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

by Lawrence Block

  “How long were you married?”

  “It was a year in May, so that’s what, seventeen months? Not quite a year and a half.”

  “When did you move in here?”

  “The day we got back from the honeymoon. When we met Glenn had a studio apartment in Yorkville and of course I was still on Madison Street. After the wedding we flew to Bermuda for a week, and when we came back there was a limousine waiting for us at the airport. We came right here and I thought the driver got the address wrong, I thought we were going to live at Glenn’s place until we found something larger. The next thing I knew Glenn was carrying me over the threshold. He said if I didn’t like it we could move. If I didn’t like it!”

  “Quite a surprise.”

  “He was full of surprises.”

  “Oh?”

  She started to say something, then caught herself. “I should be businesslike,” she said. “But I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do. I’ve never hired a detective before.”

  “I already have a client, Lisa.”

  “Oh? Did he hire you?”

  “Did who hire me?”

  “Glenn.”

  “No,” I said. “Why would he have hired me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I plunged in. “A man named Thomas Sadecki hired me,” I said. “His brother was arrested for Glenn’s murder.”

  “And he hired you—”

  “To explore the possibility that his brother didn’t do it. You should understand that I’m not trying to get Sadecki off if he’s guilty. But there’s a slim chance that he’s innocent, in which case your husband’s real killer is walking around free.”

  “Yes, of course.” She thought about it. “You’re trying to find someone in Glenn’s life with a reason to kill him.”

  “That’s one possibility. The other is that he was shot down by a stranger, but that the killer was someone other than George Sadecki. Eleventh Avenue is different at night than it is by day. They stop selling cars and brake jobs and switch over to drugs and sex. That kind of activity puts a lot of wrong people on the street, and it could have been one of them who ran into Glenn.”

  “Or it could have been someone he knew.”

  “Yes, that’s possible, too. I met Glenn for the first time in April, and of course I did see him a couple of times after that around the neighborhood. But I didn’t really know him.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “Oh?”

  “I told you he swept me off my feet. That was no exaggeration. We met at his office, I think that came up in conversation the night we all got together—”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “He made a real play for me, courted me as I’d never been courted before. He gave me a real rush. I talked with him every day. If we didn’t go out, he would call me on the phone. I’d had boyfriends before, I’d had men who were interested in me, but nothing like this.

  “And at the same time he didn’t pressure me sexually. We went together for a month before we went to bed, and during that time we probably saw each other an average of three or four times a week. Well, AIDS and all, people don’t automatically go to bed on the third or fourth date anymore, but do they wait a month?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’d have worried about it, but I had the sense that he was in charge and he knew what he was doing. I always had that feeling. And one night we had dinner in his neighborhood and he took me back to his apartment. ‘You’ll stay over,’ he said. And I thought, okay, great. And we went to bed. And two days later he proposed marriage. ‘We’ll get married,’ he said. Okay, great.”

  “Very romantic.”

  “God, yes. How could I help being in love with him? And even if I weren’t, to tell you the truth I think I would have married him anyway. He was bright, he was rich, he was handsome, and he was crazy about me. If I married him I could have babies, and I could quit struggling to make a living and concentrate on the kind of art I really wanted to do. No more Madison Street, no more chasing around town on the subway, showing my book to art directors who were more interested in my figure than my work, except for the ones who weren’t interested in women at all. If I’d met someone like Glenn a few years earlier he would have scared the daylights out of me, the way he took charge of everything, but I’d had enough years of coping with things on my own. This is a tough town.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  “I was ready to let somebody else take the helm. And it never felt as though he was pushing me around. With the honeymoon, he chose the destination and made all the arrangements. But he picked a place he knew I would like. And with this apartment, he knew I liked the neighborhood and he knew I loved the idea of being way up high and looking out over the city.

  “It was all ready, too. He had it all furnished. Anything I didn’t like could go right back to the store, he said. He hadn’t wanted to bring me home to an empty apartment, but he wanted to make sure it was to my liking, so I should feel free to change anything I wasn’t crazy about. There was one rug I didn’t care for, and we took it right back to Einstein Moomjy and got that one instead, and there was really nothing the matter with the original rug but I felt as though I ought to make some little change, as though he expected me to. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Sure.”

  “He was a wonderful husband,” she said. “Thoughtful, considerate. When I lost the baby he was really there for me. It was a hard time for me and I didn’t really have anyone but Glenn. I never made close friends in New York. I was friendly with a few people in Alphabet City and I lost touch with them when I moved to Madison Street, and the same thing happened with my Madison Street friends when I got married and moved here. It’s the way I am. I’m friendly and I get along with people, but I don’t really connect with them, not in any lasting way.

  “That meant I spent a lot of time alone, because Glenn had to work late some nights, and he sometimes had business appointments evenings and weekends. I took classes—that’s how I met Elaine—and of course I had my drawing and painting. And I would take myself to the movies, or on a Wednesday afternoon I might go to a matinee. And there are always concerts. With Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center so close, it’s not hard to find something to do. And I never minded spending time by myself. Can I get you more coffee?”

  “Not right now.”

  “Since the murder,” she said, “I find I keep turning on the television set. I never watched when I was home by myself. Now I seem to watch it all the time. But I suppose I’ll get over that.”

  “Right now it’s company,” I said.

  “I think that’s exactly what it is. I started watching it for the news. I had this need to see every newscast because there might be something having to do with Glenn’s death, some new development in the case. Then once they’d arrested that man—I’m sorry, I have a block, I can never remember his name.”

  “George Sadecki.”

  “Of course. Once they arrested him, I didn’t care about the news, but I still wanted to hear voices in the house. That’s what the television is, human voices. I think I’m going to stop turning it on. If I need voices I can always talk to myself, can’t I?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them and resumed speaking her voice sounded tired, strained. “I’ve come to realize that I didn’t know my husband at all,” she said. “Isn’t that curious? I thought I knew him, or at least I didn’t give any thought to the fact that I didn’t know him. And then he was killed, and now I can see that I never knew him at all.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Sometime last month,” she said, “he in a very offhand way brought up the possibility of his death. If anything ever happened to him, he said, I wouldn’t have to worry about losing the apartment. Because there was mortgage insurance. If he should happen to die, the mortgage would automatically be paid off in full.”

  “And you haven’t b
een able to find the policy?”

  “There is no policy.”

  “People sometimes lie about having insurance coverage,” I told her. “It seems innocent enough to them because they don’t expect to die. He probably just wanted to set your mind to rest. And are you absolutely certain there’s no policy? It might be worthwhile to check with the lender.”

  “There’s no policy,” she said. “There’s no lender.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean there’s no mortgage,” she said. “I own the apartment free and clear. There was never a mortgage. Glenn bought it outright for cash.”

  “Maybe that’s what he was saying, that there was no lien against the property.”

  “No, he was very specific. He explained exactly what the policy was and how it worked. It was reducing term insurance, with the amount of coverage decreasing each year as the mortgage was amortized. It was all very clear, and it was all a complete fabrication. He did have insurance coverage, as a matter of fact, a group policy at work and a whole-life policy he took out on his own, both with me as sole beneficiary. But he didn’t have any reducing term insurance, and there was never any mortgage.”

  “I gather he handled the family finances.”

  “Of course. If I had been paying the bills each month—”

  “You would have noticed there was no mortgage payment to make.”

  “He took care of everything,” she said. She started to say something else, then stopped and got to her feet. She went over to the window. It was fully dark now, and you could see stars. You can’t always see them over New York, even on clear nights, because of the pollution. But they sparkled now, thanks to the clean Canadian air.

  She said, “I don’t know if I should tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “I wonder if I can trust you.” She turned around and fastened those big blue eyes on me. They looked trusting enough. There was precious little calculation in their gaze. “I wish I could hire you,” she said. “But you’ve already got a client.”

  “Do you think your interests are opposed to his?”

  “I don’t know what my interests are.”

  I waited for more. When she didn’t say anything I asked her how her husband had been able to buy the apartment for cash.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He had money he’d inherited on the death of his parents, that’s how he’d been able to afford the down payment. He said.”

  “Maybe there was enough family money so that he didn’t need a mortgage.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And maybe he was secretive about it because he didn’t want to let you know that you were married to a wealthy man. Some rich people are like that, afraid they’ll be loved for their money alone. And if there was a great discrepancy between your net worth and his—”

  “Mine was about a dollar ninety-eight.”

  “Well, that might explain it.”

  “Then where’s the money?” she demanded. “If he was rich, shouldn’t there be bank accounts, CDs, stocks and bonds? I can’t find any of that. There are the insurance policies, I told you about them, and there’s a few thousand dollars in a checking account, and that’s it.”

  “There may be other resources you aren’t aware of yet. He could have had a safe-deposit box you don’t know about, or brokerage accounts, or any number of things. If no money turns up in the next few months I’ll grant it’s a strange situation, but it’ll take that long to tell what’s out there.”

  “Some money did turn up,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  She took a deep breath, let it out, and made her decision. She went into another room and came back a moment later with a metal strongbox about the size of a shoe box.

  “I found this in the closet,” she said, “just a couple of days ago. I was thinking that I ought to go through his things and give his clothes to the Goodwill. And I found this on the top shelf. I didn’t know the combination and I was going to try to break it open with a hammer and screwdriver, and then I realized it was just a three-number dial so there could only be a thousand combinations, and if I started with three zeroes and ran the numbers in turn up to nine ninety-nine, well, how long could it take? And what else did I have to do? Then when I hit the number I started to cry, because it was five-one-one, and that’s our anniversary, May eleventh, five-eleven. I looked at the dial and I started to cry, and I was still crying as I lifted the lid.”

  “What did you find?”

  For answer she worked the dial and opened the box and showed it to me half-filled with banded stacks of bills. The ones I could see were all hundreds.

  “I was expecting stock certificates and personal papers,” she said. “But after all that buildup you must have known what I was going to show you.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “What else could it have been?”

  Dozens of things, I thought. A secret diary. A drug stash, for sale or for personal use. Pornography. A gun. Audio tapes. Company secrets. Love letters, old or new. Heirloom jewelry. Anything.

  “I figured it was probably money,” I said.

  “I counted it,” she said. “There’s close to three hundred thousand dollars here.”

  “And nothing to indicate where it came from.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t suppose it’s what’s left of his inheritance.”

  “I don’t know if there was any inheritance. For all I know his parents are still alive. Matt, I’m frightened.”

  “Has anybody tried to throw a scare into you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Any strange phone calls?”

  “Just reporters, and not many of those this past week. Who else would call?”

  “Somebody who wants his money back.”

  “You think Glenn stole this?”

  “I don’t know how he got it,” I said, “or where it came from, or how long he’s had it. I’m not sure it’s a good idea for you to keep it around the house.”

  “That occurred to me, but I’m not sure where I can put it, either.”

  “Don’t you have a safe-deposit box?”

  “No, because I never had anything valuable enough to keep in one.”

  “You do now.”

  “But is it a good idea? If there’s an IRS investigation—”

  “You’re right. Wherever this came from, it’s a pretty sure bet he didn’t pay taxes on it. If they run an audit they’ll get a court order to open any boxes in either of your names.”

  “Do you have a box? If you were to hold it for me—”

  I shook my head. A few minutes ago she was unsure whether or not to trust me with the information. Now she wanted to hand me the money. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” I said. “Do you have a lawyer?”

  “Not really. There was a guy on East Broadway I used once when I had a hassle with my old landlord, but I don’t really know anything about him.”

  “Well, there’s somebody I can recommend. He’s across the Brooklyn Bridge, but I think he’s worth the trip. I can give you his number, or if you want I could call him for you.”

  “Would you?”

  “First thing tomorrow. He’ll give you good advice, and he can probably keep the money in his safe. It’ll be more secure there than in your closet, and I think attorney-client privilege would apply. I’ll have to ask him about that.”

  “And until then—”

  “Until then it can stay in the closet. It’s been safe there so far, and I’m not going to tell anyone it’s there.”

  “I’ll be glad when it’s out of here,” she said. “I’ve been nervous ever since I found it.”

  “I’d be nervous myself,” I said. “It’s a lot of money. But I don’t think you should give it to the Goodwill.”

  Chapter 13

  “Do you know,” Mick said, “my mother always swore I had the second sight, and sometimes I believe the good woman was right. I was just now thinking I ought t
o give you a call. And here you are.”

  “I just dropped in to use the phone,” I said.

  “Did you now? When I was just a bit of a boy, there was a woman a flight up from us sent me every day to Featherstone’s on the corner to fetch her a bucket of beer. They’d sell it to you like that then, by the pail. A little galvanized-iron pail it was, about so big. They filled it up for her for a dollar, and she paid me a quarter to run the errand.”

  “And that’s how you got your start.”

  “Saving those twenty-five cent pieces,” he said, “and investing them wisely. And look where I am today. No, sad to say, I spent the money on candy. A terrible sweet tooth I had in those days.” He shook his head at the memory. “The point of the story—”

  “You mean there is one?”

  “—is that the woman wouldn’t have you thinking she ever drank the beer. ‘Mickey, there’s a good lad, and would ye ever run down to Featherstone’s for me, as I need to be washin’ me hair.’ I asked my mother how come Mrs. Riley used beer to wash her hair. ‘It’s her belly she’s after washin’,’ says herself, ‘for if Biddie Riley washed her hair for every bucket of beer she bought, she’d wash herself baldheaded.’ ”

  “That’s the point?”

  “The point is she only wanted the beer for a hair rinse, and you’re only here to use the fucking telephone. Have ye no phone in your room?”

  “You found me out,” I said. “I actually dropped in for a wash and set.”

  He clapped me on the shoulder. “If you’ve a call to make,” he said, “use the phone in my office. You don’t want the whole world listening.”

  There were three men at the bar and one behind it. Andy Buckley and a man I recognized but didn’t know by name were playing darts in back, and two or three tables were occupied. So the whole world wouldn’t have heard if I’d used the pay phone on the wall, but I was grateful all the same for the privacy of his office.

  It is a good-sized room, with an oak desk and chair and a green metal filing cabinet. There was a huge old Mosler safe, no doubt at least as sturdy as the one in Drew Kaplan’s law office, but unprotected by lawyer-client privilege. Hand-colored steel engravings in plain black frames formed two groups on the wall. Those over the desk were of the west of Ireland, where his mother’s people had come from. The ones over the old leather couch showed scenes in the south of France, once home to his father.