Manhattan Noir 2

by Lawrence Block

  He thinks now of his doctor, a thin, nervous internist who had also treated his wife, been taciturn about her own condition, had insisted on the sanctity of that relationship and of his files.

  Funny that the doctor had never known anything about the man’s personal life, although he had been treating the two of them for seven years. No pictures on his desk that might be indicative, no wife or children squinting or smiling imbecilically at the degrees framed on the wall opposite.

  Perhaps she was having an affair with the doctor then as well. This was not impossible. She was a passionate woman for whom he had had little time for many years. Pressures of business. Building the firm. Acquiring securities. There might have been quite a few.

  Robinson’s problem, in fact, might not have been the end of the affair but the discovery that he was merely another in a procession. Robinson had vanity over his insecurity. This would have been unbearable to him. Looked at in that way the situation creates sympathy for Robinson as well. Tragic he thinks. All of it was tragic: missed circumstances, lapsed opportunities, an exercise in misdirection. No time to take the long view however or to want to go back. It is too late for this.

  Procedures. Stick to the modus operandi as he has seen it established. First, the call to the inspector to clear himself. Then the meeting with the inspector to give the details, the abandonment of charges, the hunt for the true murderer, Robinson.

  He thinks he knows how the man can be found. In Italy or New York Robinson’s habits are still as naked to him as only those of a lifelong business partner can be. It is not for nothing that they have worked together, shared his wife.

  At last, soon or late, in the presence of the police or alone he will come face to face with the man, possibly in some dismal hotel room just like this one. Staggering against the walls, sweating, coughing, mumbling, choking, Robinson may look very much as he has over these weeks. He will feel sympathy for the man as only one who has shared these circumstances could.

  “I forgive you,” he will say, reaching forward to touch Robinson. “I’m sorry, it was not merely your fault but mine too. I relieve you of your guilt. All right, it is all right,” and will connect then, a springing clasp, wrist to wrist and Robinson will disintegrate before him, weeping.

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” he will say, “I had no choice. It was just that I was so frightened,” and will cast him a look so full of pleading and mercy that it will contain all the vengeance he ever needed. As for the rest of it, the arrest, arraignment, trial, incarceration, he will play no role. He will let the authorities do as they will for the urge for vengeance will be out of him. Will anyone understand this?

  Passion and loss. That was what it was. He can surely make this clear to the inspector, who is himself an understanding man who in his business must have seen many interesting cases like this. He and the inspector someday will share those reminiscences in a cocktail lounge or at a good restaurant on the East Side. He and the inspector. His salvation and his friend.

  He picks up the phone, knowing the number so well that he could, if a blind man, find it expertly. He dials the number.

  Finally, as a suddenness, all of it falls into place for him. The doctor. All of the time it would have had to have been the doctor.

  Yes, yes! The man must have known his wife well. It had been seven years after all. He had treated her, understood from the confidences she would have given that she was lonely and abandoned, resentful of the way his original interest in her had fragmented into a hundred other meaningless concerns.

  The doctor, hearing all of this on late afternoons in the gray of the empty office, must have taken all of these for signals instead of desperate secrets and tried to interest her in having an affair with him—when suddenly, stunningly, she turned on him in revulsion and then laughed at his desires. How well he knew this; she was exactly that kind of a woman.

  “Where did you ever get that idea?” his wife must have said. “Just because I told you a few things did you think it meant that I would go to bed with you? I wouldn’t touch you, you foul little man. Hire a good-looking nurse and try it on her.”

  “No,” the doctor would have said, “you can’t say this to me. You cannot. There must be some reason—”

  “I’ll say anything I want,” his wife would have answered, “I’m paying the bills. You don’t even exist in my life if I don’t want you to. Where could you have gotten the idea I would touch you?” She had that streak; it would have been what she said. And the doctor, a simple man enthralled by his desires, would have been unable to deal with it.

  So, he had killed her. After saying what she did, his wife must have turned to leave the office, but before she could even reach the door the doctor had, in a fit of passion, ended her life. With a scalpel or hypodermic injection or whatever else doctors kept in their examining rooms.

  They weren’t regulated, that was the trouble. An M.D. could get away with anything, once you had that degree on the wall. But it did not guarantee that you could have sex with your patients.

  That was the point at which he had gone wrong. It would have been a clean wound—he knew his business, after all—with very little bleeding and after that with crazed skill the doctor would have disposed of the weapon and erased all signs of his own implication in the crime.

  Had she died immediately? Or had she hung on, gasping on the floor for a few moments, her eyes slowly gazing as she stared at the fluorescence? Well, no need to be too graphic, he will think of that some other time. He wants to think that it was a clean, quick death; even for her cruelty she should not have suffered.

  The securities then. With the woman lying at last dead before him the doctor’s passion would have turned to panic and then at last to mad cunning as the thought came to him that without witnesses and with the fact of a sterile marriage there would be an available suspect.

  If he could plant the securities near the body then the investigation would inevitably turn away from him, despite the fact that it was his office, and toward the husband with whose fate those securities were inextricably linked.

  The doctor would not even have to worry about getting the corpse from the office; it would be credible that the husband would want to kill her in surroundings where someone else would be implicated.

  Double reverse. Sitting in the hotel room he nods slowly, being able to appreciate, as he thinks the thing through, the doctor’s cunning all the way down the line.

  So the doctor had done it then. There was plenty of information from the wife over seven years and he knew exactly where to look. He had seized the securities, placed them on top of the corpse and then closed up his office, knowing that all of this would shortly be found by the authorities who would make the connections.

  The trap had sprung well. If he had not finally had the alertness and good sense to consider the issue of the doctor, the man without whom, damningly, the crime could not have worked, he would never have gotten out. But finally, through his own thought and effort, the crime has been solved.

  If he can get the facts to the right people in time.

  Robinson first. He must call Robinson and give him the explanation slowly, carefully, just the way he has worked it out.

  His business partner is a ponderous man; he must take time to explain and not confuse him by hurrying. Still, he knows that he can be counted on: if it were not for Robinson smuggling him away from home at the critical moment and into this dismal but safe hotel room he would at this moment be in a cell, awaiting trial and conviction.

  Still, he thinks, Robinson could have shown better taste in hotels; even at this level there must be a better place and the drug traffic is incessant.

  But his partner and friend of almost a quarter-century, the only man he could ever trust, had stood by him as none of the others would, not even the inspector. Robinson insisted steadfastly that he was innocent, that he never could have done it. And had bought just enough time from the inspector to put him, for the moment, out of their g
rasp.

  But only for the moment. He must remember that. Like his poor wife, he had run out of time.

  He will tell Robinson and his partner will go to the inspector on his behalf with the story. Once the police know which trail to investigate, the crime will open up before them just as for himself it has opened in this grim hotel room.

  The doctor’s hasty disappearance, his failure to contact the answering service, the peculiar aspect of the corpse, the way in which the office was left—all of these will assume a different cast in the inspector’s mind. He is too tough and shrewd to deny the obvious once it is presented on him and will direct the police to close down on the evidence which must surely lurk in the doctor’s file. And surely the doctor had had friends to whom he might have, before his flight, intimated the truth.

  While he stays hidden, Robinson his one connection to the authorities, the crime will unravel about them and he will be able to come out of this with his life intact, his reputation restored.

  The loss of his wife, the pitiful way in which his marriage has ended are dreadful, of course, but he realizes that in some corridor of the heart he must have abandoned her long ago.

  There had almost never been a marriage. For this and the murder itself he will have to make atonement in some intricate way, pay some measure of penance beyond what he has already by living these dreadful weeks.

  But enough of that for now. The thing to do is to call Robinson and begin the springing of the levers which, as they are released one by one, will send him back to the world.

  He returns from the window at which he has been pacing, casting idle looks downward at 72nd Street. Three teenage boys are assaulting someone’s convertible and as scars appear on the old car’s body he has been thinking about the less visible assassins who have been working on him all this time. He coughs at some rancid odor which whisks in and out of the window.

  Then, swallowing determinedly he picks up the phone. He knows where Robinson will be. The number is engraved into him. He sighs and shakes his head. He dials.

  At last he sees the answer and hopes that it is not too late. It must have been at the corner of his mind for a while. Again and again he had pushed it off because it had been too insane, too unreasonable, but now he can no longer turn back. The truth is agony but the truth will set him free.

  It is the inspector.

  The inspector from the beginning had been too casual about his involvement in the case, too insidious in wanting to know personal facts, not willing himself to yield hard facts or opinions which would establish his own thoughts on the case, the position which a legitimate police official would have to take.

  And the matter of identity as well. Never once had the inspector offered identification. And, accepting unthinkingly as he would have to the presence of an inspector on a major murder case, he had never asked for identification. If he had the whole case might have broken in front of him then, but it was a risk the man identifying himself as the “inspector” had been willing to take. He was clever, he was a brilliant actor, and it had turned out not to be a risk at all.

  The inspector. The inspector! Oh, this man must have loved his wife for a long time, loved and hated her as well, watched her from a distance, then slowly infiltrated himself into her life.

  Who knew what manner of man he might be? Who could even touch the mask? How could his wife, that gentle, diffuse woman distracted by her own sorrow, have doubted whatever nonsensical stories he gave her to explain his original appearance? The inspector had fooled him—a hard, sophisticated businessman with half a million dollars in hidden, accumulated, tax-free securities—for a long time; his wife would have never questioned any part of him.

  So, it must have been with Robinson that the plan, in all its diabolicism, had been conceived. The “inspector” and Robinson bending their heads against one another, sharing dreadful confidences from the beginning. Murder his wife to begin and then plant the securities which Robinson somehow had remembered seeing that day when inadvertently he had left them on his desk and gone out for lunch near the corpse in order to tie the crime inextricably to the husband. He was already in trouble with the securities once discovered; what more logical, after tax evasion, than murder? Authorities, particularly police, thought in this way.

  Robinson would have been the only possible means of divining the location of the securities in the office and the “inspector” must have worked with him carefully to set up the plan. How they must have laughed! and then their faces lapsing into purpose as they had gathered more tightly to roll up the net.

  The “inspector’s” motives would always be shrouded—he can accept this, there are things in life which he will never know—but Robinson’s would not. He would have needed the securities for himself, control of the business, immunity from detection. An embezzlement of twenty-five long years’ duration would have shortly been discovered anyway and everything would have collapsed. The annual audit, he thinks excitedly, was just about due under the new accounts for the first time.

  Robinson would have known that he had very little time to act. This was part of the motive but will also make the solution easier. As it was, Robinson stood to benefit in two ways. He would hide the embezzlement forever and he would assume full control of the firm.

  Until now, then, the plan in its malevolence and cunning had worked well. If it had not been for this last-minute deduction on which Robinson and the “inspector” could not have counted it would have succeeded. But now, given only a little more time he could clear himself and bring it down around them.

  The police. He will call the police and tell them everything patiently, carefully. Already they have traced him to this miserable, dangerous hotel. Patrolmen have parked cars outside. They are prowling through the gray corridors pounding at doors, ignoring the drug traffic in their eagerness to get at him. It will not be long until they trace his room number through the little clerk downstairs and find him.

  But the same drives, he hopes, that enabled them to trace his whereabouts so skillfully will underline their willingness to listen.

  Surely the authorities want this crime solved as much as he does.

  And once the pieces begin to fall into place—the “inspector” who is not an inspector, the strange behavior of Robinson, the circumstances of the firm’s accounting—the end will come quickly. The “inspector” at least must, as part of the plan, remain in sight, continuing his normal activities, being accessible. The police will find him quickly and quickly the confirming story will emerge.

  For many years Robinson himself has been under great strain; these last few weeks must have been a nightmare for him as well—a dread tight-roping between necessity to continue and the urge to confess.

  Robinson will be found. He will tell them everything quickly.

  So. The police. He will call them now and set in motion that series of events which will free him. The authorities will not be able to bring back his wife and he realizes that to a certain extent that does make the crime his because he allowed their marriage to die. But this is something for which he will have to atone carefully, in a private way, in whatever years remain.

  For an instant he thinks of phoning his doctor instead and having him make the call to the police to negotiate a meeting, but he realizes that it is too late for this kind of caution and so he picks up the phone with determination, choking slightly. Fetid air pours in from the walls. Decrepit. The hotel is impossible. You cannot blame tenants for the quality of lives they must lead living here.

  But he, he at least will live in better circumstances soon. In possession of himself for the first time in many weeks he leans forward intensely.

  But it occurs to him in the midst of dialing that he has, so far, murdered his wife, his doctor, his business partner and the police inspector sent out for routine questioning on these murders and that he is very tired of hiding in a hotel room, becoming bored with the reduction he has made of his life. Figures. He needs more figures in his specula
tions, that is all. He cannot manipulate just the four of them forever.

  “Pardon me,” he says to the desk clerk who has come politely on the line after the long hold. “Pardon me, but would you bring me another cup of coffee and maybe a bottle of scotch up here?” He has a relationship with the desk clerk. It is a familiar errand.

  “And I’ll have something extra for you,” he adds cunningly to speed the little clerk on his errand and puts down the phone.

  “Yes, sir, here it is,” the clerk says, entering a few moments later … and then falls dead with a .32 caliber bullet in his heart, falls dead on the sheets beside him and as he does so the doctor, the inspector, his wife and Robinson all turn to congratulate the clerk with relief on their faces and to welcome at last a new member into the club.

  CROWDED LIVES

  CLARK HOWARD

  Sixth Avenue

  (Originally published in 1989)

  George Simms stood across the street on Sixth Avenue and looked at the old Algiers Hotel. It did not appear markedly different than he remembered it from years earlier. There were a couple of vagrants loitering outside and a few scruffy kids playing where previously a uniformed doorman would never have allowed, but the vagrants and the kids were there because the neighborhood had gone so far downhill. The hotel itself, twelve stories tall, standing formidably behind its marqueed entrance, was outwardly unchanged, as if its dignity, its style, might still be intact. George Simms knew, however, that inside would be a different story entirely.

  When there was a lull in traffic, Simms crossed the street and tried five of the eight entry doors before he found one unlocked. Walking quietly across a marble floor, he stopped at the edge of the foyer and looked at the lobby. The Italian-marble columns were still there, and some leaded windows high up in the wall that faced an inner courtyard, but that was all that remained unscathed. Most of the mahogany wainscoting and pilasters was warped, scratched, scarred, or broken off. The velvet tapestries were dusty and torn. The carpeting was worn, ripped, curling up at the corners. A lot of the original lobby furniture was still there, overstuffed chairs and divans on which stylishly dressed women had once taken afternoon tea. The women sitting on them now, George Simms observed, wore sweatshirts and Levis, and drank their coffee out of cardboard cups. Their children, perhaps two dozen of them—like their mothers, of various colors—were playing on the worn carpet, hiding behind the torn tapestries, or scribbling on the mahogany with stubs of crayon. Off in the corners sat a few elderly persons who watched them silently.