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

by Lawrence Block

  “Tell me.”

  “I thought it didn’t matter,” he said. “I thought he was going to die anyway. And he was!”

  “Yes.”

  “And so are we all, every last one of us. We’re all mortal. Does that mean it’s no crime to kill us?”

  No crime for God, I thought. He does it all the time.

  “I told myself I was doing him a favor,” he went on bitterly. “That I was giving him an easy out. What made me think that was what he wanted? If he’d been ready to die he could have taken pills, he could have put a plastic bag over his head. There are enough ways. For God’s sake, he lived on a high floor, he could have gone out the window. If that’s what he wanted.” He frowned. “You can tell he wasn’t eager to die. There was only one reason for him to sell that policy. It was to get money to live on. He wanted his life to be as comfortable as possible for as long as it lasted. So I provided the money,” he said, “and then I took away the life.”

  He’d removed his glasses in the course of that speech, and now he put them on again and peered through them at me. “Well?” he said. “Now what happens?”

  Always the beautiful question.

  “You have some choices,” I said. “There’s a Cleveland police officer, a friend of a friend, who’s familiar with the situation. We can go to the stationhouse where you’ll be placed under arrest and officially informed of your rights.”

  “The Miranda warning,” he said.

  “Yes, that’s what they call it. Then of course you can have your attorney present, and he’ll explain your options. He’d probably advise you to waive extradition, in which case you’ll be escorted back to New York for arraignment.”

  “I see.”

  “Or you can accompany me voluntarily,” I said.

  “To New York.”

  “That’s right. The advantage in that, as far as you’re concerned, is chiefly that it cuts out a certain amount of delays and red tape. And there’s another personal consideration.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, I won’t use handcuffs,” I said. “If you’re officially in custody you’ll have to be cuffed throughout, and that can be both embarrassing and uncomfortable on the plane. I don’t have any official standing so I’m not bound by rules of that sort. All we’ll have to do is get two seats together.”

  “On a plane,” he said.

  “Oh, that’s right. You don’t fly.”

  “I suppose it strikes you as terribly silly. Especially now.”

  “If it’s a phobic condition the rules of logic don’t apply. Mr. Havemeyer, I don’t want to talk you into anything, but I’ll tell you this. If you’re officially taken into custody and escorted to New York, they’ll make you get on a plane.”

  “But if I were to go with you—”

  “How long does it take on the train?”

  “Under twelve hours.”

  “No kidding.”

  “The Lake Shore Limited,” he said. “It leaves Cleveland at three in the morning and arrives at ten minutes of two in the afternoon.”

  “And that’s how you went to New York?”

  “It’s not that bad,” he said. “The seats recline. You can sleep. And there’s a dining car.”

  You can fly it in a little over an hour, but even if I left him in a holding cell in Cleveland, I wouldn’t be able to catch a flight back until sometime the next morning.

  “If you want,” I said, “I’ll take the train with you.”

  He nodded. “I suppose that would be best,” he said.

  23

  It was a long night.

  I left Havemeyer alone long enough to duck across the street to the car and bring Jason Griffin up to speed. He had plans for the evening but insisted it was no problem to cancel them, and that he’d be glad to take me and my prisoner to the train station. I told him he might as well join us inside the house, and he agreed that it would be more convenient than sitting in the car with the wide-mouthed jar his uncle had recommended.

  While he locked the car, I hurried back to the house myself, anxious about having left Havemeyer alone. I was afraid I might find him dead by his own hand, or on the phone with his lawyer. It was hard to say which of the two prospects was more troubling, but both fears proved groundless. I found him in the kitchen, rinsing out our teacups.

  I told him I’d invited my driver in to join us, and moments later there was a knock on the door and I opened it for Jason. I didn’t know what the three of us were going to talk about, but that settled itself when Havemeyer determined that Jason was a student at Western Reserve. That led to a conversation about the college’s football team, which turned easily enough into a spirited discussion of Cleveland’s pro team, the Browns, and their perfidious owner’s decision to pack the franchise off to Baltimore.

  “The nicest thing I can find to say about that man,” Havemeyer said, “is that he’s an utter son of a bitch.”

  That led me almost inevitably to an analysis of the character and probable ancestry of Walter O’Malley, and gave rise to a more theoretical discussion of just what a team was, and the extent to which athletes belonged to it, or it to its fans. This would have been interesting enough all by itself, but circumstance gave it a special spin. The room was thick with two conversations, the one we were having and the one we were choosing not to have. The former was about sport and its illusions, the latter about homicide and its consequences.

  Jason made a couple of phone calls to cancel his plans for the evening. I called Amtrak to book two Cleveland-to-New York seats on the Lake Shore Limited, then called Elaine in New York and got to hear my own voice on our answering machine; I left word that I’d be back in the city sometime the following afternoon. When I got back to the living room, Jason and Havemeyer were weighing prospects for dinner. Jason offered to go out for pizza, and Havemeyer said it was quicker and simpler to have it delivered. He made the phone call himself, and the kid from Domino’s was there well within the statutory twenty-minute time limit. Havemeyer drank a bottle of Amstel Light with his pizza, while Jason and I had Cokes. I had the sense that Jason would have preferred a beer, and wondered what had kept him from taking one. Did he feel it was inappropriate to drink on duty? Or had his uncle described me as a sober alcoholic, leading him to assume it was bad form to drink in front of me?

  After we’d eaten, Havemeyer remembered that he ought to pack for the trip. I went into the bedroom with him and leaned against the wall while he took his time selecting articles of clothing and arranging them in his suitcase. When he was done he closed it and hefted it and made a face. He said he’d been meaning to get one of those suitcases on wheels you saw everybody using these days, but he hadn’t gotten around to it.

  “But I don’t suppose I’ll be making many more trips,” he said.

  I asked if the suitcase was heavy.

  “It’s not too bad,” he said. “I’ve got more clothes in here than the last time I went, but I don’t have the gun, and that was heavier than you’d think. That reminds me. What should I do about the gun?”

  “You still have it?”

  “I suppose that’s foolish, isn’t it? I was going to get rid of it. Drop it down a sewer, or heave it into the lake. But I kept it. I thought I might, oh, need it.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In the attic. Do you want me to get it? Or should I just leave it where it is?”

  I considered the question. There was a time when the answer would have been obvious, but a lot of court decisions had changed the rules regarding admissibility of evidence. Would it be better to leave the gun where it was for the time being, so that it could be found in due course after a proper warrant had been obtained?

  Probably, I decided, but I weighed that against the possibility that someone would break into the house and steal the gun in the meantime, and concluded it was better to have the weapon in my possession. Even if some judge disallowed it, along with his taped confession and a few other things, it seemed to me there
ought to be more than enough hard evidence to make a case against him.

  He climbed up into the attic crawl space and came down holding the gun wrapped in a red-and-white-checkered cloth. The dish towel, I guess it mut have been. He presented it to me like that, and I could smell the gun without unwrapping it. He hadn’t cleaned it since firing it, and it still smelled of the gunshots that had killed Byron Leopold.

  I went out to Jason’s car and locked it in my suitcase.

  We killed time playing hearts, and Havemeyer made another pot of tea, and Jason drove us to the station early, getting us there almost an hour before train time. I gave him some money, and he told me he thought he ought to be paying me for the experience. I told him not to be silly and he put the money in his pocket.

  Havemeyer insisted on buying our train tickets, even as he had insisted on paying for the pizza. “Two one-way tickets,” he announced. “You won’t be coming back to Cleveland. And neither will I.”

  The train was crowded and we couldn’t get two seats together. I took the conductor aside and told him I was a private detective escorting a material witness back to New York. He got a fellow to switch his seat, and I gave Havemeyer the window and sat down next to him.

  We talked for an hour or so. He wanted to know what to expect, and I told him as much as I knew. I told him he would want an attorney, even if all he was going to do was cooperate with the police and plead guilty. He said there was a man in Cleveland he’d used in the past, but the man didn’t take criminal cases, and anyway he was in Cleveland. “But I suppose he could recommend someone,” he said. I said that was very likely true, and that I could recommend several New York lawyers.

  He said he supposed he’d be spending the rest of his life in prison. I said that wasn’t necessarily true, that he could very likely plead to a lesser charge than murder two, that a lawyer could argue that the strain of his wife’s death constituted some sort of mitigating circumstances, and that his previously unblemished record (not even a traffic violation, aside from a couple of parking tickets) would certainly work to his advantage.

  “You’ll have to go to prison,” I said, “but it’ll probably be minimum-security, and the bulk of the other cons will be white-collar criminals, not child molesters and strong-arm thugs. I’m not saying you’ll like it, but it won’t be some hellhole out of The Shawshank Redemption. And I’d be surprised if you wound up serving more than five years.”

  “That doesn’t seem very long,” he said, “for killing an innocent man.”

  It would seem longer once he was doing it, I thought. And if it still didn’t seem long enough, he could always reenlist.

  * * *

  Some forty-five minutes out of Cleveland Havemeyer took a Valium, which was evidently his custom on long train trips. He offered me one but I passed. I would have liked one, but then I would have liked a pint of Early Times, as far as that goes. Havemeyer swallowed his Valium and put his seat back and closed his eyes, and that was the last I heard from him for the next five or six hours.

  I’d picked up a paperback at Newark before they called my flight, and I’d never even opened it en route to Cleveland. I got it from my bag now and read for a while, pausing now and then to put the book down on my lap and look off into the distance, thinking long thoughts. Train travel lends itself to that sort of thing.

  Sometime before dawn I closed my eyes, and when I opened them it was light outside and we were pulling into Rochester. I slipped off to the diner for a cup of coffee. Havemeyer was still sleeping when I got back.

  He woke up not long after that and we got some breakfast and returned to our seats. He stayed awake the rest of the way but still seemed faintly tranquilized, not talking much. He read the Amtrak magazine, and when he’d exhausted its possibilities I gave him the paperback I’d given up on.

  Around noon, shortly after we left Albany, I made a phone call. You could do that, they had a phone you could use, just running your credit card through a slot. I called the Sixth Precinct and managed to get Harris Conley. I told him I was on my way back from Cleveland with a suspect in the killing of Byron Leopold. I didn’t even have to remind him who Byron Leopold was, but then it’s a name that sticks in your mind.

  He said, “What did you do, arrest him? I’m not sure of the legal status of that.”

  “He’s with me voluntarily,” I said. “I’ve got a full confession on tape. I’m not sure of the legal status of that, either, but I’ve got it, along with the gun he used.”

  “That’s pretty amazing,” he said. He offered to have the train met by a contingent of cops, but I didn’t think that was necessary. Havemeyer was coming in voluntarily, and I thought he’d be more comfortable surrendering at the precinct. Besides, I’d promised to keep him out of handcuffs as long as possible.

  I wanted to second-guess myself when we got to Grand Central. There was a light rain falling and it had the usual effect of making the taxis disappear. But before too long one pulled up to discharge a passenger and we grabbed it and headed downtown.

  I didn’t have to stick around too long at the Sixth. I turned over the gun (which, unwrapped, turned out to be a .38 revolver, with live rounds in three of its six chambers) to Conley, along with the tape of Havemeyer’s confession. I answered a battery of questions, then dictated a statement.

  “I’m glad I was around when you called,” Conley told me, “and lucky I even remembered what you were talking about. I don’t suppose I have to tell you we weren’t exactly pushing this one.”

  “That’s no surprise.”

  “Triage,” he said. “You put in your time on the ones you stand a chance of breaking. And the ones where there’s a lot of heat from up top.”

  “That’s how it’s always been.”

  “And always will be, would be my guess. Point is, this wasn’t a front-burner case, not after the first seventy-two hours. And the whole city’s so nuts today, especially the department, it’s a wonder I remember my own name, let alone yours and Byron Leopold’s.”

  “Why is the city so nuts?”

  “You don’t know? Where the hell did you spend the past twelve hours?”

  “On a train.”

  “Oh, right. But even so, didn’t you see a newspaper? Listen to the radio? You came through Grand Central, you must have walked past a newsstand.”

  “I had luggage to carry and a confessed murderer to escort,” I reminded him. “I didn’t have time to care what was happening in Bosnia.”

  “Forget Bosnia. Bosnia didn’t make the headlines today. It was all Will this morning.”

  “Will?”

  He nodded. “Either it’s Number One back from the dead or Number Two’s more dangerous than anybody thought. You know the theater critic?”

  “Regis Kilbourne.”

  “That’s the one,” he said. “Will got him last night.”

  24

  You could almost say he’d been asking for it.

  I’d somehow missed the column he wrote. It had appeared toward the end of the previous week, not in the Arts section where his reviews always ran, but on the Times’s oped page. I’ve since had a look at that issue of the paper, and it seems to me I read Safire’s column that day, an inside-the-mind-of piece on a pair of presidential hopefuls. So I very likely took a look at what Regis Kilbourne had to say, and probably stopped reading before I got to the payoff.

  That would have been natural enough, because his brief essay started off as a spirited defense of freedom of the press. He’d said the same things before, in response to having been given a spot on Will’s list, going on about a critic’s profound responsibilities to his conscience and his public. I might very well have decided I didn’t have to listen to all that again.

  He’d used up the greater portion of his 850 words before he got to the point. The rest of his column was given over to a review of a dramatic production, but this particular show was staged neither on nor off Broadway but all over town. He reviewed Will, and he gave him a bad notice.<
br />
  “It is customary but by no means imperative,” he wrote, “to revisit a long-running show after a substantive change in the cast. When the original production was essentially a star vehicle, such revisits are almost always disappointing. And this is certainly true in the case of what, were it mounted as a Broadway musical, some producer would surely entitle Will! complete down to the nowobligatory exclamation point.

  “In its first incarnation, Will! was unquestionably good theater. With the late Adrian Whitfield quietly elegant in the title role, the production had a powerful grip on its audience of eight million New Yorkers. But what succeeded initially as brilliant tragedy (albeit not unleavened by its comic moments) has come back to us as farce, and a farce with all the zest and sparkle of a fallen soufflé.