A Drop of the Hard Stuff: A Matthew Scudder Novel

by Lawrence Block

  “And that’s a murder,” I said, “but it’ll wind up on somebody else’s tab.”

  “The guy they grabbed for the other muggings. But you say he claims Sattenstein wasn’t his work. Well, they’ve got him cold on the others, and by the time he gets out of prison he’ll be too old to mug anybody, so it hardly matters. As far as the cops downtown are concerned, he did Sattenstein along with the others, and that case is closed.”

  “Sattenstein called me,” I said. “The last thing I’d asked him was where the name High-Low Jack came from, and he didn’t know.”

  “And then he remembered?”

  “I’ll never know, because I didn’t get back to him in time. My guess is he didn’t, but he thought of someone who’d know.”

  “Steffens.”

  “Sattenstein was a fence,” I said. “If he knew Jack, he probably knew some of the people he worked with. ‘Hey, where’d Jack get that nickname? I figured you’d know, seeing as how they used to call you Even Steven.’ ”

  “Not too hard for Steffens to set up a meeting in Sattenstein’s neighborhood. Not too hard to get into Stillman’s place either. ‘Hello, Gregory? I’m a police officer investigating the murder of a friend of yours. I collected some belongings of his from his super, and there are a couple of articles here that I’d like to turn over to you.’ Or ‘He had this notebook, and there’s something he wrote that I’d like to discuss with you.’ Stillman would have let him in.”

  “No question.”

  “And then a choke hold? That would work, and it wouldn’t show up, not after the poor bastard spent a few hours hanging with a belt around his neck. And then to top everything off the son of a bitch tried to buy you a drink.”

  “Shows you the depths a person can sink to,” I said, “once he starts off with a simple act of murder.”

  “Maker’s Mark, you said?”

  “He probably bought it at the liquor store right across the street from my hotel. If he did, there was probably a little gummed tag stuck to the back of the bottle, the store’s address and phone number. They used to put one of those on every bottle they sold, to remind you where you got it in the hope that you’d come back for more.”

  “You didn’t look for a tag.”

  “No. I poured it out without looking at it, and I dumped it and the glass in the wastebasket, and it all went in the big trash can next to the service elevator. The porter empties it a couple of times a day. I’m sure it’s gone by now.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “No. What would it prove? That somebody bought a bottle of bourbon across the street? He probably bought two bottles, one to leave for me and the other to pour over my bed, and I wonder how often the place across the street sells two bottles of Maker’s Mark to anybody. They’ll remember him, but so what? He’s over twenty-one. He can buy all the booze he wants.”

  “Ellery’s super met him,” Redmond said. “When he passed himself off as a cop. That’s a crime, but it’s a hard case to make if all he did was flip his wallet open and let the man draw his own conclusions.” He gave me a look. “A lot of people do that.”

  “He didn’t flash his leather at Armstrong’s,” I said, “but the day bartender had the impression he was a cop, or used to be. He went there to ask him what I liked to drink. But that’s not a crime either.”

  “No. Here you’ve got a guy who’s shaping up as a one-man crime wave. He killed two people years ago in the Village, and the one man who could put him on that one is dead. Dead because our boy shot him, but we’ve got no evidence and no witnesses for that one, or for the two men he killed to cover up the Ellery killing. As far as I can see, we can’t prove he did a thing.”

  “He committed an act of vandalism,” I said, “by dowsing a perfectly good mattress with a perfectly good bottle of whiskey.”

  “A misdemeanor,” he said, “and he had to commit unlawful entry in order to accomplish it, which might up the ante to a low-grade felony. I’d have to take a run at the penal code, but I don’t think I’m going to, because even there we’ve got no evidence.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s annoying,” he said, “because I’d like nothing better than to get this son of a bitch. I’d like to get him for Ellery, just on general principles, and I’d like even more to get him for Stillman, who struck me as a pretty decent guy.”

  “He was.”

  “And one who’d still have a pulse, if he’d had the sense to leave well enough alone. But yeah, I’d like to get Steffens for Stillman. And I can’t tell you what a treat it would be to nail him for the man and woman in the Village. A case that was that hot and then went bitter cold for so long—Jesus, wouldn’t it be satisfying to close that one?”

  “As far as I can tell,” I said, “he never got arrested for anything.”

  “He hasn’t got a sheet? Hard to believe. He was running with Ellery, so he must have been pulling some of the same crap, but he never got tagged with it.” He tapped the table with Ellery’s scrolled confession. “If this is the way it went down, and there’s no reason for Ellery to embroider it—”

  “No, it figures to be straight.”

  “Then Steffens’s ice-cold reaction was to kill the woman. And to force Ellery to fire one of the shots. Does that sound to you like the act of a man who never did this before?”

  “Probably not his first kill.”

  “And we know it wasn’t his last. But how many do you figure he ran up in between? It’s how he solves problems. How many problems you figure he encountered over the years?”

  That hung in the air. You couldn’t answer it and it wouldn’t go away. I said, “Do you see any way at all? To get him for anything?”

  He thought about it. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t. And neither do you, and you couldn’t have expected more. So why are we here, Matt? Why did you call me?”

  “I figure he’s not done.”

  “Not done killing? He’ll never be done, if that’s how he solves his problems. But you’d think he’d be out of problems for the time being. Who’s left?”

  “Well,” I said, “there’s always me.”

  XLIII

  I GOT TO my regular meeting at St. Paul’s that night, and it was good that I did, as I’d signed up a while back to speak for my anniversary. I sat down thinking I’d tell my story, the way I usually did, but I wound up starting with that last drink, the one I took but didn’t take, the one I ordered and left on the bar. And I went on from there, and spent close to half an hour talking about the past year, my first year of sobriety.

  It doesn’t really matter what you say. One morning I’d gone to a meeting called Bookshop at Noon, on West Thirtieth Street. They introduced the speaker and he said his name and that he was an alcoholic, and then he just looked at the twenty or thirty of us who were waiting for him to say something. He smiled and said, “It’s your meeting,” and opened it up for discussion.

  Nobody criticized him for shirking his duty, and in fact a couple of people complimented him on keeping it simple. Later I reported the incident to Jim, and we considered the possibilities—that he’d told his story so often recently that he couldn’t face repeating himself, that he was a drama queen looking to do something memorable, or that he’d had a slip within the past three months and thus felt unqualified to lead a meeting, but wasn’t ready to own up to it in public. We conjured up a few more scenarios, all of them plausible enough, and concluded that it didn’t matter. The meeting had gone on, and it had done me no harm. I was still sober, wasn’t I?

  And I was still sober now, when the meeting began and when it ended.

  “It’s hard to know what to do,” Dennis Redmond had said earlier. “There’s not going to be any evidence, hard or soft. I’ll go through the files, see if they ever even looked at him or Ellery in connection with Jane Street. Though I can’t see what difference it would make. You know what you could do?”

  “What?”

  “What’s he drink? Not Maker’s Mark.�
��

  “Scotch. Johnnie Walker, I think it was. Why?”

  “Get the brand right,” he said, “and send him a bottle a day for the next year or two. As long as it takes.”

  “As long as what takes?”

  “As long as it takes for him to become an alcoholic. Then he can join that club of yours, and he can climb up those famous steps, and when he writes out his confession we can fall on him like a ton of bricks.”

  “How’ll we know?”

  “You can be his rabbi, except that’s not what you call it.”

  “His sponsor.”

  “Right on the tip of my tongue. His sponsor. You can be his sponsor, and you can rat him out. But a sponsor wouldn’t do that, would he?”

  “It’s not part of the job description.”

  “I was afraid of that. Well, in that case I’m out of ideas. Of course we could put a wire on you, but that wouldn’t work, would it?”

  “He’d never say anything we could use.”

  “No, and even if he did it might not be admissible. You know he’ll lawyer up the minute he gets pulled in for anything, and if he’s hooked into the Jersey City machine he’ll know what lawyer to call. Well, he got away with two murders for what, a dozen years? He’s about to get away with two or three more. Can you live with that?”

  “I guess I’ll have to.”

  “And so will I. When you’re on the job a few years you find out you can live with almost anything.” His eyes narrowed. “But you resigned, didn’t you? Had a gold shield and gave it back. So I guess you found something you couldn’t live with.”

  “But it wasn’t the job,” I said. “I’d have told you it was at the time. That’s what I thought. There’s an element in a lot of stories you hear in AA, it’s called a geographical solution. Guy moves to California because New York is the problem. Then he moves to Alaska because California’s the problem. But he’s the problem himself, and wherever he goes, there he is.”

  “So you were the problem.” He thought about it. “Well, now you’re Even Steven’s problem, aren’t you? And we know how he solves his problems, and geography hasn’t got a lot to do with it. How are we gonna keep you alive?”

  “I’ve been wondering that myself.”

  “I can’t even offer you police protection at this stage, and that’d be a joke anyway, wouldn’t it? We assign some cops to guard you, and they do, and nothing happens, and we reassign them, and you’re right where you are now, because he’s smart and he’s patient. He can wait as long as he needs to. You have a gun?”

  “No.”

  “If you had, you know, an unregistered weapon—”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, if you should happen to get your hands on one, it might not be a bad idea to carry it. As a matter of fact…”

  His voice trailed off. I looked at him, raised my eyebrows in anticipation.

  “I want to keep this hypothetical, not that anybody but the two of us is gonna hear it. If someone’s out to kill me, and I know it, and I also know there’s not a damn thing I can do about it, well, then there’s one thing I can do about it. If you get my drift.”

  “I’d thought of that myself.”

  “One thing you ought to know,” he said, looking off to the side, “is if something happened to our friend, and if they were looking at you in connection with it, I wouldn’t have any recollection of this conversation. In fact I wouldn’t remember any of the conversations we had.” His eyes met mine. “Just something for you to think about,” he said.

  I didn’t have a gun, registered or not. Acquiring one didn’t strike me as the most challenging task in the world, and I thought about it, but it wasn’t something I wanted to do.

  After the meeting, after an hour at the Flame, after some private time with Jim, I was back in my room with my thoughts for company. He was out there somewhere, and if his thoughts weren’t of me, well, in a day or a week or a month they would be.

  I was a problem for him. And I knew what solution he’d look for. When your only tool is a hammer, they say, then every problem looks like a nail.

  I lay there in the darkness and wondered if I was afraid. I decided I was, but not of dying, not exactly. If I’d died a year ago, if I’d died drunk, that would have been as awful an ending as my life could have had. But I’d stayed sober for a year, and if I didn’t feel like celebrating, that didn’t mean I didn’t cherish the accomplishment. And if I died now, well, nobody could take that away from me. Cold comfort, I suppose, but better than no comfort at all.

  What I was afraid of, I realized, was that there was something I could do about this, and that I wouldn’t be able to figure it out.

  When I woke up the sun was shining and someone was playing the radio in the room next to mine. I couldn’t make out the words, but the announcer’s enthusiasm came through all the same. I showered and shaved and got dressed, and somewhere along the way my neighbor turned off his radio. The sun was still shining. I decided it wasn’t a bad day, and that I knew how to spend it.

  I wanted breakfast, but first I found Vann Steffens’s card and dialed his number. I was surprised when he answered; I’d expected to get a machine and leave a message. He said hello, and I said, “You probably know who this is.”

  “I might.”

  “You bought me a drink the other day,” I said, “and I never got the chance to thank you for it.”

  “I seem to recognize the voice,” he said, “but I can’t say I’ve got any idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I don’t always know myself. I think we should talk face-to-face.”

  “Oh?”

  “To clear the air.”

  “Never a bad idea. Breathing’s easier when the air’s clear. And you probably think I got that from a fortune cookie, but I’m proud to say I made it up myself.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Which is not to say Confucius wouldn’t have said it if he’d thought of it first. You want to meet? Where and when?”

  We met at three in the afternoon in the Museum of Natural History. I got there early and waited beside the fossilized skeleton of a dinosaur, and he showed up right on time, wearing a suit and tie and carrying a topcoat over his arm. His glasses were steamed up, and he handed me the coat to hold while he cleaned the lenses with his pocket handkerchief.

  The coat would have felt heavier, I decided, if there’d been a gun in the pocket. But I hadn’t expected him to come armed. He’d suspect a trap, and if he brought a gun he might have to explain it to somebody.

  He put his glasses on, blinked at me through them, and took his coat back. “Thanks,” he said. He walked over to the nearest dinosaur and said, “Hi there, buddy. All these years and you haven’t changed a bit.”

  “An old friend?”

  “My daughter loved these guys,” he said. “Don’t ask me why. I’d bring her here every other Sunday to see the dinosaurs and the other divorced daddies. But that was a while ago.”

  “I guess she outgrew them.”

  “She would have,” he said, “but her mother took her along to the Caribbean for a winter break. There’s this island called Saba. You know it?”

  I didn’t.

  “You get there by taking a small plane from another island. I forget which one. Saba’s this volcanic island, so basically it’s a mountain with a beach at the base of it, and every once in a while one of the small planes that go there crashes into the side of the mountain.”

  Was there something for me to say to that? I couldn’t think what it might be.

  “The divorce hadn’t become final yet,” he said, “so officially I’m a widower. With a dead kid too, but I don’t think there’s a word for that. And if you look at it a certain way it’s heartbreaking, but you don’t want to get all choked up about it. Because it was just about time for her to be getting too old for dinosaurs, and what was stretching ahead of us was a fucking lifetime of not having much of anything to say to each other. So she was spared that, and so
was I.”

  “That’s an interesting way to look at it.”

  “Is it? If you’re wearing a wire, you can transcribe that touching little story and show it to the shrinks. God knows what they’ll make of it.”

  “I’m not wearing a wire.”

  “No? Maybe you are and maybe you aren’t, and if you were younger and better-looking I’d pat you down. If you were a girl, that is. Nothing queer about old Vann.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “But what good would it do me? What would it prove? The cloak-and-dagger boys keep coming out with newer and better gadgets. Ballpoint pens with microphones in them, and just the other day I heard about a recording device the size of an aspirin tablet. You swallow it, and along with all the intestinal gurgles it picks up any conversation within a twenty-yard radius. Of course you wind up having to pick through your own crap, but those clowns are doing that metaphorically anyway, aren’t they? Come on, let’s get out of here. We can’t really talk here, and they don’t allow you to smoke. Like it’s gonna bother the bronto-fucking-saurus.”

  XLIV

  HE LIT UP as soon as we were out the door. We crossed Central Park West and walked a few hundred yards into the park. Steffens considered three benches and rejected them all for unspecified reasons. Then he found one he liked and wiped the seat with the handkerchief he’d used earlier to clean his glasses. He sat down, and I sat beside him without bothering to wipe the seat.

  “It’s your meeting,” he said. “Let’s hear what you’ve got to say. I’m just gonna sit here and take it all in.”

  I took three sheets of paper from my jacket pocket, unfolded them, handed them to him.

  I’d reached the age where reading was more comfortable with glasses, especially if the print was small or the light dim. Steffens was the opposite, he wore glasses all day long and took them off to read. He’d removed them when I handed him Jack’s confession, and when he was done he didn’t put them on again right away. Instead he sat looking off into the distance.