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

by Lawrence Block

  “Better take a cab,” she suggested.

  “No kidding.”

  “Let me look at you. You want to know something? You look like hell.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m serious. I know I look awful but I’ve got an excuse. Are you all right?”

  “I was up all night.”

  “Couldn’t sleep?”

  “Didn’t try. I was on my way to bed when I got your message.”

  “You should have said something. This could have waited.”

  “I wasn’t all that sleepy. Tired, but not sleepy.”

  “I know the feeling. Most of my waking hours are like that these days.” She frowned. “It’s more than that, though. Something’s bothering you.”

  I sighed.

  “Look, I don’t mean to—”

  “No,” I said. “No, you’re right. Is there more of that coffee?”

  I must have talked for a long time. When I ran out of words we sat in silence for a minute or two. Then she carried our coffee cups to the kitchen and brought them back full again.

  She said, “What do you figure it is? Not sex.”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. What, then? The old boys-will-be-boys syndrome?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “When I’m with her,” I said, “everything else is off in some other world where I don’t have to deal with it. The sex is nothing special. She’s young and beautiful, and that was exciting at first, just as the newness of it was exciting. But the sex is better with Elaine. With the other one—”

  “You can say her name.”

  “With Lisa, I can’t always perform. And sometimes the act is perfunctory. I’m there, we’re having an affair, so we’d better get down to it or her presence in my life becomes even more inexplicable.”

  “ ‘Let’s get away from it all.’ ”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Who have you told?”

  “Nobody,” I said. “No, that’s not entirely true. I’ve told you, of course—”

  “A nobody if there ever was one.”

  “And a few hours ago I told the fellow I sat up all night drinking with. Well, he was the one drinking. I stuck to club soda.”

  “Thank God for small mercies.”

  “I’ve wanted to talk about it with Jim. It sticks in my throat. See, he knows Elaine. It’s bad enough keeping something from her, but if other people know about it and she doesn’t—”

  “Not good.”

  “No. And of course there’s the fact that talking about it makes it real, and I don’t want it to be real. I want it to be a place I go in dreams, if it has to be anything at all. Lately every time I leave her apartment I tell myself it’s over, that I won’t go back there again. And then a couple of days later I pick up the phone.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve talked about it at meetings.”

  “No. Same reasons.”

  “You could try going to a meeting where nobody knows you. Some remote section of the Bronx where they’ve been marrying their cousins for the past three hundred years.”

  “And the children are born with webbed feet.”

  “That’s the idea. You could say anything there.”

  “I could.”

  “Right. But you won’t. Have you been going to meetings?”

  “Of course.”

  “As many as usual?”

  “I may have lightened up a little, I don’t know. I’ve, uh, felt a little detached. My mind wanders. I wonder what the hell I’m doing there.”

  “Doesn’t sound good, kiddo.”

  “No.”

  “You know,” she said, “I think you may have picked just the right person to talk to. Dying turns out to be a very instructive process. You learn a lot this way. The only problem is you don’t have any time to act on your newfound knowledge. But isn’t that always the way? When I was fifteen years old I said to myself, ‘Oh to be twelve again, knowing what I know now.’ What the hell did I know when I was fifteen?”

  “What do you know now?”

  “I know that time’s much too scarce to waste. I know that only the important things are important. I know not to sweat the small stuff.” She made a face. “All these brilliant insights, and they come out sounding like bumper stickers. The worst part is it seems to me that I knew these things at fifteen. Maybe I knew them when I was twelve. But I know them differently now.”

  “I think I understand.”

  “Jesus, I hope you do, Matthew.” She put a hand on my arm. “I care about you, you know. I really do. I don’t want you to fuck it up.”

  SOMETHING in the newspapers. Something in the past couple of days.

  I thought about it in the cab heading uptown, the crated bronze on the seat beside me. In front of my hotel I paid the driver and got the thing onto my shoulder again. I found a spot on the floor of my room where I wouldn’t be likely to trip over it. I’d have to uncrate it, but that could wait. I’d have to go back for the plinth, but that could wait, too.

  I went to the library, and it didn’t take me long to find the story I was looking for. It had run three days earlier. I couldn’t be sure where I’d read it, because all the local papers had it, and none of them offered much in the way of detail.

  A man named Roger Prysock had been shot to death early the previous evening on the corner of Park Avenue South and East Twenty-eighth Street. According to the police, witnesses at the scene stated that the victim had been making a telephone call when a car pulled up alongside. A gunman emerged from the car, shot Prysock several times in the chest, fired a final shot into the back of the head, and got back into the car, which drove off. With ts tires screaming, according to the Post. The deceased was said to have been thirty-six years old, and had a lengthy criminal record, with convictions for aggravated assault and possession of a stolen property.

  “HE was a pimp,” Danny Boy said. “I think he must have gotten his job through affirmative action.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was white.”

  “He’s not the first white pimp.”

  “No, but they’re pretty scarce at the street level, and Dodger Prysock was strictly street.”

  “Dodger?”

  “His nom de la rue. Damn near inevitable, isn’t it? Roger the Dodger, and he was originally from Los Angeles.”

  “I’d have thought Brooklyn.”

  “That’s because you have a sense of history. Mr. Prysock was not what you’d call a dominant figure in his chosen field, but he made a living.”

  “Enough to keep him in purple hats and zoot suits?”

  “Not his style at all. The Dodger left that sort of thing for the brothers. Dressed very J. Press himself.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “No idea,” Danny Boy said. “Last I heard he was out of town. Then the first news I got of him was the story in the paper. Who killed him? Beats me. You didn’t do it, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, neither did I,” he said, “but that still leaves a whole lot of people.”

  IT was the middle of the afternoon when I got to the top floor at 488 West Eighteenth, but it would have looked the same in the middle of the night. No daylight came through the windows. The glass panes in their lower halves had been replaced with mirrors, the upper panes painted the same lemon yellow as the walls.

  “We can’t have anyone seeing in here,” Julia said. “Not even the sun. Not even the Lord God.”

  She gave me a cup of tea, put me in a chair, sat on the daybed with her feet tucked under her. No harem pajamas this time. She was wearing snug black slacks and a fuchsia blouse. The blouse was silk, unbuttoned at the throat, and there didn’t look to be anything under it that God or the surgeons hadn’t given her.

  I had beeped TJ, and there had been several phone calls back and forth. And now I had been granted an audience with Her Majesty.

  “Roger Prysock,” I said.

 
; “Wasn’t there an Arthur Prysock?” she wondered. “A musician, I seem to recall.”

  “This one’s Roger.”

  “A relative, perhaps.”

  “Anything’s possible,” I said. “Roger the Dodger, they call him.”

  “Called him. He’s dead.”

  “Shot down on the street while he was using the phone. Three or four in the chest and an extra for insurance. In the back of the head. Does that sound familiar?”

  “It might ring a muted bell. How’s that tea?”

  “It’s fine. He was a tall man, dark hair and eyes. Good-looking. Dressed well, if not as flashily as other members of his profession.”

  “Profession,” she said archly.

  “He died on a street that’s been a hookers’ stroll for as long as I can remember. Now who else do we know who was tall and dark and an Ivy League dresser and died just like that, on the same kind of street?”

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “Do you suppose we could fast-forward through the establishing shots?”

  “Who killed him, Julia?”

  “Well,” she said, “it certainly sounds as though it was the same person who killed our friend Glenn, and I already told you I didn’t know who that was.”

  “ ‘Didn’t.’ ”

  “Have I made a mistake in my tenses, Matthew?”

  I shook my head. “You didn’t know who killed him,” I said, “but I think you do now. Because I think Glenn Holtzmann was killed by mistake. The man who killed him was looking for Roger Prysock. Maybe he only knew the Dodger by description, or maybe they were close enough in appearance to fool him in that light.”

  “I was all the way across the street,” she said. “He didn’t look like Dodger Prysock to me.”

  “You already knew he wasn’t. You’d seen him up close earlier.”

  “That’s true,” she said. She examined a fingernail, then gnawed at the cuticle. “I didn’t connect the two killings,” she said. “The first one, Glenn, I haven’t even thought about it in weeks now. And I didn’t hear any details of the second shooting. I didn’t know about the bullet in the back of the head.”

  “Sort of a signature.”

  “Yes.” She studied her nails some more and blew on them, as if the polish were still wet. “I didn’t even know he was back in town.”

  “Prysock.”

  “Yes. I haven’t seen him in months. I heard he’d gone back to Los Angeles. I think that’s where he’s from.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “The first I heard he was back,” she said, “was when I heard he was dead.”

  “Who had a beef with him?”

  Her eyes avoided mine. “I don’t have a pimp,” she said. “Or a manager, as some of them like to be called these days. And I barely knew Roger the Dodger, and I didn’t think very much of him. His clothes were conservatively cut, but he could put on a suit from Tripler and look like a ten-dollar whore in a bridesmaid’s gown. Trust me.”

  “All right.”

  “Anything I could tell you would be secondhand. And you didn’t get it from me, because I will never repeat any of this. Are we very clear on that?”

  “Crystal clear.”

  “What I heard,” she said, “and I didn’t hear it until well after the Dodger disappeared, was that he’d gone to California for health reasons. In other words, somebody wanted to kill him.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know the man. All I have’s his street name, and I never met him because he doesn’t walk down the same mean streets as this girl.”

  “What do they call him?”

  “Zoot.”

  “Zoot,” I said.

  “After the sartorial statement he likes to make, which is far removed from that of the late Mr. Prysock.”

  “He wears a zoot suit.”

  “A genuine zoot suit,” she said, “if you even know what that is. People tend to stick that label to anything really tasteless and flashy, anything that goes with a floppy magenta hat and a pink Cadillac with fur upholstery, but the zoot suit was a particular style of the forties.”

  “With a drape shape and a reet pleat,” I said.

  “You astonish me, my darling. It’s tacky of me to say this, but you didn’t strike me as terribly fashion-conscious. And now you turn out to be a veritable historian of the masculine couture.”

  “Not quite,” I said. “Tell me about Zoot. Is he black?”

  “And you never told me you were psychic.”

  “Dark skin tone,” I said. “Long pointed chin, more noticeable in profile than full face. Little button nose.”

  “It sounds as though you know him.”

  “I never met him either,” I said. “But I saw him once wearing a powder-blue zoot suit and wraparound mirrored sunglasses. And a hat.” I closed my eyes and focused. “A straw hat, cocoa brown, very narrow brim. And a very loud hatband.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “A year ago, or maybe it was more like a year and a half. I heard a name for him, but it wasn’t Zoot.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Sitting at a table with a friend of mine. Then he went away and I took his seat.”

  “And learned his name.”

  “But not his street name.”

  “And now for the big-money question. What color was the hatband?”

  I frowned, concentrating, then shook my head. “Sorry,” I said.

  “Believe me, so am I,” she said, “but it’s not a total loss. You still get to keep the microwave oven and the home-entertainment unit. And thanks for being our guest on Try to Remember.”

  “NICHOLSON James,” I told Joe Durkin. “He started out in life with the name James Nicholson, and somewhere along the way the name got reversed on some official document. My guess is it was a bench warrant, because that’s the kind of official document he probably saw the most of. Whatever it was, he liked the look of it. As soon as he could he got his name changed legally, which may be the last legal thing he ever did.”

  “And his last illegal act?”

  “Hard to say. He aced a fellow named Roger Prysock over on Park Avenue South, but that was a few nights ago, so he could have committed half a dozen class-A felonies since then. On the other hand, maybe he’s taken holy orders. You never know.”

  “I never do,” he agreed. “I can’t say I care a whole lot, either, as long as your friend Nick stays the hell out of my precinct. Is that what he calls himself for short? Nick? Or does he prefer Jim?”

  “Some people call him Zoot.”

  “Nice,” he said. “Classy. Of course if he does become a man of the cloth they’ll have to make that Father Zoot. Or maybe Sister Zoot, if he runs off and joins the Poor Clares. Tell me something, will you? What do I care about some asshole with his name on backwards who killed some other asshole in another precinct entirely?”

  “Man he shot was about six-one, one-seventy, dark hair, dark eyes, well dressed, and talking on a public telephone at the time of the shooting. Zoot put a few in his chest and one in the back of his head.”

  He sat up straight. “All right,” he said. “You’ve got my attention.”

  “Two months ago, whenever it was, Nicholson James developed a hard-on for Roger Prysock. I don’t know what the beef was about. Girls or money, probably. One night the Zooter’s taking a ride on Eleventh Avenue. Maybe he’s looking for Prysock, maybe he just gets lucky, but there’s the man he wants, talking on a pay phone the way Prysock always does and dressed all Ivy League, the way Prysock likes to dress.”

  “Only it’s not Prysock.”

  “It’s Glenn Holtzmann,” I said, “out for a walk, and very possibly trying to put some scam of his own in motion, only we’ll never know because he never got it off the ground. Zoot hops out of his car, shoots him three times. Holtzmann lands facedown, so if Zoot hasn’t already seen that he got the wrong man, he’s not going to notice it now. Anyway, it’s nighttime, and it’s not too bright.”

  �
�And neither is Nicholson James.”

  “So he shoots him one more time and goes home,” I went on, “or wherever you go to celebrate a job well done. Meanwhile, George Sadecki shuffles out of the shadows and decides he’s walking point in the Mekong Delta and he better pick up his brass. Good police work scoops him up with a pocket full of evidence and George can’t even swear he didn’t do it.”

  “And the intended vic?”

  “Roger the Dodger? Like the original Dodgers, he’s skipped to L.A. As a matter of fact, he was probably already out of town when Zoot shot Holtzmann, either that or he was on his way shortly thereafter. George goes to Rikers and off to Bellevue and back to Rikers and gets stabbed to death. The case was already closed, and now there’s not even going to be a trial to stir the ashes.”

  “What about the word on the street? How come nobody knows Holtzmann got in the way of somebody else’s bullets?”

  “How would they know? Not that many people even knew Zoot had a beef with Prysock, and the ones who did couldn’t have attached much weight to it. Pimps flare up at each other all the time. If they don’t act on it right away, generally it blows over. And the people on the street didn’t know that Holtzmann and Prysock looked alike, or that George wasn’t the shooter the way the papers said he was. Hell, Prysock himself didn’t know it was all that serious. He thought it was safe to come back. Nicholson James heard he was in town, drove around until he found the right pay phone and the right man using it, and then he did what he’d done before.”

  We went over it a couple of times. He asked me what I expected him to do.

  “Maybe you could call whoever caught the Prysock homicide,” I suggested. “Tell him they might like to check out Nicholson James for it.”

  “Also known as Zoot.” His fingers drummed the desk top. “How do I know all this?”

  “One of your snitches gave it to you.”

  “I suppose a little bird told him.”