Enough Rope

by Lawrence Block

  Which was not to say that he’d given up his little adventures entirely.

  “I would be invited somewhere to attend a conference,” he said, “or to give a guest lecture. I’d be in another city where I didn’t know anyone and nobody knew me. And I would have had a few drinks, and I’d feel the urge for some excitement. And I could tell myself that, while a liaison with another woman would be a betrayal of my wife and a violation of my marital vows, the same could hardly be said for some innocent sport with another man. So I’d go to the sort of bar one goes to—they were never hard to find, even in those closeted days, even in provincial cities and college towns. And, once there, it was never hard to find someone.”

  He was silent for a moment, gazing off toward the horizon.

  “Then I walked into a bar in Madison, Wisconsin,” he said, “and there he was.”

  “Robert Paul Naismith.”

  “David,” he said. “That’s who I saw, that’s the youth on whom my eyes fastened the instant I cleared the threshold. I can remember the moment, you see. I can see him now exactly as I saw him then. He was wearing a dark silk shirt and tan trousers and loafers without socks, which no one wore in those days. He was standing at the bar with a drink in his hand, and his physique and the way he stood, the stance, the attitude—he was Michelangelo’s David. More than that, he was my David. He was my ideal, he was the object of a lifelong quest I hadn’t even known I was on, and I drank him in with my eyes and I was lost.”

  “Just like that,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” he agreed. “Just like that.”

  He was silent, and I wondered if he was waiting for me to prompt him. I decided he was not. He seemed to be choosing to remain in the memory for a moment.

  Then he said, “Quite simply, I had never been in love with anybody. I have come to believe that it is a form of insanity. Not to love, to care deeply for another. That seems to me to be quite sane, and even ennobling. I loved my parents, certainly, and in a somewhat different way I loved my wife.

  “This was categorically different. This was obsessive. This was preoccupation. It was the collector’s passion: I must have this painting, this statue, this postage stamp. I must embrace it, I must own it utterly. It and it alone will complete me. It will change my own nature. It will make me worthwhile.

  “It wasn’t sex, not really. I won’t say sex had nothing to do with it. I was attracted to David as I’d never been attracted to anyone before. But at the same time I felt less driven sexually than I had on occasion in the past. I wanted to possess David. If I could do that, if I could make him entirely mine, it scarcely mattered if I had sex with him.”

  He fell silent, and this time I decided he was waiting to be prompted. I said, “What happened?”

  “I threw my life over,” he said. “On some flimsy pretext or other I stayed on in Madison for a week after the conference ended. Then I flew with David to New York and bought an apartment, the top floor of a brownstone in Turtle Bay. And then I flew back to Buffalo, alone, and told my wife I was leaving her.”

  He lowered his eyes. “I didn’t want to hurt her,” he said, “but of course I hurt her badly and deeply. She was not completely surprised, I don’t believe, to learn there was a man involved. She’d inferred that much about me over the years, and probably saw it as part of the package, the downside of having a husband with an aesthetic sensibility.

  “But she thought I cared for her, and I made it very clear that I did not. She was a woman who had never hurt anyone, and I caused her a good deal of pain, and I regret that and always will. It seems to me a far blacker sin than the one I served time for.

  “Enough. I left her and moved to New York. Of course I resigned my tenured professorship at UB. I had connections throughout the academic world, to be sure, and a decent if not glorious reputation, so I might have found something at Columbia or NYU. But the scandal I’d created made that less likely, and anyway I no longer gave a damn for teaching. I just wanted to live, and enjoy my life.

  “There was money enough to make that possible. We lived well. Too well, really. Not wisely but too well. Good restaurants every night, fine wines with dinner. Season tickets to the opera and the ballet. Summers in the Pines. Winters in Barbados or Bali. Trips to London and Paris and Rome. And the company, in town or abroad, of other rich queens.”

  “And?”

  “And it went on like that,” he said. He folded his hands in his lap, and a little smile played on his lips. “It went on, and then one day I picked up a knife and killed him. You know that part, Matthew. It’s where you came in.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you don’t know why.”

  “No, that never came out. Or if it did I missed it.”

  He shook his head. “It never came out. I didn’t offer a defense, and I certainly didn’t provide an explanation. But can you guess?”

  “Why you killed him? I have no idea.”

  “But you must have come to know some of the reasons people have for killing other people? Why don’t you humor an old sinner and try to guess. Prove to me that my motive was not unique after all.”

  “The reasons that come to mind are the obvious ones,” I said, “and that probably rules them out. Let me see. He was leaving you. He was unfaithful to you. He had fallen in love with someone else.”

  “He would never have left,” he said. “He adored the life we led and knew he could never live half so well with someone else. He would never fall in love with anyone else any more than he could have fallen in love with me. David was in love with himself. And of course he was unfaithful, and had been from the beginning, but I had never expected him to be otherwise.”

  “You realized you’d thrown your life away on him,” I said, “and hated him for it.”

  “I had thrown my life away, but I didn’t regret it. I’d been living a lie, and what loss to toss it aside? While jetting off to Paris for a weekend, does one long for the gentle pleasures of a classroom in Buffalo? Some may, for all I know. I never did.”

  I was ready to quit, but he insisted I come up with a few more guesses. They were all off the mark.

  He said, “Give up? All right, I’ll tell you. He changed.”

  “He changed?”

  “When I met him,” he said, “my David was the most beautiful creature I had ever set eyes on, the absolute embodiment of my lifelong ideal. He was slender but muscular, vulnerable yet strong. He was—well, go back to the San Marco piazza and look at the statue. Michelangelo got it just right. That’s what he looked like.”

  “And then what? He got older?”

  He set his jaw. “Everyone gets older,” he said, “except for the ones who die young. It’s unfair, but there’s nothing for it. David didn’t merely age. He coarsened. He thickened. He ate too much and drank too much and stayed up too late and took too many drugs. He put on weight. He got bloated. He grew jowly, and got pouchy under his eyes. His muscles wasted beneath their coating of fat and his flesh sagged.

  “It didn’t happen overnight. But that’s how I experienced it, because the process was well along before I let myself see it. Finally I couldn’t help but see it.

  “I couldn’t bear to look at him. Before I had been unable to take my eyes off him, and now I found myself averting my gaze. I felt betrayed. I fell in love with a Greek god, and watched as he turned into a Roman emperor.”

  “And you killed him for that?”

  “I wasn’t trying to kill him.”

  I looked at him.

  “Oh, I suppose I was, really. I’d been drinking, we’d both been drinking, and we’d had an argument, and I was angry. I don’t suppose I was too far gone to know that he’d be dead when I was done, and that I’d have killed him. But that wasn’t the point.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “He passed out,” he said. “He was lying there, naked, reeking of the wine seeping out of his pores, this great expanse of bloated flesh as white as marble. I suppose I hated him for having thus transfor
med himself, and I know I hated myself for having been an agent of his transformation. And I decided to do something about it.”

  He shook his head, and sighed deeply. “I went into the kitchen,” he said, “and I came back with a knife. And I thought of the boy I’d seen that first night in Madison, and I thought of Michelangelo. And I tried to be Michelangelo.”

  I must have looked puzzled. He said, “Don’t you remember? I took the knife and cut away the part that wasn’t David.”

  It was a few days later in Rome when I recounted all this to Elaine. We were at an outdoor café near the Spanish Steps. “All those years,” I said, “I took it for granted he was trying to destroy his lover. That’s what mutilation generally is, the expression of a desire to annihilate. But he wasn’t trying to disfigure him, he was trying to refigure him.”

  “He was just a few years ahead of his time,” she said. “Now they call it liposuction and charge the earth for it. I’ll tell you one thing. As soon as we get back I’m going straight from the airport to the gym, before all this pasta becomes a permanent part of me. I’m not taking any chances.”

  “I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about.”

  “That’s reassuring. How awful, though. How godawful for both of them.”

  “The things people do.”

  “You said it. Well, what do you want to do? We could sit around feeling sorry for two men and the mess they made of their lives, or we could go back to the hotel and do something life-affirming. You tell me.”

  “It’s a tough one,” I said. “How soon do you need my decision?”

  Let’s Get Lost

  When the phone call came I was parked in front of the television set in the front room, nursing a glass of bourbon and watching the Yankees. It’s funny what you remember and what you don’t. I remember that Thurman Munson had just hit a long foul that missed being a home run by no more than a foot, but I don’t remember who they were playing, or even what kind of a season they had that year.

  I remember that the bourbon was J. W. Dant, and that I was drinking it on the rocks, but of course I would remember that. I always remembered what I was drinking, though I didn’t always remember why.

  The boys had stayed up to watch the opening innings with me, but tomorrow was a school day, and Anita took them upstairs and tucked them in while I freshened my drink and sat down again. The ice was mostly melted by the time Munson hit his long foul, and I was still shaking my head at that when the phone rang. I let it ring, and Anita answered it and came in to tell me it was for me. Somebody’s secretary, she said.

  I picked up the phone, and a woman’s voice, crisply professional, said, “Mr. Scudder, I’m calling for Mr. Alan Herdig of Herdig and Crowell.”

  “I see,” I said, and listened while she elaborated, and estimated just how much time it would take me to get to their offices. I hung up and made a face.

  “You have to go in?”

  I nodded. “It’s about time we had a break in this one,” I said. “I don’t expect to get much sleep tonight, and I’ve got a court appearance tomorrow morning.”

  “I’ll get you a clean shirt. Sit down. You’ve got time to finish your drink, don’t you?”

  I always had time for that.

  Years ago, this was. Nixon was president, a couple of years into his first term. I was a detective with the NYPD, attached to the Sixth Precinct in Greenwich Village. I had a house on Long Island with two cars in the garage, a Ford wagon for Anita and a beat-up Plymouth Valiant for me.

  Traffic was light on the LIE, and I didn’t pay much attention to the speed limit. I didn’t know many cops who did. Nobody ever ticketed a brother officer. I made good time, and it must have been somewhere around a quarter to ten when I left the car at a bus stop on First Avenue. I had a card on the dashboard that would keep me safe from tickets and tow trucks.

  The best thing about enforcing the laws is that you don’t have to pay a lot of attention to them yourself.

  Her doorman rang upstairs to announce me, and she met me at the door with a drink. I don’t remember what she was wearing, but I’m sure she looked good in it. She always did.

  She said, “I would never call you at home. But it’s business.”

  “Yours or mine?”

  “Maybe both. I got a call from a client. A Madison Avenue guy, maybe an agency vice-president. Suits from Tripler’s, season tickets for the Rangers, house in Connecticut.”

  “And?”

  “And didn’t I say something about knowing a cop? Because he and some friends were having a friendly card game and something happened to one of them.”

  “Something happened? Something happens to a friend of yours, you take him to a hospital. Or was it too late for that?”

  “He didn’t say, but that’s what I heard. It sounds to me as though somebody had an accident and they need somebody to make it disappear.”

  “And you thought of me.”

  “Well,” she said.

  She’d thought of me before, in a similar connection. Another client of hers, a Wall Street warrior, had had a heart attack in her bed one afternoon. Most men will tell you that’s how they want to go, and perhaps it’s as good a way as any, but it’s not all that convenient for the people who have to clean up after them, especially when the bed in question belongs to some working girl.

  When the equivalent happens in the heroin trade, it’s good PR. One junkie checks out with an overdose and the first thing all his buddies want to know is where did he get the stuff and how can they cop some themselves. Because, hey, it must be good, right? A hooker, on the other hand, has less to gain from being listed as cause of death. And I suppose she felt a professional responsibility, if you want to call it that, to spare the guy and his family embarrassment. So I made him disappear, and left him fully dressed in an alley down in the financial district. I called it in anonymously and went back to her apartment to claim my reward.

  “I’ve got the address,” she said now. “Do you want to have a look? Or should I tell them I couldn’t reach you?”

  I kissed her, and we clung to each other for a long moment. When I came up for air I said, “It’d be a lie.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Telling them you couldn’t reach me. You can always reach me.”

  “You’re a sweetie.”

  “You better give me that address,” I said.

  I retrieved my car from the bus stop and left it in another one a dozen or so blocks uptown. The address I was looking for was a brownstone in the East Sixties. A shop with handbags and briefcases in the window occupied the storefront, flanked by a travel agent and a men’s clothier. There were four doorbells in the vestibule, and I rang the third one and heard the intercom activated, but didn’t hear anyone say anything. I was reaching to ring a second time when the buzzer sounded. I pushed the door open and walked up three flights of carpeted stairs.

  Out of habit, I stood to the side when I knocked. I didn’t really expect a bullet, and what came through the door was a voice, pitched low, asking who was there.

  “Police,” I said. “I understand you’ve got a situation here.”

  There was a pause. Then a voice—maybe the same one, maybe not—said, “I don’t understand. Has there been a complaint, Officer?”

  They wanted a cop, but not just any cop. “My name’s Scudder,” I said. “Elaine Mardell said you could use some help.”

  The lock turned and the door opened. Two men were standing there, dressed for the office in dark suits and white shirts and ties. I looked past them and saw two more men, one in a suit, the other in gray slacks and a blue blazer. They looked to be in their early to mid forties, which made them ten to fifteen years older than me.

  I was what, thirty-two that year? Something like that.

  “Come on in,” one of them said. “Careful.”

  I didn’t know what I was supposed to be careful of, but found out when I gave the door a shove and it stopped after a few inches. Th
ere was a body on the floor, a man, curled on his side. One arm was flung up over his head, the other bent at his side, the hand inches from the handle of the knife. It was an easy-open stiletto and it was buried hilt-deep in his chest.

  I pushed the door shut and knelt down for a close look at him, and heard the bolt turn as one of them locked the door.

  The dead man was around their age, and had been similarly dressed until he took off his suit jacket and loosened his tie. His hair was a little longer than theirs, perhaps because he was losing hair on the crown and wanted to conceal the bald spot. Everyone tries that, and it never works.

  I didn’t feel for a pulse. A touch of his forehead established that he was too cold to have one. And I hadn’t really needed to touch him to know that he was dead. Hell, I knew that much before I parked the car.

  Still, I took some time looking him over. Without looking up I asked what had happened. There was a pause while they decided who would reply, and then the same man who’d questioned me through the closed door said, “We don’t really know.”

  “You came home and found him here?”

  “Hardly that. We were playing a few hands of poker, the five of us. Then the doorbell rang and Phil went to see who it was.”

  I nodded at the dead man. “That’s Phil there?”

  Someone said it was. “He’d folded already,” the man in the blazer added.

  “And the rest of you fellows were still in the middle of a hand.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So he—Phil?”

  “Yes, Phil.”

  “Phil went to the door while you finished the hand.”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “And we didn’t really see what happened,” one of the suits said.

  “We were in the middle of a hand,” another explained, “and you can’t really see much from where we were sitting.”