The Devil Knows You’re Dead

Chapter 14

Waddell & Yount had offices on the eighth floor of a twelve-story building at Nineteenth and Broadway. Two stores shared the ground floor, one selling cameras and darkroom supplies, the other a stationer. The building directory included a supplier of advertising specialty items and an environmentalist magazine. The floor immediately below Waddell & Yount was occupied by a men’s discount clothier, offering closeouts and bankrupt stock at bargain prices.

The building was an old one, and the Waddell & Yount offices had not been recently refurbished. The carpet was maroon and threadbare, and the furniture ran to scarred sixty-inch wooden desks with matching swivel chairs and glassed-in stacking mahogany bookshelves. The overhead lighting consisted of bare bulbs in green metal shades. The period look was convincing, with technology providing the only anachronism; there were computers and digital phones on the old desks, and here and there a FAX and a copier. But at least one Luddite still clung to an old-fashioned typewriter. I could hear it clacking away as I followed Eleanor Yount through a maze of cubicles to her office.

She was a handsome woman in her early sixties, stout now, with iron-gray hair and alert blue eyes. She wore a cameo brooch on the lapel of her navy suit, a gold band set with diamonds on her left ring finger. When I’d called at ten that morning to ask for an appointment she had told me to come in an hour. I’d taken my time walking there, stopping for a cup of coffee along the way, and now it was eleven and she was seating herself at her desk and pointing to a chair for me.

She said, “Here’s a funny thing. After we spoke I began to wonder about the propriety of this meeting. I wanted advice, and the first thought I had was that I ought to consult Glenn.” She smiled gently. “But of course that’s not possible, is it? I called my personal attorney and explained the situation to him. He pointed out that, since I had nothing either to conceal or reveal, I needn’t worry about being indiscreet.” She picked up a pencil from the desk top. “So there’s my good and bad news, Mr. Scudder. It’s all right for me to talk with you, but I’m afraid I have next to nothing to say.”

“How long did Glenn Holtzmann work for you?”

“A little over three years. I hired him shortly after my husband’s death. Howard died in April, and I believe Glenn started here the first week in June. I interviewed him right before ABA. That’s the annual booksellers’ convention, it’s always Memorial Day weekend.” She turned the pencil in her hand. “My husband was his own in-house attorney. He was a graduate of Columbia Law School and a member of the bar, so of course he trusted himself to read contracts.”

“And after Mr. Yount died—”

“Mr. Waddell,” she said. “At home we were Mr. and Mrs. Waddell, while here we were Mr. Waddell and Ms. Yount. Of course that was Miss Yount for many years, before Ms. became a part of the language. To Howard’s great dismay, I might add, and not for reasons of male chauvinism. He just couldn’t brook the notion of an abbreviation that wasn’t an abbreviation of anything.” Her eyes aimed themselves somewhere past my left shoulder, gazing down the years. “Eisenhower was president when we moved into these offices,” she said. “And we had only half our present space, we shared the suite with a man named Morrie Kelton who was a booking agent for dance bands and strippers and the most hopeless sort of latter-day vaudevillians. The strangest people in New York were apt to walk in that door. Did you ever see Broadway Danny Rose? We saw it and thought right away of Morrie. I wonder what happened to him. I suppose he’s gone. He’d have to be close to ninety by now.”

The typewriter clattered in the distance. “Morrie Kelton,” she said. “He was a crude, hard-bitten little man, but he had a sweetness about him. Do you wear reading glasses, Mr. Scudder?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re of an age to need them. Do you wear glasses to read?”

“No,” I said. “I could probably use them, but I can get by without them. As long as the light’s not too dim.”

“Then I don’t suppose you’re a customer of ours. If you don’t need reading glasses, you probably don’t buy large-print editions.”

“Not yet.”

“You’re a patient man,” she said. “Letting me traipse down Memory Lane and putting up with my impertinent questions. I asked because I was thinking of the firm’s early days. When I met Howard Waddell he was drawing contracts and selling subsidiary rights at Newbold Brothers. They were a small trade house, acquired a few years ago by Macmillan, but still thriving when Howard went out on his own. And do you know what propelled him?”

“What?”

“Presbyopia. He was squinting at fine print, holding the paper at arm’s length, avoiding paperbacks because the print was too small. A week after he got his first pair of reading glasses he started looking for office space. Within a month he’d signed a lease here and given notice at Newbold. I was an assistant in the production department there, on the phone every day arguing with printers while I dreamed about becoming the next Maxwell Perkins and fanning some young spark into the next literary bonfire. ‘Ellie,’ he said, ‘the world is filling up with old farts with weak eyes and there’s nothing out there for them to read. Once you get past thirty-odd editions of the Bible, the only large-type books are The Power of Positive Thinking and The Book of Mormon. If this isn’t an opportunity I don’t know what one is. Why don’t you come work for me? You’ll never get to meet a real writer or wear out a blue pencil, and I don’t figure we’ll ever get rich, but I bet we have fun.’ ”

“And you went to work for him.”

“Without a second thought. What did I have to lose? And we did have fun, and somewhere along the way we got rich. Not at first, God knows. We both worked twelve-hour days. Howard gave up his apartment and slept on a couch here, claiming that saved him rent and bus fare and an hour’s commuting time every day. He brought in a hot plate and a tiny refrigerator and we ate at our desks. For years our only market was libraries and we were selling to very few of them. But we stayed with it, and our business grew.

“And we fell in love, of course. And it was genuinely romantic, because each of us quietly assumed what we felt was unrequited, and so we were in love for a long time before we let on. Then we made up for lost time, except that I don’t think there is any such thing, do you?”

I thought of the drinking years, the burned-out days, the blacked-out nights. I remembered Freddie Fender’s song, “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights.” But were they?

“No,” I said. “I don’t think any time is wasted.”

“But how we rushed to make up for it! For a week he spent every night at my apartment. I lived in two little rooms on East End Avenue. Five flights up, and no elevator, and Howard was in his mid-forties by then, and in no condition to appreciate climbing five flights of stairs. He didn’t enjoy taking two buses to work in the morning, either. After a week he said, ‘Ellie, this is ridiculous. I’ve just spoken with a real estate agent. There’s a perfectly suitable apartment available on Gramercy Park. Two bedrooms, sunken living room, key to the park. We can walk to work. Look at it, will you? I’ll trust your judgment. If it looks all right to you, tell him we’ll take it.’ And, almost as if it went without saying, he added, ‘We’ll get married. In fact we can do that right away, whether you like the apartment or not.’ ”

“Just like that.”

“Just like that. We changed my name to Mrs. Howard Waddell, and we changed the firm’s name to Waddell & Yount, and we had thirty years. We never moved the offices, we just took Morrie Kelton’s space and added on another adjoining suite when it became available. This area is fashionable now, all sorts of publishers are moving in. And we’re still here, and I’m still on Gramercy Park. The apartment’s too big for me, all by myself, but then the office is too small, so I suppose it averages out. I am sorry, Mr. Scudder. You should have steered me back on track.”

“I was interested.”

“Then I’ll withdraw my apology. Glenn Holtzmann, Glenn Holtzmann. He sent over his résumé at the suggestion of a friend of his at the firm we used on the rare occasions when we required outside counsel. Sullivan, Bienstock, Rowan and Hayes, they had offices in the Empire State Building, but I don’t think they exist anymore as a firm. It’s not important, I don’t even know the name of Glenn’s friend there, and I believe he must have been somebody very junior.

“Glenn was unemployed at the time. He grew up in western Pennsylvania, in a town called Roaring Spring. I believe the closest town of any size is Altoona. He attended Penn State University. And no, I didn’t have all of this committed to memory. I checked the files after I spoke to you on the phone.”

“I was beginning to wonder.”

“After college he worked for several years in Altoona. An uncle of his had an insurance agency and Glenn worked for him. Then his mother died — his father was already dead — and he took the insurance money and the proceeds from the sale of the house and moved to New York, where he attended New York Law School. When your eye hits that on a résumé, you tend to read it as ‘New York University Law School,’ but there’s a rather considerable difference. Still, he did well there, and he passed the bar exam on his first try, and moved up to White Plains and went to work for a small firm there. He said the New York firms weren’t hiring, which I take it to mean they weren’t hiring boys with Penn State and New York Law on their résumés.”

But he hadn’t liked living and working in Westchester County, and before too long he hooked on with a publishing house in the city, working in their legal department. He’d been let go as part of the wholesale sacking of the department that occurred when the house was gobbled up by a Dutch conglomerate in a hostile takeover. Then Howard Waddell had died, and Glenn had sent over his résumé, and there had been no need to interview anyone else.

“At first,” she said, “there wasn’t much for him to do. The vast majority of our transactions are with American trade publishers with whom we’ve done business for years. Our contracts are straightforward and clear-cut. As pure reprinters, we don’t have to secure permissions or concern ourselves about possible libel. We don’t commission original works, so we don’t have to sue to recover advances when authors fail to deliver manuscripts. You see, Glenn was being hired to handle what had amounted to only a small portion of Howard’s work.

“This didn’t mean we could have done without him. How can I best explain?” She frowned, hunting for an analogy. “My secretary has a typewriter,” she said. “Now of course she also has a computer, which she uses for almost everything. But every now and then there’s a form that has to be filled out, and you can’t do that on a computer. It uses its own paper, you see, so when you want to type a few lines on an already existing piece of paper, you need a typewriter. Frequently days go by without that typewriter’s being used, but that doesn’t mean we could get along without it.”

“I think I heard it earlier.”

“No, I know what you heard. My secretary’s typewriter is a demure little electronic model that’s very nearly as silent as her computer. What you heard was an old Underwood that sounds like the city room in The Front Page. Our foreign-rights person insists on using it and nothing else for all correspondence. It’s a hideous old machine, too, with its keys out of alignment and the o and e filled in with ink. She produces these disgraceful letters full of corrections and strikeovers and FAXes them all over the world. And this is a twenty-eight-year-old woman, mind you, presumably a part of the computer generation.” She sighed. “I don’t mean to imply there was anything old-fashioned about Glenn, because there wasn’t. But like the typewriter he was indispensable when we needed him, but that was only now and then.”

“What did he do with the rest of his time?”

“He spent a good share of it reading at his desk. His area was history and world affairs, and we took on several books on the basis of his recommendations. And he pitched in in other areas as well.” Her eyes narrowed. “When Glenn started here,” she said, “I thought he might become a good deal more than our in-house counsel. As a matter of fact, I saw him as a possible successor.”

“Really.”

“Remember, my husband had started out with a legal background. And I thought Glenn might use his position as a platform from which to reach out into all aspects of the business. I’m by no means ready to retire, but in a few years I might be, especially if I had the right sort of person standing in the wings. I never came out and said this to Glenn, but it ought to have been implicit. His was a job with a future.”

“But he didn’t exploit it.”

“No. One of my husband’s final projects was our large-print book club. The club start-up called for a lot of legal work, and it got most of Glenn’s attention at the beginning. The master plan called for us to develop additional clubs for readers with specialized interests — mysteries, science fiction, cookbooks. It was an area of the business with real growth potential, and all Glenn had to do was make it his baby, moving out of the legal area and expanding the whole operation. But he didn’t do it, and six or eight months after he started here, I realized that he was evidently content to remain a small frog in our little pond. At first I thought he was just biding his time here, that he’d jump to another firm when he got the chance, probably a corporate law firm. Then time passed and I saw I was wrong, that he was quite happy where he was. I decided he wasn’t terribly ambitious.”

“Were you disappointed?”

“I suppose I must have been. I’d envisioned him as another Howard Waddell, and he was a far cry from that. And I had thought my own retirement might come about sooner rather than later. As things stand I expect to hang on to the reins for five more years, and I think I know who’ll take them from me when the time comes.”

“Your foreign-rights person,” I said.

“That’s exactly right! And by then her typing won’t stand in her way, because she’ll have a secretary of her own. Now tell me how you knew that.”

“Just a lucky guess.”

“Nonsense. You weren’t guessing. You spoke with absolute assurance. How on earth did you know?”

“Something in your voice when you were talking about her. And a look in your eye.”

“Nothing more concrete than that?”

“No.”

“Remarkable. She doesn’t know what I have planned for her, and neither does anyone else. You must be very good at what you do, Mr. Scudder. Is that your whole job, talking to people and listening to what they say? And watching their faces while they say it?”

“That’s most of it,” I said. “It’s the part I like the best.” We talked a little about my work, and then I asked about Glenn Holtzmann’s salary.

“He got annual raises,” she said, “but he was still earning considerably less than the large corporate law firms pay to associates fresh out of law school. Of course they get seventy or eighty hours a week out of their people, and I’ve told you how little we demanded of Glenn. He earned enough to live decently. He was single when he started here, and then when he did marry he was clever enough to pick someone with money. Have I said something wrong?”

“Did he tell you his wife was rich?”

“Perhaps not in so many words, but that was certainly the impression I got.”

“She was an artist,” I said, “supporting herself as a free-lance illustrator. She lived in a run-down tenement on the Lower East Side.”

“That’s extraordinary.”

“He met her here,” I went on. “She came to show samples of her work to your art director, and he spotted her, and I gather it was quite romantic, though in a very different way from your own courtship.”

“If courtship is even the right word for it,” she said. “But please go on. This is fascinating.”

“He swept her off her feet. He proposed a month after they met.”

“I had the impression they kept company longer than that.”

“You never met his wife?”

“No. I know she was from Denver, and the wedding took place there. No one from the office attended. I gathered that it was a family affair.”

“She’s from a suburb of Minneapolis,” I said, “but I get the impression she cut her ties with her family when she moved to New York. They were married at City Hall and honeymooned in Bermuda.”

“I don’t suppose her father built ski resorts in Vail and Aspen.”

“I can’t recall that she told me anything about her father, but no, I don’t think he did anything of the sort. When they got back from the honeymoon Glenn surprised her with a new apartment. He made the down payment with money left over from his parents’ estate.”

“My impression was that he’d had barely enough to get him through law school.”

“Maybe he saved his lunch money.”

“The apartment—”

“A small two-bedroom condo with a spectacular view. I’d say a minimum of a quarter of a million dollars.”

“It’s a new building, isn’t it? The builders arrange financing with as little as ten percent down. He would only have needed twenty-five thousand dollars. But wouldn’t he have had trouble with the payments?”

The payments, I explained, had been a cinch; he’d bought the property outright for cash.

She stared at me. “Where did he get the money?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course the first thing I have to think is that he might have embezzled it. A quarter of a million dollars? I’m tempted to say it’s impossible, but everybody always says that. I’ve heard of two embezzlements in publishing in the past year or so. One of them ran into six figures. Both were very quickly hushed up, and both involved cocaine, which seems to foster that sort of behavior. It creates a compelling economic motive and undermines character and judgment at the same time. Did Glenn use cocaine?”

“Did you suspect him of it?”

“Certainly not. I don’t even think he drank very much.”

I asked about cash. Was there ever much around?

“We keep substantial funds on deposit,” she said. “They would be listed as cash assets on a balance sheet. But I don’t suppose that’s what you mean.”

“I was talking about currency,” I said. “Green money.”

“ ‘Green money.’ Well, Mr. Scudder, my secretary keeps a petty-cash box in the top right-hand drawer of her desk. She dips into it when we have to tip a delivery boy. I suppose there’s fifty dollars in there on a good day, but it would take an extremely resourceful person to steal a quarter of a million dollars out of it.”

“I think Holtzmann got his money in cash. If he found some way to steal from you it would have involved unwarranted payments to dummy accounts, and I don’t see any sign of any of that.”

“That relieves my concern but not my curiosity. Where do you suppose he got the money?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe he just had it all along. Maybe his parents were wealthy, maybe they left him a really substantial amount of money, and he didn’t want anyone to know. He used some of the money to get through law school and he just kept the rest.”

“In cash? There would be bank accounts, certificates of deposit. Unless it was already in cash when he inherited it.”

“How could that be?”

“Maybe it was fruit-jar money, untaxed cash his parents squirreled away that came to him upon their death. When is he supposed to have come to New York? Ten years ago?”

“At least that long. I could have Enid look it up.”

“It’s not important. Ten years. The bills I saw looked recent enough, but I didn’t check the series dates or the signatures, so—”

“The bills you saw?”

I hadn’t meant to let that out. “There was some cash in the apartment,” I said.

“A substantial amount?”

“I’d call it that.”

We both fell silent. At length she asked me who my client was. I told her. She wanted to know if this meant that George Sadecki was innocent. Not necessarily, I said. It might only mean that he was guilty of killing a man with a secret. I might know more when I unearthed Glenn Holtzmann’s secret, but at this point all I’d managed to establish was that he had one.

“He worked late frequently,” I said. “At least that’s what he told his wife. But if his work load was as light as you’ve said—”

“I don’t know that he ever stayed at his desk past five o’clock.”

“I wonder where he went.”

“I’ve no idea.”

“He had some evening appointments as well. Business appointments, but I gather the business wasn’t Waddell & Yount’s.”

She shook her head. “This is all so incomprehensible to me,” she said. “I don’t think I’m particularly naive. But if there was ever an unlikely candidate for the title role in A Double Life, it was Glenn.”

“I met him once.”

“You hadn’t mentioned that.”

“Well, it didn’t amount to much. My girlfriend and I saw them socially, him and his wife. That was in the spring. Then I ran into him a couple of times in the neighborhood. I live just a block from him. He wanted to talk to me about writing a book.”

“Are you a writer?”

“No, and I wasn’t at all interested, but the implication was that he’d be interested in publishing a book about my experiences. From what he’d already said about your firm I had the impression that you were strictly a reprint publisher.”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“And I also had the impression that Glenn had no more interest in my writing a book than I did. He wanted something from me, and he didn’t want to let me know what it was. I was uneasy around him. He always seemed sneaky to me.”

“Evidently your instincts were better than mine.”

“Or maybe he didn’t have a hidden agenda here,” I suggested. “Maybe he saved his dark side for when he was away from the office.”

She was the boss, she told me. If Glenn had had a dark side, or even a light side, he’d have been less likely to expose it to the woman who signed his paycheck. She took me around the office and introduced me to three of his fellow employees, including the young woman in charge of foreign rights, and a brief conversation with each of them added nothing substantial to my store of knowledge. Lately his work had centered largely upon a proposed large-print book club, and the legal ramifications of requiring members to purchase a minimum number of books annually. I wound up learning a little more about the subject than I cared to know. I didn’t figure it had much to do with money in a strongbox, or gunshots, and blood on the sidewalk.

Back in Eleanor Yount’s office, she wanted to know my guesses on some of the case’s unanswerable questions. I told her it was too early in the game for guesses. There wasn’t enough to go on.

“I was afraid you’d say that,” she said. “I’d like to know how this turns out, and I have the feeling I won’t get to read about it in the newspapers.”

“You might.”

“Even so, they won’t have the whole story, will they?”

“They usually don’t.”

“Will you come back and tell me? And of course I intend to have my accountant make very certain that W&Y didn’t pay for Glenn’s apartment. I’ll let you know if there are any irregularities. If you could let me have a card—”

I gave her one of my cards. She said, “A name, a number, and nothing else. A minimalist business card. You’re an interesting man, Mr. Scudder. I don’t publish originals, but I’m friendly with just about everyone in this town who does, so if there should happen to be a book you’ve been wanting to write—”

“There really isn’t.”

“That’s remarkable,” she said. “I didn’t think there was a policeman or private detective anywhere in New York who wasn’t trying to get a book published. Nobody’s out looking for criminals these days. They’re all looking for an agent.”