Even the Wicked

1

On a Tuesday night in August I was sitting in the living room with TJ, watching two guys hit each other on one of the Spanish-language cable channels, and enjoying the fresh air more than the fight. A heat wave had punished the city for two weeks, finally breaking over the weekend. Since then we’d had three perfect days, with bright blue skies and low humidity and the temperature in the seventies. You’d have called it ideal weather anywhere; in the middle of a New York summer, you could only call it a miracle.

I’d spent the day taking advantage of the weather, walking around the city. I got home and showered in time to drop into a chair and let Peter Jennings explain the world to me. Elaine joined me for the first fifteen minutes, then went into the kitchen to start dinner. TJ dropped by just around the time she was adding the pasta to the boiling water, insisting that he wasn’t hungry and couldn’t stay long anyway. Elaine, who had heard this song before, doubled the recipe on the spot, and TJ let himself be persuaded to take a plate and clean it several times.

“Trouble is,” he told her, “you too good of a cook. Now on, I wait to come by until mealtimes is come and gone. I don’t watch out, I be fat.”

He has a ways to go. He’s a street kid, lean and limber, indistinguishable at first glance from any of the young blacks you’ll see hanging around Times Square, shilling for the monte dealers, running short cons, looking for a way to get over, or just to get by. He’s much more than that as well, but for all I know there may be more to many of them than meets the eye. He’s the one I know; with the others, all I get to see is what’s on the surface.

And TJ’s own surface, for that matter, is apt to change, chameleonlike, with his surroundings. I have watched him slip effortlessly from hip-hop street patter to a Brooks Brothers accent that would not be out of place on an Ivy League campus. His hairstyle, too, has varied over the several years I’ve known him, ranging from an old-style Afro through assorted versions of the high-top fade. A year or so ago he started helping Elaine at her shop, and on his own decided that a kinder, gentler ‘do was more appropriate. He’s kept it cropped relatively short ever since, while his dress ranges from the preppy outfits he wears to work to the in-your-face attire they favor on the Deuce. This evening he was dressed for success in khakis and a button-down shirt. A day or two earlier, when I’d seen him last, he was a vision in baggy camo trousers and a sequined jacket.

“Wish they was speakin’ English,” he complained. “Why they got to talk in Spanish?”

“It’s better this way,” I said.

“You tellin’ me you know what they sayin’?”

“A word here and there. Mostly it’s just noise.”

“And that’s how you like it?”

“The English-speaking announcers talk too much,” I said. “They’re afraid the audience won’t be able to figure out what’s going on if they’re not chattering away all the time. And they say the same things over and over. ‘He’s not working hard enough to establish the left jab.’ I don’t think I’ve watched five fights in the past ten years when the announcer hasn’t observed that the fighter should be using the jab more. It must be the first thing they teach them in broadcasting school.”

“Maybe this dude sayin’ the same thing in Spanish.”

“Maybe he is,” I agreed, “but since I don’t have a clue what he’s saying it can’t get on my nerves.”

“You ever heard of the mute, Newt?”

“Not the same. You need the crowd noise, need to hear the punches land.”

“These two ain’t landin’ many.”

“Blame the one in the blue shorts,” I said. “He’s not working hard enough to establish the left jab.”

He did enough to win the four-round prelim, though, getting a decision and a round of perfunctory applause from the crowd. Next on the card was a ten-round welterweight bout, a classic matchup of quick light-hitting youth against a strong puncher a couple of years past his prime. The old guy — I think he was all of thirty-four — was able to stun the kid when he landed a clean shot, but the years had slowed him some and he missed more often than he connected. In return, the kid peppered him with a barrage of blows that didn’t have much on them.

“He pretty slick,” TJ said, after a couple of rounds.

“Too bad he doesn’t have a punch.”

“He just keep at you, wear you down. Meanwhile he pilin’ up the points. Other dude, he be tirin’ more with each round.”

“If we understood Spanish,” I said, “we could listen to the announcer saying pretty much the same thing. If I were betting this fight I’d put my money on the old guy.”

“Ain’t no surprise. You ancient dudes has got to stick together. You think we need any of this here?”

“This here” was the line of goods in the Gehlen catalog. The Gehlen Company is an outfit in Elyria, Ohio, offering electronic espionage equipment, gear to bug other people’s phones and offices, gear to keep one’s own phones and offices bug-free. There’s a curiously bipolar quality to the whole enterprise; they are, after all, promoting half their line as a defense against the other half, and the catalog copy keeps changing philosophical horses in midstream. “Knowledge is power,” they assure you on one page, and two pages later they’re championing “your most basic right — the right to personal and corporate privacy.” Back and forth the argument rages, from “You have a right to know!” to “Keep their noses out of your business!”

Where, you have to wonder, do the company’s sympathies lie? Given that their namesake was the legendary German intelligence chief, I figured they’d happily sell anything to anybody, committed only to increasing their sales and maximizing their profits. But would any of their wares increase my sales or boost my profits?

“I think we can probably get by without it,” I told TJ.

“How we gonna catch Will without all the latest technology?”

“We’re not.”

“’Cause he ain’t our problem?”

“Not as far as I can tell.”

“Dude’s the whole city’s problem. All they talkin’ about, everywhere you go. Will this and Will that.”

“He was the headline story in the Post again today,” I said, “and they didn’t have any news to back it up, because he hasn’t done anything since last week. But they want to keep him on the front page to sell papers, so the story was about how the city’s nervous, waiting for something to happen.”

“That’s all they wrote?”

“They tried to put it in historical context. Other faceless killers who’ve caught the public imagination, like Son of Sam.”

“Be a difference,” he said. “Wasn’t nobody cheerin’ for Son of Sam.” He flicked a finger at an illustration in the Gehlen catalog. “I like this here voice-changin’ telephone, but you see them all over now. They even got them at Radio Shack. This might be a better one, the price they charge for it. Ones at Radio Shack is cheaper.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Will could use this here, if he was to start makin’ phone calls ‘stead of sendin’ letters.”

“Next time I see him, I’ll pass along the suggestion.”

“I almost bought me one the other day.”

“What for? Haven’t you got enough of a repertoire of voices?”

“All I got is accents,” he said. “What this does is change the pitch.”

“I know what it does.”

“So you can sound like a girl, or a little kid. Or if you was a girl to begin with you can sound like a man so’s perverts won’t be talkin’ dirty to you. Be fun to fool around with somethin’ like that, only be like a kid with a toy, wouldn’t it? One, two weeks and you used up all the newness out of it and be tossin’ it in the closet and askin’ your mama to buy you somethin’ else.”

“I guess we don’t need it.”

He closed the catalog and set it aside. “Don’t need none of this,” he said. “Far as I can see. You want to know what we need, Reed, I already told you that.”

“More than once.”

“A computer,” he said. “But you don’t want to get one.”

“One of these days.”

“Yeah, right. You just afraid you won’t know how to use it.”

“It’s the same kind of fear,” I said, “that keeps men from jumping out of planes without parachutes.”

“First thing,” he said, “you could learn. You ain’t that old.”

“Thanks.”

“Second thing, I could work it for you.”

“A passing ability with video games,” I said, “is not the same thing as being computer literate.”

“They ain’t necessarily that far apart. You ‘member the Kongs? Video games is where they started at, and where they at now?”

“Harvard,” I admitted. The Kongs, their real names David King and Jimmy Hong, were a pair of hackers devoted to probing the innards of the phone company’s computer system. They were high school students when TJ introduced them to me, and now they were up in Cambridge, doing God knows what.

“You recall the help they gave us?”

“Vividly.”

“How many times have you said you wished they’s still in the city?”

“Once or twice.”

“More’n once or twice, Bryce. Whole lot of times.”

“So?”

“We had us a computer,” he said, “I could get so I could do the same shit they did. Plus I could do all the legit stuff, diggin’ out trash in fifteen minutes that you spend a whole day findin’ in the library.”

“How would you know how to do it?”

“They got courses you can take. Not to teach you to do what the Kongs can do, but all the rest of it. They sit you down at a machine and teach you.”

“Well, one of these days,” I said, “maybe I’ll take a course.”

“No, I’ll take a course,” he said, “an’ after I learn I can teach you, if you want to learn. Or I can do the computer part, whichever you say.”

“I get to decide,” I said, “because I’m the boss.”

“Right.”

I started to say something more, but the veteran fighter picked that moment to connect with an overhand right lead that caught the kid on the button and took his legs away from him. The kid was still unsteady on his pins after an eight count, but there was only half a minute left in the round. The older fighter chased him all around the ring and tagged him a time or two, but the kid managed to stay on his feet and weather the round.

They didn’t break for a commercial at the bell, electing instead to keep the camera on the younger fighter’s corner while his seconds worked on him. The announcers had a lot to say about what they were showing us, but they said it in Spanish so we didn’t have to pay any attention to it.

“About that computer,” TJ said.

“I’ll think about it.”

“Damn,” he said. “Had you the next thing to sold on it, and the old man there had to land a lucky punch and break the flow. Why couldn’t he wait a round?”

“He was just one old guy looking out for the interests of another,” I said. “We old guys are like that.”

“This catalog,” he said, brandishing it. “You happen to see this here night-vision scope? Came from Russia or some such.”

I nodded. It was Soviet Army issue, according to the Gehlen people, and would presumably enable me to read fine print at the bottom of an abandoned coal mine.

“Can’t see what we’d need it for,” he said, “but you could have fun with something like that.” He tossed the catalog aside. “Have fun with most of this shit. It’s toys is all it is.”

“And what’s the computer? A bigger toy than the others?”

He shook his head. “It’s a tool, Buell. But why do I be wastin’ my breath tryin’ to get through to you?”

“Why indeed?”

I thought we might get to see a knockout in the next round, but it was clear halfway through that it wasn’t going to happen. The kid had shaken off the effects of the knockdown, and my guy was slower, having a hard time getting his punches to go where he wanted them. I knew how he felt.

The phone rang, and Elaine picked it up in the other room. On the TV screen, my guy shook off a punch and waded in.

Elaine came in, a hard-to-read expression on her face. “It’s for you,” she said. “It’s Adrian Whitfield. Do you want to call him back?”

“No, I’ll talk to him,” I said, rising. “I wonder what he wants.”

Adrian Whitfield was a rising star, a criminal defense attorney who’d been getting an increasing number of high-profile clients in the past couple of years, and a corresponding increase in media attention. In the course of the summer I’d seen him three times on the TV screen. Roger Ailes had him on to discuss the notion that the jury system was outmoded and due for replacement. (His position was a tentative maybe in the civil courts, a flat no in criminal cases.) Then he was on Larry King twice, first to talk about the latest star-spangled homicide case in Los Angeles, and then to argue the merits of the death penalty. (He was unequivocally against it.) Most recently I’d seen him along with Raymond Gruliow on Charlie Rose, all three of them caught up in an earnest discussion of the question of the lawyer as popular celebrity. Hard-Way Ray had put the issue in historical context, telling some wonderful stories about Earl Rodgers and Bill Fallen and Clarence Darrow.

I had done some work for Whitfield on Ray Gruliow’s recommendation, running checks on witnesses and potential jurors, and I liked him well enough to hope to do more. It was a little late for him to be calling me on business, but the nature of the business is such that you get calls at all hours. I didn’t mind the interruption, especially if it meant work. It had been a slow summer thus far. That wasn’t all bad, Elaine and I had been able to get away for some long weekends in the country, but I was beginning to get rusty. The signs were there in the way I read the morning papers, obsessively interested in the local crime news and itching to get mixed up in it.

I took the phone in the kitchen and said, “Matthew Scudder,” announcing myself to whoever had placed the call for him.

But he’d made it himself. “Matt,” he said. “Adrian Whitfield. I hope I didn’t get you at a bad time.”

“I was watching two fellows hitting each other,” I said. “Without much enthusiasm, on my part or theirs. What can I do for you?”

“That’s a good question. Tell me something, would you? How do I sound?”

“How do you sound?”

“My voice isn’t shaky, is it?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think it was,” he said, “but it ought to be. I got a phone call a little while ago.”

“Oh?”

“From that idiot with the News, but perhaps I shouldn’t call him that. For all I know he’s a friend of yours.”

I knew a few people at the Daily News. “Who?”

“Marty McGraw.”

“Hardly a friend,” I said. “I met him once or twice, but neither of us had much of a chance to make an impression on the other. I doubt he’d remember, and the only reason I remember is I’ve been reading his column twice a week for I don’t know how many years.”

“Isn’t he in there three times a week?”

“Well, I don’t usually read the News on Sundays.”

“Got your hands full with the Times, I suppose.”

“Full of ink, generally.”

“Isn’t that something? You’d think they could print the damned newspaper so it doesn’t come off on your hands.”

“‘If they can put a man on the moon...’”

“You said it. Can you believe there’s a newsstand in Grand Central sells disposable white Pliofilm gloves to wear while you read the damn thing?” He drew a breath. “Matt, I’m avoiding the point, and my guess is you already know what the point is.”

I had a pretty good idea. “I suppose he got another of those letters. From Will.”

“From Will, yes. And the subject of that letter?”

“It would have to be one of your clients,” I said, “but I wouldn’t want to try to guess which one.”

“Because they’re all such estimable men?”

“I just wouldn’t have a clue,” I said. “I haven’t followed your cases that closely, except for the couple I’ve worked on. And I don’t know how Will’s mind works, anyway.”

“Oh, it’s an interesting mind. I would say it works very well, certainly well enough for the purpose at hand.” He paused, and I knew what he was going to say an instant before he said it. “He wasn’t writing about one of my clients. He was writing about me.”

“What did he say?”

“Oh, lots of things,” he said. “I could read it to you.”

“You’ve got the letter?”

“A copy of it. McGraw faxed it to me. He called me first, before he called the cops, and he faxed me a copy of the letter. That was actually damned considerate of him. I shouldn’t have called him a jerk.”

“You didn’t.”

“When I first brought his name up, I said—”

“You called him an idiot.”

“You’re right at that. Well, I don’t suppose he’s either one, or if he is he’s a considerate specimen of the breed. You asked what Will said. ‘An Open Letter to Adrian Whitfield.’ Let’s see. ‘You have devoted your life to keeping guilty men out of prison.’ Well, he’s wrong about that. They’re all innocent until proven guilty, and whenever guilt was proved to the satisfaction of a jury, they went to prison. And stayed there, unless I could get a reversal on appeal. In another sense, of course, he’s quite correct. Most of the men and women I’ve represented did what they were accused of doing, and I guess that’s enough to make them guilty in the eyes of Will.”

“What’s his beef with you, exactly? Doesn’t he think the accused are entitled to a defense?”

“Well, I don’t want to read you the whole thing,” he said, “and his position’s hard to state with precision, but you could say he takes exception to the fact that I’m good at what I do.”

“That’s all?”

“It’s funny,” he said. “He doesn’t even mention Richie Vollmer, and that’s what got him started.”

“That’s right, you were Vollmer’s attorney.”

“I was indeed, and I got my share of hate mail when he managed to dodge the wheels of Justice, but there’s nothing in here about my role in getting him off. Let’s what he says. He says I put the police on trial, which is hardly unique on my part. Our mutual friend Gruliow does that all the time. It’s often the best strategy with a minority defendant. He also says I put the victim on trial. I think he’s talking about Naomi Tarloff.’

“Probably.’

“It might surprise you to know I’ve had some second thoughts about that case. But that’s neither here nor there. I defended the Ellsworth boy the best I knew how, and even so I didn’t get him off. The jury convicted the little son of a bitch. He’s upstate serving fifteen-to-twenty-five, but that’s nothing to the sentence our friend Will has imposed. He says he’s going to kill me.”

I said, “I assume McGraw went straight to the cops.”

“With the briefest pause to ring me up and then fax me the thing. As a matter of fact he made a Xerox copy and faxed that. He didn’t want to screw up any physical evidence by running the original through his fax machine. Then he called the cops, and then I heard from them. I had two detectives over here for an hour, and I can call them idiots without regard to the possibility that they’re friends of yours. Did I have any enemies? Were there clients who were bitter about my efforts on their behalf? For Christ’s sake, the only embittered clients I’ve got are the ones behind bars, where nobody has to worry about them, least of all myself.”

“They have to ask.”

“I suppose so,” he said, “but isn’t it fairly obvious that this isn’t a guy with a personal motive? He’s already killed four people, and he nailed the first one because Marty McGraw told him to. I don’t know what earned me a place on his shit list, but it’s not because he thought I charged him too much for keeping him out of jail.”

“Did they offer you protection?”

“They talked about posting a guard in my outer office. I can’t see what good that’s going to do.”

“It couldn’t hurt.”

“No, but it couldn’t help all that much either. I need to know what to do, Matt. I’ve got no experience in this area. Nobody ever tried to kill me. The closest I’ve come to this was five or six years ago when a man named Paul Masland offered to punch me in the nose.”

“A disaffected client?”

“Uh-uh. A stockbroker with a snootful. He accused me of fucking his wife. Jesus, I was one of the few men in western Connecticut who hadn’t had a shot at her.”

“What happened?”

“He swung and missed, and a couple of guys grabbed his arms, and I said the hell with it and went home. The next time I ran into him we both acted like nothing had ever happened. Or maybe he wasn’t acting, because he’d been pretty drunk that night. It’s possible he didn’t remember a thing. You think I should have told the two detectives about Paul?”

“If you think there’s a chance he could have written that letter.”

“It’d be a neat trick,” he said, “because the poor bastard’s been dead for a year and a half. A stroke or a heart attack, I forget which, but he went in a minute, whichever it was. Son of a bitch never knew what hit him. Not like our friend Will. He’s a fucking rattlesnake, isn’t he? Warning you first, letting you know what’s coming. Matt, tell me what I should do.”

“What you should do? You should leave the country.”

“You’re not serious, are you? Even if you are it’s out of the question.”

That didn’t surprise me. I said, “Where are you? At your office?”

“No, I got out of there once I got rid of the cops. I’m at my apartment. You’ve never been here, have you? We always met downtown. I live at... Jesus, I was wondering if I should say it over the phone. But if he’s got the phone tapped he’d have to know where it’s installed, wouldn’t you say?”

Early on, he’d asked if his voice was shaky. It hadn’t been and it still wasn’t, but his anxiety was apparent in the way his conversation was becoming increasingly disjointed.

He told me the address and I copied it down. “Don’t go anywhere,” I said. “Call your doorman and tell him you’re expecting a visitor named Matthew Scudder, and not to let me up until after I’ve shown him photo ID. And tell him I’m the only visitor you’re expecting, and not to let anybody else up. And tell him that includes the police.”

“All right.”

“Let your machine screen your phone calls. Don’t pick up unless you recognize the caller. I’ll be right over.”

By the time I was off the phone there were two different fighters in the ring, a pair of sluggish heavyweights. I asked how the other bout had turned out.

“Went the distance,” TJ said. “Check it out — for a minute or two I thought I knew how to speak Spanish.”

“How’s that?”

“The ring announcer. He’s talkin’ away, and I’m understandin’ every word, and I’m thinkin’ it’s a miracle and next time you gonna see me’s on ‘Unsolved Mysteries.’”

“The fight’s being held in Mississippi,” I said. “The ring announcer was speaking English.”

“Yeah, well, I knows that. It slipped my mind is all, hearing all that Spanish from the announcers. And then when I did hear the English, I just thought it was Spanish and I was understandin’ it.” He shrugged. “Young dude got the decision.”

“It figured.”

“These two don’t look to be in a hurry. They just takin’ their time.”

“They’ll have to do it without me,” I said. “I have to go out for a while.”

“Some kind of business?”

“Some kind.”

“Want me to tag along, maybe watch your back?”

“Not tonight.”

He shrugged. “You be thinkin’ ‘bout that computer, though.”

“I’ll give it some thought.”

“Ain’t got much time, if we’s gonna join the twentieth century.”

“I’d hate to miss it.”

“That’ how they gonna catch Will, you know. Computers.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Put all the letters the fool writes into the computer, press the right keys, an’ it’ll analyze the words he uses and tell you the sucker’s a forty-two-year-old white male of Scandinavian ancestry. He be missin’ two toes on the right foot, an’ he a big Jets and Rangers fan, an’ when he a child his mama whupped him for wettin’ the bed.”

“And they’ll get all this from the computer.”

“All that an’ more,” he said, grinning. “How you think they gonna get him?”

“Forensics,” I said. “Lab work at the crime scenes and on the letters he writes. I’m sure they’ll use computers to process the data. They use them for everything these days.”

“Everybody does. Everybody but us.”

“And they’ll follow up a ton of leads,” I said, “and knock on a lot of doors and ask a lot of questions, most of them pointless. And eventually he’ll make a mistake, or they’ll get lucky, or both. And they’ll land on him.”

“I guess.”

“The only thing is,” I said, “I hope they don’t let it go too long. I’d like to see them hurry up and get this guy.”