Even the Wicked: A Matthew Scudder Novel (Matthew Scudder Mysteries)

by Lawrence Block

  Then, still not looking at me, he said, “Maybe I wrote the letters.”

  “And?”

  “What harm could it do? Keep a good story alive and throw the fear of God into three sons of bitches while you’re at it. Don’t tell me there’s laws against it.” He sighed. “I don’t mind breaking a law when I’ve got a good reason. And I don’t mind upsetting the emotional equilibrium of three assholes who never gave a rat’s ass how many emotional equilibriums they knocked to hell and gone. Or do I mean equilibria? You a Latin scholar, Mattie?”

  “Not since high school.”

  “The kids don’t take Latin anymore. Or maybe it’s back in again, for all I know.Amo, amas, amat. Amamus, amatis, amant. You remember?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Vox populi, vox dei. The voice of the people is the voice of God. And I suppose the will of the people is the will of God, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I’m no expert.”

  “On Latin?”

  “Or on the will of God.”

  “Yeah. I’ll tell you something, Mr. Expert. That first column I wrote? When I more or less told Richie Vollmer to kill himself and do the world a favor?”

  “What about it?”

  “I meant what I wrote in that column. I never thought it would inspire anyone to homicide, but if the thought had crossed my mind I might have gone ahead and written it anyhow.” He leaned forward, looked into my eyes. “But if I ever had the slightest notion that writing more letters from Will would lead to the murder of anyone, Tully or Rome or Kilbourne, I never would have done it.”

  “And that’s what happened? You put the idea in someone’s head?”

  He nodded. “Unintentionally, I swear it. I gave Adrian the idea and I gave it to this idiot as well.”

  “You know,” I said, “the cops’ll break you. You won’t have an alibi for the night of Kilbourne’s death, or if you do it won’t hold up. And they’ll find witnesses who can place you on the scene, and they’ll find carpet fibers or blood traces or some goddamn thing or other, and they won’t even need that because before all the evidence is in hand you’ll cave in and confess.”

  “You think so, huh?”

  “I’m sure of it.”

  “So what do you want me to do?”

  “Give it up now,” I said.

  “Why? So you can have the hat trick, is that it?”

  “I’ve already had more publicity than I want. I’d just as soon stay out of it.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  “I’m representing a client,” I said.

  “Who? You can’t mean Whitfield.”

  “I think he’d want me to see this through.”

  “And what’s in it for me, Mattie? Mind telling me that?”

  “You’ll feel better.”

  “I’ll feel better?”

  “Havemeyer did. He thought he could commit murder and then go right back to his life. But he found out he couldn’t. It was eating him up and he didn’t know what to do with it. He was ready to give it up the minute I walked in the door, and he told me he felt relieved.”

  “You know, he handled the killing part neatly enough,” he said. “Havemeyer, I mean. Shot him, ran down the street, got away clean.”

  “Nobody ever gets away clean.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them he said he could certainly use another drink. He caught the waitress’s eye, held up two fingers, and made a circular motion. Neither of us said anything until she came to the table with another double round, two double shots with beer chasers for Marty, two more glasses of club soda for me. I still had a glass and a half of soda from the round before, but she took them away, along with Marty’s empty glasses.

  “Oh fuck it,” he said, when she was out of hearing range. “You’re right about one thing, you know. Nobody ever gets away with anything. What do you want me to say? I wrote the letters and I killed the son of a bitch. You happy now? What the hell’s that?”

  I put the tape recorder on the table. “I’d like to record this,” I said.

  “And if I say no it turns out you’re wearing a wire, right? I think I saw that program.”

  “No wire. If you say no I’ll leave it turned off.”

  “But you’d prefer to record it.”

  “If you don’t object.”

  “Fuck it,” he said. “What do I care?”

  26

  SCUDDER: Please state your name for the record.

  MCGRAW: What bullshit…My name is Martin Joseph McGraw.

  S: You want to tell me what happened?

  M: You know what happened. You already told me what happened…Oh all right. After the death of Adrian Whitfield I desired as a journalist to maintain the momentum of the story. I sought to do this by writing additional letters.

  S: From the person who called himself Will.

  M: Yes.

  S: Whitfield’s last letter wasn’t really misaddressed, was it?

  M: He got the zip code wrong. That happens a lot but it doesn’t delay the mail. We’re the Daily News, for God’s sake. Even the geniuses at the post office can find us.

  S: So his letter arrived—

  M: First thing Friday morning. Body was barely cold and there’s a letter on my desk claiming credit for it. I took a good look at the postmark, wanting to know when it was mailed and where from, and while I was at it I happened to notice the zip code.

  S: And?

  M: First thing I thought was it wasn’t from Will, because he never made that mistake. Then I read the letter and I knew it was from Will, it couldn’t be from anybody else. And he said he was through. There wouldn’t be any more letters, there wouldn’t be any more victims. He was done.

  S: Did you suspect Whitfield wrote the letter?

  M: Not at the time. Remember, I’m reading this before there’s any speculation about suicide. I don’t know the autopsy’s going to show he was dying of cancer. I just got the thought that I ought to hang on to this letter and see what happens. What the hell, it could have been delivered late the way it was addressed, so why not give myself time to think it through?

  S: And you turned the letter over finally—

  M: To spike the suicide theory. It proved Will was the killer. I thought about addressing a new envelope and mailing it to myself, but that could constitute sabotaging the investigation.

  S: Hadn’t you already done that?

  M: I’d delayed it slightly, but a new envelope would establish that the letter had been mailed at a later date than it actually had, and suppose they finally catch up with Will and he can prove he’s in Saudi Arabia at the date the letter’s postmarked? I wanted to cover my ass without kicking sand over any bona fide clues. And then I remembered the zip code and decided to take advantage of it. So I took the envelope and circled the zip code in red and scribbled ‘delayed—wrong zip code’ alongside of it. I made the writing illegible enough so you’d believe some postal employee actually wrote it. Anybody examining it would be able to determine when it was actually mailed, and would simply assume it had been delayed somewhere in the system.

  S: That was clever.

  M: It was clever but it was stupid, because it was the first step in fucking around with the case.

  S: And the next step was writing your own letter.

  M: I just wanted to keep it alive.

  S: The story.

  M: That’s right. Even if Whitfield killed himself, which I didn’t think he did, that still left Will out there, with a couple of other killings to his credit. Now he’s lying low, but what’s it gonna do to him to see someone else pretending to be him? He has to respond, doesn’t he? And even if he doesn’t, he’s back in the news.

  S: So you wrote the letter…

  M: So I wrote the letter, and then you broke the case and got Adrian tagged as Will. And now I’m out here with this stupid phony letter from some fucking copycat, with everybody in a rush to demonstrate that only a punk with cheese where his guts ought t
o be would write such a chickenshit letter. I thought it was a pretty good letter. Remember, it wasn’t supposed to be Will. It was supposed to pry Will out of the woodwork.

  S: But that was impossible…

  M: Because Adrian was Will, and the poor fuck was dead. And the story goes about quietly dying, and I try to fan the flames a little, and then that asshole Regis Kilbourne isn’t content with stinking up the Arts section, he’s got to piss all over the oped page. And he couldn’t just say, hey, look at me world, I’m braver than the characters Errol Flynn used to play. Instead the dirty little cocksucker has the nerve to review me.

  S: He gave you another bad notice.

  M: He killed Tumult, you know. Most of the other notices were gentle, even if they weren’t going to sell any tickets. But he was vicious. He had a line toward the end, how he was speaking this candidly in the hope that it would dissuade me from ever writing another play. Can you imagine reviewing a first play that way?

  S: It must have been painful.

  M: Of course it was. And I have to say it worked. I never wrote a second play. Oh, I tried, I wanted nothing more than to prove the cocksucker wrong, but I couldn’t do it. I’d type ‘Act One, Scene One,’ and then I’d fucking freeze. He put me out of business as a playwright, the bastard. He stabbed me in the back.

  S: And you returned the favor.

  M: Funny, huh? That wasn’t planned. Except it’s hard to say what was planned and what wasn’t.

  S: What happened?

  M: He reviewed me a second time, told me to strike the set and get a life. And I thought, Jesus, he’s asking for it, isn’t he? I found out what play he was going to that night, and when the curtain came down I was waiting outside. I followed him right into Alien’s. I got to look at the poster.

  S: The poster?

  M: For Tumult. All the posters on the walls in there are for shows that didn’t make it.Kelly. Christine. If you close within a few days of your opening night, you’re sure of a place of honor in Joe Alien’s.

  S: I knew that, but I never noticed your poster there.

  M: Oh, it’s there, right alongside the men’s room door. The Tumult in the Clouds, a new play by Martin Joseph McGraw. And there’s the man who killed it, stepping out with this hot-looking broad while he gets ready to piss all over somebody else’s life’s work. I had a few at the bar while Kilbourne and the photographer stuffed their faces, then went outside when they did. I didn’t have to do a ‘follow that cab’ routine. I was close enough to hear what he said to the cabby, so I got my own cab and wound up standing across the street from his house. I almost went in while she was there.

  S: Oh?

  M: Because I thought maybe he’s alone, maybe she dropped him and kept the cab. If I’d gone and she’d been there—

  S: You’d have killed them both?

  M: No, never. First place, he wouldn’t have let me in. ‘Go way, I’ve got somebody here.’ You know what? I’d have gone home and slept it off and that would have been the end of it.

  S: Instead…

  M: Instead I stayed where I was. I had a pint in my coat pocket and I kept warm nipping at it, and then the two of them came out and walked down to the corner. I thought, fuck it, am I gonna follow them to her place now? Or are they off to some after-hours to party until dawn? They could do it without me. But instead he put her in a cab and came back.

  S: And?

  M: And went in his fucking house.

  S: And what did you do?

  M: Finished the pint. Stood there for a while with my thumb up my ass. And then I went over and rang his bell. He buzzed me in but kept me standing in the hallway. I told him who I was and that there’d been a new development in the Will case. Even then he didn’t much want to let me in, but he did, and I went in and started babbling, the cops this and Will that, I didn’t know what I was saying, and I don’t suppose he knew what to make of it. Long story short, I got behind him and crowned him with an engraved cut-glass paperweight. Fancy fucking thing, weighed a ton, he got it for making a speech somewhere. I hit him as hard as I ever hit anybody in my life and he went down like the good ship Titanic.

  S: And you went into the kitchen…

  M: Yeah.

  S: And got the knife?

  M: And got the knife, yeah. And stabbed him in the back. I thought, teach you to turn your back on me, you little fuck. I thought, you stabbed me in the back, now we’re even. Who knows what I thought? I was too drunk for whatever I thought to make much sense.

  S: You washed the knife.

  M: I washed the knife, and do me a big favor and don’t ask me why. If I was worried about prints all I had to do was wipe it, right? But I washed it, and then I put the paperweight in my pocket and took it home with me. And then I went to bed.

  S: And you remembered everything when you woke up?

  M: Everything. You used to have blackouts?

  S: Lots of them.

  M: I never had one in my life. I remembered every fucking thing. The only thing, I tried to tell myself maybe I dreamed it. But the fucking paperweight’s sitting on the bedside table, so it’s no dream. I killed him. Can you believe it?

  S: I guess I have to.

  M: Yeah, and so do I. I killed a human being because he gave my play a bad review fifteen years ago. I can’t fucking believe it. But I believe it.

  27

  “You like irony,” I told Ray Gruliow. “Maybe you’ll like this. I suspected Marty early on. Matter of fact, I suspected him long before he did anything.”

  “That’s irony, all right,” he said. “I’d recognize it anywhere. And we even talked about it at the time. You ran a check on Marty, made sure he was otherwise occupied when a couple of Will’s victims qualified for last rites.”

  “Patsy Salerno and Roswell Berry. He couldn’t have killed either of them, but before I established as much I had this scenario spinning in my mind. He writes the original column, just pouring out his very real feelings about Richie Vollmer.”

  “And Richie calls up and says he’s not really such a bad guy, and Marty arranges to meet him, sucker-punches him, and strings him up.”

  “Seems farfetched,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “What struck me as a little more plausible was that some public-spirited citizen read Marty’s column and got inspired.”

  “And wrote Marty a letter, and then did a number on Richie.”

  “Yes to the second part,” I said. “But no to the first. The way I figured it, all the Will letters were Marty’s. He wrote the original column and thought that was the end of it. Then Richie turned up hanging from a tree limb. Then Marty saw a way to make a big story a whole lot bigger. He invented Will and wrote two letters, one he pretended to have received before Richie’s murder, expressing agreement with the column, and one he sent himself afterward, taking credit for it.”

  “Just to make a better story out of it,” he said. “And position himself as a key player.”

  “Without any intention of taking it any further. But it’s a hell of a story.”

  “Bigger than Bosnia.”

  “Well, closer to home. You get a story like that, you don’t want to let it die. You already wrote two Will letters and nobody looked at you cross-eyed, so you write one more and threaten somebody you figure the city could live without.”

  “Patsy Salerno, for example.”

  “Right. But Marty was miles away making a speech when Patsy was killed, so that took a farfetched theory and made it impossible. I thought up a few variations on the theme. Maybe Marty wrote the letters, and whoever had killed Richie was equally obliging when it came to knocking off the rest of the people on the list. I didn’t think that could work, and the Omaha business exploded it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The letter writer knew Roswell Berry had been stabbed before he got the coat hanger treatment. And that was something only the killer would have known, and Marty was in New York when it happened.”

  “An
d then Adrian died.”

  “Adrian died,” I agreed, “and Adrian turned out to be Will, and that made the story bigger than ever, so big that Marty couldn’t bear to see it die out. And he got the idea of writing a letter. Why not? He was a writer.”