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

by Lawrence Block

  I’d have gone through the desk drawers out of the idle curiosity that is an old cop’s stock in trade. But the desk was locked, and I left it that way, unable to think of a reason to break in.

  I’d switched the light on when I entered, and I left it on. No one could make out more than a silhouette through the frosted glass, but even if they could I had little to worry about, because it was odds-on nobody in the building had seen enough of Barish to remember what he looked like.

  My guess was that “consultant” was what it so often is, a euphemism for “unemployed.” Leland Barish had lost a job and took this little office while he looked for another one. By now either he’d found something or he’d given up looking.

  Maybe he’d found employment that took him to Saudi Arabia or Singapore, and had left without bothering to clear out his office. Maybe he’d stopped paying rent months ago and his landlord hadn’t gotten around to evicting him.

  Whatever the actual circumstances, I didn’t look to be running much of a risk cooping in his office for a couple of hours. I thought of TJ and decided to beep him, figuring it was perfectly safe for him to call me back, perfectly all right for Barish’s phone to ring. I lifted the receiver and couldn’t get a dial tone, which tended to confirm my guesses about Barish. I picked out the most recent magazine, a ten-week-old issue of The New Yorker, and settled myself in the easy chair. For a few minutes I tried to guess just what had become of Leland Barish, but then I got interested in an article about long-haul truckers and forgot all about him.

  After an hour or so I noticed, a key hanging from a hook on the wall next to the light switch. I guessed that it would unlock the door to the men’s room, and it turned out I was right. I used the John, and checked Whitfield’s office going and coming. It was still occupied.

  I checked again an hour later, and an hour after that. Then I dozed off, and when I opened my eyes it was twenty minutes to twelve. The lights were out in the law office. I walked on past it and used the lavatory again, and the lights were still out when I returned.

  The lock was better than the one on Barish’s door, and I thought I might have to break the glass to get in. I was prepared to do that—I didn’t think anyone was around to hear it, or inclined to pay attention—but first I used my pocketknife to gouge the door jamb enough so that I could get a purchase on the bolt and snick it back. I put on the lights, figuring that a lighted office would look less suspicious to someone across the street than a darkened office with someone moving around inside it.

  I found Whitfield’s office and got busy.

  It was around one-thirty in the morning when I got out of there. I left the place looking as I’d found it, and wiped whatever surfaces I might have left prints on, more out of habit than because I thought anyone might dust the place for prints. I rubbed a little dirt into the gouges I’d made around the lock, so that the scar didn’t look too new, and I drew the door shut and heard the bolt snick behind me.

  I was too tired to think straight, and actually considered holing up in Barish’s office and napping in his easy chair until dawn, all that in order to avoid having to sneak out past the guard. Instead I decided to bluff my way past him, and when I went downstairs the lobby was empty. A sign I’d missed on my way in announced that the building was locked from ten at night to six in the morning.

  This didn’t mean I couldn’t get out, just that once out I couldn’t get back in again. That was fine with me. I got out of there and had to walk three blocks before I could hail a cruising cab. Stickers on the windows in the passenger compartment warned me against smoking. In front, the Pakistani driver puffed away at one of those foul little Italian cigars. Di Nobili, I think they’re called. Years and years ago I was partnered with a wise old cop named Vince Mahaffey, and he smoked the damn things day in and day out. I suppose they were no less appropriate for a Pakistani cabby than for an Irish cop, but I didn’t let myself be transported on wings of nostalgia. I just rolled down the windows and tried to find something to breathe.

  Elaine was asleep when I got in. She stirred when I slipped into bed beside her. I gave her a kiss and told her to go back to sleep.

  “TJ called again,” she said. “You didn’t beep him.”

  “I know. What did he want?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “I’ll call him in the morning. Go to sleep, sweetie.”

  “You all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Find out anything?”

  “I don’t know. Go to sleep.”

  “‘Go to sleep, go to sleep.’ Is that all you can say?”

  I tried to think of a response, but before I could come up with anything she had drifted off again. I closed my eyes and did the same.

  12

  Elaine was gone by the time I woke up. There was a note on the kitchen table explaining that she’d left early for an auction at Tepper Galleries on East Twenty-fifth Street, and reminding me to beep TJ. I had a shower first, and toasted an English muffin. There was coffee in the thermos, and I drank one cup and poured another before I picked up the phone and dialed his beeper number. When the tone sounded I punched in my own number and hung up.

  Fifteen minutes later the phone rang and I picked it up. “Who wants TJ?” he said, and went on without waiting for a response, “’Cept I know who it is, Diz, on account of I reckanize the number. You believe it took me this long to find a phone? Either they out of order or somebody be on them, talkin’ like they gettin’ paid by the word. You think I should get a cell phone?”

  “I wouldn’t want one.”

  “You don’t want a beeper,” he said, “or a computer, neither. What you want’s the nineteenth century back again.”

  “Maybe the eighteenth,” I said, “before the Industrial Revolution took the joy out of life.”

  “Someday you can tell me how nice it was with horses and buggies. Why I don’t want a cell phone, they cost too much. Cost when you call somebody, cost when somebody call you. Top of that, you got no privacy. Dude’s chillin’ with a Walkman, he’s liable to pick up everything you sayin’. What makes it work like that?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Don’t even need a Walkman. People be pickin’ up your conversation on the fillings in their teeth. Next thing you know they think it’s the CIA, tellin’ ’em they supposed to go to the post office and shoot everybody.”

  “You wouldn’t want that on your conscience.”

  “Damn, you right about that.” He laughed. “I stick to my beeper. Hey, listen. I found that dude.”

  “What dude is that?”

  “Dude you had me lookin’ for. Dude who was on the scene when the one dude shot the other dude.”

  “There’s too many dudes in that sentence,” I said. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  “Talkin’ ’bout Myron.”

  “Myron.”

  “Dude got shot in that little park? Dude had AIDS? Ring a little bell, Mel?”

  “Byron,” I said.

  “Byron Leopold. Wha’d I do, call him Myron? I been doin’ that in my head all along. Thing is, see, I never heard of nobody named Byron…You still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “You didn’t say nothin’, so I beginnin’ to wonder.”

  “I guess I was speechless,” I said. “I didn’t know you were still looking for the witness.”

  “Ain’t been nobody told me to stop.”

  “No, but—”

  “An’ the man got me started in this detectin’ business, everybody say he like a dog with a bone. Once he get his teeth in somethin’, he ain’t about to turn it loose.”

  “Is that what they say?”

  “So I gettin’ to be the same my own self, like a dog with a bone. ‘Sides, it be somethin’ to do.”

  “And you found the dude.”

  “Took some doin’,” he admitted. “He wasn’t exactly lookin’ to be found. But he saw the whole thing, ‘cept it was more hearin’ than
seein’. He wasn’t lookin’ at first, and when he did look he was seein’ it from behind. So he saw the back of the dude who did the shooting, and he didn’t see the gun, just heard, you know, pop pop.”

  “That’s what he heard? Pop pop?”

  “What he heard was gunshots. What else you gone hear when somebody shoots a gun?”

  “Everybody who was there heard the gunshots,” I said, “and even if they hadn’t the bullets in Leopold’s body are fairly strong evidence that a couple of shots were fired. So if all this fellow did was hear the shots—”

  “Ain’t all he heard.”

  “Oh.”

  “That was all the man heard, you think I’d be botherin’ you with it?”

  “Sorry. What else did he hear?”

  “Heard the dude say, ‘Mr. Leopold?’ Then he didn’t hear nothin’, so either Byron just nodded or his voice didn’t carry. Then he heard the dude say, ‘Byron Leopold?’ An’ maybe he looked up an’ maybe he didn’t, but the next he heard the dude was bustin’ caps.”

  “Pop pop.”

  “Like that.”

  “When can I see this witness?”

  “He might be pretty slow to talk to you. He already missed a few chances to talk to the police.”

  “I don’t suppose the gentleman’s a vice president at IBM.”

  “He in the park sellin’ product,” he said, “an’ soon as the dude commences to shoot, he ready to call it a day hisself. I can maybe put you ’cross a table from him, but that don’t mean he’s gone talk to you. ’Sides, what you gonna axe him that I didn’t axe him already?”

  “‘Mr. Leopold? Byron Leopold?’”

  “Don’t sound to me like he’s makin’ it up.”

  “No,” I said, “it doesn’t.”

  An hour later I was watching him eat french fries at a Fourteenth Street coffee shop. His cheeseburger was but a memory. He was wearing baggy jeans and a denim jacket with a quilted lining. His railroader’s cap was on the seat beside him.

  I told him I had pretty much forgotten Byron Leopold.

  “Why’s that?” he wondered. “You come to the conclusion he died of natural causes?”

  “When I thought about it at all,” I said, “which wasn’t often, I suppose I figured he’d been taken for someone else and killed in error. Or that he’d unwittingly made an enemy in the neighborhood by sitting on the wrong bench or mouthing off at the wrong person. And he had AIDS, and he was far enough along so that the disease was visible. Maybe somebody had an AIDS phobia and decided the best cure lay in killing off the victims.”

  “Like the dudes who set bums on fire.”

  “As a quick cure for the problem of homelessness. That’s the idea. I didn’t think that was it, though, because that kind of killer doesn’t act once and then go off and enter a monastery.”

  “He repeats.”

  “Usually.” The waitress came by and filled my coffee cup without asking. The coffee wasn’t very good, but there was plenty of it. I said, “‘Mr. Leopold? Byron Leopold?’”

  “Like that.”

  “Making sure he’s got the right person.”

  “Person he’s supposed to shoot. Like he knows the name but he never met him before. We brainstormin’, right? Battin’ ideas back and forth?”

  “Something like that,” I agreed. “He sounds hired, doesn’t he?”

  “The killer? You mean like a pro?”

  “Not like a pro,” I said. “The whole thing’s too raggedy-ass for a pro. Here’s a man who’s alone a lot, leads a very regular life, hasn’t set up any security system to make himself hard to kill. It’s easy to get close to him in private, so why would a professional hitman kill him in front of witnesses?”

  “Only reason I said a pro, Joe, is you said hired.”

  “An amateur,” I said, “hired by another amateur. It pretty much takes a pro to hire a pro. You need to be connected, you can’t look up contract killers in the yellow pages. Ordinary citizens hire killers all the time, but there’s nothing terribly professional about the people who work for them.”

  “An’ it don’t always work out the way it s’posed to,” he said. “Like the other day in Washington Heights.”

  I knew the one he was talking about. It had been all over the papers the past few days. A Dominican teenager, bridling at her father’s strict discipline, had engaged a pair of local hard cases to kill the man, enticing them with the prospect of the $20,000 he kept in a strongbox in the closet, considering it ever so much safer than the bank.

  So they showed up at the house one night and she let them in. She gave them the money, and then they were supposed to wait for Daddy to come home. But they got tired of waiting, and it occurred to them that he might be armed, and there was an easier way to close the account. So they took the girl who started the whole thing and shot her twice in the head, and they did the same for her sleeping mother and brother while they were at it, and then they went home. The father came home from work to find his family dead and his money gone. I bet his car wouldn’t start, either.

  “In Washington Heights,” I said, “everybody had a reason. The girl was mad at her father, and the killers wanted the money.”

  “So who had a reason to kill Byron?”

  “That’s what I was wondering.”

  “Didn’t have any money, did he?”

  “Actually,” I remembered, “he had more money than he should have. He cashed in his insurance and he died with something like forty thousand dollars in the bank.”

  “Ain’t that a motive?”

  “He left it all to some AIDS charities. Some of those organizations are a little aggressive in their fund-raising, but I’ve never heard of them going out and killing for the money.”

  “Besides, all they gotta do is wait, right? ‘Cause the man already dyin’.” He frowned. “You know what’d be nice? Piece of pie.” I beckoned the waitress over and he asked her what kind of pie she had, giving her response some careful attention. “Pecan,” he decided, “with some of that whatcha-call a la mode on it. Say chocolate?” She looked at him, confused, and the street went right out of his speech. “I’ll have a piece of pecan pie,” he said, “with a scoop of chocolate ice cream.” She nodded and went away, and he rolled his eyes. “Now she be thinkin’ I a doctor. She be after me to take out her appendix.”

  “Tell her your doctorate’s in botany.”

  “That’s just as bad, Tad. She’ll have me talkin’ to her plants. If killin’ Byron didn’t put no money in nobody’s pocket, who’d hire somebody to do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He had AIDS, right? But he wasn’t gay.”

  “He got it from a needle.”

  “He keep it all to hisself? Or did he pass it on?” I must have looked puzzled. “The virus, Cyrus. Who’d he go and infect?”

  “He could have spread it around,” I said. “Years ago, before he even knew he had it.”

  “So he gives it to some woman, and then her husband or her boyfriend or her brother wants to know how she got it. ‘Couldn’t be nobody but that no-account junkie Byron Leopold,’ she says.”

  “Whereupon the husband or brother or whatever he is goes out and hires somebody to kill Byron.”

  “Or does it his own self. Either way Byron’d be a stranger to him an’ he might axe him his name to make sure he didn’t kill the wrong person. ‘Mr. Leopold? Byron Leopold?’”

  “Pop pop.”

  “All she wrote,” he agreed.

  “What about This is for Sheila, you dirty rat?’ The way he did it, Byron wouldn’t even know why he was dying.”

  “If Sheila’s brother was doin’ it hisself, you’d ‘spect him to say somethin’. If he only hired the shooter—”

  “The shooter might not bother with the oratory. Even if the brother did it himself, he could have a speech planned and be too nervous to deliver it.” I drank some coffee. “I don’t buy any of it,” I said. “Who takes that kind of revenge on a man with one fo
ot in the grave? Byron Leopold was a bag of bones, his idea of a big day was sitting in the sun with his newspaper. No matter what he did to you, one long look at him and the resentment’d go right out of you.”

  “What’s that leave? Suicide?”