The Devil Knows You’re Dead

by Block, Lawrence

  “Another bar fight?”

  “A holdup. He was assistant manager of a check-cashing place on Ralph Avenue and there was three of them shot, him and a security guard and a customer. He was the only one died. Well, shit happens, and maybe his number was up, but if his number’d been up a year earlier I’d be a guy’d done time in prison, a guy you’d describe as having a history of violent behavior, and all because a guy gave me a push and I pushed him back.”

  “You were lucky.”

  “I been lucky all my life,” he said. “My poor fucking brother’s had no luck at all. He’s a man who walks away from confrontations, but all the same he could find himself in a fight, given the right set of circumstances. Life he led, violence is always waiting for you around the next bend in the road.” He straightened up in his seat. “But what happened last week,” he said, “it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t fit George.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Okay,” he said. “Here’s how the police reconstruct it. Holtzmann’s on the corner making a call from a pay phone. George approaches him, asks him for money. Holtzmann ignores him, tells him no, maybe tells him to go fuck himself. George pulls out a gun and starts blasting.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “You saw George around the neighborhood. Did you ever see him ask anybody for money?”

  “Not that I can recall.”

  “Believe me, you didn’t. George didn’t panhandle. He didn’t like to ask anybody for anything. If he was really broke and he wanted to scrape a few bucks together and he couldn’t do it hustling bottles and cans, maybe he’d go up to cars at a stoplight and wipe windshields. But even then he wouldn’t press hard for the money. He certainly wouldn’t disturb some guy in a business suit talking on the phone. George walked right by guys like that.”

  “Maybe George asked the time of day and didn’t like the answer he got.”

  “I’m telling you, George wouldn’t even have spoken to the guy.”

  “Maybe he had a flashback, thought he was in a fire-fight.”

  “Triggered by what? The sight of a man making a phone call?”

  “I see what you’re saying,” I said, “but it’s all theoretical, isn’t it? But when you look at the evidence—”

  “Okay,” he said, leaning forward. “Good, let’s talk about the evidence. As far as I’m concerned, that’s where their whole case breaks down.”

  “Really? I thought it was pretty persuasive.”

  “Oh, it looks solid at first glance,” he said. “I’ll grant you that. Witnesses placing him on the scene, but what’s so remarkable about that? He lives just around the corner from there, he must walk past that pay phone every day of his life. They’re supposed to have another witness says he was talking about guns and shooting, but who are these witnesses? Other street people? They’ll tell the cops anything they want to hear.”

  “What about the physical evidence?”

  “I guess you’re talking about the cartridge casings.”

  “Four of them,” I said, “matching the four nine-millimeter slugs they took out of the victim. They would have been ejected automatically from the murder weapon when the shots were fired, but they weren’t at the crime scene when the cops got there. Instead they turned up in the pocket of your brother’s army jacket when the police picked him up.”

  “It’s strong evidence,” he admitted.

  “A lot of people would call it conclusive.”

  “But to me it just proves what we already know, that he was there at the approximate time the shooting took place. Maybe he was just steps away, standing in a doorway. Holtzmann wouldna seen him and neither would the killer. Holtzmann’s on the phone, the killer shows up, maybe on foot, maybe he hops out of a car, who knows? Bang bang bang bang, Holtzmann’s dead and the killer’s out of there, takes off running or jumps back in his car, whatever. Then George comes forward. Maybe he watched the whole thing, maybe he was nodding and the shots woke him up, but now there’s a man down and the light from the streetlamp is glinting off four pieces of metal on the sidewalk.” He broke off, lowered his eyes. “I’m getting carried away here. I better stop before you figure I’m crazier than my brother.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “Yeah? Okay, so he steps forward to get a good look at the victim. That’s something he might do. And he sees the casings, and he was in the military, he knows what they are. You remember what he said to the police? ‘You have to police the area,’ he told them. ‘You have to pick up your own brass.’ ”

  “Doesn’t that suggest that he was responsible for their presence? That they’d come out of his own gun?”

  “It suggests to me that he was confused. There was a dead man on the ground and cartridge casings alongside it and his only reference for that was Vietnam. He remembered right off what they told him about picking up shell casings on patrol and that told him what to do in the present situation.”

  “Isn’t it simpler to assume he was trying to conceal evidence of his own involvement?”

  “But what the hell did he conceal? He dropped the goddamn things in his jacket pocket, he walked around with them for a full day until they picked him up. If he wanted to get rid of them, he had plenty of chances. They say he walked over to the river to get rid of the gun, that he flung it off a pier into the water. He threw away the gun but kept the casings? He could have tossed them anywhere, a trash can, a Dumpster, a sewer grate, but instead he carried them in his pocket all day? Where’s the sense in that?”

  “Maybe he forgot they were there.”

  “Four brass casings? They’da rattled around in there. No, it’s senseless, Matt. Senseless.”

  “I don’t think anyone’s tried to argue that your brother was behaving rationally.”

  “Even so, Matt. Even so. Look, speaking of the gun. The murder weapon was a nine-millimeter pistol, right? The bullets they dug out of Holtzmann were nine-millimeter, and so were the casings in George’s pocket.”

  “So?”

  “So George had a forty-five.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw it.”

  “When?”

  “Maybe a year ago. Maybe a little less than that. I came looking for him, I had some stuff for him, and I drove around until I found him. He was in one of his usual spots, near the entrance to Roosevelt Hospital.” He drank some coffee. “We walked back to his room so he could stow what I’d brought, clothes mostly, and a couple of bags of cookies. He always liked those Nutter Butter cookies, with the peanut-butter filling. From the time we were kids, that was his favorite kind of cookie. I always brought him some whenever I went looking for him.” He closed his eyes for a moment, opened them and said, “We got to his room and he told me he had something to show me. The place was a mess, piles of crap everywhere, but he knew right where to look and he moved some junk out of the way and came up with a gun. He had it wrapped in this filthy hand towel, but he unwrapped it and showed it to me.”

  “And you were able to identify it as a forty-five?”

  He hesitated. “I don’t know a lot about guns,” he said. “I’ve got a revolver I keep at the store, a thirty-eight, it sits on a shelf under the cash register and I don’t even touch it from one month to the next. We’re on Kings Highway west of Ocean Avenue, household appliances, we’ll sell you anything from a Waring blender to a washer-dryer, and there’s not a whole lot of cash comes over the counter. It’s all checks or plastic nowadays, but they’ll hold up anything, they smoke a little crack and they can’t think straight, and if the cash register’s empty they’ll shoot you to make a point. So the gun’s there, but I pray to God I never have to use it.

  “It’s a revolver, I don’t know if I mentioned that. The gun George showed me wasn’t, it didn’t have a cylinder like mine. It was L-shaped, rectangular.”

  He sketched its outline on the tabletop. I told him it sounded like a pistol, but how did he know it was a forty-five?

  “George said t
hat’s what it was. He called it a forty-five-caliber pistol. What was the other phrase he used? A military sidearm, that’s it. He said it was a government-issue military sidearm.”

  “Where did he get it?”

  “I don’t know. I asked him and he said something about carrying it in Vietnam, but I don’t believe he brought it back with him. I think he may have had one like it over there. My guess is he found this one or bought it on the street. I don’t know if it was loaded or if he even had any bullets for it. The cops turned up people from the neighborhood who said he used to carry a gun and he’d take it out and show it around. Maybe he did. Life he led, I can see him carrying a gun for protection, even using it to defend himself. But why would he have to defend himself from a man making a phone call? And anyway, you can’t shoot nine-millimeter bullets out of a forty-five, can you?”

  “What happened to the gun?”

  “The one I saw? You got me. It wasn’t on him when they picked him up. They didn’t find it when they searched his room. They say George told them some story about throwing it off a pier into the Hudson. They sent divers down and came up empty, but who even knows if they had the right pier. You want to know what I think happened?”

  “What?”

  “George threw his gun in the river months ago. One reason or another he decides it’s not safe to carry it and he ditches it, and then when they pick him up and ask him what happened to the gun, he says he tossed it. He can’t say when because he doesn’t have that kind of memory. Or here’s another possibility—he gets worried after the murder, after he picks up the cartridge casings, and decides he better get rid of the gun, so he goes home and finds it and tosses it. Or here’s another way it could have happened—”

  He went on working out scenarios to fit the evidence while leaving his brother innocent of all charges. Finally he ran out of theories and looked at me and asked me what I thought.

  I said, “What do I think? I think the cops arrested the right man. I think your brother showed you a nine-millimeter pistol and said it was a forty-five because they look similar and that was the type of semiautomatic handgun he was familiar with. I think he probably found the gun in a garbage can while he was searching for redeemable cans and bottles. I think there were bullets in the clip when he found it. I think the previous owner used the gun in the commission of a felony and got rid of it afterward, which is generally how guns find their way into garbage cans and Dumpsters and the river.”

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “I think your brother was nodding in a doorway when Glenn Holtzmann went to make his phone call. I think something roused him out of a dream or reverie. Something he saw or heard, on the street or in his dream, convinced him that Holtzmann was a threat. I think he reacted instinctively, drawing the gun and firing three times before he really knew where he was or what he was doing. I think he put the fourth and final bullet in the back of Holtzmann’s neck because that’s how you executed people in Southeast Asia.

  “I think he picked up the casings because he was taught to, and also because they might tie him to the shooting. I think he got rid of the gun for that reason, and I think he would have thrown the casings in after it if he hadn’t forgotten they were there, or that he was supposed to get rid of them. I think he has no memory of shooting Holtzmann because he was only partially aware of what he was doing at the time. He was in a dream or a flashback.”

  He sat back, looking as though he’d just taken a stiff right to the solar plexus. “Whew,” he said. “I thought . . . well, never mind what I thought.”

  “Go ahead, Tom.”

  “Well, see, I figured on having to spend a few thousand dollars on a lawyer for George, and it turned out they’d already appointed an attorney, and on account of him being an indigent person the attorney’s fees are paid out of public funds. And the lawyer was as good as anybody I could hire, plus he’d already seen George and had some rapport with him.” He shrugged. “So I’ve got this money I thought I was going to spend, and I thought, you know, maybe I could hire somebody to do a little detective work, find out if maybe George is innocent. Soon as I thought ‘detective’ I thought of you. But if you’re stone certain the man is guilty—”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “No? That’s what it sounded like.”

  I shook my head. “I said I think he’s guilty. Or that he did it; words like ‘guilty’ seem ill-chosen when the person involved may have thought he was executing a sniper somewhere north of Saigon. But that’s just what I think, and it’s an opinion based on the existing evidence. I could hardly think anything else, given the data available to me. There may be more data that neither of us knows about, and if it was brought to my attention I might have to revise that opinion. So yes, I think he did it, but I also think it’s possible I’m wrong.”

  “Say he didn’t do it. Is there a way to prove it?”

  “You’d have to prove it,” I said, “because I don’t think you could get him off by discrediting the prosecution’s case. Even if you impugned some of the eye-witness testimony, the cartridge casings are solid physical evidence and the next best thing to a smoking gun. Since they’ve got enough to prove him guilty, your only defense is to provide actual proof of innocence, probably by establishing that somebody else did it. Because Holtzmann sure as hell didn’t commit suicide, and if George didn’t kill him somebody else did.”

  “So you’d have to find the real killer.”

  “Not quite. You wouldn’t have to identify him or develop a case against him.”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “Not really. Say a flying saucer descended from the skies and a Martian hopped out, put four bullets in Holtzmann, got back in his saucer, and took off for outer space. If you can substantiate that, if you can prove it happened, you don’t have to produce the saucer or subpoena the Martian.”

  “I get it.” He got out a cigarette, lit it with a Zippo. Through a cloud of smoke he said, “Well, what do you think? You want to go looking for that Martian?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I may be the wrong person for this,” I said. “See, I was acquainted with Glenn Holtzmann.”

  “You knew him?”

  “Not well,” I said, “but better than I knew your brother. I was up to his apartment once. I’ve met his wife. I talked to him a few times on the street and I had coffee with him once a block from here.” I frowned. “I wouldn’t say we were friends. As a matter of fact, I can’t say I liked him much. But I don’t think I’d be comfortable trying to get his killer off the hook.”

  “Neither would I.”

  “How’s that?”

  “If George did it,” he said, “I don’t want him off the hook either. If he pulled the trigger then he’s a danger to himself and others and he belongs in a locked ward somewhere. I only want him cleared if he didn’t do it, and if that’s the case where’s your conflict? You’d only be helping George if he turns out to be innocent. And you just said it yourself, if he didn’t do it then somebody else did. If George goes away for it, then the real killer’s getting away with it.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “The fact that you knew the victim,” he said, “to my mind that makes you the perfect man for the job. You knew Holtzmann, you know George, you know the neighborhood. That gives you a head start, the way it looks to me. If anybody’s got a shot at it, I’d say you do.”

  “I’m not sure that means much,” I said. “I think the chance that your brother didn’t do it is slim, and the likelihood of establishing it is slimmer still. I’m afraid you’d be throwing your money away.”

  “It’s my money, Matt.”

  “That’s a point, and I guess you’re entitled to throw it away if you want to. The thing is, it’s my time, and I don’t much like to throw it away even if I’m getting paid for it.”

  “If there’s a chance he’s innocent—”

  “That’s another thing,” I sa
id. “You believe he’s innocent, in part because that’s what you’d prefer to believe. Well, let’s suppose that he is, and that if you just sit back and do nothing he’s going to go away for the rest of his life for a crime he didn’t commit.”

  “That’s the thought that drives me crazy.”

  “Well, is it the worst thing in the world, Tom? You said yourself that he wouldn’t be in a conventional penitentiary, that he’d wind up in some sort of mental facility where his needs would be met and he’d get some sort of help. Even if he’s innocent, even if he got there for the wrong reason, is that so bad? They’ll feed him, they’ll see that he bathes and takes care of himself, he’ll get treatment—”

  “Thorazine’s what he’ll get. They’ll turn him into a fucking zombie.”

  “Maybe.”

  He took off his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose. “You don’t know my brother,” he said. “You’ve seen him but you don’t know him. He’s not homeless, he’s got a room, but he might as well be homeless for all the time he spends there. He can’t take being cooped up. He’s got a bed that he hardly ever sleeps in. He doesn’t sleep like a normal person, lies down at night and gets up in the morning. He sleeps like an animal, half an hour or an hour at a time, on and off throughout the day and night. He’ll stretch out on a bench or curl up in a doorway and nap like a cat.