The Devil Knows You’re Dead

Chapter 6

“So I said I’d look into it,” I told Elaine. “He put a thousand dollars on the table and I picked it up. Don’t ask me why.”

“Compassion,” she said. “A sense of social responsibility. The need to see justice done.”

“What else could it be?”

“Maybe you wanted the money.”

“I was taught to grab what came my way,” I allowed, “but it’s a hard way to turn a buck. You work overtime trying to give the client his money’s worth and walk away feeling fraudulent because you haven’t accomplished anything. The fact that there was nothing to accomplish ought to carry some weight, but somehow it doesn’t.”

“You think George did it?”

“I think so, yes. For all the reasons I gave Tom.”

“But there’s room for doubt.”

“Not much room,” I said. “Not much doubt.”

We had dinner in the Village and hit a couple of jazz clubs on Bleecker Street, then caught a cab back to her place. In the morning she made a pot of strong coffee, toasted a couple of poppy-seed bagels, and cut a papaya in half. Sunlight streamed in through the living-room window, but Elaine, reading the Times we’d picked up on the way home, informed me it wouldn’t last. Cloud cover would settle in by midday, with a strong probability of showers in the late afternoon and evening. “Clearing tomorrow,” she said. “A lot of good that does me. Tomorrow’s Monday. The museum’s closed.”

She was taking another photography course, this one called “The Urban Landscape Through the Camera’s Eye.” There was a display uptown at the Museum of the City of New York and she was supposed to see it before her next class.

“I guess I’ll get rained on,” she said. “What about you?”

“I think I’ll go walk around my neighborhood.”

“I figured you might. Hell’s Kitchen or Clinton?”

“Maybe a little of each. I’ll wear out some shoe leather and start earning the thousand dollars Tom Sadecki gave me. And I want to get to a meeting, and then tonight I’ve got my usual Sunday dinner date with Jim Faber.”

“Well, I might go to the gym,” she said, “or I might say the hell with it and go straight to the museum. Then I’ll come home and plant myself in front of the television set. How come a television binge doesn’t seem nearly as degenerate when the programs are British?”

“It’s the way they talk.”

“It must be. American Gladiators would feel like an edifying experience if they got Alistair Cooke to introduce it. Call me tonight, if you get the chance, or I’ll talk to you in the morning. And say hello to Jim for me.”

I said I would. I somehow failed to mention my two o’clock date with an old girlfriend.

Ages ago, when phone calls cost a dime, you made them from little glassed-in booths with doors that closed against traffic noise and weather. Maybe it’s still that way in other parts of the country, but in New York the phone booths gradually evolved out of existence, providing less and less shelter with each model change. Now all you get is a phone mounted on a post, and one of these days they’ll get rid of the post.

The phone I was interested in was on the southwest corner of Eleventh Avenue and West Fifty-fifth Street, and I knew it was the one Glenn Holtzmann had been using on the night he died because it was the only one around. It was about ten-thirty by the time I walked across town from Elaine’s. I looked over at the phone while I waited for the light to change, then crossed the street and took the receiver off the hook. I listened to the dial tone and put it back.

For all the years I’d lived at the Northwestern, I had spent precious little time on Eleventh Avenue. This stretch of it ran to auto showrooms and warehouses, building-supply outlets and collision repair shops. They were all closed now, as they would have been on the night of the shooting.

I walked around some, trying to get the feel of the crime scene. There was nothing to identify it as such, no chalk outline to mark where the body had lain, no yellow plastic Crime Scene tape.

No visible bloodstains.

I could picture him standing there, lifting the receiver, digging in his pocket for a quarter, dropping the coin in the slot. Then something makes him turn — a sound, perhaps, or movement glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. He starts to turn, and even as he’s turning a shot rings out, and he’s hit.

The bullet takes him on the right side below the rib cage. It pierces the liver and severs the portal vein, the large blood vessel that services that organ.

A mortal wound, in all likelihood, but he won’t live long enough to die of it. He reels toward the shooter, who fires twice more from point-blank range. One slug glances off a rib and plows through muscle tissue, doing little serious damage. The other finds the heart and causes virtually instantaneous death.

He’s on the ground now, sprawled full length on the sidewalk with his feet at the base of the post on which the phone is mounted. There’s a fourth and final shot, a coup de grâce, fired into the back of his neck. It’s as loud as the others, but he doesn’t hear it.

Hard to say how long he lay there, or how much blood spilled out of him. Dead bodies don’t bleed much, as a rule, and the heart wound would have brought death quickly, but I couldn’t guess how much blood might have gouted from the liver wound before the heart stopped its pumping. In any event he lay there, first bleeding and then not bleeding, until someone picked up the dangling receiver and phoned it in.

Tom Sadecki had given me the address of the building where his brother rented a room. It was on Fifty-sixth just off the avenue, a red-brick old-law tenement with an identical building on its right and a rubble-strewn vacant lot on its left. A flight of steps led down to the basement entrance. The door at the bottom of the stairs had a glass window set at eye level, but I couldn’t see anything through it. The door was locked. It didn’t look as though it would be terribly hard to force it, but I didn’t try. I don’t know that I would have wanted to go in even if it had been unlocked.

I went back to the corner of Fifty-fifth and Eleventh, got out my notebook and made a rough sketch of the scene. There was a Honda dealership on the corner where Holtzmann was killed, a Midas Muffler franchise directly across the street. I remembered Tom Sadecki’s scenario and tried to figure out where George might have lurked in the shadows while somebody else did the shooting. I didn’t see any doorways, but there was a spot alongside the entrance to the Honda showroom where a person might have stood or crouched without being too conspicuous. There was a trash can on the corner, not ten yards from the pay phone, and others on the opposite curb and ranging alongside the muffler shop.

The sun had been shining when I left Elaine’s apartment. Clouds obscured it by the time I reached the site of the murder, and the sky kept getting darker by the minute. The temperature was dropping, too, and it occurred to me that the jacket I was wearing wasn’t going to be warm enough. I headed back to my hotel to change, and pick up an umbrella while I was at it.

But when I got to Ninth Avenue there was a bus just pulling up and I ran and caught it. Maybe the rain would hold off, I told myself. Maybe the sun would come out and warm things up again.

Sure.

It was almost twelve-thirty when I walked into a room on Houston Street, filled a Styrofoam cup with coffee, and took a couple of cookies from a chipped china plate. I found a chair, and someone stood up and read the AA preamble and introduced the speaker.

The group was mostly gay, and a lot of the sharing was about AIDS and HIV. At one-thirty we held hands and had a moment of silence, followed by the Serenity Prayer. The young man on my right said, “Do you know how they close the meetings at the agnostics’ group? They have a moment of silence, followed by another moment of silence.”

I walked down through SoHo, stopping at a pizza stand for a Sicilian slice and a Coke. Lispenard Street is just below Canal and only two blocks long, and Jan’s loft is on the fifth floor of a six-story building wedged between two larger and more modern buildings. I stepped into the vestibule and rang her bell, then went back onto the sidewalk and waited for her to open the window and throw down the key.

That’s what she’d done the night I met her, and on quite a few subsequent occasions. Then for a while I’d had a key of my own. I’d used it a final time on the afternoon I came to pick up my things. I had filled two shopping bags with my clothes and left the key on the kitchen counter, right next to the Mr. Coffee machine.

I looked up. The window opened and the key sailed out, hit the pavement, bounced, clattered, lay still. I picked it up and let myself into the building.