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

by Lawrence Block

  “Every month there’s another story of the year,” I said, “and every year there’s a story of the decade and a trial of the century. One thing we’ll never have to worry about is a shortage of hype. But you’re right, it would be a big story.”

  “Get your name in all the papers.”

  “And my face in front of a lot of TV cameras, if I wanted. Or even if I didn’t. That’s almost reason enough right there to keep the story quiet.”

  “On account of you shy.”

  “I’d just as soon stay out of the spotlight. I don’t mind having my name in the paper once in a while. It draws clients, and while I don’t necessarily want more business it’s nice to be able to pick and choose. But this wouldn’t be a little publicity. This would be a circus, and no, I wouldn’t want to be the trained seal in the center ring.”

  “So Will’s secret be safe,” he mused, “just because you don’t want to go on ‘Geraldo.’”

  “I could duck most of the publicity. I could feed it to Joe and let him whisper it into the right ears. He’d find a way to make sure other people got the credit. That’s probably what I’ll do, if I do anything.”

  “But you might not even do that much.”

  “I might not.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a sleeping dog,” I said, “and maybe the decent thing is to let him lie.”

  “How you gonna decide?”

  “By talking to people.”

  “Like we doin’ now?”

  “Exactly like we’re doing now,” I said. “This is part of the process.”

  “Glad I helpin’.”

  “I’ll go home and talk to Elaine,” I said, “and later on I’ll talk about it at a meeting. I won’t be specific, and nobody will know what I’m talking about, but it’ll help me clarify my own thoughts on the subject. And then there’s somebody else I think I’ll talk it over with.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “An attorney I know.”

  He nodded. “Seems like don’t nobody do nothin’ without they first got to talk it over with a lawyer.”

  Elaine and I had dinner at Paris Green, on Ninth Avenue, and our conversation stayed on a single topic from the portobello mushroom appetizer clear through to the cappuccino. I walked her back to the Parc Vendôme and continued on up Ninth to St. Paul’s. I got there ten minutes late, and settled into my chair just as the speaker reached that point in the story where he took his first drink. I’d missed the history of his dysfunctional family, but I could probably get along without hearing it.

  During the break I helped myself to coffee and chatted with a couple of people, and when the meeting resumed I got my hand up and talked about having to make a decision. I was wonderfully vague, and no one could have had a clue what I was getting at, but that’s not atypical of AA shares. I talked about what was on my mind, and then a TV set designer talked about whether or not he was going home to Greenville for Thanksgiving, and then a woman talked about being on a date with a man who was drinking nonalcoholic beer, and how the whole thing had done a number on her head.

  After we’d folded the chairs, I walked with some friends as far as the Flame, but turned down an invitation to join them for coffee, pleading a previous engagement. I headed over to Columbus Circle and rode the IRT local downtown to Christopher Street. By 10:30 I was standing on a stoop on Commerce Street, using a door knocker shaped like a lion’s head.

  Commerce Street is two blocks long and off the beaten path, and it can be hard to find. I’d put in enough time at the Sixth Precinct so that I still knew my way around the Village, and I’d had occasion to get to this particular block several times in the past couple of years. Once Elaine and I had caught a play at the Cherry Lane Theater, just across the street. My other visits, like this one, were to Ray Gruliow’s town house.

  I didn’t have to linger long on his stoop. He drew the door open and motioned me inside, his face bright with the smile that is his most winning feature. It was a smile that said the world was a great cosmic joke, and you and he were the only two people who were in on it.

  “Matt,” he said, and clapped me on the shoulder. “There’s fresh coffee. Interested?”

  “Why not?”

  The coffee was strong and rich and dark, worlds removed from the bitter sludge I’d sipped out of a Styrofoam cup in the basement of St. Paul’s. I said as much and he beamed. “When I go to St. Luke’s,” he said, “I take my own coffee in a thermos jar. My sponsor says it’s my way of distancing myself from the group. I say it’s more a matter of distancing myself from a gastritis attack. What’s your opinion?”

  “I agree with both of you.”

  “Ever the diplomat. Now. What brings you here beside the lure of my most excellent coffee?”

  “The last time we spoke,” I said, “you defended Adrian Whitfield against a charge of suicide. Do you remember?”

  “Vividly. And shortly thereafter Will was good enough to send off a letter that validated my contention by claiming credit.”

  I took another sip of the coffee. It was really something special.

  I said, “Adrian killed himself. He wrote the letter. He wrote all those letters, he killed all those people. He was Will.”

  15

  “It could have been murder,” I said, “even if I couldn’t figure out how Will had managed to pull it off. Assume he had his ways, assume he could scale the side of the building and get in through a window, or unlock the door and disarm the burglar alarm system and reset it afterward. It was a real locked-room puzzle, though, any way you looked at it.

  “But if it was suicide, the hell, what’s simpler than poisoning your own whiskey? He could have done it whenever he had a few minutes alone, and that gave him plenty of opportunity. Just uncap the bottle, pour in the cyanide crystals, and put the cap back on.”

  “And be sure not to drink from that particular bottle until you’re ready to catch the bus.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “But we’re back to the points you raised earlier. Why, in the absence of any kind of a financial motive, go to all that trouble to make suicide look like murder? And, motive aside, why wrap it up in a locked-room puzzle? Why make it look like an impossible murder?”

  “Why?”

  “So that Will would get the credit, and look good in the process. This would be Will’s last hurrah. Why not make it a good one and go out with a bang?”

  He thought about it, nodded slowly. “Makes a kind of sense if he’s Will. But only if he’s Will.”

  “Granted.”

  “So how did you get that part? Because if it’s just a hypothesis that you dreamed up because it’s the only way to make sense out of the locked-room-murder-that-has-to-be-suicide…”

  “It’s not. There’s something else that got me suspicious.”

  “Oh?”

  “That first night at his apartment,” I said, “he didn’t have booze on his breath.”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “Why didn’t you say so earlier? Jesus, I’m surprised you didn’t arrest the son of a bitch right then and there.”

  But he listened without interrupting while I explained my recollection of that first visit to Whitfield’s Park Avenue apartment. “He made a point of saying he’d been drinking when he hadn’t,” I explained. “Now why the hell would he lie about something like that? He wasn’t a heavy drinker, and he didn’t claim to be a heavy drinker, but he did drink, and he even took a drink in front of me. So why the subterfuge, why pretend to have had a couple of drinks earlier in the evening?

  “I didn’t have to be able to answer that in order to conclude that he’d lied to me, and I didn’t think he’d do that without a reason. Well, what did the lie accomplish? It underscored his claim of having been really rattled by Will’s threat. What was he saying, really? Something along the lines of, ‘I’m truly and righteously scared, in fact I’m so scared that I’ve already had a couple of drinks today, and now I’m going to have another one and
you can stand there and watch me do it.’

  “Why would he want me to think he was scared? I busted my head on that one. What I came up with was that the only reason he’d have for going out of his way to impress me with his fear was because it didn’t exist. That’s why he had to lie about it. He wanted me to think he was afraid because he wasn’t.”

  “Why bother? Wouldn’t you assume he was afraid, getting marked for death by some clown who was riding a hot streak? Wouldn’t anybody?”

  “You’d think so,” I said, “but he knew something I didn’t. He knew he wasn’t afraid, and he knew he had nothing to be afraid of.”

  “Because Will couldn’t hurt him.”

  “Not if he was Will.”

  He frowned. “That’s a pretty big leap of logic, wouldn’t you say? He’s pretending to be afraid, therefore he’s not afraid, therefore he’s got nothing to fear. Therefore he’s Will, master criminal and multiple murderer. I don’t remember a whole lot from my freshman logic class, but it strikes me there’s a flaw in the ointment.”

  “A flaw in the ointment?”

  “The ointment, the woodpile. Maybe he’s not afraid because he’s got terminal cancer and he figures Will’s just doing him a favor.”

  “I thought of that.”

  “And, since he’s keeping his illness secret from the world, he puts on an innocent act in order to keep you from wondering why it doesn’t upset him more to be Will’s next headline.”

  “I thought of that, too.”

  “And?”

  “I had to admit it was possible,” I said, “but it just didn’t ring true. The motive for subterfuge seemed pretty thin. So what if I didn’t think he was afraid? I’d just figure him for a stoic. But if what he wanted to cover up was the fact that he was Will, well, you could understand why he’d be moved to keep that a secret.”

  “Where did you go from there?”

  “I took a look at the first murder.”

  “Richie Vollmer.”

  “Richie Vollmer. Adrian’s client, now free to do it again.”

  “Anybody would have gotten Richie off, Matt. It wasn’t Adrian’s doing. The state’s case fell apart when the Neagley woman hanged herself. It’s not as though Adrian handed her the rope.”

  “No.”

  “You think he felt responsible?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. I think he saw Richie’s release as a gross miscarriage of justice, and I think he read Marty McGraw’s column and came to the conclusion that Marty was right. The world would be a better place without Richie in it.”

  “How many people read that column? And what proportion of them found nothing in it to object to?”

  “A whole lot of people read it,” I said, “and most of them very likely agreed with it. Adrian had something most of the rest of us lacked. Two things, actually. He’d played a role in Richie’s little dance through the halls of justice, and he could probably find a way to feel at least some responsibility for the outcome. Maybe he’d passed up a chance to get Richie to plead.”

  “All right, it’s speculative but I’ll allow it. You said two things. What’s the other one?”

  “He had access.”

  “To what, the blunt instrument he clubbed him with? Or the rope he used to hang him from the tree?”

  “To Richie. Think about it, Ray. Here’s a son of a bitch they caught dead to rights for killing children, and he walks, so now he’s free but he’s a pariah, a fucking moral leper. And you’re Will, a public-spirited citizen determined to dispense rough justice. What do you do, look him up in the phone book? Call him up, tell him you want to talk to him about the advantages of investing in tax-free munis?”

  “But Adrian would have known where to find him.”

  “Of course he’d know. He was his lawyer. And do you think Richie would refuse a meeting with him? Or be on his guard?”

  “You can never predict what a client will do,” he said. “You’re the next thing to a member of their family during the trial, and then it ends in an acquittal and they don’t want to know you. I used to think it was ingratitude. Then for a while I decided it stemmed from a desire to put the experience behind them.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I’m back to ingratitude. God knows there’s a lot of it going around.” He leaned back in his chair, his fingers interlaced behind his head. “Let’s say you’re right,” he said, “and Adrian had access. He could call Richie and Richie would meet him.”

  “And not be on his guard.”

  “And not be on his guard. Adrian wouldn’t have to turn up on his doorstep disguised as a twelve-year-old girl. You have anything beside conjecture to place the two of them together?”

  “The cops might have the manpower to turn up a witness who saw the two of them together,” I said. “I didn’t even try. What I looked for was the opposite, proof that Adrian was somewhere else when Richie was killed.”

  “In court or out of town, for instance.”

  “Anything that would give him an alibi. I checked his desk calendar and his time sheets at the office. I can’t prove he didn’t have an alibi, because he wasn’t around to answer questions, but I couldn’t find anything to establish one for him.”

  “What about the others? Patsy Salerno was next. Another distinguished client?”

  “Adrian never represented him. But a few years ago he had one of Patsy’s soldiers for a client.”

  “So?”

  “Maybe it gave him a chance to take a strong dislike to the man. I don’t know. Maybe it left him with a contact in Patsy’s circle, someone who might let slip where Patsy was going to be having dinner and when.”

  “So Adrian could get there first and hide in the toilet.” He shook his head. “It’s hard to picture him walking in there in the first place, this Waspy guy chasing up to Arthur Avenue for a plate of ziti and eggplant. And how does he hide in the can, and how can he be sure Patsy’s going to answer a call of nature? I’ll grant you Patsy was of an age where you wouldn’t expect him to go too many hours between visits to the can, but you could still spend a long time waiting. And Adrian wasn’t a guy who’d blend in there.”

  “More conjecture,” I said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Maybe he didn’t try to blend in. Maybe he used who he was instead of trying to disguise it. Maybe he got Patsy’s ear and set up a supersecret meeting.”

  “On what pretext?”

  “A traitor in Patsy’s ranks. A leak in the U.S. Attorney’s office. A message from somebody highly placed in one of the other crime families. Who knows what he made up? Patsy’d have no reason to be suspicious. The only wire he’d worry about is the kind you wear, not the kind that goes around your neck.”

  “He could even let Patsy pick the time and place,” Ray said. “‘I’ll make sure the back door’s unlocked for you. Slip in, and the bathroom’s along the hall on the right.’”

  “I don’t even know if there’s a rear entrance,” I said, “but one way or another he’d let Patsy set up a meeting. And he’d make sure Patsy wouldn’t mention it to anybody.”

  “So his identity gives him access. Same as with Richie.”

  “It strikes me as the best way for him to operate.”

  He nodded. “When you think of Will,” he said, “you picture some Ninja gliding invisibly through the city streets. But the best cloak of invisibility might be a three-piece suit. I suppose you looked for an alibi for him for Salerno’s murder? And I don’t suppose he was fly-fishing in Montana?”

  “As far as I can tell, he was right here in New York.”

  “So were eight million other people,” he said, “and I don’t see you accusing them of murder. What about Julian Rashid? How was Adrian planning on getting into the compound in St. Albans?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe he was working on a plan to lure Rashid out. I know he wasn’t there when Rashid was killed. He spent the evening with”—I checked my notebook—“Henry Berghash and DeWitt P
almer.”

  “A judge and a college president? I’d say it’s a damn shame the cardinal couldn’t join them. I don’t suppose the three of them wound up at a leather bar on West Street.”

  “Dinner at Christ Cella’s, fifth-row seats for the new Stoppard play, and drinks afterward at Agin-court. A notation in his calendar, backed up with a credit card receipt and a ticket stub.”

  “That’s just perfect,” he said. “You managed to find him a rock-solid alibi for the one murder Will didn’t commit.”

  “I know.”