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

by Lawrence Block

  At the southeast corner of the park stood a World War I memorial, a larger-than-life statue of a Doughboy green with verdigris, a rifle on his shoulder. These six lines were engraved upon the small plinth on which he stood:

  FROM “FLANDERS FIELDS”

  IF YE BREAK FAITH

  WITH THOSE WHO DIED

  WE SHALL NOT SLEEP

  THOUGH POPPIES GROW

  ON FLANDERS FIELDS

  I remembered the poem from high school English. The author was one of the War Poets, but I couldn’t recall which one, Rupert Brooke or Wilfred Owen or someone else. The plinth offered no clues; as far as it was concerned, the lines might have been the work of the Unknown Soldier.

  To the Doughboy’s right, two men many years younger than I stood close together, deep in conversation. One was black and wore a Chicago Bulls warm-up jacket, the other an Hispanic in acid-washed denim. Perhaps they were debating the authorship of the poem, but somehow I didn’t think so. The poppies that interested them didn’t grow on Flanders fields.

  On my earlier visits to Eleventh Avenue I hadn’t noticed any drug dealers, but then I’d barely taken notice of the park, deserted at that hour. Now, in the late afternoon, it was still a long way from being a drug supermarket like Bryant Park or Washington Square. There were young men scattered about, singly or in pairs, sitting on benches or leaning against the fence, perhaps eight of them in all. Two more sat behind home plate in the otherwise empty grandstand. Most of them eyed me, warily or in entrepreneurial anticipation, as I made my rounds. A few whispered enticements: “Smoke, good smoke.”

  At the park’s western edge I looked across Twelfth Avenue and viewed the traffic, already beginning to thicken with commuters heading for the bridge and the northern suburbs. Beyond the stream of cars stood the Hudson piers. I tried to picture George Sadecki in his ratty army coat, dodging traffic so that he could heave his gun off one of those piers. But of course he’d have run that particular fool’s errand in the middle of the night. There would have been less traffic to dodge.

  I turned to watch a couple of fellows my age giving each other a workout on the handball court. They had piled their jackets and sweatpants at courtside and were down to shorts and shoes and terrycloth sweatbands, and they powered the ball as if determined to drive it through the wall, playing with the singleminded devotion of the middle-aged male. A few years ago Jan Keane and I had come upon a similar display, a pickup basketball game in the Village, and she had made a show of sniffing the air. “Testosterone,” she announced. “I can smell the testosterone.”

  Bring me a gun, she’d said. I pictured her holding it in her hands, sniffing the oiled steel. I imagined the shot, heard her disembodied voice over its reverberation. Cordite, she’d be saying. I can smell the cordite.

  I left the park at its northwest corner, and the first pay phone I came to was right there at Twelfth Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street. I listened to the dial tone but held on to my quarter because someone had removed the label that gave the phone’s number. You could call out from the unit but no one could call you back.

  There was a phone with its number intact at Fifty-fourth and Eleventh, but it wouldn’t take a quarter from me. I tried four different coins and it found something unacceptable about each of them, spewing them all back to me. I retrieved them in turn and walked a block north, and the phone I wound up calling from was the one Glenn Holtzmann used for the last call he ever made. It had its number posted, it provided a dial tone, and it took my quarter. As long as nobody shot me I was in good shape.

  I dialed a number, and when a tone sounded I punched in the number of the phone I was calling from. Then I hung up and held the mute receiver to my ear while surreptitiously holding down the hook with my other hand, so that it would appear to passersby that I was actually using the phone, not simply waiting for it to ring.

  I didn’t have long to wait. I picked up and a voice said, “Who wants TJ?”

  “The police of three continents,” I said. “Among others.”

  “Hey, my man! Where’s it at, Matt? You got something for TJ?”

  “I might,” I said. “Are you free this afternoon?”

  “No, but I be reasonable. What you got?”

  “I’m a block from DeWitt Clinton Park,” I said. “I don’t know if you know it.”

  “ ’Course I know it. That’s the park and not the school? Say I meet you by the statue of the captain.”

  “You mean the soldier.”

  “I know he’s a soldier. I don’t know his name, so I call him Captain Flanders.”

  “I think you’ve got the rank wrong,” I said. “He’s dressed like an enlisted man.”

  “Oh yeah? He white, so I figure he be an officer. Meet you there in twenty minutes?”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

  “Then why’d you call, Paul? What you said—”

  “I don’t think we should meet in the park, that’s all.” I looked around for a place to meet but didn’t see anything suitable on the avenue. “Tenth Avenue and Fifty-seventh,” I said. “There’s a coffee shop on the corner. Armstrong’s is on one corner and there’s a high-rise apartment building diagonally across from it, and on one of the other corners there’s a coffee shop, a Greek place.”

  “That’s three corners,” he said. “What’s on the fourth one?”

  “I don’t know offhand. What difference does it make?”

  “Don’t make none to me, man, but you already told me about two other places that don’t make no difference either. You want to meet me at a coffee shop, all you got to tell me about is the coffee shop. I guess I find it all right. No need to give me landmarks.”

  “Twenty minutes?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  I took my time getting there, doing a little window shopping along Fifty-seventh Street. It took me fifteen minutes to get to the coffee shop, and TJ was already there, sitting in one of the front booths and working his way through a pair of cheeseburgers and a plate of well-done french fries. TJ is a black street kid, visually indistinguishable from all the others who hang out on West Forty-second Street between Bryant Park and the Port Authority Bus Terminal. A while back a case had led me to that blighted stretch of pavement, and that’s where I met TJ.

  By now we were old friends and business associates, but I still knew remarkably little about him. TJ was the only name I knew for him, and I had no idea what the letters stood for, or if indeed they stood for anything at all. I didn’t know how old he was—sixteen, if I had to guess—or anything about his family. From his accent and speech pattern I’d have to guess he was Harlem born and bred, but he turned accents on and off, and I had heard him sound convincingly Brooks Brothers more than once.

  He spent most of his waking hours in and around Times Square, practicing the survival skills you need to get over on the Deuce. I don’t know where he slept. He insisted he wasn’t homeless, that he had a place to live, but he was very secretive about the subject.

  At first I’d had no way to reach him, and when he called me I was unable to return his calls. Then he took the money I paid him for a good night’s work and bought himself a beeper, claiming it was an investment. He was very proud of the beeper and always managed to pay the monthly charge to keep it on-line. He thought I should have one, too, and couldn’t understand why I didn’t.

  Whatever else he did for money, he seemed willing to drop it in a second if I called him with an offer of a day’s work. When I failed to call he would call me, insisting I must have something for him, proclaiming that he was energetic and resourceful. God knows I didn’t throw a whole lot of money his way, and I’m sure he got a better financial return on his time scamming on the Deuce, running errands for the players and shilling for the monte men. But he persisted in regarding the detective business as his chosen career, and looked forward to the day when the two of us would be partners. Meanwhile he seemed perfectly content to play Tonto.

  While he ate I told him a
bout Glenn Holtzmann and George Sadecki. He’d heard about the incident—it would have been hard for anyone in the tri-state area to miss it—but it had had less impact on the Deuce than in less volatile neighborhoods. I could understand this. A dude shot a dude is how the street kids would sum it up, and what after all was so remarkable about that? It happened all the time.

  Now, though, he had a reason to pay attention to the fate of these particular dudes, and he listened closely while I laid it out for him. When I was done I motioned for the waiter and ordered more coffee for myself and a chocolate egg cream for TJ.

  When his egg cream came he took a sip and nodded like a gourmet indicating that the Pommard was acceptable. Not outstanding, mind you, but perfectly acceptable. He said, “They’s people in the park an’ on the street. Be buyin’ this an’ sellin’ that.”

  “Not so much in the daytime,” I said, “but especially at night.”

  “An’ it was nighttime when it went down, an’ you think maybe somebody seen something. An’ they take one look at you an’ right away they make you for the Man, so you don’t be gettin’ no place with ’em.”

  “I didn’t even try.”

  “Nobody be thinkin’ I the Man.”

  “My thought exactly.”

  “They see me an’ you together, they be puttin’ two an’ two. So that’s why we here ‘stead of meetin’ in the park.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “Well, it don’t take no rocket scientist.” He lowered his head, worked on the egg cream. He came up for air and said, “I’d fit in better’n you would. No question. Might even bump into some dude I already know. Might not, though. Clinton Park be off of my usual turf.”

  “Just by a few blocks, and you must have made the trip before. You remembered Captain Flanders.”

  “Oh, Cappy an’ I be old friends, but this here’s my city, Kitty. I be plannin’ to know it all, time I’m through. That don’t mean I know the dudes on the pavement everywhere I go. Most of your players, they don’t move around too much. Somebody new comes on the scene, he be looked over pretty good. Maybe he competition, maybe he runnin’ a game of his own. Maybe he the Man, or maybe he workin’ for the Man. More he ask questions, more he start lookin’ like trouble.”

  “If there’s a risk involved,” I said, “let’s forget it.”

  “Be a risk in crossin’ the street,” he said. “Risk in not crossin’ the street, too. Can’t spend your life standin’ on the corner. What you do, you look both ways an’ then you cross.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Just that it might could take a few days. Can’t be walkin’ up to people an’ askin’ questions right off. Got to take your time, build up to it.”

  “Take all the time you want,” I said. “The only thing is that there’s not much money in the case. Tom Sadecki didn’t give me a great deal of it in advance, and I doubt there’ll be more coming. As a matter of fact, I have a feeling I’ll wind up giving all or part of his money back to him.”

  “Hate to hear you talk like that. Givin’ money back.”

  “It goes against the grain,” I said, “but sometimes I don’t seem to have any choice.”

  “That case,” he said, pushing the check across the table at me, “I guess I best let you pay for lunch. Might as well get the money out of you while you still got some.”

  AFTER he’d headed off toward the park, I stood on the sidewalk in front of the coffee shop and looked at Glenn Holtzmann’s building. I told myself I should have picked another coffee shop for my meeting with TJ. It’s not as if my choices had been limited. There are almost as many coffee shops in Manhattan as there are Greeks in Astoria, all with essentially the same menu and about the same ambience, or lack thereof. Why did I have to pick one that would put me on this particular street corner, face-to-face with the task I least wanted to perform?

  A homicide investigation begins with the victim. From where I stood I could count up twenty-eight stories and look at the victim’s windows, behind which I might well find the victim’s wife. Lisa Holtzmann was beyond question the first person I should be talking to, the one person most likely to have information I needed to know.

  And she was the last person I wanted to talk to. I hadn’t called when she lost her unborn child. I hadn’t called when her husband was killed. I hadn’t spoken to her once since the evening the four of us spent together in April, and I had rebuffed her husband’s overtures of friendship, and I felt uncomfortable about all of that, if not precisely guilty. My discomfort grew geometrically at the thought of disturbing her now, intruding upon her grief with the kind of impolite questions it would be my duty to ask.

  I looked up, counted windows. I knew their apartment—her apartment—was on twenty-eight, but that left me uncertain as to how many windows to count, because I hadn’t noticed whether or not the building had a thirteenth floor. Most New York high-rises omit the number, but a few builders over the years had refused to cater to the superstition. (Harmon Ruttenstein, who’d plunged from his terrace a week ago, had been particularly outspoken on the subject, and more than one article had quoted his assertion that life was too short for triskaidekaphobia, which sent people all over town running to their dictionaries. Since he’d lived in one of his own buildings, one of the obituary writers pointed out, his sixty-second floor had actually been on the sixty-second floor, not on the sixty-first as would have been the case in most comparable buildings.)

  Either way, I’d told Elaine, it’s just the last half-inch or so that you have to worry about.

  For all I knew, the Holtzmanns had lived in a Harmon Ruttenstein building, but for all I knew they hadn’t, so I couldn’t really be sure which windows were theirs. I was of course able to narrow it down to two possibilities, and in any case I couldn’t tell whether the apartments in question were lit because the lowering sun was reflected in all the windows on the building’s western face.

  I thought, Jesus, spend a quarter, will you?

  There were two pay phones on the corner but one was out of order and the other wasn’t built to accept coins, just NYNEX calling cards. They offered me a card with every monthly phone bill but I had thus far resisted, seeing it as just one more thing to carry, but if the coin phones keep disappearing I suppose I’ll have to get one. Then, as with everything else, I’ll wonder how I’d ever got along without it.

  I crossed the street and made the call from Armstrong’s. In my early sobriety I’d made a great point of avoiding the place, having virtually lived there for so many years. In my absence Jimmy had lost his lease and moved the joint from the east side of Ninth just south of Fifty-eighth to its present location. I stayed out of the new place, too, and I also found myself avoiding the establishment that had replaced it, a perfectly innocent Chinese restaurant. (Once, when Jim Faber suggested it for our Sunday dinner, I told him I didn’t think it was a good idea. “I used to drink in that place before it existed,” I explained. He didn’t question either the language of that sentence or the logic of my argument. Only another alcoholic would have understood either.)

  Then one night another friend, also a sober alcoholic, suggested Armstrong’s for a late supper, and since then I’d gone there when I had a reason. I had a reason now, but an inner voice challenged it. Weren’t there any other phones in the neighborhood? What was the matter with the one in the coffee shop? And why was I looking for an excuse to hang out in a ginmill?

  A mind may be a terrible thing to waste, but it’s an even worse thing to have to listen to. I told mine Thanks for sharing and went ahead and made my phone calls, first to 411 and then to the number I copied down. Lisa Holtzmann’s phone rang four times, and then I got to hear her husband’s recorded voice advising me that no one was home and inviting me to leave my message at the beep. “Now be sure to wait for the beep,” he said. I waited for the beep, all right, and then I hung up.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d listened to a ghost. Years ago an English call girl named Portia Carr got herself kill
ed by a client—her client, not mine—and one night I got drunk enough to call her number, and got sober in a hurry when she answered. But of course it was her machine, and as soon as I figured that out I was able to go back to being drunk again.

  Machines were scarcer then. Now everybody’s got one—everybody but me—and we’re used to voices that outlive their owners. Not long ago I called a friend and Humphrey Bogart answered his phone. I called him again a week later and got Tallulah Bankhead. There was a tape you could buy, a triumph of modern technology which allowed long-dead celebrities to answer your phone. “Here’s looking at you, shweetheart. My pal Jerry Palmieri can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave your number he’ll get back to you when we round up the usual suspects.”

  Glenn Holtzmann’s voice was less of a shock than Portia Carr’s and no more of a surprise than Tallulah’s. But I was a little off-balance to begin with, making a call I was loath to make from a joint I didn’t want to be in, and I’d jump at any excuse to short-circuit the process and get out of there. Under the circumstances, I’d have hung up on John Wayne.

  Back at my hotel, I took another stab at it, but by the time I’d heard him again I’d talked myself out of leaving a message. Speaking to her was one thing, leaving word for her to call me was another. Once again I listened to the beep, and once again I left it unanswered.

  I called Elaine and told her I couldn’t remember if we had anything planned for the evening. She said we didn’t. “But I’d love to see you,” she said. “Only I don’t really feel like leaving the house.”