The Devil Knows You're Dead: A MATTHEW SCUDDER CRIME NOVEL

by Lawrence Block

  She was pretty sure all anybody ever told her was MultiCircle Productions, whatever that was. See, anybody could buy a condo. With a co-op you had to go before the tenants’ board and satisfy them that you were a decent person and you wouldn’t be giving loud parties or being an unwelcome presence in the building. They could turn you down for any reason at all, or for no reason. They could discriminate in ways that were illegal for either a landlord or a private seller. Why, there was one East Side co-op that turned down Richard Nixon, for heaven’s sake!

  Condos were different. If you had a pulse and your check was good, you could buy a condo, and the other tenants couldn’t keep you out. And once you had it you could sublet it, which a lot of co-ops didn’t allow. So the luxury condos were very popular with foreigners who wanted a safe investment in the United States. And buyers of that sort were in turn quite popular with people selling condos, because they didn’t expect you to finance their purchase, nor did they want a clause in the sales contract making the sale contingent upon their getting a mortgage. They generally wrote out a check and paid the full sum in cash.

  Which was what this buyer had done. She remembered the closing, because nobody showed up for it, not even MultiCircle’s lawyer. He sent the check by messenger.

  Come to think of it, had she ever met the lawyer? They’d spoken on the phone several times, and she had this mental picture of him that looked like the lieutenant on Miami Vice, but had she ever seen him?

  She didn’t remember the selling price, but she could ballpark it. All the apartments on a line varied in price—the higher you went, the more you had to pay—and that floor on that line would be, let’s see, three-twenty? Well, give or take ten or fifteen thousand dollars, but that was close, anyway.

  Probably a third of that was the view, and wasn’t it spectacular? You didn’t mind sitting around by the hour waiting for prospects when you had that to look out at. She’d enjoyed living there, although she hadn’t been crazy about the neighborhood to begin with. But she liked it better as she got to know it more.

  “There’s a place right across the street,” she said, “that’s really super. Jimmy Armstrong’s? Looks like nothing much from the outside, but it’s nice and the food’s sensational. Serious chili, and the selection of beers on tap is outstanding. You ought to check it out.”

  I assured her I would.

  I called Elaine. “I had a hunch you’d be home,” I said.

  “I was out earlier, though. I went to the gym. Of course there were no cabs to be had, but I put on that plastic shmatte and I carried an umbrella. And I still got soaked going and coming, but it didn’t kill me. You’re home, I take it?”

  “And staying put.”

  “Good, because it doesn’t look as though it’s going to quit soon. If I lived on a lower floor I’d start building an ark.”

  I told her what I’d learned about MultiCircle. “Foreign money,” I said, “and no easy way to tell where it came from. One principal or a whole slew of them, and no way to tell that, either. A condo’s an attractive investment, a good hedge against inflation and a way to shift some money here to guard against political or economic instability at home.”

  “Wherever home is.”

  “Although that probably wouldn’t have been a big consideration, not if they were already incorporated in the Caymans and could stow the money in a dollar account there. Still, it’s a good investment and you can rent it out. There’s usually a minimum rental period, it’s not like a hotel, although some resort condos have the minimum down to three days. In New York it’s generally a month, sometimes longer.”

  “And in the Holtzmanns’ building?”

  “A month, but it didn’t matter to MultiCircle because they never had a tenant in there. Glenn and his wife”—interesting how I avoided saying her name—“were the first people to spend a night there.”

  “And they’d been married all of a week at the time? I bet they did a good job of christening it.”

  “MultiCircle paid cash,” I said. “They sent over a check in full payment.”

  “So?”

  “So how did they lose it? I was thinking foreclosure, but how can you foreclose on a nonexistent mortgage? Sometimes a corporation has its assets seized to satisfy creditors, but this was some kind of shell in the Caymans. What kind of creditors would they have?”

  “Their lawyer could probably tell you.”

  “Could but wouldn’t. Assuming I knew who he was, which I don’t. She didn’t remember his name. It’s probably on a piece of paper somewhere, and I’ll try to find it, but even if I managed to find the guy I wouldn’t get anything out of him. MultiCircle. You know what that sounds like to me?”

  “Like going around in circles?”

  “Like wheels within wheels,” I said.

  “Does it even matter who they are, or why they lost the property? I mean, if you were investigating me, would you want to know who lived here before I did?”

  “This is different,” I said. “There’s something strange about MultiCircle Productions, and there’s something strange about US Asset Reduction Corp., and God knows there’s something strange about Holtzmann. All that strangeness, you’ve got to assume a connection.”

  “I guess.”

  “I have a feeling it’s right in front of me,” I said. “But I just can’t see it yet.”

  I called Joe Durkin. “I actually tried you an hour ago,” he said. “Two, three times. Your line was busy.”

  “I’ve been on it all morning.”

  “Well, just to set your mind at rest, Gunther Bauer was not the hired agent for an international conspiracy. I was lucky, guy I talked to was polite as can be. I could tell he wanted to laugh in my face, but he managed to control himself. Gunther’s beef with George was personal and deeply felt, according to him. He was nobody’s guided missile. Unless God told him to do it, which is possible, but he wasn’t taking orders from any intermediary.”

  “I didn’t really have much faith in that theory anyway.”

  “No, but you thought it was worth checking, and you’re an overly stubborn son of a bitch but you’re not stupid.”

  “Thanks.”

  “The idea was somebody put him up to it to keep George from talking, right?”

  “Well, George wasn’t much of a talker. But to close out the case.”

  “It was already closed out, though I’ll grant you this slams the door. But if you’re thinking about somebody pulling strings inside Rikers—”

  “Which has been known to happen.”

  “Oh, no question, but it’s not something your average citizen can do. You can’t take a course at the Learning Annex, ‘How to Arrange a Homicide Behind Prison Walls.’ Might be a popular course, but they haven’t offered it yet.”

  “No.”

  “So you’re thinking in terms of somebody with reach. You must’ve found something indicates Holtzmann’s dirty.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Bought an apartment from a foreigner that nobody was living in.”

  “Well, Jesus, that’s just as suspicious as hell, isn’t it?”

  “Why would a foreigner buy an apartment and not live in it or rent it out? You got any idea?”

  “I don’t know, Matt. Why would a foreigner do anything? Why would a foreigner join the police force?”

  “Huh?”

  “You didn’t read about that? There’s a proposal to do away with the citizenship requirement on the NYPD.”

  “Seriously? Why would they want to do that?”

  “To make the department more representative of the population at large. Which is a worthwhile goal, don’t misunderstand me, but that’s a hell of a way to do it. You should hear the PBA delegate on the subject.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “ ‘Go all the way,’ he says. ‘Why should they even need green cards? Take illegal aliens, take wetbacks. Hang a fucking sign on the Rio Grande, You too can be a police officer.
’ He was in rare form.”

  “Well, it’s an unusual idea.”

  “It’s a terrible idea,” he said, “and it won’t do what they want it to, because what you’ll wind up with is half the male population of Woodside and Fordham Road, donkeys fresh off the Aer Lingus flight. Remember when they did away with the height requirement? That was supposed to get more Hispanics on the force.”

  “Did it work?”

  “No,” he said. “Of course not. All it brought in was a lot of short Italians.”

  I called Holtzmann’s previous landlord, owner of the building in Yorkville where he’d been living when he met Lisa. When I was downtown I’d found the address in an old city directory and got the landlord’s name and address from city real estate records. That’s not always easy, a lot of landlords hide behind corporate shells as hard to penetrate as MultiCircle, but not this fellow. He owned the building, lived with his wife in one of its sixteen units, and served as its superintendent himself.

  And he remembered Glenn Holtzmann, who had evidently lived there ever since he moved back to the city from White Plains. The landlord, a Mr. Dozoretz, had only good things to say about Holtzmann, who had paid his rent on time, made no unreasonable demands, and caused no problems with other tenants. He’d been sorry to lose him as a tenant, but not surprised; the fourth-floor studio was a tight fit for one person, and far too small for two. A great shock, though, what had happened to Mr. Holtzmann. A tragedy.

  SOMETIME after noon I called down to the deli and asked them to send up some coffee and a couple of sandwiches. Fifteen minutes later I was so lost in thought that the knock on my door came as a surprise. I ate my lunch dutifully, without really tasting it, and got back on the phone.

  I called New York Law School and spoke to several different people before I managed to confirm the dates of Holtzmann’s attendance there. No one I talked with remembered him, but his records indicated an unremarkable student. They had the name of the White Plains firm where Holtzmann had gone to work after graduation, and his address there, the Grandview Apartments on Hutchison Boulevard, but that was as recent as their information got; he hadn’t bothered to keep them up to date.

  The Westchester Information operator had no listing for the law firm Kane, Breslow, Jespesson & Reade, but under Attorneys she had a Michael Jespesson listed. I called his office but he was out to lunch. I thought, in this weather? Why couldn’t he order in from a deli and eat at his desk?

  I might have tried the Grandview Apartments but I couldn’t imagine what I might ask whoever took my call. Even so, it was a struggle to keep from calling them. There is an acronym in the New York Police Department, or at least there used to be. They taught it to new recruits at the Academy, and you heard it a lot in all the detective squad rooms. GOYAKOD, they said. It stood for Get Off Your Ass and Knock On Doors.

  You hear it said that that’s how most cases are closed, and that’s not even close to true. Most cases close themselves. The wife calls 911 and announces she shot her husband, the holdup man runs out of the convenience store and into the arms of an off-duty patrolman, the ex-boyfriend has a knife under his mattress with the girl’s blood still on it. And of the cases that require solution, a majority are closed through information received. If a workman is as good as his tools, a detective is no better than his snitches.

  Now and then, though, a case won’t solve itself and no one will be obliging enough to drop a dime on the bad guy. (Or on the good guy; snitches lie, too, like everybody else.) Sometimes it takes actual police work to clear a file, and that’s when GOYAKOD comes into play.

  It’s what I was doing now. I was employing a foul-weather version of GOYAKOD. I was sitting on my ass and using the phone, waging the same kind of war of attrition on the blank wall of Glenn Holtzmann’s death. The only thing wrong with it is that sometimes it becomes pointless and mechanical. You’re at a dead end, but rather than admit it and try to figure out where you took a wrong turn, you keep on knocking on doors, grateful that there is an endless supply of doors to knock on, grateful that you can keep busy and tell yourself you’re doing something useful.

  So I didn’t call the Grandview. But I didn’t throw their number away, either. I kept it handy, in case I ran out of doors.

  WHEN I reached Michael Jespesson, he was shocked to learn that Glenn Holtzmann was dead. He had been aware of the murder but had paid very little attention to it; it was, after all, a street crime committed on streets well removed from his own. And it had been several years since Holtzmann had been associated with his late firm. Somehow the victim’s name hadn’t registered.

  “Of course I remember him,” he said. “We were a small firm. Just a handful of associates plus a couple of paralegals. Holtzmann was a pleasant fellow. He was a few years older than the standard law-school graduate, but only a few years. The first impression he made was that of a real self-starter, but he turned out to be less ambitious than I’d guessed. He did his work, but he wasn’t going to set the world on fire.”

  That echoed what Eleanor Yount had told me. She’d initially seen him as a likely successor, then realized he lacked the drive. But somehow he’d driven himself all the way to the twenty-eighth floor. Add up the cash and the apartment and he’d left an estate well in excess of half a million dollars. Imagine what he could have accomplished if he’d had a little ambition.

  “Maybe he was just in the wrong place,” Jespesson said. “I wasn’t surprised when he left. I never thought he’d stay. He was single, he hadn’t grown up in the area, so what was he doing in White Plains? Not that he was a born New Yorker. He was from somewhere in the Midwest, wasn’t he?”

  “Pennsylvania.”

  “Well, that’s not the Midwest. But he wasn’t from Philadelphia. He was from somewhere out in the sticks, if I remember correctly.”

  “I think Altoona.”

  “Altoona. New York is full of people from Altoona. White Plains isn’t. So I wasn’t surprised when he left us, and if he hadn’t left then he’d have done so a few months later.”

  “Why?”

  “The firm broke up. Sorry, I took it for granted that you knew that, but there’s no reason why you should. Nothing to do with Holtzmann, anyway, and I don’t think he could have read the handwriting on the wall. I don’t think there was any handwriting on the wall. I certainly didn’t see it.”

  I asked if there was anyone else I should talk to.

  “I think I knew him as well as anyone,” he said. “But how do you come to be investigating? I thought you had a man in custody.”

  “Routine follow-up,” I said.

  “But you do have the man responsible? A homeless derelict, if I remember correctly.” He snorted. “I was going to say he should have stayed in White Plains, but we have our share of street crime here, I’m sorry to say. My wife and I live in a gated community. If you wanted to visit us I would have to leave your name with the guard. Can you imagine? A gated community. Like a stockade, or a medieval walled city.”

  “I understand they have them all over the country.”

  “Gated communities? Oh yes, they’re quite the rage. But not in Altoona, I shouldn’t think.” Another snort. “Maybe he should have stayed in Altoona.”

  WHY didn’t he?

  Why had he come to New York? He’d gone to college not far from home, returned home after graduation, and very likely fallen into the job selling insurance at his uncle’s agency. Then when he came into a few dollars he moved to New York and went to law school.

  Why? Didn’t Penn State have a law school? It would have been cheaper than moving to New York, and would have been a logical preface to taking the Pennsylvania bar exam and practicing law not far from home. He could even have gone on selling insurance in his free time; he wouldn’t have been the first person to work his way through law school in that fashion.

  But instead he’d had a clean break. Hadn’t looked back, as far as I could tell. Hadn’t taken his bride back home, hadn’t introduced her to his
family.

  What had he left behind? And what had he taken with him when he made the move? How much had his parents left him?

  Or had they left him anything at all?

  START with the uncle. I called Eleanor Yount to see if the firm’s records had him listed by name. She had an assistant pull Glenn’s résumé and reported that he had not been specific in listing his job experience prior to law school. Like his after-school jobs and summer employment, his career in insurance had been merely summarized. Sales and administrative work at uncle’s insurance office, Altoona, PA, he’d written, along with the dates.

  I got through to the Information operator in Altoona and had her check the Yellow Pages listings for an insurance agent named Holtzmann. There were a lot of Holtzmanns in the region, she told me, most but not all of them spelling it with two N’s, but none of them seemed to be in the insurance business.

  Of course your uncle doesn’t necessarily have the same last name as you. And there was a fair chance the uncle had died, or retired to Florida, or sold the business and bought a Burger King franchise.

  Still, how big was Altoona? And how many insurance agents could it have, and wouldn’t they tend to know each other?

  I asked the operator for the names and numbers of the two insurance agencies with the largest Yellow Pages ads. She seemed to think that was an amusing request, but she gave me what I wanted. I called them both, in each case managing to get through to someone who’d been there a while. I explained that I was trying to contact a man who had been in the insurance business in Altoona and who may have been named Holtzmann, but who in any event had employed his nephew, whose name was in fact Holtzmann, Glenn Holtzmann.

  No luck.

  I called Information again and got the names of half a dozen of the two-N Holtzmanns. I took them in order. The first two didn’t answer. The third was a woman with a voice like Ethel Merman’s who assured me that she knew all the Holtzmanns in town, that they were all related, and that there was no one in the family named Glenn. Nothing wrong with the name, but no Holtzmann had ever used it, and she would know if they had.