Even the Wicked

3

“I’ll tell you,” he said, “I just don’t know what to make of it. One minute I’m laughing over the latest Will joke. Next thing you know I find out that I’m the latest Will joke, and you want to know something? All of a sudden it’s not so funny.”

We were in his apartment on the twenty-first floor of a prewar apartment building on Park Avenue and Eighty-fourth Street. He was a tall man, around six two, lean and trim, with patrician good looks. His dark hair had gone mostly gray, and that just enhanced the commanding presence that stood him in good stead in a courtroom. He was still wearing a suit but he’d taken off his tie and opened his collar.

He was at the serving bar now, using tongs to fill a tall glass with ice cubes. He added club soda and set it down, then dropped a couple of ice cubes in a shorter glass and filled it with a single-malt scotch. I got a whiff of it as he was pouring it, strong and smoky, like wet tweed drying alongside an open wood fire.

He gave me the tall glass and kept the short one for himself. “You don’t drink,” he said. “Neither do I.” My face must have shown something. “Ha!” he said, and looked at the glass in his hand. “What I mean to say,” he said, “is that I don’t drink like I used to. I drank a lot more when I was living in Connecticut, but I think that’s because everybody in that crowd used to hit it pretty good. One small scotch before dinner is generally as much as I have these days. Tonight’s an exception.”

“I can see where it would be.”

“When I left the office,” he said, “after I got rid of those cops, I stopped at the bar down the block and had a quick one before I went and hailed a cab. I can’t remember the last time I did that. I never even tasted it. I threw it down and walked right on out again. And I had another when I walked in the door, I went over and poured it without thinking about it.” He looked at the glass he was holding. “And then I called you,” he said.

“And here I am.”

“And here you are, and this will be my last drink of the night, and I’m not even sure I’ll finish it. ‘An Open Letter to Adrian Whitfield.’ You want to know the most distressing thing about it?”

“The company you’re in.”

“That’s it exactly. Now how the hell did you know I was going to say that? That’s the clarity of club soda talking.”

“It must be.”

“Vollmer and Salerno and Berry and Rashid. A child-killer, a mobster, an abortion-clinic bomber, and a black racist. I graduated from Williams College and Harvard Law School. I’m a member of the bar and an officer of the court. Will you please tell me how I can possibly belong on the same list with those four pariahs?”

“The thing is,” I said, “Will gets to decide who’s on his list. He doesn’t have to be logical about it.”

“You’re right,” he said. He went over to a chair and sank into it, held his glass to the light, then set it down untasted. “You said something earlier about leaving the country. You were exaggerating to make a point, right? Or were you serious?”

“I was serious.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

“If I were you,” I said, “I’d get the hell out of the country, and I wouldn’t wait, either. You have a passport, don’t you? Where do you keep it?”

“In my sock drawer.”

“Put it in your pocket,” I said, “and pack a change of clothes and whatever else will fit into a bag you can carry onto the plane. Take whatever cash you’ve got around the house, but don’t worry if that’s not very much. You’re not a fugitive, so you’ll be able to cash checks and use credit cards wherever you wind up. You can even get cash. They’ve got ATMs all over the world.”

“Where am I going?”

“That’s up to you, and don’t tell me. Some European capital would be my suggestion. Go to a first-class hotel and tell the manager you want to register under another name.”

“And then what? Lock myself in my room?”

“I don’t think you’d have to do that. He followed Roswell Berry to Omaha, but he didn’t have to do any detective work. Berry was right there on the evening news every night, throwing cow’s blood on doctors and nurses. And you don’t need a passport to go to Nebraska, either. My guess is if you leave the country and don’t make it too obvious where you’ve gone, he’ll find it a lot simpler to dash off an open letter to somebody else than to knock himself out tracking you down. And he can always tell himself he won the game by scaring you out of the country.”

“And he’d be quite right about that, wouldn’t he?”

“But you’ll be alive.”

“And a little tarnished around the image, wouldn’t you say? The fearless defense attorney who skipped the country, rousted by an anonymous letter. I’ve had death threats before, you know.”

“I’m sure you have.”

“The Ellsworth case brought a whole slew of them. ‘You son of a bitch, if he walks you’re dead.’ Well, Jeremy didn’t walk, so we’ll never know.”

“What did you do with the letters?”

“What I’ve always done with them. Turned ’em over to the police. Not that I expected a lot of sympathy from that quarter. There weren’t a lot of cops pulling for me to get Jeremy Ellsworth acquitted. Still, that wouldn’t keep them from doing their jobs. They investigated, but I doubt they pushed it too hard.”

“They’d have dug a lot deeper,” I said, “if you’d gotten killed.”

He gave me a look. “I’m not leaving town,” he said. “That’s out of the question.”

“It’s your call.”

“Matt, death threats are a dime a dozen. Every criminal lawyer in this town’s got a desk drawer full of them. Look at Ray Gruliow, for God’s sake. How many death threats do you suppose he’s received over the years?”

“Quite a few.”

“He got a shotgun blast through his front windows on Commerce Street one time, if I remember correctly. He said the shooters were cops.”

“He couldn’t know that for sure,” I said, “but it was a logical guess. What’s your point?”

“That I’ve got a life to live and I can’t let something like this make me run like a rabbit. You’ve had death threats yourself, haven’t you? I’ll bet you have.”

“Not that many,” I said. “But then I haven’t had my name in the papers all that much.”

“But you’ve had some.”

“Yes.”

“Did you pack a bag and hop a plane?”

I took a sip of club soda, remembering. “A couple of years ago,” I said, “a man I’d sent to prison got out determined to kill me. He was going to start out by killing the women in my life. There weren’t any women in my life, not at the time, but his definition turned out to be broader than mine.”

“What did you do?”

“I called an ex-girlfriend,” I said, “and I told her to pack a bag and leave the country. And she packed a bag and left the country.”

“And lived to tell the tale. But what did you do?”

“Me?”

“You. My guess is you stayed around.”

“And went after him,” I said. “But that was different. I knew who he was. I had a fair shot at getting him before he got me.” I frowned at the memory. “Even so, I came awfully close to getting myself killed. Elaine came even closer. She got stabbed, she had her spleen removed. She almost died.”

“Didn’t you say she left the country?”

“That was another woman, a former girlfriend. Elaine’s my wife.”

“I thought you didn’t have any women in your life at the time.”

“We weren’t married then. We’d known each other years previously. Motley brought us together again.”

“Motley was the guy who wanted to kill you.”

“Right.”

“And after she recovered — Elaine?”

“Elaine.”

“After she recovered you resumed seeing each other, and now you’re married. A good marriage?”

“A very good marriage.”

“My God,” he said. “Maybe if I stick around and see this thing through I’ll wind up back in Connecticut with Barbara. But it’s hard to imagine her without her spleen. It’s the key element of her character.” He took a drink. “In the meantime, my friend, I’ve got a law practice to run and a case to try. Tempting as it may be to fly off for a couple of weeks in Oslo or Brussels, I think I’ll stick around and face the music. But that doesn’t mean I want to get killed, nor do I think it makes much sense to leave the task of protecting me to the NYPD. I’m safe here—”

“Here?”

“In this apartment. The building has good security.”

“I don’t think Will would have much trouble getting in here.”

“Didn’t the guy on the desk make you show ID? I told him to.”

“I flashed a card at him,” I said. “I didn’t give him time to look at it, and he didn’t insist.”

“I’ll have to speak to him about that.”

“Don’t bother. You can’t expect very much from the building personnel. The elevator’s self-service. All anybody has to do is take out the doorman and he’s in.”

“Take him out? You mean kill him?”

“Or just slip past him, which wouldn’t be on the same level with getting into Fort Knox. If you want a good shot at getting through this alive, and if you won’t leave town, you need bodyguards around the clock. That means three shifts a day, and I’d recommend you employ two men per shift.”

“Would you be one of those men?”

I shook my head. “I don’t like the work and I don’t have the reflexes for it.”

“Can you supply bodyguards?”

“Not directly. I’m a one-man operation. There are people I can call for backup, but not as many as you’d need. What I can do is recommend a couple of agencies who can be counted on to furnish reliable operatives.”

I took out my notebook, wrote down the names of two firms, along with a phone number for each and a person to ask for. I tore out the page and handed it to Whitfield. He read it, folded it, and tucked it in his breast pocket.

“No point in calling now,” he said. “I’ll call first thing in the morning. If Will lets me live that long.”

“You’ve probably got a few days. He’ll wait until the story runs, and until you’ve had time to worry about it.”

“He’s a real prick, isn’t he?”

“Well, I don’t suppose he’s on the short list for the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.”

“Not this year, but then he’s got a lot of competition. Ah, Jesus, you think your life’s in order and then something like this comes at you from out of nowhere. Do you worry a lot?”

“Do I worry a lot? I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“It seems to me that I do. I worry about a stroke or a heart attack, I worry about prostate cancer. Sometimes I worry about having some bad gene that’ll have me coming down with one of those rare diseases. I can’t think of the word I want and I start to worry about early-onset Alzheimer’s. You know something? It’s a big fucking waste of time.”

“Worrying?”

“You said it. You never worry about the right thing. I never worried about this son of a bitch, I’ll tell you that, and now he’s got me on his list. Tell me what else I can do. Besides hiring guards. You must have a few ideas on the kind of routine I should follow, the precautions I ought to take.”

By the time I was done suggesting ways he could increase the odds of his staying alive, he’d made a pot of coffee and we were each working on our second cup. He talked about a current case of his, and I talked about a piece of work I’d wrapped up a month previously.

“I want you to know I appreciate all this,” he said. “I’d tell you to send me a bill, but a man on Will’s list ought to keep his accounts current. What do I owe you? I’ll write you a check.”

“There’s no charge.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “I dragged you out of your house in the middle of the night and got two solid hours’ worth of your professional expertise. Go ahead and put a price on it.”

“I have a vested interest in your survival,” I told him. “If you stay alive, there’s a chance you’ll throw some work my way.”

“I’d say you can count on it, but you still ought to get paid for tonight.” He patted the pocket where he’d put the slip I gave him. “Will you get a referral fee from these guys?”

“It depends which one you call.”

“Only one of them’ll pay you for a referral?”

“I do a certain amount of per diem work for Reliable,” I said, “and Wally Donn pays me a commission on anything else I happen to steer their way.”

“Then why’d you put down the other agency as well?”

“Because they’re good.”

“Well, I’ll use Reliable,” he said. “That goes without saying. And I’d still like to pay you for your time tonight.”

“There’s no need.”

“In that case, I’ve got a better idea. I’d like to hire you.”

“To do what?”

“To go after Will.”

I told him all the reasons why it didn’t make sense. Half the police force was already assigned to the case, and the cops had access to the available data and evidence along with the scientific apparatus to learn something from it. On top of that, they had the manpower to knock on every door and run down every lead and phone tip that came their way. All I could do was get in their way.

“I know all that,” he said.

“So?”

“So I still want to hire you.”

“Why? As a way of paying me for this evening?”

He shook his head. “I want you on the case.”

“What for?”

“Because I think there’s a chance you’ll make a difference. The first time I hired you, you know, was on Ray Gruliow’s recommendation.”

“Yes, I know.”

“He said you had a good mind and caught on fast. ‘Give him the first sentence and he’s got the whole page,’ that’s what he said.”

“He was being generous,” I said. “Sometimes I move my lips.”

“I don’t think so. He also said good things about your character and personal integrity. And he said something else, too. He said you were dogged.”

“It’s a nicer word than pigheaded.”

He rolled his eyes. “You’re a hard man to compliment, aren’t you? Matt, offense is the best defense. That’s true in the courtroom and it’s true on the street. I don’t know what the hell you can do that the cops can’t, but the one thing I don’t have to worry about these days is money, and if I can throw a little of it your way I can tell myself I’m doing something to see that Will gets nailed before he nails me. Now why don’t you just say you’ll take the case so I can write you out a check?”

“I’ll take the case.”

“See? You’re stubborn, which may be part of the job description for what you do. But I’m persuasive, which is very definitely part of my job description.” He went over to the desk, got out his checkbook and wrote me a check, tore it out and handed it to me.

“A retainer,” he said. “Good enough?”

The amount was two thousand dollars. “That’s fine,” I said.

“You have anything else you’re working?”

“Not at the moment,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’ll start doing it in the morning.”

“And I’ll call Donn at Reliable and see about getting my body guarded. What a thing to have to do. Can I tell you something? Don’t repeat this, but until this afternoon I sort of liked Will.”

“You did?”

“Let’s say I had a grudging admiration for him. He was a kind of urban folk hero, wasn’t he? Almost like Batman.”

“Batman never killed anybody.”

“Not in the comic books. He does in the movies, but Hollywood’ll fuck up anything, won’t they? No, the real Batman never killed anybody. Listen to me, will you? ‘The real Batman.’ But when you grew up on the comic book that’s how it seems.”

“I know.”

“For Christ’s sake,” he said, “I’m Adrian Whitfield, I’m a fucking lawyer. That’s all I am. I’m not the Joker, I’m not the Penguin, I’m not the Riddler. What’s Batman got against me?”