The Devil Knows You’re Dead

by Block, Lawrence

  I found Danny Boy at Poogan’s, a regular spot of his on West Seventy-second Street. He was at his usual table, with an iced bottle of vodka alongside. He had his right leg folded so that the foot was propped up on his left knee, and he was studying his shoe. It was a half-boot, actually, beige in color, with a slight heel.

  “I don’t know about this,” he said. “You recognize the leather?”

  “Ostrich, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” he said, “and that’s what bothers me. Ever see an ostrich?”

  “Years ago at the zoo.”

  “I’ve only seen them on Channel Thirteen. Nature. National Geographic specials. Spectacular creatures. Can’t fly, but they can run like hell. Imagine killing something like that just so you can skin it and make boots.”

  “I understand they’re doing remarkable things these days with Naugahyde.”

  “It’s not the killing that bothers me,” he said. “It’s the waste. All they use is the outside, for God’s sake. It’d be different if they ate the meat, but it can’t be very tasty or they’d have it on the menu all over town.”

  “Ostrich piccata,” I suggested.

  “I was thinking of Ostrich Wellington. But you follow me, don’t you? I have this vision of the flayed corpses of ostriches rotting by the thousands, like buffalo on the Great Plains.”

  “Victims of rapacious ostrich skinners,” I said.

  “Led by the legendary Ostrich Bill Cody. Don’t you agree with me that it’s wasteful?”

  “I suppose so. They’re good-looking boots.”

  “Thank you. Long-wearing, they tell me. Makes a great leather, ostrich. And maybe it’s a good thing we kill them for their hides. Otherwise I suppose we’d be up to here in ostriches. They’d be worse than rats. God knows they’re bigger.”

  “Probably run faster, too.”

  “They’d ruin Jones Beach,” he said. “Be no place to put your towel. Every few yards you’ve got another fucking ostrich with his head in the sand.”

  Maybe he’d seen Jones Beach on Channel Thirteen. It was a sure bet he’d never been there. Danny Boy Bell, short in stature and elegant in dress, is the albino son of black parents, and he is no more apt than Dracula to venture out in daylight. At night you can find him at Poogan’s or Mother Goose, drinking Stoly or Finlandia and brokering information. In the daytime you can’t find him at all.

  I asked him what he’d heard about Glenn Holtzmann. Nothing, he said. All he knew was what he read in the papers, a story of an innocent victim, an armed derelict, and crime-ridden streets. I let out that it might not have happened that way, and that the deceased had handled a lot of cash for someone who got paid by check.

  “Ah,” Danny Boy said. “Lived life off the books, did he? I never heard a word.”

  “Maybe you could ask around.”

  “Maybe I could. And how’s your life, Matthew? How is the beautiful Elaine, and when are you going to make an honest woman of her?”

  “Gee, I was going to ask you that, Danny Boy,” I said. “You’re the man with all the answers.”

  I took a couple of cabs and dropped in on a couple of other people who kept their ears open as assiduously as Danny Boy. They didn’t dress as well or run as engaging a line of small talk, but sometimes they heard things and that made them worth a visit.

  By the time I was finished it was past midnight and I was at the counter at Tiffany’s, not the jeweler on Fifth Avenue but the all-night coffee shop on Sheridan Square. There’s a midnight meeting a short walk from there on Houston Street, in premises occupied for years by the Village’s most notorious after-hours club. I thought about dropping in, but I’d already missed half the meeting. They had a two A.M. meeting, too, but I didn’t want to stay up that late.

  Too late to call Elaine.

  Much too late to call Tom Sadecki, although it was time I let him hear from me. What had originally looked a lot like tilting at windmills was turning out to be a halfway rational mission. The more I thought about it, the more persuaded I was that George Sadecki was innocent of Glenn Holtzmann’s murder.

  With a little luck I’d be able to prove it. If I turned over Holtzmann’s life I’d find someone with a motive, and that’s half the battle, as often as not. Once you know who did it all you need to do is prove it, and I didn’t need enough proof to get a conviction in a court of law. I just had to persuade people in a position to get the charges dropped. Then George could go back to his life’s work of being a danger to himself and a nuisance to others.

  I ordered another cup of coffee. A man and woman got up from a front booth and went to the cashier’s desk. The man gave me a nod. I waved back. I recognized him from the Perry Street meeting a few blocks away. I went there sometimes when I was in the neighborhood.

  Maybe we ought to move down here, I thought. I’d certainly spent enough time in the Village, working a long hitch out of the Sixth Precinct. That’s where I’d been when Elaine and I first met, all those years ago.

  The neighborhood had gone through changes since then, but all in all it had changed less than the rest of the city. Much of it was an official historic district, its buildings protected as landmarks. There were fewer high-rises, and the crooked streets with their three-story Federal houses were on a more human scale than her present neighborhood, or mine. I’d have plenty of meetings to choose from, Elaine could walk to classes at NYU or the New School, and the SoHo art galleries were ten minutes away.

  Was that what I wanted to do?

  I knew what I wanted to do.

  “IT’S Matt,” I told her machine. “It’s late but I, uh, felt like talking if you were awake. I’ll call you in the morning.”

  She picked up. “Hello,” she said.

  “It’s late.”

  “It’s not that late.”

  “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “No, and it wouldn’t matter if you did. I was hoping you’d call.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was thinking,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “I was wondering if you felt like company. But I guess it’s too late.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not that late.”

  MY cab took Eighth Avenue uptown, turned left at Fifty-seventh, caught a red light at Ninth just past the entrance to my hotel. In my mind I heard myself tell the driver that this was fine, that I’d get off here. But the words remained unspoken and the light changed and we went another block west. He made an illegal but not uncommon U-turn and dropped me at my destination.

  The lobby attendant, so suspicious the night before, smiled in recognition this time. He called upstairs anyway, then smiled again and motioned to the elevator. On Twenty-eight, her door opened to my knock. She closed the door after me and put the chain on, then turned to give me a long look from those deep blue eyes.

  She was wearing a robe, dark green with yellow piping. Under it was a nightgown of some sort, something pinky and filmy. Her feet were bare.

  I could smell her perfume, or thought I could. Hard to tell. I’d been smelling it all the way up in the cab.

  She said something and I said something, but I don’t remember our lines. Then I said something about its being a restless night, and she said she thought maybe the moon was full and went over to the window to look for it.

  I followed her there and stood behind her. I didn’t notice the moon. I wasn’t looking for the moon. Not literally, anyway.

  I put my hands on her shoulders. She sighed and leaned back against me. I felt the warmth of her body through the robe. She turned in my arms and looked up at me, her mouth slack, her eyes enormous. I gazed into them, scared of what I might find.

  And kissed her, scared of what I might miss.

  AFTERWARD I lay there, feeling the sweat cooling on my skin, listening to the beating of my own heart. I felt gloriously, joyously alive, and at once filled to overflowing with sorrow and regret.

  I said, “I’d better be going.”
r />   “Why?”

  “It’s late.”

  “You said that when you called,” she said, “and you said that when you got here.”

  “It’s getting truer by the minute. And I’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”

  “You could stay here.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not? I’d let you sleep.”

  “Would you?”

  “A little, anyway.” She was lying on her back, her hands folded on her flat stomach, her eyes pointed at the ceiling. There was a faint sheen of perspiration on her upper lip. The silence stretched, and she broke it to say, “I like Elaine very much.”

  “Oh?”

  “I do.”

  I was propped up on an elbow, looking down at her. “So do I,” I said.

  “I know that, and—”

  “I love Elaine,” I said. “Elaine and I belong to each other. None of this has anything to do with me and Elaine. It doesn’t affect us.”

  “Then what are you doing here, Matt?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You called me, didn’t you? That was you on the phone, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what’s this all about? Is it all just part of the service? ‘Excuse me, honey, I hate to eat and run, but I’ve got to go fuck the client.’ ”

  “Cut it out.”

  “ ‘She’s a widow, and you know how they get. The poor thing’s probably dying for it.’ ”

  “And where would I get an idea like that?”

  She looked at me.

  “You didn’t want me to leave this afternoon,” I said. “You wanted help watching the sunset.”

  “I was lonely.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “No. No, I was attracted to you. And I knew you were attracted to me, at least I was pretty sure you were. And I wanted this to happen.”

  “And it did.”

  “And it did. And now you wish I would turn into a pumpkin. Or a pizza, or a puff of smoke. Because you love Elaine.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Believe me,” she said. “I don’t want to complicate your life. I don’t want to wear your ring or bear your children. I don’t even want flowers. I’d like you to go on being the detective I hired you to be, and I’d like for you to be my friend.”

  “That’s easy.”

  “Is it?”

  “Uh-huh. Except that there’s a potential for conflict between the two roles.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A detective can’t help taking note when you tell a lie. A friend is supposed to overlook it.”

  “When did I tell you a lie?”

  “Well, it was a pretty fair-skinned lie. When I called, you said you’d been awake. But you had already retired for the night.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You can’t fool the Great Detective,” I said. “When I showed up you were wearing a robe and a nightgown.”

  “So I must have been sleeping when you called.”

  “Right.”

  “In the nightgown, and when I got up I put on the robe.”

  “Right again.”

  “When you called,” she said, “I was sitting in the living room watching The Fabulous Baker Boys on HBO. I was wearing what you saw me in this afternoon.”

  “Tan slacks and a green turtleneck.”

  “Exactly. When I finished talking to you I turned off the TV and took off all my clothes. I dabbed on a little more perfume, freshened my makeup, and put on the nightie and the robe.”

  “Oh.”

  “Which probably makes me a slut, but who cares? I don’t.” She took my hand in both of hers. “Come back to bed, Great Detective. We’ll search for clues.”

  IT was well after four when I left. The bars were closed, and I was just as glad.

  I walked home across Fifty-seventh Street, feeling too many things all at once even to take note of what they were. Rather than sort out the signals, I just wanted to turn off the set.

  I went straight to my room without even stopping at the desk, got out of my clothes and under the shower. Sometimes there’s no hot water at that hour but this time there was plenty and I must have used most of it.

  I dried myself off and went straight to bed. I had a long list of things to think about but I was too tired to start. I closed my eyes and put my head on the pillow and I was gone.

  I did manage to set my clock first, and it jarred me loose from a dream at half past nine. By the time I had the alarm shut off, the dream was completely gone. All I could recall was that there had been a lot of people in the room with me, and that I didn’t have any clothes on.

  I took another shower and shaved and got dressed. On my way out I stopped at the desk for the messages I hadn’t picked up earlier, and there weren’t any. I thought that was odd, and I had one foot out the door before I realized I had never turned off Call Forwarding after I’d left Elaine’s. I had gone straight down to Chelsea, and never returned to the hotel until just before dawn.

  I went upstairs and did what you had to do. I thought about calling Elaine to check for messages, but if there’d been anything crucial she would have called the hotel desk directly. She’d done just that in the past, when I’d been similarly forgetful.

  Besides, she was probably toning her muscles at the gym. And if not, well, I didn’t feel quite ready to talk to her yet.

  I had plenty to do. I grabbed a quick breakfast around the corner, took the subway downtown to Chambers Street, and made the rounds of various city and state offices. I learned a few things about Glenn Holtzmann, the most interesting having to do with the ownership of the apartment where I had just committed what certainly felt like adultery. The original owner was a corporation called MultiCircle Productions, which had purchased the unit three years ago from the builder. MultiCircle had evidently lost it to foreclosure, because Glenn Holtzmann had acquired it a year and a half ago from an outfit called US Asset Reduction Corp. They deeded it to him on the thirteenth of April, a month before he and Lisa were married.

  That was before he’d proposed to her, and in order to close on that date he’d have had to enter negotiations before he even met the girl, which seemed odd. Maybe he fell for her because he already had a place for them to live. And maybe he bought it because the deal was too good to turn down, but what was the deal? I couldn’t find out what he’d paid for it. That was supposed to be a matter of record, but I couldn’t find the record.

  Around four I used a phone and caught Joe Durkin at his desk. I said, “You know, it’s the damnedest thing. I’m right around the corner from One Police Plaza and I don’t know a soul well enough to ask a favor.”

  “So you called me.”

  “I did. One quick question, won’t take a minute.”

  “Of my valuable time.”

  “Of your valuable time. Did Glenn Holtzmann have a record?”

  “Jesus Christ on stilts. What the hell are you jerking yourself off with now?”

  “Did he?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You know that for a fact? Your own personal knowledge?”

  “Come on, Matt. You don’t think somebody would have checked? Case generated more heat than anything since the Lindbergh kidnapping. You know how many people we had on it?”

  “Each of them assuming somebody else did the obvious thing.”

  “Come on.”

  “Humor me,” I said. “What does it hurt to check?”

  “What good could it do? Especially at this stage. I swear I can’t figure out why you’re still screwing around with this piece of shit. What’s the point?”

  “Take you twenty seconds. You just punch it up on your computer. It’ll tell you straight out and then we’ll both know.”

  “All it ever tells me straight out is Invalid Request, or else it tells me Access Not Authorized. You’re lucky you got out before these fuckers came in. The worst thing about it is the way kids fresh out of
cop school pick it all up in about a minute and a half. Makes me feel like a fucking dinosaur. . . . Shit . . . Okay, here we go. No record. What a surprise.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure, at least as far as felony and misdemeanor arrests are concerned. Maybe he ran a red light once. Maybe he was a scofflaw, had a lot of unpaid parking tickets. I wouldn’t fucking know, and don’t tell me to get my computer to talk to the computer at the Parking Violations Bureau, because I don’t want to.”

  “He didn’t have a car.”

  “He could have rented one. You can get a traffic ticket in a rented car.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I don’t really care about traffic tickets.”

  “I don’t care about any of this. Seriously, what’s the matter with you? Why are you still pursuing this?”

  “Joe, I’ve been on it less than a week.”

  “So? Look, I gotta go. Call me some day when you’re done playing with yourself, you can take me out and buy me a hamburger.”

  I bought myself a cup of coffee and wondered what had him in such a fierce mood. If I was starting with the victim, a perfectly traditional approach, why wouldn’t I want to make certain that the victim didn’t have an arrest record? It was more than odds-on that somebody would have checked, but why wouldn’t I double-check? And where did he get off being astonished, even contemptuous, of the fact that I was still on the case?

  It had been Saturday afternoon when I sat across a table from Tom Sadecki and took a thousand dollars from him. It was Thursday now. I had been on it four days. I didn’t get it.

  That reminded me, though, that I’d been planning on calling my client. I checked my notebook and tried him at the store. A woman answered, and called him to the phone without asking my name.

  I said, “Tom, it’s Matt Scudder. It occurred to me that I ought to be giving you a progress report.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that I was reluctant to take the case initially, but now it’s beginning to look as though there’s a very real possibility your brother is innocent. I don’t have anything to take to the D.A., but I feel a hundred percent more hopeful than I did Saturday.”

  “You do, huh?”