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

by Lawrence Block

  Male bonding, I guess they call it. Guy stuff, according to Elaine.

  This was an early night, and I was out of there and on my way home well before closing. I don’t remember too much of what we talked about, but it seems to me the conversation rambled all over the place. I know we talked about dreams, and he recalled a dream that had saved his life, alerting him to a danger of which he’d been unaware.

  I said I supposed a dream was when you knew something on an unconscious level, and it came bubbling up to your consciousness. Sometimes it was that, he agreed, and sometimes it was one of God’s angels whispering in your ear. I was not certain whether he was speaking metaphorically. He is a singular mix of brutal practicality and Celtic mysticism. His mother once told him he had the second sight, and he accordingly places more faith in feelings and hunches than you might expect.

  I must have told him how I’d found myself standing in front of Armstrong’s, because he talked some about the owner of the Falling Rock, and who’d killed him and why. We talked about other neighborhood homicides over the years, most of them old cases, with the killers themselves long since gone to the same hell or heaven as their victims. Mick remembered a whole string of men killed for no real reason at all, because someone was drunk and took a remark the wrong way.

  “I wonder,” he said, “if your man’s grown to like the work.”

  “My man?”

  “Himself, that’s killing men and writing letters to the newspaper about it. The People’s Will, and do you suppose William’s his true name?”

  “No idea.”

  “That might add to the fun,” he said, “or not, as the case may be. He’s full of himself, isn’t he? Killing and claiming credit like a fucking terrorist.”

  “It’s like that,” I said. “Like terrorism.”

  “They all start with a cause,” he said, “and it’s noble or it’s not, and along the way it fades and grows dim. For they fall in love with what they’re doing, and why they’re after doing it scarcely matters.” He looked off into the distance. “It’s a terrible thing,” he said, “when a man develops a taste for killing.”

  “You have a taste for it.”

  “I have found joy in it,” he allowed. “It’s like drink, you know. It stirs the blood and quickens the heart. Before you know it you’re dancing.”

  “That’s an interesting way to put it.”

  “I have schooled myself,” he said deliberately, “not to take life without good reason.”

  “Will has his reasons.”

  “He had them at the start. By now he may be caught up in the dance.”

  “He says he’s through.”

  “Does he.”

  “You don’t believe him?”

  He thought about it. “I can’t say,” he said at length, “for not knowing him, or what drives him.”

  “Maybe he’s worked his way to the end of his list.”

  “Or he’s tired of the game. The work takes its toll. But if he’s got a taste for it…”

  “He may not be able to quit.”

  “Ah,” he said. “We’ll see, won’t we?”

  I spent the rest of the week and most of the next one just getting through the days and enjoying the fall season. One offer of work came in, a negligence lawyer who needed someone to chase down witnesses to an accident, but I passed on it, pleading a heavy caseload. I didn’t have a heavy caseload, I didn’t have any kind of a caseload at all, and for the time being I wanted to keep it that way.

  I read the paper every morning and went to a noon meeting every day, and an evening meeting too, more often than not. My attendance at AA wanes and waxes with the tides in my life. I go less often when I’m busier with other things, and seem to add meetings automatically in response to the prompting of stress, which I may or may not consciously feel.

  Something evidently had me wanting to go to more meetings, and I didn’t argue with it. The thought did come to me that I’d been sober for too many years to need so many meetings, and I told the thought to go to hell. The fucking disease almost killed me, and the last thing I ever want to do is give it another chance.

  When I wasn’t at a meeting I was walking around town, or at a concert or a museum with Elaine, or sitting in the park or in a coffee shop with TJ. I spent a certain amount of time thinking about Will and the people he’d killed, but there was nothing in the news to add fresh fuel to that particular fire, so it burned less brightly with every passing day. The tabloids did what they could to keep the story prominent, but there was only so much they could do, and yet another indiscretion in the British royal family helped nudge Will off the front page.

  One afternoon I went into a church. Years ago, when I turned in my shield and left my wife and kids, I found myself dropping into churches all the time, though almost never when there was a service going on. I guess I found some measure of peace there. If nothing else I found silence, often an elusive commodity in New York. I got in the habit of lighting candles for people who’d died, and once you start that you’re stuck, because it’s a growth industry. People keep dying.

  I got in another habit, too. I began tithing, giving a tenth of whatever money came my way to whatever poor box I saw next. I was ecumenical about it, but the Catholics got most of my trade because they worked longer hours. Their churches were more apt to be open when I was looking for a beneficiary for my largesse.

  I’ve thought about it, and I can’t say for sure what the tithing was all about. During those years I didn’t keep records or pay taxes, or even file a return, so it’s possible I thought of my tithe as a voluntary tax. It couldn’t have amounted to very much, anyway, because I went long stretches without working, and when I worked I never made a great deal of money. My rent always got paid on time and my tab at Armstrong’s got settled sooner or later, and when I could manage it I sent money to Anita and the boys. But the sums involved were small, and you wouldn’t see any priests riding around in Lincolns on ten percent of my gross.

  When I got sober I began spending my time not in the sanctuaries of churches but in their basements, where my contribution when they passed the basket was limited by tradition to a dollar. I rarely lit a candle, and I stopped tithing altogether, though I could no more tell you why than I could explain having begun the practice in the first place.

  “You cleared up a little,” my sponsor suggested, “and you realized you had more use for the money than the church did.”

  I don’t know that that’s it. For a while I gave away a lot of money on the street, hi essence tithing to the homeless population of New York. (Maybe I was just cutting out the middleman, making a collective poor box of all those empty coffee cups and outstretched hands.) That habit, too, ran its course, perhaps because I was daunted by the ever-increasing profusion of cups and hands. Compassion fatigue set in. Unable to stuff a dollar bill into every beseeching cup or hand, I stopped it altogether; like most of my fellow New Yorkers, I got so I didn’t even notice them anymore.

  Things change. Sober, I found I had to do many of the chickenshit things that everybody else has to do. I had to keep records, had to pay taxes. For years I charged clients arbitrary flat fees and saved myself the aggravation of itemizing my expenses, but you can’t work that way for attorneys, and now that I have a PI license much of my work comes from attorneys. I still work the old way for clients who are as casual as I am, but more often than not I save receipts and keep track of my expenses, just like everybody else.

  And Elaine and I give away a tenth of our income. Mine comes from detective work, of course, and hers is primarily from her real estate investments, although her shop is beginning to turn a small profit. She keeps the books—thank God—and writes the checks, and our few dollars find their way to the dozen or so charities and cultural institutions on our list. It is, to be sure, a more regimented way of doing things. I feel more like a solid citizen and less like a free spirit, and I do not always prefer it this way. But neither do I spend much time chafing at the col
lar.

  The church I went into on this occasion was on a side street in the west forties. I didn’t notice the name of it, and couldn’t tell you if I’d ever dropped in there before.

  I was lucky to find it open. While my own use of churches has diminished in recent years, so too has their accessibility. It seems to me that the Catholic churches, at least, used to be open the whole day long, from early in the morning until well into the evening. Now their sanctuaries are often locked up between services. I suppose that’s a response to crime or homelessness or both. I suppose an unlocked church is an invitation, not only to the occasional citizen looking for a moment’s peace, but to all of those who’d curl up and nap in the pews or steal the candlesticks from the altar.

  This church was open and seemingly unattended, and it was a throwback in another way as well. The candles at the little side altars were real ones, actual wax candles that burned with an open flame. Lots of churches have switched over to electrified altars. You drop your quarter in the slot and a flame-shaped bulb goes on and stays on for your quarter’s worth of time. It’s like a parking meter, and if you stay too long they tow away your soul.

  It’s not my church, so I can’t see that I’ve got any rights in the matter, but when did that sort of logic ever keep an alcoholic from nursing a resentment? I’m sure the electric candles are cost-efficient, and I don’t imagine they’re any harder for God to overlook than the real thing. And maybe I’m just a spiritual Luddite, hating change for its own sake, resisting an improvement in the candle-lighting dodge even as I resisted TJ’s arguments for a computer. If I’d been alive at the time, I probably would have been every bit as pissed off when they switched from oil lamps to candles. “Nothing’s the same anymore,” you’d have heard me grumbling. “What kind of results can you expect from melting wax?”

  I wouldn’t have wasted a quarter on an electric flame. But this church had the real thing, with three or four little candles lit. I looked at them, and my mind summoned up an image of Adrian Whitfield. I couldn’t think what good it could do him to burn a candle on his behalf, but I found myself recalling Elaine’s words. What could it hoit? So I slipped a dollar bill in the slot, lit one candle from the flame of another, and let myself think about the man.

  I got a funny montage of images.

  First I was seeing Adrian Whitfield at his apartment a few hours after he’d learned about Will’s letter. He was pouring a drink even as he proclaimed himself a nondrinker, then explaining, talking about the drinks he’d had already that day.

  Then I saw him sprawled on the carpet with Kevin Dahlgren hunkered down beside him, picking up the glass he’d dropped, sniffing at it. I hadn’t been there to see it, had only heard Dahlgren’s account of the moment, but the image came to me as clearly as if I’d witnessed it myself. I could even smell what Dahlgren had smelled, the odor of bitter almonds superimposed upon the aroma of good malt whiskey. I’d never smelled that combination in my life, but my imagination was inventive enough to furnish it quite vividly.

  The next flash I got was of Marty McGraw. He was sitting in the topless joint where I’d met him, a shot glass clutched in one hand, a beer glass in the other. There was a belligerent expression on his face, and he was saying something but I couldn’t make it out. The reek of cheap whiskey trailed up at me from the shot glass, the reek of stale beer from the other, and the two were united on his breath.

  Adrian again, talking into a telephone. “I’m going to let the genie out,” he said. “First one today.”

  Mick Ballou at Grogan’s, on our most recent night together. It was what he thought of as a sober night, in that he was passing up the whiskey and staying with beer. The beer in this instance was Guinness, and I could see his big fist wrapped around a pint of the black stuff. The smell of it came to me, dark and rich and grainy.

  I got all of this in a rush, one image after another, and each overlaid heavily with scents, singly or in combination. Smell, they say, is the oldest and most primal sense, the sure trigger for memory. It bypasses the thought process and goes straight to the most primitive part of the brain. It doesn’t pass Go, it doesn’t collect its thoughts.

  I stood there, letting it all come at me, taking in what I could of it. I don’t want to make too much of this. I was not Saul of Tarsus, knocked off his horse en route to Damascus, nor was I AA’s founder wrapped up in his famous white-light experience. All I did was remember—or imagine, or both—a whole slew of things one right after the other.

  It couldn’t have taken much time. Seconds, I would think. Dreams are like that, I understand, extending over far less of the sleeper’s time than it would require to recount them. At the end there was just the candle—the soft glow of it, the smell of the burning wax and wick.

  I had to sit down again and think about what I’d just experienced. Then I had to walk around for a while, going over every frame in my memory like an assassination buff poring over the Zapruder film.

  I couldn’t blink it away or shrug it off. I knew something I hadn’t known before.

  11

  “The first night I went to Whitfield’s place,” I told Elaine. “TJ was over for dinner, we were watching the fights together—”

  “In Spanish. I remember.”

  “—and Whitfield called. And I went over there and talked with him.”

  “And?”

  “And I remembered something,” I said, and paused. After a long moment she asked me if I was planning on sharing it with her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m still sorting it out. And trying to think of a way to say it that won’t sound ridiculous.”

  “Why worry about that? There’s nobody here but us chickens.”

  There could have been. We were in her shop on Ninth Avenue, surrounded by the artwork and furnishings she dealt in. Anyone could have rung the bell and been buzzed in to look at the pictures and perhaps buy something, possibly one of the chairs we were sitting on. But it was a quiet afternoon, and for now we were alone and undisturbed.

  I said, “There was no liquor on his breath.”

  “Whitfield, you’re talking about.”

  “Right.”

  “You don’t mean at the end, when he drank the poison and died. You mean the night you first met him.”

  “Well, I’d met him before. I’d worked for the man. But yes, I’m talking about the night I went to his apartment. He’d told me on the phone that he’d received a death threat from Will, and I went over there to suggest ways he might go about protecting himself.”

  “And there was no liquor on his breath.”

  “None. You know how it is with me. I’m a sober alcoholic, I can damn near smell a drink on the other side of a concrete wall. If I’m on a crowded elevator and the little guy in the far corner had a thimbleful of something alcoholic earlier in the day, I smell it as surely as if I just walked into a brewery. It doesn’t bother me, it doesn’t make me wish I were drinking or that the other person weren’t, but I could no more fail to notice it than if somebody turned out the lights.”

  “I remember when I had the chocolate.”

  “The chocolate…oh, with the liquid center.”

  She nodded. “Monica and I were visiting this friend of hers who was recovering from a mastectomy, and she passed around these chocolates someone had given her. And I got piggy, because these were very good chocolates, and I had four of them, and the last one had a cherry-brandy filling. And I had it half swallowed before I realized what it was, and then I swallowed the rest of it, because what was I going to do, spit it out? That’s what you’d have done, you’d have had reason to, but I’m not an alcoholic, I’m just a person who doesn’t drink, so it wouldn’t kill me to swallow it.”

  “And it didn’t make you take off all your clothes.”

  “It didn’t have any effect whatsoever, as far as I know. There couldn’t have been very much brandy involved. There was a cherry in there, too, so that didn’t leave much room for brandy.” She shr
ugged. “Then I came home and gave you a kiss and you looked as startled as I’ve ever seen you.”

  “It took me by surprise.”

  “I thought you were going to sing me a chorus of ‘Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine.’”

  “I don’t even know the tune.”

  “Do you want me to hum a little? But we’re straying from the subject. The point is you’re super aware of the smell of booze and you didn’t smell it on Adrian Whitfield. Could it be, Holmes, that the man hadn’t been drinking?”

  “But he said he had.”