The Devil Knows You’re Dead

Chapter 22

A few days later I put on a suit and tie and went to the window, trying to guess if the weather would hold. It was sunny now, cool and clear, and I hoped it would stay that way.

Something drew my eye down to the benches alongside the Parc Vendôme, and I saw a familiar silhouette hunched over one of the stone cubes. I went downstairs, and instead of turning left for the subway I crossed the street and approached the lean black man with the white hair. He had a copy of the Times folded open to the chess column, and he was working out the problem with his own board and chessmen.

“You look nice,” he said. “I like your necktie.”

I thanked him. I said, “Barry, they’re having a service for George this afternoon. I’m going out to Brooklyn for it.”

“That right?”

“His brother called and told me about it. Just family, but he said I’d be welcome.”

“Be a nice day for it,” he said. “ ‘less it rains.”

“You’d be welcome, too.”

“At the funeral?”

“I thought maybe we could go together.”

He looked at me, a long, appraising look. “No,” he said. “I guess not.”

“If you’re thinking you won’t fit in,” I said, “well, hell, you’ll fit in as well as I will.”

“Guess you’re right,” he said. “We’re both the same color, and dressed about the same.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“Thing is,” he said, “it don’t matter, fitting in or not fitting in. I don’t care to go. You come back, tell me how it was. How’s that?”

I rode out on the D train. They buried him out of a funeral parlor on Nostrand Avenue, and there were more people in attendance than I would have expected, close to fifty in all. Tom, his wife, his sister, their relatives. Neighbors, employees, AA friends. The crowd was mostly white and a majority of the men wore ties and jackets, but there were a few black faces, a few gentlemen in shirtsleeves. Barry would not have been greatly out of place.

The casket was closed, the service brief. The clergyman who officiated hadn’t known George, and he spoke of death as a liberation from the bondage of physical and mental infirmity. The veils drop away, he said, and blind eyes can see again. The spirit soars.

Tom followed him and said a few words. In a sense, he said, we’d all lost George a long time ago. “But we went on loving him,” he said. “We loved the sweetness of him. And there was always the hope that someday the clouds would blow away and we’d get him back. And now he’s gone and that can never happen. But in another sense we do have him back with us. He’s with us now and he’ll never lose his way again.” His voice broke, but he squeezed the last words out. “I love you, George,” he said.

There were two hymns, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “Abide With Me.” A heavyset woman with dark hair to her waist sang them both unaccompanied, her voice filling the room. During the first hymn I thought of George in his army jacket, his pocket full of shell casings. The old soldier, fading away. Listening to the second, I remembered a version on a Thelonious Monk album, just eight bars long, just the melody. Haunting. Jan Keane owned the record. I hadn’t heard it in years.

After the service there was a procession of cars following the hearse to a cemetery in Queens, but I passed on that and caught a train back to Manhattan. I found Barry right where I’d left him. I sat down across from him and told him all about George’s funeral. He heard me through and suggested we play a little chess.

“One game,” I said.

It didn’t take him long to beat me. When I tipped my king over he suggested a toast to George’s memory might be fitting. I gave him five dollars and he came back with a quart of malt liquor and a cup of coffee. After several long swallows he capped the bottle and said, “See, I don’t never go to funerals. Don’t believe in ’em. What’s the point?”

“It’s a way to say goodbye.”

“Don’t believe in that either. People come and people go. Just the way of the world.”

“I suppose so.”

“Matter of what you get used to, is all it is. George came around and I got used to him. Got used to him being around. Now he’s gone and I’m used to that. Get used to anything, if you give yourself half a chance.”

Early the following week they finally released Glenn Holtzmann’s remains. I think they might have done so earlier if his widow had asked. I made a few calls for Lisa and arranged to have the body picked up at the morgue and cremated. There was no service.

“It seems incomplete,” Elaine said. “Shouldn’t there be some sort of service? There must be people who would come.”

“You could probably round up a contingent from his office,” I said, “but I don’t think he had any friends as such. The easiest thing for her is a quick private cremation and no service.”

“Will she have to attend? Do you think you ought to go with her?”

“She seems to have it all under control,” I said, “and I’d just as soon start letting go.”

So I didn’t keep Lisa Holtzmann company when she picked up her husband’s ashes. A day or two later, though, I left an AA meeting at ten o’clock and felt a restlessness I couldn’t walk off, or talk myself out of.

I picked up the phone. “This is Matt,” I said. “Do you feel like company?”

The following morning I walked over to Midtown North. Joe Durkin wasn’t around, but I didn’t need him for the task at hand. I talked to several different cops, explaining that I was working for Holtzmann’s widow and that the personal effects returned to her had been incomplete. “She never got his keys back,” I said. “He definitely would have had his keys with him, and she never got them back.”

Nobody knew anything. “Well, shit,” one cop said. “Tell her to change the locks.”

I went through the same thing at Manhattan Homicide, and at Central Booking. I spent most of the day bothering people who had more important things to do, but by late afternoon I walked out of a police station with a set of keys in my pocket. It wasn’t hard to establish that the keys were Holtzmann’s — one of them fit the door to his and Lisa’s apartment. It was easy to pick out the key to his safe-deposit box, and an officer at my own bank had a chart which enabled us to determine the bank and branch where we would find that box.

Drew Kaplan obtained authorization to open the box, and he and Lisa did so, accompanied by the inescapable representative of the Internal Revenue Service. I suppose everyone was hoping for cash and Krugerrands, but there was nothing inside to quicken anybody’s pulse. A birth certificate, a marriage license. Old snapshots of unidentified persons, school pictures of Glenn.

“The prick from the IRS couldn’t stand it,” Drew reported. “Why have a box if he didn’t have anything to keep in it? And why not have the smallest size? There must have been something else in there, he said. Obviously we got into the box, scooped the cash, and then called Uncle Sam. I suggested he look at the bank’s records and confirm that no one had obtained access to the box since the boxholder’s death. Which he already knew, the irritating little bastard, but he figured one way or another the government was getting screwed.”

“Which they must have been.”

“I would say so,” he said. “If I had to guess, I’d say the money she found in the closet used to live in the safe-deposit box. Their records put him there a week to the day before he got hit. I’d say he went in there and took out his money and put it in a tin box and stuck it in his closet. Now why would he do that?”

“In case he needed it in a hurry.”

“That’s one. For a cash transaction, or just because he wanted to be able to cut and run. The other thought comes to me is maybe he had a premonition.”

“I like that the best,” I said. “He realizes he’s in danger and wants to make sure she gets the money. That would explain why there was nothing else in the box that could embarrass anybody. He was already imagining the IRS, looking over his widow’s shoulder.”

“And we know he knows all about the IRS, ever since he sicced them on Uncle Al.”

“And we know he had good feelings toward her,” I said, “because he picked their wedding anniversary for the strongbox combination.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Five-eleven,” I said. “May eleventh.”

“Nice touch,” he said. “And nice job finding the keys.”

“Oh, they’d have turned up sooner or later.”

“Don’t bet on it,” he said. “You ever want to hide where you’ll never be found, check into a police department warehouse and stretch out on a shelf. They got Peter Stuyvesant’s wooden leg there, and you can use Boss Tweed’s wallet for a pillow.”

That should have been the end of it.

I’d done what I’d been hired to do. I hadn’t established who’d pulled the trigger, but that had not been my assignment. I’d signed on to protect the financial interests of Lisa Holtzmann, and it seemed as though I’d done that. The last act I performed on her behalf consisted of accompanying her once more to Drew’s office, where we collected the strongbox. We cabbed back to Manhattan and went to a bank on Second Avenue where she still had an account in her maiden name. She rented a safe-deposit box there and stowed the cash in it. It could stay there forever if it had to, or until someone figured out a good way to launder it.

I had been generously paid for my time, but it wasn’t the most I’d ever earned for the least amount of work, and I don’t think I felt grossly overpaid.

Anyway, it averages out. A week or so after I helped Lisa stash her money, I did some work for a woman who lived in a housing project in Chelsea. The job came to me through someone I knew from AA; this woman was the friend of a sister, or the sister of a friend, something like that. The woman had thrown out her live-in boyfriend when she found out he was molesting her nine-year-old daughter. The boyfriend didn’t want to stay thrown out. He’d come back twice and beaten her up. After the second time she got an order of protection, but that’s only useful after the fact; he’d promptly violated it, and violated the daughter while he was at it. She reported this, and the police had a warrant for the guy’s arrest, but no one knew where he was living and they weren’t about to launch a major manhunt over what the cops were inclined to categorize as a domestic disturbance.

I moved into the woman’s apartment, staking it out from within. The woman was pretty in a lush, overblown way. She drank enough wine to stay permanently unfocused, smoked Newport Lights one after another, played solitaire by the hour, and never turned off the television set in the five days I spent in her apartment.

I would sit in a chair all day, reading a book or watching the TV if she happened to have it tuned to something I could stand. I used the phone a lot to keep from going crazy. Around midnight Eddie Rankin would come over. He’s an occasional employee of the Reliable agency, a big towhead with quick reflexes and an appetite for violence. I figured the boyfriend was most likely to come around at night, and Eddie would be good if it got physical. He and I would tell lies for an hour or two, until I got drowsy enough to nap on the couch. At five he would wake me and I’d pay him a hundred dollars and send him home.

I don’t think I could have stood it for more than a week, but the boyfriend showed up on the fifth night. It was around two-thirty. The kid was asleep in her bedroom. The woman had passed out in her chair in front of the TV, as she did every night. The set was still on, and Eddie was watching it while I was dozing lightly. I heard a key in the lock, and I was sitting up and throwing my legs over the side of the couch when the door burst open and the boyfriend came in, wild-eyed and roaring.

I never had to move. Eddie was on him before he got two steps in the door. He hit him with a hard left just below the rib cage, and he must have found the liver because it took the poor son of a bitch completely out of the play. He fell as if he’d been gutshot, and caught Eddie’s knee in his face on the way down.

We could have called the cops and she could have pressed charges, assuming she would wake up enough to follow through with it. But he would have made bail, people like that always make bail, and he probably would have come over and killed her. He might have done that this time if we hadn’t been there; I frisked him while he was lying there moaning, and took a seven-inch folding knife off him.

The idea was to keep him from coming back. “Maybe he fell off the roof,” Eddie said, dragging the clown over to the window as he talked. “He strikes me as the kind of guy, he walks on roofs a lot, he tends to fall off.”

But of course we didn’t throw him off the roof, or out the window. What we did do was a pretty good job of beating the crap out of him. Eddie did it, actually — kicking him in the groin, in the ribs, stepping down hard on his hands. I’d have had to have been in a rage to do any of that, and once the situation itself was under control, so were my emotions. Eddie, on the other hand, was never far from rage, and could turn it on at will, with no provocation whatsoever.

If pressed, I could probably guess what kind of childhood he had.

When he’d had enough we got the boyfriend on his feet and out the door. In the stairwell I took hold of him by the front of his shirt and told him I never wanted to see him again. “If you ever come around here again,” I said, “I’ll break your arms and your legs, and I’ll put your eyes out, and I’ll cut your dick off and make you eat it.”

We got out of there and rode in Eddie’s car to a diner he liked. “I was gonna have knockwurst,” he said, “until you said that shit about making him eat his dick. You want to tell me something? How come the fucker had a key?”

“I guess she didn’t change the lock.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Well, it costs. She’s not rolling in dough, as you may have guessed from a look around the place.”

“Hey, she had money to pay us,” he said. “You gave me, what, hundred a night for five nights, plus the extra yard for tonight” — I’d given him a bonus for combat duty — “is what, six bills? And how much are you getting, if you don’t mind me asking?”

I admitted I wasn’t getting paid, and told him when he pressed that his wages had come out of my pocket. He asked if she was family. I said no, and he frowned and asked if I was sleeping with her.

I said, “Jesus, Eddie.”

“Well, shit,” he said. “I mean, what are you, the March of fucking Dimes?”

“Lawyers call it ‘pro bono,’ ” I said. “Once in a while I do one for free. She’s a friend of a friend and she’s got no money and you can’t let a shitbag like that walk all over somebody that way.”

“He was a shitbag, all right.”

“So it was easier to help her out than explain why I couldn’t,” I said. “That’s all. I don’t make a habit of it.”

“Shit, I should hope not,” he said. And later, when we were on our way out, he said, “One more time, Matt. You sure you’re not poking her?”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said. “And what difference does it make?”

“Well, I was thinking I might try my luck,” he said. “But not if I’d be stepping on your toes.”

“My toes’ll be in another part of town,” I said. “But are you serious?”

“Why not?”

“Well…”

“Look,” he said, “I know she’s a pig. But she’s built nice, and she’s got those sleepy eyes. Hey, I’m not talking love affair. I’d like to do her once, that’s all.”

“Be my guest.”

“Those eyes an’ that mouth. She looks like you could get her to do anything, you know what I mean?”

I was silent for a moment. Then I said, “Just don’t touch the kid.”

“Hey,” he said. “What am I, an animal? Don’t answer that.”

“I won’t.”

“I may be an animal,” he said, “but there’s a limit.”

It wasn’t long after that that I celebrated my anniversary. Another sober year, a day at a time.

An accepted article of AA folk wisdom holds that we tend to experience a lot of anxiety around the anniversary of our last drink, and I suppose it’s generally true. I’d be hard put to say how I felt this time around, and it seemed to me that I had more things to blame it on than my anniversary.

We celebrated the occasion. I qualified at an open meeting at a senior center on Ninth Avenue, and Elaine attended and got to hear me tell my story, and not for the first time. Afterward we went out for dinner with Jim and Beverly Faber.

“You’ll see,” Jim said. “It sneaks up on you. One of these days you’ll wake up and realize you’ve got Long-Term Sobriety.”

“I’ll probably have serenity, too,” I said.

“I don’t know about that. But you might actually have enough time so that you can say you’ve been sober ‘a few twenty-four hours.’ ”

“Never happen.”

Some of the old-timers talk like that. I know a few who never acknowledge their own anniversaries, let alone celebrate the occasion. Just another day, they say, and maybe they’re right.

Elaine and I went back to her place after dinner. We sat up talking for a while, then went to bed and made love. I was just about asleep, just slipping over the edge, and then something woke me. I don’t know what it was. Elaine was lying on her side, facing away from me, her breathing slow and regular. I lay there, not wanting to move for fear of waking her. I hoped I’d drift off, but eventually I had to give up and go in the other room.

I sat on the couch with the lights off and tried to get rid of the thought that was keeping me awake. What I couldn’t stop thinking was that someday I would drink again. It seemed perfectly inevitable to me.

And maybe that’s why the old-timers don’t think in terms of years. Maybe it’s dangerous to take long views, or think long thoughts.

Every three or four days I would stop in at Grogan’s and spend some time with Ballou. I would get there late, near closing time, and we’d sit at a table and drink. Irish whiskey for him, coffee or Coke or club soda for me. The best time was when the customers were gone, and the bartender put up the chairs and swept the floor and went home. Then we’d sit there with all the lights off but one and tell stories and share silences.

He liked the story about my pro bono work in Chelsea.

“You have to hurt the man,” he said. “If you’re not inclined to kill him — and you didn’t want to kill him, did you?”

“No.”

“It’s kill them or throw the fear of God into them, and with some of them killing’s the easier. You can hurt your man and throw a good scare into him, and then he gets drunk or takes some fucking drug and there’s no fear in him. Do you know what I mean?”

“He forgets.”

“That’s it exactly. He forgets that he’s afraid of you. It slips his fucking mind. So you must hurt him badly enough that he simply cannot forget it, he’d sooner forget his own name.”

The words echoed in the still air. In the silence that followed I wondered if it wasn’t simpler to kill, simpler and more certain. Especially if you were a man who killed easily, a man to whom it was second nature. I looked at my friend Mick Ballou, of whom I was uncommonly fond, and thought of another man of whom I had not been fond at all. The silence stretched, and I kept my night thoughts to myself.

When the night ran long, more often than not he’d urge me to join him at mass. He liked to close out the night at the eight o’clock mass at St. Bernard’s on Fourteenth Street. His father had attended that mass every morning, cloaked in his white butcher’s apron, kneeling in the little side chapel, receiving communion before he went off to wield his cleaver a block away.

Mick had his father’s old apron, and he always wore it when he went to mass. He still owned the old man’s cleaver, too, but he left that home. His father had begun each day at the butchers’ mass; Mick would get up from his knees and go off to bed — in one of several apartments around town with a name other than his own on the deed or lease, at the farm upstate, or on the old leather couch in his office at Grogan’s. And, unlike his father, he didn’t ordinarily take communion.

Once, though, we had both stepped up to the altar, had in turn taken the wafer. He’d had the cleaver with him earlier that night, and had cut fresh meat with it. We had both of us bloodied our aprons before standing together in a singular act of sacrilege or piety, as you prefer.

Had my old friend put fresh blood on that apron?

Come to mass with me, he’d urge me now, as the night turned to morning. Not tonight, I’d always say. Another time, perhaps, but not tonight.

Elaine stopped going to her class.

One night we were at dinner and I realized that she was supposed to be in a classroom. I started to say something and she stopped me. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I dropped the course.”

“Why?”

“Except I didn’t do anything as formal as drop it. I just stopped going. When you’re not taking these things for credit there’s no point in withdrawing formally. That would be like sending a certified letter to Channel Thirteen telling them you were about to turn off Nova. Why bother? You can just click the remote and watch Roseanne like the rest of America.”

I asked her how come she didn’t want to go anymore.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Because it’s bullshit,” she said. “Because I’m such a cliché, another old broad with time on her hands and nothing to do with it, I’m like the lilies of the field, I don’t toil and I don’t spin, and what fucking good am I?”

“I thought you enjoyed the classes.”

“They’re not my life.”

“No.”

“They can’t be my life. I don’t have a life. That’s the problem.”

I didn’t know what to say, what to suggest. And, while I was trying to think of something, her mood changed. It was as if she’d hit a button on her own personal remote and switched herself to another channel.

“Enough of that,” she said. “No long faces, no soul-searching in public places. People like to see you smile. At least that’s what they taught us in Call Girl School.”

Every few days I would pick up the phone and call Lisa. Sometimes I called her in the afternoon, sometimes late at night. She was almost always home. I would ask if I could come over. She would always tell me to come.

After a while she changed the message on her machine, replacing Glenn’s final phrases with some equally bland lines of her own. My first reaction, once I’d realized that I hadn’t dialed a wrong number, was one of relief that I wouldn’t have to listen to that voice from the spirit world anymore, wouldn’t have to hear the man out before I got to speak with his wife.

But the next time I heard her message I could hear his voice along with it, intoning lines from “Flanders Fields.”

I never saw her outside of the apartment, never called her to talk, never took her downstairs for a cup of coffee or a bite to eat. I would go over there, early or late. She might be wearing anything — jeans and a sweatshirt, a skirt and sweater, a nightgown. We would talk. She told me about growing up in White Bear Lake, and about the way her father had started coming to her bed when she was nine or ten. He did everything but put it inside her. That would be wrong, he told her.

I told her war stories, sketched word portraits of some of the characters I’d known over the years, the unusual specimens I’d encountered on either side of the law. That way I could hold up my end of the conversation without revealing very much of myself, which was fine with me.

And we would go to bed.

One afternoon, with a Patsy Cline record playing in the background, she asked me what I figured we were doing. Just being together, I suggested.

“No,” she said. “You know what I mean. What’s the point? Why are you here?”

“Everybody’s got to be someplace.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are. I don’t have any answers. I’m here because I want to be here, but I don’t know why that is.”

Patsy was singing about faded love.

“I hardly leave this apartment,” Lisa said. “I sit at the window and look at New Jersey. I could be out making the rounds, showing my book to art directors, calling the people I know, trying to get some work. Tomorrow, I tell myself. Next week, next month. After the first of the year. What the hell, everybody knows there’s no work now. The economy’s a mess. Everybody knows that.”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been looking for work, so how do I know it’s not out there? But how can I work up any enthusiasm for the struggle when I’ve got all that money just sitting there?”

“If you’re not under any pressure—”

“I could be doing my own work,” she said. “But I don’t do that either. I sit around. I look at TV. I watch the sun go down. I wait for you to call. I hope you won’t call, but that’s what I’m waiting for. For you to call.”

I waited in similar fashion, waited for my own action, to call or not to call. I won’t call her today, I would decide. And sometimes I’d stick to my decision. And sometimes I wouldn’t.

“Why do you come over here, Matt?”

“I don’t know.”

“What am I, do you figure? Am I a drug? Am I a bottle of booze?”

“Maybe.”

“My father drank. I know I told you that.”

“Yes.”

“The other day when you kissed me I had the sense that there was something missing, and I realized what it was. It was the smell of whiskey on your breath. We don’t need a psychiatrist to figure that one out, do we?”

I didn’t say anything. I remember our faded love, sang Patsy Cline.

“So I guess that’s what’s in it for me,” she said. “I get to have Daddy in bed with me, and I don’t have to worry that Mommy’ll hear us because she’s all the way across town. And he wouldn’t put it in. He thought it was a sin.”

“So do I.”

“You do?”

I nodded. “But I do it anyway,” I said.

Later that same day she talked about her late husband. We never talked about Elaine, I had ruled out that topic of conversation, but I couldn’t presume to tell her I didn’t want to hear about him either.

“I wonder if he expected this,” she said.

“This?”

“Us. I think he did.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know. He admired you, I know that much.”

“He thought I could be useful.”

“It was more than that. He put it in my mind to call you. You called me, I realize that, but I was going to call you. I remember he told me once that if a person was ever in a jam, you’d be a good person to call. He said it with a certain intensity, too, as if he wanted to make sure I would remember later. It’s as if he was telling me to call you if anything ever happened to him.”

“You could be reading more into his words than he put there.”

“I don’t think so,” she said, burrowing into the crook of my arm. “I think that was exactly what he meant. In fact I’m surprised there wasn’t a note in the strongbox, along with the money. ‘Call Matt Scudder, he’ll tell you exactly what to do.’ ” Her hand reached for me. “Well? Aren’t you going to tell me exactly what to do?”

And when I left her apartment that day I walked a block to Eleventh Avenue and down to the corner where he died. I stood there while the lights changed several times, then walked on down to DeWitt Clinton Park to pay my respects to the Captain. I read McCrae’s misquoted words:

Had I broken faith, with Glenn Holtzmann, with George Sadecki? Was there more I could do, and was my inaction keeping their spirits restless?

What action could I take? And how could I bring myself to take it, if I was afraid of where it might lead?