Time to Murder and Create

Chapter 15

He came at me in a rush, the knife held underhand and arcing upward, and if it hadn’t been raining he would have had me cold. But I got a break. He lost his footing on the wet pavement and had to check the knife thrust in order to regain his balance, and that gave me time to react enough to duck back from him and set myself for his next try.

I didn’t have to wait long. I was up on the balls of my feet, arms loose at my sides, a tingling sensation in my hands and a pulse working in my temple. He rocked from side to side, his broad shoulders hinting and feinting, and then he came at me. I’d been watching his feet and I was ready. I dodged to the left, pivoted, threw a foot at his kneecap. And missed, but bounced back and squared off again before he could set himself for another lunge.

He began circling to his left, circling like a prizefighter stalking an opponent, and when he’d completed a half circle and had his back to the street, I figured out why. He wanted to corner me so that I couldn’t make a run for it.

He needn’t have bothered. He was young and trim and athletic and outdoorsy. I was too old and carried too much weight, and for too many years the only exercise I had got was bending my elbow. If I tried to run, all I’d manage to do would be to give him my back for a target.

He leaned forward and began transferring the knife from hand to hand. That looks good in the movies, but a really good man with a knife doesn’t waste his time that way. Very few people are really ambidextrous. He had started off with the knife in his right hand, and I knew it would be in his right hand when he made his next pass, so all he did with his hand-to-hand routine was give me breathing space and let me tune in on his timing.

He also gave me a little hope. If he’d waste energy with games like that, he wasn’t all that great with a knife, and if he was amateur enough I had a chance.

I said, “I don’t have much money on me, but you’re welcome to it.”

“Don’t want your money, Scudder. Just you.”

Not a voice I’d heard before, and certainly not a New York voice. I wondered where Prager had found him. After having met Stacy, I was fairly sure he wasn’t her type.

“You’re making a mistake,” I said.

“It’s your mistake, man. And you already made it.”

“Henry Prager killed himself yesterday.”

“Yeah? I’ll have to send him some flowers.” Back and forth with the knife, knees tensing, relaxing. “I’m gonna cut you up pretty, man.”

“I don’t think so.”

He laughed. I could see his eyes now by the light of the street lamps, and I knew what Billie meant. He had killer eyes, psychopath eyes.

I said, “I could take you if we both had knives.”

“Sure you could, man.”

“I could take you with an umbrella.” And what I really wished I had was an umbrella or a walking stick. Anything that gives you a little reach is a better defense against a knife than another knife. Better than anything short of a gun.

I wouldn’t have minded a gun just then, either. When I left the police department, one immediate benefit was that I no longer had to carry a gun every waking moment. It was very important to me at the time not to carry a gun. Even so, for months I’d felt naked without one. I had carried one for fifteen years, and you sort of get used to the weight.

If I’d had a gun now, I’d have had to use it. I could tell that about him. The sight of a gun wouldn’t make him drop the knife. He was determined to kill me, and nothing would keep him from trying. Where had Prager found him? He wasn’t professional talent, certainly. Lots of people hire amateur killers, of course, and unless Prager had some mob connections I didn’t know about, he wouldn’t be likely to have access to any of the pro hit men.

Unless—

That almost started me on a whole new train of thought, and the one thing I couldn’t afford to do was let my mind wander. I came back to reality in a hurry when I saw his feet change their shuffling pattern, and I was ready when he closed in on me. I had my moves figured and I had him timed, and I started my kick just as he was getting into his thrust, and I was lucky enough to get his wrist. He lost his balance but managed not to take a spill, and while I managed to jar the knife loose from his hand, it didn’t sail far enough to do me much good. He caught his balance and reached for the knife, and got it before my foot did. He scrambled backward almost to the edge of the curb, and before I could jump him he had the knife at his side and I had to back off.

“Now you’re dead, man.”

“You talk a good game. I almost had you that time.”

“I think I’ll cut you in the belly, man. Let you go out nice and slow.”

The more I kept talking, the more time he’d take between rushes. And the more time he took, the better chance there was that someone would join the party before the guest of honor wound up on the end of the knife. Cabs cruised by periodically, but not many of them, and the weather had cut the pedestrian traffic down to nothing. A patrol car would have been welcome, but you know what they say about cops, they’re never around when you want ’em.

He said, “Come on, Scudder. Try and take me.”

“I’ve got all night.”

He rubbed his thumb across the blade of the knife. “It’s sharp,” he said.

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Oh, I’ll prove it to you, man.”

He backed off a little, moving in the same shuffling gait, and I knew what was coming. He was going to commit himself to one headlong rush, and that meant it wouldn’t be a fencing match any more, because if he didn’t stab me on the first lunge he’d wind up tumbling me to the ground and we’d wrestle around there until only one of us got up. I watched his feet and avoided getting taken in by the shoulder fakes, and when he came I was ready.

I dropped to one knee and went way down after he’d already committed himself, and his knife hand went over my shoulder and I came up under him, my arms around his legs, and in one motion I spun and heaved. I got my legs into it and threw him as high and as far as I could, knowing he’d drop the knife when he landed, knowing I’d be on him in time to kick it away and put a toe into the side of his head.

But he never did drop the knife. He went high into the air and his legs kicked at nothing and he turned lazily in midair like an Olympic diver, but when he came down there was no water in the swimming pool. He had one hand extended to break the fall, but he didn’t land right. The impact of his head on the concrete was like that of a melon dropped from a third-floor window. I was fairly sure he’d have a skull fracture, and that can be enough to kill you.

I went over and looked at him and knew it didn’t matter if his skull was fractured or not, because he had landed on the back of his head while falling forward, and he was now in a position you can’t achieve unless your neck is broken. I looked for a pulse, not expecting to find one, and I couldn’t get a beat. I rolled him over and put my ear to his chest and didn’t hear anything. He still had the knife in his hand, but it wouldn’t do him any good now.

“Holy shit.”

I looked up. It was one of the neighborhood Greeks who did his drinking at Spiro and Antares. We would nod at each other now and then. I didn’t know his name.

“I saw what happened,” he said. “Bastard was tryin’ to kill you.”

“That’s just what you can help me explain to the police.”

“Shit, no. I didn’t see nothin’, you know what I mean?”

I said, “I don’t care what you mean. How hard do you think it’ll be for me to find you if I want to? Go back into Spiro’s and pick up the phone and dial nine one one. You don’t even need a dime to do it. Tell ’em you want to report a homicide in the Eighteenth Precinct and give ’em the address.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“You don’t have to know anything. All you have to do is what I just told you.”

“Shit, there’s a knife in his hand, anybody can see it was self-defense. He’s dead, huh? You said homicide, and the way his neck’s bent. Can’t walk the fuckin’ streets any more, the whole fuckin’ city’s a fuckin’ jungle.”

“Make the call.”

“Look—”

“You dumb son of bitch, I’ll give you more aggravation than you’d ever believe. You want cops driving you crazy for the rest of your life? Go make the call.”

He went.

I kneeled down next to the body and gave it a fast but thorough frisk. What I wanted was a name, but there was nothing on him to identify him. No wallet, just a money clip in the shape of a dollar sign. Sterling silver, it looked like. He had a little over three hundred dollars. I put the ones and fives back into the clip and returned it to his pocket. I stuffed the rest into my own pocket. I had more of a use for it than he did.

Then I stood there waiting for the cops to show and wondering if my little friend had called them. While I was waiting, a couple of cabs stopped from time to time to ask what had happened and if they could help. Nobody’d taken the trouble while the Marlboro man was waving the knife at me, but now that he was dead everybody wanted to live dangerously. I shooed them all away and waited some more, and finally a black-and-white turned at Fifty-seventh Street and ignored the fact that Ninth Avenue runs one way downtown. They cut the siren and trotted over to where I was standing over the body. Two men in plainclothes; I didn’t recognize either of them.

I explained briefly who I was and what had happened. The fact that I was an ex-cop myself didn’t hurt a bit. Another car pulled up while I was talking, with a lab crew, and then an ambulance.

To the lab crew I said, “I hope you’re going to print him. Not after you get him to the morgue. Take a set of prints now.”

They didn’t ask who I was to be giving orders. I guess they assumed I was a cop and that I probably ranked them pretty well. The plainclothes guy I’d been talking to raised his eyebrows at me.

“Prints?”

I nodded. “I want to know who he is, and he wasn’t carrying any I.D.”

“You bothered to look?”

“I bothered to look.”

“Not supposed to, you know.”

“Yes, I know. But I wanted to know who would take the trouble to kill me.”

“Just a mugger, no?”

I shook my head. “He was following me around the other day. And he was waiting for me tonight, and he called me by name. Your average mugger doesn’t research his victims all that carefully.”

“Well, they’re printing him, so we’ll see what we come up with. Why would anybody want to kill you?”

I let the question go by. I said, “I don’t know if he’s local or not. I’m sure somebody’ll have a sheet on him, but he may never have taken a fall in New York.”

“Well, we’ll take a look and see what we got. I don’t think he’s a virgin, do you?”

“Not likely.”

“Washington’ll have him if we don’t. Want to come over to the station? Probably a few of the boys you know from the old days.”

“Sure,” I said. “Gagliardi still making the coffee?”

His face clouded. “He died,” he said. “Just about two years ago. Heart attack, he was just sitting at his desk and he bought it.”

“I never heard. That’s a shame.”

“Yeah, he was all right. Made good coffee, too.”