The Devil Knows You're Dead: A MATTHEW SCUDDER CRIME NOVEL (Matthew Scudder Mysteries)

by Lawrence Block

  I called Elaine and told her I couldn’t remember if we had anything planned for the evening. She said we didn’t. “But I’d love to see you,” she said. “Only I don’t really feel like leaving the house.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “That’s going to make it tough for us to get together,” she said. “Unless we spend the whole night on the phone, and that could really burn up the old message units.”

  We got that sorted out. “I don’t mind leaving my house,” I said. “I just don’t want to leave yours.”

  “Well, you never have to,” she said. “Mí casa es su casa. Come over anytime, I’ll cook or we’ll order in, and we’ll spend a quiet evening at home.”

  “At su casa.”

  “Yeah, chez moi. I’ve got some reading and paperwork to do, but it won’t take me forever. You know what? Pick up a movie on the way over.”

  “Anything special?”

  “No, surprise me. Nothing with monsters, that’s all I ask.”

  “We get enough of those in real life.”

  “You said it. What time should I expect you?”

  “I could catch an early meeting and get over there around eight. How does that sound?”

  “As a matter of fact,” she said, “it sounds terrific.”

  Chapter 11

  We spent a quiet evening at home. We had curry, delivered by an Indian restaurant that had just recently opened on First Avenue. According to Elaine, there was a key advantage to eating Indian food at home.

  “In every Indian restaurant I have ever been to,” she said, “there is one waiter whose last bath was in the Ganges, and when he comes near your table you could die.”

  I tried Lisa Holtzmann after dinner and rang off without a word when her machine answered. Elaine spent twenty minutes on paperwork and then popped a cassette in the VCR. I’d picked up The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, with Lee Marvin playing the titular villain and John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart playing themselves.

  Elaine said, “When I was a kid my parents would watch old movies on the late show. ‘My God, look how young Franchot Tone is!’ Or Janet Gaynor, or George Arliss, or whoever they were watching. It used to drive me crazy. And now I’m doing it. Throughout the whole movie all I could think of was how young Lee Marvin was.”

  “I know.”

  “But I didn’t come out and say it until the picture had ended. I think I showed commendable restraint.”

  The phone rang and she answered it. “Oh, hi,” she said. “How’s it going? It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

  I tried not to hang on the words, even as the usual faint wave of jealousy rolled over me. Elaine still got calls now and then from former clients, and felt it was simpler to spend ten seconds announcing her retirement than go to the trouble of changing her number. I understood, but all the same I’d have preferred them to call when I was somewhere else.

  “Just a minute,” she said. “He’s right here.”

  I took the phone and TJ said, “Man, I been to your hotel room. That room is small with just you in it. You shouldn’t be bringin’ a nice lady there.”

  “That was no nice lady,” I said. “That was Elaine.”

  “Think I don’t know that? Oh, now I get it. You ain’t at your hotel.”

  “I knew you’d figure it out.”

  “You at her house. You got the whatchacall on. Call Forwarding.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “If you had a beeper,” he said, “you wouldn’t need stuff like that, confuse people when somebody else answers your phone. Why I called, I been hangin’ out with the Captain.”

  “Captain Flanders.”

  “That’s my man. Hey, the park changes some when the sun goes down, the park and the street both. Got a whole bunch of folks buyin’ and sellin’.”

  “You’ve got that in the daytime,” I said, “but then they’re mostly buying and selling Hondas.”

  “Different shit now,” he said. “Lotta crack. You see the empty vials on the ground. Just about anything you want, there be somebody here sell it to you. Lot of girls, too, an’ some of ’em lookin’ real fine. ’cept they ain’t girls. You know what they call ’em?”

  “Transsexuals.”

  “ ‘Chicks with dicks’ is what you hear people say. Say the other word again.” I did, and he repeated it after me. “Transsexuals. I know there’s people call ’em sex changes, but that’s after they has the operation. Up until then they chicks with dicks. You happen to know if they born that way?”

  “I’m fairly sure they’re born with dicks.”

  “Gimme a break, Jake. You know what I mean.”

  The transsexuals I’d known all said they’d been that way as far back as they could remember. “I guess they’re born that way,” I said.

  “How do they get the titties? It don’t hardly come natural. What do they get, hormone shots? Implants?”

  “Both, I think.”

  “An’ then they hustlin’, savin’ up for the big operation. What they all want, get the operation so you can’t tell ’em from a real woman, ’cept they standin’ six-two and got big hands an’ feet, which might give somebody a clue.”

  “Not all of them want the surgery.”

  “You mean they want to have it both ways? Why’s that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A pause, and then he said, “Just tryin’ to feature myself walkin’ down the street with titties bouncin’ under my shirt. Weird.”

  “I guess.”

  “Get a headache thinkin’ about it. You recollect what I told you first time I met you? When you was walkin’ on the Deuce an’ I couldn’t get you to say what you was lookin’ for?”

  “I remember.”

  “I told you everybody got a jones. You can take that to the bank, Frank. Truest thing I ever said.”

  I said, “I wonder if Glenn Holtzmann had a jones.”

  “Nothin’ to wonder. If he had a pulse he had a jones. Maybe we get lucky, find out what it was.”

  Elaine had caught enough key words to be interested, and I filled her in on the rest. “TJ’s wonderful,” she said. “One minute he’s utterly hip slick and cool, and then his innocence peeks through. At that age the whole notion of transsexuals has to be disturbing.”

  “But not unfamiliar, not where he hangs out.”

  “I guess. I just hope he doesn’t turn up with tits one of these days. I don’t think I’m ready for that.”

  “I don’t think TJ is, either.”

  “Good. You figure Glenn Holtzmann had a jones?”

  “TJ says everybody does. That reminds me.” I looked at my watch and decided it wasn’t too late to call Holtzmann’s widow, especially since she wasn’t likely to be home. Nor was she. This time, though, I didn’t listen dutifully to her late husband’s voice. As soon as the machine picked up, I broke the connection.

  I said, “Something took him to Eleventh Avenue. He could have been stretching his legs, but why stretch them in that direction? It could have been coincidence, or he could have been looking for something that Eleventh Avenue had to offer.”

  “He didn’t strike me as the crackhead type.”

  “No, but he wouldn’t be the first yuppie who ever did lines of coke.”

  “Do people like him buy it on the street?”

  “Not usually, no. Maybe he had a sex jones, maybe he was looking for love in all the wrong places.”

  “With a wife like that at home?”

  “ ‘A neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land.’ But what’s that got to do with it?”

  “Not much,” she said. “Most men have wives at home, and they can’t all be bowwows. Maybe he just got the urge for something different.”

  “Maybe he was partial to tall girls with big hands and feet.”

  “And dicks. He was taking a big chance, picking up a streetwalker.”

  “No kidding.”

  “No, besides the usual. Remember the view from their apartment? If she’d bee
n at the window she could have seen him on the corner. She might even have witnessed the shooting.”

  “Assuming the angles were right and the view wasn’t obstructed. I doubt you could make much out at that distance, anyway.”

  “I guess not. You think she’ll keep the apartment?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Would you like to live there? Not that particular apartment, necessarily, but something like it?”

  “Way up in the sky, you mean?”

  “Way up in the sky with a drop-dead view. If and when we get around to moving in together—but maybe you don’t feel like talking about it now.”

  “No, I don’t mind.”

  “Well, I love this apartment, but I was thinking we might be better off someplace new. This place has an awful lot of history.”

  “All the times we’ve made love here.”

  “That’s not what I was thinking of.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m not in the game anymore, and I’m still living in the same apartment. I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. Even if we didn’t move in together, I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”

  “Would you sell this place?”

  “I could. The way the market is now, I’d probably be better off renting it out. The company that manages my other real estate holdings could take care of it.”

  “Ms. Rich Bitch.”

  “Well, I’m not going to apologize for it. I didn’t steal it and nobody left it to me. I made it the old-fashioned way.”

  “I know you did.”

  “I fucked for it. So? It’s honest work. It may not be legal but it’s honest. I worked hard and saved my money and invested it wisely. Are those things to be ashamed of?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I sound defensive, don’t I?”

  “A little,” I said, “but so what? Nobody’s perfect. Where would you want to live?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure that out. I like this neighborhood, but if the apartment’s got a history so does the neighborhood. What about you? You might want to keep your hotel room as an office.”

  “Some office.”

  “It’s a place to meet clients.”

  “I used to meet them in bars,” I said, “and now I meet them in coffee shops.”

  “Would you want to give it up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s so cheap,” she said. “Rent-controlled and all. It might be worth keeping just so that you’d have some private space when you wanted it. Living together might be less threatening if you knew you had a place of your own nearby.”

  “What would it be, an escape hatch?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You’d have one, too, if you rented this place instead of selling it.”

  “No,” she said. “Once I’m out of here, that’s it. Fifty-first Street won’t see me again. Even if things don’t work out, even if we find out we can’t, uh, live together, I’m never coming back here. As a matter of fact—”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, even if we’re not ready to live together, maybe I ought to think about getting out of here. It seems silly to go to the trouble of finding some interim place if we’re going to be looking for an apartment together, but I think it’s time I got the hell out.”

  “Why the urgency?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh?”

  After a moment she said, “I got a phone call today. One of my old regulars.”

  “He didn’t know you’d retired?”

  “He knew.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s called a few times over the past year. To make sure this retirement hadn’t turned out to be a passing fancy.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s understandable. Somebody sells her ass for twenty years, then takes it off the market, you don’t assume it’s permanent.”

  “I suppose.”

  “A few times he called just to chat. So he said. Well, we knew each other for years, and it was a friendly relationship, so you don’t like to tell a guy like that to shit in his hat. But I don’t need chatty conversations with former johns, either, so I always managed to cut it short. No hard feelings, gotta go, ’bye.”

  “Good.”

  “Today he asked if he could come over. No, I said, you can’t. Just to talk, he said, because he’s going through something difficult and he needs to talk to somebody who really knows him. Which is bullshit, because I don’t. Really know him, I mean. So I said no, you can’t come over, I’m very sorry but that’s the way it is. I’ll pay you, he says. I’ll give you two hundred dollars, just let me come over and talk.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I told him no. I told him I wasn’t in the therapy business, either, and I told him not to call me anymore. He didn’t just want to talk. You probably figured that much out on your own.”

  “Yes.”

  “He figured once he got in the door he could get in the bedroom. He figured once I took money I’d do something to earn it. But it wasn’t really about sex, it was about power. He liked the idea of getting me to do something I didn’t want to do.”

  “Who is he?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “I could have a talk with him.”

  “No, Matt. Absolutely not.”

  “All right.”

  “If I hear further from him, but I don’t think I will, not more than once every couple of months and I can live with that. No, I don’t need to be protected. Not from this particular jerk.”

  “If you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “But I think you should change your number.”

  “When I move. New apartment, new phone number.”

  “Both at once.”

  “Right.”

  I thought about it. I said, “Maybe we should start looking for a new place.”

  “Or at least think about it. You’d prefer the neighborhood where you are now, wouldn’t you?”

  “Well, I’m used to it,” I said, “the same way you’re used to Turtle Bay. I’ve got certain restaurants and coffee shops I go to, and of course I’ve got my regular meetings. Mick’s joint is a short walk from me. So are Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall and most of the city’s theaters, not that we go all that often, but it’s nice to know they’re there.

  “But it’s not the only part of town I like, or even my favorite in a lot of ways. I like the West Village, I like Chelsea, I like Gramercy Park.”

  “Or farther downtown. SoHo, Tribeca.”

  But those places had a history of their own. “Or a little farther up on the West Side,” I went on. “Say the West Seventies. I’d be an easy walk or a short bus ride from where I am now, so I could keep the hotel room as an office and still go to the same AA meetings. Now that I think about it, though, the possibilities are vast. We could live almost anywhere.”

  “Not out of Manhattan, though.”

  “No, definitely not.”

  “Unless we move to Albuquerque.”

  Shortly before Christmas I’d had a windfall; I took a case on a contingency basis and it paid off. When her school’s semester break came around after the first of the year we’d flown out to New Mexico and spent two weeks driving around the northern part of the state, much of it among the Indian pueblos. We’d both responded to the adobe architecture in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

  “We could have a whole house there,” I said, “with swirls and minarets and curved walls. And it wouldn’t matter where it was, because we’d have to drive everywhere anyway, and whatever neighborhood we picked would be safer and more comfortable than anywhere in New York.”

  “Would you like to do that?”

  “No.”

  “Thank God,” she said, “because neither would I. The whole country’s full of places that are much nicer than New York and I wouldn’t want to live in any of them. And you’re the same way, aren’t you?”

  “I’m afraid so.”
>
  “It’s good we found each other. And if we start to yearn for the sight of adobe, we can always fly out to Albuquerque for a visit, can’t we?”

  “Anytime we want,” I said. “It’s not going anywhere.”

  IT must have been around midnight when we went to bed. An hour later I gave up on sleep and tiptoed out to the living room. There was a rack full of magazines and a bookcase full of books, and of course there was always the TV, but I was too restless to sit still. I got dressed and stood at the living-room window, looking at the red neon Pepsi-Cola sign across the river. New buildings had eclipsed much of her view since Elaine moved in, but you could still see the Pepsi ad. Would I miss it if we moved? Would she?

  Downstairs the doorman nodded wordlessly, then returned his gaze to the middle distance. He was a young fellow, a recent immigrant from somewhere in the Arab world, and he always had a Walkman headset plugged into his ears. I’d assumed he was hooked on Top 40 radio until I found out one night that he listened relentlessly to self-improvement tapes that exhorted him to take charge of his life, boost his money-generating capacity, and lose weight and keep it off.

  I walked down First Avenue, past the UN building, clear to Forty-second Street. There I turned right, walked a block, and headed back uptown on Second Avenue. I passed a few saloons, and while they did not call to me I cannot say I was entirely unaware of their appeal. I could have looked for Mick at Grogan’s, but if I found him it meant a late night, and even if we cut it short I’d be clear over on the West Side and not much inclined to come all the way back to East Fifty-first.

  Living together would solve that problem. And bring what others in its place?

  There’s an all-night coffee shop at the corner of Second and Forty-ninth. I took a seat at the counter and ordered a prune Danish and a glass of milk. Someone had left an early edition of the Times behind, and I started to read it but couldn’t keep my mind on what I was reading. Maybe I needed some self-improvement tapes. Develop the Hidden Powers of Your Mind! Take Charge of Your Life!

  I didn’t need to develop any hidden powers. I had enough brain cells left to figure out what was going on.

  Jan Keane had come back into my life, even as she was nearing the end of her own. She and I had almost lived together, had indeed been groping in that direction, and then the relationship had instead broken down, and we had lost each other.