The Devil Knows You're Dead: A MATTHEW SCUDDER CRIME NOVEL

by Lawrence Block

  “Strictly a bass player, huh?”

  “That would be my guess.”

  I drank some tea. I said, “I hate the thought of losing her.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  I said, “When Jan and I broke up, when we finally called it quits and I got my stuff from her place and gave her back her key, I remember telling you how much it saddened me to see the relationship end. Do you remember what you said to me?”

  “I hope it was profound.”

  “You told me that relationships don’t end, they just take a different form.”

  “I said that?”

  “Yes, and I found the words very comforting. For the next few days I was running them through my mind like a mantra. ‘Relationships don’t end, they just take a different form.’ It helped me keep from feeling that I’d lost something, that something valuable had been taken from me.”

  “It’s funny,” he said, “because not only don’t I remember the conversation, but I can’t even recall ever having had the thought. But I’m glad it was a comfort.”

  “It was,” I said, “but after a couple of days I thought about it, and I decided it was a cold comfort. Because this particular relationship had changed its form, all right. It had changed from two people who spent half their nights together and spoke at least once a day to two people who made a particular point of staying out of each other’s way. The new form the relationship had taken was one of nonexistence.”

  “Maybe that’s why I didn’t remember the line. Maybe my unconscious mind had the good sense to spot it for the horseshit it was.”

  “But it’s not horseshit,” I said, “because when all is said and done you were absolutely right. Jan and I were cordial when we ran into each other, but how often did that happen? Once or twice a year? I can tell you the last two times I spoke to her over the phone. That lunatic Motley was running around killing any woman he could find who’d ever had anything to do with me, and I called my ex-wife to tell her to lay low, and I called Jan, too. Then I called her again afterward to tell her the coast was clear.

  “But she’s always been there whether I see her or not, whether I talk to her or not, whether I consciously think of her or not. Relationships change their form, yes, but there’s something about them that doesn’t change. I’ll tell you, I hate to think of a world that doesn’t have her in it. I’m going to lose something when she dies. My life’s going to be a little smaller.”

  “And a little closer to the end.”

  “Maybe.”

  “All our mourning’s for ourselves.”

  “You think so? Maybe. When I was a kid I couldn’t understand why people had to die. You want to know something? I still can’t.”

  “You were young when you lost your father, weren’t you?”

  “Very young. I thought the whole thing was a colossal mistake on God’s part. Not my father’s death in particular but the way the system worked. I still don’t get it.”

  Neither did he, and we batted that one around for a while. Then he said, “Getting back to my words of wisdom about relationships enduring. Maybe death doesn’t change things, either.”

  “You mean the spirit lives on? I’m not sure I buy that.”

  “I don’t know that I do, either, although I keep an open mind on the subject. But that’s not what I’m getting at. Do you honestly think Jan’ll stop being a part of your life when her own life comes to an end?”

  “Well, it’ll be a little harder to get her on the phone.”

  “My mother died over six years ago,” he said, “and I can’t get her on the phone, but I don’t have to. I can hear her voice. I don’t mean that she’s necessarily out there somewhere, in an afterworld or on another plane of existence. The voice I hear is the part of her that’s become a part of me and lives on in my mind.” He fell silent for a moment, and then he said, “My father’s been gone over twenty years, and I’ve still got his voice in my head, too, the old bastard. Telling me I’m no damn good, telling me I’ll never amount to anything.”

  “I sat at the window and watched it rain,” I said, “and I thought of all the people I’ve lost over the years. That’s what comes of living this long. It’s a hell of a choice life gives you. Either you die young or you lose a lot of people. But they’re not gone if I still think of them, right?”

  “More cold comfort, huh?”

  “Well, it’s better than no comfort at all.”

  He signaled for the check. “There’s a new Big Book meeting Sundays at Holy Name,” he said. “If we leave now we should be right on time for it. Want to check it out?”

  “I went to a meeting this morning.”

  “So?”

  THERE are several different formats for AA meetings. There are speaker meetings and discussion meetings, and there are formats which combine the two elements. There are step meetings, which center each week upon one of the program’s twelve steps, and tradition meetings, which do the same for AA’s twelve traditions. Promise meetings focus on the benefits of recovery, which are presumably assured to everyone who follows the directions. (There are twelve promises, too. If Moses had been an alcoholic, I’ve heard it said, we’d be stuck with twelve commandments instead of ten.)

  The Big Book is the oldest and most important piece of AA literature, written by the first members over fifty years ago. Its opening chapters explain the program’s principles, and the rest of the book consists of members telling their personal stories, much as we tell them now when we speak at meetings, telling what our lives used to be like, what happened, and what it’s like now.

  When I was first getting sober Jim kept telling me to read the Big Book, and I kept finding things I didn’t like about it. The prose style was leaden, the tone was deadly earnest, and the sophistication level was that of a Rotary Club breakfast in a small town in Iowa. He said I should read it anyway. The writing’s old-fashioned, I said. So’s Shakespeare, he said. So’s the King James Bible. So what? When I complained of insomnia, he told me to read the Big Book at bedtime. I tried it, and reported that it worked. Of course it works, he said; some of those chapters would stop a charging rhino in its tracks.

  At a Big Book meeting, members typically take turns reading a couple of paragraphs of the sacred text. When the week’s designated chapter has been completed, the rest of the hour is given over to a discussion of what was read, with people relating what they heard to their own personal histories and current situations.

  This particular group, Clinton Big Book, had been meeting for the past eight Sundays in a first-floor classroom at Holy Name School, on Forty-eighth between Ninth and Tenth. There were fourteen of us and the chapter was a long one, so most of us got to read more than once. I didn’t pay much conscious attention to the reading, but that was all right. It wasn’t exactly new information.

  IT was still raining when the meeting ended. I walked a few blocks with Jim, neither of us saying much. At his corner he clapped me on the shoulder and told me to stay in touch. “Remember,” he said, “it’s not your fault. I don’t know how Jan got cancer, never mind why, but there’s one thing I do know. You didn’t give it to her.”

  I was only a few blocks from Grogan’s, but rather than walk past it I cut over to Ninth Avenue. It was no night for me to be sitting at a table with a bottle of good whiskey, even if another man was doing the drinking. Nor did I feel much like talking. I’d had enough conversation for one night, for all I’d left unsaid.

  I hadn’t said a word about the gun. Jim never asked the reason for Jan’s call, assuming she’d just felt the need to share significant news with an old friend. If he’d asked I’d probably have told him about the mission she’d assigned to me, and that I had accepted it. But he hadn’t asked and I hadn’t mentioned it.

  I called Elaine from my hotel room, and I didn’t mention it to her, either. I didn’t say much about my visit to the murder site, or about the rest of the day. We weren’t on the phone all that long, and what we mostly talked about was he
r day, and the show she’d seen uptown at the museum. “Early photos of New York, and it’s really a wonderful show,” she said. “I think you’d enjoy it. It’s up through the middle of next month, so maybe you can get to it. I walked out of there thinking I’ll buy a camera, I’ll walk around the city every day and take pictures of everything.”

  “You could do that.”

  “Yeah, but why? Because I like to look at photographs? Remember what W. C. Fields said.”

  “ ‘Never give a sucker an even break.’ ”

  “He said women are like elephants. ‘I like to look at them but I wouldn’t want to own one.’ ”

  “What has that got to do with photographs?”

  “Well, I like to look at them, but . . . I don’t know. Forget it. Does everything I say have to make sense?”

  “No, and it’s a good thing.”

  “I love you, you old bear. You sound tired. Long day?”

  “Long day, cold day, wet day.”

  “Get some sleep. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  But I couldn’t sleep for the longest time. I turned the TV on and off, picked up books and magazines, read a page here and a page there and put them down again. I even tried the Big Book, that time-honored soporific, but it didn’t work. There are times when it doesn’t, times when nothing works, and all you can do is look out the window at the rain.

  Chapter 9

  “I hate to say it,” Joe Durkin said, “but I’ve got a bad feeling about this. I wish you would give the guy his money back.”

  “That’s something I never thought I’d hear you say.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s not like me. When a man gets a chance to make an honest dollar, who am I to stand in his way?”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  He leaned back in his chair, balancing it on its back legs. He said, “What’s the problem? My friend, you’re the problem.”

  We were in the detective squad room on the second floor of the Midtown North station house on Fifty-fourth Street. I’d walked over after breakfast, going a little bit out of my way in order to have another look at the Eleventh Avenue murder site. It was a lot livelier on a Monday morning, with most of the shops and showrooms open for business and more vehicular traffic on the avenue, but it didn’t offer any fresh insights into the last moments of Glenn Holtzmann.

  From there I’d gone to Midtown North, where I’d found Joe at his desk. I’d told him how Tom Sadecki had given me a retainer, and now he was telling me to give it back.

  “If you were almost anybody else,” he said, “you’d do what almost anybody else would do, which is put in a dozen hours or so and then tell your client what he probably already knows, which is that his nut job of a brother did it. That way your client knows he did all he could, and you earn yourself a decent piece of change without busting your hump to do it.

  “But you’re a contrary bastard, and on top of that you’re as stubborn as a fucking mule. Instead of just taking your guy and shining him on, which is all he really wanted in the first place, whether he knows it or not, you’ll have to make sure you give him his money’s worth. And you’ll find a way to convince yourself there’s a possibility the brother didn’t do it, and you’ll put in the hours, and you’ll break everybody’s balls, mine included. By the time you’re done you’ll have so much time invested that you’ll be lucky to clear minimum wage for your troubles, and you’ll have come to the reluctant conclusion that Lonesome George is every bit as guilty as everybody knows he is, but you’ll have done everything in your power to fuck up an open-and-shut case. Why are you staring at me like that?”

  “I was just wishing I had a tape of that speech. I could play it for prospective clients.”

  He laughed. “You think I went overboard there? Well, it’s a Monday morning. You have to make allowances. Seriously, Matt, just go through the motions on this one, will you? It’s a high-profile case. We solved it fast with some good police work, but the media’s in love with the story. You don’t want to give ’em an excuse to open it up again.”

  “What would they find?”

  “Nothing. The case is solid. It was a good bust.”

  “Were you on the case, Joe?”

  “The whole precinct was on it, along with half of Manhattan Homicide. I didn’t have much to do with closing it. Once they picked him up it was closed. He had the brass in his pocket, for Chrissake. The casings. What more do you need?”

  “How did you know to pick him up?”

  “Information received.”

  “Received from whom?”

  He shook his head. “Uh-uh. Can’t tell you that.”

  “From a snitch?”

  “No, from a priest who decided it was time to violate the seal of the confessional. Yes, of course from a snitch. As far as the identity of the snitch is concerned, don’t ask.”

  “What did the snitch have to say?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “I don’t know why not,” I said. “Was he on the scene? Did he see something, hear something? Or did somebody just pass on a rumor that led you to George?”

  “We have an eyewitness,” he said. “How’s that?”

  “An eyewitness to the actual shooting?”

  He frowned. “I always tell you more than I planned,” he said. “Why do you figure that is?”

  “You know it’s the best way to get rid of me. What did your eyewitness see?”

  “I already said too much, Matt. There’s a witness and there’s hard physical evidence and there’s the next best thing to a confession. Sadecki says he figures he probably did it. The case is so solid even the perp’s convinced.”

  It had me convinced, too, but I had a fee to earn. “Suppose what the witness saw was the aftermath,” I said. “George bending over the body, picking up the shells.”

  “After somebody else shot him.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Oh, sure, Matt. Somebody fired from the grassy knoll. You ask me, the CIA was in on it.”

  “Holtzmann could have been mugged,” I said. “It’s not exactly unheard-of in that neighborhood. He could have been shot resisting a robbery attempt.”

  “No evidence of it. He had a wallet on his hip with over three hundred dollars in it.”

  “The mugger panicked after the shooting.”

  “Funny way to panic. First he fires a very deliberate fourth shot into the back of the neck, then he panics.”

  “Who else was on the scene? Who else did the witness get a look at?”

  “He saw George. That was enough.”

  “What was Holtzmann doing there? Did anybody bother to check that out?”

  “He went for a walk. It’s not like commercial aviation, you don’t have to file a flight plan first. He was restless and he went for a walk.”

  “And he stopped to make a phone call? What was the matter with the phone in his apartment?”

  “Maybe he was trying to call his apartment, tell his wife when he’d be home.”

  “How come he didn’t reach her?”

  “Maybe the line was busy. Maybe he had the number half-dialed when Boy George shot him. Who the hell knows, and what the hell difference does it make? God damn it, you’re doing just what I knew you would do, you’re trying to pick holes in a perfectly solid case.”

  “If it’s really solid I won’t be able to, will I?”

  “No, but you’ll make a real pain in the ass of yourself in the meantime.”

  I’m the one fly in the ointment, Tom Sadecki had said. I’m the pain in everybody’s ass.

  I said, “What do you know about Holtzmann, Joe?”

  “I don’t have to know anything about him. He’s the victim.”

  “That’s where a homicide investigation starts, isn’t it? With the victim?”

  “Not when you can cut to the chase. When you’ve already got the killer in custody, you don’t have to turn the victim inside out. Why the thoughtful expression?”

 
“You know what’s wrong with the case, Joe?”

  “The only thing wrong with it is you’re taking an interest. Aside from that it’s perfect.”

  “What’s wrong with it,” I said, “is you solved it too fast. There are a lot of things you would have learned—about Holtzmann, about other people in the area—but you never had to pursue them because why bother? You already had the killer in custody.”

  “You think we’ve got the wrong man?”

  “No,” I said. “I think you’ve got the right man.”

  “You think the police work was slipshod? You think we missed something?”

  “No, I think the police work was excellent. But I think there are some avenues you haven’t needed to explore.”

  “And you figure you’ll take a little walk down them.”

  “Well, I took the man’s money,” I said. “I have to do something.”

  THE Donnell branch library is on Fifty-third off Fifth. I spent a couple of hours in the second-floor reading room going through all the local papers for the past ten days. Once I got past the hard news, most of which was already familiar to me, the bulk of the stories turned out to be non-stories, pieces about homelessness, about neighborhood gentrification, about crime in the streets. There were interviews with people who’d lived for years in the area’s tenements and apartment houses, with others who’d recently moved into Holtzmann’s high-rise, and with a few who lived on the street. Every columnist with an ax to grind found a way to hone it here. Some of it made interesting reading, but it didn’t tell me much I hadn’t already known.

  There was one essay I particularly liked, a Times Op-Ed piece by an advertising copywriter who was identified as residing within two blocks of the Holtzmann apartment building. He had been unemployed since late May, and he explained how his economic circumstances altered his perspective.

  “With every passing day,” he wrote, “I identify a little less strongly with Glenn Holtzmann, a little more closely with George Sadecki. When the news first broke, I was shocked and horrified. That could have been me on the sidewalk, I told myself. A man just past entering the prime of life, a professional man with a bright future, living in Clinton, the most exciting area of the most stimulating city in the world.