A Drop of the Hard Stuff: A Matthew Scudder Novel

by Lawrence Block

  “You’re not a bad investigator yourself.”

  “Well, two plus two, you know? He owes me an apology, he wants to make amends. He used to be an alcoholic, but he’s not drinking anymore, and part of staying sober is what he’s doing now. There was an expression he used, something about cleaning up the mess he made—”

  “The wreckage of the past.”

  “That’s it.” He drank some beer. “The hell, I know a little about addiction. Fucking blow took me down big-time. And right about this time I place the guy. If I ever knew his last name I long since forgot it, but I’m listening to him and he’s talking about a coke deal, how he beat me for a couple of grand, and of course, Jesus, he’s High-Low Jack.”

  “That’s what you used to call him?”

  “Well, I don’t know that I ever called him that. I called him Jack. Or man, we all called each other man all the time. Hey, man. Where’s it at, man? But if somebody wanted to know which Jack I was talking about—”

  “High-Low Jack.”

  “Right. And I remembered the deal. Not the numbers, whether it was two grand or five or whatever it was, but I was making this quantity buy and I was no rube, I checked it out first, laid out a line and had a taste, and it was very good and righteous coke.”

  “And you got it home and it wasn’t.”

  “It magically turned into baby laxative,” he said, “somewhere between Googie’s men’s room and my apartment. Not the first time I got burned, and not the last, either. I was mad as hell, believe it, but at the same time I had to admire how slick he’d been. And now here he is, parked in my lobby, perched on the edge of this sectional sofa, asking if I remember the amount because he wants to make arrangements to pay me back. Just so much a month, but for as long as it takes to make it right.”

  I hadn’t seen him signal the waiter, who appeared magically with another Dos Equis. I had barely touched my soda.

  He said, “Cheers,” and took a sip. “You can probably guess what I told him. I said he didn’t owe me a thing. Whatever he beat me out of would have gone straight up my nose. And the money wasn’t mine in the first place. It was my firm’s, and it was a drop in the bucket I siphoned out of that place. I had to make restitution, and I did, but you never pay back everything you took, because they didn’t know just how bad I hurt them and neither did I. Whatever my debt was, they’d marked it paid in full, and that’s how I felt about whatever Jack thought he owed me.”

  “And that’s what you told him.”

  “Yes, and I had to spell it out, because he didn’t want to get off the hook that easily. What I didn’t say, but I have to admit it was going through my mind, was what did I want with a guy in a thrift-shop overcoat showing up once a week to slip me a ten-dollar bill? Makes you feel better, I said, find a charity you like and give them a few bucks. But as far as you and I are concerned, I said, we’re square.”

  “And he accepted that.”

  “Finally. He said he guessed he could cross me off his list. I guess I wasn’t the only person he burned.”

  “One way or another,” I said, “there were quite a few people he felt he needed to make amends to.”

  “And everybody in your crowd goes through something like that?” He didn’t wait for an answer, brandished his stein of beer. “Might find out for myself,” he said. “One of these days.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Except I pretty much stick to beer these days. Cocaine was my problem, you know. I got one noseful of blow, and nothing was ever gonna be the same. But I stopped, and I never had a taste since. And I got to tell you it’s all over the place. There’s a guy at the bar, I’m not gonna point him out, but all I’d have to do is tip him a wink and go to the can, and he’d follow me there and sell me whatever I want. And he’s here all the time, and wherever you go there’s somebody just like him.

  “So these days just about the only thing I allow myself from south of the border is this here, and maybe a small glass of brandy after a big meal. Can’t turn into an alcoholic that way, can you?”

  “It’s not what you drink,” I said, as I’d heard others say. “It’s what it does to you.”

  “That the party line on the subject? Well, who knows where I’ll end up. But that doesn’t mean I’m asking you to save me a seat.”

  Lord, make me sober. But not yet.

  XVII

  FRANCIS PAUL DUKACS was easy to find, once I had that name to work with. By then I’d called every Dukes in the Manhattan book, and every Duke, too; there weren’t all that many of either, and it seemed reasonable that one of them might be related to Frankie Dukes, or at least know of him. But plural or singular, nobody could help me out.

  Then I got home from St. Paul’s one night and there was a message to call Mr. Bell. I dialed the number on the slip and they answered at the Top Knot and called Danny Boy to the phone. “You could stop by,” he said, “and I was going to suggest that, but it’s easier to pass this on over the phone. Unless you feel the need to compare the Top Knot’s Coca-Cola with Poogan’s, in which case I’d welcome your company.”

  I told him I was just about ready to call it a night.

  “Then write this down, Matthew. Francis Paul Doo-kosh, except that’s not how it’s spelled.” He spelled it out for me. “It’s Hungarian, I think, or maybe Czech. One of those countries that get in the papers whenever the Russians send in their tanks.”

  “Frankie Dukes.”

  “The man himself. And that is all I know about him, though I could probably find out more. But that may be all you need to track him down.”

  And indeed it was. I opened the book as soon as I got off the phone, and there he was, with a listed phone and an address all the way east on Seventy-eighth Street. That put him south and east of the furnished room where Jack had been shot to death, but not more than ten minutes away. It would have been easy enough for Jack to find him, I thought. Or for him to find Jack.

  I called a couple of times the following morning and couldn’t even reach an answering machine, so I took a bus across Seventy-ninth and found his address in the middle of a row of brownstones. I pushed the buzzer for Dukacs, got no answer, and a framed note on the wall led me next door, where I was able to find the super. She lived in a basement apartment, and I don’t know what she had on the stove, but I wanted some. It smelled terrific.

  I told her I was looking for one of her tenants, a Mr. Dukacs. I must have pronounced it correctly, because her face registered approval. In good but accented English she told me I would probably find him at his shop on First Avenue, Dukacs & Son. He was the son. Dukacs, God rest his soul, was his father. If the younger Dukacs wasn’t there, he was most likely taking a break next door at Theresa’s. He had all his meals there.

  “Whatever he gets,” I said, “I’ll bet it’s not as good as what you’ve got cooking.”

  “My lunch,” she said levelly. “Only enough for one.”

  Theresa’s would have been a standard New York coffee shop, but the specials were kielbasa and goulash instead of spanakopita and moussaka. Two women shared a booth, having either a late breakfast or a very early lunch, and an old man with a patterned cloth cap sat at the counter stirring a cup of coffee. I suppose he could have been Frankie Dukes, but the odds were against it.

  The shop next door was a Korean greengrocer, but next to it was a meat market, and the sign overhead read DUKACS & SON. You could see where a final S had been long since painted out. A man my age or a little older stood at a counter, cutting a rack of lamb into individual rib chops. He was short and stout, a fireplug of a man with a full head of glossy black hair and a luxuriant mustache. There were a couple of gray hairs in the mustache, and in his abundant eyebrows. He wielded his cleaver with an efficiency that made it clear he’d done this before.

  When I went in he put down the cleaver and asked what he could get for me this morning. “Beautiful chops here,” he said, and held one up for me to admire. “On special, matter of fact.”
r />   “I’m afraid I’m not here as a customer.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’re Francis Dukacs?”

  “Why?”

  I dug out a wallet, flipped it open at random, flipped it shut. He might not be holding the cleaver, but he was standing close enough to it so that I was just as happy to have him assume I was an officer of the law.

  “I have a couple of questions,” I said, “about a man named Jack Ellery.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “I believe you had a recent visit from him.”

  “Did he come to buy meat? That’s the only people come here. Customers.”

  “He would have come to make amends, to offer an apology—”

  “That son of a bitch!”

  I took a step backward. In an instant Dukacs was transformed from a stolid shopkeeper into a wild-eyed madman.

  “That fucker! That cocksucker! You know about him, that son of a bitch? You know what he did?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “He walked in here, he waited until my other customers left, then he stuck a gun in my face. ‘Give me all your money or I shoot you.’ ”

  “This was some time ago.”

  “So? Not so goddamn long I don’t remember it. You got a gun in your face, you remember.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I was shaking. My hands, shaking. I tried to open the register. I couldn’t open the fucking thing.”

  “And he struck you?”

  “With the gun. Back, forth. Split my head open, blood down my face like a curtain. Here, you see the scar? I woke up in the hospital. Stitches, concussion, two teeth out.” He tapped an incisor. “Bridgework,” he said. “All thanks to him. And you know what he got out of it? Nothing! He couldn’t open the cash box either. Fucking thing was jammed. Neither one of us could open it and he gave me a beating for nothing.”

  “Did the police—”

  He waved a hand, dismissing the question. “Nothing,” he said. “They showed me books full of pictures. I got a headache looking. What did he look like? It’s like I went blank, I couldn’t see his face in my mind. And then I’d go to sleep and I’d see it in my dreams.”

  “His face?”

  “Perfectly clear in the dreams. Drove me crazy, those fucking dreams. I didn’t want to go to sleep because I’d have the dream, and he’d be there and I’d be trying to open the register and it wouldn’t open and he’d beat me like a drum. Every night, that damn face of his, and I’d wake up, and the face would be gone. I had to go to sleep to see it, and I didn’t want to see it.”

  Sleeping pills made it worse, and for a while he couldn’t sleep without them. Then he got off the pills, and eventually the nightmares became a rare event, only returning at times of great stress. A friend’s death, a relative’s illness, and he’d dream of the robbery. And then one day the man who’d starred in the nightmares had the colossal nerve to walk into Dukacs & Son.

  “And I’m standing here, and I don’t recognize him. And he starts talking and there’s something about the voice, it’s a voice I recognize but I can’t place it. And he says he owes me something, and he uses a word you used before, that he has to make.”

  “Amends.”

  “Yeah, that’s the word. And I don’t know what he’s talking about, and then there’s all this shit about how he used to be a drunk, he used to be a drug addict, he used to rob people, and all of a sudden the years fall away and it’s him, that son of a bitch, that bastard. In my store, can you believe it? Standing in front of me, saying he wants to apologize!”

  “What did you do?”

  “What did I do? What do you think I did? Get the fuck out of here, I tell him. Go fuck yourself, drop dead, take your apology and shove it up your ass!”

  “And he left?”

  “Not right away. ‘Oh, tell me what I can do to make it right. Can I pay money? Can I do anything?’ Fucking cocksucker. What’s he gonna do, grow me two new teeth? All I wanted was for him to get the hell out of my store. So I picked this up.”

  The cleaver. “And he left?”

  “This he understood. ‘Easy, easy,’ and he backs away, and he’s out the door, and I can put this down again. And then, when he’s gone, the shakes come.”

  “And the nightmares?”

  He shook his head. “No, thank God. Not so far.” He looked at me. “Why?”

  “Why did he come? Well, as I understand it—”

  “No, what do I care why he came? He’s a crazy bastard, he’s a son of a bitch. He beats up a man whose fingers can’t open a cash box? A fucker like that, who cares why he does what he does?”

  “Then—”

  “You,” he said. “Why are you here? What do you want from me?”

  “Ellery was killed,” I said. “I’m investigating his death.”

  “Somebody killed him? You’re standing there and telling me the son of a bitch is dead?”

  “I’m afraid so, and—”

  “Afraid? What’s to be afraid? You couldn’t bring me better news. You know what I say? I say thank God the bastard is dead!” He leaned forward, both hands on the counter. “ ‘Mr. Dukes’—’cause of course he gets the name wrong—‘Mr. Dukes, just tell me what I can do to make it right.’ What can he do? I tell him what he can do is drop dead, that’s what he can do. Just drop fucking dead. And he did!”

  “Actually,” I said, “he had help.”

  “Huh?”

  “Somebody killed him.”

  “Yeah? You find him, I’ll buy him a drink. How? Beat him to death, I hope?”

  “He was shot.”

  “Shot dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said flatly. “Good, I’m glad. A man’s dead and I’m glad. Wait a minute. You don’t think I did it, do you?”

  “No,” I said. “Somehow I don’t.”

  XVIII

  IF HE’D KILLED JACK,” I told Greg Stillman, “he’d have called the cops himself and claimed full credit for it. He was so happy to hear Jack was dead I thought I was going to get some free pork chops for being the bearer of good news.”

  “ ‘Ding-dong, the witch is dead.’ He must have felt like the Munchkins after Dorothy’s house made that famous crash landing. And you did say he was short, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t think you’d mistake him for a Munchkin.” I’d called Greg after I left Dukacs, met him at a coffee shop a few blocks away. “And he’s not the type to burst into song. But I think he felt liberated in about the same way.”

  “No more bad dreams.”

  “I guess not.” I drank some coffee. “If that’s what you get when you make amends, I may take my time getting to that step.”

  “That was Jack’s reaction,” he said. “I had to tell him he was mistaken.”

  “Oh?”

  “He wasn’t specific. He called me right after he got his apology thrown back in his face. He didn’t tell me who the man was or any of the circumstances, just that he’d been rejected and cursed out and ordered off the premises. He regarded the whole incident as a complete and total failure, and wondered if he could cross the fellow off his list or had to find a way to take it a step further.”

  “And?”

  “And I told him he’d done it perfectly. That the object of the action wasn’t to be forgiven. That’s just a fringe benefit. He got the point, but he remained troubled. Said he hadn’t realized just how much damage he’d done. Or that you couldn’t entirely undo it.”

  I was still thinking that one over when he said, “Unless I’ve miscounted, we’ve only got one name left. And it’s cloaked in John Doe–style anonymity.”

  “Robert Williams,” I said.

  “Whose name is Legion, or might as well be. Robert Williams, with a cheating wife. What are the odds?”

  “That I’ll be able to find him? Or that he’ll turn out to be the killer?”

  “Either.”

  “Slim and slimmer,” I said.

  “That’s as I thought. Mat
t, are we done?”

  I looked at my cup. There was still coffee in it.

  “No,” he said, “I mean overall. I think you’ve done what I hired you to do. There were five names on the list, four after you ruled out the one in prison—”

  “Piper MacLeish.”

  “—and you’ve cleared Sattenstein and Crosby Hart and now Mr. Dukacs, and the object was to see if there was a name on the list that we ought to give to the police. The only name left is Robert Williams, and to give that to the police—”

  I nodded, and imagined the conversation with Dennis Redmond. Years ago he had an affair with this guy’s wife, and he may have tried to find him and tell him he was sorry. Yeah, right.

  “I don’t know how many hours you’ve put in,” he said, “but it seems to me you’ve more than earned the thousand dollars I gave you. Did you have to pay for information?”

  “A few dollars here and there.”

  “So you didn’t even clear the thousand. Do I owe you money, Matt?”

  I shook my head. “You can pay for the coffee.”

  “And that’s all? Are you sure?”

  “I made out all right,” I said. “And there’s still a chance I’ll be able to clear Williams. I put the word out and I might hear something. You never know.”

  And I guess you never do, because the following night I got home a little before midnight. Jacob was behind the desk, in what I’d come to recognize as a terpin hydrate fog, and he told me I’d had a batch of calls and no messages. “All the same gemmun,” he said, “each time sayin’ he’d try you later, and not once leavin’ a name or a number.”

  I went to my room, showered, and was glad my caller hadn’t left a number, because I was exhausted. I’d gone to a meeting, then over to the Flame for coffee, and the conversation had gone on longer than usual. I decided to tell Jacob to hold my calls, and the phone rang even as I was reaching for it. I picked it up, and a voice like thirty miles of bad road said, “Don’t tell me I’m finally talking to Matthew Scudder.”