Sinner Man

by Lawrence Block

  So I reached for the phone again. And stopped.

  Donald Barshter, thirty-two-year-old representative for one of the country’s leading life insurance companies, was a goner. The life he had been living for those thirty-two years was over. He was finished, washed up, through.

  Well, to hell with him. I still had a chance.

  * * *

  It was Friday night. In a little less than half an hour it would be midnight. Ellen had been dead almost an hour. Her skin was already growing cold. I still sat on the edge of our bed. I was working my way through the last cigarette from the pack.

  I had picked a bad night to kill her. There was the unimpressive sum of fifty-three dollars in my wallet and a few bucks in change in various pockets here and there—which was not nearly enough.

  I got rid of the cigarette, went to my desk and began adding up assets with paper and pencil. There was fourteen hundred in the checking account, thirty-five hundred in the savings account. There was the cash surrender value of a few life policies, a couple thousand tied up in stocks, a little more in mutual funds. But there was no time to surrender the insurance and no time to sell the securities. I had forty-nine hundred dollars in cash assets and I couldn’t get to them until Monday morning.

  Since the banks opened at nine, I had fifty-seven hours to kill. Fifty-seven hours to spend at home with Ellen, who was dead.

  I went downstairs and made myself a cup of instant coffee. I found a fresh pack of cigarettes and smoked one while I drank the coffee. Then I came back upstairs and returned to the bedroom. I picked up Ellen’s body and carried her to her closet. She was heavy but not hard to carry. I placed her on the closet floor and closed the door on her. The room was much emptier without her body in the middle of the floor. It also made her death that much less real. And thinking that much easier.

  Fifty-seven hours. The daytime hours would be the hard ones, with the phone ringing and the doorbell ringing and too many people to talk with, too many explanations to invent. Nights would be easier.

  And, because there was nothing else to do for the time being, I got into my own bed and slept. There was a lot of tossing and turning before sleep came. There were hectic dreams later, but when I awoke I couldn’t remember them.

  There were two phone calls for Ellen Saturday morning and one during the afternoon. I told three women that she was out, that I didn’t know when she’d be back, that I’d have her call them. I made one call on my own. We were supposed to have dinner with three other couples Saturday night, after which we were scheduled to play bridge at somebody’s house and spend a dull evening with them. I called Grace Dallman and told her we wouldn’t be able to make it, that an aunt of Ellen’s in North Carolina had died and that Ellen was catching a train that evening for Charlotte. The funeral would be held Monday and she wanted to get there early.

  It was a handy story. Ellen actually did have an aunt in North Carolina, a noisy and unpleasant woman who had never been sick a day in her life as far as I knew. But I liked the story and stuck to it that evening when a few more of Ellen’s friends called up. I told them all that she would be back Tuesday or Wednesday. They were all properly sympathetic.

  So I spent Saturday night watching television and nursing a can or two of beer. I have no idea what I watched on the twenty-one-inch silver screen. It was a way to pass time and nothing more. For the time being I wanted to do as little thinking or planning as I possibly could. That would come later when my mind was a little looser and the fact of Ellen’s death a little further removed from reality. Any thinking now would be colored too strongly by fear, shot through too thoroughly by worry. There was time.

  I went to sleep at two, with the fifty-seven hours pared to thirty-one. I slept until ten and cut the time down to twenty-three hours. We were getting right down to the wire.

  * * *

  I scrambled a pair of eggs and fried bacon for Sunday breakfast. I smoked the day’s first cigarette with coffee and thought about one thing I’d been consciously avoiding. Now it was time to think about it.

  Because the killing of Ellen wasn’t manslaughter anymore. The killing wasn’t manslaughter and it wasn’t second-degree murder—it had ceased to be either the minute I stuffed Ellen’s corpse in her closet and decided to leave her to heaven. Now it was Murder One, the big one, and I was a murderer in the first and foremost degree.

  The killing had stopped being manslaughter the minute I decided not to call the police, the minute I decided not to go to court or to jail. I couldn’t plead for gentle justice anymore. I couldn’t get caught at all.

  So now I was the man on the run. The fact that I wasn’t running at all, that in fact I was having breakfast in my own kitchen, had nothing to do with it. I had to run—hell, I had to do more than that. A lifetime on the run was nothing but a life sentence to a mobile jail.

  I had to be someone else. I had to be someone who was not Donald Barshter, someone who didn’t live in this town, someone who didn’t sell insurance. Someone who hadn’t murdered his wife. Someone who wasn’t running.

  Someone with a new name and a new address and a new personality. Someone with his own life to live and his own fish to fry. Someone settled in his own little groove.

  And it couldn’t help being an infinitely better groove than selling insurance to people who didn’t really want or need insurance; living with a woman I didn’t even like, let alone love; making monthly deposits in the savings account and the checking account and balancing these precariously with monthly payments on the house and the car and the television set and the washer and the dryer; and saying the same dismal words day after day to the same dismal people.

  The impersonation might even be fun. Like an actor playing a part. Like Danton playing Legs.

  I left the breakfast dishes in the sink and wondered if anybody would ever wash them and dry them and put them to bed in the proper cupboards. I went upstairs again, took a shower and got dressed. I found a good leather suitcase of mine, one of the few that hadn’t been monogrammed. I opened it, propped it up on the bed and looked through drawers and closets for things to put in it. I found few things. It was going to be necessary to travel light. The wardrobe that suited Donald Barshter would not suit the man I was going to become.

  Clothes are part of a personality. Donald Barshter’s tweeds and pinstripes and regimental ties and button-down shirts were part and parcel of his grownup Ivy League personality—they went hand in hand with the briefcase and the actuarial tables and the memo books. Barshter’s clothes wouldn’t do.

  I packed three white shirts, a few pairs of undershorts and T-shirts, a few of my louder ties. I didn’t bother with suits or shoes—I would wear one suit and one pair of shoes and that would be enough. The less of Donald Barshter’s clothes I had, the less I’d have to get rid of later on.

  That more or less took care of Sunday. During the afternoon I wandered around the corner to the drugstore and picked up a copy of the New York Times. I ran into a few people I knew and mentioned that Ellen was out of town and that I was living a bachelor’s life for the next day or two. I even set up an appointment to talk a fellow into carrying more life insurance. Then I went home and alternated between the Times and the television set until it was time to go to sleep.

  I didn’t sleep much.

  * * *

  I had the alarm set for eight-thirty but I was up before it had a chance to go off. I was completely awake the second I opened my eyes and my blood nearly sang with energy. I showered and shaved and dressed, picking out an anonymously gray suit and a pair of Italian shoes. I tried to remember the last time I’d felt so thoroughly alive, so excited and ready to go. I couldn’t remember a comparable morning in years. There had been similar mornings in Korea, of course, and a few in the first years of marriage. But since then excitement had not been part of my life, had not been a common feeling at all. Which was a shame—excitement is a healthy thing.

  I tucked my wallet in one pocket, my keys in another. I scoop
ed up a handful of loose change and dropped it into a third pocket. Next I found my bankbook and my checkbook and made room for them. I picked up the suitcase, which wasn’t heavy at all, and carried it out of the house to the car. I put the suitcase in the back of the car on the floor.

  The two banks where I had accounts were across the street from one another on Chambers. I cashed a check for thirteen hundred at the bank where I had my checking account, leaving a hundred dollars to keep the account warm. I crossed the street and emptied the savings account, explaining that I had a cash deal pending and needed the dough in a hurry. The teller told me I could take a low-interest loan and keep my account intact but I managed to talk him out of it. I left the bank with forty-eight hundred-dollar bills in my wallet. I hoped the sum would be enough.

  Now I felt tension building up in my body like steam in a teakettle just before it whistles. I crossed the street to my car, the morning sun coming down strong. I couldn’t help feeling that everybody was looking at me, that I was marvelously conspicuous with Cain’s mark on my forehead. Or maybe there was a special mark for uxoricide, a particular sign for wife-killers.

  I got into the car and drove out of town. There was a perfectly good railroad terminal in town just a few blocks away—but I had to go somewhere safe, to a place where I wouldn’t be stepping on acquaintances. I drove to Hartford and put the car in a downtown parking lot. I carried the suitcase to the railroad station. On the way I shredded the parking check and dropped it in a trash can.

  It was a shame to give up the car but I could hardly keep it. And it might have hurt more if I had liked the car or if it had been paid for. As it was I owed an impressive sum to the finance company, so it wasn’t quite as though I were abandoning the entire car. Just the power steering and the power brakes and the automatic transmission—I could live without them just as I could live without Ellen.

  There was a line in front of the ticket window in the railroad station. I stood in line and waited my turn, still feeling painfully conspicuous, still feeling that everyone was taking careful notice of me. Finally I was at the front of the line. I bought a ticket to New York and went to the platform to wait for my train. It came and I boarded it.

  2

  I went as far as Syracuse and took another train out of there at six-fourteen P.M. and headed west. Nathaniel Crowley sat alone in a seat in the coach nearest the dining car. At Syracuse he had bought a hat, a black fedora with a very short brim, now resting on top of a folded New York tabloid on the seat next to him. His legs were crossed at the knee and his hands rested easily in his lap.

  But he wasn’t as relaxed as he looked. His nerves were stretched taut and his heart was beating a little faster than it usually did. His mind refused to rest. It planned, plotted, schemed and came up with ideas and rejected them. His mind worked a mile a minute, more than could be said for the train—which crawled.

  I’m not projecting. I know precisely how Nathaniel Crowley felt. I was Crowley. Nathaniel Crowley—a new name to take the place of Donald Barshter, to fit the new personality and the new life. The name had to be nationless because a handle like Giardello or Rabinowitz or Pilsudski would only get in my way. But the name had to be a little more memorable than Joe Jones or John Smith—it had to be something simple but with a certain amount of individuality.

  Thus Nathaniel Crowley, Nat for short. It had come to me somewhere in the course of the void between Albany and Utica, and when it came I didn’t fight it. I let it run through my head a few times and decided that I liked the sound of it. Nat Crowley. It had a nice, easy, breezy ring to it. Easy to spell, easy to pronounce, easy to remember. Probably easy enough to scrawl on a hotel register in Buffalo.

  Buffalo. Because that was where Nat Crowley was going to live. For a variety of reasons, some of which might be worth thinking about.

  You see, I had to live somewhere. And the place I picked had to be big enough so that a new face in town wouldn’t stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. That consideration knocked out all the towns with less than half a million inhabitants.

  Size was the first requirement but there were others. Location was a prime one. If I picked a town in a state in the South or West, my accent was going to work against me. I could never create a good niche for myself in Mississippi, for example, because I’d always be that Yankee who talks funny.

  Another big thing—I had to pick a city where I wouldn’t run into anybody I knew. That killed New York, where I knew far too many people, where I could never feel altogether safe. The same consideration killed Los Angeles and Chicago and Philadelphia and St. Louis and Detroit, because those cities booked too many conventions.

  By the time I had finished ruling out city after city for one reason or another, Buffalo headed the list and seemed to fill the bill. Its population was just shy of a million. And the only visitors the town ever had were Canadians who didn’t know any better. Which was fine with me.

  Now it was a few minutes after six. We were supposed to hit Buffalo a little after midnight.

  I got up from my seat, leaving the newspaper and the hat for the time being. I walked to the diner, sat down at an empty table and ordered rye with soda and a rare steak. I drank the rye and ate the dinner and wondered if anybody had come across Ellen’s body yet. It didn’t seem likely. Unless I picked up a little bad luck somewhere along the line, I had two or three days of grace before some buffoon opened the wrong closet door and screamed for the police.

  By that time Nat Crowley would have a life of his own. He would be in Buffalo. He would have a new wardrobe and a new apartment and a start on assembling a new circle of friends. He would also have a new job.

  His employer would be the local crime syndicate.

  * * *

  I finished my dinner, had another drink and smoked a cigarette. I left the diner and went back to my coach. I sat down, looked at my tabloid for a minute or two, then folded it again and thought some more about Nat Crowley. He was going to be a criminal. Not a wife-murderer, like Donald Barshter. A professional criminal, the kind that doesn’t go to jail.

  There were reasons for this. I had to earn a living, since the five grand I was carrying wouldn’t last forever. And I couldn’t walk into the nearest insurance agency and tell them to hire me. I could invent Crowley easily enough but it was something else entirely to invent a past for him. I couldn’t outfit Nat with employers’ references and past job summaries and the rest. A respectable employer would run a check just as a matter of course and pretty soon the police would come knocking on my door. Then it would all be over with.

  So Crowley couldn’t work for anybody who would check on him. That left him with two choices—he could go into business for himself, using whatever remained of his five grand as operating capital, or he could get some sort of tie-up with the kind of boys who don’t ask to see your references. Like the syndicate, or the Mafia, or the organization, or the combination, or the outfit, or the mob—or whatever term the press is using these days to conceal its overwhelming ignorance of the whole thing.

  I couldn’t think of a business offhand that I felt competent to run or that I could pick up with the amount of capital I could afford to invest. That left me with the mob. And there was another reason for the mob, as far as that went. It fit in with the new personality I was inventing for Nat Crowley.

  Because the personality would be as much of a disguise as Crowley would have. Crowley would be six feet tall, with brown eyes and mud-colored hair and properly unobtrusive features. In short, he would look exactly like Donald Barshter. I could play all kinds of games—dyeing my hair, wearing platform shoes, paying a plastic surgeon to twist my nose around. But if I did any of those, one day or another the chosen disguise would slip and some clown would figure out that it was a disguise and that therefore I was hiding something. Which was all I needed.

  There are better ways to disguise yourself. You leave your hair its usual color and keep it the usual distance from the ground. Your face remains the
same. You change what’s behind it.

  You change the clothes from the quiet tweeds and pinstripes and flannels to suits with more of a flair. You buy longer jackets and spend more money on them. You buy expensive shoes and noisy ties. You wear a hat—it alters the shape of your face at least as thoroughly as a nose job and at the same time the hat changes the tone of your appearance tremendously.

  Little things. Nat Crowley would walk less hurriedly and more confidently. His voice would be lower, but not so much lower that it would be a strain. He’d speak slowly and he’d hold the words to a minimum.

  More little things. Barshter drank either scotch on the rocks or dry martinis. Crowley would drink rye and soda or a bottle of premium beer. Barshter played lousy golf and listened inattentively to classical music. Crowley would hang out at jazz clubs and stick to spectator sports. He might catch the Friday fights from ringside or spend an afternoon at the track but you’d never catch him out at the country club for a weekend in the pool.

  It wasn’t just a matter of props. Because props are something you use in an act and this had to be more than an act—it had to be real. I had to let myself slip into Crowley’s personality, playing it by ear at the beginning, living with it until it became my own. Eventually I would be Nat Crowley. I would live his life and think his thoughts and see the world through his eyes.

  I could do worse, a lot worse. By now I was looking forward to the whole masquerade the way a satyr with a virgin bride looks forward to his wedding night. Donald Barshter had shot his wad years ago. There was nothing left for him—no kicks, no excitement, no sense of being alive—which, indirectly, was why Ellen and I had fought so much lately. We had nothing better to do. More directly, that was why I had knocked her around during a rare moment of passion. And why I was riding the train to the little city of Buffalo.