Lawrence Block - Even the Wicked

When I wasn’t at a meeting I was walking around town, or at a concert or a museum with Elaine, or sitting in the park or in a coffee shop with TJ. I spent a certain amount of time thinking about Will and the people he’d killed, but there was nothing in the news to add fresh fuel to that particular fire, so it burned less brightly with every passing day. The tabloids did what they could to keep the story prominent, but there was only so much they could do, and yet another indiscretion in the British royal family helped nudge Will off the front page.

One afternoon I went into a church. Years ago, when I turned in my shield and left my wife and kids, I found myself dropping into churches all the time, though almost never when there was a service going on. I guess I found some measure of peace there. If nothing else I found silence, often an elusive commodity in New York. I got in the habit of lighting candles for people who’d died, and once you start that you’re stuck, because it’s a growth industry. People keep dying.

I got in another habit, too. I began tithing, giving a tenth of whatever money came my way to whatever poor box I saw next. I was ecumenical about it, but the Catholics got most of my trade because they worked longer hours. Their churches were more apt to be open when I was looking for a beneficiary for my largesse.

I’ve thought about it, and I can’t say for sure what the tithing was all about. During those years I didn’t keep records or pay taxes, or even file a return, so it’s possible I thought of my tithe as a voluntary tax. It couldn’t have amounted to very much, anyway, because I went long stretches without working, and when I worked I never made a great deal of money. My rent always got paid on time and my tab at Armstrong’s got settled sooner or later, and when I could manage it I sent money to Anita and the boys. But the sums involved were small, and you wouldn’t see any priests riding around in Lincolns on ten percent of my gross.

When I got sober I began spending my time not in the sanctuaries of churches but in their basements, where my contribution when they passed the basket was limited by tradition to a dollar. I rarely lit a candle, and I stopped tithing altogether, though I could no more tell you why than I could explain having begun the practice in the first place.

“You cleared up a little,” my sponsor suggested, “and you realized you had more use for the money than the church did.”

I don’t know that that’s it. For a while I gave away a lot of money on the street, hi essence tithing to the homeless population of New York. (Maybe I was just cutting out the middleman, making a collective poor box of all those empty coffee cups and outstretched hands.) That habit, too, ran its course, perhaps because I was daunted by the ever-increasing profusion of cups and hands. Compassion fatigue set in. Unable to stuff a dollar bill into every beseeching cup or hand, I stopped it altogether; like most of my fellow New Yorkers, I got so I didn’t even notice them anymore.

Things change. Sober, I found I had to do many of the chickenshit things that everybody else has to do. I had to keep records, had to pay taxes. For years I charged clients arbitrary flat fees and saved myself the aggravation of itemizing my expenses, but you can’t work that way for attorneys, and now that I have a PI license much of my work comes from attorneys. I still work the old way for clients who are as casual as I am, but more often than not I save receipts and keep track of my expenses, just like everybody else.

And Elaine and I give away a tenth of our income. Mine comes from detective work, of course, and hers is primarily from her real estate investments, although her shop is beginning to turn a small profit. She keeps the books — thank God — and writes the checks, and our few dollars find their way to the dozen or so charities and cultural institutions on our list. It is, to be sure, a more regimented way of doing things. I feel more like a solid citizen and less like a free spirit, and I do not always prefer it this way. But neither do I spend much time chafing at the collar.

The church I went into on this occasion was on a side street in the west forties. I didn’t notice the name of it, and couldn’t tell you if I’d ever dropped in there before.

I was lucky to find it open. While my own use of churches has diminished in recent years, so too has their accessibility. It seems to me that the Catholic churches, at least, used to be open the whole day long, from early in the morning until well into the evening. Now their sanctuaries are often locked up between services. I suppose that’s a response to crime or homelessness or both. I suppose an unlocked church is an invitation, not only to the occasional citizen looking for a moment’s peace, but to all of those who’d curl up and nap in the pews or steal the candlesticks from the altar.

This church was open and seemingly unattended, and it was a throwback in another way as well. The candles at the little side altars were real ones, actual wax candles that burned with an open flame. Lots of churches have switched over to electrified altars. You drop your quarter in the slot and a flame-shaped bulb goes on and stays on for your quarter’s worth of time. It’s like a parking meter, and if you stay too long they tow away your soul.

It’s not my church, so I can’t see that I’ve got any rights in the matter, but when did that sort of logic ever keep an alcoholic from nursing a resentment? I’m sure the electric candles are cost-efficient, and I don’t imagine they’re any harder for God to overlook than the real thing. And maybe I’m just a spiritual Luddite, hating change for its own sake, resisting an improvement in the candle-lighting dodge even as I resisted TJ’s arguments for a computer. If I’d been alive at the time, I probably would have been every bit as pissed off when they switched from oil lamps to candles. “Nothing’s the same anymore,” you’d have heard me grumbling. “What kind of results can you expect from melting wax?”

I wouldn’t have wasted a quarter on an electric flame. But this church had the real thing, with three or four little candles lit. I looked at them, and my mind summoned up an image of Adrian Whitfield. I couldn’t think what good it could do him to burn a candle on his behalf, but I found myself recalling Elaine’s words. What could it hoit? So I slipped a dollar bill in the slot, lit one candle from the flame of another, and let myself think about the man.

I got a funny montage of images.

First I was seeing Adrian Whitfield at his apartment a few hours after he’d learned about Will’s letter. He was pouring a drink even as he proclaimed himself a nondrinker, then explaining, talking about the drinks he’d had already that day.

Then I saw him sprawled on the carpet with Kevin Dahlgren hunkered down beside him, picking up the glass he’d dropped, sniffing at it. I hadn’t been there to see it, had only heard Dahlgren’s account of the moment, but the image came to me as clearly as if I’d witnessed it myself. I could even smell what Dahlgren had smelled, the odor of bitter almonds superimposed upon the aroma of good malt whiskey. I’d never smelled that combination in my life, but my imagination was inventive enough to furnish it quite vividly.

The next flash I got was of Marty McGraw. He was sitting in the topless joint where I’d met him, a shot glass clutched in one hand, a beer glass in the other. There was a belligerent expression on his face, and he was saying something but I couldn’t make it out. The reek of cheap whiskey trailed up at me from the shot glass, the reek of stale beer from the other, and the two were united on his breath.

Adrian again, talking into a telephone. “I’m going to let the genie out,” he said. “First one today.”