Even the Wicked

7

“It’s like he saw it coming,” Kevin Dahlgren said. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his early thirties, his light brown hair cropped close to his broad skull, his light brown eyes alert behind his eyeglasses. He looked at once capable and thoughtful, as if he might be a studious thug.

“I was the last person to talk to him,” I said. “Except for yourself, of course.”

“Right.”

“He was tired, and I think that soured his outlook. But maybe he had a premonition, or just some sense that he’d reached the end of the line.”

“He offered me a drink. Not that I even considered taking it. On the job, and a bodyguard job at that? They’d drop me like a hot rock if I ever did anything like that, and they’d be right to do it. I wasn’t even tempted, but now I’m picturing what would have happened if I said yes. We clink glasses, we drink up, and boom! We hit the deck together. Or maybe I’d have been the first to take a drink, because he was sort of stalling. So I’d be dead and he’d be here talking to you.”

“But that’s not how it happened.”

“No.”

“When you met him and entered the apartment...”

“You want me to go over that? Sure thing. My shift started at ten P.M., and I reported to the Park Avenue residence, where I met up with Samuel Mettnick, who was sharing the ten-to-six shift with me. We stationed ourselves downstairs in the lobby. The two fellows on the previous shift brought Mr. Whitfield home in the limo and turned him over to us at ten-ten. Sam Mettnick and I rode upstairs with Mr. Whitfield, observing the usual security procedures as far as entering and exiting the elevator, and so forth.”

“Who opened the door of the apartment?”

“I did, and went in first. There was a whistle indicating the burglar alarm was set, so I went to the keypad and keyed in the response code. Then I checked all the rooms to make sure the place was empty. Then I returned to the front room and Sam went downstairs and I locked the door and made sure it was secure. Then Mr. Whitfield went off through his bedroom to use the bathroom, and I guess stopped in his bedroom and used the phone before returning to the front room. And you know the rest.”

“You’d been in the apartment before.”

“Yes, sir, for several nights running. From ten o’clock on.”

“And you didn’t notice anything out of place when you entered.”

“There were no signs of intrusion. Anything like that and I’d have grabbed Mr. Whitfield and got him the hell out of there. As for anything out of place, all I can say is everything looked normal to me, same as on previous nights. The thing is, I’d been relieved at six that morning, so my counterpart on the six A.M.-to-two P.M. shift would have been the last person in there. Whether anything had been moved around since he and Mr. Whitfield left to go to court, that’s something I couldn’t say.”

“But there was nothing about the appearance of the room that drew a comment from Whitfield.”

“You mean like, ‘What’s this bottle doing over here?’ No, nothing like that. Though to tell you the truth I’m not sure he would have noticed. You know the mood he was in.”

“Yes.”

“He seemed abstracted, if that’s the word I want. Sort of out of sync. Right before he took the drink—” He snapped his fingers. “I know what it reminded me of.”

“What’s that, Kevin?”

“It’s a scene in a movie I saw, but don’t ask me the name of it. This one character’s an alcoholic and he hasn’t had a drink in, I don’t know, months or years, anyway a long time. And he pours one and looks at it and drinks it.”

“And that’s how Whitfield looked at his drink.”

“Kind of.”

“But he had a glass of scotch every night, didn’t he?”

“I guess so. I wasn’t always there to see him have it. Some nights he was already home when my shift started, so I would just come up and relieve the man from the earlier shift. Other times he’d already had his drink before I got him. As far as being an alcoholic, I’d say he was anything but. I never saw him take more than one drink a night.”

“When I talked to him,” I said, “he said he was about to have his first drink of the day.”

“I think he said as much to me. I wasn’t with him earlier, but I can testify he didn’t have it on his breath.”

“Would you have noticed it if he had?”

“I think so, yes. I was standing right next to him in the elevator, and I’ve got a pretty good sense of smell. I can tell you he had Italian food for dinner. Plus I hadn’t had anything to drink all that day, and when you’re not drinking yourself it makes you much more aware of the smell of alcohol on somebody else.”

“That’s true.”

“It’s the same thing with cigarettes. I used to smoke, and all those years I never smelled smoke on anybody, me or anybody else. I quit four years ago, and now I can just about smell a heavy smoker from the opposite side of an airport. That’s stretching it, but you know what I mean.”

“Sure.”

“So I guess it was his first drink of the night. Jesus.”

“What, Kevin?”

“Well, it’s not funny, but I was just thinking. One thing for sure, it was his last.”

I didn’t have to take Kevin Dahlgren’s word about the acuity of his sense of smell. He’d proved it shortly after Adrian Whitfield collapsed. Dahlgren’s immediate assumption had been that he was in the presence of a man having a heart attack, and he reacted as he’d been trained to react and began performing CPR.

At the onset of the procedure, he had of course smelled alcohol on Whitfield. But there was another odor present as well, the odor of almonds, and while Dahlgren had never smelled this particular almondy scent before, he was sufficiently familiar with its description to guess what it was. He picked up Whitfield’s empty glass from where it had fallen and noted the same bitter almond scent. Accordingly, he discontinued CPR and called the Poison Control number, although his instincts told him there was nothing to be done. The woman he spoke to told him essentially the same thing; about the best thing she could suggest was that he try to get the victim breathing again, and his heart beating. He took a moment to call 911, then resumed CPR for lack of anything better to do. He was still at it when the cops got there.

That was shortly after eleven, and New York One was on the air with a news flash well before midnight, beating Channel Seven by a full five minutes. I didn’t have the set on, however, and Elaine and I went to bed around a quarter of one without knowing that a client of mine had died a couple of miles away from the ingestion of a lethal dose of cyanide.

Sometimes Elaine starts the day with “Good Morning America” or the “Today” show, but she’s just as likely to play classical music on the radio, and when I joined her in the kitchen the next morning she was listening to what we both thought was Mozart. It turned out to be Haydn, but by the time they said as much she had left for the gym. I turned off the radio — if I’d left it on I’d have heard a newscast at the top of the hour, and Whitfield’s death would have been the first or second item. I had a second cup of coffee and the half bagel she had left unfinished. Then I went out to get a paper.

The phone was ringing when I left the apartment, but I was already halfway out the door. I kept going and let the machine answer it. If I’d picked it up myself I’d have received word of Whitfield’s death from Wally Donn, but instead I walked to the newsstand, where twin stacks of the News and the Post rested side by side on adjacent upended plastic milk crates. “LAWYER WHITFIELD DEAD” cried the News, while the Post went right ahead and solved the crime for us. “WILL KILLS #5!”

I bought both papers and went home, played Wally’s message and called him back. “What a hell of a thing,” he said. “Personal security work’s the most clear-cut part of the business. All you have to do is keep the client alive. Long as he’s got a pulse, you did your job right. Matt, you know the procedures we set up for Whitfield. It was a good routine, and I had good men on it. And there’s cyanide in the fucking scotch bottle and we come off looking like shit.”

“It was cyanide? The account I read just said poison.”

“Cyanide. My guy knew it from the smell, called Poison Control right away. A shame he didn’t sniff the glass before Whitfield drank it.”

“A shame Whitfield didn’t sniff the glass.”

“No, he just knocked it right back, and then it knocked him on his ass. On his face, actually. He pitched forward. Dahlgren had to roll him over to start CPR.”

“Dahlgren’s your op?”

“I had two working. He’s the one was upstairs with Whitfield. Other guy was in the lobby. If I’d have put them both upstairs... but no, what are they gonna do, sit up all night playing gin rummy? The procedure was the correct one.”

“Except the client died.”

“Yeah, right. The operation was a success but the patient died. How do you figure poison in the whiskey? The apartment was secure. It was left empty that morning and the burglar alarm was set. My guy swears he set it, the one who picked Whitfield up yesterday morning, and I know he did because my other guy, Dahlgren, swears it was set when he opened up last night. So somebody got in there between whenever it was, eight or nine yesterday morning and ten last night. They got through two locks, a Medeco and a Segal, and bypassed a brand-new Poseidon alarm. How, for Christ’s sake?”

“The alarm was new?”

“I ordered it myself. The Medeco cylinder was new, too, on the top lock. I had it installed the day we came on the job.”

“Who had keys?”

“Whitfield himself, of course, not that he needed a key. Coming or going, he was never the first one to go through the door. Then there were two sets of keys, one for each of the men on duty. When they were relieved they passed on their keys to the next shift.”

“What about the building staff?”

“They had keys to the Segal, of course. But we didn’t give them a key to the new lock.”

“He must have had a cleaning woman.”

“Uh-huh. Same woman’s been coming in and cleaning for him every Tuesday afternoon for as long as he’s had the apartment. And no, she didn’t get a key to the Medeco, or the four-digit code for the burglar alarm, and not because I figured there was much chance of Will turning out to be a nice old Polish lady from Greenpoint. She didn’t get a key because nobody got one who didn’t need one. On Tuesday afternoons one of our men would meet her there, let her in, and stick around until she was done. He’s sitting there reading a magazine while she’s vacuuming and ironing and on her hands and knees scrubbing out the bathtub, and you know his hourly rate’s three or four times what she’s getting. Don’t you ever let anybody tell you life is fair.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said.

“Let me answer a question or two before you ask it, because the cops already asked and I already answered. The alarm’s not just on the door. The windows are also wired in. That was probably excessive, since there’s no fire escape, and do we really figure Will to be capable of doing a human fly act, coming down from the roof on a couple of knotted bedsheets?”

“Is that what flies do?”

“You know what I mean. I been up all night talking to cops and not talking to reporters, so don’t expect me to sound like Shakespeare. It doesn’t cost that much more to hook up the alarm to the windows, so why cut corners? That was my thinking. Besides, if this guy could get Patsy Salerno and Whatsisname in Omaha, who’s to say he can’t walk up a brick wall?”

“What about a service entrance?”

“You mean the building or the apartment? Of course there’s a service entrance for the building, and a separate service elevator. There’s also a service entrance for the apartment, and nobody went in or out of it from the time we got on the case. One of the first things I did was throw a bolt on it and keep it permanently shut, because as soon as you got two ways in and out of a place you’ve got the potential for headaches from a security standpoint. Sooner or later somebody forgets to lock the service door. So I had it all but welded shut, and that meant Mrs. Szernowicz had to take the long way around when she took the trash to the compactor chute, but she didn’t seem to mind.”

We talked some more about the security at the apartment, the locks and the alarm system, and then we got back to the cyanide. I said, “It was in the whiskey, Wally? Do we know that for sure?”

“He drank his drink,” he said, “and flopped on the floor, so what could it be but the drink? Unless somebody picked that particular minute to plink him with a pellet gun.”

“No, but—”

“If he was drinking tequila,” he said, “and he was one of those guys goes through the ritual with the salt and the lemon, takes a lick of each after he does the shot of tequila, then I could see how we could check and see if the lemon’s poisoned, or maybe the salt. But nobody drinks tequila that way anymore, at least nobody I know, and anyway he was drinking scotch, so where the hell else would the poison be but in the whiskey?”

“I was at his place once,” I said. “The night he got the letter from Will.”

“And?”

“And he had a drink,” I said, “and he used a glass, and if I remember correctly he had ice in it.”

“Aw, Jesus,” he said. “I’m sorry, Matt. I was up all night, and it’s shaping up to be a bitch of a day. Could it have been in the glass or the ice cubes? I don’t know, maybe. I’m sure they’re running an analysis of the booze in the bottle, if they haven’t done it already. Dahlgren smelled cyanide on the guy’s breath, and I think he said he smelled it in the glass, or maybe on the ice cubes. Did he smell what was left in the bottle? I don’t think so. It was on top of the bar and he was on the floor with Whitfield, trying to get him to start breathing again. Neat fucking trick, that would have been.”

“Poor bastard.”

“Which one, Whitfield or Dahlgren? Both of them, I’d have to say. You know, I was concerned about food in restaurants. You remember that case where there was poison in the salt?”

“I must have missed that one.”

“It wasn’t local. Miami, I think it was. Mobbed-up businessman, he’s having dinner at his favorite restaurant, next thing you know he’s facedown in his veal piccata. Looks like a heart attack, and if it happened to Joe Blow it would have gone as that, but this guy’s the target of an investigation so of course they check, and they establish that cyanide killed him and find cyanide on the food that’s left on his plate, and there’s a surveillance tape, because this is the restaurant he always goes to and the table he always sits at, the dumb bastard, and the feds or the local cops, whoever it was, were set up to tape it. And the tape shows this guy come over to the table and switch salt shakers, but you can’t be absolutely certain that’s what he’s doing, and anyway they didn’t find any cyanide in the salt shaker, because evidently somebody switched them again afterward. So they couldn’t get a conviction, but at least they knew who did it and how it was done.” He sighed. “Whitfield never sat down to a meal without one or two of my guys at the table with him, primed to make sure nobody switched salt shakers. It’s like generals, isn’t it? Always preparing for the last war. Meantime, somebody got in his house and poisoned his whiskey.”

We were on the phone for quite a while. He anticipated most of my questions, but I thought of a few others as well, and he answered them all. If there was a weak link in the security, he’d set up for Adrian Whitfield, I couldn’t spot it. Short of posting a man full-time in the apartment itself, I didn’t see how it could have been rendered more completely secure.

And yet someone had managed to get enough cyanide into Whitfield’s drink to kill him.

It was late afternoon by the time I got to talk with Kevin Dahlgren, and by then I’d been interrogated myself by two detectives from Major Cases. They’d spent close to two hours learning everything I could tell them about my involvement with Adrian Whitfield, from the cases I’d worked on for him to the contact I’d had with him since he was the target of Will’s open letter.

They found out everything I knew, which wasn’t much. It was more than I learned from them. I didn’t ask many questions, and the few I asked went largely unanswered. I did manage to learn that cyanide had been found in the residue of scotch left in the bottle, but I’d have learned that shortly thereafter anyway by turning on the television set.

I was worn out from my session with the two of them, and what I went through was nothing compared with what Dahlgren had to undergo. He’d been up all night, of course, and had spent most of the time either answering questions or waiting for them to get around to interrogating him some more. He managed to get a couple of hours sleep before I saw him, and he seemed alert enough, but you could tell he was pretty well stressed-out.

He was a suspect, of course, along with the several other men who’d had access to Whitfield’s apartment in their capacity as bodyguards. Each of them was subjected to an intensive background check and interrogated exhaustively, and each voluntarily underwent a polygraph examination as well. (It was voluntary as far as the police were concerned. It was compulsory if they wished to remain employees of Reliable.)

Mrs. Sophia Szernowicz, Whitfield’s cleaning woman, was interrogated as well, though not subjected to a polygraph test. They talked to her more to rule out the possibility of anyone else having visited the apartment while she was cleaning it than because anyone thought she might be Will. She’d been there on Tuesday afternoon, and he’d swallowed the poisoned scotch Thursday night. No one could testify with absolute certainty that Whitfield had poured a drink from that bottle on either Tuesday or Wednesday evening, so the possibility existed that the cyanide could have gone into the bottle during her visit.

She told them she’d seen no one in the apartment while she cleaned it, no one except for the man who’d let her in and out, and who’d sat watching talk shows on television all the time she was there. She could not recall seeing him anywhere near where the bottles of liquor were kept, although she couldn’t say what he’d done when she was in one of the other rooms. For her part, she had been at the bar, and might even have touched the bottle while dusting it and its fellows. Had she by any chance sampled it, or any of the other bottles, while she was dusting? The very suggestion outraged her, and they’d been a while calming her down to the point where they could resume questioning her.

The only fingerprints on the bottle were Whitfield’s. All that suggested was that the killer had wiped the bottle off after adding the cyanide, and one could hardly have assumed otherwise. It also implied that no one but Whitfield had touched the bottle after its contents were poisoned, but, as far as anyone knew, no one but Whitfield had laid a hand on that particular bottle since it had come into the house.

It had been delivered two weeks before Will mailed his threat against Whitfield to Marty McGraw. A liquor store on Lexington Avenue had delivered the order, consisting in all of two fifths of Glen Farquhar single-malt scotch, one quart of Finlandia vodka, and a pint of Ronrico rum. The rum and vodka remained unopened, and Whitfield had worked his way through one bottle of the scotch and was a third of the way into the second bottle when he drank the drink that killed him.

“You don’t drink,” he’d said to me. “Neither do I.” He’d been enough of a drinker to order two bottles of his regular tipple at a time, but a light enough hitter that it had taken him over a month to drink as much as he had. A fifth holds twenty-six ounces, or something like eighteen drinks if you figure he poured approximately an ounce and a half of scotch over his two ice cubes. Eighteen drinks from the bottle he’d finished, another six or so from bottle #2 — I decided the math worked out right. There were nights when he had his drink before he came home, and other nights when he evidently didn’t drink at all.

That night Elaine and I walked over to Armstrong’s for dinner. She had a big salad. I had a bowl of chili and stirred a large side order of minced Scotch bonnet peppers into it. It must have been hot enough to blister paint, but you couldn’t have proved it by me. I was barely aware of what I was eating.

She talked some about her day at her shop, and about what TJ had said when he dropped by to jive with her. I talked about my day. And then we both fell silent. Classical music played over the sound system, barely audible through the buzz of conversations around us. Our waiter came around to find out if we wanted more Perrier. I said we didn’t, but he could bring me a cup of black coffee when he had a moment. Elaine said she’d have herb tea. “Any kind,” she said. “Surprise me.”

He brought her Red Zinger. “What a surprise,” she said.

I tried my coffee, and something must have shown in my face, because Elaine’s eyebrows went up a notch.

“For an instant there,” I said, “I could taste booze in the coffee.”

“But it’s not really there.”

“No. Good coffee, but only coffee.”

“What they call a sense-memory, I guess.”

“I guess.”

You could say I came by it honestly. Years ago, before Jimmy lost his lease and relocated a long block to the west, Armstrong’s had been situated on Ninth Avenue around the corner from my hotel, and it had functioned for me almost as an extension of my personal living space. I socialized there, I isolated there, I met clients there. I put in long hours of maintenance drinking there, and sometimes I did more than maintain and got good and drunk at the bar or at my table in the back. My usual drink was bourbon, and when I didn’t drink it neat, the way God made it, I would stir it into a mug of coffee. Each flavor, it seemed to me then, complemented and enhanced the other, even as the caffeine and alcohol balanced one another, the one keeping you awake while the other softened the edges of consciousness.

I have known people who, when quitting smoking, have had to give up coffee temporarily because they so strongly associate the two. I had problems of my own getting sober, but coffee was not one of them, and I have been able to go on drinking it with pleasure, and apparently with impunity, at an age when most of my contemporaries have found it advisable to switch to decaf. I like the stuff, especially when it’s good, the way Elaine makes it at home (although she hardly ever has a cup herself) or the way they brew it in the Seattle-style coffee bars that have sprouted up all over town. The coffee’s always been good at Armstrong’s, rich and full-bodied and aromatic, and I took a sip now, savoring it, and wondered why I’d tasted bourbon.

“There was nothing you could have done,” Elaine said. “Was there?”

“No.”

“You told him he ought to leave the country.”

“I could have pushed a little harder,” I said, “but I don’t think he would have done anything differently, and I can’t blame him for that. He had a life to live. He took all the precautions a man could be expected to take.”

“Reliable did a good job for him?”

“Even in hindsight,” I said, “I can’t point to a thing they did wrong. I suppose they could have posted men around the clock in his apartment, whether or not there was anybody in it, but even after the fact I can’t argue that that’s what they should have done. And as far as my own part in all this is concerned, no, I can’t see anything I left undone that might have made a difference. It would have been nice if I’d had some brilliant insight that told me who Will was, but that didn’t happen, and that gives me something in common with eight million other New Yorkers, including however many cops they’ve got assigned to the case.”

“But something’s bothering you.”

“Will’s out there,” I said. “Doing what he does, and getting away with it. I guess that bothers me, especially now that he’s struck down a man I knew. A friend, I was going to say, and that would have been inaccurate, but I had the sense the last time I spoke with him that Adrian Whitfield might have become a friend. If he’d lived long enough.”

“What are you going to do?”

I drank the rest of my coffee, caught the waiter’s eye and pointed to my empty cup. While he filled it I thought about the question she’d asked. I said, “The funeral’s private, just for the family. There’d be a crowd otherwise, with all the headlines he’s getting. I understand there’ll be a public memorial service sometime next month, and I’ll probably go to that.”

“And?”

“And maybe I’ll light a candle,” I said.

“It couldn’t hoit,” she said, giving the phrase an exaggerated Brooklyn pronunciation. It was the punch line to an old joke, and I guess I smiled, and she smiled back across the table at me.

“Does the money bother you?”

“The money?”

“Didn’t he write you a check?”

“For two thousand dollars,” I said.

“And don’t you get a referral fee from Reliable?”

“Dead clients don’t pay.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“A basic principle of the personal-security industry,” I said. “Someone used it for the title of a book on the subject. Wally took a small retainer, but it won’t begin to cover what he has to pay in hourly rates to the men he’s had guarding Whitfield. He’s legally entitled to bill the estate, but he already told me he’s going to eat it. Since he’ll wind up with a net loss, I won’t be picking up a referral fee.”

“And you’re just as glad, aren’t you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. If he’d made money on the deal I’d have been comfortable taking a share of it. And if the two grand Whitfield paid me starts bothering me I can always give it away.”

“Or try to earn it.”

“By chasing Will,” I said, “or by hunting for the man who shot Byron Leopold.”

“On Horatio Street.”

I nodded. “Whitfield suggested there might be a link, that maybe Will killed Byron at random, more or less for practice.”

“Is that possible?”

“I suppose it’s possible. It’s also possible Byron was gunned down by an extraterrestrial, and every bit as likely. It was his way of telling me to keep his money and investigate whatever the hell I wanted to investigate. It made as much sense for me to be working one case as the other. Either way I wasn’t going to accomplish anything, was I?”

“That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what’s making you taste alcohol that isn’t there. That you can’t accomplish anything.”

I thought about it. I sipped some coffee, put the cup in the saucer. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s it.”

Outside, I took her hand as we waited for the light to change. I glanced at the building diagonally across the street, and my eyes automatically sought out a window on the twenty-ninth floor. Noticing my glance, or perhaps just reading my mind, Elaine said, “You know what that shooting in the Village reminds me of? Glenn Holtzmann.”

He’d lived in that twenty-ninth-floor apartment. His widow, Lisa, had gone on living there after his death. She hired me, and after I was through working for her I continued to return occasionally to her apartment, and to her bed.

When Elaine and I were married we went to Europe for a honeymoon. We were in Paris, lying together in our hotel room, when she told me that nothing had to change. We could go on being ourselves and living our lives. The rings on our fingers didn’t change anything.

She said this in a way that made the unspoken subtext unmistakable. I know there’s someone else, she’d been saying, and I don’t care.

“Glenn Holtzmann,” I said. “Killed by accident.”

“Unless Freud’s right and there’s no such thing as an accident.”

“I thought about Holtzmann when I was poking around the edges of Byron’s life. The idea of someone killed by mistake.”

“It’s bad enough being killed for a reason.”

“Uh-huh. Somebody heard the shooter call Byron by name.”

“Then he knew who he was.”

“If the witness got it right.”

We walked the rest of the way home, not saying much. Upstairs in our apartment I put a hand on her shoulder and turned her toward me, and we were in each other’s arms. We kissed, and I put a hand on her hindquarters and drew her against me.

Nothing has to change, she’d told me in Paris, but of course things change over time. We have been many things to each other over many years, Elaine and I. When we met I was a married cop and she was a sweet young call girl. We were together, and then we were apart for years, until the past drew us together again. After a while she quit hooking. After a while we found an apartment together. After a while we got married.

Passion, after all those years, was different from what it had been when I’d made those first visits to her Turtle Bay apartment. Then our desire for each other had been fierce and urgent and undeniable. Now it had been tempered by time and custom. The love, present from the beginning, had grown infinitely broader and deeper with time; the delight we had always taken in each other’s company pany was keener than ever. And our passion, if it had grown less furious, was richer as well.

We kissed again, and her breath caught in her throat. We moved to the bedroom, shed our clothes.

“I love you,” I said. Or maybe she said it. After a while you lose track.

“You know,” she said, “if we keep on like this, I can see where we might acquire a certain degree of proficiency.”

“Never happen.”

“You’re my bear and I love you. And you’re about to drop off to sleep, aren’t you? Unless I keep you awake by glowing in the dark. I almost could, the way I feel. Why does sex wake women up and put men to sleep? Is it just bad planning on God’s part or does it somehow contribute to the survival of the species?”

I was turning the question over and over in my mind, trying to form an answer, when I felt her breath on my cheek and her lips brushing mine.

“Sleep tight,” she said.