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

by Lawrence Block

  “So we’re okay then, you and me.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “You know what I wish? I wish you’d drink a fucking beer.”

  “Not today, Marty.”

  “‘Not today.’ Listen, I know the jargon, all right? ‘Not today.’ You just do it a day at a time, don’t you?”

  “Like everything else.”

  He frowned. “I don’t mean to bait you. It’s the booze talking, you know that.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not me wants you to drink, it’s the drink wants you to drink. You know what I’m saying?”

  “Sure.”

  “What I found out, I learned it helps me more than it hurts me. It does more for me than it does to me. You know who else said that? Winston Churchill. A great man, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I’d say so, yes.”

  “Fucking Limey drunk. No friend to the Irish either, the son of a bitch. More for me than to me, he was right about that though, you got to give him that much. I got the story of the year, you realize that?”

  “I guess you do.”

  “The story of the year. Locally, I mean. Overall scheme of things, what’s Will in comparison to Bosnia, huh? You want to weigh ’em in the balance, Will’s lighter than air. But who do you know that gives two shits about Bosnia? Will you tell me that? The only way Bosnia sells a newspaper’s if you can manage to get ‘rape’ in the headline.” He picked up the second bottle of Rolling Rock and took a sip. “The story of the year,” he said.

  After I finally got away from him, what I probably should have done was go to a meeting. When I first got sober I had found it unsettling to be around people who were drinking, but as I grew more comfortable with my own sobriety I gradually became less uneasy in the presence of drink. Many of my friends these days are sober, but quite a few are not, and some like Mick Ballou and Danny Boy Bell are heavy daily drinkers. Their drinking never seems to bother me. Now and then Mick and I make a night of it, sitting up until dawn in his saloon at Fiftieth and Tenth, sharing stories and silences. Never on those occasions do I find myself wishing that I were drinking, or that he were not.

  But Marty McGraw was the kind of edgy drunk who made me uncomfortable. I can’t say I wanted a drink by the time I got out of there, but neither did I much want to go on feeling the way I felt, as if I’d been up for days and had drunk far too much coffee.

  I stopped at a diner for a hamburger and a piece of pie, then just started walking without paying too much attention to where I was headed. My mind was playing with what I’d learned about Will’s letter and when it had been mailed, and I worried this piece of information like a dog with a bone, running it through my mind, then thinking of something else, then coming back to it and turning the thoughts this way and that, as if they were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and I could fit them into place if I just held them at the right angle.

  I was headed uptown when I started, and I suppose if I’d picked up a tailwind I might have walked clear to the Cloisters. But I didn’t get that far. When I came out of my reverie I was only a block from my apartment. But it was a long block, a crosstown block, and it put me at a location that was significant in and of itself. I was at the northwest corner of Tenth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, standing directly in front of Jimmy Armstrong’s saloon.

  Why? It wasn’t because I wanted a drink, was it? Because I certainly didn’t think I wanted a drink, nor did I feel as though I wanted a drink. There is, to be sure, a part of me deep within my being that will always thirst for the ignorant bliss that is alcohol’s promise. Some of us call that part of ourselves “the disease,” and tend to personify it. “My disease is talking to me,” you’ll hear them say at meetings. “My disease wants me to drink. My disease is trying to destroy me.” Alcoholism, I once heard a woman explain, is like a monster sleeping inside you. Sometimes the monster begins to stir, and that’s why we have to go to meetings. The meetings bore the monster and it dozes off again.

  Still, I couldn’t attribute my presence in front of Armstrong’s to a talkative disease or a restless monster. As far as I knew, I’d never had a drink of anything stronger than cranberry juice on the northwest corner of Fifty-seventh and Tenth. I had stopped drinking by the time Jimmy moved from his original Ninth Avenue location. There had been other gin mills at Tenth and Fifty-seventh before his, including one I could remember called The Falling Rock. (It got the name when a neighborhood guy bought it and started remodeling the facade. While he was working on a ladder, a chunk of stone flaked off and fell, conking him on the head and almost knocking him cold. He figured it would be good luck to name the joint after the incident, but the luck didn’t hold; a little while later he did something that irritated a couple of the Westies, and they hit him harder and more permanently than the rock had. The next owner changed the name to something else.)

  I didn’t want a drink, and I wasn’t hungry, either. I shrugged it off and turned around, looking across the intersection at what I suppose I’ll always think of as Lisa Holtzmann’s building. Was that what I wanted? An hour or so with the Widow Holtzmann, sweeter than whiskey and easier on the liver, and almost as certain a source of temporary oblivion?

  No longer an option. Lisa, when I last spoke to her, had told me that she was seeing someone, that it looked serious, that she thought the relationship might have a future. I’d been surprised to discover that the news came as less of a blow than a relief. We agreed that we’d stay away from each other and give her new romance a chance to flower.

  For all I knew it had gone to seed by now. The new man was by no means the first she’d dated since her husband’s death. She’d grown up with a father who came to her bed at night, thrilling and disturbing her at once, always stopping short of intercourse because “it wouldn’t be right,” and she would be awhile working her way out of the residue of those years. I didn’t need a shrink to tell me that I was a component of that process. It was not always clear, though, whether I was part of the problem or part of the solution.

  In any case, Lisa’s relationships did not tend to last, and there was no reason to believe the latest was still viable. I could without difficulty imagine her sitting by the phone now, wishing it would ring, hoping it would be me on the other end of it. I could make the call and find out if what I imagined was true. It was easy enough to check. I had a quarter handy, and I didn’t need to look up the number.

  I didn’t make the call. Elaine has made it clear that she does not expect me to be strictly faithful. Her own professional experience has led her to believe that men are not monogamous by nature, and that extracurricular activity need not be either a cause or a symptom of marital disharmony.

  For now, though, I chose not to exercise that freedom. Now and then I felt the urge, even as once in a while I felt the desire for a drink. There is, I have been taught, all the difference in the world between the desire and the act. The one is written on water, the other carved in stone.

  Glenn Holtzmann.

  Unaccountably pleased with myself for having resisted the slenderest of temptations, I marched east on Fifty-seventh and got almost to the corner of Ninth Avenue before the penny dropped. I had been dreaming a dream which I was somehow certain had some bearing on Adrian Whitfield’s murder, and Elaine had somehow managed to coax and tease the subject of that dream out of some dark corner of my mind. It was Glenn Holtzmann I’d dreamed about, and I’d stood staring at the building he’d lived in without making the connection.

  Glenn Holtzmann. Why was he disturbing my sleep, and what could he possibly be trying to tell me? I’d hardly had time to consider the point when Will’s latest letter drove the question clear out of my mind.

  I stopped at the Morning Star and sat at a window table with a cup of coffee. I took a sip and remembered one of the few meetings I’d had with Holtzmann. I’d been sitting in that very window, and perhaps at that very table, when he’d tapped on the glass to get my attention, then came inside and shared my table for a few mi
nutes.

  He’d wanted to be friends. Elaine and I had spent one evening with him and Lisa, and I hadn’t liked him much. There was something off-putting about him, though I’d have had trouble defining it. I couldn’t recall everything he’d said that time at the Morning Star, although it seemed to me that was when he’d informed me that Lisa had had a miscarriage. I’d felt sympathy for him then, but it hadn’t made me want his friendship.

  Not too long after that he was dead. Shot down on Eleventh Avenue while making a call from a pay phone. That had been a case of mine, and in its course, oddly enough, I’d found myself working for the brother of the chief suspect and the widow of the victim. I don’t know how well I served either client, but by the time it was over I’d learned who killed Glenn Holtzmann. (It turned out he’d been killed by mistake, in what Elaine characterized as a perfect postmodern homicide. I’m not sure what she meant.)

  Glenn Holtzmann, Glenn Holtzmann. He was a lawyer, in-house counsel for a publisher of large-print books. He’d floated the idea of my writing a book based on my experiences, but I’d been no more likely to write such a book than his firm would have been to publish it. He’d been on a fishing expedition, perhaps in the hope that I’d drop some kernel of information that might prove profitable for him.

  Because, as I was to learn, information meant profit to Holtzmann. He’d supplemented his income nicely as a bearer of tales, getting his start when he ratted out his uncle to the IRS. It was a profitable enterprise, if high in risk and low in prestige, and when he died on the sidewalk on Eleventh Avenue he left behind a two-bedroom high-rise apartment to which he had clear title and a metal strongbox in which he’d stowed something like $300,000 in cash.

  Why the hell was I dreaming about him? I let the waiter refill my coffee cup, stirred it, stared out the window at my own apartment building, and tried to free-associate. Glenn Holtzmann. Lawyer. Publisher. Large-print. Failing vision. White cane, tap tap tap…

  Glenn Holtzmann. Blackmail. Except it wasn’t blackmail, not so far as I knew. He wasn’t a blackmailer, he was an informer, a paid informer…

  Glenn Holtzmann. Lisa. Legs, tits, ass. Stop it.

  Glenn Holtzmann. Closet. Strongbox. Money. Too much money.

  I sat up straight.

  Too much money.

  The phrase rang like a bell. Glenn Holtzmann had had too much money, and that was what had made his death look like something other than the act of random violence it appeared to be. It was the money that led his wife to call me, and it was the money that started me looking beneath the ordinary surface of his life for something that might explain his death.

  I closed my eyes and tried to conjure up his face. I couldn’t bring the image into focus.

  Too much money. What the hell did that have to do with Will? How could there be a money motive behind the murders? How, really, could there be any kind of motive for the killings, behind the particular mania which led the man to perceive himself as a righter of social wrongs?

  Did anybody benefit from the deaths, singly or collectively? I considered the victims in turn. Richie Vollmer’s death was good news for whatever children he would have otherwise gone on to kill, but they couldn’t know who they were. It was, I suppose, good news as well for all the rest of us, who were spared having to go on sharing a planet with Richie. But nobody made a dime out of his death, except the people with newspapers to sell. Richie died with nothing to leave and nobody to leave it to.

  Patsy Salerno? Well, if you took a prominent mob guy off the board, it had to be good news to whoever wound up in his shoes. This particular fact of economic life had led the boys to kill each other right and left over the years, and it still applied even when someone else did the killing. But Patsy hadn’t been on anybody else’s list before he wound up on Will’s, and when did his kind of people ever try to make their all-in-the-family hits look like somebody else’s doing? For God’s sake, they all but signed their work.

  I didn’t do any better with the rest of Will’s list. I was willing to believe that somebody was making a dollar or two out of the anti-abortion movement, even as I supposed somebody had to be turning a buck on the other side, but I couldn’t see a big financial payoff in wrapping a coat hanger around Roswell Berry’s neck. Somebody was richer for Julian Rashid’s death, though I didn’t know how or how much, but that particular case was cleared and Will hadn’t done the killing, although he’d have gotten around to it if Scipio hadn’t beaten him to the punch.

  And Adrian Whitfield? No, and I was back to square one. Money’s at the root of a lot of evil, but by no means all of it. Will, whoever he might be, wasn’t getting rich off his actions. He wasn’t even covering expenses—which, while not too considerable, had to include airfare to and from Omaha, along with whatever he’d had to lay out for rope and wire and cyanide. (I figured the coat hanger couldn’t have cost him much.)

  Once they caught him, one or more true-crime writers would publish books on the case, and just how fat they’d get on it would depend on how sensational the material was and how strong a hold Will still had on the public imagination. Until then, a lot of print and broadcast journalists were earning their salaries with Will’s help, but without him they’d bring home the same money reporting on somebody else’s misdeeds. Marty McGraw was on the top of the heap, glorying in his role in a story that was bigger than Bosnia, but his pay envelope hadn’t gotten any thicker since Will went to work, and maybe he didn’t care. All those moves from paper to paper had boosted his salary way up there already, and how much money did he need? You couldn’t spend that much on blended whiskey, even if the girls who brought it to you didn’t have shirts on.

  Too much money. That struck me as the ultimate irrelevance, because Will looked to be a pure idealist, however misguided. It was frustrating—I’d managed to remember who it was I’d dreamed about, and I’d ferreted out the message the dream had for me, and it didn’t mean anything.

  Well, why should it? A friend of Elaine’s had attended a séance, in the course of which a dead uncle of hers had counseled her to buy a particular over-the-counter computer stock. She’d risked a couple of thousand dollars, whereupon the stock plummeted.

  Elaine had not been surprised. “I’m not saying it wasn’t her Uncle Manny that spoke to her,” she said, “but when he was alive nobody ever called him the Wizard of Wall Street. He was a furrier, so why should he suddenly be a financial genius now that he’s dead? Where is it written that death raises your IQ?”

  Same goes for dreaming. Just because the subconscious mind sends a cryptic message doesn’t mean it knows what it’s talking about.

  Too much money. Maybe Glenn Holtzmann was talking to me, maybe he thought I should spread the wealth around. Well, a word to the wise and all that. I paid for my coffee, and left the waiter twice as much as usual. Matt Scudder, last of the big spenders.

  After dinner that night I watched a little television with Elaine. There were a couple of cop shows on back to back, and I kept finding fault with their investigative procedure. Elaine had to remind me that it was only TV.

  After the news at eleven I stood up and stretched. “I think I’ll go out for a while,” I said.

  “Give Mick my love.”

  “How do you know I’m not going to the midnight meeting?”

  “How do you know you won’t run into him there?”

  “Do Jewish girls always answer a question with a question?”

  “Is there something wrong with that?”

  I walked south and west to Grogan’s Open House, a Hell’s Kitchen bar stubbornly holding its own in the face of neighborhood gentrification. Now and then a salesman will walk in and ask to speak to Grogan, which is a little like asking for Mr. Stone at the Blarney Stone. “There’s no such person,” I heard the day barman tell one such visitor. “And for all that, he’s not in at the moment.”

  Grogan’s is the home turf of one Michael Ballou, although you won’t find his name on the license or the deed. His c
riminal record would preclude his owning premises where liquor is sold, but Mick has extended the principle of nonownership to all areas of his life. Another man’s name appears on the ownership papers for his car, and the deed to his farm in Sullivan County. What a man takes care not to own, I have heard him say, they cannot take away from him.

  We met some years ago when I walked into Grogan’s and asked him some questions, feeling a little like Daniel in the lion’s den. That was the start of our unlikely friendship, and it has broadened and deepened over time. We are two men of very different backgrounds leading vastly different lives, and I have ceased to grope for an explanation of the satisfaction we find in each other’s company. He is a killer and a career criminal, and he is my friend, and you can make what you will of that. I don’t know what to make of it myself.

  Sometimes we make a long night of it, sitting up past closing with the door locked and all but one of the lights out, sharing stories and silences until dawn. Sometimes he’ll finish up at the early mass at St. Bernard’s on West Fourteenth Street, the Butchers’ Mass, where he’ll wear his late father’s stained white apron and match the meat cutters who come there before they start work in the market down the street. Now and then I’ve stayed the course and gone with him, kneeling when they kneel, rising when they rise.