Time to Murder and Create

Chapter 13

I went to a bar, but stayed only long enough to throw down two double shots, one right after the other. There was a time factor involved. Bars remain open until four in the morning, but most churches close up shop by six or seven. I walked over to Lexington and found a church I couldn’t remember having been to before. I didn’t notice the name of it. Our Lady of Perpetual Bingo, probably.

They were having some sort of service, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. I lit a few candles and stuffed a couple of dollars in the slot, then took a seat in the rear and silently repeated three names over and over. Jacob Jablon, Henry Prager, Estrellita Rivera, three names, three candles for three corpses.

During the worst times after I shot and killed Estrellita Rivera, I had been unable to keep my mind from going over and over what had happened that night. I kept trying to repeal time and change the ending, like an antic projectionist reversing the film and drawing the bullet back into the barrel of the gun. In the new version that I wanted to superimpose on reality, all my shots were on target. There were no ricochets, or if there were they spent themselves harmlessly, or Estrellita spent an extra minute picking out peppermints in the candy store and wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time, or—

There was a poem I’d had to read in high school, and it had nagged at me from somewhere in the back of my mind until one day I went to the library and ran it down. Four lines from Omar Khayyam:

I had tried hard to blame myself for Estrellita Rivera, but in a certain sense it wouldn’t stick. I had been drinking, certainly, but not heavily, and my overall marksmanship that night could not be faulted. And it was proper for me to shoot at the robbers. They were armed, they were fleeing from one killing already, and there were no civilians in the line of fire. A bullet ricocheted. Those things happen.

Part of the reason I left the force was that those things happen and I did not want to be in a position where I could do wrong things for right reasons. Because I had decided that, while it might be true that the end does not justify the means, neither do the means justify the end.

And now I had deliberately programmed Henry Prager to kill himself.

I hadn’t seen it that way, of course. But I couldn’t see that it made too much difference. I had begun by pressuring him into attempting a second murder, something he would never have done otherwise. He had killed Spinner, but if I had simply destroyed Spinner’s envelope I’d have left Prager with no need ever to kill again. But I’d given him reason to try, and he had tried and failed, and then he’d been backed into a corner and chosen, impulsively or deliberately, to kill himself.

I could have destroyed that envelope. I had no contract with Spinner. I’d agreed only to open the envelope if I failed to hear from him. I could have given away the whole three thousand instead of a tenth of it. I had needed the money, but not that badly.

But Spinner had made a bet, and he’d turned out a winner. He had spelled it all out: “Why I think you’ll follow through is something I noticed about you a long time ago, namely that you happen to think there is a difference between murder and other crimes. I am the same. I have done bad things all my life but never killed anybody and never would. I have known people who have killed which I’ve known for a fact or a rumor and would never get close to them. It is the way I am and I think that you are that way too…”

I could have done nothing, and then Henry Prager would not have wound up in a body bag. But there is a difference between murder and other crimes, and the world is a worse place for the murderers it allows to walk unpunished, as Henry Prager would have walked had I done nothing.

There should have been another way. Just as the bullet should not have ricocheted into a little girl’s eye. And try telling all that to the moving finger.

Mass was still going on when I left. I walked a couple of blocks, not paying much attention to where I was, and then I stopped at a Blarney Stone and took communion.

It was a long night.

The bourbon kept refusing to do its job. I moved around a lot, because every bar I hit had one person in it whose company put me on edge. I kept seeing him in the mirror and taking him with me wherever I went. The activity and the nervous energy probably burned off a lot of the alcohol before it had a chance to get to me, and the time I spent walking around was time I could have more profitably spent sitting in one place and drinking.

The kind of bars I chose had something to do with keeping me relatively sober. I usually drink in dark quiet places where a shot is two ounces, three if they know you. Tonight I was hitting Blarney Stones and White Roses. The prices were considerably lower but the shot glasses were small, and when you paid for an ounce that’s what you got, and even so it was apt to be about 30 percent water.

At one place on Broadway they had the basketball game on. I watched the last quarter on a big color set. The Knicks were down by a point when the quarter started, and wound up dropping it by twelve or thirteen. That was the fourth game for the Celtics.

The guy next to me said, “And next year they lose Lucas and DeBusschere, and Reed’s knees are still gonna be shit, and Clyde can’t do it all, so where the fuck are we?”

I nodded. What he said sounded reasonable to me.

“Even at the end of three, dead even for three periods, and they got Cowens and What’s-his-name with five fouls, and then they can’t find the basket. I mean, they don’t fucking try, you know?”

“Must be my fault,” I said.

“Huh?”

“They started falling apart when I started watching. It must be my fault.”

He looked me over and backed off a step. He said, “Easy, guy. I didn’t mean nothing.”

But he’d read me wrong. I’d been absolutely serious.

I wound up at Armstrong’s, where they pour perfectly fine drinks, but by then I’d lost my taste for it. I sat in the corner with a cup of coffee. It was a quiet night, and Trina had time to join me.

“I kept a weather eye open,” she said, “but saw of him neither hide nor hair.”

“How’s that?”

“The cowboy. Just my cute little way of saying he hasn’t been around tonight. Wasn’t I supposed to keep watch, like a good Junior G-Man?”

“Oh, the Marlboro man. I thought I saw him tonight.”

“Here?”

“No, earlier. I’ve been seeing a lot of shadows tonight.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey.” She covered my hand with one of hers. “What’s the matter, baby?”

“I keep finding new people to light candles for.”

“I don’t get you. You’re not drunk, are you, Matt?”

“No, but not for lack of trying. I have had better days.” I sipped coffee, put the cup down on the checkered cloth. I took out Spinner’s silver dollar — correction, my dollar, I’d bought and paid for it — and I gave it a spin. I said, “Last night somebody tried to kill me.”

“God! Around here?”

“A few doors down the block.”

“No wonder you’re—”

“No, that’s not it. This afternoon I got even. I killed a man.” I thought she would take her hand from atop mine, but she didn’t. “I didn’t exactly kill him. He stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. A little Spanish gun, they truck them in by the ton from the Carolinas.”

“Why do you say you killed him?”

“Because I put him in a room and the gun was the only door out of it. I boxed him in.”

She looked at her watch. “Fuck it,” she said. “I can leave early for a change. If Jimmie wants to sue me for half an hour, then the hell with him.” She reached behind her neck with both hands to unfasten her apron. The movement emphasized the swell of her breasts.

She said, “Like to walk me home, Matt?”

We had used each other a few times over the months to keep the lonelies away. We liked each other in and out of bed, and both of us had the vital security of knowing it could never lead to anything.

“Matt?”

“I couldn’t do you much good tonight, kid.”

“You could keep me from getting mugged on the way home.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, Mr. Detective, but you don’t know what I mean.” She touched my cheek with her forefinger. “I wouldn’t let you near me tonight anyway. You need a shave.” Her face softened into a smile. “I was offering a little coffee and company,” she said. “I think you could use it.”

“Maybe I could.”

“Plain old coffee and company.”

“All right.”

“Not tea and sympathy, nothing like that.”

“Just coffee and company.”

“Uh-huh. Now tell me it’s the best offer you’ve had all day.”

“It is,” I said. “But that’s not saying a hell of a lot.”

She made good coffee, and she managed to come up with a pint of Harper’s to flavor it with. By the time I was done talking, the pint had gone from mostly full to mostly empty.

I told her most of it. I left out anything that would make Ethridge or Huysendahl identifiable, and I didn’t spell out Henry Prager’s smarmy little secret. I didn’t mention his name, either, although she figured to dope it out for herself if she bothered to read the morning papers.

When I was finished she sat there for a few minutes, head tilted to one side, eyes half lidded, smoke drifting upward from her cigarette. At length she said she didn’t see how I could have done things differently.

“Because suppose you managed to let him know that you weren’t a blackmailer, Matt. Suppose you got a little more evidence together and went to him. You would have exposed him, wouldn’t you?”

“One way or another.”

“He killed himself because he was afraid of exposure, and that was while he thought you were a blackmailer. If he knew you were going to hand him over to the cops, wouldn’t he have done the same thing?”

“He might not have had the chance.”

“Well, maybe he was better off having the chance. Nobody forced him to take it, it was his decision.”

I thought it over. “There’s still something wrong.”

“What?”

“I don’t exactly know. Something doesn’t fit together the way it should.”

“You just have to have something to feel guilty about.” I guess the line hit home enough to show in my face, because she blanched. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Matt, I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I was just, you know, being cute.”

“Many a true word is et cetera.” I stood up. “It’ll look better in the morning. Things generally do.”

“Don’t leave.”

“I had the coffee and company, and thanks for both. Now I’d better get on home.”

She was shaking her head. “Stay over.”

“I told you before, Trina—”

“I know you did. I don’t particularly want to fuck either, as a matter of fact. But I really don’t want to sleep alone.”

“I don’t know if I can sleep.”

“Then hold me until I fall asleep. Please, baby?”

We went to bed together and held each other. Maybe the bourbon finally got around to working, or maybe I was more exhausted than I’d realized, but I fell asleep like that, holding her.