Eight Million Ways to Die ms-5

by Lawrence Block

"I mean what kind of bills? What'd he give you, a pair of fifteens?"

  "A pair of-"

  "He give you a twenty and a ten?"

  "I think it was two twenties."

  "And you gave him twelve bucks back? Wait, there must have been tax, right?"

  "It's twenty-nine forty with the tax."

  "And he gave you forty bucks and you gave him the change."

  Something registered. "He gave me two twenties and forty cents in change," the man said. "And I gave him a ten and a one."

  "See? You remember the transaction."

  "Yeah, I do. Sort of."

  "Now tell me what he looked like. He white?"

  "Yeah, sure. White."

  "Heavy? Thin?"

  "Thin but not too thin. On the thin side."

  "Beard?"

  "No."

  "Moustache?"

  "Maybe. I don't know."

  "There was something about him, though, something that stuck in your memory."

  "What?"

  "That's what we're trying to get, John. That what they call you? John?"

  "Mostly it's Jack."

  "Okay, Jack. You're doin' fine now. What about his hair?"

  "I didn't pay attention to his hair."

  "Sure you did. He bent over to sign in and you saw the top of his head, remember?"

  "I don't-"

  "Full head of hair?"

  "I don't-"

  "They'll sit him down with one of our artists," Durkin said, "and he'll come up with something. And when this fucking psycho ripper steps on his cock one of these days, when we catch him in the act or on his way out the door, he'll look as much like the police artist's sketch as I look like Sara fucking Blaustein. She looked like a woman, didn't she?"

  "Mostly she looked dead."

  "I know. Meat in a butcher's window." We were in his car, driving over the bumpy surface of the Queensboro Bridge. The sky was starting to lighten up already. I was beyond tiredness by now, with the ragged edges of my emotions perilously close to the surface. I could feel my own vulnerability; the smallest thing could nudge me to tears or laughter.

  "You gotta wonder what it would be like," he said.

  "What?"

  "Picking up somebody who looked like that. On the street or in a bar, whatever. Then you get her someplace and she takes her clothes off and surprise. I mean, how do you react?"

  "I don't know."

  " 'Course if she already had the operation, you could go with her and never know. Her hands didn't look so big to me. There's women with big hands and men with little hands, far as that goes."

  "Uh-huh."

  "She had a couple rings on, speaking of her hands. You happen to notice?"

  "I noticed."

  "One on each hand, she had."

  "So?"

  "So he didn't take 'em."

  "Why would he take her rings?"

  "You were saying he took Dakkinen's."

  I didn't say anything.

  Gently he said, "Matt, you don't still think Dakkinen got killed for a reason?"

  I felt rage swelling up within me, bulging like an aneurysm in a blood vessel. I sat there trying to will it away.

  "And don't tell me about the towels. He's a ripper, he's a cute fucking psycho who makes plans and plays by his own private rules. He's not the first case like that to come along."

  "I got warned off the case, Joe. I got very professionally warned off the case."

  "So? She got killed by a psycho and there could still be something about her life that some friends of hers don't want to come out in the open. Maybe she had a boyfriend and he's a married guy, just like you figured, and even if what she died of was scarlet fucking fever he wouldn't want you poking around in the ashes."

  I gave myself the Miranda warning. You have the right to remain silent, I told myself, and exercised the right.

  "Unless you figure Dakkinen and Blaustein are tied together. Long-lost sisters, say. Excuse me, brother and sister. Or maybe they were brothers, maybe Dakkinen had her operation a few years ago. Tall for a girl, wasn't she?"

  "Maybe Cookie was a smokescreen," I said.

  "How's that?"

  I went on talking in spite of myself. "Maybe he killed her to take the heat off," I said. "Make it look like a train of random murders. To hide his motive for killing Dakkinen."

  "To take the heat off. What heat, for Christ's sake?"

  "I don't know."

  "There's been no fucking heat. There will be now. Nothing turns the fucking press on like a series of random killings. The readers eat it up, they pour it on their corn flakes. Anything gives 'em a chance to run a sidebar on the original Jack the Ripper, those editors go crazy for it. You talk about heat, there'll be enough heat now to scorch his ass for him."

  "I suppose."

  "You know what you are, Scudder? You're stubborn."

  "Maybe."

  "Your problem is you work private and you only carry one case at a time. I got so much shit on my desk it's a pleasure when I get to let go of something, but with you it's just the opposite. You want to hang onto it as long as you can."

  "Is that what it is?"

  "I don't know. It sounds like it." He took one hand off the wheel, tapped me on the forearm. "I don't mean to bust balls," he said. "I see something like that, somebody chopped up like that, I try to clamp a lid on it and it comes out in other directions. You did a lot of good work."

  "Did I?"

  "No question. There were things we missed. It might give us a little jump on the psycho, some of the stuff you came up with. Who knows?"

  Not I. All I knew was how tired I was.

  He fell silent as we drove across town. In front of my hotel he braked to a stop and said, "What Garfein said there. Maybe Ricone means something in Italian."

  "It won't be hard to check."

  "Oh, of course not. Everything should be that easy to run down. No, we'll check, and you know what we'll find? It'll turn out it means Jones."

  I went upstairs and got out of my clothes and into bed. Ten minutes later I got up again. I felt unclean and my scalp itched. I stood under a too-hot shower and scrubbed myself raw. I got out of the shower, told myself it didn't make any sense to shave before going to bed, then lathered up and shaved anyway. When I was done I put a robe on and sat down on the edge of my bed, then moved to the chair.

  They tell you not to let yourself get too hungry, too angry, too lonely or too tired. Any of the four can put you off balance and turn you in the direction of a drink. It seemed to me that I'd touched all four bases, I'd boxed that particular compass in the course of the day and night. Oddly enough, I didn't feel the urge for a drink.

  I got the gun from my coat pocket, I started to return it to the dresser drawer, then changed my mind and sat in the chair again, turning the gun in my hands.

  When was the last time I'd fired a gun?

  I didn't really have to think very hard. It had been that night in Washington Heights when I chased two holdup men into the street, shot them down and killed that little girl in the process. In the time I remained on the force after that incident, I never had occasion to draw my service revolver, let alone discharge it. And I certainly hadn't fired a gun since I left the force.

  And tonight I'd been unable to do it. Because something clued me that the car I was aiming at held drunken kids instead of assassins? Because some subtle intuitive perception made me wait until I was certain what I was shooting at?

  No. I couldn't make myself believe that.

  I had frozen. If instead of a kid with a whiskey bottle I'd seen a thug with a tommy gun, I wouldn't have been any more capable of squeezing the trigger. My finger'd been paralyzed.

  I broke the gun, shook the bullets out of the cylinder, closed it up again. I pointed the empty weapon at the wastebasket across the room and squeezed the trigger a couple of times. The click the hammer made as it fell upon an empty chamber was surprisingly loud and sharp in my little room.

  I aimed at
the mirror over the dresser. Click!

  Proved nothing. It was empty, I knew it was empty. I could take the thing to a pistol range, load it and fire at targets, and that wouldn't prove anything either.

  It bothered me that I'd been unable to fire the gun. And yet I was grateful it had happened that way, because otherwise I'd have emptied the gun into that car of kids, probably killed a few of them, and what would that have done to my peace of mind? Tired as I was, I went a few hard rounds with that particular conundrum. I was glad I hadn't shot anyone and frightened of the implications of not shooting, and my mind went around and around, chasing its tail.

  I took off the robe, got into bed, and couldn't even begin to loosen up. I got dressed again in street clothes, used the back end of a nail file as a screwdriver, and took the revolver apart for cleaning. I put its parts in one pocket, and in another I stowed the four live cartridges along with the two knives I'd taken from the mugger.

  It was morning and the sky was bright. I walked over to Ninth Avenue and up to Fifty-eighth Street, where I dropped both knives into a sewer grating. I crossed the street and walked to another grating and stood near it with my hands in my pockets, one holding the four cartridges, the other touching the pieces of the disassembled revolver.

  Why carry a gun you're not going to shoot? Why own a gun you can't carry?

  I stopped in a deli on the way back to the hotel. The customer ahead of me bought two six-packs of Old English 800 Malt Liquor. I picked out four candy bars and paid for them, ate one as I walked and the other three in my room. Then I took the revolver's parts from my pocket and put them back together again. I loaded four of the six chambers and put the gun in the dresser drawer.

  I got into bed, told myself I'd stay there whether I could sleep or not, and smiled at the thought as I felt myself drifting off.

  Chapter 29

  The telephone woke me. I fought my way out of sleep like an underwater swimmer coming up for air. I sat up, blinking and trying to catch my breath. The phone was still ringing and I couldn't figure out what was making that damned sound. Then I caught on and answered it.

  It was Chance. "Just saw the paper," he said. "What do you figure? That the same guy as got Kim?"

  "Give me a minute," I said.

  "You asleep?"

  "I'm awake now."

  "Then you don't know what I'm talkin' about. There was another killing, this time in Queens, some sex-change streetwalker cut to ribbons."

  "I know."

  "How do you know if you been sleeping?"

  "I was out there last night."

  "Out there in Queens?"

  He sounded impressed. "Out there on Queens Boulevard," I told him. "With a couple of cops. It was the same killer."

  "You sure of that?"

  "They didn't have the scientific evidence sorted out when I was there. But yes, I'm sure of it."

  He thought about it. "Then Kim was just unlucky," he said. "Just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

  "Maybe."

  "Just maybe?"

  I got my watch from the nightstand. It was almost noon.

  "There are elements that don't fit," I said. "At least it seems that way to me. A cop last night told me my problem is I'm too stubborn. I've only got the one case and I don't want to let go of it."

  "So?"

  "He could be right, but there are still some things that don't fit. What happened to Kim's ring?"

  "What ring?"

  "She had a ring with a green stone."

  "Ring," he said, and thought about it. "Was it Kim had that ring? I guess it was."

  "What happened to it?"

  "Wasn't it in her jewelry box?"

  "That was her class ring. From high school back home."

  "Yeah, right. I recall the ring you mean. Big green stone. Was a birthstone ring, something like that."

  "Where'd she get it?"

  "Out of a Crackerjack box, most likely. Think she said she bought it for herself. It was just a piece of junk, man. Chunk of green glass is all."

  Shatter wine bottles at her feet.

  "It wasn't an emerald?"

  "You shuckin', man? You know what emeralds cost?"

  "No."

  "More'n diamonds. Why's the ring important?"

  "Maybe it's not."

  "What do you do next?"

  "I don't know," I said. "If Kim got killed by a psycho striking at random, I don't know what I can do that the cops can't do better. But there's somebody who wants me off the case, and there's a hotel clerk who got scared into leaving town, and there's a missing ring."

  "That maybe doesn't mean anything."

  "Maybe."

  "Wasn't there something in Sunny's note about a ring turning somebody's finger green? Maybe it was a cheap ring, turned Kim's finger green, and she got rid of it."

  "I don't think that's what Sunny meant."

  "What did she mean, then?"

  "I don't know that either." I took a breath. "I'd like to connect Cookie Blue and Kim Dakkinen," I said. "That's what I'd like to do. If I can manage that I can probably find the man who killed them both."

  "Maybe. You be at Sunny's service tomorrow?"

  "I'll be there."

  "Then I'll see you. Maybe we can talk a little afterward."

  "Fine."

  "Yeah," he said. "Kim and Cookie. What could they have in common?"

  "Didn't Kim work the streets for a while? Didn't she take a bust on that Long Island City stroll?"

  "Years ago."

  "She had a pimp named Duffy, didn't she? Did Cookie have a pimp?"

  "Could be. Some of the TVs do. Most of 'em don't, from what I know. Maybe I could ask around."

  "Maybe you could."

  "I haven't seen Duffy in months. I think I heard he was dead. But I'll ask around. Hard to figure, though, that a girl like Kim had anything in common with a little Jewish queen from the Island."

  A Jewish queen and a Dairy Queen, I thought, and thought of Donna.

  "Maybe they were sisters," I suggested.

  "Sisters?"

  "Under the skin."

  I wanted breakfast, but when I hit the street I bought a paper before I did anything else, and I could see right away that it wasn't going to make a good accompaniment for my bacon and eggs. Hotel Ripper Claims Second Victim, the top teaser headline announced. And then, in big block caps, sex-change hooker butchered in queens.

  I folded it, tucked it under my arm. I don't know what I thought I was going to do first, read the paper or eat, but my feet decided for me and picked neither of those choices. I walked two blocks before I realized I was heading for the Y on West Sixty-third, and that I was going to get there just in time for the twelve-thirty meeting.

  What the hell, I thought. Their coffee was as good as anybody else's.

  I got out of there an hour later and had breakfast in a Greek joint around the corner on Broadway. I read the paper while I ate. It didn't seem to bother me now.

  There wasn't much in the story I didn't already know. The victim was described as having lived in the East Village; I'd somehow assumed she lived across the river in Queens. Garfein had mentioned Floral Park, just across the line in Nassau County, and evidently that was where she'd grown up. Her parents, according to the Post, had both died several years earlier in an air crash. Mark/Sara/Cookie's sole surviving relative was a brother, Adrian Blaustein, a wholesale jeweler residing in Forest Hills with offices on West Forty-seventh Street. He was out of the country and had not yet been notified of his brother's death.

  His brother's death? Or his sister's? How did a relative relate to someone who'd changed sex? How did a respectable businessman regard a brother-turned-sister who turned quick tricks in strangers' parked cars? What would Cookie Blue's death mean to Adrian Blaustein?

  What did it mean to me?

  Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. Any man's death, any woman's death, any death in between. But did it diminish me? And was I truly
involved?

  I could still feel the trigger of the.32 trembling beneath my finger.

  I ordered another cup of coffee and turned to a story about a young soldier home on furlough, playing pickup basketball at a sandlot game in the Bronx. A gun had apparently fallen out of some bystander's pocket, discharging on impact, and the bullet had struck this young serviceman and killed him instantly. I read the story through a second time and sat there shaking my head at it.

  One more way to die. Jesus, there really were eight million of them, weren't there?

  At twenty to nine that evening I slipped into the basement of a church on Prince Street in SoHo. I got myself a cup of coffee, and while I looked for a seat I scanned the room for Jan. She was near the front on the right-hand side. I sat further back near the coffee.

  The speaker was a woman in her thirties who drank for ten years and spent the last three of them on the Bowery, panhandling and wiping windshields to get money for wine. "Even on the Bowery," she said, "there are some people who know how to take care of themselves. Some of the men down there always carry a razor and a bar of soap. I gravitated straight to the other kind, the ones who don't shave and don't wash and don't change their clothes. A little voice in my head said, 'Rita, you're right where you belong.' "

  During the break I ran into Jan on her way to the coffee urn. She seemed pleased to see me. "I was in the neighborhood," I explained, "and it got to be meeting time. It occurred to me I might see you here."

  "Oh, this is one of my regular meetings," she said. "We'll go for coffee after, okay?"

  "Sure."

  A dozen of us wound up around a couple of tables in a coffee shop on West Broadway. I didn't take a very active part in the conversation, or pay too much attention to it. Eventually the waiter distributed separate checks. Jan paid hers and I paid mine and the two of us headed downtown toward her place.

  I said, "I didn't just happen to be in the neighborhood."

  "There's a big surprise."

  "I wanted to talk to you. I don't know if you read today's paper-"

  "About the killing in Queens? Yes, I did."

  "I was out there. I'm all wound up and I feel the need to talk about it."

  We went up to her loft and she made a pot of coffee. I sat with a cup of coffee in front of me and by the time I stopped talking and took a sip it was cold. I brought her up to date, told her about Kim's fur jacket, about the drunken kids and the broken wine bottle, about the trip to Queens and what we'd found there. And I told her, too, how I'd spent this afternoon, riding the subway across the river and walking around Long Island City, returning to knock on doors in Cookie Blue's East Village tenement, then crossed the island to work the gay bars on Christopher Street and up and down West Street.