Even the Wicked

by Lawrence Block

Page 41

 

  He nodded slowly. "Ive thought about it all the time," he said, "and I still cant explain it, not to myself and certainly not to anybody else. I had the illusion that I could go to New York and kill this man, and then I could come back here, and the only change in my life would be that I would have more money. "

  "But thats not the way it was. "

  "The instant I pulled the trigger," he said, "the illusion vanished like a portrait in smoke blown away by a gust of wind. You couldnt even see where it had been. And it was done, the man was dead, there was no reversing it. "

  "There never is. "

  "No, there never is, not one bit of the past. Its all etched in stone. You cant erase a word, not a syllable. " He sighed heavily. "I thought… well, never mind what I thought. "

  "Tell me. "

  "I thought it didnt matter," he said. "I thought he was going to die anyway. And he was!"

  "Yes. "

  "And so are we all, every last one of us. Were all mortal. Does that mean its no crime to kill us?"

  No crime for God, I thought. He does it all the time.

  "I told myself I was doing him a favor," he went on bitterly. "That I was giving him an easy out. What made me think that was what he wanted? If hed been ready to die he could have taken pills, he could have put a plastic bag over his head. There are enough ways. For Gods sake, he lived on a high floor, he could have gone out the window. If thats what he wanted. " He frowned. "You can tell he wasnt eager to die. There was only one reason for him to sell that policy. It was to get money to live on. He wanted his life to be as comfortable as possible for as long as it lasted. So I provided the money," he said, "and then I took away the life. "

  Hed removed his glasses in the course of that speech, and now he put them on again and peered through them at me. "Well?" he said. "Now what happens?"

  * * *

  Always the beautiful question.

  "You have some choices," I said. "Theres a Cleveland police officer, a friend of a friend, whos familiar with the situation. We can go to the stationhouse where youll be placed under arrest and officially informed of your rights. "

  "The Miranda warning," he said.

  "Yes, thats what they call it. Then of course you can have your attorney present, and hell explain your options. Hed probably advise you to waive extradition, in which case youll be escorted back to New York for arraignment. "

  "I see. "

  "Or you can accompany me voluntarily," I said.

  "To New York. "

  "Thats right. The advantage in that, as far as youre concerned, is chiefly that it cuts out a certain amount of delays and red tape. And theres another personal consideration. "

  "Whats that?"

  "Well, I wont use handcuffs," I said. "If youre officially in custody youll have to be cuffed throughout, and that can be both embarrassing and uncomfortable on the plane. I dont have any official standing so Im not bound by rules of that sort. All well have to do is get two seats together. "

  "On a plane," he said.

  "Oh, thats right. You dont fly. "

  "I suppose it strikes you as terribly silly. Especially now. "

  "If its a phobic condition the rules of logic dont apply. Mr. Havemeyer, I dont want to talk you into anything, but Ill tell you this. If youre officially taken into custody and escorted to New York, theyll make you get on a plane. "

  "But if I were to go with you-"

  "How long does it take on the train?"

  "Under twelve hours. "

  "No kidding. "

  "The Lake Shore Limited," he said. "It leaves Cleveland at three in the morning and arrives at ten minutes of two in the afternoon. "

  "And thats how you went to New York?"

  "Its not that bad," he said. "The seats recline. You can sleep. And theres a dining car. "

  You can fly it in a little over an hour, but even if I left him in a holding cell in Cleveland, I wouldnt be able to catch a flight back until sometime the next morning.

  "If you want," I said, "Ill take the train with you. "

  He nodded. "I suppose that would be best," he said.

  23

  It was a long night.

  I left Havemeyer alone long enough to duck across the street to the car and bring Jason Griffin up to speed. He had plans for the evening but insisted it was no problem to cancel them, and that hed be glad to take me and my prisoner to the train station. I told him he might as well join us inside the house, and he agreed that it would be more convenient than sitting in the car with the wide-mouthed jar his uncle had recommended.

  While he locked the car, I hurried back to the house myself, anxious about having left Havemeyer alone. I was afraid I might find him dead by his own hand, or on the phone with his lawyer. It was hard to say which of the two prospects was more troubling, but both fears proved groundless. I found him in the kitchen, rinsing out our teacups.

  I told him Id invited my driver in to join us, and moments later there was a knock on the door and I opened it for Jason. I didnt know what the three of us were going to talk about, but that settled itself when Havemeyer determined that Jason was a student at Western Reserve. That led to a conversation about the colleges football team, which turned easily enough into a spirited discussion of Clevelands pro team, the Browns, and their perfidious owners decision to pack the franchise off to Baltimore.

  "The nicest thing I can find to say about that man," Havemeyer said, "is that hes an utter son of a bitch. "

  That led me almost inevitably to an analysis of the character and probable ancestry of Walter OMalley, and gave rise to a more theoretical discussion of just what a team was, and the extent to which athletes belonged to it, or it to its fans. This would have been interesting enough all by itself, but circumstance gave it a special spin. The room was thick with two conversations, the one we were having and the one we were choosing not to have. The former was about sport and its illusions, the latter about homicide and its consequences.

  Jason made a couple of phone calls to cancel his plans for the evening. I called Amtrak to book two Cleveland-to-New York seats on the Lake Shore Limited, then called Elaine in New York and got to hear my own voice on our answering machine; I left word that Id be back in the city sometime the following afternoon. When I got back to the living room, Jason and Havemeyer were weighing prospects for dinner. Jason offered to go out for pizza, and Havemeyer said it was quicker and simpler to have it delivered. He made the phone call himself, and the kid from Dominos was there well within the statutory twenty-minute time limit. Havemeyer drank a bottle of Amstel Light with his pizza, while Jason and I had Cokes. I had the sense that Jason would have preferred a beer, and wondered what had kept him from taking one. Did he feel it was inappropriate to drink on duty? Or had his uncle described me as a sober alcoholic, leading him to assume it was bad form to drink in front of me?

  * * *

  After wed eaten, Havemeyer remembered that he ought to pack for the trip. I went into the bedroom with him and leaned against the wall while he took his time selecting articles of clothing and arranging them in his suitcase. When he was done he closed it and hefted it and made a face. He said hed been meaning to get one of those suitcases on wheels you saw everybody using these days, but he hadnt gotten around to it.

  "But I dont suppose Ill be making many more trips," he said.

  I asked if the suitcase was heavy.

  "Its not too bad," he said. "Ive got more clothes in here than the last time I went, but I dont have the gun, and that was heavier than youd think. That reminds me. What should I do about the gun?"

  "You still have it?"

  "I suppose thats foolish, isnt it? I was going to get rid of it. Drop it down a sewer, or heave it into the lake. But I kept it. I thought I might, oh, need it. "

  "Where is it?"

  "In the attic. Do you want me to get it? Or should I just leave it where it is?"

  I considered the question. There was a time
when the answer would have been obvious, but a lot of court decisions had changed the rules regarding admissibility of evidence. Would it be better to leave the gun where it was for the time being, so that it could be found in due course after a proper warrant had been obtained?

  Probably, I decided, but I weighed that against the possibility that someone would break into the house and steal the gun in the meantime, and concluded it was better to have the weapon in my possession. Even if some judge disallowed it, along with his taped confession and a few other things, it seemed to me there ought to be more than enough hard evidence to make a case against him.

  He climbed up into the attic crawl space and came down holding the gun wrapped in a red-and-white-checkered cloth. The dish towel, I guess it must have been. He presented it to me like that, and I could smell the gun without unwrapping it. He hadnt cleaned it since firing it, and it still smelled of the gunshots that had killed Byron Leopold.

  I went out to Jasons car and locked it in my suitcase.

  * * *

  We killed time playing hearts, and Havemeyer made another pot of tea, and Jason drove us to the station early, getting us there almost an hour before train time. I gave him some money, and he told me he thought he ought to be paying me for the experience. I told him not to be silly and he put the money in his pocket.

  Havemeyer insisted on buying our train tickets, even as he had insisted on paying for the pizza. "Two one-way tickets," he announced. "You wont be coming back to Cleveland. And neither will I. "

  The train was crowded and we couldnt get two seats together. I took the conductor aside and told him I was a private detective escorting a material witness back to New York. He got a fellow to switch his seat, and I gave Havemeyer the window and sat down next to him.

  We talked for an hour or so. He wanted to know what to expect, and I told him as much as I knew. I told him he would want an attorney, even if all he was going to do was cooperate with the police and plead guilty. He said there was a man in Cleveland hed used in the past, but the man didnt take criminal cases, and anyway he was in Cleveland. "But I suppose he could recommend someone," he said. I said that was very likely true, and that I could recommend several New York lawyers.

  He said he supposed hed be spending the rest of his life in prison. I said that wasnt necessarily true, that he could very likely plead to a lesser charge than murder two, that a lawyer could argue that the strain of his wifes death constituted some sort of mitigating circumstances, and that his previously unblemished record (not even a traffic violation, aside from a couple of parking tickets) would certainly work to his advantage.

  "Youll have to go to prison," I said, "but itll probably be minimum-security, and the bulk of the other cons will be white-collar criminals, not child molesters and strong-arm thugs. Im not saying youll like it, but it wont be some hellhole out of The Shawshank Redemption. And Id be surprised if you wound up serving more than five years. "

  "That doesnt seem very long," he said, "for killing an innocent man. "