A Drop of the Hard Stuff: A Matthew Scudder Novel

by Lawrence Block

  “I know.”

  “What it is, it’s the absence of a trait. It’s sort of like ‘Oh, you know who I mean. He’s the guy who hasn’t got a wooden leg.’ ”

  “Well, if you happen to hear anything.”

  “We’ll see,” he said. “I gather you’re still on that case.”

  “Sort of.”

  “Well, if the client’s still footing the bill—”

  “My client’s dead.”

  “Oh.”

  “He killed himself.”

  “Oh.”

  “Hanged himself with his belt. I liked him too.”

  Danny Boy didn’t say anything for a long moment, and I’d already said more than I’d intended. Eventually he said he’d let me know if he came up with anything, and I told him not to worry if he didn’t, and that’s where we left it.

  XXXVI

  IN THE MORNING I made a couple of phone calls before I went out for breakfast, then worked the phones some more after I’d eaten and read the paper. I had a name to try on people—Even Steven—and I bounced it off everybody I could think of, including Bill Lonergan in Woodside and Vann Steffens in Jersey City. Could anybody come up with a fellow named Steve who’d hung out with Jack Ellery? Did anybody get any kind of a hit off the name Even Steven? I kept busy, but I wasn’t getting anywhere.

  And why was I even bothering? I didn’t have a case, and my client was dead. He’d hanged himself. The only way someone else could have strung him up was by knocking him out first, and that hadn’t happened.

  Unless—

  Unless he had a visitor, a calm and credible fellow with a good cover story. Someone who might even pass for a cop, someone who might have turned up at Jack Ellery’s rooming house and convinced the fellow in charge to hand over whatever remained of Ellery’s belongings.

  Someone who inspired confidence. Someone who could get behind Greg Stillman and get him in a choke hold, cutting off the flow of blood to the brain, inducing unconsciousness. Not choking him enough to strangle him, just enough to put him under, just enough to render him helpless while he staged the suicide. Stripped to his shorts, the belt around his neck, its end secured by the closet door.

  And then what? Drop him and let him hang? Or wait until he began to come out of it, and then let him go, so you could watch him thrash around, kicking at the closed door, struggling for breath, for life.

  The choke hold might leave marks, some form of physical evidence. But the belt would cover up all of that.

  Even Steven.

  The super at Jack’s rooming house was named Ferdie Pardo. Short for Ferdinand, I suppose. He wore a dark blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had a pack of Kools in his shirt pocket and a pencil behind his ear, and he looked like a man who didn’t expect the day to turn out well.

  “There was a guy showed up maybe a week ago,” he said. “Asking the same question. What did I do with Ellery’s stuff?”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “Same thing I’m telling you. Guy showed up and I gave it to him.”

  “He sign for it?”

  He shook his head. “There was nothing,” he said. “Just crap, you know? Imagine you live your whole life and when you’re gone you leave some old clothes and a couple of books.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Pair of shoes, a notebook, some papers. I didn’t think anybody was gonna come for it. I had it down in the basement, all packed up in this duffel bag, and I have to say the duffel bag was worth more than everything inside it put together. And it was a worn-out old duffel bag that wasn’t worth anything much to begin with.”

  “So you didn’t think a signature was required.”

  “Another week,” he said, “and I’d of put it out for the garbage pickup, and I wouldn’t make them sign for it, either. He was a cop, he had some reason to collect it, so I gave it to him.”

  “You say he was a cop.”

  He frowned. “He wasn’t a cop?”

  “I’m the one asking.”

  “Well, now I’m asking you.” Maybe so, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “I think he said he was a cop. He definitely gave that impression.”

  “Did he show ID?”

  “Like a badge?” He frowned. “I had any sense, I’d just say yes, absolutely, showed me a badge, showed me his ID, Patrolman Joe Blow, Detective Joe Blow, whatever.”

  “But as luck would have it you’re an honest man.”

  “Shit,” he said. “What I am, I’m a man who thinks of things a couple of seconds too late. What I think he did, and even so I can’t swear to it, is he took out his wallet and flashed it at me. Like, I’m a cop and I can’t be bothered wasting my time showing some asshole like you my ID. Like that.”

  “But the impression you got was police.”

  “Yeah. He looked like a cop.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “Jesus,” he said. “I wish you’d ask me to describe the other one that showed up. Skinny fag with an earring. That’d be easier. He sure as shit didn’t look like a cop.”

  One more flattering obituary notice for Greg. I said, “Take a shot at describing the cop, why don’t you.”

  “Oh, so he’s a cop after all? Okay, fuck it. About your height and weight.”

  “How old?”

  “I don’t know. What are you?”

  “Forty-five.”

  “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

  “So he’s about forty-five.”

  “Well, forty, fifty, somewhere in there. Split the difference and you got forty-five.”

  “Maybe it was me,” I suggested.

  “Huh?”

  “My age, my height, my weight—”

  “Maybe he was a little heavier,” he said grudgingly. “Sort of a blocky-type body, thicker through the middle.”

  “What about his face?”

  “What about it?”

  “Can you describe it?”

  “It was a face, you know? Two eyes, a nose, a mouth—”

  “Oh, a face.”

  “Huh?”

  “If you saw him again, would you know him?”

  “Sure, but what are the odds? What are there, a couple of million people in New York? When am I gonna see him again?”

  “How was he dressed?”

  “He was dressed okay.”

  Jesus. “You recall what he was wearing?”

  “A suit. Suit and tie.”

  “Like a cop might wear.”

  “Yeah, I guess. And glasses. He was wearing glasses.”

  “And he took Ellery’s duffel bag and left.”

  “Right.”

  “Never told you his name, that you remember, and I don’t suppose he gave you a business card.”

  “No, nothing like that. Why give me a business card? What business am I gonna give him? Call him up, tell him the shitter in Room Four-oh-nine won’t flush? Let him know one of my deadbeats moved out in the middle of the night, and if he comes real quick he can have the room?”

  “And everything Ellery left,” I said, “was in the duffel bag.”

  “Except for the suit they buried him in.”

  They didn’t bury him, they cremated him, but that was more than my new friend needed to know.

  “And you rented his room.”

  “The man’s dead,” he said, “and I cleaned all his crap outta there, and he’s not coming back, so what do you think I did with it? There’s a guy in there right now.”

  “Even as we speak?”

  “Huh?”

  “Is the new tenant home?”

  “He’s not a new tenant,” he said. “He moved to Ellery’s room because it’s a little bigger than the one he was in. He’s been living here, oh, maybe three years at this point.”

  “What I was asking—”

  “And no, he’s not home. This hour he’s at OTB, two blocks down on Second Avenue. That’s where you’ll find him, all day every day.”

  “Good,” I said. “You can sh
ow me his room.”

  “Huh? I told you, it’s rented. Somebody’s already living there.”

  “And he’s welcome to it,” I said. “I just want a few minutes to look around.”

  “Hey, I can’t let you do that.”

  I took out my wallet.

  “What, you’re gonna show me ID? I still can’t let you in there no matter how many badges you show me.”

  “I can do better than that,” I said.

  Pardo thought he should be in the room with me while I searched it. I told him he’d be better positioned in the hall, in case the current tenant made a sudden reappearance.

  “I told you,” he said. “He’s gone for the day. Long as those betting windows are open, he’s there.”

  “Even so.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I should be here to keep an eye, you know?”

  “Because I might be running an elaborate scam,” I said, “where I go around paying fifty dollars to gain access to rooms of people who don’t own anything.”

  He wasn’t happy, but he went out into the hall and I closed the door, and used the hook-and-eye gadget to keep him out. Then I got to work looking for anything Jack might have tucked away where it wouldn’t be easy to find.

  A piece of carpeting covered most of the floor. It was a bound remnant, and it hadn’t been tacked down, so it was easy enough to roll it up after I’d moved a couple of pieces of furniture. And it was almost as easy to replace everything after I’d established that the carpet hadn’t been hiding anything.

  The next place I looked was the dresser, a dark wood chest of drawers, its top scarred by neglected cigarettes. I took out each drawer in turn, stacking its contents on the floor, turning over the empty drawer to check its bottom, then putting everything back. One drawer, the wood warped with age, didn’t want to come out, but I coaxed it, and had no more luck with it than with the one before it, but the next drawer, just one up from the bottom, was the charm. There was a 9×12 manila envelope Scotch-taped to its underside. An envelope just like it had held Jack’s Eighth Step.

  I picked at the tape, freed the envelope. One wing of the metal clasp broke while I was opening it. If the contents turned out to be the new tenant’s can’t-miss formula for picking winners, I’d be hard put to leave it as I found it. But I wasn’t really worried on that score.

  The envelope held three sheets of unlined notebook paper, covered in what I was able to recognize as Jack’s careful handwriting. There was a newspaper clipping as well, and I took a look at it before I read what Jack had written.

  It was from the Post, and it ran to the better part of a full page. I read it all the way through, although I could have stopped after the first paragraph.

  I remembered the case.

  When I’d finished the clipping I read the first paragraph of what Jack had written, then decided the rest could wait. I put the dresser drawer back, then returned everything to the envelope, fastened it with what remained of the clasp, and tucked the envelope inside my shirt. I can’t say it improved the fit of that garment, but with the shirt buttoned over it there wasn’t much chance anyone would take notice. And I could leave Jack’s old room as empty-handed as I’d entered it.

  I let myself out. Pardo was a few steps down the hall.

  “Nothing,” I told him.

  “What did I tell you? These people had anything, they’d live somewhere else.”

  XXXVII

  I WALKED DOWNTOWN, looking for someplace to have a cup of coffee while I read what Jack had written. I wound up at Theresa’s. I skirted the counter, where Frankie Dukacs was giving his full attention to a bowl of soup, and took a booth where all he’d see of me was the back of my head.

  I didn’t want a meal, but I remembered the last time I’d been here and ordered a piece of pie with my coffee. They didn’t have strawberry-rhubarb, but they had pecan, and I decided that would do just fine.

  The newspaper clipping told of a man and woman who’d been shot dead in what the Post called a “Bohemian love nest” on Jane Street. It was Bohemian because it was not only in the Village, but in a back house, a onetime carriage house located to the rear of the Federal-period town house that fronted on the street. And it was a love nest because the two victims were nude, and in bed, and the man was married to somebody else.

  He was a big player in the financial world. His name was G. Decker Raines, with the G standing for Gordon, and his name got in the papers a lot in connection with corporate takeovers and leveraged buyouts. Her name was Marcy Cantwell, and she’d come to New York to be an actress. What she’d become instead was a waitress, but she’d taken some classes and had a turn in some showcase and workshop productions.

  One night she waited on Raines’s table, and caught his eye, and he was back the next evening all by himself. He was still there at closing time, and walked her back to where she was staying at the Evangeline House, a residence for young women on West Thirteenth Street. Male guests weren’t allowed upstairs, but they were able to sit together in the parlor.

  A week later she was living in the Jane Street back house, and she wasn’t waiting tables anymore.

  A few months later she was dead, and so was he.

  I didn’t get all of this from the clipping, or from Jack’s account of the incident. I read through everything a couple of times, then got myself down to the microfilm room at the library, where I read everything the Times had. The story had stayed alive a long time. It couldn’t really miss. She was a beauty and he was a rich guy, and his wife was socially prominent and his kids went to private schools, and best of all the case never got solved. That meant it might be just what it looked like, a home invasion that turned violent, but it might be something else—a contract killing arranged by a business rival of Raines’s, or something spawned by jealousy, either the wife’s or that of a prior boyfriend of Marcy’s. She’d had a couple, including a bartender with a history of violence toward women, and the cops knocked on a lot of doors and asked a lot of questions, but they never caught a break.

  Or maybe I should say we and not they, because I was still with the NYPD when it happened, and in fact still attached to the Sixth Precinct. Our house caught the case, but I was never assigned to it, and we didn’t have it long before all the publicity led the Major Case Squad to take it away from us.

  A while ago, this was. Before the bullet that killed Estrellita Rivera swept me along in its wake, out of my job and marriage and into a room at the Northwestern. Before Jack Ellery got tagged for something else, and went away for it, and came out and got sober. A full dozen years ago, and more than enough time for the case to go very cold. There were cold cases where you knew who did it, even though you couldn’t do anything about it. And there were cases where you didn’t know a thing, and this was one of those.

  But I knew. Jack did it. Jack and Steve.

  “I’m writing this out separately,” Jack’s account started out. “This is part of my Fourth Step, and I’ll discuss this in my Fourth Step and talk about it with G. when I do my Fifth Step. But there is someone else involved, so I am going to write this out now just for myself. And of course for my Higher Power, who might be reading over my shoulder, or listening to my thoughts.”

  Then there was some speculation on the nature of that Higher Power, or God. It was interesting enough, but nothing special, and really just Jack thinking some thoughts of his own on paper.

  After a couple of paragraphs of that, he got back to the matter at hand. He told how an acquaintance, whom he neither named nor identified, had pointed out Marcy Cantwell as a former actress-waitress who now had plenty of time for auditions and acting classes, because she’d found a sugar daddy with a fat wallet. And how he’d shared this information with a friend. “I will call him S.,” he added, and that’s what he called him for the rest of the document, never revealing any personal information about him, never describing or identifying him.

  He didn’t say how they got the keys, only that they’d had access
to the locked passage leading back to the carriage house and to the house itself. It was early evening when they let themselves in, and they burst into the bedroom before either of the two lovers was aware of their presence.

  “I had a gun in my hand,” he wrote, “and when the man went for a gun, I shot him without thinking. He was naked and was grabbing for his pants to cover himself. I don’t know why I thought he was going for a gun. I shot him in the chest and he fell back and I said we have to do something, we have to call somebody. And then S. took the gun from me. He told me to shut up. He told me I had to calm down. He said she’d seen our faces, she could identify us. She was crying and begging, and trying to cover herself with her hands, and I was like No, you can’t do this, and he was ice-cold the way he always was and he just shot her between the breasts and she fell back next to the man. I don’t know if she was alive or dead. And E.S. took the gun and put it back in my hand, and wrapped his own hand around mine, and said, Come on, you have to do this. And I had my finger on the trigger and his finger was over mine, and together we shot her in the forehead. And he took the gun and shot the man one more time, also in the head, to make sure.”

  And that was that.

  He’d changed it when he recounted it to his sponsor. Shifted the scene from the Village to the Upper West Side, recast the personnel, changing a money guy and his playmate to a drug dealer and his Spanish girlfriend. The most vivid image of all, S. pressing the gun into his hands and making him shoot the girl, somehow never made the final cut.

  Some of it had likely been designed to render the event less identifiable, and it had certainly worked; I’d been unable to find a case that fit the account I got from Greg. Beyond that, I had to believe he’d tailored the story to lessen its impact on his sponsor. Jack had wanted to be honest, but he hadn’t been capable of one hundred percent honesty right off the bat. He had to work his way up to it.

  It was getting dark out when I left the library. I’d lost all track of the time, and when I checked my watch I saw that it was past five. It wasn’t fully dark, but the sun was down, and a gray day was drawing to a close. Every day the sun disappeared a little earlier than the day before. There was nothing out of the ordinary about that, it happened every year, but there were times when I felt there was a sadness attached to it, that the poor old year was dying a day at a time.