Even the Wicked

11

“The first night I went to Whitfield’s place,” I told Elaine. “TJ was over for dinner, we were watching the fights together—”

“In Spanish. I remember.”

“—and Whitfield called. And I went over there and talked with him.”

“And?”

“And I remembered something,” I said, and paused. After a long moment she asked me if I was planning on sharing it with her.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m still sorting it out. And trying to think of a way to say it that won’t sound ridiculous.”

“Why worry about that? There’s nobody here but us chickens.”

There could have been. We were in her shop on Ninth Avenue, surrounded by the artwork and furnishings she dealt in. Anyone could have rung the bell and been buzzed in to look at the pictures and perhaps buy something, possibly one of the chairs we were sitting on. But it was a quiet afternoon, and for now we were alone and undisturbed.

I said, “There was no liquor on his breath.”

“Whitfield, you’re talking about.”

“Right.”

“You don’t mean at the end, when he drank the poison and died. You mean the night you first met him.”

“Well, I’d met him before. I’d worked for the man. But yes, I’m talking about the night I went to his apartment. He’d told me on the phone that he’d received a death threat from Will, and I went over there to suggest ways he might go about protecting himself.”

“And there was no liquor on his breath.”

“None. You know how it is with me. I’m a sober alcoholic, I can damn near smell a drink on the other side of a concrete wall. If I’m on a crowded elevator and the little guy in the far corner had a thimbleful of something alcoholic earlier in the day, I smell it as surely as if I just walked into a brewery. It doesn’t bother me, it doesn’t make me wish I were drinking or that the other person weren’t, but I could no more fail to notice it than if somebody turned out the lights.”

“I remember when I had the chocolate.”

“The chocolate... oh, with the liquid center.”

She nodded. “Monica and I were visiting this friend of hers who was recovering from a mastectomy, and she passed around these chocolates someone had given her. And I got piggy, because these were very good chocolates, and I had four of them, and the last one had a cherry-brandy filling. And I had it half swallowed before I realized what it was, and then I swallowed the rest of it, because what was I going to do, spit it out? That’s what you’d have done, you’d have had reason to, but I’m not an alcoholic, I’m just a person who doesn’t drink, so it wouldn’t kill me to swallow it.”

“And it didn’t make you take off all your clothes.”

“It didn’t have any effect whatsoever, as far as I know. There couldn’t have been very much brandy involved. There was a cherry in there, too, so that didn’t leave much room for brandy.” She shrugged. “Then I came home and gave you a kiss and you looked as startled as I’ve ever seen you.”

“It took me by surprise.”

“I thought you were going to sing me a chorus of ‘Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine.’”

“I don’t even know the tune.”

“Do you want me to hum a little? But we’re straying from the subject. The point is you’re super aware of the smell of booze and you didn’t smell it on Adrian Whitfield. Could it be, Holmes, that the man hadn’t been drinking?”

“But he said he had.”

“Oh?”

“It was a funny conversation,” I recalled. “He started out by announcing that he didn’t drink, and that got my attention because he was uncapping the scotch bottle even as he said it. Then he qualified it by saying he didn’t drink the way he used to, and that he pretty much limited himself to one drink a day.”

“That would be enough for anybody,” she said, “if you had a big enough glass.”

“For some of us,” I said, “you’d need a bathtub. Anyway, he went on to say that this particular day had been an exception, what with the letter from Will, and that he’d had a drink when he left the office and another when he got home to his apartment.”

“And you didn’t smell them on his breath.”

“No.”

“If he brushed his teeth—”

“Wouldn’t matter. I’d still smell the alcohol.”

“You’re right, he’d just wind up smelling like crème de menthe. I notice alcohol on people’s breath, too, because I don’t drink. But I’m nowhere near as aware of it as you are.”

“All the years I drank,” I said, “I never once smelled alcohol on anybody’s breath, and it hardly ever occurred to me that anyone could smell it on mine. Jesus, I must have gone around smelling of it all the time.”

“I kind of liked it.”

“Really?”

“But I like it better this way,” she said, and kissed me. After a few minutes she went back to her chair and said, “Whew. If we were not in a semi-public place—”

“I know.”

“Where anyone could ring the bell at any moment, even though no one has in the longest time—” She heaved a sigh. “What do you think it means?”

“I think we’re still hot for each other,” I said, “after all these years.”

“Well, I know that. I mean the booze that wasn’t on Whitfield’s breath, which is uncannily like the dog that didn’t bark in the nighttime, isn’t it? What do you make of it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re sure you noticed it at the time? Noticed the absence of it, I mean, and the contradiction between what he said and what you observed. It wasn’t just something your imagination supplied when you were lighting candles and cursing the darkness?”

“I’m positive,” I said. “I thought of it at the time, and then I just plain forgot about it because there were too many far more important things to think about. Here was a man sentenced to death by a killer who’d built up a pretty impressive track record. He wanted me to help him figure out a way to stay alive. That had more of a claim on my attention than the presence or absence of booze on his breath.”

“Of course.”

“I smelled the scotch when he opened the bottle and poured the drink. And it struck me that I hadn’t smelled it on his breath when he let me into the apartment. We shook hands, our faces weren’t all that far apart. I’d have smelled it if it had been there to smell.”

“If the man hadn’t been drinking,” she wondered, “why would he say he had?”

“I have no idea.”

“I could understand if it was the other way around. People do that all the time, especially if they think the person they’re talking to might have a judgment on the subject. He knew you didn’t drink so he might assume you disapprove of others drinking. But you don’t, do you?”

“Only when they throw up on my shoes.”

“Maybe he wanted to impress you with the gravity of the situation. ‘I’m not much of a drinker, I never have more than one a day, but this creep with the poisoned pen has me so rattled I’ve had a few already and I’m about to have another.’”

“‘And then I’ll stop, because stress or not I’m no rummy.’ I thought of that.”

“And?”

“Why would he think he needed to do that? He just got a death threat from a guy with maximum credibility. Will’s been all over the front pages for weeks, and so far he’s batting a thousand. And here you’ve got Adrian Whitfield, a worldly man, certainly, and one professionally accustomed to the company of criminals, but all the same a far cry from a daredevil.”

“You wouldn’t mistake him for Evel Knievel.”

“You wouldn’t,” I said, “because when all is said and done he’s a lawyer in a three-piece suit, and the chances he takes tend not to be physical in nature. Of course he’s going to take a letter from Will seriously. He doesn’t have to prove it to me by pretending to have had drinks earlier.”

“You don’t suppose...”

“What?”

“Could he have been a closet teetotaler?”

“Huh?”

“You said he poured a drink in front of you. Are you sure he actually drank it?”

I thought about it. “Yes,” I said.

“You saw him drink it.”

“Not in a single swallow, but yes.”

“And it was whiskey?”

“It came out of a scotch bottle,” I said, “and I got a whiff of it when he poured it. It smelled like booze. In fact it smelled like a single-malt scotch, which is what it claimed to be on the label.”

“And you saw him drink it, and you smelled it on his breath.”

“Yes to the first part. Did I smell it on his breath afterward? I don’t remember one way or the other. I didn’t have occasion to notice.”

“You mean he didn’t kiss you goodnight?”

“Not on the first date,” I said.

“Well, shame on him,” she said. “I kissed you goodnight, on our first date. I can even remember what you had on your breath.”

“You can, huh?”

“Whiskey,” she said. “And moi”

“What a memory.”

“Well, it was memorable, you old bear. No, what I was getting at, I know there are people who drink but try to hide it. And I wondered if there might also be people who don’t drink, and try to hide that.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Why does anybody do anything?”

“I’ve often wondered.” I thought about it. “A lot of us maintain our anonymity to one degree or another. There’s a longstanding tradition against going public about being a member of AA, though lately that’s getting honored in the breach.”

“I know. All these Hollywood types go straight from Betty Ford to Barbara Walters.”

“They’re not supposed to do that,” I said, “but it’s your own business to what extent you stay anonymous in your private life. I don’t tell casual acquaintances unless I have a reason. And if I’m at a business meeting and the other fellow orders a drink, I’ll just order a Coke. I won’t issue an explanation.”

“And if he asks if you drink?”

“Sometimes I’ll say ‘Not today,’ something like that. Or, ‘It’s a little early for me,’ if I’m feeling particularly devious. But I can’t imagine pouring a drink and pretending to drink it, or keeping colored water in a scotch bottle.” I remembered something. “Anyway,” I said, “there were the liquor store records, the deliveries he’d had over the past months. They confirmed that he was just what he claimed to be, a guy who had one drink a day on the average.”

“He was ill,” she said. “Some kind of lymphatic cancer, wasn’t it?”

“It metastasized to the lymph system. I believe the original site was one of the adrenals.”

“Maybe he couldn’t drink as much as he used to. Because of the cancer.”

“I suppose that’s possible.”

“And he was in denial about his health, wasn’t he? Or at least he wasn’t telling people about it.”

“So?”

“So maybe that would lead him to pretend he was more of a drinker than he was.”

“But the first thing he did was tell me he wasn’t much of a drinker.”

“You’re right.” She frowned. “I give up. I don’t get it.”

“I don’t get it, either.”

“But you don’t give up, do you?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

Over dinner she said, “Was Glenn Holtzmann a drinker?”

“Not that I ever noticed. And where did that question come from?”

“Your dreams.”

“You know,” I said, “I’m having enough trouble making sense out of the thoughts I have while I’m awake. What was it Freud said about dreams?”

“‘Sometimes it’s only a cigar.’”

“Right. If there’s any connection between Glenn Holtzmann and the liquor Adrian Whitfield didn’t have on his breath, I’m afraid it’s too subtle for me.”

“I was just wondering.”

“Holtzmann was a phony,” I said. “He betrayed people and sold them out.”

“Was Adrian a phony?”

“Did he have some secret life besides practicing criminal law? It doesn’t seem very likely.”

“Maybe you sensed that he was hiding something about himself.”

“By pretending to be more of a drinker than he was. Or at least by pretending to have had more to drink on that one night than he had.”

“Right.”

“So my unconscious mind immediately made the leap from him to Glenn Holtzmann.”

“Why?”

“That was going to be my next question,” I said. “Why indeed?” I put down my fork. “Anyway,” I said, “I think I figured out what Glenn Holtzmann was trying to tell me.”

“In the dream, you mean.”

“Right, in the dream.”

“Well?”

“‘Too much money.’”

“That’s it?”

“What did we just say? Sometimes it’s only a cigar?”

“Too much money,” she said. “You mean like the line about a cocaine habit is God’s way of telling you you’ve got too much money?”

“I don’t think cocaine’s got anything to do with it. Glenn Holtzmann had too much money, that’s what made me dig deeper and find out about his secret life.”

“He had all that cash in the closet, didn’t he? How does that apply to Adrian Whitfield?”

“It doesn’t.”

“Then—”

“Sometimes it’s only a cigar,” I said.

I don’t remember any dreams that night, or even a sense of having dreamed. Elaine and I went home and finished what we’d started in her shop, and I slipped right off into a deep sleep and didn’t stir until dawn.

But there had been a thought nagging at me before we went to bed, and it was still there when I woke up. I took it out and examined it, and I decided it wasn’t something I had to devote my time to. I had a second cup of coffee after breakfast and considered the matter again, and this time I decided it wasn’t as though there were too many other matters with a greater claim on my time. I had, as they say, nothing better to do.

And the only reason not to pursue it was for fear of what I might find out.

I made haste slowly. I went to the library first to check my memory against what the Times had run, noting down dates and times in my notebook. I spent a couple of hours at that, and then I went outside and sat on a bench in Bryant Park and went over my notes. It was a perfect fall day, and the air had the tang of a crisp apple. They’d been forecasting rain, but you didn’t even have to look at the sky to know that it wasn’t going to rain that day. It felt in fact as though it would never rain, or turn any colder than it was now. The days wouldn’t get any shorter, either. It felt like eternal autumn, stretching out in front of us until the end of time.

Everybody’s favorite season, and you always think it’s going to last forever. And it never does.

Enough time had passed since Whitfield’s death for them to have taken the NYPD seals off the door. All I had to do was find someone with the authority to let me in. I don’t know precisely where that authority was vested — Whitfield’s heirs, the executor of his estate, or the coop’s board of directors. I’m sure it wasn’t the building superintendent’s decision to make, but he took it upon himself to make it, his resolution buttressed by the portrait of U.S. Grant I palmed him. He found a key and let me in and lingered at the door while I poked around in drawers and closets. After a while he coughed discreetly, and when I looked up he asked me how long I’d be. I told him that was hard to say.

“Because I’ll have to let you out,” he said, “and lock up after you, only I got a few things I have to be doing.”

He jotted down a phone number, and I agreed to call him. I felt a lot less pressed for time once he was out of there, and it’s better if you’re not in a hurry, especially when you don’t know what you’re looking for or where you’re likely to find it.

It was close to two hours later when I used the phone in the bedroom to call the number he’d left me. He said he’d be up in a minute, and while I waited for him I retraced the route from the phone, the one Whitfield had used to call me that last night, into the room where he’d died. There were no bottles on or in the bar — I guess they’d removed everything for lab tests — but the bar was there, and I stood where he’d have stood to make himself his last drink, then stepped over to where he was when he collapsed. There was nothing on the carpet to indicate where he had lain, no chalk outline, no yellow tape, no stains he’d left behind, but it seemed to me I knew just where he’d fallen.

When the super came I gave him an extra $20 along with an apology for having taken so long. The bonus surprised him, but only a little. It also seemed to reassure him that I hadn’t appropriated any property of Whitfield’s during his absence, although he still felt compelled to ask.

I hadn’t taken a thing, I told him. Not even snapshots.

I didn’t take anything from Whitfield’s office, either, nor did I find anyone to let me in. Whitfield had shared an office suite and secretarial and paralegal staff with several other attorneys in an old eight-story office building on Worth Street. I went to a noon meeting on Chambers Street the day after my visit to his apartment, then walked over to Worth and checked out his offices from the fifth-floor corridor. I weighed a few possible approaches and found them all unlikely to work on lawyers or legal secretaries, so I got out of there and walked clear up to Houston Street and saw a movie at the Angelika. When it broke I called Elaine and told her I’d get dinner on my own.

“TJ called,” she said. “He wants you to beep him.”

I would have if the phone I was using had a number on it. Most of them have had their numbers removed from the dials, and even if you manage to worm the number out of a cooperative operator, it won’t do you any good; NYNEX has rigged the bulk of their pay phones so that they can no longer receive incoming calls. This is all part of the never-ending war on drugs, and its twin effects, as far as I can tell, have been a momentary inconvenience for the dealers, all of whom promptly went out and bought cellular phones, and a slight but irreversible decline in the quality of life for everybody else in town.

I had a plate of jerked chicken and peas and rice at a West Indian lunch counter on Chambers Street and went back to Whitfield’s building on Worth. It was past five o’clock so I had to sign in with the guard downstairs. I scribbled something illegible on the sheet and rode up on the elevator. There were lights on in the law offices and a quick glance in passing showed me a man and two women seated at desks, two of them plugging away at computers, one talking on the phone.

I wasn’t surprised. Lawyers keep late hours. I walked the length of the corridor and tried the men’s room door. It was locked. The lock seemed unlikely to pose much of a challenge — it was designed, after all, to keep out the homeless, not to protect the crown jewels. On the other hand, if I was going to commit illegal entry I ought to be able to spend the next couple hours in a pleasanter spot than a lavatory.

At the opposite end of the hall I found the one-room office of one Leland N. Barish. His name was painted on the frosted glass, along with “CONSULTANT.” The lock looked to be the building’s original equipment, shaped to take a skeleton key. I’ve carried a couple on my key ring for years, although I’d be hard put to tell you the last time I had occasion to use one of them. I didn’t expect them to work now, but I tried the larger of the two and it turned the lock.

I let myself in. There was nothing to show who Barish was or who’d want to consult with him. The desk, its top uncluttered except for a couple of magazines, had a coating of dust that looked a good two weeks old. A stack of glassed-in bookshelves held only a few more magazines and eight or ten paperback science fiction novels. There was a wooden chair on casters that went with the desk, and an overstaffed armchair on which a cat had once sharpened its claws. The gray-beige walls showed rectangles and squares of a lighter shade, indicating where a previous tenant had displayed pictures or diplomas. Barish had neither repainted nor hung up anything of his own, not even a calendar.

I’d have gone through the desk drawers out of the idle curiosity that is an old cop’s stock in trade. But the desk was locked, and I left it that way, unable to think of a reason to break in.

I’d switched the light on when I entered, and I left it on. No one could make out more than a silhouette through the frosted glass, but even if they could I had little to worry about, because it was odds-on nobody in the building had seen enough of Barish to remember what he looked like.

My guess was that “consultant” was what it so often is, a euphemism for “unemployed.” Leland Barish had lost a job and took this little office while he looked for another one. By now either he’d found something or he’d given up looking.

Maybe he’d found employment that took him to Saudi Arabia or Singapore, and had left without bothering to clear out his office. Maybe he’d stopped paying rent months ago and his landlord hadn’t gotten around to evicting him.

Whatever the actual circumstances, I didn’t look to be running much of a risk cooping in his office for a couple of hours. I thought of TJ and decided to beep him, figuring it was perfectly safe for him to call me back, perfectly all right for Barish’s phone to ring. I lifted the receiver and couldn’t get a dial tone, which tended to confirm my guesses about Barish. I picked out the most recent magazine, a ten-week-old issue of The New Yorker, and settled myself in the easy chair. For a few minutes I tried to guess just what had become of Leland Barish, but then I got interested in an article about long-haul truckers and forgot all about him.

After an hour or so I noticed, a key hanging from a hook on the wall next to the light switch. I guessed that it would unlock the door to the men’s room, and it turned out I was right. I used the John, and checked Whitfield’s office going and coming. It was still occupied.

I checked again an hour later, and an hour after that. Then I dozed off, and when I opened my eyes it was twenty minutes to twelve. The lights were out in the law office. I walked on past it and used the lavatory again, and the lights were still out when I returned.

The lock was better than the one on Barish’s door, and I thought I might have to break the glass to get in. I was prepared to do that — I didn’t think anyone was around to hear it, or inclined to pay attention — but first I used my pocketknife to gouge the door jamb enough so that I could get a purchase on the bolt and snick it back. I put on the lights, figuring that a lighted office would look less suspicious to someone across the street than a darkened office with someone moving around inside it.

I found Whitfield’s office and got busy.

It was around one-thirty in the morning when I got out of there. I left the place looking as I’d found it, and wiped whatever surfaces I might have left prints on, more out of habit than because I thought anyone might dust the place for prints. I rubbed a little dirt into the gouges I’d made around the lock, so that the scar didn’t look too new, and I drew the door shut and heard the bolt snick behind me.

I was too tired to think straight, and actually considered holing up in Barish’s office and napping in his easy chair until dawn, all that in order to avoid having to sneak out past the guard. Instead I decided to bluff my way past him, and when I went downstairs the lobby was empty. A sign I’d missed on my way in announced that the building was locked from ten at night to six in the morning.

This didn’t mean I couldn’t get out, just that once out I couldn’t get back in again. That was fine with me. I got out of there and had to walk three blocks before I could hail a cruising cab. Stickers on the windows in the passenger compartment warned me against smoking. In front, the Pakistani driver puffed away at one of those foul little Italian cigars. Di Nobili, I think they’re called. Years and years ago I was partnered with a wise old cop named Vince Mahaffey, and he smoked the damn things day in and day out. I suppose they were no less appropriate for a Pakistani cabby than for an Irish cop, but I didn’t let myself be transported on wings of nostalgia. I just rolled down the windows and tried to find something to breathe.

Elaine was asleep when I got in. She stirred when I slipped into bed beside her. I gave her a kiss and told her to go back to sleep.

“TJ called again,” she said. “You didn’t beep him.”

“I know. What did he want?”

“He didn’t say.”

“I’ll call him in the morning. Go to sleep, sweetie.”

“You all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Find out anything?”

“I don’t know. Go to sleep.”

“‘Go to sleep, go to sleep.’ Is that all you can say?”

I tried to think of a response, but before I could come up with anything she had drifted off again. I closed my eyes and did the same.