A Stab in the Dark

by Lawrence Block

Page 18

 

  "So why keep it? Why not throw it away?"

  "Its against the law to litter. "

  "Turn around. "

  He came off the wall slowly, eyes wary. A little line of blood trailed from the corner of his mouth down over his chin. His mouth was starting to puff up some where my elbow had caught him.

  He wouldnt die of it.

  I gave him the wallet and the cigarette lighter. I tucked the roll of bills in my own pocket.

  "Thats my money," he said.

  "You stole it. "

  "Like hell I did! What are you gonna do, keep it?"

  "What do you think?" I flicked the knife open and held it so that the light glinted off the face of the blade. "You better not turn up in this part of the city again. Another thing you better not do is carry a blade when half the departments looking for the First Avenue Slasher. "

  He stared at me. Something in his eyes said he wished I didnt have that knife in my hand. I met his gaze and closed the knife, dropped it on the ground behind me.

  "Go ahead," I said. "Be my guest. "

  I balanced on the balls of my feet, waiting for him. For a moment he might have been considering it, and I was hoping hed make a move. I could feel the blood singing in my veins, pulsing in my temples.

  He said, "Youre crazy, you know? What you are is crazy," and he edged off ten or twenty yards, then half-ran to the corner.

  I stood watching until he was out of sight.

  The street was still empty. I found the gravity knife on the pavement and put it in my pocket. Across the street, Armstrongs door opened and a young man and woman emerged. They walked down the street holding hands.

  I felt fine. I wasnt drunk. Id had a day of maintenance drinking, nothing more. Look how Id handled the punk. Nothing wrong with my instincts, nothing slow about my reflexes. The booze wasnt getting in the way. Just a matter of taking on fuel, of keeping a full tank. Nothing wrong with that.

  Chapter 12

  I came suddenly awake. There was no warm-up period. It was as abrupt as turning on a transistor radio.

  I was on my bed in my hotel room, lying on top of the covers with my head on the pillow. I had piled my clothes on the chair but slept in my underwear. There was a foul taste in my dry mouth and I had a killer headache.

  I got up. I felt shaky and awful, and a sense of impending doom hung in the air, as though if I turned around quickly I could look Death in the eye.

  I didnt want a drink but knew I needed one to take the edge off the way I felt. I couldnt find the bourbon bottle and then I finally found it in the wastebasket. Evidently Id finished it before I went to bed. I wondered how much it had contained.

  No matter. It was empty now.

  I held out a hand, studied it. No visible tremors. I flexed the fingers. Not as steady as Gibraltar, maybe, but not a case of the shakes, either.

  Shaky inside, though.

  I couldnt remember returning to the hotel. I probed gingerly at my memory and couldnt get any further than the boy scuttling down the street and around the corner. Anthony Sforczak, that was his name.

  See? Nothing wrong with the memory.

  Except that it ran out at that point. Or perhaps a moment later, when the young couple came out of Armstrongs and walked up the street holding hands. Then it all went blank, coming into focus again with me coming to in my hotel room. What time was it, anyway?

  My watch was still on my wrist. Quarter after nine. And it was light outside my window, so that meant a. m. Not that I really had to look to be sure. I hadnt lost a day, just the length of time it took me to walk half a block home and get to bed.

  Assuming Id come straight home.

  I stripped off my underwear and got into the shower. While I was under the spray I could hear my phone ringing. I let it ring. I spent a long time under the hot spray, then took a blast of cold for as long as I could stand it, which wasnt very long. I toweled dry and shaved. My hand wasnt as steady as it might have been but I took my time and didnt cut myself.

  I didnt like what I saw in the mirror. A lot of red in the eyes. I thought of Havermeyers description of Susan Potowski, her eyes swimming in blood. I didnt like my red eyes, or the mesh of broken blood vessels on my cheekbones and across the bridge of my nose.

  I knew what put them there. Drink put them there. Nothing else. I could forget about what it might be doing to my liver because my liver was tucked away where I didnt have to look at it every morning.

  And where nobody else could see it.

  I got dressed, put on all clean clothes, stuffed everything else in my laundry bag. The shower helped and the shave helped and the clean clothes helped, but in spite of all three I could feel remorse settling over my shoulders like a cape. I didnt want to look at the previous night because I knew I wasnt going to like what Id see there.

  But what choice did I have?

  I put the roll of bills in one pocket, the gravity knife in the other. I went downstairs and out, walking past the desk without breaking stride. I knew thered be messages there but I figured theyd keep.

  I decided not to stop at McGoverns but when I got there I turned in. Just one quick drink to still the invisible shaking. I drank it like the medicine it was.

  Around the corner I sat in a rear pew at St. Pauls. For what seemed like a long time I didnt even think. I just sat there.

  Then the thoughts started. No way to stop them, really.

  Id been drunk the night before and hadnt known it. Id probably been drunk fairly early in the day. There were patches in Brooklyn that I couldnt remember clearly, and I didnt seem to have any recollection of the subway ride back to Manhattan. For that matter, I couldnt be sure Id ridden the subway. I might have taken a cab.

  I remembered talking to myself in a Brooklyn bar. I must have been drunk then. I didnt tend to talk to myself when I was sober.

  Not yet, anyway.

  All right, I could live with all that. I drank too goddamn much, and when you do that with consistency there are going to be times when you get drunk without wanting to. This wasnt the first time and I didnt suspect it would be the last. It came with the territory.

  But Id been drunk when I was playing Hero Cop on Ninth Avenue, drunk with the booze for high-octane fuel. My street-smart instincts that warned me about a mugging were less a source of pride the morning after.

  Maybe he just wanted a match.

  My gorge rose at the thought and I tasted bile at the back of my throat. Maybe he was just another kid from Woodside having himself a night on the town. Maybe hed been a mugger only in my mind, my drunken mind. Maybe Id beaten him and robbed him for no good reason at all.

  But hed asked for a match when he had a working lighter.

  So? That was an icebreaker as old as tobacco. Ask for a match, strike up a conversation. He could have been a male hustler. He would hardly have been the first gay man to put on a bomber jacket.

  He was carrying a gravity knife.

  So? Frisk the city and you could stock an arsenal. Half the city was carrying something to protect it from the other half. The knife was a deadly weapon and he was breaking a law carrying it, but it didnt prove anything.

  He knew how to grab that wall. It wasnt his first frisk.

  And that didnt prove anything either. There are neighborhoods where you cant grow up without getting stopped and tossed once a week by the cops.

  And the money? The roll of bills?

  He could have come by it honestly. Or he could have earned it in any of innumerable dishonest ways and still not have been a mugger.

  And my vaunted cop instincts? Hell, the minute he came out of the doorway Id known he was going to approach me.

  Right. And Id also known his partner was moving in behind me, knew it as if Id had eyes in the back of my head. Except there was nobody there. So much for the infallibility of instinct.

  I took out the gravity knife, opened it. Suppose Id been carrying it the ni
ght before. More realistically, suppose Id still been carrying the icepick Id bought in Boerum Hill. Would I have limited myself to a couple of body punches and a forearm smash to the face? Or would I have worked with the materials at hand?

  I felt shaky, and it was more than the hangover.

  I closed the knife and put it away. I took out the roll of bills, removed the rubber band, counted the cash. I made it a hundred and seventy dollars in fives and tens.

  If he was a mugger, why didnt he have the knife in his hand? How come it was in his jacket pocket with the flap buttoned down?

  Or was the flap buttoned?

  Didnt matter. I sorted the money and added it to my own. On my way out I lit a couple of candles, then slipped seventeen dollars into the poor box.

  At the corner of Fifty-seventh I dropped the gravity knife into a sewer.

  Chapter 13

  My cab driver was an Israeli immigrant and I dont think hed ever heard of Rikers Island. I told him to follow the signs for LaGuardia Airport. When we got close I gave him directions. I got out at a luncheonette at the foot of the bridge that spans Bowery Bay and the channel of the East River that separates the island from the rest of Queens.

  Lunch hour had come and gone and the place was mostly empty. A few men in work clothes were seated at the counter. About halfway down a man sat in a booth with a cup of coffee and looked up expectantly at my approach. I introduced myself and he said he was Marvin Hiller.

  "My cars outside," he said. "Or did you want to grab a cup of coffee? The only thing is Im a little bit rushed. I had a long morning in Queens Criminal Court and Im supposed to be at my dentists in forty-five minutes. If Im late Im late. "

  I told him I didnt care about coffee. He paid his tab and we went outside and rode his car over the bridge. He was a pleasant and rather earnest man a few years younger than I and he looked like what he was, a lawyer with an office on Queens Boulevard in Elmhurst. One of his clients, one whod be contributing very little toward the rent on that office, was Louis Pinell.

  Id gotten his name from Frank Fitzroy and managed to get his secretary to beep him and call me at the hotel. Id expected a flat turndown on my request for clearance to see Pinell and got just the reverse. "Just so its kosher," he had said, "why dont you meet me out there and well drive over together. Youll probably get more out of him that way. Hes a little more comfortable about talking with his lawyer present. "

  Now he said, "I dont know what youll be able to get from him. I suppose you mostly want to satisfy yourself that he didnt kill the Ettinger woman. "

  "I suppose. "

  "I would think hes in the clear on that one. The evidence is pretty clear-cut. If it was just his word Id say forget it, because who knows what they remember and what they make up when theyre as crazy as he is?"

  "Hes really crazy?"

  "Oh, hes a bedbug," Hiller said. "No question about it. Youll see for yourself. Im his attorney, but between ourselves I see my job as a matter of making sure he never gets out without a leash. Its a good thing I drew this case. "

  "Whys that?"

  "Because anybody crazy enough to want to could get him off without a whole lot of trouble. Im going to plead him, but if I made a fight the States case wouldnt stand up. All theyve got is his confession and you could knock that out a dozen different ways, including that he was cuckoo at the time he confessed. Theyve got no evidence, not after nine years. Theres lawyers who think the advocate system means they should go to bat for a guy like Lou and put him back on the streets. "