The Devil Knows You’re Dead

Chapter 19

The next day was Friday, and I spent it downtown having another crack at government records before they locked them all away for the weekend. I didn’t learn much.

I quit in time to beat the rush hour and rode uptown on the subway. There was a message to call Eleanor Yount. It was almost five o’clock but I managed to catch her at her desk.

She was delighted to report that there had been no embezzlement. “My accountant was quite startled when I suggested the possibility,” she said, “and very much relieved when he was able to rule it out. I hate to think that Glenn might have been a thief, but it does make the thought less unsettling to know he didn’t steal anything from me.”

I hadn’t really figured him as an embezzler. Nor had I pictured an enraged Eleanor Yount keeping a rendezvous in Hell’s Kitchen and pumping four bullets into her in-house counsel.

She asked me if I’d learned anything.

Not much, I said. I knew a few things I hadn’t known before, but I couldn’t make them add up to anything.

“I wonder when it started,” she said.

I asked her what she meant.

“I always wonder,” she said. “Don’t you? Whether someone’s a born criminal, or is it the scar of some childhood experience, or is there some pivotal incident later on. Glenn seemed such a supremely ordinary young man. But he seems to have told so many lies, and lived a life so different from what it appeared. I suppose it will turn out that he was beaten by his father or molested by his uncle. And then one day a cartoon light bulb formed over his head and he said, ‘Aha! I’ll commit embezzlement!’ Or traffic in drugs, or blackmail someone. It would be convenient if one knew what exactly it was that he did.”

There was a message from T J as well. I beeped him and he called me back, but the things we had to talk about weren’t suited to an open line, so we didn’t say much. I gathered that he didn’t have the gun yet but he was working on it.

He didn’t volunteer anything about Julia, and I didn’t ask.

At St. Paul’s that night the speaker was from Co-op City in the Bronx. He worked construction, mostly as a window installer, and he told a good basic drinking story. My attention drifted some, but he brought me back when he said, very solemnly, “And every single night I would lock myself in my furnished room and drink myself to Bolivia.”

Jim Faber was there, and during the break he said, “Did you happen to catch that one? I thought you had to drop LSD if you wanted to take a trip, but this fellow got all the way to La Paz on Clan MacGregor. They could use that in their ads.”

“I guess he thinks that’s the expression, drinking yourself to Bolivia. I mean, it wasn’t a slip of the tongue.”

“No, he meant to say it. Well, many’s the time I tried drinking myself to Bolivia. And nine times out of ten I wound up in Cleveland.”

When the meeting ended we established that we were on for Sunday dinner. I asked him if he felt like a cup of coffee but he had to get home. I thought about calling Lisa, maybe dropping in on her. Instead I hooked up with a few others from the meeting and went over to the Flame. When I got out of there I still felt like calling Lisa, but I didn’t. I went home and called Elaine to confirm our Saturday night date.

Afterward I watched CNN for a little while, then turned off the set and looked through the book of poems until I found one that gave me something to think about. Sometime after midnight I turned out the light and went to bed.

It was like not drinking, I thought, like staying away from a drink a day at a time. If I could stay away from bourbon that way, I ought to be able to resist Lisa Holtzmann.

Saturday afternoon I got a call from T J. He said, “You know the bagel shop in the bus station?”

“Like the back of my hand.”

“You ask me, they better at doughnuts than bagels. You want to meet me there?”

“What time?”

“You say. Won’t take me five minutes.”

I said it would take me a little longer than that, and it was closer to half an hour before I was seated next to him at the counter of Lite Bite Bagels on the ground floor of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He had a doughnut and a Coke. I ordered a cup of coffee.

“They got good doughnuts,” he said. “Sure you don’t want one?”

“Not right now.”

“The bagels is mushy. You eatin’ a bagel, you ‘spect it to fight back some. Doughnuts, you don’t mind if they’s mushy. Weird, huh?”

“The world’s a mysterious place.”

“And that’s the truth, Ruth. Almost called you last night, woulda been real late. Dude had a Uzi he lookin’ to sell.”

“That’s not what I was looking for.”

“Yeah, I know. It was pretty slick, though. Had an extra clip, had this case to carry it in, all fitted an’ all. Cheap, too, ’cause all he wanted was to get high.”

I pictured Jan trying to kill herself firing at full automatic. “I don’t think so,” I said.

“Oh, must be he sold it by now. Else he used it to hold somebody up. Anyway, I got what you want.”

“Where?”

He patted the blue canvas Kangaroo pouch he was wearing around his waist. “Right in here,” he said softly. “Thirty-eight revolver, three bullets for it. Holds five, but he didn’t have but three. Maybe he went an’ shot two people. Three bullets be enough?”

I nodded. One was enough.

“Know the men’s room around to the right? I’ll catch you there in a minute or two.”

He slipped off his stool and left the bagel shop. I finished my coffee and paid for both of us. I found him in the men’s room, leaning over a sink, checking his hair in the mirror. I moved to the sink beside him and washed my hands while the fellow at the urinal finished up and left. When he was out the door T J unclasped the pouch from around his waist and handed it to me. “Check it out,” he said.

I went into one of the stalls. The gun was a Dienstag five-shot revolver with checkered grips and a two-inch barrel. It smelled as though it hadn’t been cleaned since it was last fired. The front sight had been filed down. The cylinder was empty. The pouch held three bullets, each individually wrapped in tissue paper. I unwrapped one and made sure it fit the cylinder, then took it out and wrapped it back in the tissue paper. I put the three bullets in my pocket and tucked the gun under my belt in the small of my back. My jacket concealed it well enough, as long as it didn’t slip.

I left the stall and handed the blue pouch to T J. He started to ask what was wrong, then felt the weight of the pouch and realized that it was empty. He said, “Man, don’t you want the Kangaroo? To carry it.”

“I thought it was yours.”

“It came with the goods. Here.”

I returned to the stall and put the gun and the bullets into the pouch and adjusted the strap so that it would fit around my waist. The gun felt a lot more secure there than wedged under my belt. Outside, T J explained that the pouches had become the holster of choice on both sides of the law.

“I believe it was cops started it,” he said. “You know how they got to carry a gun when they off duty? Only they don’t want no gun weighin’ down their pocket or spoilin’ the lines of their suit. Then a lot of the players, they was usin’ these shoulder bags, but that’s a little too much like a purse, you know? ‘Sides, anything you carry like that, there be times you put it down an’ forget to pick it back up again. The Kangaroos, they sell ’em everywhere, you don’t even know you wearin’ one. Leave the zipper open, you ready to quick-draw. An’ they cheap. Ten, twelve dollars. ’Course you can buy one in leather an’ spend more. I seen a dope dealer has one in eelskin. That be a fish or a snake?”

“A fish.”

“Didn’t know you could make leather out of no fish. Charge a lot for it, too. I guess you could get a Kangaroo made out of alligator if you was fool enough to want it.”

“I guess.”

I asked about Julia. “She a strange one,” he said. “How old you think she is?”

“How old?”

“Take a guess, Les. How old you think?”

“I don’t know. Nineteen or twenty.”

“Twenty-two.”

I shrugged. “Well, I was close.”

“She seem younger,” he said. “An’ she seem older. One minute she this little girl an’ you want to keep her safe. Next minute she your teacher, gone keep you after school. She know a whole lot of things, you know?”

“I’ll bet she does.”

“Not just what you thinkin’. She knows all kind of shit. She made those pajamas she was wearin’. You believe that? Designed ’em herself, too. Lotta ways she could make money. She don’t have to be gettin’ in cars on Eleventh Avenue. ’Course, right now she need the money.”

“What about you?”

His eyes turned wary. “What about me?”

“I just wondered how we stand as far as money is concerned. Did you make out all right on the gun?”

“Yeah, we cool. Got a good deal on the gun. Only real expenses I had was all the dope I had to buy.”

“What dope?”

“Well, hangin’ out by the Captain an’ all. You want to start askin’ a bunch of questions, people got to know you all right. Best way is buy some drugs. They makin’ money off you, they got a reason to like you.”

“Did you have to spend very much? Because it’s only right for me to reimburse you.”

“No need, Reed. I made out fine.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mean I took what I bought and sold it right here on the Deuce. Lost money on one deal but made some on another one. All said an’ done, I come out a few dollars ahead.”

“You sold drugs.”

“Well, shit, man, what else was I gonna do? I don’t use none of that shit. I wasn’t gonna throw the shit away. That’s bread, Ed. I ain’t in the business, not any more’n I’m in the gun business. Only business I want to be in is the detectin’ business, but if I has to buy the shit I might as well get my money back. There be anything wrong with that?”

“I guess not,” I said. “Not when you explain it like that.”

In my room I took the gun apart and cleaned it. I didn’t have the right tools, but Q-tips and Three-in-One oil were better than nothing. When I was done I put the gun in the drawer with the five thousand dollars. I’d been meaning to put the cash in my safe-deposit box, but I had missed my chance. I’d have to wait until Monday.

I turned the TV on and off, then picked up the phone and called Jan. “I think I’m going to be able to get that item we discussed,” I told her. “Before I follow through, I just wanted to make sure you were still in the market.” She assured me that she was. “Well, I should have something by the end of next week,” I said.

I hung up and checked the dresser drawer, as if the gun might have magically dematerialized while I was on the phone. No such luck.

That night I reprised most of my conversation with T J for Elaine, of course leaving out the part about the gun. I told her how he’d bought and sold dope on my behalf, and how he seemed to be getting involved with a pre-op transsexual.

“Entranced by a transsexual,” she said. “Or transfixed. Just how fascinated is he, do you know? What do we do if he shows up with tits?”

“That’s a stretch. He’s just experimenting.”

“That’s all they were doing at the Manhattan Project, and look what happened to Hiroshima. What’s the story? Are they an item?”

“I think she probably took him to bed and showed him a good time. I think the novelty of it impressed him and shook him up a little. That doesn’t mean he’ll be running down to the nearest clinic for electrolysis and hormone shots. Or that the two of them are going to be picking out drapes together.”

“I guess. Have you ever tried that?”

“Picking out drapes?”

“You know. Have you?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Not that you know of? How could you do it and not know it?”

“Well, strange things happen when you drink yourself to Bolivia. I did lots of things I don’t remember, so how can I say for certain who I did them with? And if the girl was post-op, and if the surgeon did good work, how could you tell?”

“But you never did it that you know of. Would you?”

“I’ve already got a girlfriend.”

“Well, this is hypothetical. I wasn’t propositioning you on behalf of Julia. How did you feel about her? Did you want to do her?”

“It never entered my mind.”

“Because you’ve got a cleaner greener maiden in a neater sweeter land, except I just got it backward, didn’t I? A neater sweeter maiden. Will I ever get to meet Ms. Julia? Or do I have to take a walk on Eleventh Avenue?”

“No need,” I said. “I’m sure they’ll invite us to the wedding.”

I spent Saturday night at Elaine’s. Sunday morning I went back to my hotel right after breakfast and turned off Call Forwarding. I checked the drawer, confirmed the continuing existence of the gun and the money, and called Jan.

I said, “Will you be home for the next hour or so? I’d like to stop by.”

“I’ll be here,” she said.

Half an hour later I was standing on the sidewalk on Lispenard Street, waiting for her to toss down the key. I was wearing the blue Kangaroo pouch. The zipper was closed. I wasn’t looking to make any quick draws.

When I got off the elevator she noticed the pouch right away. “Very snazzy,” she said. “And very sensible. I never saw you as the backpack type, but that’s handy, isn’t it?”

“It lets me keep my hands free.”

“And blue’s the right color for you.”

“They come in eelskin, too.”

“I don’t think so, not for you. But come on in. Coffee? I just made a fresh pot.”

I guess she looked the same. I don’t know what change I expected. It had only been a week. At first glance her hair seemed grayer, but that was because it had darkened some in my memory. She brought the coffee and we tried to find things to talk about. I remembered the speaker at the Friday meeting and told her how he’d drunk himself to Bolivia, and we got through a cup of coffee apiece by trotting out malapropisms and curious turns of phrase we’d heard in various AA rooms over the years.

During a lull I said, “I brought you the gun.”

“You did?”

I tapped the pouch.

“For heaven’s sake,” she said. “It never occurred to me to wonder what you were carrying in that thing. From what you said yesterday I figured it would be the better part of a week before you managed to get it.”

“I already had it when I called.”

“Oh?”

“I guess I was hoping you’d tell me you didn’t want it.”

“I see.”

“So I was stalling. At least I think that’s what I was doing. I don’t always know what I’m doing.”

“Welcome to the club.”

“What do you know about guns, Jan?”

“You pull the trigger and a bullet comes out. What do I know about them? Next to nothing. Is there a lot I have to know?”

I spent the next half hour teaching her some basic rules about handguns. There was an underlying absurdity in providing firearm-safety instruction to a potential suicide, but she didn’t seem to think it was silly. “If I’m going to kill myself,” she said, “I don’t want to do it by accident.” I taught her how to work the cylinder, how to load and unload the gun. I made sure it was unloaded, showed her how to make sure it was unloaded, and told her how to place the gun when the time came. The technique I suggested was the policeman’s old favorite, the time-honored ritual known as eating one’s gun. The barrel in the mouth, tilted upward, firing up through the soft palate and into the brain.

“That should do it,” I told her. “The bullets are thirty-eight caliber, hollow-pointed so that they tend to expand upon impact.” I must have winced because she asked me what was the matter. “I’ve seen people who did this,” I said. “It’s not pretty. It distorts the face.”

“So does cancer.”

“A smaller bullet doesn’t make as much of a mess, but the chance of missing a vital spot—”

“No, this is better,” she said. “What do I care what I look like?”

“I care.”

“Oh, baby,” she said. “I’m sorry. But it tastes terrible, doesn’t it? Sticking a gun in your mouth. Have you ever done it?”

“Not in years.”

“Were you—?”

“Considering it? I don’t know. I remember one night, sitting up late in the house in Syosset. Anita was sleeping. I was still married, obviously, and still a cop.”

“And drinking.”

“That goes without saying, doesn’t it? Anita was asleep, the boys were asleep. I was in the front room and I stuck the gun in my mouth to see what it was like.”

“Were you depressed?”

“Not particularly. I was drunk, but I wouldn’t say I was positively shitfaced. I probably would have blown the circuits on a Breathalyzer, but hell, I drove like that all the time.”

“And never had an accident.”

“Oh, I had a couple, but nothing serious, and I never got in trouble for it. A cop pretty much has to kill somebody to get cited for drunk driving. It never happened to me, and I did my share of it. Looking back, I’d have to say leaving the force and moving to the city probably saved my life. Because I stopped carrying a gun and I stopped driving a car, and either one would have killed me sooner or later.”

“Tell me about the night you put the gun in your mouth.”

“I don’t know what more there is to tell. I remember the taste, metal and gun oil. I thought, So this is what it feels like. And I thought that all I had to do was do it, and I thought that I didn’t want to.”

“And you took the gun out of your mouth.”

“And I took the gun out of my mouth, and didn’t do it again. I thought about it some, living alone in New York, bottoming out on the booze. Of course I didn’t have a gun anymore, but the city gives you plenty of ways to kill yourself. The easiest way was to do nothing and just go on drinking.”

She picked up the gun, turned it over in her hands. “It’s heavy,” she said. “I didn’t realize it would be that heavy.”

“People are always surprised about that.”

“I don’t know why I didn’t expect it. It’s metal, of course it’s heavy.” She put it on the table. “I had a pretty good week,” she said. “I’m not in any great rush to use this, believe me.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“But it’s a relief to have it in the house. I know it’s here for when I need it, and I find that very reassuring. Can you understand that?”

“I think so.”

“You know,” she said, “when people find out you’ve got cancer, you’re really in for it. I haven’t run around telling people, but I can’t go to meetings and not talk about what’s going on in my life. So a lot of people know about it. And as soon as they know that your doctor’s given up on you, that what you’ve got is hopelessly incurable, then they come at you with the advice.”

“What kind of advice?”

“Everything from macrobiotic diets and wheatgrass juice to the power of prayer and crystal healing. Quack clinics in Mexico. Getting your blood replaced in Switzerland.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“I forgot him, but his name gets mentioned a lot, too. Everybody knows somebody who was given fifteen days to live and now they’re out chopping wood and running marathons because of some stupid thing they tried that worked. And I’m not even saying they’re full of crap. I believe these things work sometimes. I know miracles happen, too.”

“There’s a thing you hear around the program—”

“ ‘Don’t kill yourself five minutes before the miracle.’ I know. I don’t intend to. I believe in miracles, but I also believe I had my quota of miracles when I got sober. I don’t expect another one.”

“You never know.”

“Sometimes you know. But here’s what I was getting at. Here are all these people trying to help, each of them bringing me something and it’s all useless. And you brought me the one thing I can use.” She picked up the gun again. “Funny, huh? Don’t you think it’s funny?”

The sun had been shining that morning, but the sky was clouded over by the time I left Jan’s loft. A week ago I’d had to go home in the rain. At least it wasn’t raining yet.

Back at my hotel, I had five hours to get through before my dinner date with Jim. I thought of a way to get through them, and looked over at the telephone.

Like not drinking, I thought. You do it in manageable increments, a day at a time, an hour at a time, even a minute at a time when you have to. You don’t pick up the phone, you don’t call her, and you don’t go over there.

Piece of cake.

Around two I reached for the phone. I didn’t have to look up the number. While her husband’s taped message ran its course, I thought instead of other words from the grave, those of John McCrae. If ye break faith with us who die…

I said, “It’s Matt, Lisa. Are you there?” She was. “I’d like to come by for a few minutes,” I said. “There are a couple of things I’d like to go over with you.”

“Oh, good,” she said.

I went straight from her apartment to the restaurant. I showered first, so I don’t suppose I could actually have been carrying her scent upon my skin. On my clothes, perhaps. Or on my mind.

Definitely on my mind, and several times I was on the point of saying something to Jim. I could have. One of the roles a sponsor plays is that of a nonjudgmental confessor. I strangled my grandmother this morning, you might say. She probably had it coming, he would reply, and anyway the important thing is you didn’t drink.

I didn’t mention it to Mick, either, although I might have if we’d made what he calls a proper night of it. I walked Jim home after the Big Book meeting at St. Clare’s, then dropped by Grogan’s, and one of the first things he told me was that we wouldn’t be able to see the sun up together.

“Unless you want to drive up to the farm with me,” he said, “for I’ll be on my way in a couple of hours. I have to sit down with O’Mara.”

“Is something the matter?”

“Not a thing,” he said, “except that Rosenstein has it in his head that O’Mara might die.”

Rosenstein is Mick’s lawyer, O’Mara and his wife the co-managers of the country property he owns in Sullivan County. I asked if O’Mara was ill.

“He is not,” Mick said. “Nor should he be, living the life he does, out in the open air every day, drinking the milk of my cow and eating the eggs of my hens. He’s lived sixty years, has O’Mara, and should be good for sixty more. I said as much to Rosenstein. Ah, says he, but suppose he died, then where are you?”

“You’d have to hire someone else,” I said. “Oh, wait a minute. Who’s the owner of record?”

His smile held no joy. “O’Mara himself,” he said. “You know I own nothing.”

“The clothes on your back.”

“The clothes on my back,” he agreed, “and nothing else. There’s another man’s name on the lease of Grogan’s, and another that owns the building itself. The car’s not mine either, not legally. And the farm belongs to O’Mara and his wife. A man can’t own anything or the bastards’ll be after taking it away from him.”

“You’ve always operated that way,” I said. “At least as long as I’ve known you. You’ve never had any assets.”

“And a good job, too. They had their hands out last year when they were trying to make their RICO case, ready to attach any assets they could find. Their fucking case fell apart, thanks to God and Rosenstein, but in the meantime they might have grabbed my holdings and sold them off. If I’d had the misfortune to own anything.”

“So what’s the problem with O’Mara?”

“Ah,” he said. “If O’Mara dies, and herself with him, although women live forever—”

Not always, I thought.

“—then what happens to my farm? The O’Maras have no children. He has a niece and nephew in California, and herself has a brother, a priest in Providence, Rhode Island. Who stands to inherit depends on which O’Mara outlives the other, but sooner or later my farm’s to be left to the niece and nephew or to the priest. And, Rosenstein wants to know, how do I propose to tell O’Mara’s heirs that the farm is my own, and they’re quite welcome to slop the hogs and collect the eggs, but I’ll have the use of it when I see fit?”

Rosenstein had suggested ways to safeguard the farm, ranging from an undated and unregistered transfer of ownership to a codicil to O’Mara’s will. But any arrangement could be dismissed as a legal fiction if the federal authorities ever took a good look at the situation.

“So I’ll talk to O’Mara,” he said, “though I don’t know what I’ll say to him. ‘Take care of yourself, man. Stay out of drafts.’ But I know the answer. You must go through life owning nothing.”

“You’re already doing that.”

“I am not,” he said. “That’s what Rosenstein called it, a legal fiction. However you own something, on paper or in secret, it can be taken from you.” He looked at the glass in his hand, drank the whiskey. “But if you don’t fucking care,” he said, “then it seems to me you’re all right. For God’s sake, if O’Mara’s fucking nephew gets my farm then I’ll buy it from him. Or buy another one, or get along without one. It’s being attached to bloody things that drags you down, that more than losing them. Here I am ready to drive half the night for fear O’Mara might die, and him not sick a day in his life.”

“The Indians say men can’t own land, that it all belongs to the Great Spirit. Man only has the use of it.”

“And what is it we say of beer? You can’t own it, you can only rent it.”

“True of coffee, too,” I said, getting to my feet.

“True of all property,” he said. “True of everything.”