Small Town

by Lawrence Block

Page 62

 

  When he’d finished she said, “But you don’t remember killing her. ”

  “No, but I can imagine it vividly enough. Maybe that’s a form of memory. ”

  “Do you always imagine it the same way?”

  He shook his head. “Different versions. ”

  “That sounds like genuine imagination, not a memory slipping out the back door because your conscience has the front one blocked. John, I don’t think it proves anything. You know you were in her apartment, you know you were with her. You already knew that. ”

  “I didn’t know there were holes in my memory. I thought I was a little vague about leaving her place and getting back to mine, but if I was so far gone I picked this little critter up and brought him home without remembering any of it, I must have had a hole in my memory big enough to drive a truck through. ” Or stick your hands through, she thought, and fit them around a woman’s throat.

  “If you’d found the rabbit the morning after . . . ”

  “And I could have, when I put my socks on. What would I have done? I’d have picked it up and stared at it and wondered where the hell it came from. ”

  “And when the cops came the first time?”

  “They weren’t looking for the rabbit. Oh, would I have made the connection? I don’t know. I might have thought, oh, that’s where the damn thing came from. But I might just as easily have thought someone gave it to me years ago and I’d managed to forget the gift and the giver. ”

  “When they came back a second time—”

  “The rabbit was listed on the search warrant. So what would I have done? Either pulled it out right away and showed it to them or prayed they wouldn’t find it. But all this is hypothetical. They didn’t find it, and I didn’t find it myself until long after they’d come and gone. ”

  “And now it’s eating up all your stone-ground cornmeal. ”

  “That’s why it stayed hidden until I got the big contract. ”

  “Why? Oh, then it knew you could afford to feed it. ”

  “You got it. ”

  She said, “John, everybody knows the Carpenter killed her.

  Maury told me they offered to let you walk. That was very brave, turning them down. ”

  “It shows moral strength if I didn’t do it. I’m not sure what it shows if I did. ”

  “If they had one more piece of evidence, one more link—”

  “But they don’t. ”

  “The cleaning person, I forget his name . . . ”

  “Jerry Pankow. That looks like a link, but is it? The Carpenter reads the papers, he learns how this poor guy cleaned up the crime scene and then discovered the body. Let’s give him a few more to find, he says to himself. Let’s see what other potential crime scenes he cleans. That might appeal to his sense of humor. ”

  “You think he has one?”

  “The nail in that woman’s forehead in Brooklyn? Call me the Carpenter and I’ll sign my work for you. Yes, I think he has a sense of humor. He’s not the Joker, laughing at Batman while he terror-izes Gotham City, but he’s got a sense of humor. ”

  “Couldn’t the same sense of humor lead him to take something from her apartment and put it here?”

  “Toward what end? So the cops’ll think I did it? They think that already. Besides, I’m a light sleeper. And he’d have had to break in while I was sleeping, because the rest of the time I was holed up here. ”

  “You left a few times. ”

  “Only a very few, and only briefly. How would he get in the door? He’s the Carpenter, not the Locksmith. ”

  “Do you always double-lock your door?”

  “Except when I forget. Okay, I could have forgotten, or not bothered if I was only going to be gone for a minute, and yes, it locks when you pull it shut, but if you know what you’re doing you can open it with a credit card. I used to do it myself when I forgot and locked myself out. ”

  “So he could have done that. You used to do it? But then you stopped locking yourself out?”

  He laughed. “Well, no, once in a while I’m lost in thought and go out for cigarettes with my keys still on the dresser. Another thing I don’t have to worry about now that I’m an ex-smoker. ”

  “But when you did lock yourself out, then what?”

  “There’s a key under the mat. ”

  “Which the Carpenter could have used. ”

  “If he thought to look there. Susan, come on. Remember Occam’s razor?”

  “From college, but I forget what it is. ”

  “A philosophical principle. When you hear hoofbeats, don’t look around for zebras. Because it’s probably horses. That’s my example, not that of the bishop of Occham, but you get the idea.

  When there’s a simple and obvious explanation, it’s generally on the money. ”

  She nodded slowly, looked at the rabbit in the palm of her hand.

  She asked if anyone else had seen it. No one, he said. She alone had been in his apartment since the rabbit turned up.

  “And you’re the only person I’ve said a word to. You notice I checked first to make sure you weren’t wearing a wire. ”

  “Checked very thoroughly, too. ”

  “Well, you can’t be too careful. ”

  I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you . . .

  She said, “John? Thank you. ”

  “For letting you know you might be sleeping with a murderer?”

  “I already knew that. ”

  She closed her fingers around the rabbit, reached out with her other hand to touch him. She had to have her hand on him while she said this.

  She said, “I told you everything about myself, all the fucking, all the weird shit in my mind. But I held one thing back. ”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “Yes I do. John, maybe you killed her and maybe you didn’t, but what you have to know is I don’t care. I honest to God don’t care. ”

  “You don’t care if—”

  “—If you killed her or not. No, I don’t. I care about you. I want them to drop the charges, I want you to be out from under this cloud. I want everyone in the world to know you never killed anybody. But I don’t have to know it because it doesn’t matter to me.

  You think maybe you killed her? So fucking what? I love you just as much if you did. Maybe more, for all I know. ” She raised her eyes to him. There were tears in her eyes and she blinked them away. She said, “Can you take me to bed? I need to come. Can you make me come?”

  W H E N I T W A S T I M E for her to go he went downstairs with her, walked her to Eighth Avenue. An empty cab sailed by, not even slowing down.

  “Didn’t see us,” he said. “Too busy talking on his cell phone. ”

  “Listening to bad music,” she offered.

  “And munching on raw garlic. I don’t think it was the right cab for you. Tomorrow’s Friday, so I guess you’ll be busy, won’t you?”

  “Does it bother you?”

  “No, I think I like it. I’ve got work to do, but I think I’d like it even if I didn’t. Friday’s the one you’re turning into a girl, right?”

  “That’s the one, but what I’m really doing is teaching him that he’s kinkier than he thought he was. ”

  “Well, so am I, evidently, because I’m already looking forward to hearing about it. I expect a full report. ”

  “And while I’m doing him, I’ll be thinking how I’m going to get to tell you about it. ”

  “And I’ll be imagining it, writing scripts for you in my mind.

  Here’s your cab. I’ll see you Saturday, okay?” She nodded, kissed him.

  He said, “I’m glad we found each other. ”

  “Oh, baby,” she said. “How could we help it?” twenty-nine

  THE EYE-OPENER, JIM Galvin had to acknowledge, was probably a mistake. If you waited awhile, if you had a decent breakfast in your belly, eggs and rashers and a link or two of sausage, and here it was getting on for lunchtime, su
rely no one would begrudge a man a drop of the hard stuff. If you held out until midafternoon, that was even better. But when that first one went down the hatch before breakfast, or instead of breakfast, well, that didn’t look so good. There it was, John Jameson’s finest, in your belly and on your breath, and no one who smelled it was going to mistake it for altar wine.

  On the other hand, nothing else really got you going after a bad night. He knew men who swore by Valium, said it straightened you out without knocking you out, and left your breath discreetly unscented. But he also knew a man who’d developed a Valium habit and almost died trying to get off it. Poor bastard wound up in Beth Israel hospital, where they told him Valium detox could be tougher than heroin. Thanks all the same, but I’ll stay with the whiskey. It’ll kill me, too, in its own good time, but at least it’ll taste good going down.

  Last night had been a bad one, though it had seemed good enough while it was taking place. A few bars, a few old friends, a few new ones, and a couple of laughs. A feeling of abiding love for the old friends, for the new friends, for the whole human race. A sense that it wasn’t such a bad old world after all.

  Grand thoughts, grand feelings, and there were only two ways he knew of that a man could get to have them. Have a fucking jelly doughnut for a brain, or have a couple of drinks.

  He’d had the latter, and now he felt as though he had the former, and that the jelly was oozing out of the doughnut. So he took down the bottle and filled a six-ounce jelly glass halfway full. And picked it up and looked at it, like you’d look at—what? An old friend? An old enemy?

  He drank it down. Just the one, just to take the edge off, just to lighten the load the least bit.

  He had breakfast around the corner on Avenue B, in a Ukrain-ian place where they didn’t worry any more about cholesterol than he did. He had salami and eggs and crisp hash browns and three cups of lousy coffee, and by God he felt fine by the time he walked out of there.

  Now he had to figure out something to do with the day.

  H E W A S O F F T H E clock. Maury Winters had given him a lot of hours, first rooting around for the writer, Creighton, and then doing some background checking on a couple of prosecution witnesses in a robbery case. The robbery case pleaded out, with a better deal resulting in part from a lead he’d developed, so he had to feel good about that, and Maury was probably feeling good about him.

  But he hadn’t been able to turn the trick for Creighton.

  He’d figured there was probably a limit to what he could accomplish, given that you didn’t need psychic powers to know the writer was guilty. Lady walks into a bar, walks out with a guy, and wakes up dead, you don’t reach for the tea leaves and the crystal ball. You pick up the guy, and he goes away for it.

  So he’d gone through the motions, but he’d been a good cop and he was making an effort to be just as good at this racket.

  Before he’d been busting his ass to put bad guys in prison and now he was working almost as hard to keep them out, which seemed weird now and then, but the work itself wasn’t all that different. It was a similar mix of headwork and footwork, and he had the head for it. And the feet, although they were starting to go on him.