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

by Lawrence Block

  He thought about it while the girl brought his drink. “It’s not just the exotic aspect,” he said once she was out of hearing range. “It’s also she happens to be gorgeous.”

  “You and Regis Kilbourne,” I said, “placing an undue premium on physical appeal.”

  “We’re both a couple of superficial bastards,” he agreed. “Who the hell would want to kill a critic?”

  “Anybody who ever wrote a play or appeared in one,” I said, “which in this town would have to include half the waiters and a third of the bartenders. But they’d like to kill him the way you’d welcome a shot at Judge Send-’em-home Rome. You might relish the fantasy, and it might not break your heart if a piece of the cornice broke off a tall building and took him out when it landed. But you wouldn’t actually want to kill him.”

  “No, and I probably wouldn’t jump for joy if somebody else did, either. It’s not good for the system when people start taking out judges.”

  “Or critics,” I said, “or labor leaders, either. You know the difference between the two Wills? The first one objected to the invulnerability of his targets, the way they’d managed to subvert the system. But these three don’t have that kind of invulnerability. Marvin Rome’s not going to be riding the bench forever. The voters’ll probably boot him next time he comes up for reelection.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  “And Peter Tully can shut down the city, but the governor can return the favor. Under the Taylor Law, he can lock up anybody who orders a work stoppage by public employees. Kilbourne’s probably got a job for life at the Times, but he’s likely to rotate off the theater desk sooner or later, like the man before him. These three are by no means invulnerable, and that’s not what’s got the new Will’s motor running. What he resents is the power of the men on his list.”

  “Power, huh?”

  “Tully can throw a switch and plunge the city into immobility. Rome can unlock the cell doors and put criminals back on the street.”

  “And Regis Kilbourne can tell an actress her nose is too big and her tits are too small and send her running in tears to the nearest plastic surgeon. If you call that power.”

  “He can pretty much decide which shows stay open and which ones close.”

  “He’s got that much clout?”

  “Just about. It’s not him personally, it’s the position he holds. Whoever reviews plays for the Times has influence that comes with the territory. A bad notice from him won’t guarantee a show’s dead, and a rave won’t necessarily keep one open if everybody else hates it. But that’s usually what happens.”

  “Which means he’s the man.”

  “Yes.”

  “‘What man?’ The man with the power.’ Remember that?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “‘What power?’ ‘The power of voodoo.’”

  “It comes back to me now.”

  “‘Who do?’ ‘You do.’ They don’t write ‘em like that anymore, Matt.”

  “No, and I can see why. He must feel powerless himself, don’t you figure?”

  “Who, the man with the power?”

  “The man who wrote this.”

  “Let’s see.” He held the letter, scanned it. “Powerless, huh?”

  “Don’t you think so?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose that’s what the Feebies would say if they did a profile of him. He resents the power others have over him and seeks to redress the balance by threatening their lives. Plus he wet the bed when he was a kid.”

  “Funny how they always tell you that.”

  “Like it’s going to help you find the son of a bitch. ‘Hey, the FBI says our guy used to wet the bed, so I want you guys out on the street looking for a grown-up little pisspot.’ Useful bit of knowledge when you’re mounting a manhunt, but they always toss it in.”

  “I know.”

  “Along with the information that he came from a dysfunctional family. Jesus, that’s helpful, isn’t it? A dysfunctional family, holy shit, whoever heard of such a thing?”

  “If you came from a dysfunctional family,” I said solemnly, “you’d wet the bed, too.”

  “And probably kill a few people while I was at it. It’s all part of the package.” He frowned at the letter. “Powerless and resenting the power of others. Yeah, I suppose so. It’s a hard theory to argue with. But you know what he reminds me of, Will Number Two?”

  “What?”

  “A list of pet peeves like you’d write up for the high school yearbook. ‘What really pisses me off is insincere people, snap quizzes in algebra class, and lumpy mashed potatoes.’”

  “Well, who likes lumpy mashed potatoes?”

  “Not me. They make me want to kill the pope. But isn’t that how it reads? ‘Here’s a list of the people who really piss me off.’s”

  “You’re right.”

  “I am, aren’t I?” He pushed his stool back. “The son of a bitch doesn’t sound like a homicidal maniac. He just sounds like a nut with a hair up his ass.”

  18

  The next couple of days were a three-ring circus for the media. Marty McGraw broke the story of the new letter from Will, with “WILL’S BAAAAACK!” on his newspaper’s front page. Reporters hurried around town interviewing his three prospective victims, each of whom seemed to take the distinction more as an insult than a threat.

  Peter Tully chose to see Will not as a personal foe but as an enemy of organized labor as a whole. He issued a statement linking the anonymous letter writer with the repressive anti-union forces as exemplified by the mayor and the governor. There was a wonderful cadence of old-fashioned lefty rhetoric to his words. You could almost hear the Almanac Singers in the background, harmonizing on “Union Maid” and “Miner’s Lifeguard,” songs to fan the flames of discontent.

  Judge Marvin Rome managed to view Will’s attack as an assault on civil liberties and the rights of the accused. The one time I saw him on the news, he was linking Will with prosecutors and police officers who were willing to call an end run around the Bill of Rights in order to railroad a defendant—“invariably poor, and all too often black”—into a prison cell. Will’s threat, he assured the public, would no more lead him to compromise his principles than had the vilification he’d received over the years from DAs and cops and their lackeys in the press. He would go on dispensing true justice and tempering it with mercy.

  Regis Kilbourne turned the whole thing into a free-speech issue, lamenting a world in which a critic might feel constrained in any way from the free expression of his views. He went on to say the worst constraints came not from government censorship or his newspaper’s editorial policy, but from “those very aspects of oneself one tends to regard as emblematic of one’s better nature.” Friendship, compassion, and a sense of fair play seemed to be the worst offenders, tempting one to give a kinder, gentler review than the material might otherwise deserve. “If I have dared to inflict pain, to destroy a cherished relationship, to crush a perhaps promising career, all for the sake of a higher truth, can simple physical fear possibly sway me from my course? Indeed, it cannot and it will not.”

  They were all going to carry on bravely, but that didn’t mean they were ready to make Will’s work easier for him. Peter Tully declined police protection but went about guarded by a thuggish phalanx of husky well-armed union members. Judge Rome accepted the NYPD’s offer and supplemented their ranks with some additional cops he hired as moonlighters. (This struck some people as curious, and a Post reporter quoted an unnamed source: “If Will really wants to kill Harold Rome, odds are he’s a cop himself.”) Regis Kilbourne also took the police protection, and, at each of the openings and previews he attended, his companion was not one of the dewy-eyed and pouting young women he favored, but a burly plainclothes cop with a five o’clock shadow and an expression of bored bemusement.

  Will’s letter, targeting three prominent New Yorkers at once, would have been enough all by itself to keep the story hot for a week or more. Long before
it had a chance to die down, McGraw broke the news that Adrian Whitfield, already famous as Will’s most recent victim, had now been definitely determined by police investigators to have been Will himself. (One of the TV news shows hit the air with a news flash hours before the Daily News was on the street with it, but Marty was the first to have all the details.)

  While nobody knew quite what to make of it, everybody remained determined to make the most of it. I’d hoped the cops would keep me out of it, and they may have done what they could, but there was just too much media attention for anyone to slip by unnoticed. After the first phone call we learned to let the answering machine screen everything. I took to leaving my building via the service entrance, which kept to a minimum the number of reporters who caught up with me. I had to enter through the lobby, however, and that was when they were apt to corner me, sometimes with microphones and cameras, sometimes with notebooks. I was poor fodder for either medium, though, shouldering wordlessly past them, giving them nothing, not even a smile or a frown.

  I saw myself on TV one evening. I was visible for less time than it took an off-camera voice to identify me as the Manhattan-based private detective, formerly employed by Adrian Whitfield, whose investigation into his client’s death had led to Whitfield’s unmasking. “It’s great,” Elaine said. “You could very easily look angry or impatient or guilty or embarrassed, the way people do when they won’t talk to the press. But instead you manage to look sort of harried and oblivious, like a man trying to get off a crowded subway car before they close the doors.”

  I’ve been in the limelight before over the years, though it’s never shined that brightly on me, nor have I basked in it for very long. I’ve never cared for it and I didn’t like it any better this time around. Fortunately it didn’t seem to affect me much. A few people at AA meetings made veiled reference to my momentary fame. “I’ve been reading about you in the papers,” they might say, or, “Saw you on TV the other night.” I would deflect the remark with a smile and a shrug, and nobody pursued the subject. The greater portion of my AA acquaintances couldn’t make a connection between the PI named Scudder who’d unmasked Will and that guy Matt who usually sat in the back row. They might know my story, but relatively few of them knew my last name. AA is like that.

  I didn’t stay that hot for that long, perhaps because I managed to avoid adding any fuel to the fire myself. The press didn’t need me to build the case against Adrian Whitfield, which got a little stronger and solider day by day. If there’d been room for doubt, the police kept finding bits of hard evidence to fill it in. Airline and hotel employees had ID’d his photo, and NYNEX records had turned up some calls that didn’t admit to a more innocent explanation, including two to a residential hotel on upper Broadway. There was no way to guess what hotel guest he’d talked to, but Richie Vollmer had been living there, registered under an alias, and both calls were logged the day before Richie’s death.

  The clearer it became that Adrian was the original Will, the murkier the waters grew around Will #2. A whole string of deaths had given the first Will a grim credibility. A threat, after all, has a certain undeniable authority when it’s uttered by a man with blood on his hands.

  But when the threat comes from a copycat, and when everybody damn well knows he’s a copycat, how much weight do you attach to it? That was a question that was getting asked a lot, on TV and in the papers, and I can only assume the police were asking it themselves. As far as anyone could tell, the man (or woman, for all anyone knew) who’d written out a death sentence for the unlikely partnership of Tully, Rome & Kilbourne had never killed anything but time. That being the case, how much of a danger was he? And what did you do about it?

  You had to do something. They still empty schools and office buildings when some joker phones in a bomb threat, even when they know it’s almost certainly a hoax. The fire engines roll when the alarm goes off, the fact notwithstanding that most calls turn out to be false alarms. (The NYFD started taking down most of their red streetcorner call boxes when statistics showed that virtually all alarms called in from the street were the work of pranksters. But they had to physically dismantle the boxes. They couldn’t leave them standing and ignore the alarms.)

  Meanwhile, everybody waited to see what would happen next. The three men named in Will’s letter probably waited with a little more urgency than the rest of the public, but even they probably found themselves paying a little less attention as the days passed and nothing untoward took place.

  Like Benny the Suitcase, bored to tears with the job of starting Tony Furillo’s car every morning. Complaining that nothing ever happened.

  One day I caught a noon meeting at the Citicorp building and spent an hour or two in the stores, trying to get an early start on my Christmas shopping. I didn’t find a thing to buy, and I just wound up feeling overwhelmed by the season.

  It happens every year. Even before the Salvation Army Santas can get out there and start competing with the homeless for handouts, I find myself haunted by all the ghosts of Christmas past.

  I’ve largely come to terms with the failure of my first marriage, with my shortcomings as a husband and a father. “Clearing up the wreckage of the past” is what they call that ritual in AA, and it’s a process you neglect at your peril.

  I’d done all that, making amends, forgiving others and forgiving myself, systematically laying the ghosts of my own history. I didn’t rush into it the way some people do, but I kept working at it over time. There was a series of long talks with my sponsor, a lot of soul-searching, plenty of thought and a certain amount of action. And I would have to say it worked. Here was something that had haunted me for years, and now it doesn’t.

  Except when it does, and that is most apt to happen around the time November starts to bleed into December. The days get shorter and shorter, the sun gives less and less light, and I start to remember every present I didn’t get around to buying, every argument I ever had, every nasty remark I ever made, and every night I found a reason to stay in the city instead of hauling my sad ass home to Syosset.

  So when I’d walked home from my failed shopping spree I went not to the Parc Vendôme but to the hotel across the street. I told myself I couldn’t face a media gauntlet in the lobby, but in fact I had no reason to expect to encounter one. The reporters had understandably lost interest in the fellow who walked through them as if he was trying to get off the subway.

  I said hello to Jacob behind the desk and exchanged nods with a fellow who spends most of his waking hours in the Northwestern’s faded lobby. The poor bastard moved into the hotel years before I did, and sooner or later he’ll die there. I don’t suppose he stands much chance of marrying a beautiful woman and moving across the street.

  I went up to my room. I put the TV on, took a quick tour of the channels, and switched it off again. I pulled a chair over to the window and sat there, looking out at everything and nothing.

  After a while I picked up the phone, made a call. Jim Faber answered the phone himself, saying “Faber Printing” in the gruff voice in which I have come to find considerable reassurance over the years. It was good to hear his voice now, and I said as much.

  “Matter of fact,” I said, “just dialing your number made me feel better.”

  “Well, hell,” he said. “I can remember times I’d be getting to the bar for the first one of the day, and really needing it. You know, feeling like I was going to jump right out of my skin?”

  “I remember the feeling.”

  “And once the drink was poured I could relax. I hadn’t had it yet, it wasn’t in my bloodstream spreading peace and love to every cell in my body, but just knowing it was there had the same effect. But what can be so bad that you’re actually driven to call your sponsor?”

  “Oh, the joy of the season.”

  “Uh-huh. Everybody’s favorite time of year. I don’t suppose you’ve been to a meeting within recent memory.”

  “I left one about two hours ago.”

&nb
sp; “That a fact. What’s keeping you busy these days, besides guilt and self-pity? You hot on the trail of Will’s replacement?”

  “He’s got half the cops in town after him,” I said, “and all the reporters. He doesn’t need me.”

  “Seriously? You’re not investigating the case?”

  “Of course not. I’d just get in everybody’s way.”

  “So what is it you’re doing, if you’re not doing that?”

  “Nothing, really.”

  “Well, there’s your answer,” he said. “Get off your ass and do something.”

  He rang off. I hung up the phone and looked out the window. The city was still out there. I went out to take another crack at it.

  19