit costs more than most junkies can earn legitimately. But if you’ve got a decent job and your habit’s not a monster, you can maintain.”

  “I know there are middle-class people who use it,” I said. “There was that woman last month, a magazine editor married to a tax lawyer. Of course she didn’t use a needle.”

  “Not in the age of AIDS. Byron wouldn’t have used a needle either, if he’d started a few years later than he did. But it’s still heroin even if you snort it. You get high if you use it and dope-sick if you don’t. And if you take too much it kills you. The reason we know about the magazine editor is that she died of an overdose.”

  We talked about that, and then I said, “So he kept the same job all those years.”

  “He kept it until he got sober. Then he lost it when his firm was swallowed up in a merger, but I don’t think he was out of work for more than two months before he found something very much like it with another firm. And he kept that job until he had to quit for health reasons.”

  “And how long ago was that?”

  “I think six months, but it may have been longer than that. Yes, it was, because I remember he had stopped working before the holidays, but he went back to the office Christmas party.”

  “Always a comfortable place for a sober alcoholic.”

  “He was depressed afterward, and I don’t think it was from being around all the drinking. Although that might have been part of it. I think it was from knowing that part of his life was over. He’d never be able to go back to work.”

  “Some people would call that one of the good things about AIDS.”

  “Like not having to worry about skin cancer? I’m sure you’re right. But Byron wasn’t like that. He liked having a job to go to.”

  “He had money in the bank,” I said. “Close to forty thousand dollars.”

  “Is that how much it was? I knew he didn’t have to worry about money. His health insurance was in force, and he said he had enough money to last him. To see him out, that was the expression he used.” She was silent for a moment. “This past winter he said he thought he had about a year to go, two years at the outside. Barring a miracle drug, or some other kind of miracle.”

  “I understand there was a will,” I said. “Simple and straightforward, he used a printed form and had two of his neighbors witness it. He left everything to a couple of AIDS charities.”

  “That’s what he told me he was going to do.”

  “Was he ever married?”

  “For about a year, right after he got out of school. Then they got divorced, or maybe it was an annulment. I think that’s what it was.”

  “No children, I assume.”

  “No.”

  “Any family?”

  “A broken home, and both parents were alcoholic.”

  “So he came by it honestly.”

  “Uh-huh. They both died, his father many years ago and his mother sometime after he got sober. One brother, but nobody’s heard from him in years, and Byron thought he was probably dead. There was another brother, and he’d been dead for some years. Byron said he died of an esophageal rupture, so I guess he must have been an alcoholic, too.”

  “All happy families are alike,” I said.

  “God.”

  “Where do you figure the forty thousand came from? And it must have been more than that to start with, if he stopped working before last Christmas. Even if he started putting something aside each week when he sobered up, that’s a lot of money to have saved in such a short amount of time.”

  “Life insurance.”

  “He was somebody’s beneficiary?”

  “No, he had a policy on his own life. He took it out years ago because somebody convinced him it was a good investment.”

  “And maintained the coverage all those years?”

  “He said it was the luckiest thing that ever happened to him. There were stretches when he didn’t have the money or he forgot to send in the premiums, but they were automatically paid by loans against the cash value. So when he got sober it was still in force, and he went on paying the premiums.”

  “Who was his beneficiary?”

  “I think it was probably his wife originally. Then for years he had his mother as beneficiary, and then when she died—”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sorry, it’s hard to get the words out. I didn’t know it at the time, but as it happens he listed me as the beneficiary. I guess he had to put someone.”

  “You said you were close.”

  “Close,” she said. “You know how I found out? I had to be notified when he cashed in the policy. The company had a requirement to that effect, so there was a paper I had to sign. I didn’t have to consent to it, but
he was required to notify me.”

  “A lot of them have that rule,” I said. “In case the insured is required to maintain coverage, say as part of the terms of a divorce settlement.”

  “He was almost apologetic, Matt. ‘I’m afraid you’re not going to be a rich lady after all, Ginnie. I’m going to need the money myself.’”

  “How much was the policy for?”

  “It wasn’t a fortune. Seventy-five thousand dollars? Eighty? Under a hundred, anyway. I don’t know how much he got for it.”

  “That would depend on the cash surrender value of the policy.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that. Whatever it was, it had to last him the rest of his life.”

  “I don’t know much about it myself,” I admitted, “beyond the fact that it’s based on what you’ve paid in premiums over the years. You gradually build up a cash value for the policy, depending on the type of policy you’ve got. With straight life you pay high premiums and your policy’s cash value builds up gradually over time. With term coverage your premiums are lower but you don’t build up any cash value. And there are some intermediate categories, too.”

  “I don’t know what kind he had.”

  “It couldn’t have been term,” I said, “because you can’t borrow against term insurance. That’s how his coverage stayed in force when he stopped paying premiums.”

  “There were loans against the cash value, yes.”

  “So you said. Of course the cash value’s reduced by any outstanding loans against the policy.”

  “He would have paid those back, though. Wouldn’t he?”

  “Not necessarily. The interest rates are very low, since what you’re essentially doing is borrowing your own money. Say you’ve borrowed a couple of thousand dollars that way. Why pay it back out of your own pocket? What’s the incentive? If you just put it off they’ll deduct whatever’s outstanding from the death benefit when you die. Your beneficiary’ll get less than he would otherwise, but you Won’t be around to hear him whine about it.”

  “Well, I don’t know how much Byron’s loans amounted to,” she said, “or if he paid it back. I don’t really know very much about life insurance.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “He probably had some other investments that he sold. Or I may have got the numbers wrong. I have a terrible memory for that sort of thing. Oh, and that reminds me. Did you say you were actually inside his apartment? You didn’t happen to see a little brass elephant, did you?”

  She’d given it to him back when they were both getting sober. His memory had been unreliable then, as is not infrequently the case in early sobriety. He could never remember phone numbers, or where he put his keys. This is the elephant that never forgets, she’d told him, and it had become a running gag between them.

  “I’d like to have it,” she said. “It’s not worth anything, and it wouldn’t mean a thing to anybody but me.”

  “It must have meant something to him,” I said. “He didn’t have a lot in the way of knickknacks, and he gave it a place of honor on top of the TV. I’m sure that’s why I happened to notice it. The super told me to put it in my pocket.”

  “And did you?”

  “No, dammit, I put it back where I found it. It’s funny, too, because I had the impulse to take it. I’ll go back and get it.”

  “I hate to ask you to make a special trip.”

  “I’m two blocks from his building,” I said. “It’s no trouble at all.”

  The hard part was finding the super. He was fixing a leaky faucet on the seventh floor, and it took the doorman awhile to track him down. This time I didn’t linger long in Byron’s apartment. It seemed to me that the scent of AIDS was more palpable on my second visit. There is a particular musky odor that seems to be associated with the disease. Earlier I’d noticed it when I’d looked in his closet—clothing holds the smell—but this time the entire apartment was full of it. I took the little elephant and left.

  6

  Forty-eight hours later I’d made two more visits to the Horatio Street apartment building. I’d knocked on a lot of doors and talked to a great assortment of people. The police had already spoken to most if not all of them, but that didn’t make them unwilling to talk to me, even if they didn’t have much to tell me. Byron was a good neighbor, he mostly kept to himself, and as far as they knew he didn’t have an enemy in the world. I heard a host of different theories about the killing, most of which had already occurred to me.

  Wednesday afternoon I met TJ and compared notes, and was not too surprised to learn that he wasn’t doing any better than I was. “Elaine wants me to work tomorrow,” he said, “but I told her I got to check with you first.”

  “Go ahead and mind the shop for her.”

  “What I thought. We gettin’ noplace on the street.”

  I rode the Eighth Avenue bus uptown and got off when it got mired in traffic around Fortieth Street. I walked the rest of the way home, and I was across the street in my office when Ray Gruliow called.

  “Why, you son of a gun,” he said. “I understand the self-styled Will of the People knows he’s licked now that you’re on the case.”

  Ages ago, when I turned in my gold shield and moved out on my wife and sons, I took a room at the Hotel Northwestern on West Fifty-seventh Street just east of Ninth Avenue. I’ve come a long ways since then in certain respects, but geography is not one of them. The Pare Vendome, where Elaine and I have our apartment, is on the downtown side of Fifty-seventh, directly across from the hotel. I kept my room when we moved in together, telling myself I’d use it as an office. I can’t say it gets much use. It’s no place to meet clients, and the records I keep there would fit easily in a closet or cupboard across the street.

  “Adrian Whitfield,” Ray Gruliow said. “I ran into him downtown earlier today. As a matter of fact I found myself at loose ends, so I sat down and watched him at work. He’s trying a case, as I’m sure you know.”

  “I haven’t spoken to him in a couple of days,” I said. “How’s he holding up?”

  “He doesn’t look so hot,” he said, “but it could be that he’s just plain exhausted. I can’t turn on my television set without seeing him. If they’re not sticking a mike in front of his face outside of the Criminal Courts Building, they’ve got him in a TV studio somewhere. He was on Larry King last night, doing a remote from their New York studio.”

  “What did he talk about?”

  “Moral aspects of the adversary system of criminal justice. To what lengths can a lawyer go, and to what extent do we hold him accountable? It was starting to get interesting, but then they took questions from listeners, and that always reduces everything to the lowest common denominator, which is generally pretty low.”

  “And dreadfully common.”

  “All the same, he was hell on wheels in court this morning. You know what Samuel Johnson said. ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’”

  “Great line.”

  “Isn’t it? I’m surprised the capital punishment people haven’t dragged it out as evidence of the efficacy of their panacea for the world’s ills.”

  “I hope you’re not getting ready to make a speech.”

  “No, but I might haul out Dr. Johnson next time I do. Our boy Adrian seemed pretty well bodyguarded. Your doing, I understand.”

  “Not really. I made a couple of strategic suggestions and gave him a number to call.”

  “He says he’s wearing body armor.”

  “He’s supposed to be,” I said, “and I wish he’d keep his mouth shut about it. If a shooter knows you’re wearing it, he’ll go for a head shot instead.”

  “Well, Will’s not going to hear it from me. Of course, we don’t know who Will is, do we?”

  “If we did,” I said, “he’d cease to be a problem.”

  “For all you know,” he said, “I could be Will myself.”

  “Hmmm. No, I don’t
think so.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “His letters,” I said. “They’re too elegantly phrased.”

  “You son of a bitch. He does have a way with words, though, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Almost makes a man want to get a letter from him. Here’s something I’m not proud of. You know my immediate reaction when I saw the open letter to Adrian?”