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

by Lawrence Block

  “Oh?”

  “It was a funny conversation,” I recalled. “He started out by announcing that he didn’t drink, and that got my attention because he was uncapping the scotch bottle even as he said it. Then he qualified it by saying he didn’t drink the way he used to, and that he pretty much limited himself to one drink a day.”

  “That would be enough for anybody,” she said, “if you had a big enough glass.”

  “For some of us,” I said, “you’d need a bathtub. Anyway, he went on to say that this particular day had been an exception, what with the letter from Will, and that he’d had a drink when he left the office and another when he got home to his apartment.”

  “And you didn’t smell them on his breath.”

  “No.”

  “If he brushed his teeth—”

  “Wouldn’t matter. I’d still smell the alcohol.”

  “You’re right, he’d just wind up smelling like crème de menthe. I notice alcohol on people’s breath, too, because I don’t drink. But I’m nowhere near as aware of it as you are.”

  “All the years I drank,” I said, “I never once smelled alcohol on anybody’s breath, and it hardly ever occurred to me that anyone could smell it on mine. Jesus, I must have gone around smelling of it all the time.”

  “I kind of liked it.”

  “Really?”

  “But I like it better this way,” she said, and kissed me. After a few minutes she went back to her chair and said, “Whew. If we were not in a semi-public place—”

  “I know.”

  “Where anyone could ring the bell at any moment, even though no one has in the longest time—” She heaved a sigh. “What do you think it means?”

  “I think we’re still hot for each other,” I said, “after all these years.”

  “Well, I know that. I mean the booze that wasn’t on Whitfield’s breath, which is uncannily like the dog that didn’t bark in the nighttime, isn’t it? What do you make of it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re sure you noticed it at the time? Noticed the absence of it, I mean, and the contradiction between what he said and what you observed. It wasn’t just something your imagination supplied when you were lighting candles and cursing the darkness?”

  “I’m positive,” I said. “I thought of it at the time, and then I just plain forgot about it because there were too many far more important things to think about. Here was a man sentenced to death by a iller who’d built up a pretty impressive track record. He wanted me to help him figure out a way to stay alive. That had more of a claim on my attention than the presence or absence of booze on his breath.”

  “Of course.”

  “I smelled the scotch when he opened the bottle and poured the drink. And it struck me that I hadn’t smelled it on his breath when he let me into the apartment. We shook hands, our faces weren’t all that far apart. I’d have smelled it if it had been there to smell.”

  “If the man hadn’t been drinking,” she wondered, “why would he say he had?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “I could understand if it was the other way around. People do that all the time, especially if they think the person they’re talking to might have a judgment on the subject. He knew you didn’t drink so he might assume you disapprove of others drinking. But you don’t, do you?”

  “Only when they throw up on my shoes.”

  “Maybe he wanted to impress you with the gravity of the situation. ‘I’m not much of a drinker, I never have more than one a day, but this creep with the poisoned pen has me so rattled I’ve had a few already and I’m about to have another.’”

  “‘And then I’ll stop, because stress or not I’m no rummy.’ I thought of that.”

  “And?”

  “Why would he think he needed to do that? He just got a death threat from a guy with maximum credibility. Will’s been all over the front pages for weeks, and so far he’s batting a thousand. And here you’ve got Adrian Whitfield, a worldly man, certainly, and one professionally accustomed to the company of criminals, but all the same a far cry from a daredevil.”

  “You wouldn’t mistake him for Evel Knievel.”

  “You wouldn’t,” I said, “because when all is said and done he’s a lawyer in a three-piece suit, and the chances he takes tend not to be physical in nature. Of course he’s going to take a letter from Will seriously. He doesn’t have to prove it to me by pretending to have had drinks earlier.”

  “You don’t suppose…”

  “What?”

  “Could he have been a closet teetotaler?”

  “Huh?”

  “You said he poured a drink in front of you. Are you sure he actually drank it?”

  I thought about it. “Yes,” I said.

  “You saw him drink it.”

  “Not in a single swallow, but yes.”

  “And it was whiskey?”

  “It came out of a scotch bottle,” I said, “and I got a whiff of it when he poured it. It smelled like booze. In fact it smelled like a single-malt scotch, which is what it claimed to be on the label.”

  “And you saw him drink it, and you smelled it on his breath.”

  “Yes to the first part. Did I smell it on his breath afterward? I don’t remember one way or the other. I didn’t have occasion to notice.”

  “You mean he didn’t kiss you goodnight?”

  “Not on the first date,” I said.

  “Well, shame on him,” she said. “I kissed you goodnight, on our first date. I can even remember what you had on your breath.”

  “You can, huh?”

  “Whiskey,” she said. “And moi”

  “What a memory.”

  “Well, it was memorable, you old bear. No, what I was getting at, I know there are people who drink but try to hide it. And I wondered if there might also be people who don’t drink, and try to hide that.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Why does anybody do anything?”

  “I’ve often wondered.” I thought about it. “A lot of us maintain our anonymity to one degree or another. There’s a longstanding tradition against going public about being a member of AA, though lately that’s getting honored in the breach.”

  “I know. All these Hollywood types go straight from Betty Ford to Barbara Walters.”

  “They’re not supposed to do that,” I said, “but it’s your own business to what extent you stay anonymous in your private life. I don’t tell casual acquaintances unless I have a reason. And if I’m at a business meeting and the other fellow orders a drink, I’ll just order a Coke. I won’t issue an explanation.”

  “And if he asks if you drink?”

  “Sometimes I’ll say ‘Not today,’ something like that. Or, ‘It’s a little early for me,’ if I’m feeling particularly devious. But I can’t imagine pouring a drink and pretending to drink it, or keeping colored water in a scotch bottle.” I remembered something. “Anyway,” I said, “there were the liquor store records, the deliveries he’d had over the past months. They confirmed that he was just what he claimed to be, a guy who had one drink a day on the average.”

  “He was ill,” she said. “Some kind of lymphatic cancer, wasn’t it?”

  “It metastasized to the lymph system. I believe the original site was one of the adrenals.”

  “Maybe he couldn’t drink as much as he used to. Because of the cancer.”

  “I suppose that’s possible.”

  “And he was in denial about his health, wasn’t he? Or at least he wasn’t telling people about it.”

  “So?”

  “So maybe that would lead him to pretend he was more of a drinker than he was.”

  “But the first thing he did was tell me he wasn’t much of a drinker.”

  “You’re right.” She frowned. “I give up. I don’t get it.”

  “I don’t get it, either.”

  “But you don’t give up, do you?”

  “No,” I said. “Not yet.”


  Over dinner she said, “Was Glenn Holtzmann a drinker?”

  “Not that I ever noticed. And where did that question come from?”

  “Your dreams.”

  “You know,” I said, “I’m having enough trouble making sense out of the thoughts I have while I’m awake. What was it Freud said about dreams?”

  “‘Sometimes it’s only a cigar.’”

  “Right. If there’s any connection between Glenn Holtzmann and the liquor Adrian Whitfield didn’t have on his breath, I’m afraid it’s too subtle for me.”

  “I was just wondering.”

  “Holtzmann was a phony,” I said. “He betrayed people and sold them out.”

  “Was Adrian a phony?”

  “Did he have some secret life besides practicing criminal law? It doesn’t seem very likely.”

  “Maybe you sensed that he was hiding something about himself.”

  “By pretending to be more of a drinker than he was. Or at least by pretending to have had more to drink on that one night than he had.”

  “Right.”

  “So my unconscious mind immediately made the leap from him to Glenn Holtzmann.”

  “Why?”

  “That was going to be my next question,” I said. “Why indeed?” I put down my fork. “Anyway,” I said, “I think I figured out what Glenn Holtzmann was trying to tell me.”

  “In the dream, you mean.”

  “Right, in the dream.”

  “Well?”

  “‘Too much money.’”

  “That’s it?”

  “What did we just say? Sometimes it’s only a cigar?”

  “Too much money,” she said. “You mean like the line about a cocaine habit is God’s way of telling you you’ve got too much money?”

  “I don’t think cocaine’s got anything to do with it. Glenn Holtzmann had too much money, that’s what made me dig deeper and find out about his secret life.”

  “He had all that cash in the closet, didn’t he? How does that apply to Adrian Whitfield?”

  “It doesn’t.”

  “Then—”

  “Sometimes it’s only a cigar,” I said.

  I don’t remember any dreams that night, or even a sense of having dreamed. Elaine and I went home and finished what we’d started in her shop, and I slipped right off into a deep sleep and didn’t stir until dawn.

  But there had been a thought nagging at me before we went to bed, and it was still there when I woke up. I took it out and examined it, and I decided it wasn’t something I had to devote my time to. I had a second cup of coffee after breakfast and considered the matter again, and this time I decided it wasn’t as though there were too many other matters with a greater claim on my time. I had, as they say, nothing better to do.

  And the only reason not to pursue it was for fear of what I might find out.

  I made haste slowly. I went to the library first to check my memory against what the Times had run, noting down dates and times in my notebook. I spent a couple of hours at that, and then I went outside and sat on a bench in Bryant Park and went over my notes. It was a perfect fall day, and the air had the tang of a crisp apple. They’d been forecasting rain, but you didn’t even have to look at the sky to know that it wasn’t going to rain that day. It felt in fact as though it would never rain, or turn any colder than it was now. The days wouldn’t get any shorter, either. It felt like eternal autumn, stretching out in front of us until the end of time.

  Everybody’s favorite season, and you always think it’s going to last forever. And it never does.

  Enough time had passed since Whitfield’s death for them to have taken the NYPD seals off the door. All I had to do was find someone with the authority to let me in. I don’t know precisely where that authority was vested—Whitfield’s heirs, the executor of his estate, or the co-op’s board of directors. I’m sure it wasn’t the building superintendent’s decision to make, but he took it upon himself to make it, his resolution buttressed by the portrait of U.S. Grant I palmed him. He found a key and let me in and lingered at the door while I poked around in drawers and closets. After a while he coughed discreetly, and when I looked up he asked me how long I’d be. I told him that was hard to say.

  “Because I’ll have to let you out,” he said, “and lock up after you, only I got a few things I have to be doing.”

  He jotted down a phone number, and I agreed to call him. I felt a lot less pressed for time once he was out of there, and it’s better if you’re not in a hurry, especially when you don’t know what you’re looking for or where you’re likely to find it.

  It was close to two hours later when I used the phone in the bedroom to call the number he’d left me. He said he’d be up in a minute, and while I waited for him I retraced the route from the phone, the one Whitfield had used to call me that last night, into the room where he’d died. There were no bottles on or in the bar—I guess they’d removed everything for lab tests—but the bar was there, and I stood where he’d have stood to make himself his last drink, then stepped over to where he was when he collapsed. There was nothing on the carpet to indicate where he had lain, no chalk outline, no yellow tape, no stains he’d left behind, but it seemed to me I knew just where he’d fallen.

  When the super came I gave him an extra $20 along with an apology for having taken so long. The bonus surprised him, but only a little. It also seemed to reassure him that I hadn’t appropriated any property of Whitfield’s during his absence, although he still felt compelled to ask.

  I hadn’t taken a thing, I told him. Not even snapshots.

  I didn’t take anything from Whitfield’s office, either, nor did I find anyone to let me in. Whitfield had shared an office suite and secretarial and paralegal staff with several other attorneys in an old eight-story office building on Worth Street. I went to a noon meeting on Chambers Street the day after my visit to his apartment, then walked over to Worth and checked out his offices from the fifth-floor corridor. I weighed a few possible approaches and found them all unlikely to work on lawyers or legal secretaries, so I got out of there and walked clear up to Houston Street and saw a movie at the Angelika. When it broke I called Elaine and told her I’d get dinner on my own.

  “TJ called,” she said. “He wants you to beep him.”

  I would have if the phone I was using had a number on it. Most of them have had their numbers removed from the dials, and even if you manage to worm the number out of a cooperative operator, it won’t do you any good; NYNEX has rigged the bulk of their pay phones so that they can no longer receive incoming calls. This is all part of the never-ending war on drugs, and its twin effects, as far as I can tell, have been a momentary inconvenience for the dealers, all of whom promptly went out and bought cellular phones, and a slight but irreversible decline in the quality of life for everybody else in town.

  I had a plate of jerked chicken and peas and rice at a West Indian lunch counter on Chambers Street and went back to Whitfield’s building on Worth. It was past five o’clock so I had to sign in with the guard downstairs. I scribbled something illegible on the sheet and rode up on the elevator. There were lights on in the law offices and a quick glance in passing showed me a man and two women seated at desks, two of them plugging away at computers, one talking on the phone.

  I wasn’t surprised. Lawyers keep late hours. I walked the length of the corridor and tried the men’s room door. It was locked. The lock seemed unlikely to pose much of a challenge—it was designed, after all, to keep out the homeless, not to protect the crown jewels. On the other hand, if I was going to commit illegal entry I ought to be able to spend the next couple hours in a pleasanter spot than a lavatory.

  At the opposite end of the hall I found the one-room office of one Leland N. Barish. His name was painted on the frosted glass, along with “CONSULTANT.” The lock looked to be the building’s original equipment, shaped to take a skeleton key. I’ve carried a couple on my key ring for years, although I’d be hard put to tell
you the last time I had occasion to use one of them. I didn’t expect them to work now, but I tried the larger of the two and it turned the lock.

  I let myself in. There was nothing to show who Barish was or who’d want to consult with him. The desk, its top uncluttered except for a couple of magazines, had a coating of dust that looked a good two weeks old. A stack of glassed-in bookshelves held only a few more magazines and eight or ten paperback science fiction novels. There was a wooden chair on casters that went with the desk, and an overstaffed armchair on which a cat had once sharpened its claws. The gray-beige walls showed rectangles and squares of a lighter shade, indicating where a previous tenant had displayed pictures or diplomas. Barish had neither repainted nor hung up anything of his own, not even a calendar.