Even the Wicked

9

“An Open Letter to the People of New York.”

That’s how Will headed it. He had addressed and mailed it, like all the others, to Marty McGraw at the Daily News, and they were the ones with the story. They gave it the front-page headline and led with it, under McGraw’s byline. His column, “Since You Asked...” ran as a sidebar, and the full text of Will’s letter appeared on the page opposite. It was a long letter for Will, running to just under eight hundred words, which made it just about the same length as McGraw’s column.

He started out by claiming credit (or assuming responsibility) for the murder of Adrian Whitfield. His tone was boastful; he talked at first about the elaborate security set up to protect Whitfield, the burglar alarm, the three shifts of bodyguards, the armor-plated limousine with the bulletproof glass. “But no man can prevail against the Will of the People,” he proclaimed. “No man can run from it. No man can hide from it. Consider Roswell Berry, who fled to Omaha. Consider Julian Rashid, behind his fortified walls in St. Albans. The Will of the People can reach across vast space, it can slip through the stoutest defenses. No man can resist it.”

Whitfield, Will went on, was by no means the worst lawyer in the world. It had simply been his lot to serve as representative of an ineradicable evil in the legal profession, an apparent willingness to do anything, however abhorrent and immoral, in the service of a client. “We nod in approval when an attorney defends the indefensible, and even tolerate behavior in a client’s interest which would earn the lawyer a horsewhipping were he so to act on his own behalf.”

Then Will launched into an evaluation of the legal system, questioning the value of the jury system. There was nothing startlingly original about any of the points he raised, though he argued them reasonably enough so that you found yourself ready to forget you were reading the words of a serial murderer.

He ended on a personal note. “I find I’m tired of killing. I am grateful to have been the instrument selected to perform these several acts of social surgery. But there is a heavy toll taken on him who is called upon to do evil in the service of a greater good. I’ll rest now, until the day comes when I’m once again called to act.”

I had a question, and I made half a dozen phone calls trying to get an answer. Eventually I got around to calling the News. I gave my name to the woman who answered and said I’d like to talk to Marty McGraw. She took my number, and within ten minutes the phone rang.

“Marty McGraw,” he said. “Matthew Scudder, you’re the detective Whitfield hired, right? I think we might have met once.”

“Years ago.”

“Most of my life is years ago. What have you got for me?”

“A question. Did the letter run verbatim?”

“Absolutely. Why?”

“No cuts at all? Nothing held back at the cops’ request?”

“Now how could I tell you that?” He sounded aggrieved. “For all I know, you could be Will yourself.”

“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “On the other hand, if I were Will, I’d probably know whether or not you cut my copy.”

“Jesus,” he said, “I’d hate to be the one to do something like that. I know how I get when that mutt at the big desk cuts my copy, and I’m not a homicidal maniac.”

“Well, neither am I. Look, here’s what I’m getting at. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing in the letter to disprove the suicide theory.”

“There’s Will’s word on the subject. He says he did it.”

“And he’s never lied to us in the past.”

“As far as I know,” he said, “he hasn’t. With Roswell Berry in Omaha he refused to confirm or deny, but he was being cute.”

“He mentioned that Berry’d been stabbed, if I remember correctly.”

“That’s right, and that was information the police had held back, so that certainly suggested he’d had a hand in it.”

“Well, is there anything like that in the latest letter? Because I couldn’t spot it. That’s why I wondered if anything had been cut.”

“No, we ran it verbatim. I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d hate to be the one to cut his copy. I’m already getting more attention than I want from the guy.”

“I can see where it must have cost you a lot of readers.”

His laugh was like a terrier’s bark. “In that respect,” he admitted, “it s a fucking godsend. My only regret is he didn’t get this rolling before my recent contract negotiations. Same time, a person gets nervous being Will’s window on the world. I have to figure he’s reading me three times a week. Suppose he doesn’t like what I write? Last thing I want to do is piss off an original thinker like him.”

“An original thinker?”

“Case in point. While I’m saying the sentence, the phrase I’ve got in mind is ‘nut job.’ And the thought strikes me that maybe he’s got my phone tapped and he’ll resent me for casting aspersions on his state of mind. So I do a spot edit in midsentence, strike out ‘nut job’ and pencil in ‘original thinker.’

“The journalistic mind at work.”

“But on second thought I don’t really believe he has my phone tapped, and what does he care what I call him? Names will never hurt him. I’m not sure sticks and stones will, either. What makes you think he’s lying about getting Whitfield?”

“The amount of time it took him to write. It’s been a full week since Whitfield died.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “That’s what proves it.”

“Proves what? That he did it? Because I don’t see how.”

“We just got this,” he said, “or it would have run along with the rest of the story. So I don’t want to say anything over the phone because we’d like to be first with it tomorrow. You right here in the city? You know where the News is, don’t you?”

“Thirty-third between Ninth and Tenth. But if you hadn’t asked I might have gone to the old place on East Forty-second. That’s still the first thing that comes to mind when I think of the News.”

“What’s the zip code?”

“The zip code? You want me to write to you?”

“No, not particularly. Look, you haven’t got anything against tits, have you? There’s a joint called Bunny’s Topless on Ninth and Thirty-second that’s quieter than a sulky Trappist this time of day. Why don’t you meet me there in half an hour?”

“All right.”

“You won’t have any trouble recognizing me,” he said. “I’ll be the guy with a shirt on.”

I don’t know what Bunny’s Topless is like at night. It would almost have to be livelier, with more young women displaying their breasts and more men staring at them. And it’s probably sad at any hour, deeply sad in the manner of most emporia that cater to our less-noble instincts. Gambling casinos are sad in that way, and the glitzier they are the more palpable is their sadness. The air has an ozone-tainted reek of base dreams and broken promises.

Early in the day, the place made no sense at all. It was a cave of a room, the door and windows painted matte black, the room within not so much decorated as thrown together, its furnishing a mix of what the previous owner had left and what had come cheap at auction. Two men occupied stools at either end of the bar, dividing their attention between the TV set (CNN with the sound off) and the bartender, whose breasts (medium size, with a slight droop) looked a good deal more authentic than her bright red hair.

There was a little stage, and they probably had dancers at night, but the stage was empty now and a Golden Oldies station on the radio provided the music. A waitress, clad like the bartender in cottontailed hot pants and rabbit ears and high heels and nothing else, worked the booths and tables. Maybe things would pick up some at lunchtime, but for now she had two men each at a pair of tables in front and one man all by himself in a corner booth.

The loner was Marty McGraw, and anybody would have recognized him. A little photo of him, head cocked and lip curled, ran three times a week with his column. There was gray in his hair that didn’t show in the photo, but I knew about that for having seen him so many times on television since the Will story first broke. Aside from that, the years hadn’t changed him much. If anything, time had treated him as a caricaturist would have done, accenting what was already there, making the eyebrows a little more prominent, pushing out the jaw.

He’d shucked his suit jacket and loosened his tie, and he had one hand wrapped around the base of a glass of beer. There was an empty rocks glass next to the beer glass, and the raw smell of cheap blended whiskey rose straight to my nostrils.

“Scudder,” he said. “McGraw. And this little darling” — he waved to summon the waitress — “assures me her name is Darlene. She’s never lied to me in the past, have you, sweetie?”

She smiled. I had the feeling she was called upon to do that a lot. She had dark hair, cut short, and full breasts.

“The bartender’s name is Stacey,” he went on, “but she’d probably answer to Spacey. You don’t want to ask her to do anything terribly complicated. Order a pousse-café and you’re taking your life in your hands. A shot and a beer’s a safe choice here, and you want to make the shot some cheap blend, because that’s what you’re gonna get anyway, no matter what it says on the bottle.”

I said I’d have a Coke.

“Well, that’s safe,” he said, “if not terribly adventurous. Another of the same for me, Darlene. And don’t ever change, understand?”

She walked off and he said, “The zip code’s one-oh-oh-oh-one, or should I say one-zero-zero-zero-one? You notice how they been doing that lately?”

“Doing what?”

“Saying zero. You give a credit card number over the phone, say ‘oh’ for ‘zero,’ and they’ll replace all your ohs with zeroes when they read it back to you for confirmation. You know what I think it is? Computers. You copy down a number by hand, what’s it matter whether you make an oh or a zero on the page? They both look the same. But when it’s keystrokes, you’re hitting different keys. So they have to make sure.”

Our drinks came. He picked up the shot and tossed it off, took a small sip of the beer. “Anyway, that’s my theory, take it or leave it, and it’s got nothing to do with Will’s letter, anyway. He got the zip code wrong.”

“He put an oh for a zero?”

“No, no, no. He wrote down the wrong number entirely. The right address, 450 West Thirty-third Street, but for some goddam reason he put one-oh-oh-one-one instead of one-oh-oh-oh-one. One-oh-oh-eleven’s the zip for Chelsea and part of the West Village.”

“I see,” I said, but I didn’t. “But what difference does it make? He did get the street number right, and you’re the New York Daily News, for God’s sake. You shouldn’t be that hard to find.”

“You would think that,” he said, “and I take back what I said before, because it’s all of a piece with people saying zero instead of oh, and having to get the keystrokes right. It’s fucking technology getting in everybody’s face is what it is.”

I waited for him to explain.

“It delayed the letter,” he said, “if you can believe it. I’d hate to guess how many pieces of mail a day get sent to the News, most of them written in crayon. So you’d think the dorks who sort the mail could figure out where we were, especially since it’s no more than a long five-iron shot from the main post office. But all you have to do is put a one where an oh ought to be, pardon me all to hell, I mean a zero, and they’re lost. They’re fucking stymied.”

“There must have been a postmark,” I said.

“More than one,” he said. “There was the original one, when it went through the machine at the intake station before it got shipped uptown to the Old Chelsea station on West Eighteenth, which is where they ship the mail for delivery to the one-oh-oh-one-one zips. Then it went out in somebody’s route bag and came back again, and then it picked up a second postmark when they bounced it from Old Chelsea to the Parley building on Eighth Avenue, which is where the one-oh-oh-oh-one mail gets delivered out of. The second one was handwritten, which probably makes it a collector’s item in this day and age, but what you’re interested in, what anybody’d be interested in, is the first postmark.”

“Yes.”

He knocked back his glass of beer. “I wish I had it to show it to you,” he said, “but of course the cops took it. It tells you two things, the zip for the intake station and the date it went through the stamping machine. The zip was one-oh-oh-thirty-eight, indicating the station was Peck Slip.”

“And the date?”

“Same night Whitfield was killed.”

“What time?”

He shook his head. “Just the date. Which escapes me at the moment, but it was that night, the night he died.”

“Thursday night.”

“Was it a Thursday? Yeah, of course it was, and we were on the street with it Friday morning.”

“But the postmark was Thursday.”

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

“I just want to make sure I’ve got this right,” I said. “It went through the stamping machine before midnight, and as a result it had Thursday’s date on it and not Friday’s.”

“You’ve got it right.” He pointed to my glass. “What’s that, Coca-Cola? You want a refill?” I shook my head. “Well, I damn well do,” he said, and got Darlene’s attention and signaled for another round.

I said, “Whitfield died around eleven that night, and the first news flash was on New York One just before midnight. Unless I’m missing something, the letter went in the mail before Whitfield was dead.”

“Probably true.”

“Just probably?”

“Well, you’re assuming the post office did everything right,” he said, “and you already know how long it took them to deliver the fucking letter, so why should they be letter-perfect in any other area of operations? Meaning it’s entirely possible somebody neglected to advance the date on the postmark at the stroke of midnight. But I’d certainly say it’s odds-on that Adrian Whitfield still had a pulse when Will mailed the letter.”

“Peck Slip,” I said. “That’s down by the Fulton Fish Market, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. But the post office serves the whole three-eight zip code, and that includes a big chunk of downtown. One Police Plaza, City Hall—”

“And the Criminal Courts Building,” I said. “He could have been in court that afternoon, watching while Adrian entered a guilty plea for Irwin Atkins. He’s already poisoned the whiskey and written the letter, and now he drops it in the mail. Why doesn’t he wait?”

“We already know he’s cocky.”

“But not half-cocked. He’s mailing the letter before his victim’s dead. Suppose Adrian goes out and drinks a bottle of wine with dinner and doesn’t want to mix the grape and the grain when he gets home? Suppose Adrian’s still alive and kicking when Will’s letter turns up on your desk? Then what?”

“Then I call the cops and they run over to Whitfield’s apartment and grab the scotch bottle before he can take a drink from it.”

“Does he ever say anything about the scotch?” I’d clipped the piece from the News and I got it out now and scanned it. Our own drinks had come by this time, with Darlene setting them down and removing their predecessors without interrupting us. She didn’t have to collect any money. Joints like that used to make you pay when they served you, but that was back before everyone paid for everything with a credit card. Now they run a tab, just like everybody else. “There’s a reference to poison,” I said, “and he talks about the security setup at Whitfield’s apartment. He doesn’t specifically say the poison’s in the whiskey.”

“Still, once he mentions poison and talks about the Park Avenue apartment—”

“They’d search everything until they found cyanide in the scotch.”

“And Will winds up looking like a horse’s ass.”

“So why take the chance? What’s the big hurry that he has to get the letter in the mail?”

“Maybe he’s leaving town.”

“Leaving town?”

“Take another look at the clipping,” he suggested. “He’s announcing his retirement. There won’t be any more killing because he’s done. He’s saying goodbye. Isn’t that what a fellow might do on his way to catch a slow boat to China?”

I thought about it.

“Matter of fact,” McGraw said, “why else announce his retirement? He’s got enough news for one letter, claiming credit for Whitfield. He could save the rest for another time. But not if he’s pulling up stakes and relocating in Dallas or Dublin or, I don’t know, Dakar? If he had a plane to catch, that’d be a good reason to put all the news in one letter and send it off right away.”

“And if it gets there before Whitfield takes the drink, then what?”

“Given that the son of a bitch is nuts,” he said, “I’d be hard put to say just what he’d do, but I suppose he’d deal with it one way or the other. Either he’d come back and figure out some other way to get the job done or he’d decide fate had let Adrian off the hook. And maybe he’d write me one more letter about it and maybe he wouldn’t.” He reached to tap the newspaper clipping. “What I think,” he said, “is there’s no question in his mind that Whitfield’s gonna go straight home and swallow the scotch. You read what he wrote, he’s talking about a fait accompli. Far as he’s concerned, it’s a done deal. Whitfield’s already dead. If there’s a word or phrase in his letter that suggests for a moment that the outcome’s still up in the air, I sure as hell missed it.”

“No, you’re right,” I said. “He writes about it as though it already happened. But we’re sure it didn’t?”

“It’s possible Whitfield was dead before this letter picked up its postmark. Barely possible. But the letter probably got dropped in a mailbox, and in order for it to get picked up and trucked to the Peck Slip post office and go through the machine that stamped it with a postmark—”

I scanned the clipping one more time. “What I asked you over the phone,” I said, “was whether there was anything in the letter that absolutely ruled out the possibility of suicide.”

“That’s why I suggested a meeting. That’s why we’re sitting here. The letter doesn’t rule out suicide, except for the fact that Will says he did it, and he’s never lied to us in the past. But the postmark rules it out.”

“Because it was mailed before the death happened.”

“You got it. He might have decided to claim credit for Whitfield’s suicide. But, good as he is, he couldn’t read Whitfield’s mind and know ahead of time that he was going to kill himself.”