Sinner Man
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Contents
Cover
Raves for the Work of Lawrence Block!
Some Other Hard Case Crime Books you will Enjoy
Title Page
Copyright
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Nat Crowley, We Hardly Knew Ye
Want More Block?
More Sexy Suspense From the Grand Master!
Raves For the Work of
LAWRENCE BLOCK!
“Wonderful.”
—USA Today
“Addictive.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Reads like it’s been jolted by factory-fresh defibrillator pads.”
—Time
“A first-rate writer.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Block grabs you…and never lets go.”
—Elmore Leonard
“[The] one writer of mystery and detective fiction who comes close to replacing the irreplaceable John D. MacDonald.”
—Stephen King
“The suspense mounts and mounts and mounts…very superior.”
—James M. Cain
“The narrative is layered with detail, the action is handled with Block’s distinctive clarity of style and the ending is a stunning tour de force.”
—New York Times
“Lawrence Block is a master of entertainment.”
—Washington Post
“One of the very best writers now working the beat.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Stellar…a master storyteller in top form.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Brilliant…For clean, close-to-the-bone prose, the line goes from Dashiell Hammett to James M. Cain to Lawrence Block. He’s that good.”
—Martin Cruz Smith
“No one writes the hard-boiled thriller better than Lawrence Block.”
—San Diego Union
“Lawrence Block is a master of crime fiction.”
—Jonathan Kellerman
“Ratchets up the suspense with breathtaking results as only a skilled, inventive and talented writer can do.”
—Orlando Sentinel
“Lawrence Block is addictive. Make room on your bookshelf.”
—David Morrell
“Remarkable…The suspense is relentless.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Lawrence Block is America’s absolute Number One writer of mystery fiction.”
—Philip Friedman
“The reader is riveted to the words, the action.”
—Robert Ludlum
“Block’s grasp of character is extraordinarily honest…his combining of the genre requirements has an expert touch.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Everything mystery readers love best.”
—Denver Post
“If Lawrence Block writes it, I read it.”
—Mike Lupica
“Marvelous…will hold readers gaga with suspense.”
—New York Newsday
“A superior storyteller.”
—San Antonio Express-News
“A smooth, chilling suspense novel that stretches nerves wire-tight before they snap.”
—Boston Herald
“Block knows how to pace a story and tighten the noose of suspense. He writes sharp dialogue and knows his mean streets.”
—San Francisco Examiner
“He is simply the best at what he does…If you haven’t read him before, you’ve wasted a lot of time. Begin now.”
—Mostly Murder
She called me at the Stennett. It was around noon and I was asleep when the phone rang. I yawned, lit a cigarette, answered it.
“You’re a son of a bitch, Nat,” Anne said.
I laughed softly.
“A real son of a bitch. Why didn’t you have a few goons come over and beat me up? Or something subtle, like acid in the face?”
“I like your face.”
“Uh-huh. All of a sudden I don’t have a job. All of a sudden I don’t have a roof over my head. All of a sudden I can’t even buy a drink in this goddamned town. Isn’t that cute?”
I dragged on my cigarette. “It sounds rough.”
“Doesn’t it? You don’t issue invitations, Nat. You issue ultimatums. I don’t like ultimatums.”
I didn’t say anything. I smoked my cigarette and let her dangle on her end of the phone.
“No place to live, no job, nothing to do. What am I supposed to do, Nat?”
“You should leave town.”
“Should I?”
“Sure. You should come to Las Vegas. With me.”
A pause. “An ultimatum, Nat?”
“Call it an invitation…”
SOME OTHER HARD CASE CRIME BOOKS YOU WILL ENJOY:
JOYLAND by Stephen King
THE COCKTAIL WAITRESS by James M. Cain
THE TWENTY-YEAR DEATH by Ariel S. Winter
THE SECRET LIVES OF MARRIED WOMEN by Elissa Wald
ODDS ON by Michael Crichton writing as John Lange
BRAINQUAKE by Samuel Fuller
A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES by Lawrence Block
EASY DEATH by Daniel Boyd
THIEVES FALL OUT by Gore Vidal
SO NUDE, SO DEAD by Ed McBain
THE GIRL WITH THE DEEP BLUE EYES by Lawrence Block
QUARRY by Max Allan Collins
CUT ME IN by Ed McBain
PIMP by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr
SOHO SINS by Richard Vine
A HARD CASE CRIME BOOK
(HCC-126)
First Hard Case Crime edition: November 2016
Published by
Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street
London SE1 0UP
in collaboration with Winterfall LLC
Copyright © 1960, 2016 by Lawrence Block
Cover painting copyright © 2016 by Michael Koelsch
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Paperback edition ISBN 978-1-78565-001-7
Hardcover edition ISBN 978-1-78565-134-2
E-book ISBN 978-1-78565-002-4
Design direction by Max Phillips
www.maxphillips.net
The name “Hard Case Crime” and the Hard Case Crime logo are trademarks of Winterfall LLC. Hard Case Crime books are selected and edited by Charles Ardai.
Visit us on the web at www.HardCaseCrime.com
1
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “You can get up now. No matter how long you lie there, nobody’s gonna give you a fucking Academy Award for it.”
No response. I noted the trickle of blood from her temple, the angle of her head where it met the surround of the fieldstone fireplace.
I stood there, waiting for someone to run the film backward, waiting for her to rise up from the carpet, waiting for my hand to draw back from her face, to delete the blow that had sent her stumbling and falling and cracking her head on th
e stone with a sound that still echoed through the room.
Waiting for the past five minutes to erase themselves.
I don’t know how long it took for me to kneel down next to her. I felt for a pulse that wasn’t there, tried to remember what else you were supposed to do. In movies they’d see if there was a trace of breath to fog a pocket mirror, but strangely enough I didn’t happen to have a mirror in my pocket.
There was a large mirror mounted above the fireplace. I thought of hauling Ellen to her feet and pressing her face against the mirror, but that didn’t strike me as a very good idea. Or I could try smashing the thing and holding a piece of it to her lips, but I had the feeling I was already in for enough bad luck, I didn’t need seven years more.
I could just wait a few hours and see if she cooled to room temperature. That would be a pretty good sign, wouldn’t it?
Not that I needed a sign.
What I needed was someone to blame.
How about Ray Danton? Or Legs Diamond, the slick fellow I’d watched him play a few hours earlier? Or another slick fellow, Johnnie Walker by name, whose picture was on the bottle on the mantel over the fireplace. The bottle was half empty or half full, depending on whether you were an optimist or a pessimist.
But there looked to be two bottles, one the mirror’s reflection of the other. One was half empty, I decided, and the other was half full.
I dismissed the bottle in the mirror and uncapped the real one.
Haven’t you had enough to drink?
Ellen’s voice, clear as a bell in my head, as if it were still echoing around the room. God knows she’d spoken the sentence often enough over the years, and the answer was always no, I hadn’t had enough to drink, now that she mentioned it.
But maybe this time she was right. I’d need a clear head, wouldn’t I?
For what?
I compromised by taking a short pull straight from the bottle, then recapped it and set it down.
My wife was dead. And while I might try to blame her—for provoking the blow, for falling clumsily, for landing wrong—it was clearly my fault and not hers. Nor could I blame those three old smoothies, Ray and Legs and Johnnie.
Though they’d all played their parts…
* * *
It’s hard to say where anything starts, but it may have been that day at lunch, and it wasn’t Johnnie Walker but his cousin Gordon who supplied the jigger in the woodpile. Gordon’s Gin, that is to say, and when my lunch companion suggested a second round of martinis, I thought it sounded like a good idea.
After lunch we went our separate ways, and my way was supposed to lead to an appointment with a client. I’d been softening the guy up for a while now, and he was just about ready to bite on a hefty straight life policy, and all I had to do was meet with him and reel him in.
That second martini loosened me up just enough to question the need to waste the afternoon in that fashion.
Not that it was an afternoon that made one rush to the beach, or hike in the mountains. It was a gray day, constantly threatening to rain but never quite getting around to it. A day to sit in a movie house and watch something dark and nasty.
I was in my car, driving in the direction of my afternoon appointment. And I caught a red light at the corner of Wayland and Lamonica, and I looked over to my left at a movie marquee. The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond, I read.
I’d read something about the film. It had just opened. And I knew a little about Legs Diamond, who’d operated in New York and up the Hudson Valley to Albany, which is not that far away from Danbury.
And I’ve always loved gangster movies.
I parked the car, checked the schedule, discovered that the picture was going to start in twenty minutes. That gave me just enough time to find a pay phone and cancel my appointment, and find a liquor store and switch from Gordon to cousin Johnnie. Just a half pint, to keep me company while I watched Ray Danton bring the late Jack “Legs” Diamond back to life.
For a while at least, until a hail of bullets cut him down.
* * *
I watched the film through to the end, and when it was over I wished it was the first half of a double feature. But there was just the one picture, and I walked out thinking that maybe that was just as well, because I’d sipped my way through the half pint of scotch while Legs was occupied with rising and falling.
I suppose I was a little bit drunk. Closer, certainly, to drunkeness than to sobriety. But I didn’t feel drunk. I felt deeply relaxed, very comfortable within my own skin, and at the same time I felt energized, ready for something to happen.
Yeah, right.
I sat in the car, left my key unturned in the ignition, and gave myself over to the film I’d just seen. Somewhere in there, buried beneath the drama and action, there looked to be a moral. And, because that’s how Hollywood works, it pretty much had to be Crime Does Not Pay.
And I suppose it didn’t, if you went by the ending. Legs Diamond wound up dead.
But doesn’t everybody? All of us, even those of us who wear Brooks Brothers suits and sell whole life, wind up the same way.
But Legs sure had fun while it lasted…
* * *
I stopped at a liquor store on the way home, and my house was empty when I walked in the door. I cracked the seal on the bottle—Johnnie Walker Red Label, a fifth of the same medicine I’d had a half pint of in the tenth row at Loews Danbury. I used a glass, and when it was empty I filled it up again, and when it was full I sipped at it until it needed filling.
Somewhere along the way Ellen came home.
I don’t remember how the argument started, or what it was about. The fact that I’d been drinking was mentioned, you can be sure of that, and that line—Haven’t you had enough to drink?—was spoken, and answered silently, unless you count the sound of liquor transferred from bottle to glass.
She put dinner on the table, though neither of us had much of an appetite for it. And then the argument resumed, and she said something about the folly of breaking appointments with valuable clients, and I said something about having to see movies during the daytime, because I could no more stomach the Rock Hudson-Doris Day crap she liked than she could sit through a good gangster movie. And it got nasty, the way an argument can, and that’s what you get in a marriage that’s not very good and probably never should have happened in the first place.
But that would have been nothing new, an argument, with each of us saying things we shouldn’t have said, and me drinking too much, and in the morning we’d pretend it hadn’t happened.
Nothing we couldn’t live with.
Except her mouth just wouldn’t quit, and I reached for the scotch bottle, and she said it was already half-empty. I could have said that was a pessimistic way of looking at it, that you could as easily say it was half-full, but that sort of banter wouldn’t have matched my mood. I had hold of it by the neck, and her eyes widened as I stepped toward her, bottle raised overhead.
She thought I was going to hit her with the bottle. But I swear that was never in my mind, it was enough that the threat cut off the flow of words. I set the bottle down.
And the words started flowing again.
And, finally, I gave her a smack. Openhanded, across the face, just to make her shut up.
Nothing that hadn’t happened a couple of times before.
Except she fell, and don’t ask me why because I didn’t hit her all that hard. And she landed wrong.
And now she was dead.
* * *
Did they still have the death penalty in Connecticut? I couldn’t remember.
It seemed to me there’d been a movement to abolish it, but I didn’t know if it got anywhere. I smoked a cigarette and thought about it. I remembered the bullets that Legs Diamond got, and I wondered how the state did it. A chair wired for electricity? A rope around your neck? A room full of gas?
Or just a lifetime in a prison cell?
Whether or not there was a death penalty, I didn’t have to
worry about it. Not even a low-grade moron would plan to murder his wife by smashing her head in their own living room. There were plenty of rational ways to kill Ellen, and I’d had fantasies of most of them at one time or another, running them through my mind the way you do. Some were simple and some were elaborate, but none of them was anything like what had just happened.
So I had not committed premeditated murder. What would a jury call it? Second-degree murder at worst, temporary insanity at best, with some kind of manslaughter in the middle, and the most likely.
So I wouldn’t get the chair, or the rope, or gas, or life—whatever was dispensed in this state. I’d catch either a short-to-middling prison sentence or an acquittal. All I had to do was pick up the telephone and call the local police and inform them that I, Donald Barshter, had just accidentally killed my wife. They would do the rest. From that point on it would be out of my hands, a judicial tug of war between the district attorney’s office and my own lawyer. I could relax and let them figure out what they were going to do to me.
I reached for the phone, I held the receiver to my ear with my left hand and fitted my index finger into the little hole marked O for Operator. Then I took a deep breath.
And stopped cold. And took my index finger out of O for Operator and put the receiver back in the cradle.
This picture came to me. It was a picture of my little world with everything gone right—an acquittal, say, or the suspended sentence they give you that says you’re a solid citizen who made a mistake and please don’t do it again. I wondered how many people would be likely to buy an insurance policy from Donald Barshter, wife-killer. I wondered how many of the friends Ellen and I had shared would ask me over for a few drinks and a rubber or two of bridge. I thought about the way the good folks of the town would stare at me on the streets and the way the mothers would chain their daughters home when I was walking around.
I thought of courtrooms, jails and newspaper photos. I thought of all the little details that completed the picture. All I had to do was call the police and I would make that picture my life.
But what was the alternative? Ellen looked up at me with a flat empty stare. She was dead, I had killed her—and the dumbest cop in town could figure out that much with his eyes shut. I couldn’t get Ellen’s blood out of the carpet, couldn’t patch her head with plastic wood. I was her husband and that made me suspect number one from the start. No matter how cute an alibi I cooked up, the police would pick it to pieces and laugh in my face.