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

by Lawrence Block

  Because they were supposed to die. They’d had AIDS, both of them, and it had been sufficiently advanced as to meet the medical criteria established by the viatical transaction brokers. Just because they were dead didn’t mean Havemeyer killed them. Mother Nature could have beaten him to the punch.

  So I made some more phone calls, and what I learned saved me from having to make the tough choice between “Inside Edition” and “Hard Copy.” Harlan Phillips had died in a hospice in the Mission District, two years and eight months after having been diagnosed with AIDS, and just short of a year after assigning his Mass Mutual policy to William Havemeyer. John Wilbur Settle, treating himself to a trip abroad, no doubt with the windfall that blew his way when Havemeyer bought his policy, was one of eighty-four people drowned when a Norwegian passenger ferry caught fire, burned, capsized, and sank in the Baltic Sea.

  I remembered the incident, though I hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to it at the time. I went to the library and determined that the fire had broken out as a result of a failure of the ship’s electrical system, that the ship had been carrying a load of passengers slightly in excess of its legal capacity, and that many of them were described as holiday revelers, which is often a nonjudgmental way of saying everybody was drunk. Rescue efforts were delayed as a result of a communications snafu, but were nevertheless reasonably successful, with over nine hundred passengers and crew members surviving. Of an even dozen Americans aboard, three were casualties, and the paper of record dutifully supplied their names. They were Mr. and Mrs. D. Carpenter, of Lafayette, Louisiana, and Mr. J. Settle, of Eugene, Oregon.

  Somehow I couldn’t see Bad Billy Havemeyer flying off to Oslo, then sneaking aboard the SS Magnar Syversen and crossing a couple of wires in the engine room. Nor could I picture him at Phillips’s bedside in San Francisco, ripping out IVs, say, or pressing a pillow over a ravaged face.

  I left the library and just walked for a while, not really paying much attention to where I was going. It was cold out and the wind had a nasty edge to it, but the air was fresh and clean the way it gets when there’s a north wind blowing.

  When I got home there was a message on the machine. Marty McGraw had called and left a number. I called him back and he said he just wanted to keep in touch. What was I working on these days?

  Just going around in circles, I said, and winding up back at square one.

  “Be a good name for a restaurant,” he said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Square One. A restaurant, a saloon, place on the order of the old Toots Shor’s. Kind of joint where you can have a few pops and get a decent steak without worrying what kind of wine goes with it. Call it Square One because you know you’re always going to wind up back at it. You getting anywhere with Will?”

  “You must mean Will Number Two.”

  “I mean the son of a bitch who wrote me a letter threatening three prominent New Yorkers, and nobody seems to give a shit. I don’t suppose you’ve been looking into it by any chance.”

  “I don’t figure it’s any business of mine.”

  “Hey, when did that ever stop you in the past?” I didn’t say anything right away, and he said, “That sounded wrong, the way it came out. Don’t take it the wrong way, will you, Matt?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “You read that crap in the competition this morning?”

  “The competition?”

  “The New York Fucking Post. That’s close to the original name of that rag, as a matter of fact. The New York Evening Post, that’s what used to grace that masthead.”

  “Like the Saturday Evening Post?”

  “That was a magazine, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I know that, I just—”

  “Slight difference, one’s a magazine, the other’s a newspaper.” I could hear the drink in his voice now. I suppose it had been there all along, but I hadn’t been aware of it before. “There’s a story about the Post,” he said. “Years ago, before you were born or your father before you, they were in an ass-kicking and hair-pulling contest with the old New York World. The Post had the rag on one day and ran an editorial calling the World a yellow dog. Now this was considered quite the insult. You know, yellow journalism? You familiar with the term?”

  “Not as well as you are.”

  “What’s that? Oh, a wiseass. You want to hear this or not?”

  “I’d love to hear it.”

  “So everybody was waiting to see what the World was going to come back with. And next day there’s an editorial in the World. ’The New York Evening Post calls us a yellow dog. Our reply is the reply of any dog to any post.’ You get it, or is the subtlety of a bygone age lost on you?”

  “I get it.”

  “In other words, piss on you.”

  “When was this?”

  “I dunno, eighty years ago? Maybe more. Nowadays a newspaper could come right out and say, ‘Piss on you,’ and nobody’d turn a hair, the way standards have fucking crumbled. How the hell did I get on this?”

  “The Post.”

  “Right, the New York Fucking Post. They’ve got an analysis of the latest letter, supposedly proves the guy’s a phony, a talker and not a doer. Some expert, some college professor, needs to read the instructions on the roll of Charmin before he can figure out how to wipe his ass. What do you think of that?”

  “What do I think of what?”

  “Wouldn’t you say it’s irresponsible? They’re calling the guy a liar to his face.”

  “Only if he reads the Post.”

  He laughed. “And piss on them, huh? But you get what I mean, don’t you? They’re saying, ‘I dare you.’ Saying, ‘Go ahead, kill somebody, make my day.’ I call that irresponsible.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Why, you patronizing son of a bitch. Are you too much of a big shot now to have conversation with me?”

  I resisted the impulse to hang up. “Of course not,” I said soothingly. “I think you’re probably right saying what you said, but it’s no longer something I’m involved in, not even peripherally. And I’m going nuts enough without it.”

  “Oh, yeah? Over what?”

  “Another case that’s not really any business of mine, but I seem to have taken it on. There’s a man I’m just about certain committed murder, and I’m damned if I can figure out why.”

  “Gotta be love or money,” he said. “Unless he’s a public-spirited son of a bitch like my guy.”

  “It’s money, but I can’t make it make sense. Suppose you’re insured and I’m the beneficiary. I gain if you die.”

  “Why don’t we make it the other way around?”

  “Just let me—”

  “No, really,” he said, his voice rising as he got into it. “I know this is hypothetical, but why do I have to be the schmuck? Make it that I win if you die.”

  “Fine. You gain if I die. So I jump out the window, and—”

  “Why do a crazy thing like that?”

  “And you shoot me on the way down. Why?”

  “You jump out the window and I shoot you on the way down.”

  “Right. Why?”

  “Target practice? Is this some trick, you were wearing a parachute, some shit like that?”

  “Jesus,” I said. “No, it’s not a trick question. It’s an analogy.”

  “Well, excuuuuse me. I shoot you on the way down?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And kill you.”

  “Right.”

  “But you would have died anyhow when you landed. Because this is an analogy and not a trick question, so please tell me it’s not a first-floor window you just jumped out of.”

  “No, it’s a high floor.”

  “And no parachute.”

  “No parachute.”

  “Well, shit,” he said. “I don’t get the money if it’s suicide. How’s that for simple?”

  “Doesn’t apply.”

  “Doesn’t apply? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?�
��

  “Suicide wouldn’t invalidate the policy,” I said. “Anyway, when I jump out the window it’s not suicide.”

  “No, it’s an act of Christian charity. It’s a response to overwhelming public demand. Why isn’t it suicide when you jump out the window? You’re not a bird or a plane, let alone Superman.”

  “The analogy was imperfect,” I allowed. “Let’s just say I’m falling from a great height.”

  “What did you do, lose your balance?”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “Ha! Tell me about it. So it’s an accident, is that what you’re saying?…Where’d you go? Hey, Earth to Matt. Are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Well, you had me wondering. It’s an accident, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “It’s an accident.”

  21

  I stayed put over the weekend. I went to a couple of meetings, and Saturday afternoon Elaine and I took the #7 train out to Flushing and walked around the new Chinatown. She complained that it wasn’t like Manhattan’s Chinatown at all, feeling neither quaint nor sinister but disturbingly suburban. We wound up eating at a Taiwanese vegetarian restaurant, and after two bites she put down her chopsticks and said, “I take back everything I said.”

  “Not bad, huh?”

  “Heaven,” she said.

  Sunday I had dinner with Jim Faber for the first time in quite a few weeks, and that meant another Chinese meal, but in our own part of town, not way out in Queens. We talked about a lot of different things, including Marty McGraw’s column in that morning’s News, in which he’d essentially accused Will #2 of jerking us all around.

  “I can’t understand it,” I said. “I talked to him a couple of days ago and he was pissed off at the Post for running a story suggesting that this Will is all hat and no cattle. And now he—”

  “All hat and no cattle?”

  “All talk and no action.”

  “I know what it means. I’m just surprised to hear it coming out of your New York mouth.”

  “I’ve been on the phone with a lot of Texans lately,” I said. “Maybe some of it rubbed off. The point is he called them irresponsible for writing Will off, and now he’s deliberately goading him himself, telling the guy to shit or get off the pot.”

  “Maybe the police put him up to it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  “I think they’d be more inclined to let sleeping dogs lie. That’s more their style than using Marty as a cafs-paw.”

  “Cats and dogs,” he said. “Sounds like rain. McGraw’s a drunk, isn’t he? Didn’t you tell me that?”

  “I don’t want to take his inventory.”

  “Oh, go ahead and take his inventory. ‘We are not saints,’ remember?”

  “Then I suppose he’s a drunk.”

  “And you’re surprised he’s not perfectly consistent? Maybe he doesn’t remember objecting to the story in the Post. Maybe he doesn’t even remember reading it.”

  Monday I got on the phone right after breakfast and made half a dozen calls, some of them lengthy. I called from the apartment, not from my hotel room across the street, which meant I’d be charged for the calls. That allowed me to feel virtuous and stupid instead of shady and clever.

  Tuesday morning Marty McGraw’s column included a letter from Will. There was a teaser headline to that effect on the front page, but the main story was about a drug-related massacre in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. Before I even saw the paper, the doorman rang upstairs during breakfast to announce a FedEx delivery. I said I’d be down to pick it up, and I was eager enough to get going that I skipped my second cup of coffee.

  The delivery was what I was expecting, an overnight letter containing three photographs. They were all four-by-five color snaps of the same individual, a slightly built white man in his late forties or early fifties, clean-shaven, with small even features and eyes that were invisible behind wirerimmed eyeglasses.

  I beeped TJ and met him at a lunch counter in the Port Authority bus terminal. It was full of wary people, their eyes forever darting around the room. I suppose they had their reasons. It was hard to guess which they feared more, assault or arrest.

  TJ spoke highly of the glazed doughnuts, and put away a couple of them. I let them toast a bagel for me and ate half of it. I knew better than to drink their coffee.

  TJ squinted at the photos and announced that their subject looked like Clark Kent. “’Cept he’d need more than a costume change to turn hisself into Superman. This the dude chilled Myron?”

  “Byron.”

  “What I meant. This him?”

  “I think so.”

  “Don’t look like no iceman. Look like he’d have to call in for backup ‘fore he’d step on a cockroach.”

  “That witness you found,” I said. “I was wondering if you could find him again.”

  “The dude who was dealin’.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Might be I could find him. You sellin’ product, you don’t want to make yourself too hard to find. Or folks be buyin’ from somebody else.” He tapped the picture. “Dude saw the shooter from the back, Jack.”

  “Didn’t he get a glimpse of his face after the shooting?”

  He tilted his head back, grabbing at the memory. “Said he was white,” he recalled. “Said he was ordinary lookin’. Must be he saw him a little bit, but don’t there be other witnesses got a better look at him?”

  “Several of them,” I agreed.

  “So what we doin’, coverin’ all the bases?”

  I shook my head. “The other witnesses might have to testify in court. That means their first look at Havemeyer ought to be in a police lineup. If his lawyer finds out some private cop showed them a picture ahead of time, then their ID is tainted and the judge won’t allow it.”

  “Dude I found ain’t about to testify,” he said. “So it don’t matter how tainted he gets.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Tainted,” he repeated, savoring the word. “Only thing, I supposed to work for Elaine today. Mindin’ the shop while she checks out this Salvation Army store somebody told her about.”

  “I’ll cover for you.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Lotta stuff you got to know, Bo. How to write up sales, how to make out the charge slips, how to bargain with the customers. It ain’t somethin’ you can do just walkin’ in off the street.”

  I swung at him and he grinned and dodged the blow. “Didn’t I tell you?” he said. “You got to work to establish the jab.” And he snatched up the photographs and headed for the door.

  The photos had been taken by a third-year student at Western Reserve, in Cleveland. I’d started out with a name and phone number from Wally Donn, but the guy I reached was swamped with work and didn’t know when he could get to it. He gave me two other numbers, and when each one led me no further than an answering machine I looked in my book and called a fellow I knew in Massillon, Ohio. Massillon’s not exactly next door to Cleveland, but I didn’t know anybody closer.

  I’d met Tom Havlicek six or seven years ago when a man I’d locked up once killed an old friend of Elaine’s, along with her husband and children. Havlicek was the cop in charge, a police lieutenant who liked his work and was good at it. We’d hit it off and stayed in touch. I’d managed to deflect his periodic invitations to come out to Ohio and hunt deer, but I’d seen him twice in New York. He came alone the first time, to attend a police products trade show at the Javits Center, and I met him for lunch and showed him a little of the city. He liked what he saw enough to bring his wife a year or so later, and Elaine and I took them to dinner and arranged theater tickets. We joined them for the revival of Carousel at Lincoln Center, but they were on their own for Cats. Friendship, Elaine explained, only goes so far.

  It didn’t take long to determine, through a contact in the Cleveland Metropolitan PD, that William Havemeyer had skated thus far throug
h life without getting into trouble. “He hasn’t got a yellow sheet,” he reported. “Which means he hasn’t been arrested. Not in Cuyahoga County, at any rate. Not under that name.”

  I thanked him and got the name and phone number of his Cleveland contact.

  “Now, since they never arrested him,” he went on, “they sure don’t have a photo of him, and Garvin”—his friend on the CMPD—“gave me a number of a guy he knows who retired recently, but it turns out he’s in Florida for the season. So I thought of my sister’s boy.”