Everybody Dies (Matthew Scudder)

by Lawrence Block

  “Trying to muscle in on his business, say.”

  “If anyone tried,” I said, “he’d have handed them the keys and wished them the best of luck. He squeezed a living out of the business, but it’s not something you get rich at, not something a gangster would want to take over.”

  “He do any work for them?”

  “For gangsters?”

  “For organized crime.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “It’s not as farfetched as it sounds, Matt. Criminal enterprises need the same kinds of goods and services as everybody else. They need letterhead and invoice forms and order blanks and, yes, business cards, and God knows what else. They own a lot of restaurants, so they’re always getting menus printed. No reason your friend couldn’t have done some of their printing. He wouldn’t necessarily have known who he was doing it for.”

  “I suppose it’s possible, but—”

  “It’s also possible they’d have asked him to print up something that wasn’t kosher. To duplicate government forms or somebody else’s purchase order blanks, something dubious like that. Maybe he went along, maybe he refused to go along, maybe he learned something along the way he was better off not knowing.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “What’s my point? My point is your friend Faber was the victim of what looks like a very professional hit. Those guys don’t shoot you just to keep in practice, if he was mobbed up in any kind of way, innocent or otherwise, you’re doing him no favor by keeping it a secret.”

  “Believe me, I’m not keeping any secrets.”

  “Can you think of anybody who’d want to see him dead?”

  “No.”

  “Anyone associated with him who might have paid to have him killed? Or anyone in the criminal world who might have had any kind of a grudge against him?”

  “Same answer.”

  “You arrived at the restaurant, you sat down at the table. What was his state of mind?”

  “Same as always. Calm, serene.”

  “Nothing bothering him, far as you could tell?”

  “Nothing that showed.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  “Anything and everything. Oh, you mean tonight?”

  “You were with him a minute or two before you went to the john. What did the two of you talk about?”

  I had to think. Ike and Mike, and then what?

  “Air conditioning,” I said.

  “Air conditioning?”

  “Air conditioning. They had theirs turned up so it was like an icebox in there, and we talked about that.”

  “Small talk, in other words.”

  “Too small to remember.”

  He took another tack, asked me if I’d got even the slightest glimpse of the shooter. I said what I’d been saying all along, that he was out the door and gone before I got back from the men’s room.

  “Now memory’s a funny thing,” he said. “Different things affect it. Your mind doesn’t want to let a piece of information in, it walls off a section of memory and won’t give you access to it.”

  “I could give you examples,” I said, “but that’s not what happened here. I was in the john when I heard the gunshots. I came running, I saw what had happened, and I chased out into the street hoping to get a look at him.”

  “And you never saw him.”

  “Never.”

  “So you don’t know if he was tall or short, fat or thin, black or white . . .”

  “I understand the witnesses said he was black.”

  “But you didn’t see him yourself.”

  “No.”

  “Or any black man in the restaurant.”

  “I didn’t pay much attention to the other customers, before or after the shooting. But the place was close to empty, and no, I don’t believe any of the other people in it were black.”

  “How about seeing a car pulling away, which you didn’t happen to take note of at the time?”

  “I’d have taken notice, because that’s what I was looking for, either a man on foot or a car puffing away.”

  “But you didn’t see either one.”

  “No.”

  “Or a cab or . . .”

  “No.”

  “And now you can’t come up with anyone with a reason to want James Faber dead.”

  I shook my head. “Not to say no such person exists,” I said, “but I can’t think of him, and I’ve got no reason to believe in his existence.”

  “Except for what happened tonight.”

  “Except for that.”

  “How about yourself, Matt?”

  I stared hard at him. “I must be missing something here,” I said levelly. “Are you really suggesting I set him up and ducked into the bathroom so some gunman I’d hired could come in and start blasting?”

  “Take it easy. . . .”

  “Because that’s so far off base I didn’t even know how to react to it.”

  “Easy,” he said. “Sit down, Matt. That’s not at all what I was getting at.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Not at all.”

  “That’s what it sounded like.”

  “Well, then, that’s my fault, because it’s not what I intended. I said ‘How about you?’ meaning is there anybody with a reason to have you hit.”

  “Oh.”

  “But you thought . . .”

  “I know what I thought. I’m sorry I went off like that.”

  “Well, you didn’t yell and scream, but your face got so dark I was afraid you were going to stroke out on me.”

  “I guess I’m more exhausted than I realized,” I said. “You’re saying the shooter could have got the wrong man?”

  “It’s always possible when the shooter doesn’t know the vic personally. Faber was what, a couple of years older?”

  “I’m taller by a few inches, and he was heavier, and thicker in the middle. I don’t think we looked much alike. Nobody ever called me Jim by mistake, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “You have any old enemies? From when you were on the job, say?”

  “That’s over twenty years ago, George. I’m off the job longer than I was ever on it.”

  “Well, what enemies have you made lately? You’re a PI. You working on any mob-related cases?”

  “No.”

  “Anything at all where you might have rubbed some hard case the wrong way?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “These days I work mostly for lawyers, checking out witnesses in personal injury and product liability lawsuits. I got a kid with a computer who does most of the heavy lifting for me.”

  “So you can’t think of a thing.”

  “No.”

  “Well, why don’t you run on home, then? Sleep on it, see what comes to you overnight. You know how it’s probably going to turn out, don’t you?”

  “How?”

  “Mistaken identity. I got a feeling what happened, and God knows it wouldn’t be the first time. Somebody saw your friend, mistook him for a mope who burned him in a drug deal, or dicked his wife, some damned fool thing. Or, and I’ve known of cases, there’s a contract out on some guy, some poor bastard looked nothing like your friend, and somebody spots him and drops a dime on him, and the guy who gets the call goes to the wrong fucking Chinese restaurant. He shows up at the Lucky Panda on Eighth instead of the Golden Rabbit on Seventh or the Hoo Flung Poo on Ninth.”

  “Maybe.”

  “The moon’s full, you know.”

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “Well, it’s overcast. You can’t see it, but it’s on the calendar. Tomorrow night, actually, but that’s close enough. That’s when weird shit happens.”

  I remembered the moon Wednesday night, the gibbous moon. And now it was full.

  “So go on home. There’s uniforms chasing down witnesses now, taking testimony from people who were on the street when it went down, or maybe looking out their windows, wondering is it ever gonna rain. You know how it works. We’ll check everything out
, we’ll see what our snitches have to tell us, and if we get lucky we’ll come up with the shitbag who pulled the trigger.” He worried his chin. “It won’t bring him back, your friend,” he said, “but it’s what we do. It’s all we can do.”

  I walked home on Ninth Avenue. I passed a few bars along the way, and each time I felt my heart race just the least little bit at the sight of them. It was an appropriate response. I couldn’t stand the movie that was playing in my head, and booze was a sure bet to drown the sound track and fade the image to black.

  Here’s looking at you, Jim. Down the hatch. Bombs away. Mud in your eye, fella.

  Thanks for helping me stay sober for the past sixteen years. Who’s to say I could have done it without you? And now I’ll honor your memory by forgetting everything you taught me

  No, I don’t think so.

  Jim stopped watching NYPD Blue when Sipowicz drank after his son’s death. What a jerk, he said. What a fucking asshole.

  He can’t help it, I said. He’s just a character, all he can do is what it says in the script.

  I’m talking about the writer, he said.

  So I wasn’t going to pick up a drink, but I couldn’t pretend the desire wasn’t there. My eyes took note of each gin joint, each winking neon beer sign. My mouth may have watered a little. But my feet kept on walking.

  I looked for the moon, the full moon, but couldn’t see it.

  Anxiety grabbed me as I walked into the lobby of our building, and in the elevator I had a sudden vision of what I was going to find on the fourteenth floor. The door kicked in, furniture overturned, pictures slashed.

  And worse . . .

  The door was shut and locked. I rang the bell before I used my key, and Elaine was on the other side of the door when I got it open. She started to say something and stopped when she got a look at my face.

  “Jim’s dead,” I said. “I got him killed.”

  “I suppose I was in shock,” I said, “and I suppose I still am, to some extent. But no matter how thick the fog got, I never lost sight of my commitment to the obstruction of justice.”

  “Because you didn’t tell them everything?”

  “Because I deliberately misled them and withheld information I knew to be pertinent. I sat there parrying questions about Jim’s printing business when it was crystal clear to me why he was killed. The shooter made a mistake, all right, and it had nothing to do with phases of the moon. He was supposed to shoot a middle-aged guy in khakis and a windbreaker and a red polo shirt, and that’s what he did.”

  “Why couldn’t you tell them that?”

  “Because it would tie me to Mick Ballou and drop both of us in the middle of a full-scale homicide investigation. They’d want to know where all the bodies were buried, and that’s not a figure of speech. I’d be on the spot for failing to report the murders of Kenny and McCartney, and for in fact actively covering up their deaths. We broke a lot of laws the night we dug up Mick’s back yard.”

  “You’d lose your license.”

  “That’s the least of it. I could face criminal charges.”

  “I didn’t think of that.”

  “It seems to me I committed a couple of felonies,” I said, “and we crossed a state line with a trunkful of corpses, so there might be a federal charge involved as well. Even so, I might have taken my chances if I’d thought leveling with Wister would do any good.”

  “It won’t bring Jim back.”

  “No, but neither will anything else. It won’t catch his killer, either. Jim was an innocent bystander who walked into the middle of a gang war.”

  “Is that what it is? Gang warfare?”

  “That’s what it looks like. That’s what it looked like in the storage room in Jersey. If I’d had any sense I’d have bowed out then and there.”

  “I wish you would stop blaming yourself.”

  I let that pass. She’d said it more than once, and I still didn’t have a response to it. I said, “There are things the cops are good at, but solving gang-related homicides isn’t one of them. Even when they get lucky and learn who gave the order and who pulled the trigger, they can’t put together a case that’ll hold up in court.”

  “I guess they’re helpless against organized crime.”

  “Not exactly helpless. The RICO laws gave them broad powers, and in the past few years they’ve made some major cases and put away a lot of mob guys. They’ll get somebody to wear a wire, they’ll get somebody else to roll over on his boss, and next thing you know there’s one more guy in the federal joint at Marion, complaining that nobody there can make a decent marinara sauce. That works, and so do some of the local stings they run, like renting a storefront and receiving stolen goods, then locking up all the people who walked in the door with minks and TV sets.”

  “They get a lot of press when they do that.”

  “And I’m sure that’s one of the things they like about it. But it’s good police work just the same. Some of my contemporaries might disagree, but I think the NYPD’s better than when I was a part of it. They’re doing a superior job. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to come up with the guy who shot Jim.”

  “Still,” she said, “it bothers you that you held out on them.”

  “I think it would bother me more if I hadn’t. I’d have had fun explaining a lot of things, including the gun I was carrying.”

  “I was wondering about that. Nobody spotted it?”

  “I wasn’t a suspect and nobody had any reason to pat me down. I kept my windbreaker zipped up. It was chilly in the restaurant and on the street, but it was warm and stuffy in the squad room at Midtown North. I kept waiting for Wister to tell me to take off my jacket and get comfortable, but he never did.”

  “But if you’d told them you were the intended victim . . .”

  “Then they’d have asked me a few hundred questions, and everything would have had to come out, including the gun. ‘This? Well, you’ve already got the murder weapon, and anyway this is a .38, not a .22, and you can see it hasn’t been fired recently. I haven’t registered it yet because I just acquired it the other day from this guy who was pounding on my stomach.’”

  “How is your stomach, by the way?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “But it must be empty. You didn’t get dinner, you haven’t had anything since lunch.”

  “I don’t want anything.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Why the look?”

  “I was just thinking what Jim would say about letting yourself get too hungry.”

  “He’d say not to,” I said. “But I’m not hungry. Right now the thought of food turns my stomach.”

  “If you change your mind . . .”

  “I’ll let you know. Say, is there any coffee? I could stand a cup of coffee.”

  “What bothers me,” I said, “is that I held out without thinking twice. It was second nature.”

  We were at the kitchen table, with coffee for me and herbal tea for her. I had taken off the windbreaker, and the gun and holster. I’d taken off the polo shirt, shucked the Kevlar vest, and put the shirt back on again. The vest was draped over the back of a chair now, and the gun and holster were on the kitchen counter.

  I said, “I was a cop for a lot of years, and then for a long time I worked private without a license. I finally got one because it was an inconvenience not to have it, and it was costing me work. But there was another reason. I had it in the back of my mind that it would make me respectable.”

  “You never said that before.”

  “No.”

  “When you and I got married,” she said, “I told you something. Do you remember what it was?”

  “I was just thinking about it the other day. You said it didn’t have to change anything.”

  “Because we were already committed to each other, so how could a piece of paper change things? And you were already respectable.”

  “Maybe that’s the wrong word. Maybe I was looking for the license to make m
e more legitimate, more a part of the establishment.”

  “And did it?”

  “That’s the thing,” I said. “It didn’t. You know, I lost most of my illusions about the system during my years as a cop. They say working in a meat-packing plant ruins your appetite for sausage, and something similar happens on the job. You’re essentially taught to break the rules. I learned to cut corners, learned to stand up in court and lie under oath. I also took bribes and robbed the dead, but that was something else, that was more about the erosion of my own morals. It may have been job-related, but it didn’t arise directly out of how I’d learned to regard the system.

  “Then I put in my papers and quit,” I went on, “and you know about that. It was abrupt, one day I was a cop and one day I wasn’t, but in another sense it was a more gradual process. I was still a cop at heart. All I lacked was a badge and a paycheck. I still saw the world the same way. I knew guys working in houses all over the five boroughs, and I pulled strings and called in favors when I was working my own cases. Or I bought favors, paying cops for information as if they were my snitches.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, the years went by,” I said, “and everybody I knew died or retired. Joe Durkin’s my only real friend on the job, and I never even knew him back then. I’d been working private for years before he and I got acquainted. And now he’s always talking about retiring himself, and one of these days he’ll do it.”

  “Suppose it had been him instead of Wister asking you questions tonight.”

  “Would I have told the same lies? Probably. I don’t see what else I could have done. I might have been a little less comfortable lying to Joe, and he might have sensed I was holding out. As far as that goes, Wister may have sensed as much himself.”

  “It’s complicated, isn’t it?”

  “Very. It’s hard to know what I am. ‘My name is Matt and I’m an alcoholic.’ I’ve said that so many times I’m beginning to believe it, but beyond that point it gets a little fuzzy. For years I’ve been cutting corners and making my own rules. I learned how on the job and I never learned how not to. I’ve deliberately subverted the law, and now and then I’ve taken it into my own hands. I’ve played judge and jury. Sometimes I guess I’ve played God.”