A Drop of the Hard Stuff: A Matthew Scudder Novel

by Lawrence Block

  After I’d seen him home I went home myself. I’d stopped at the hotel earlier, surprised that there were no messages, and I didn’t see anything in my box this time, either. I asked the fellow behind the desk and he said that there’d been one person who’d called a couple of times but hadn’t given his name or left any kind of a message. All he could tell me was that the caller had been a man.

  Jack, I thought, and he’d given up leaving messages because they didn’t do any good. I went upstairs, and I was hanging up my jacket when the phone rang.

  A voice I didn’t recognize said, “Matt? This is Gregory Stillman.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “We met the other night at Sober Today. Jack Ellery introduced us.”

  “I remember.” Jack’s sponsor, the jewelry designer, with one of his creations dangling from his ear. “I don’t think we got as far as last names.”

  “No,” he said, and drew an audible breath. “Matt, I have some very bad news.”

  V

  THE MEMORIAL SERVICE for John Joseph Ellery was held Monday afternoon in the same church basement where I’d heard Jan tell her story on Thursday evening. There was no AA meeting scheduled, but Greg had been able to make arrangements with the church for the use of the room. As far as I could tell, all of the thirty or so in attendance had known Jack in AA.

  All but two, a pair of men in suits who might as well have been wearing blue uniforms. Cops, following the long-established routine of attending a service to see who showed up. I’d done that myself a few times, and couldn’t remember ever learning anything useful in the process. But that didn’t mean it never paid off.

  The service was nonreligious, and there was no clergyman in attendance. When I arrived there was a tape playing quietly, something classical that I recognized but couldn’t identify, and when it faded out Greg Stillman got up in front of the group. He was wearing a dark suit, and had left the earring home.

  He introduced himself as Jack’s friend and sponsor, and spoke for five minutes or so, telling a couple of stories. There was a moment when he seemed on the verge of being overcome by emotion, but he stopped talking and waited and the moment passed, and he was able to go on.

  Then people stood up in turn and shared something about Jack. It was like an AA meeting except you didn’t wait to be called on, you just took your turn. And all of the sharing was about Jack. Aside from the anecdotes, the gist of it was that Jack had had a rough life and a bad drinking story, but that he’d found real hope and comfort in the program, and was genuinely reborn through the twelve steps. And, by the grace of God, he’d died sober.

  There’s a comfort.

  The service concluded with a song. An ethereal young woman with big eyes and see-through skin stood up in front of the room and said that her name was Elizabeth and that she was an alcoholic. She hadn’t known Jack very well, she said, but she had sobriety in common with him, if nothing else, and Greg had asked her to sing, and she was glad to do it. She gave an a cappella rendition of “Amazing Grace,” including one verse I couldn’t recall having heard before. Not long before I got sober, I’d heard Judy Collins sing the song on a record they played at a whore’s funeral. That would have been hard to improve on, but this version came close.

  There was a coffee urn—it was, after all, an AA crowd—and people gathered around it afterward. I turned to look for the cops, thinking I could see if they wanted coffee. I figured they wouldn’t take it without an invitation. But they had slipped out, and I headed for the door myself until I heard my name called.

  It was Greg. He took my arm and asked me if I had a minute. “A few minutes,” he said. “There’s a conversation we ought to have, and then I’ve got a favor to ask you.”

  The next time I saw Jack Ellery he was dead.

  And that was at the viewing room at the morgue, where Greg and I looked for a long moment at the mortal remains of a man we’d both known. Then he said, “Yes, that’s him. That’s Jack Ellery.” And I nodded in affirmation, and they let us out of there.

  Outside he turned up his collar against the chill and wondered if we’d get more rain. I said I’d missed the forecast, and he said he never knew what the forecasts meant. “They used to tell you what it was going to do,” he said, “and even if they were wrong a lot of the time, at least they gave you a clear-cut answer. Now it’s all percentages. What on earth is a fifty percent chance of rain? How do you respond to that, carry half of an umbrella?”

  “This way they’re never wrong.”

  “That’s it exactly. ‘Well, we said only a ten percent chance of rain and it poured all day, so all that means is a long shot came in.’ Just because you’re a meteorologist doesn’t mean you don’t feel the need to cover your ass.” He took a breath. “I never asked you this, but do you prefer Matt or Matthew?”

  Either’s fine with me, but it only confuses people to tell them that. “Matt’s good,” I said.

  “Matt, why do they insist on a formal identification? He was in prison, he has a police record, they’d already identified him from fingerprints. Suppose there was nobody around who could do it. They’d get along without it, wouldn’t they?”

  “Sure.”

  “I really didn’t want to see him like that. My father’s funeral was open-casket, and there he was, like something from a road-company Madame Tussauds, and that’s the image I was left with, this lifeless waxen effigy. We had our problems, God knows. I was not the son he’d had in mind, as he made all too clear. But we made it up during his last illness, and there was love and mutual respect there at the end, and then that final hideous glimpse of him eclipsed the strong and vigorous man I wanted to remember. I knew that would happen, I dreaded it, but at the same time I couldn’t not look. Do you know what I mean?”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “A little over a year. Why?”

  “Because time will probably change that,” I said. “The earlier memory will supplant the other.”

  “That’s already begun to happen. I didn’t know whether I could trust it, whether it was real. Or just some form of wishful thinking.”

  “Wishful thinking may have something to do with it,” I said, “but it’s still real. We wind up remembering people the way they were, or at least the way we knew them. I had an aunt with Alzheimer’s, she spent the last ten years of her life institutionalized, while the disease ate her mind and her personality and everything that made her human. And that’s how I knew her, and how I remembered her.”

  “God.”

  “And that all faded out after she was gone, and the real Aunt Peg came back.”

  Over coffee he said, “I barely looked at him just now. All I really saw were the wounds.”

  He’d been shot in the mouth and the forehead. They’d shown the corpse with a sheet covering him from the neck down, so if there were other wounds we wouldn’t have seen them.

  “I hope you’re right,” he said. “About the image fading. It can’t fade too soon for me. Thank you for that. More than that, thanks for making the trip.”

  I hadn’t much wanted to keep him company, but it was a hard request to say no to.

  “I didn’t want to go at all,” he said, “and I certainly didn’t want to go by myself. I could have found someone else to come, some AA friend of Jack’s, but you felt like the right choice. Thank you.”

  We’d headed north on First Avenue when we left the morgue, and stopped at a coffee shop called Mykonos just past Forty-second Street. When he ordered a grilled cheese sandwich, I realized it had been a while since I’d eaten, and said I’d have the same.

  “Besides,” he said, “there’s something else I want to talk about.”

  “Oh?”

  “The two men at the back of the room. They were police officers.”

  “Somehow I sensed as much.”

  “Well, I didn’t need radar, because I saw their badges when they interviewed me. In fact they were the ones who asked me to make the formal ID. I aske
d them if they were close to solving the case, and they said something noncommittal.”

  “That’s no surprise.”

  “Do you think they’ll solve it?”

  “It’s possible they’ve solved it already,” I said, “in the sense that they may know who did it. Of course that’s not the same as having sufficient evidence to bring a case to trial.”

  “Could you find out?”

  “Whether or not they know who did it?” He nodded. “I suppose I could ask around. An ordinary citizen wouldn’t get a straight answer, but I still know a few people in the department. Why?”

  “I have a reason.”

  One he evidently preferred to keep to himself. I let it go.

  I said, “I’ll see if anybody wants to tell me anything. But I can make an educated guess right now as to who killed Jack.”

  “You can?”

  “Not by name,” I said. “Maybe it’s more accurate to say I can guess why he was killed. Somebody wanted to shut him up.”

  “He was shot in the mouth.”

  “At very close range. Essentially, somebody stuck the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, and this would have been after the forehead shot killed him. Put that together with the Ninth Step work Jack kept talking about and the message is pretty clear.”

  “I was afraid of that,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  He looked at his hands, then raised his eyes to meet mine. “I got him killed,” he said.

  VI

  DENNIS REDMOND WAS a detective attached to the Nineteenth Precinct, on East Sixty-seventh Street. I reached him at his desk, and let him pick a time and a place to meet.

  “I got a few calls to make,” he said, “and then I can get out of here. You know the Minstrel Boy?”

  “I know the song.”

  “On Lexington,” he said, “right around the corner from us. Say two o’clock?”

  The minstrel boy to the war has gone

  In the ranks of death you will find him…

  It was, not surprisingly, an Irish tavern, and I got there a few minutes early and took a booth on the side, sitting where I could see him come in. I walked over to the jukebox while I waited for the waiter to bring me my club soda. There were a lot of Irish selections, and among them was “The Minstrel Boy,” the Thomas Moore song, with “The Rose of Tralee” on the flip side, both of them performed by John McCormack. I spent a quarter and listened to that great tenor voice from the past singing about a war that was before my time or his.

  The record ended and I sipped my club soda and glanced now and then at my watch, and wondered how McCormack would do with “The Rose of Tralee” and thought about spending another quarter to find out, and then at 2:12 Redmond came through the door. I recognized him right away from Jack’s memorial service, and he may even have been wearing the same suit. He took a moment to scan the bar and tables—there wasn’t much of a crowd—and came right over.

  “Dennis Redmond,” he said. “And you’re Matt Scudder, and you didn’t happen to mention you were at the service yesterday.”

  “I saw you there,” I said, “with another fellow—”

  “That’d be Rich Bikelski.”

  “—but I didn’t know it was you, not until you walked in just now.”

  “No, how would you?” He shook his head. “Been a long day. I can use something. What’s that you got there, vodka tonic?”

  “Club soda.”

  He straightened up. “I don’t think I’m gonna follow your lead on that one,” he said, and went over to the bar. He came back with a tall glass of pale amber liquid over ice. Whiskey and water, from the look of it, and I found myself wondering what kind of whiskey it was, and which brand.

  He sat down, raised his glass to me, and took a sip. He was a bulky man with a beefy face and a whiskey drinker’s ruddy complexion, but a look at his eyes let you know there was a working brain in there. “Joe Durkin called to put in a word for you,” he said. “Says you’re all right. You were on the job, had a gold shield. That how you came to know Joe?”

  I shook my head. “We didn’t meet until a little over a year ago. I was a few years off the force by then.”

  “Working private.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But I guess the two of you got along. That what you’re doing now? Working private?”

  “When something comes my way,” I said. “But my interest in Ellery is personal.”

  “Oh?” He frowned in concentration. “You were at the Six, and it seems to me he took a bust down there once. Nothing came of it, but was that your case? Years ago, that would have been.”

  I told him that was a good guess, that it hadn’t been my case but that I’d been present as a spectator when the witness blew the ID. “We went back a little further than that,” I said, and explained how I’d known Jack briefly in the Bronx.

  “Boys together,” he said. “One turns bad, the other goes on the cops. Years pass and they’re facing each other down in a darkened alley. A shot rings out. I think I saw the movie.”

  “You probably did. Barry Fitzgerald played the priest.”

  He took a hit of his drink, and I got enough of a whiff of it to identify it as Scotch. He said, “Then you lose touch, and he goes off to the joint for something else, and he gets out and gets himself killed, and a couple dozen people from AA hold a service for him, and here you sit drinking club soda. Is it any wonder they made me a detective?”

  “I’m surprised they didn’t name you commissioner.”

  “Just a question of time,” he said. “So it’s the same movie, but now the cop and the crook meet up again in the same AA room, and instead of Barry Fitzgerald you’ve got Queen for the Day running the show. What’s his name, Spellman? No, Jesus, that was the cardinal. This was the gym. Stillman.”

  “He said you talked to him.”

  “Couple of times. Took the whole thing pretty hard, but you get the sense that he’s got some toughness to him, under all the glitter. He was Ellery’s sponsor, whatever that amounts to. Is that anything like having a rabbi in the department?”

  “That’s close.”

  “Somebody who pulls your coat, steers you right.”

  “There you go.”

  “You got a sponsor yourself?” I nodded. “It’s not Stillman, is it?”

  “No.”

  “And I don’t suppose you’re Stillman’s sponsor.”

  “I haven’t been sober long enough to start telling other people how to do it.”

  “How long? Or isn’t that something I’m supposed to ask?”

  “I don’t know what anybody’s supposed to do or not do. I’m coming up on a year the middle of next month.”

  “And Ellery—”

  “Just celebrated two years.”

  “Just in time to get shot. You know who shot him?”

  “Somebody who wanted him to keep quiet.”

  “Yeah, that’s our thinking on the subject. ‘Here’s a little something for that big mouth of yours. Bang!’ Far as who that somebody might be, I’d say your guess is as good as mine, but what I’m hoping is it’s better. You got anything?”

  “No.”

  “My position, where would you go with this, Matt? You made detective, and I understand you were good at it. Who would you look at?”

  “People he ran with. Guys he jailed with.”

  “Uh-huh. And when that didn’t go anywhere?”

  “I’d probably wait for somebody who knew something to use it as a bargaining chip.”

  “A Get Out of Jail Free card.”

  “Right.”

  “Other words, wait for the case to clear itself. Something to be said for that. You got a high-profile case, prominent and affluent victim, that’s another story. Then you have to look like you’re doing something, so you take action whether or not there’s much point to it. Ask you something, Matt? The vic here, you knew him way back when, and you knew him again this past year, with both of you sober.”
r />   “So?”

  “I was just wondering how close you were with him.”

  “Close enough to show up at the funeral.”

  “But no closer?”

  “Not really. I’m here now because someone asked me to see what I could find out.”

  “Somebody with an earring would be my guess. Why I ask, I don’t want to say anything’s gonna rub you the wrong way. But what it comes down to, nobody’s gonna stay up all night sweating this one out. What do they say about speaking ill of the dead?”

  “They say not to.”

  “Well, sometimes you can’t help it. This was a low-life criminal for all but two years of his life, when he suddenly decided to get off the booze and find God. Is that what happens? You find God?”

  “Some people seem to.”

  He thought about it, finished his drink, put down the empty glass. “More power to them,” he said. “Would I like to clear this one? Of course I would. I’d like to clear all my cases and watch all the bad guys get convicted and go away. But what are the odds? Words of one syllable, your friend was a bum, and after his dry spell what’s he gonna do but pick up a drink and point a gun at somebody? Happens all the time.”

  Not all the time, I thought. Often, though. I had to give him that. But not all the time.

  “So I’d like to clear it,” he said, “because it’s on my plate, and my mother raised me to finish everything.” He patted his stomach. “A lesson I learned all too well. But on the dinner plate of crime, my friend, Jack Ellery is the Brussels sprouts.”

  VII

  MOST PEOPLE OVERCOOK them,” Greg Stillman said. “If you don’t, there’s nothing wrong with Brussels sprouts.”

  “Next time I see Redmond,” I said, “I’ll be sure to tell him that.”

  “Sautéed in coconut oil, just long enough to ensure that they’re cooked through, but still crisp. And a little curry powder makes all the difference.”