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

by Lawrence Block

  I said I thought he was from Roaring Spring.

  Now that was a different story, she said. She didn’t quite say it, but she gave me the impression that people in Roaring Spring had tails. She knew there was a Holtzmann family in Roaring Spring, although she hadn’t heard tell of them in years and couldn’t say if any of them were still around. One thing she did know was that the Holtzmanns in Roaring Spring were not in any way related to the Holtzmanns in Altoona.

  “Unless you go clear back to the Rhineland,” she said.

  I called Information and asked for Holtzmanns in Roaring Spring, wondering why it hadn’t occurred to me to do so earlier. No matter. There weren’t any.

  * * *

  I called Lisa. Did she happen to know the name of the uncle at whose insurance agency Glenn had worked in Altoona?

  She said, “What a question. Did he ever mention any of his relatives by name? If he did I don’t remember. The thing is, neither of us talked much about our families.”

  “What about his mother’s maiden name? Did he happen to mention that?”

  “I’m sure he didn’t,” she said. “But wait a minute, I just came across it on his group insurance policy. Hold on a minute.” I held, and she came back to report that it was Benziger. “ ‘Father’s name—John Holtzmann, Mother’s maiden name—Hilda Benziger’ ” she read. “Does that help?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I called Altoona Information again looking for an insurance agent named Benziger. There was none listed, and I didn’t bother chasing the Benziger name any further than that. The uncle in question could have been an uncle by marriage, husband of the sister of one of Glenn’s parents. He could even have been an honorary uncle, the father of a second cousin. There were just too many ways he could have a name that was neither Holtzmann nor Benziger.

  I hung up the phone and sat there trying to figure out what to do next. It seemed to me that I was knocking on plenty of doors, but I kept getting them slammed in my face.

  Was I going to have to make a trip to Altoona? God knows I didn’t want to. It seemed a long way to go to chase down information that wasn’t very likely to lead anywhere. But I didn’t know if I could manage it from a distance. Up close, I could chase his parents’ names through old city and county records, find out who all his relatives were, and come up with a name for the uncle in question.

  Assuming the people I encountered were cooperative. I knew how to ensure cooperation from record clerks in New York. You bribe them. In Altoona that might not be possible.

  Was I going to have to find out?

  I glared at the phone, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t pick that moment to ring. It was Lisa. She said, “After I hung up I started thinking. Why insurance? Because he never told me he was ever in the insurance business.”

  “He told Eleanor Yount.”

  “He told me he sold cars,” she said. “He sold Cadillacs and Chevrolets. And something else. Oldsmobiles?”

  “When did he do that?”

  “After college,” she said. “Before he moved to New York, before he went to law school.”

  “UNDER Auto Dealerships,” I said. “Do you see the name Holtzmann anywhere? Holtzmann Motors, Holtzmann Cadillac?”

  They were remarkably patient at Altoona Information. While she checked I pictured Glenn Holtzmann stretched out on the pavement in front of a Honda dealership and across the street from a muffler shop. The city’s largest Cadillac dealer was only a block or so away.

  There were no Holtzmanns in the Altoona listings. I asked her to try Benziger. That rang a bell, she said, but she couldn’t say why, or find a Benziger Motors on the page. I told her I was looking for a dealership that sold Chevrolet, Cadillac, and possibly Oldsmobile.

  After a brief search she reported that only one local dealership listed itself as an agency for Cadillac. They had the other lines I mentioned, and GMC trucks, and Toyota as well. “Sign of the times,” she said of the last. “That would be Nittany Motors,” she said, “out on Five Mile Road.”

  I took the number and dialed the call. The woman who answered didn’t believe there was a Mr. Holtzmann present, unless it was a new man in the service department whose name she didn’t know as yet. Was that who I wanted?

  “Then I guess Mr. Holtzmann’s not the owner,” I said.

  The idea seemed to tickle her. “Well, I guess not,” she said. “Mr. Joseph Lamarck is the owner and has been as long as there’s been a Nittany Motors.”

  “And how long has that been?”

  “Why, quite a few years now.”

  “And before that? Was there a time when it was Benziger Motors?”

  “Why, yes,” she said. “That was before my time, I’m afraid. May I ask the nature of your interest?”

  I told her I was calling from New York, that I was involved in the investigation of a homicide. The deceased seemed to have been a former employee of Benziger Motors, and might have been a relative of Mr. Benziger.

  “I think you ought to talk with Mr. Lamarck,” she said, then came back to tell me he was busy on another line. Would I hold? I said I would.

  I was lost in space when a deep male voice said, “Joe Lamarck here. Afraid I didn’t get your name, sir.”

  I supplied it.

  “And someone’s been killed? Used to work here and a relative of Al Benziger’s? I guess that would have to be Glenn Holtzmann.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Oh, sure. Not well, and I can’t say I’ve thought of him in years, but he was a nice enough young fellow. He was Al’s sister’s boy, if I’m not mistaken. She raised young Glenn by herself and died about the time he went up to State College. I believe Al helped them some over the years, and then took Glenn on after he graduated.”

  “How did he do?”

  “Oh, he did all right. I don’t think he had any real feeling for the automobile business, but sometimes that comes with time. He left, though. I couldn’t say what it was he was tired of, Altoona or the automobile business. May have been Al. Damn good man, but he could be hard to work for. I had to quit him.”

  “You used to work for Benziger?”

  “Oh, sure, but I quit, oh, musta been a couple months after Glenn started. Nothing to do with Glenn, though. Al chewed me out one time too many and I went down the street and worked for Ferris Ford. Then when Al had his troubles I came back and bought the place, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “Lord, fifteen years ago,” he said. “History.”

  “That was after Glenn left.”

  “You bet. Several months after that Al had his troubles, and it was some time after that before I took over.”

  “What kind of troubles?”

  There was a pause. “Well, I don’t like to say,” he said. “All just history now, anyway. There’s nobody around played any part in it. Al and Marie left town soon as they could, and I couldn’t guess where he is now. If he’s alive at all, and it’d be my guess that he’s not. He was a broken man when he left Altoona.”

  “What broke him?”

  “The damn federal government,” he said with feeling. “I wasn’t going to say, but I’m not hurting anybody and you could find out easy enough. Al was keeping two sets of books, been doing it for years. His wife Marie was his bookkeeper and I guess they worked it out between them. He had an accountant, of course, Perry Preiss, and he was in trouble there for a while, until it turned out that Al and Marie had kept him in the dark all along. Still, I understand it hurt his practice.”

  “What happened to the Benzigers?”

  “They settled. No choice, was there now? IRS had ’em cold. It was out-and-out tax evasion, too, with a fraudulent set of books and some secret bank accounts. You couldn’t say you made a mistake, you didn’t report this and that because it slipped your mind. IRS wanted to, they could have put the both of them in jail. Had ’em over a barrel, and didn’t show a lot of mercy, my opinion. Took Al Benz
iger for everything he had. I wound up buying this place. Somebody else bought their house, and somebody else got their summer place down by the lake.”

  “And Glenn was gone when this happened.”

  “Oh, sure. Didn’t come back to rally round, either. If he even heard about it. Where was he at the time, New York?”

  “New York,” I said. “In law school, paying his way with the money he came into when his mother died.”

  He asked me to repeat that. When I’d done so he said, “No, that part’s wrong. Glenn Holtzmann grew up in a trailer in Roaring Spring, and they didn’t even own the trailer. I don’t guess his mother ever had a dime aside from what her brother gave her.”

  “Maybe there was some insurance money.”

  “Surprise me if there was, but anything like that would have been long gone. Didn’t I say Glenn’s mother died about the time he started college?”

  “I guess you did.”

  He said, “Raises a question, doesn’t it? Where’d he get the money?”

  “I don’t know. How did the IRS know to come after Al Benziger?”

  “My Lord,” he said.

  “Who knew about the second set of books?”

  “An hour ago I’da said nobody knew. Perry Preiss didn’t, I know that for a fact. I didn’t know about it. I’da said Al and Marie and nobody else.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I’d have to wonder if maybe Glenn knew,” he said. “My Lord, my Lord.”

  Chapter 21

  “He was a snitch,” I told Drew. “A career informant, working free-lance. He got his start in Altoona selling cars for his uncle Al.”

  “Uncle Al in Altoona.”

  “He managed to find out that his aunt and uncle were evading taxes in high style. Two sets of books, secret bank accounts. I gather the uncle was a hard man to work for, so Glenn went to work for himself.”

  “He ratted them out to the IRS?”

  “You can make money that way,” I said. “I always knew that, but I never knew what a popular cottage industry it was. They’ve got an 800 number just for snitches. I called it yesterday and spoke with a woman who told me how the program worked. I asked her a lot of questions, and I didn’t get the feeling she was hearing any of them for the first time. She must sit there all day long, chatting with the greedy and the resentful.”

  “Plenty of those to go around.”

  “I would think so. Your compensation is a percentage of the take in back taxes and penalties, and the percentage varies with the quality of the material you supply. If you bring in a set of books and make their whole case for them, that’s worth more than if you just point the finger and tell them where to look.”

  “Only fair.”

  “You can stay anonymous, too, and I’m sure Glenn did. His uncle may have figured out who jobbed him, but maybe not. He had to step lively to stay out of Leavenworth. Sold everything he owned and left town in disgrace. I don’t know how much he settled for, but Glenn’s piece of the action was enough to put him through law school.”

  “Did he have to pay taxes on it?”

  “You know,” I said, “I asked her about that. She said they like to collect it in advance, like withholding tax.”

  “They would,” he said.

  We were in the Docket, on Joralemon Street around the corner from Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. It’s a nice room, high-ceilinged, the decor running to oak and brass and red leather. As the name would suggest, the patrons are lawyers for the most part, although the place is also popular with cops. Lunch hour is the busy time. They sell a lot of overstuffed sandwiches, pour a lot of drinks.

  “Gorgeous day,” Drew said.

  “Beautiful,” I said. “Last time I ate here it was like this. It was in the spring and I had lunch with a cop from Brooklyn Homicide. John Kelly, I saw him at the bar just now when I came in. It was such a nice day that I walked out of here and kept on walking clear out to Bay Ridge. I don’t think I’ll do that today. You know something? If yesterday had been warm and sunny I’d still be wondering where Glenn Holtzmann’s money came from.”

  “The weather kept you home.”

  “And so I spent the whole day on the phone, and that turned out to be the right way to do it. Once I caught on to how he got his start, it wasn’t hard to figure out who to call next and what to look for. When he passed the bar exam he went to work at a law firm in White Plains. Shortly after he left them the firm fell apart. The partner I talked to suggested idly that maybe Holtzmann had seen the handwriting on the wall.”

  “I bet he wrote it himself.”

  “And didn’t sign his name. I called Jespesson back, that’s the lawyer’s name, to ask what had happened to the firm. The question must have caught him off base, because he didn’t even ask why I wanted to know. It seems one of the other partners represented a couple of drug traffickers.”

  “And the lawyer got paid in drug money and didn’t report it and they sank his boat for it. You don’t know how much I hate stories like this, Matt.”

  “That’s not quite how it went. The firm didn’t do any criminal work, they represented these clients in other matters. And they got paid by check, or if any cash changed hands nobody knew about it. But this one partner developed a taste for cocaine.”

  “Oh, don’t tell me.”

  “He funded his habit by doing a little dealing on his own. Then his partner in one of his deals turned out to be the DEA. They gave him a chance to roll over on his dealer clients, but I guess he figured a federal prison was better than an unmarked grave. By the time it was over it developed that he’d been stealing from clients, too. Jespesson gave me the impression that dissolving the firm was a cinch, that there wasn’t much left to dissolve.”

  “I’m assuming Holtzmann put the DEA onto the partner.”

  “I’m assuming the same thing,” I said. “I can’t call them up and ask. But I think it’s a safe assumption.”

  “I gather the DEA pays informants.”

  “I did call and ask them that. They weren’t as forthcoming as the nice lady at the tax office, but yes, they pay a bounty on drug dealers and a percentage on whatever they confiscate. I learned more about how it works from a fellow I know who knows a lot about information and its value in the open market.” Danny Boy, and I’d called him at home; the weather had kept him indoors last night, too. “The zero-tolerance policy may not be winning the war on drugs,” I said, “but it’s starting to make the battles cost-effective. The first thing you do when you make a drug bust is confiscate everything within arm’s reach. Vehicles, boats. Drugs, of course, but also the cash if the people you arrested came to buy. If any meetings took place in their houses, or if they stored product there, then you attach that. With so much property up for grabs, you’ve suddenly got a big budget for compensating informants.”

  “The apartment,” Drew said.

  “It’s suddenly obvious, isn’t it? Some Europeans or South Americans bought it for cash under the shield of a Cayman Islands corporation. There’s a dozen other things that could be besides drug money, but it’s certainly up there on the list. And governmental seizure would explain how MultiCircle Productions lost the apartment when there was no mortgage for anybody to foreclose on. And then there’s the US Asset Reduction Corp. I couldn’t find a trace of them because they probably don’t exist outside of a file folder in some government agency or other. They must be some sort of corporate shell for the liquidation of seized assets.”

  “I thought they liked to get a lot of publicity with their seizures. Show the taxpayers how they’re really socking it to the dope peddlers.”

  “Not always,” I said. “Sometimes they’d just as soon keep it quiet. So nobody in Congress starts noticing how much money’s passing through their hands.”

  “Maybe some of it sticks to the occasional palm.”

  “Not absolutely out of the question, is it?”

  “And Holtzmann? What did he do to get the apartment, and who’d he do it to?”


  “I don’t know,” I said. “My first thought was that he helped make a case against somebody in MultiCircle. But that would leave him with his cock on the block. If any of the people he screwed knew him, and then he’s living in their apartment—”

  “How else would he get it? It had to be compensation for some sort of informing he did.”

  “Say he ratted out Joe Blow and had a six-figure fee coming. And somebody said, ‘Look, you need a decent place to live, and here’s a list of confiscated properties up for grabs, why don’t you pick one and we’ll deed it to you?’ ”

  “Virtue rewarded.”

  “It always is.”

  He got the waiter’s attention and pointed to our empty coffee cups. When they’d been filled he said, “So who was Joe Blow? Any ideas?”

  “No.”

  “Look at his résumé. He went from selling cars in Altoona to practicing law in White Plains. Where did he turn up next, this latter-day Jonah?”

  “In the legal department of a publisher. That ship sank when a foreign conglomerate took them over.”

  “How’d he manage that?”

  “I don’t think he had a thing to do with it. From there he went to Waddell & Yount, and he was working there when he died. A publisher’s legal department is a funny career slot for a professional snitch.”

  “So?”

  “Well, I have a theory,” I admitted. “It fits the facts, and I think it meshes with my own sense of Glenn Holtzmann.”

  “I keep forgetting you knew the guy.”

  “I didn’t, really. I met him a couple of times, that’s all.”

  “Let’s hear your theory.”

  “I think he fell into it,” I said. “I think he found out what his uncle was pulling and he felt a mixture of righteous anger and personal resentment. He did a job on Uncle Al and got himself out of Altoona in the process. He didn’t take the IRS money and buy himself a Mercedes, either. He pieced it out, put himself through law school. He said it was an inheritance that enabled him to get his law degree, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he saw the money as a sort of patrimony. Maybe he managed to tell himself the money should have been his in the first place, that Al Benziger got the gold mine while Glenn’s mother got the shaft.