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

by Lawrence Block

  Dahlgren ducked most interviews, and acquitted himself creditably when he was cornered. He had, he said, no opinion as to whether he’d witnessed an act of suicide or murder. His only regret was that there’d been nothing he could do to save the man’s life.

  If Dahlgren didn’t want the victim role, a man named Irwin Atkins was eager to snatch it up for himself. Atkins was Adrian Whitfield’s final client, the brawler who’d decided to plead guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge just hours before Adrian Whitfield went off to argue his own case before a higher court. Building on the speculation that Whitfield had felt free to end his life once the case had been disposed of, Atkins served notice of his intention to file an appeal on the grounds that he’d been improperly served by counsel.

  “He’s got two arguments,” Ray Gruliow told me. “One, Whitfield deliberately talked him into pleading because he was in a rush to go home and drink rat poison, or whatever the hell it was. Two, Whitfield’s suicidal state of mind impaired his judgment and rendered him incapable of furnishing sound legal advice. He could buttress his second argument by pointing out that Whitfield was sufficiently unbalanced as to take on a mutt like him for a client.”

  “You think it’ll work?”

  “I think they’ll let him withdraw the plea,” he said, “and I think he’ll regret it, the silly son of a bitch, when his retrial ends in a conviction.”

  “And will it?”

  “Oh, I’d say so. You pull something like that, withdraw an eleventh-hour plea, and you invite the widespread perception that you’re a pain in the ass. I think it’s all a load of crap anyway. Adrian didn’t kill himself.”

  “No?”

  “I’d never argue it’d be a bad choice, or that it wasn’t his choice to make. And I think he might have done it sooner or later. He could very well have been contemplating the act, might even have had it on his mind while he poured himself that drink. But I don’t believe he had the faintest idea there was anything in that bottle but good scotch whiskey.”

  “Why?”

  “Because what in the hell is the point? If Adrian was going to kill himself he’d damn well leave a note, and I wouldn’t have put it past him to get the document notarized. Anything else would have been inconsistent with the man.”

  I’d thought as much myself.

  “I’m not saying he lacked a sense of the dramatic. He was a trial lawyer, after all. If we didn’t like to be in the spotlight we’d spend our lives writing briefs in back rooms. I can imagine Adrian killing himself, and I can even see him doing it in front of witnesses. Remember Harmon Ruttenstein?”

  “Vividly.”

  “Invited some friends over, sat them down, gave them drinks, and told them he wanted them around so there wouldn’t be any horseshit about what happened. And then he took a header out the window. I’m committing suicide, he was saying, and I want you fellows here to attest to it. That’s completely different from what they say Adrian did.”

  “He made it look like murder.”

  “Exactly, and why? That’s the question nobody bothers to ask, maybe because nobody can answer it. Because there’s a stigma attached to it? Adrian wasn’t raised Catholic, and as far as I know the only thing he believed in absolutely was collecting fees in advance in criminal cases. Because he didn’t want to invalidate his insurance policies? They keep floating that in the press and on television, as if suicide automatically had that effect.”

  “I was talking about that the other day,” I said. “It’s a pretty common misconception.”

  “And of course it doesn’t apply, because Adrian’s coverage consisted entirely of policies which had been in force for years. He hadn’t applied for additional coverage since the doctor gave him the bad news. This all came out yesterday, but they’re still prattling about insurance. I just heard a new wrinkle. Double indemnity.”

  “For accidental death?”

  “Right. As far as the insurance companies are concerned, murder is an accident. It qualifies in that respect if the policy contains a clause specifying a two-hundred-percent payout for accidental death. Stupid clause, incidentally. You’re buying financial protection, what the hell’s the difference if you fall out of the hay loft or flake away with terminal psoriasis? If anything, you’d think it should be the other way around. It’s slow natural deaths that run up the costs for the family, so that’s when they’d need extra protection.”

  “I gather suicide’s not considered accidental.”

  “Well, you can’t argue it’s natural death, either, but it’s excluded from double-indemnity coverage in every policy I ever heard of. So it’s within the realm of possibility that a man would be sufficiently moved by consideration of his family’s financial well-being to commit suicide in such a manner as to resemble accidental death.” He took a breath. “Whew. Did you hear that? I sounded like a goddam lawyer.”

  “You did at that.”

  “But,” he went on, “there’s an easy way to do that, and it’s done all the time, and not necessarily to defraud an insurance company. All you have to do is get in your car and drive into a bridge abutment. I don’t know what the best guesses are as to percentages, but the conventional wisdom holds that a whole lot of unwitnessed single-car accidents are nothing but suicide, whether preplanned or spontaneous. It’s a foolproof method for killing yourself and being buried with the full rites of the Catholic church, and it would be just as effective in getting double payment from John Hancock and his friends.”

  I thought of the earnest lady from the Hemlock Society. “And for city dwellers who don’t have cars—”

  “There’s always the subway. You lose your balance and fall in front of it. Here’s the kicker, though. Say you’re determined to make it look like murder. Unless your name is Ed Hoch or John Dickson Carr, you’re not going to turn it into a fucking locked room murder, are you? Because that’s what this is. The security’s so tight, between the bodyguards and the burglar alarm, nobody can figure out how the hell Will got in there to drop the poison in. It’s so obviously impossible that half the city’s convinced Adrian must have done it himself, which is just what he’s supposed to have attempted to conceal. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “Wherever Adrian is now,” I said, “if he needs an attorney, I think he ought to pick a guy named Gruliow.”

  “I’m right, though, wouldn’t you say? Makes no sense.”

  “I agree.”

  “Well, let me frost the cupcake for you. All his coverage was term insurance, and there wasn’t a single policy with a double-indemnity clause. Case closed.”

  He was convincing, but I wasn’t entirely convinced. I’d seen too many people do too many illogical things to rule out any act by a human being on the grounds that it didn’t make sense.

  Meanwhile, there was still Will to be considered. Even if Adrian Whitfield had died by his own hand, you had to give Will an assist at the very least. One columnist argued, perhaps facetiously, that the anonymous killer was getting more powerful every time. He’d had to get out there and kill his first three victims all by himself, but all he’d had to do was point a finger at numbers four and five. Once targeted by Will, they were struck down with no effort on his part, Rashid by an enemy within his gates, Whitfield by an even more intimate enemy, the one who lived within his own skin.

  “Pretty soon he won’t even have to write letters,” Denis Hamill concluded. “He’ll just think his powerful thoughts in private, and the bad guys’ll be dropping like flies.”

  Funny, I thought, that we hadn’t heard from him.

  * * *

  Tuesday morning I was up before Elaine, and I had breakfast on the table when she got out of the shower. “Great cantaloupe,” she pronounced. “Much better than yesterday.”

  “It’s the other half of the one we had yesterday,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. “I guess it’s the preparation.”

  “I put it on a plate,” I said, “and I set it in front of you.”

&
nbsp; “Yes, that’s just what you did, you old bear. And nobody could have done it better, either.”

  “It’s all in the wrist.”

  “Must be.”

  “Combined with a sort of Zen approach,” I said. “I was concentrating on something else while I just let breakfast happen.”

  “Concentrating on what?”

  “On a dream I can’t remember.”

  “You hardly ever remember your dreams.”

  “I know,” I said, “but I woke up with the feeling that there was something this dream was trying to tell me, and it seemed to me it was a dream I’d had before. In fact—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I have the sense of having been dreaming this dream a lot lately.”

  “The same dream.”

  “I think so.”

  “Which you can’t remember.”

  “It had a familiarity to it,” I said, “as if I’d been there before. I don’t know if it’s the same dream each time, but I think I keep dreaming about the same person each time. He’s right there, and he’s looking very earnest and trying to tell me some thing, and I wake up and he’s gone.”

  “Like a puff of smoke.”

  “Sort of.”

  “Like your lap when you stand up.”

  “Well…”

  “Who is he?”

  “That’s the problem,” I said. “I don’t remember who he is, and no matter how much I try to remember—”

  “Quit trying.”

  “Huh?”

  She rose, moved to stand behind me. She smoothed my hair back with the tips of her fingers. “There’s nothing to remember,” she said. “Just ease up. So don’t try to remember. Just answer the question. Who’d you dream about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s okay. Imagine Adrian Whitfield.”

  “It wasn’t Adrian Whitfield.”

  “Of course it wasn’t. Imagine him anyway.”

  “All right.”

  “Now imagine Vollman.”

  “Who?”

  “The one who killed those kids.”

  “Vollmer.”

  “Fine, Vollmer. Imagine him.”

  “It wasn’t—”

  “I know it wasn’t. Humor me, okay? Imagine him.”

  “All right.”

  “Now imagine Ray Gruliow.”

  “I didn’t dream about Ray,” I said, “and this isn’t going to work. I appreciate what you’re trying to do—”

  “I know you do.”

  “But it’s not going to work.”

  “I know. Can I ask you a couple of questions?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Matthew Scudder.”

  “What’s your wife’s name?”

  “Elaine Mardell. Elaine Mardell Scudder.”

  “Do you love her?”

  “Do you have to ask?”

  “Just answer the question. Do you love her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who’d you dream about?”

  “Nice try, but it’s not going to…”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch.”

  “So? Are you going to tell me?”

  “Pleased with yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Pleased beyond measure, and—now stop that!”

  “I just want to touch it for a minute.”

  “Say the name, will you? Before it slips your mind again.”

  “It won’t,” I said. “Now why in the hell would I dream about him?”

  “Fine, keep me in suspense.”

  “Glenn Holtzmann,” I said. “How did you do that?”

  “Ve haff vays of making you remember.”

  “So it would seem. Glenn Holtzmann. Why Glenn Holtzmann, for Christ’s sake?”

  I was no closer to the answer an hour later when I went downstairs for the papers. Then I forgot Glenn Holtzmann for the time being.

  There had been another letter from Will.

  9

  “An Open Letter to the People of New York.”

  That’s how Will headed it. He had addressed and mailed it, like all the others, to Marty McGraw at the Daily News, and they were the ones with the story. They gave it the front-page headline and led with it, under McGraw’s byline. His column, “Since You Asked…” ran as a sidebar, and the full text of Will’s letter appeared on the page opposite. It was a long letter for Will, running to just under eight hundred words, which made it just about the same length as McGraw’s column.

  He started out by claiming credit (or assuming responsibility) for the murder of Adrian Whitfield. His tone was boastful; he talked at first about the elaborate security set up to protect Whitfield, the burglar alarm, the three shifts of bodyguards, the armor-plated limousine with the bulletproof glass. “But no man can prevail against the Will of the People,” he proclaimed. “No man can run from it. No man can hide from it. Consider Roswell Berry, who fled to Omaha. Consider Julian Rashid, behind his fortified walls in St. Albans. The Will of the People can reach across vast space, it can slip through the stoutest defenses. No man can resist it.”

  Whitfield, Will went on, was by no means the worst lawyer in the world. It had simply been his lot to serve as representative of an ineradicable evil in the legal profession, an apparent willingness to do anything, however abhorrent and immoral, in the service of a client. “We nod in approval when an attorney defends the indefensible, and even tolerate behavior in a client’s interest which would earn the lawyer a horsewhipping were he so to act on his own behalf.”

  Then Will launched into an evaluation of the legal system, questioning the value of the jury system. There was nothing startlingly original about any of the points he raised, though he argued them reasonably enough so that you found yourself ready to forget you were reading the words of a serial murderer.

  He ended on a personal note. “I find I’m tired of killing. I am grateful to have been the instrument selected to perform these several acts of social surgery. But there is a heavy toll taken on him who is called upon to do evil in the service of a greater good. I’ll rest now, until the day comes when I’m once again called to act.”

  I had a question, and I made half a dozen phone calls trying to get an answer. Eventually I got around to calling the News. I gave my name to the woman who answered and said I’d like to talk to Marty McGraw. She took my number, and within ten minutes the phone rang.

  “Marty McGraw,” he said. “Matthew Scudder, you’re the detective Whitfield hired, right? I think we might have met once.”

  “Years ago.”

  “Most of my life is years ago. What have you got for me?”

  “A question. Did the letter run verbatim?”

  “Absolutely. Why?”

  “No cuts at all? Nothing held back at the cops’ request?”

  “Now how could I tell you that?” He sounded aggrieved. “For all I know, you could be Will yourself.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” I said. “On the other hand, if I were Will, I’d probably know whether or not you cut my copy.”

  “Jesus,” he said, “I’d hate to be the one to do something like that. I know how I get when that mutt at the big desk cuts my copy, and I’m not a homicidal maniac.”

  “Well, neither am I. Look, here’s what I’m getting at. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing in the letter to disprove the suicide theory.”

  “There’s Will’s word on the subject. He says he did it.”

  “And he’s never lied to us in the past.”

  “As far as I know,” he said, “he hasn’t. With Roswell Berry in Omaha he refused to confirm or deny, but he was being cute.”

  “He mentioned that Berry’d been stabbed, if I remember correctly.”

  “That’s right, and that was information the police had held back, so that certainly suggested he’d had a hand in it.”

  “Well, is there anything like that in the latest letter? Because I couldn
’t spot it. That’s why I wondered if anything had been cut.”