The Night and The Music

by Lawrence Block

  We listened to the rest of Gordon Lurie’s act. Then Barry leaned forward and chatted with the bartender to find out how I could get backstage. I found my way to what passed for a dressing room at Kid Gloves. It must have been a ladies’ lavatory in a prior incarnation.

  I went in there thinking I’d made a breakthrough, that Lurie had killed her and now he was dealing with his guilt by singing about her. I don’t think I really believed this but it supplied me with direction and momentum.

  I told him my name and that I was interested in his act. He wanted to know if I was from a record company. “Am I on the threshold of a great opportunity? Am I about to become an overnight success after years of travail?”

  We got out of the tiny room and left the club through a side door. Three doors down the block we sat in a cramped booth at a coffee shop. He ordered a Greek salad and we both had coffee.

  I told him I was interested in his song about the bag lady.

  He brightened. “Oh, do you like it? Personally I think it’s the best thing I’ve written. I just wrote it a couple of days ago. I opened next door Tuesday night. I got to New York three weeks ago and I had a two-week booking in the West Village. A place called David’s Table. Do you know it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Another stop on the K-Y circuit. Either there aren’t any straight people in New York or they don’t go to nightclubs. But I was there two weeks, and then I opened at Kid Gloves, and afterward I was sitting and drinking with some people and somebody was talking about the shopping bag lady and I had had enough Amaretto to be maudlin on the subject. I woke up Wednesday morning with a splitting headache and the first verse of the song buzzing in my splitting head, and I sat up immediately and wrote it down, and as I was writing one verse the next would come bubbling to the surface, and before I knew it I had all six verses.” He took a cigarette, then paused in the act of lighting it to fix his eyes on me. “You told me your name,” he said, “but I don’t remember it.”

  “Matthew Scudder.”

  “Yes. You’re the person investigating her murder.”

  “I’m not sure that’s the right word. I’ve been talking to people, seeing what I can come up with. Did you know her before she was killed?”

  He shook his head. “I was never even in this neighborhood before. Oh. I’m not a suspect, am I? Because I haven’t been in New York since the fall. I haven’t bothered to figure out where I was when she was killed but I was in California at Christmastime and I’d gotten as far east as Chicago in early March, so I do have a fairly solid alibi.”

  “I never really suspected you. I think I just wanted to hear your song.” I sipped some coffee. “Where did you get the facts of her life? Was she an actress?”

  “I don’t think so. Was she? It wasn’t really about her, you know. It was inspired by her story but I didn’t know her and I never knew anything about her. The past few days I’ve been paying a lot of attention to bag ladies, though. And other street people.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Are there more of them in New York or is it just that they’re so much more visible here? In California everybody drives, you don’t see people on the street. I’m from Canada, rural Ontario, and the first city I ever spent much time in was Toronto, and there are crazy people on the streets there but it’s nothing like New York. Does the city drive them crazy or does it just tend to draw crazy people?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe they’re not crazy. Maybe they just hear a different drummer. I wonder who killed her.”

  “We’ll probably never know.”

  “What I really wonder is why she was killed. In my song I made up some reason. That somebody wanted what was in her bags. I think it works as a song that way but I don’t think there’s much chance that it happened like that. Why would anyone kill the poor thing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They say she left people money. People she hardly knew. Is that the truth?” I nodded. “And she left me a song. I don’t even feel that I wrote it. I woke up with it. I never set eyes on her and she touched my life. That’s strange, isn’t it?”

  Everything was strange. The strangest part of all was the way it ended.

  It was a Monday night. The Mets were at Shea and I’d taken my sons to a game. The Dodgers were in for a three-game series which they eventually swept as they’d been sweeping everything lately. The boys and I got to watch them knock Jon Matlack out of the box and go on to shell his several replacements. The final count was something like 13 – 4. We stayed in our seats until the last out. Then I saw them home and caught a train back to the city.

  So it was past midnight when I reached Armstrong’s. Trina brought me a large double and a mug of coffee without being asked. I knocked back half of the bourbon and was dumping the rest into my coffee when she told me somebody’d been looking for me earlier. “He was in three times in the past two hours,” she said. “A wiry guy, high forehead, bushy eyebrows, sort of a bulldog jaw. I guess the word for it is underslung.”

  “Perfectly good word.”

  “I said you’d probably get here sooner or later.”

  “I always do. Sooner or later.”

  “Uh-huh. You okay, Matt?”

  “The Mets lost a close one.”

  “I heard it was thirteen to four.”

  “That’s close for them these days. Did he say what it was about?”

  He hadn’t, but within the half hour he came in again and I was there to be found. I recognized him from Trina’s description as soon as he came through the door. He looked faintly familiar but he was nobody I knew. I suppose I’d seen him around the neighborhood.

  Evidently he knew me by sight because he found his way to my table without asking directions and took a chair without being invited to sit. He didn’t say anything for a while and neither did I. I had a fresh bourbon and coffee in front of me and I took a sip and looked him over.

  He was under thirty. His cheeks were hollow and the flesh of his face was stretched over his skull like leather that had shrunk upon drying. He wore a forest green work shirt and a pair of khaki pants. He needed a shave.

  Finally he pointed at my cup and asked me what I was drinking. When I told him he said all he drank was beer.

  “They have beer here,” I said.

  “Maybe I’ll have what you’re drinking.” He turned in his chair and waved for Trina. When she came over he said he’d have bourbon and coffee, the same as I was having. He didn’t say anything more until she brought the drink. Then, after he had spent quite some time stirring it, he took a sip. “Well,” he said, “that’s not so bad. That’s okay.”

  “Glad you like it.”

  “I don’t know if I’d order it again, but at least now I know what it’s like.”

  “That’s something.”

  “I seen you around. Matt Scudder. Used to be a cop, private eye now, blah blah blah. Right?”

  “Close enough.”

  “My name’s Floyd. I never liked it but I’m stuck with it, right? I could change but who’m I kidding? Right?”

  “If you say so.”

  “If I don’t somebody else will. Floyd Karp, that’s the full name. I didn’t tell you my last name, did I? That’s it, Floyd Karp.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, okay, okay.” He pursed his lips, blew out air in a silent whistle. “What do we do now, Matt? Huh? That’s what I want to know.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean, Floyd.”

  “Oh, you know what I’m getting at, driving at, getting at. You know, don’t you?”

  By this time I suppose I did.

  “I killed that old lady. Took her life, stabbed her with my knife.” He flashed the saddest smile. “Steee-rangled her with her skeeee-arf. Hoist her with her own whatchacallit, petard. What’s a petard, Matt?”

  “I don’t know, Floyd. Why’d you kill her?”

  He looked at me, he looked at his coffee, he looked at me a
gain.

  He said, “Had to.”

  “Why?”

  “Same as the bourbon and coffee. Had to see. Had to taste it and find out what it was like.” His eyes met mine. His were very large, hollow, empty. I fancied I could see right through them to the blackness at the back of his skull. “I couldn’t get my mind away from murder,” he said. His voice was more sober now, the mocking playful quality gone from it. “I tried. I just couldn’t do it. It was on my mind all the time and I was afraid of what I might do. I couldn’t function, I couldn’t think, I just saw blood and death all the time. I was afraid to close my eyes for fear of what I might see. I would just stay up, days it seemed, and then I’d be tired enough to pass out the minute I closed my eyes. I stopped eating. I used to be fairly heavy and the weight just fell off of me.”

  “When did all this happen, Floyd?”

  “I don’t know. All winter. And I thought if I went and did it once I would know if I was a man or a monster or what. And I got this knife, and I went out a couple nights but lost my nerve, and then one night — I don’t want to talk about that part of it now.”

  “All right.”

  “I almost couldn’t do it, but I couldn’t not do it, and then I was doing it and it went on forever. It was horrible.”

  “Why didn’t you stop?”

  “I don’t know. I think I was afraid to stop. That doesn’t make any sense, does it? I just don’t know. It was all crazy, insane, like being in a movie and being in the audience at the same time. Watching myself.”

  “No one saw you do it?”

  “No. I threw the knife down a sewer. I went home. I put all my clothes in the incinerator, the ones I was wearing. I kept throwing up. All that night I would throw up even when my stomach was empty. Dry heaves, Department of Dry Heaves. And then I guess I fell asleep, I don’t know when or how but I did, and the next day I woke up and thought I dreamed it. But of course I didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “And what I did think was that it was over. I did it and I knew I’d never want to do it again. It was something crazy that happened and I could forget about it. And I thought that was what happened.”

  “That you managed to forget about it?”

  A nod. “But I guess I didn’t. And now everybody’s talking about her. Mary Alice Redfield, I killed her without knowing her name. Nobody knew her name and now everybody knows it and it’s all back in my mind. And I heard you were looking for me, and I guess, I guess …” He frowned, chasing a thought around in his mind like a dog trying to capture his tail. Then he gave it up and looked at me. “So here I am,” he said. “So here I am.”

  “Yes.”

  “Now what happens?”

  “I think you’d better tell the police about it, Floyd.”

  “Why?”

  “I suppose for the same reason you told me.”

  He thought about it. After a long time he nodded. “All right,” he said. “I can accept that. I’d never kill anybody again. I know that. But — you’re right. I have to tell them. I don’t know who to see or what to say or, hell, I just — ”

  “I’ll go with you if you want.”

  “Yeah. I want you to.”

  “I’ll have a drink and then we’ll go. You want another?”

  “No. I’m not much of a drinker.”

  I had it without the coffee this time. After Trina brought it I asked him how he’d picked his victim. Why the bag lady?

  He started to cry. No sobs, just tears spilling from his deep-set eyes. After a while he wiped them on his sleeve.

  “Because she didn’t count,” he said. “That’s what I thought. She was nobody. Who cared if she died? Who’d miss her?” He closed his eyes tight. “Everybody misses her,” he said. “Everybody.”

  So I took him in. I don’t know what they’ll do with him. It’s not my problem.

  It wasn’t really a case and I didn’t really solve it. As far as I can see I didn’t do anything. It was the talk that drove Floyd Karp from cover, and no doubt I helped some of the talk get started, but some of it would have gotten around without me. All those legacies of Mary Alice Redfield’s had made her a nine-day wonder in the neighborhood. It was one of those legacies that got me involved.

  Maybe she caught her own killer. Maybe he caught himself, as everyone does. Maybe no man’s an island and maybe everybody is.

  All I know is I lit a candle for the woman, and I suspect I’m not the only one who did.

  All this happened a long time ago.

  Abe Beame was living in Gracie Mansion, though even he seemed to have trouble believing he was really the mayor of the city of New York. Ali was in his prime, and the Knicks still had a year or so left in Bradley and DeBusschere. I was still drinking in those days, of course, and at the time it seemed to be doing more for me than it was doing to me.

  I had already left my wife and kids, my home in Syosset, and the NYPD. I was living in the hotel on West Fifty-seventh Street where I still live, and I was doing most of my drinking around the corner in Jimmy Armstrong’s saloon. Billie was the nighttime bartender. A Filipino youth named Dennis was behind the stick most days.

  And Tommy Tillary was one of the regulars.

  He was big, probably 6’2”, full in the chest, big in the belly, too. He rarely showed up in a suit but always wore a jacket and tie, usually a navy or burgundy blazer with gray-flannel slacks or white duck pants in warmer weather. He had a loud voice that boomed from his barrel chest, and a big, clean-shaven face that was innocent around the pouting mouth and knowing around the eyes. He was somewhere in his late forties and he drank a lot of top-shelf scotch. Chivas, as I remember it, but it could have been Johnnie Black. Whatever it was, his face was beginning to show it, with patches of permanent flush at the cheekbones and a tracery of broken capillaries across the bridge of the nose.

  We were saloon friends. We didn’t speak every time we ran into each other, but at the least we always acknowledged each other with a nod or a wave. He told a lot of dialect jokes and told them reasonably well, and I laughed at my share of them. Sometimes I was in a mood to reminisce about my days on the force, and when my stories were funny, his laugh was as loud as anyone’s.

  Sometimes he showed up alone, sometimes with male friends. About a third of the time, he was in the company of a short and curvy blonde named Carolyn. “Carolyn from the Caro-line” was the way he occasionally introduced her, and she did have a faint Southern accent that became more pronounced as the drink got to her.

  Then, one morning, I picked up the Daily News and read that burglars had broken into a house on Colonial Road, in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. They had stabbed to death the only occupant present, one Margaret Tillary. Her husband, Thomas J. Tillary, a salesman, was not at home at the time.

  I hadn’t known Tommy was a salesman or that he’d had a wife. He did wear a wide yellow-gold band on the appropriate finger, and it was clear that he wasn’t married to Carolyn from the Caroline, and it now looked as though he was a widower. I felt vaguely sorry for him, vaguely sorry for the wife I’d never even known of, but that was the extent of it. I drank enough back then to avoid feeling any emotion very strongly.

  And then, two or three nights later, I walked into Armstrong’s and there was Carolyn. She didn’t appear to be waiting for him or anyone else, nor did she look as though she’d just breezed in a few minutes ago. She had a stool by herself at the bar and she was drinking something dark from a lowball glass.

  I took a seat a few stools down from her. I ordered two double shots of bourbon, drank one, and poured the other into the black coffee Billie brought me. I was sipping the coffee when a voice with a Piedmont softness said, “I forget your name.”

  I looked up.

  “I believe we were introduced,” she said, “but I don’t recall your name.”

  “It’s Matt,” I said, “and you’re right, Tommy introduced us. You’re Carolyn.”

  “Carolyn Cheatham. Have you seen him?”
<
br />   “Tommy? Not since it happened.”

  “Neither have I. Were you-all at the funeral?”

  “No. When was it?”

  “This afternoon. Neither was I. There. Whyn’t you come sit next to me so’s I don’t have to shout. Please?”

  She was drinking a sweet almond liqueur that she took on the rocks. It tastes like dessert, but it’s as strong as whiskey.

  “He told me not to come,” she said. “To the funeral. He said it was a matter of respect for the dead.” She picked up her glass and stared into it. I’ve never known what people hope to see there, though it’s a gesture I’ve performed often enough myself.

  “Respect,” she said. “What’s he care about respect? I would have just been part of the office crowd; we both work at Tannahill; far as anyone there knows, we’re just friends. And all we ever were is friends, you know.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Oh, shit,” she said. “I don’t mean I wasn’t fucking him, for the Lord’s sake. I mean it was just laughs and good times. He was married and he went home to Mama every night and that was jes’ fine, because who in her right mind’d want Tommy Tillary around by the dawn’s early light? Christ in the foothills, did I spill this or drink it?”

  We agreed she was drinking them a little too fast. It was this fancy New York sweet-drink shit, she maintained, not like the bourbon she’d grown up on. You knew where you stood with bourbon.

  I told her I was a bourbon drinker myself, and it pleased her to learn this. Alliances have been forged on thinner bonds than that, and ours served to propel us out of Armstrong’s, with a stop down the block for a fifth of Maker’s Mark — her choice — and a four-block walk to her apartment. There were exposed brick walls, I remember, and candles stuck in straw-wrapped bottles, and several travel posters from Sabena, the Belgian airline.

  We did what grown-ups do when they find themselves alone together. We drank our fair share of the Maker’s Mark and went to bed. She made a lot of enthusiastic noises and more than a few skillful moves, and afterward she cried some.