“Because it leads straight to the dead man in Brooklyn. You want me to take it out and drop it down a storm drain?”
“Not until I find a replacement for it. I thought about leaving it at the scene and taking his gun, but what do I want with a dinky little .22?”
“Mah man wants a man’s gun,” she drawled. “I’ll tell you one thing you can get rid of right now, and that’s the shirt you’re wearing. It’s got bullet holes in it. Well, not holes, because the bullets didn’t go through, but bullet marks. How about the jacket? No, he missed that, but it’s got bloodstains, and so do your slacks. Why don’t you take a shower while I run all your clothes through the washing machine? Or is it a waste of time? I can get the stains out, but are there still traces that show up in a test?”
“There may be,” I said, “but if the stains are invisible to the naked eye I’d say that’s enough. If we get to the point where they do spectroscopic tests on everything in my closet, it won’t matter what they find. TJ left some blood on the floor at Tapscott Street, and they can tie him to it with a DNA match, so I’m not going to worry about blood traces that nobody can see.”
I took a shower, then put on clean clothes and had a look at TJ. He was sleeping soundly and his color looked better. I put a hand on his forehead. It felt warm, but not dangerously so.
In the living room, Elaine told me I shouldn’t have bothered getting dressed. “Because you have to sleep,” she said. “You can catch a few hours on the couch. I’ll sit up with him, and then you can take over when the stores are open, and I’ll go buy beets and carrots. I almost fell over when Jerry started telling me about beet juice.” She took a moment, then said, “He performed one of my abortions, but before that he was a client.”
“I wasn’t going to ask.”
“I know, but why should you have to wonder? Speaking of having to wonder, do you think he’s dead? The man in Brooklyn?”
“He was well on his way when I left. I’d say he’s probably dead by now.”
“Unless someone phoned for an ambulance.”
“That seems unlikely. Even if they did, my guess is he’d be dead at the scene or DOA at the hospital.”
“Does it bother you?”
“That he’s dead?”
“And that you didn’t try to save him.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. He killed Jim, you know.”
“I know.”
“You’d think that would have filled me with rage when I stood there in front of him, but it didn’t. He was just a problem to solve. He had some information I wanted. Or at least I thought he did at the time. It turned out he didn’t know anything. He identified one sketch and got my hopes up, but then I showed him one Ray and I did as an exercise, someone completely out of the frame, and he ID’d him, too. I could have shown him a picture of the Dalai Lama and he’d have sworn that was the guy who set me up.”
“He just wanted to get to the hospital.”
“That’s it. But the point is I didn’t walk in with vengeance in mind. I fully intended to stiff him on the two grand, but I wasn’t planning to shoot him. If he hadn’t started firing, my gun would never have left the holster.”
“But he did.”
“But he did, and I shot the son of a bitch, and then he expected me to get him patched up. Well, the hell with that. I don’t think I could have if I’d wanted to, but why even make the effort? I hadn’t been willing to kill him, but I was willing to let him die.”
“He had it coming.”
“You could probably say that about most people. Still, the guy’s a poster child for the death penalty. He struck me as a pretty pure sociopath. He’d kill anybody, just so you paid him. God knows how many people he killed in his life, and Jim wouldn’t have been the last. He wouldn’t even have been the last this week if I hadn’t been wearing the vest.”
“I was thinking that,” she said, “but I decided I’m not going to allow myself any thoughts that start with if. There are too many of them and they’re too upsetting. You’re alive, thank God, and TJ’s alive. That’s enough for now.”
I got a few hours on the couch. They were fitful, with a lot of dreams that dispersed like smoke when I opened my eyes. TJ was alone in the bedroom, his features relaxed in sleep. For a moment he looked about twelve years old.
Elaine was in the kitchen watching the news. “Nothing about a dead man in Brownsville,” she said.
“There wouldn’t be. A black man dead of gunshot wounds in an abandoned building? Not the kind of item that makes a news director holler for a film crew.”
“They’ll investigate it, though.”
“The police? Of course they will. You get any kind of a homicide, you try to clear it. This one’s easy to read. Dead man on the floor, shot twice in the chest with a .38. Another gun nearby, a .22, recently fired, and several slugs from it there in the apartment.”
“Oh?”
“The two that the Kevlar vest stopped, plus one that missed both of us. They can dig it out of the wall if they want to take the trouble. Blood—the dead man’s, and another person’s, presumably the shooter.”
“But we know better.”
“And a blood trail, I’d have to assume, leading out the door and down the stairs. Scenario’s got to be that two men had an argument, probably over drugs or women—”
“Because what else do grown men argue about.”
“—and they shot each other, and the survivor decided not to stick around. It’s certainly the kind of case you try to clear, but you don’t knock yourself out. You wait until somebody says, ‘Listen, what for you want to hassle me about ten dime bags of product when I’m the man can give you the dude shot that Cayman dude over on Tapscott Street?’ And you make your deal and pick up your perp.”
“Cayman? Purvis was from the Cayman Islands?”
“Just a guess. He was wearing a Georgetown University sweatshirt.”
“So? That’s in DC.”
“Keep going.”
“Georgetown is the capital of the Caymans,” she said, after some thought. “So if that’s where you’re from, a Georgetown University sweatshirt would be a hip thing to wear.”
“Stands to reason.”
“Of course it’s also the capital of Guyana.”
“It is?”
“Uh-huh. So maybe he’s Guyanese.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Then again, maybe he stole the shirt.”
“I used to like the Caymans,” she said, “back when a suntan was considered sexy, instead of precancerous. He’s been sleeping pretty soundly. He woke up one time when I was taking his temperature and I got him to drink some water, and then he went right back to sleep. He’s running a slight fever, a little over a degree.”
“I think that’s to be expected.”
“Yes, I’d say so. One of us has to go buy beets and carrots.”
I said I’d go. The place she sent me was on Ninth Avenue near Forty-fourth. It was an oversized health food store with a big produce section and no end of herbs and vitamins. There was probably something on the shelves that would have him healed overnight without even a scar, but I didn’t have a clue what it was or where to look for it. I bought enough beets and carrots to fill two shopping bags and took a cab home.
She had the juicer set up by the time I got there, and I watched as she washed beets and carrots and cut them up and ran them through the thing. The result may have been half carrot but all you could see was the beet, dark and purplish as blood from a vein.
She went into the bedroom with a big glass of the stuff and I tagged along to see how much of a fight he put up. “This is beet juice,” she said, “mixed with carrot. The doctor said you have to drink it to replace the blood you lost.”
He looked at her. “Like a transfusion?”
“But without the needles and tubes.”
“Doc said so? Same one as was here before?” She said yes, and he took the glass from her and drank it off in two swallows. “It ain’t
bad,” he said, sounding surprised. “Kind of sweet. What you say it was? Beet and carrot?”
“That’s right. Could you drink some more?”
“I believe I could,” he said. “Got a powerful thirst.”
While she prepared it I helped him to the bathroom, then back to bed. He couldn’t believe how weak he was, or how much the few steps to the john and back exhausted him. “It’s just a flesh wound,” he said. “Ain’t that what they say? Then they up and runnin’ like nothin’ ever happened.”
“That’s in the movies.”
“Anyway,” he said, “they all flesh wounds, ’cause that’s what folks is made out of. Wha’d the doe give me, you happen to know? A. person could do okay sellin’ it on the street.”
“Don’t tell the doc,” I said. “He might try it.”
We nursed him through the day. Elaine napped on the couch and I took a turn watching him sleep and talking with him when he was awake. His fever rose during the afternoon, and when it hit 102° Elaine called Froelich. He said he’d be over in two hours, but to call him again if it reached 104° before then. But it broke, and when the doctor arrived and took his temperature it was normal.
Froelich changed the dressing, said the wound was healing nicely, and told TJ he should consider himself lucky. “If it had hit the artery,” he said, “you could have bled out. If it hit the bone, you could be laid up for a month.”
“If it missed me completely,” TJ said, “I could be out playin’ basketball.”
“You’re too short,” Froelich told him. “These days they’re all giants. Keep doing what you’ve been doing, and stay with the beet juice. Incidentally, it’ll color your urine.”
“Yeah, well, I found that out. Thought I was bleedin’ to death, Beth, and then it came to me where I seen that color before. I’d been drinkin’ it by the quart.”
He dozed off after the doctor left, and I wound up taking an unpremeditated nap of my own in front of the TV set. When I woke up Elaine reported that he was starting to complain a little, and she took it for a sign of recovery. “He says if he was in his own place, meaning across the street, he could check his e-mail and keep up with some message boards, whatever they are.”
“It’s a computer thing,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
We spent a quiet evening at home. TJ had an appetite, and finished a second portion of the lasagna. He also had the idea he could get to and from the bathroom on his own, and asked if Elaine still had the cane she’d used in the spring when she sprained her ankle. She found it and he took a couple of hesitant steps with it and saw it wasn’t going to work. His wound was too raw for him to put any weight at all on that leg.
The phone rang intermittently. We let the machine pick up, and half the time the caller rang off without leaving a message. Maybe it was some phone sales rep who wanted to talk us into switching long-distance carriers, or maybe it was someone reluctant to issue death threats to an answering machine. I didn’t waste a lot of time worrying about it.
Then right around midnight it rang, and after the recorded message and the tone there was a pause that seemed eternal, but was probably only five or six seconds. Then a voice I knew said, “Ah, ‘tis I. Are you there then?”
I picked up and talked to him, put down the receiver and found Elaine. “It’s Mick,” I said. “He’s in his car, driving around. He wants to come by and pick me up.”
“Did you tell him yes?”
“I haven’t told him anything yet.”
“TJ’s much better,” she said. “I can manage here. And it’s not over yet, is it? TJ was shot, and the man who shot Jim is dead, but it’s not over till it’s over. Isn’t that what they say?”
“That’s what they say. And no, it’s not over.”
“Then you’d better go,” she said.
I waited in the lobby and watched the street while the midnight-to-eight doorman shared his views on global warming. I can’t remember the thread of his argument, but he saw it as a direct result of the collapse of world communism.
Then Andy Buckley’s battered Caprice pulled up at the curb, and started rolling again as soon as I was inside it. The night was clear and cool and I caught a glimpse of the moon. It was gibbous, and just about the same shape as it had been the night we dug the grave. It had been waxing then and now it was on the wane.
“Andy was trying to reach you,” I remembered to tell him. “He wanted your number, but I let him think I didn’t have it.”
“When was this?”
“Yesterday, early evening. Have you talked to him since?”
“Yesterday and today as well. He had the Cadillac and wanted to trade cars.”
“So he said.”
“I told him he had the better of the deal, but he was afraid to park the thing for fear some harm would come to it. Least of my worries, I said, but he would have none of it. He put it back in the garage and now he’s driving some old wreck of his cousin’s.”
“That’s what he said he was going to do.”
We’d turned on Broadway and were heading downtown. “Now where’ll we go?” he wondered. “Just so we’re going somewhere and doing something. It’s the inactivity drives a man mad. Knowing the other side is up to something, whoever they are, and not knowing what, and doing not a thing about it. I sat up all last night with a bottle and a glass. I don’t mind drinking and I don’t mind drinking alone, but I wasn’t doing it for the pleasure of it. It was out of boredom, and that class of drinking is deadening to the soul.”
“I know what you mean.”
“You did some of the same in your day, did you? And lived to tell the tale. What luck have you had with the detecting? Are we any closer to knowing what we’re up against?”
“We know more than we did,” I said. “TJ found out a few things about the Vietnamese who shot up the bar, and we’ve got a line out for something on his partner.”
“The bomb thrower, that would be.”
“That’s right. And I’ve got a sketch of one of the two men who mugged me.”
“They were the ones mugged, by the time it was over.”
I let that go. “I’ve got a sketch,” I said, “but so far no one’s recognized it. There were a lot of things I might have done today, but I had to spend it at home taking care of TJ.”
“Why, for the love of God? Hasn’t he managed for years taking care of himself?”
“Oh, of course, we haven’t talked since then. How could you know?”
“How could I know what?”
“He was shot last night,” I said.
“Fucking Jesus,” he said, and hit the brake pedal. A car behind us braked hard, and the driver leaned on his horn. “Aaah, fuck yourself,” Mick told him, and demanded to know what had happened.
I told him the whole story. I broke it off when we got to McGinley & Caldecott, resumed the narration after we’d stowed the car in its parking space and made our way down the stairs and through the narrow aisle to the office. He poured himself a drink, and from a table-model refrigerator he produced a can of Perrier.
“They didn’t have bottles,” he said. “Only the cans. It should be all right, don’t you think?”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine. I’ve been known to drink tap water in a pinch, as far as that goes.”
“Nasty stuff,” he said. “You don’t know where it’s been. Get on with it, man. You left him for dead, the black bastard?”
“He was on his way out. He couldn’t have lasted long. It was black comedy, now that I think about it. The two of us stood there snarling ‘fuck you’ at each other. I can’t swear to it, but I think those were his last words.”
“I wouldn’t doubt they’re the last words of more than a few of us.”
I told him how TJ’d been shot, and how I got him home. “I put a gun to the cabdriver’s head,” I said, “and at the end of the ride he gave me his card and said to call him anytime, any hour of the day or night. I love New York.”
“There’s no
place can touch it for people.”
When I was finished he sat back in his chair and looked at the drink in his hand. “It must have gone hard when you turned to the boy and saw he’d been shot.”
“It was strange,” I said. “I’d just been shot twice myself and watched the bullets bounce off. And I’d shot back and my bullets didn’t bounce off, and I felt as though I was in charge of the world. Then I turned around and the bottom fell out, because while I’d been feeling like the master of the universe TJ’s blood was oozing out between his fingers, and I didn’t even know what was going on.”
“He’s a son to you, isn’t he?”
“Is he? I don’t know. I’ve already got sons, two of them. I wasn’t around much when they were growing up and I don’t see much of them now. Michael’s out in California and Andy’s in a different place every time I hear from him. I don’t know that I’ve installed TJ in their place, but I suppose he’s a sort of surrogate son. To Elaine, certainly. She mothers him, and he doesn’t seem to mind.”
“Why should he?”
“I don’t know that I act like a father to him. More like a crusty old uncle. Our relationship’s fairly ritualized. We joke around a lot, trade good-natured insults.”
“He loves you.”
“I suppose he does.”
“And you love him.”
“I suppose I do.”
“I never had a son. There was a time I got a girl in trouble and she went off and had the baby and put it up for adoption. I never heard if it was a boy or girl she had. I never cared.” He drank some whiskey. “I was young. What did I care about children? I wanted only to be left alone, and she went off and had the child and gave it away, and I heard no more about it. Which was as much as I cared to hear.”
“It was probably best for the child.”
“Oh, of course it was, and for the girl, and for myself as well. But every now and then I’ll find myself wondering. Not what might have been, but just wondering how the wee one turned out, and what sort of a life it had. Night thoughts, you know. Nobody has such thoughts in the light of day.”
Everybody Dies (Matthew Scudder) Page 20