After the First Death

by Lawrence Block

  The gray in my hair would not help. Linda had no doubt described my current appearance when she sounded the alarm. I turned another corner, leaned against the trunk of a tree and tried to catch my breath. A wave of bright fury came suddenly and went as suddenly. I thought of going back to her house and getting her car keys, but it stood to reason that the cops would have her place staked out for the next few hours, and perhaps throughout the night Even if they didn’t, she would know better than to open her door a second time.

  I kept walking. It did no good to hate Linda, I realized. One might as logically hate a cat for killing birds. It is part of the essence of catness to slaughter warblers, just as it is part of the essence of Lindaness to decorate the walls of her psychic trophy room with male genitalia. It is a trait of the species; however deplorable, one can expect no better.

  I moved steadily away from the center of town and walked in darkness down quiet residential streets. Every family seemed to have two cars, and often only one was kept in the garage, sharing that space with bicycles and toys and power lawn mowers and such. The second car, ungaraged, was parked either in the driveway or at the curb.

  Many of these cars, I discovered, were not locked.

  This was an interesting revelation, but I wasn’t sure just what I could do with it. There is a way of starting a car without a key, I understand; I believe it involves the use of some apparatus called a jumper cable or wire or something which is affixed to the terminals of the ignition switch. I’m not quite sure how it goes, and have no idea how one does it.

  It would seem an art worth knowing. All of those unlocked cars began to drive me to distraction. Better by far if the cars were locked up tight with their keys left in the ignition. Any fool can break a window.

  Hide-A-Key—

  I remembered, suddenly, the brilliant little device sold through the mails and at hardware stores and gas stations, a magnetized box in which a spare key could repose beneath a fender, theoretically available whenever needed. I’d bought one myself once, years ago, and had dutifully tucked an extra key into it and slapped it onto the underside of a fender. It was months before I needed it, and sometime during those months it had fallen off and was lost forever.

  Did people still use them? I wondered. And I checked a variety of cars, looking in the logical places, on the undersides of the fenders, front and back, and felt foolish the first time, and felt like an idiot by the time I was key-hunting on the tenth or twelfth car. But ultimately I found a year-old Plymouth convertible whose owner had responded to the Hide-A-Key sales pitch. He had evidently bought the thing about the same time he had bought the car and had never touched it since. The Hide-A-Key was rusted and grime-covered. But it slid properly open, and the key fit quite neatly into the ignition.

  I had not driven in a long time, and did not know the roads. Driving—like swimming, like love—is never forgotten. Routes are, but once out of town I followed the New York markers and got where I was going. There were things I did not want to think about on the way. I played the radio, and between the noise of a rock ’n’ roll station and the unknown route and unfamiliar car, I didn’t have to think about very much of anything.

  I left the car somewhere on the West Side and walked back to the hotel. I spent the night not sleeping. I wanted a drink badly. But by the time I had managed to decide to get up and go out and have one, it was four o’clock and the bars were closed. So I stayed where I was, and kept trying to sleep, and kept not making it.

  According to my erstwhile sister-in-law, Gwen had had an affair with Doug MacEwan. Linda, certainly, was in no sense constitutionally incapable of falsehood; her only reason for telling the truth instead of a lie would be that the truth was more damaging. In this case, the truth seemed to be that the pal that I loved stole the gal that I loved—and, given the circumstances, my own position seemed perfectly obvious.

  Except that things are rarely as simple as they seem. The automatic rage, the sense of having been cruelly used and ignominiously betrayed, just wouldn’t come. Time does more than heal wounds. Time can, in some instances, grow scar tissue in advance and prevent the wound from doing more than scratching the surface.

  You see, there were all of those years in the way. The gal that I loved was a gal I loved no more. It had all happened five years ago, five desperately long years ago, and my world in those five years was so much changed that I could not put the betrayal into context. The participants in the drama were my once-wife (who now betrayed me nighdy, or however frequently their schedule permitted, with yet another man, to whom she happened to be lawfully married) and my vestigial best friend, whose world now barely overlapped with mine and with whom I could no longer communicate. I might damn them both for treachery and lechery, but I was so far removed from the realness of it that I was more struck by the fortuitous rhyme of those two sins than by the awesome enormity of the crime.

  I believed that it had happened. I knew that it had happened. Viewed from my present vantage point, armed with Linda’s passed-along knowledge, much of Doug’s reticence ever since Sunday night came vividly into focus. And, more to the point, I remembered what Kay had said, albeit hysterically, earlier that evening.

  You have to leave us alone, Alex! You have to leave us out of it! It was years ago! It means nothing now, can’t you understand? It’s over and done with, we’ve forgotten all about it—

  At the time I had read all of this as meaningless hysteria which defied proper translation. Forgotten all about what? And what was over and done with? Our mutual friendship, I had assumed at the time. But it now seemed clear that Kay had thought I had known of the affair—as she herself had evidently long known of it.

  So I believed it. I believed it, and lay in bed not sleeping, and tried to be furious about it all, and couldn’t. Which is not to say that I felt nothing. What I did feel, actually, was double-barreled—on the one hand, an alarming sense of extreme personal isolation; on the other, the sort of feeling a child must have upon discovering, many years after the fact, that he was adopted. The equihbrium-shattering realization that the most important persons in one’s life are not at all what one has forever thought them to be, and that one’s life itself is not as one has seen it.

  Around the time that the sun came up it occurred to me that I had solved everything. Doug was Gwen’s phantom lover; thus he was my phantom killer as well, and had murdered twice to frame me. I thought about this for quite some time, turning it this way and that in my mind. It seemed wholly logical at first, but of late so many things were showing themselves to be rather less logical than they first appeared. I had taken it for granted that, if Gwen had had a lover, he and the killer were the same man. Now, the more I thought it over, the more I was forced to conclude that I was working upon an equation with two unknowns. X was the lover and Y was the killer, and there was no reason to conclude that X = Y. Now, with X known, it seemed less and less likely.

  The affair did not seem to have been a grand passion. It had ended, and must have done so in such a way that Kay MacEwan (a) knew about it and (b) did not deem it ample justification for leaving her husband. It could, conceivably, have moved Doug to frame me for murder. And, that accomplished, he could have decided that he did not want Gwen after all, that he had to stay with Kay, or whatever.

  But, after it was all five years dead, after Gwen was married to another man and three thousand miles away on the other side of the country, why would Doug set me up a second time? He, more than anyone else, still knew me. He, more than anyone else, knew that I had not the slightest suspicions about anything, that I was convinced of my own guilt for Evangeline Grant’s murder, that I entertained no dreams of clearing myself, that I wanted only to tread water and stay afloat one way or another. He could have had a reason for the first murder, albeit a shaky ill-founded one. But for the second murder he had no motive that I could possibly imagine.

  Of course Gwen could have had more than one lover. Despite what Linda had said, there was no way to rul
e out Bussell Stone entirely. And Pete Landis, for all her slander, might yet be the man. And—

  Sand castles. Speculation.

  That was all it was, all of it. I wasn’t getting anywhere. I was unused to detection, and while my tactics were not without occasional skill, my strategy was amateurish and hazy at best. I knew a good many things, some of which I might have been better off not knowing, but I still had no real idea who might have killed Robin, or why.

  I fell asleep somewhere around mid-morning. I dreamed an idiot dream of a girl with three blue eyes, the third one slightly smaller than the others and set just between the other two over the bridge of the nose. She kept talking to me, and the middle eye kept blinking. I woke around six with the dream still buzzing in my head, and bothering me. I couldn’t get the image out of my mind. It hovered for hours. I tried to remember what the rest of the girl looked like, but I couldn’t get past the extra eye. That was all that remained of the dream.

  I was back in the afternoon papers again. They had begun to lose interest in me, which in turn had permitted me to feel somewhat safe walking the city streets, but now Linda had given them a fresh and exciting story, however little relationship it may have borne to reality, and I was back in print once more. My disappearance from Larchmont had not yet been explained officially. If the police had guessed that I had stolen the Plymouth convertible, or if it had been discovered where I parked it, the New York Post was as yet unaware of the fact.

  I had dinner, then took the paper back to my room and read all of it. I threw it away and tried to decide where to go next, and what to do. I had spent a few days with an abundance of things to do, and now I was fresh out, and it unsettled me.

  It was a combination of a number of things, I think, that ultimately got to me. The newspaper article, and the reality of the near capture in Larchmont left me very shaky. I was afraid to leave the room and at the same time found myself developing an unaccustomed sense of claustrophobia, as though the room were a cul-de-sac in which I could be easily captured at any moment I had nothing specific to do, and wanted more than ever to do something. Around eleven o’clock I left the hotel and wandered over to Times Square.

  The girls were out already on Seventh Avenue, though not in full force. They mostly walked, although a few lurked in doorways or pretended to study movie posters. A collection of immaculately dressed Negro pimps grouped in front of the Forty-seventh Street Whelan’s and defined the word cool. Uniformed cops oversaw and ignored everything. A pair of sailors picked up a pair of hookers. I kept in the shadows, had a papaya drink at the Elpine stand, worked my way through a pack of cigarettes.

  I was afraid to work into the scene. The girls who were here now had very probably been on the street Saturday night. They probably knew Robin, and some of them may have seen me pick her up. They could recognize me. The cops—and there were usually plainclothes bulls on that stretch, along with the ones in uniform—would be more tuned to my picture and description than the average cop in another part of the city. It was a dangerous place for me, and yet it exerted a special fascination.

  I was halfway back to my hotel before I figured out why.

  I was coming at things from the wrong direction. I was getting nowhere because I was looking for motive, and as a result was flying blind. There was more to it than motive. There was fact, there was empirical observation, there was the gradual compilation of important data. I had passed up all of that by concentrating on theory. I had spent all my time trying to reason out who might have wanted to frame me for murder, when I might better have worked with clean facts to find out who actually did the job on me.

  Those whores and those pimps knew Robin. Those whores and those pimps could have seen me pick her up.

  And they could have seen him, too. They could have seen him following me, and following Robin and me to the Maxfield. They could know what he looked like, how he was dressed.

  That was the sort of knowledge I had to tap. The police could have gotten it themselves if they hadn’t closed the books on the case almost before it opened. But, convinced beyond doubt that I was the killer, they had no reason to look any further. And whores and pimps and junkies do not seek out police with their information. If they did know about the other man, that knowledge would remain hidden. I could be arrested and tried and convicted and executed, and no one would rush forward to tell the court that I was innocent, that another man had trailed us both and used the knife on Robin’s throat.

  They wouldn’t tell the police, because the police would never think to ask them.

  But they might tell me—

  I thought of moths and flames. If there was one part of New York that was dramatically unsafe for me, it was those few blocks. The idea of approaching a girl, of starting to ask questions, was absolutely terrifying. She would run, or shriek, and the police would move in, and the game would be over. PLAYGIRL SLAYER CAUGHT ON THIRD TRY, the tabloids would jubilantly announce, and crime reporters would murmur darkly about killers returning to the scenes of past crimes, while somewhere a two-time murderer would relax and grin while the noose tightened around my neck.

  If only I had a ticket to that world. If only I knew someone, so that I could come on like something other than a John.

  I found a phone, and a phone book. There was no listing for Williams, Turk. His straight name was Eugene, and there were around fifteen Eugene Williamses listed, the greater portion of them with Harlem addresses. There were also E Williamses, any one of which might have been the Turkey.

  I changed a couple of singles into dimes and went right through the list of Eugenes. I asked everyone who answered if I could speak to Turk, and eight times running I was told I had the wrong number. Did they happen to know a Eugene Williams nicknamed Turk or Turkey? No, they didn’t.

  The ninth time, he answered. I wasn’t sure the voice was his. I asked for Turk, and he said, “Right here, man.”

  I said, “This is—” and stopped, because it occurred to me that heroin wholesalers might have their phones tapped. “This is the Fountain,” I said. That had been his name for me, coined when I helped him with his appeal. He had told me how brilliant I was, and I agreed I was a regular fount of knowledge, and he said yeah, a Fountain Penn.

  “Mr. Ball Point.”

  “Right.”

  “Give me a number, this phone’s dirty.”

  I did, and he rang off. I held the hook down with one hand and kept the receiver to my ear, milming a conversation to justify my continuing presence in the booth. Five or ten minutes later the phone rang.

  He said, “I’m in a booth now, but let’s leave out the names, dig? My man, I thought you was in Brazil by now.”

  “I’m here in New York.”

  “Well, we better do something about that. Why you called, huh? My pleasure. You got me out of a tighter place than New York, New York, and if I can return the favor—”

  “Turk, I—”

  “You need money and you need transportation, am I right? Money is no problem, and there’s a car I can let you have. You want me to meet you some place, say where and when. I would say Mexico would be the best place for you. At least for a start I can tell you where to hit the border, and once you’re across—

  “Turk, I didn’t kill her.”

  He stopped in mid-sentence. He was silent for a moment, then, “Tell me more, baby.”

  I went through it as quickly as I could. “The cat who killed her,” he said finally. “You recognize him if you saw him again?”

  “All I remember was an arm. An arm and a hand.”

  “Recollect what it looked like?”

  “Like an arm, that’s all. You see one arm—”

  “No, hang on. Like was it a fat arm or a thin arm, or what kind of shirt on it or was it white or colored. Dig?”

  I tried. “No,” I said, finally. “All I really know is that it wasn’t mine. I can’t do any better than that.”

  “You can’t come any closer? It could even be a woman?”r />
  “For all I know. I hadn’t thought of that, but—”

  “Yeah, I’m hip. Maybe it’ll come clearer for you, maybe—”

  It won’t I’ve been over it too many times. I can’t get any more out of it and I’m afraid I never will.”

  “That does make it rugged, man.”

  “I know.”

  “So where do you go from here?”

  I told him my idea of tackling it from a new angle, trying to make contact with a girl who might have known Robin. He wasn’t very encouraging. “They don’t talk,” he said. “And you know, junkies, they never notice anything anyway. And when they do they forget it or they won’t talk about it.”

  “I thought you might know some of them.”

  “Not that crowd. I’m uptown, you know—”

  “I know.”

  “—And down there is another scene entirely. I’ll lay it out straight baby. You’re innocent and it’s good for you to know it and all, but stick around this town and they’ll do you just as bad as if you were guilty. Either way you got to put some mileage on you. Then maybe something comes to the surface while you’re gone, and then you come back. But meanwhile—”

  “I think I’ll keep trying.”

  “Your life, man. Need anything?”

  “No.”

  “You do, you know where to shout. Anytime, and for anything.”

  “Thanks, Turk.”

  “Cause I owe you, you know, and I settle up.”

  I rang off, left the booth. I wondered whether or not he believed me. And then, hopelessly, I realized that he did not even care. His was a practical mind, cool and calm, and he saw clearly enough that I was in precisely the same bind whether it was my hand or another’s that killed Robin Canelli. And his advice was correspondingly practical. Run, run, save yourself—

  I found a liquor store and bought a fifth of rye.

  In the hotel room I set the bottle on top of the dresser, unopened, and stared at it, and tried to find something else to look at, and thought of Linda and Gwen and Doug and pimps and whores, of girls with three blue eyes, of girls with scarlet throats.