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

by Lawrence Block

  “Somehow I don’t think Adrian got cyanide from apricot kernels.”

  “No, but that leaves a whole lot of other ways to get it. Turns out there’s all kinds of industrial uses for that shit.” He went on to tell me some of them. “So his name might turn up on a list,” he said, “or Allen Johnson’s might, but they might not. On account of there’s so many different ways to get it.”

  “How do you happen to know all this?”

  “Computer.”

  “You don’t have a computer.”

  “This girl does.”

  “What girl?”

  “Girl I know. Not like the Kongs, she ain’t no hacker, don’t know how to do anything tricky, sneakin’ into networks an’ data bases and all of that. She just use it to do her homework and balance her checkbook an’ shit.”

  “So you asked her computer about peach pits and cyanide and it spat out all that information?”

  “You don’t ask the computer nothin’. Computer just a machine.”

  “Oh.”

  “She got this on-line service, see, and you hook up to that and browse these different message boards. An’ when you find somebody might know the answer to your question, you send him an E-mail. An’ he E-mails you back. Like talkin’, ’cept it on the screen.”

  “Oh.”

  “An’ what else you can do, you can post a question on the message board, an’ people post their answers an’ you can pick ’em up later on. Or they’ll E-mail it straight to you. Anything you want to know, somebody out there got the answer.”

  “Oh.”

  “Course, sometimes what you get gonna be the wrong answer, ’cause people who don’t know be just as apt to answer as people who do. So all of that about the apricot kernels ain’t exactly somethin’ you can take to the bank, Frank. Might be he got the details wrong.”

  “I see.”

  “Anyway,” he said, “I learned all of that, so I thought I’d pass it on. I be at Elaine’s shop later, case you need me.”

  I finished my coffee, and I was on my way out the door when the phone rang.

  It was Joe Durkin. “We have to talk,” he said.

  “I was on my way over.”

  “Don’t come here. There’s that coffee shop I met you once, Greek place, Eighth between Forty-fourth and Forty-fifth. I forget the name, they changed it when they redecorated, but it’s the same place.”

  “I know the one you mean. The east side of Eighth.”

  “Right. Ten minutes?”

  “Fine. I’ll buy the coffee.”

  “All I want is straight answers,” he said. “I don’t give a shit who buys the coffee.”

  He was in a booth when I got there. He had a cup of coffee in front of him and an expression on his face that I couldn’t read. He said, “I want to know what you know about Will.”

  “What brought this on?”

  “What brought it on? I made a phone call this morning, just thought I’d ask if the Allen Johnson name turned up on any lists they might have got from Poison Control.”

  “I gather it rang a bell.”

  “The name? It couldn’t, because I didn’t get that far. Before I knew it I was right in the middle of a Chinese fire drill. What did I know about Will? What did I have and where did it come from?”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “That I’d heard something from a source during an investigation of another matter. I don’t remember exactly what I said. I didn’t mention your name, if that’s what you were wondering.”

  “Good.”

  “The only reason I kept you out of it,” he said, “is before I give you to them I want to know what I’m giving. How did this Allen Johnson get to be Will, and how did you get onto him, and who the hell is he anyway?” When I hesitated he added, “And don’t hold out on me, Matt. If you’re blowing smoke, blow it someplace else, will you? And if you’ve got something, well, the son of a bitch already murdered four people. Don’t sit there with your thumb up your ass while he goes and kills somebody else.”

  “He’s not going to kill anybody else.”

  “Why, because he gave us his word? He kills people but he draws the line at lying?”

  “His killing days are over.”

  “And you know for a fact he won’t change his mind?”

  “He can’t.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because he’s dead,” I said. “The last person he killed was himself. I’m not blowing smoke and I’m not holding out, either. Will was Adrian Whitfield. He killed three people and then he killed himself.”

  He looked at me. “In other words, case closed. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “It’ll take some police work to wrap it up and tie off the loose ends, but—”

  “But Will’s history and the people of this great city can sleep safe in their beds. Is that it?”

  “Evidently not,” I said, “if your tone of voice is anything to go by. What have you got?”

  “What have I got? I haven’t got a thing. I could tell you what they’ve got downtown, except you can figure it out for yourself when I tell you who they got it from. Our old friend Martin J. McGraw.” I looked at him and he nodded. “Yeah, right,” he said. “Another letter from Will.”

  17

  The letter had obviously been written after its author had read Marty McGraw’s most recent column, the one that ended in an oblique invitation to Will to deal harshly with the principal owner of the New York Yankees. “An Open Letter to Marty McGraw” was how he headed it, and he started with a reference to the last line of McGraw’s column. “You ask where I am now that you need me,” he said. “The question answers itself if you will but remember what I am. The Will of the People is always present, even as it is always needed. The particular flesh and blood embodiment of that Will who writes these lines, and who has been called to action several times in recent months, is nothing more than a physical manifestation of that Will.”

  He went on in that abstract vein for another paragraph or two, then turned specific. His letter’s title notwithstanding, Marty McGraw was not his target. Neither was the Yankees’ arrogant owner. Instead he named three New Yorkers whom he charged with acting in flagrant opposition to the public good. First was Peter Tully, head of the Transit Workers Union, who was already threatening to greet the new year with a bus and subway strike. Second on the list was Marvin Rome, a judge who’d never met a defendant he didn’t like. The final name was that of Regis Kilbourne, for many years the theater critic of the New York Times.

  Hours later, I finally got to see a copy of the letter. “You keep shaking your head like that,” Joe Durkin said, “you’ll wind up suing yourself for whiplash.”

  “Will never wrote this letter.”

  “So you said. At great length, as I recall.”

  We’d spent the day in a conference room at One Police Plaza, where I got to tell my story over and over to different teams of detectives. Some of them acted respectful while others were cynical and patronizing, but whatever attitude they struck it felt as though they were acting the part. They all seemed impossibly young to me, and I suppose they were. Their average age must have been around thirty-five, which gave me a good twenty years on them.

  I don’t know why they had to ask me the same questions quite as many times as they did. A certain amount of that was probably to see if I contradicted myself or offered any additional information, but eventually I guess they just settled into a routine. It was easier to go over my story a few more times than to think of something else to do.

  Meanwhile, other people were off doing other things. They sent a crew to toss Adrian’s apartment and another to disrupt things at his office. His photograph went out by wire to Omaha and Philadelphia, as well as to Midwest Express’s hub city, Milwaukee. They weren’t keeping me posted, but I guess some corroborating evidence began to turn up, because there was an attitudinal shift sometime around the middle of the afternoon. That was when it began to become clear th
at they knew the story I’d spun for them was more than smoke.

  Joe was around for the whole thing. He wasn’t always in the conference room, and at one point I thought he’d gone home, or back to his precinct. He came back, though, and he brought a sandwich and a container of coffee for me. He disappeared again after a while, but he was planted in a chair in the outer office when they finally told me to go home.

  We walked a couple of blocks, passing up a few favorite cop watering holes, and wound up in the bar of a Vietnamese restaurant on Baxter Street. The place was the next thing to empty, with one man reading a newspaper at a table and another nursing a beer at the far end of the bar. The woman behind the bar looked exotic, and thoroughly bored. She fixed a martini for Joe and a Coke for me and left us alone.

  Joe drank a third of his martini and held the glass aloft. “I ordered this,” he said, “not because I ever liked the taste of these things, but because after a day like today I wanted something that would hit me right between the eyes.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “That’s why I ordered a Coke.”

  “Is that a fact. Don’t tell me you never get the urge for something stronger.”

  “I get lots of urges,” I said. “So?”

  “So nothing.” He nodded in the direction of the bartender. “Talk about urges,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “What do you figure, black father and Vietnamese mother?”

  “Something like that.”

  “A lonely GI far from home. A girl, young in years, but filled with the ancient knowledge of the East. Listen to me, will you? It’s funny, though. You see somebody looks exotic like that, you think it’d be special. But it’s just in your mind.”

  “You’ve looked at clouds from both sides now.”

  “Oh, go fuck yourself,” he said.

  “Everybody tells me that.”

  “Yeah, and I can see why. Here, I got a copy of this. I don’t think I was supposed to, and I know I’m not supposed to show it to you, but I’ll bet you anything it’s in the paper by morning, so why should you be the last person in town to see it?”

  And he handed me Will’s letter.

  “It’s all wrong,” I said. “Will didn’t write this.”

  “If Will was Whitfield,” he said, “and assuming Whitfield’s not playing possum, then all of that goes without saying, doesn’t it? Of course he didn’t write it. Dead men don’t write letters.”

  “They can write them before they die. He already did that once.”

  He took the letter from me. “He’s got references to the column of McGraw’s that ran yesterday, Matt. And he talks about Tully’s threat of a TWU strike, and that’s only been news in the past week or ten days.”

  “I know that,” I said. “There’s plenty of evidence to disprove any theory that Adrian wrote this and arranged to have it mailed weeks after his death. But suppose I never even suspected Adrian. You could still take one look at this and know that the same person hadn’t written it.”

  “Oh? Style’s pretty close.”

  “Will Number Two is literate,” I said. “He’s got an ear for language, and I’d guess he made a conscious effort to mimic Will Number One. I haven’t got the other letters handy to compare them, but it seems to me I can recognize phrases that I’ve read before.”

  “I don’t know about that. I’d agree it has a familiar ring to it. But wouldn’t anybody copycatting Will make an effort to sound like the original?”

  “Not everybody could pull it off.”

  “No?” He shrugged. “Maybe it’s harder than it looks. You know, he didn’t just copycat the style of the writing. He got the rest of it right, too. See the signature?”

  “It’s printed in script.”

  He nodded. “Same as the others. I was talking to a couple of the guys while the rest of them were in there trying to make your head spin. I asked about the forensic side.”

  “I was wondering about that,” I said. “It seems to me it shouldn’t be much of a trick to prove that the new letter was typed on a different machine.”

  “Well, sure,” he said. “If it was typed.”

  “If it wasn’t,” I said, “he’s got a funny kind of handwriting.”

  “I mean typed on a typewriter, which it wasn’t, and neither were any of the earlier letters. They were done on a computer and printed on a laser printer.”

  “Can’t they identify the computer and the printer forensically?”

  He shook his head. “With a typewriter the keys’ll be worn differently, and this one’ll be out of alignment, or the E and O’s’ll be filled in. Or the typeface is different. A typewriter’s like a fingerprint, no two alike.”

  “And a computer?”

  “With a computer you can choose a different typeface every time, you can make the type larger or smaller by touching this key or that one. You see how the signature’s in script? You get that by switching to a script font.”

  “So you can’t tell if two letters came out of the same computer?”

  “I’m not a hundred percent in the loop on this,” he said, “but there’s a certain amount you can tell. With Will’s letters, the ones from Will Number One, they think there was more than one printer involved.”

  He went on to tell me more than I could take in, about ways in which you could compose a letter on one computer, copy it on a disk, and then print it out through another computer and printer. I didn’t listen too closely, and eventually I held up a hand to stop him.

  “Please,” I said. “I’m sick to death of computers. I can’t have a conversation with TJ without hearing how wonderful they are. I don’t care about the typeface or the paper, or if he composed it on the East Side and printed it out on the West Side. I don’t even care about the writing style. What’s so different it jumps off the page at you is what he’s saying.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “His list.”

  “The original Will wrote open letters to the vies,” he said. “This one writes to McGraw. Plus he lists three at once.”

  “Uh-huh. And look who’s on the list.”

  “Peter Tully, Marvin Rome, and Regis Kilbourne.”

  “Adrian picked people society couldn’t come to terms with. A child killer who got away with it. A Mafia don who got away with everything. A right-to-lifer who’d incited homicide and remained untouchable. A racist firebrand who, like the rest of them, had found a way around the system.”

  “And a defense attorney.”

  “Adrian didn’t really belong on the list, did he? That should have been grounds for suspecting him in and of itself. Leave him out, though, and you’ve got four people who could certainly be viewed as public enemies out of the law’s reach. You could argue that the small-W will of the people might very well be what big-W Will was carrying out.”

  “And the new list?”

  “A labor leader, a judge, and a critic. They’re right up there with Jack the Ripper and Attila the Hun, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. He knocked back the rest of his martini, caught the bartender’s eye and pointed to his glass. “I could probably think of a few people who might not break down crying if Send-’em-home Rome went to that great courtroom in the sky. The son of a bitch has made a career out of never giving a police officer the benefit of the doubt. He sets minimum bail or releases on own recognizance all the damn time, dismisses cases right and left.”

  “He’s a judge,” I said, “and the people voted him into office, and they could vote him out if they really wanted to. And one of these days they probably will.”

  “Not soon enough.”

  “What about Peter Tully?”

  “Well, he’s an arrogant prick,” he said. “What’s Will have to say about him? ‘You hold an entire city hostage to your lust for power as you threaten to thrust a wrench into the machinery of urban transit.’ You know, maybe Will Number Two isn’t such a great mimic after all. I can’t see Number One coming u
p with a sentence like that.”

  “Listen to his bill of goods against Regis Kilbourne. ‘Your power over the Broadway stage is near absolute, and it has absolutely corrupted you. Drunk with it, you unfailingly choose form over content, style over substance, promoting the willfully obscure at the expense of the well-made drama with a story to tell.’ There’s more about how he’ll criticize an actor for being physically unattractive, and how unfair it all is.”