Sinner Man

by Lawrence Block

  So they would take two simple sentences and make a compound sentence out of them, and in the next paragraph they’d take a compound sentence and break it into two simple ones. For no apparent reason—other than that they wanted to keep their jobs.

  I found this out when I got a copy of either April North or Community of Women and read the first couple of pages. Right away I hit a sentence that struck me as awfully clunky, and wondered how I could have written it. Then I hit another just as bad, and retrieved my carbon copy of the book from the closet shelf. (I kept a carbon copy of everything until the book was published, at which time I felt free to discard it.)

  And no, those clunky sentences weren’t mine. The same weirdness prevailed throughout the book, and when I brought all of this to agent Henry Morrison’s attention, he explained Mr. Abramson’s editorial policy.

  Ah well.

  The point (he said, brushing away a tear) is that I didn’t think a great deal of Softcover Library, or Beacon, or whatever you want to call them. And when Henry was representing me again, after he too had taken leave of Scott Meredith and set up his own shop, he remembered Sinner Man, and had me augment its sexual aspect with a scene here and another scene there, and sent it off to my old friends at Beacon/Softcover. And I got whatever I got ($1000? $1500?) and turned my attention to other things.

  And never heard anything more about the book, and remembered it as having been sold not to Beacon but to Irwin Stein at Lancer Books. I was writing a variety of books for Irwin, and it would certainly have made sense to lay off Sinner Man with him, and that’s what I managed to believe had happened.

  Thus, if I ever ran across a copy of Savage Lover, or encountered it in a list of books, I’d have passed it by without a second thought, dismissing it as one of the dozen Sheldon Lord books written by ghostwriters. If I’d even noticed the 1968 pub date, I’d have concluded that the publisher had, not for the first time, reissued an early book with or without a cover and title change, or—also not for the first time—that Scott Meredith, old pirate that he was, had set some other ghost to operating under my pen name, even though we’d parted company four years earlier.

  Well, that’s all more than you needed to know, isn’t it? But I always enjoyed listening to Paul Harvey, and the best part of each broadcast was when he’d intone, “And now, the rest of the story.”

  * * *

  When Sinner Man finally came my way in the guise of Savage Lover, it needed work. Elements of the first chapter bothered me, and I decided to rewrite the opening. And Charles took on the thankless task (though that may be an inappropriate adjective, as I thank him all the time) of line-editing the text, cleaning up Beacon’s bad editorial choices and my own infelicitous phrases and never knowing which was which.

  And Charles had a couple of questions, which I answered to his satisfaction. But they might well have occurred to you as well, so why don’t I repeat them and answer them here?

  Was it really that simple to get a Social Security card in the early 1960s? Didn’t you have to show identification?

  Yes, it was really that simple. It would have been the mid-1950s when I got my card, and all I did was take the bus downtown to the appropriate government office and fill out a form. The card I was given said right on it “Not to be Used for Identification Purposes,” and I can see why, because they gave it to me without my having to make even a token effort to prove who I was.

  I think I went back another time to pick one up for my friend Tom Manford.

  Who?

  Oh, right, I never told you about him. During my junior year in high school, I acquired a new wallet, either bought it myself or got it as a gift. Either way, it came with a couple of cards in it, one a piece of dummy ID in the name of Thomas B. Manford. So over the next few months I picked up other pieces of ID for Tom, including a Social Security card.

  It was harmless enough, and did provide a small amount of amusement at school, where Thomas Manford managed to get on a few lists, and occasionally failed to respond to a roll call. And, late in my senior year, when the elections of class officers were held, a few of us got the word out. For Class Historian, we told everybody, vote for Tom Manford. Most kids just nodded dutifully; those who asked who the hell Manford was were quickly assured that he was a really great guy, and he’d do a hell of a job.

  Well, he won. And the results were quickly thrown out, and a new election held. I believe my friend Richard Dattner won this time, and I’m sure he did a hell of a job with the History of Bennett High’s Class of 1955, probably even better than anything Manford might have managed.

  Richard’s an architect now, a very distinguished one. I don’t know what ever became of Tom Manford. Jesus, come to think of it, he’s old enough to be collecting Social Security…

  If so, I bet he has to show ID. It’s hard to believe it was that easy to get a Social Security card. Maybe it was different in Buffalo.

  Well, Buffalo’s where I got my card, and Tom Manford’s, too. And, since it’s where Nat Crowley got his, it hardly matters how they did it in the rest of the country. But I checked with my Frequent Companion, who grew up in New Orleans, and she confirmed that was how it worked in the Crescent City in the early 1960s. You walked in, you told them your name, and they gave you a card.

  And yes, it’s hard to believe nowadays. Just yesterday I went to a midtown medical office in Madison Avenue, and I had to provide a thumbprint and a semen sample just to get access to the building. Upstairs they wanted to see a driver’s license, and took my palm print and photograph so that no future impostor could pass himself off as me and filch urine specimens.

  Okay, I guess I believe you about the Social Security card. But what about the train?

  Yes, they still had trains then. I know it’s hard to believe, but trains ran with some frequency between American cities, and passengers rode them, and—

  I’m talking about the toilets on trains. Did they really flush right onto the tracks?

  They did.

  I mean, nowadays they flush into a tank, and it’s emptied at the end of the run, but in the book—

  It took them awhile to come up with the idea of a receiving tank for waste. They certainly didn’t have it in Nat Crowley’s day. And each lavatory bore a cautionary sign, enjoining one against so fouling the trackbed within a station:

  “Passengers will please refrain

  from flushing toilets while the train

  is passing through the station.”

  It’s poetry in motion, isn’t it? I mean it could even be haiku, but with a few extra syllables.

  More of a song lyric, I’d say, and it was in fact commonly sung to the tune of Dvorak’s Humoresque. One appended the words “I love you” to fill out the last three notes of the melody. But don’t take my word for it. Oscar Brand’s full version is easily found on YouTube, and worth a listen.

  WANT MORE

  BLOCK?

  If you enjoyed SINNER MAN,

  the very first crime novel by

  LAWRENCE BLOCK,

  you’ll love his latest

  THE GIRL WITH THE DEEP BLUE EYES

  available now from your favorite local or online bookseller.

  Read on for a sample…

  ONE

  The phone woke him from a dream. At first his dream simply incorporated the sound in its narrative, and his dream-hand picked it up and his dream-voice said hello, and there his imagination quit on him, failing to invent a caller on the other end of the line. He said hello again, and the real-world phone went on ringing, and he shook off the dream and got the phone from the bedside table.

  “Hello?”

  “Doak Miller?”

  “Right,” he said. “Who’s this?”

  “Susie at the Sheriff’s Office. Sorry, your voice sounded different.”

  “Thick with sleep.”

  “Oh, did I wake you? I’m sorry. Do you want to call us back?”

  “No, it’s what? Close to nine-thirty, time I was up. Wh
at can I do for you?”

  “Um—”

  “So long as it’s not too complicated.”

  “On account of you’re still not completely awake?”

  He’d gotten a smile out of her, could hear it in her voice. He could picture her at her desk, twirling a strand of yellow hair around her finger, happy to let a phone conversation turn a little bit flirty.

  “Oh, I’m awake,” he said. “Just not at the absolute top of my game.”

  “Well, do you figure you’re sharp enough for me to put you through to Sheriff Bill?”

  “He won’t be using a lot of big words, will he?”

  “I’ll warn him not to,” she said. “You hold now, hear?”

  Just the least bit flirty, because it was safe to flirt with him, wasn’t it? He was old enough to be her father, old enough to be retired, for God’s sake.

  He let that thought go and went back for a look at his dream, but all that was left of it was the ringing telephone with no one on the other end of it. If the phone hadn’t rung, he’d have awakened with no recollection of having dreamt. He knew he dreamed, knew everyone did, but he never remembered his dreams, or even that his sleep had been anything other than an uninterrupted void.

  It was as if he led two lives, a sleeping life and a waking life, and it took the interruption of a phone call to make one life bleed through into the other.

  “Doak?”

  “Sheriff,” he said. “How may I serve the good people of Gallatin County?”

  “Now that’s what I ask myself every hour of every day. You’ll never believe the answer came back to me first thing this morning.”

  “Try me.”

  “‘Hire a hit man.’”

  “So you thought of me.”

  “You know, there must be another fellow with your qualifications between Tampa and Panama City, but I wouldn’t know how to get him on the phone. Susie said you were sleeping when she called, but you sound wide awake to me. You want to come by once you’ve had your breakfast?”

  “Have y’all got coffee?”

  “I’ll tell her to make a fresh pot,” Sheriff William Radburn said. “In your honor, sir.”

  * * *

  When he’d moved to the state three years ago, Doak had put up at first in a motel just across the Taylor County line. A Gujarati family owned it, and the office smelled not unpleasantly of curry. It took him a couple of months to tire of the noise of the other guests and the small-screen TV, and he let a housewife with a real estate license show him some houses. The one he liked was off by itself, with a dock on a creek that flowed into the gulf. You could hitch a boat to that dock, she’d pointed out. Or you could fish right off the dock.

  He made an offer. When the owner accepted it, the agent delivered the good news in person. He’d had a beer going, and offered her one. She hesitated just long enough to signal that her acceptance was significant.

  “Well,” he said. “How are we going to celebrate?”

  She gave him a look, and that was answer enough, but to underscore the look she twisted the wedding ring off her finger and dropped it in her purse. Then she looked at him again.

  Her name was Barb—“Like a fishhook,” she’d said—and while she wasn’t the first woman he’d been to bed with since the move south, she was the first to join him in his room at the Gulf Mirage Motel. What better way, really, to celebrate his departure than by nailing the woman who’d facilitated it?

  And she had a nice enough body, built more for comfort than for speed. Her breasts were nice, her ass was even nicer, and long before she’d shown him the house he wound up buying, he’d already decided not only that he wanted her but just how he intended to have her.

  So when he went down on her he got a finger in her ass, and while she tensed up at first she wound up going with it. Her orgasm was a strong one, and had barely ended when he rolled her over and arranged her on her knees. He moistened himself in her pussy, and she was so warm and wet he had to force himself to leave, but he withdrew and she gave a little gasp at his departure and another when she felt him where his finger had been earlier.

  She said, “Oh, I don’t think—”

  It wasn’t much of a protest and he didn’t pay any attention to it, forcing himself into her, feeling her resist, feeling her resistance subside, feeling her open for him only to tighten around him. He fucked her gently at first, then more savagely as passion took hold of him, and he cried out as he emptied himself into her.

  He went away someplace for a moment, and the next thing he was aware of was lying on his back while she cleansed him with a washcloth. “Just a tame little thing now,” she said, “but it like to split me in two a few minutes ago.”

  She took him in her mouth, and for an hour or so they found things to do. Then he got two more beers from the mini-fridge and they sat up in bed drinking them.

  She said, “I hardly ever like that.”

  “Sex?”

  “Silly. No, you know. Butt sex.”

  “You got into it pretty good there.”

  “I almost came. Which is something I never did.”

  “Came that way?”

  “Never even enjoyed it, not really. I wonder if I ever could come that way.”

  “From getting fucked in the ass?”

  “That sounds so dirty. Saying butt sex is bad enough.”

  “With an ass like yours—”

  “I saw the way you looked at it. I knew what you wanted to do.” She looked at him over the top of the beer can, weighed her words carefully. “I knew you wanted to fuck me in my ass.”

  “Your gorgeous ass.”

  “My gorgeous ass. My gorgeous ass which is a little sore, but I’m not complaining. I thought, oh, that’s what he’s gonna want to do, I just know it.”

  “And you hardly ever like it.”

  “And yet,” she said, “I took my ring off, didn’t I? Which reminds me.” She got the ring from her purse, put it on her finger. “Now I’m married again,” she said. “And I’m in desperate need of a shower. It’s bad enough I’ll be going home smelling of beer.”

  She showered, toweled dry. While she was dressing he went over and put his hands on her, but she said, “No, not now. And you can finish my beer for me, because I’ve had enough, and what I have to do now is stop at Cozy Cole’s for my usual end-of-the-day glass of Chardonnay.”

  “So you can smell of wine instead of beer.”

  “Probably a little of both,” she said, “with a top note of—no, never mind. Doak? We’re not going to have a romance, are we?”

  “No.”

  “No, we’re not, which means we can probably do this every now and then without worrying that it’ll blow up in our faces. But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here. I mean, would you want to do this every now and then? Like maybe a couple of times a month?”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Like friends with benefits, I guess they call it, except I don’t even know that we’d be friends. Friendly, sure, but friends?”

  “Just so we get the benefits.”

  “And I’d be interested in finding out if I can come that way.”

  TWO

  It turned out she could. They established as much on her first visit to his new house, and it was a few days after that momentous occasion that he paid his first visit to the Gallatin County sheriff’s office. It was a courtesy call, and a counterpart to one he’d made to the Taylor County sheriff not long after the state of Florida had licensed him as a private investigator. He didn’t even know how much use he’d get out of the license, he could get by easily enough on his NYPD pension, but it never hurt to be on good terms with the local law, and he’d known retired cops back home with P. I. tickets who picked up the occasional piece of work through friends still on the job.

  The sheriff of Taylor County turned out to be a piece of work himself, a slick article with a college diploma framed on his wall, and enough of a cracker accent to establish his bona fides as a good old boy
. Doak could tell the man had an eye on the state house in Tallahassee, along with a snowball’s chance of getting there, but he was young enough that it’d be another five years before he figured out that last part. Sheriff D. T. Newton was cordial enough, because he’d never be less than cordial to anyone without a reason, but Doak could tell right away they were never going to be Best Friends Forever.

  The Gallatin County courtesy call was a good deal more fruitful. Bill Radburn was a genuine good old boy who didn’t feel the need to act like one. If he’d ever had ambitions for higher office, he’d shed them somewhere along the way, and now all he wanted was to do his job well enough to keep the voters happy. His age was around sixty to Doak’s forty-eight, and he liked ESPN and his wife’s cooking, and the photo cube on his desk showed pictures of his grandchildren.

  “Retired from the NYPD,” he’d said. “Put in your twenty years?”

  “Closer to twenty-five.”

  “And Tallahassee saw fit to give you a private license, though it’s hard to guess what it’ll do for you here in Gallatin County. Though I guess you never know, given the tendency folks have to get themselves in messes they can’t get out of on their own.”

  “Oh, they do that down here, do they?”

  “Now and again,” the sheriff said.

  And Doak had found occasion to drop in now and again himself, to drink a cup of coffee and swap war stories in a way he’d never have tried with D. T. Newton. Folks did get in messes, and now and then one of them turned up on his doorstep, and he got to pick up an honest fee for a little honest work. Sometimes he had to drive around, sometimes he had to talk to people, but a surprising amount of the time he got the job done and made the client happy without leaving his desk. More often than you’d guess, your computer could go around and knock on doors for you—and did it all without pissing off the person on the other side of the door.