Lawrence Block - Even the Wicked

“So Will’s secret be safe,” he mused, “just because you don’t want to go on ‘Geraldo.’”

“I could duck most of the publicity. I could feed it to Joe and let him whisper it into the right ears. He’d find a way to make sure other people got the credit. That’s probably what I’ll do, if I do anything.”

“But you might not even do that much.”

“I might not.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s a sleeping dog,” I said, “and maybe the decent thing is to let him lie.”

“How you gonna decide?”

“By talking to people.”

“Like we doin’ now?”

“Exactly like we’re doing now,” I said. “This is part of the process.”

“Glad I helpin’.”

“I’ll go home and talk to Elaine,” I said, “and later on I’ll talk about it at a meeting. I won’t be specific, and nobody will know what I’m talking about, but it’ll help me clarify my own thoughts on the subject. And then there’s somebody else I think I’ll talk it over with.”

“Who’s that?”

“An attorney I know.”

He nodded. “Seems like don’t nobody do nothin’ without they first got to talk it over with a lawyer.”

Elaine and I had dinner at Paris Green, on Ninth Avenue, and our conversation stayed on a single topic from the portobello mushroom appetizer clear through to the cappuccino. I walked her back to the Parc Vendôme and continued on up Ninth to St. Paul’s. I got there ten minutes late, and settled into my chair just as the speaker reached that point in the story where he took his first drink. I’d missed the history of his dysfunctional family, but I could probably get along without hearing it.

During the break I helped myself to coffee and chatted with a couple of people, and when the meeting resumed I got my hand up and talked about having to make a decision. I was wonderfully vague, and no one could have had a clue what I was getting at, but that’s not atypical of AA shares. I talked about what was on my mind, and then a TV set designer talked about whether or not he was going home to Greenville for Thanksgiving, and then a woman talked about being on a date with a man who was drinking nonalcoholic beer, and how the whole thing had done a number on her head.

After we’d folded the chairs, I walked with some friends as far as the Flame, but turned down an invitation to join them for coffee, pleading a previous engagement. I headed over to Columbus Circle and rode the IRT local downtown to Christopher Street. By 10:30 I was standing on a stoop on Commerce Street, using a door knocker shaped like a lion’s head.

Commerce Street is two blocks long and off the beaten path, and it can be hard to find. I’d put in enough time at the Sixth Precinct so that I still knew my way around the Village, and I’d had occasion to get to this particular block several times in the past couple of years. Once Elaine and I had caught a play at the Cherry Lane Theater, just across the street. My other visits, like this one, were to Ray Gruliow’s town house.

I didn’t have to linger long on his stoop. He drew the door open and motioned me inside, his face bright with the smile that is his most winning feature. It was a smile that said the world was a great cosmic joke, and you and he were the only two people who were in on it.

“Matt,” he said, and clapped me on the shoulder. “There’s fresh coffee. Interested?”

“Why not?”

The coffee was strong and rich and dark, worlds removed from the bitter sludge I’d sipped out of a Styrofoam cup in the basement of St. Paul’s. I said as much and he beamed. “When I go to St. Luke’s,” he said, “I take my own coffee in a thermos jar. My sponsor says it’s my way of distancing myself from the group. I say it’s more a matter of distancing myself from a gastritis attack. What’s your opinion?”

“I agree with both of you.”

“Ever the diplomat. Now. What brings you here beside the lure of my most excellent coffee?”

“The last time we spoke,” I said, “you defended Adrian Whitfield against a charge of suicide. Do you remember?”

“Vividly. And shortly thereafter Will was good enough to send off a letter that validated my contention by claiming credit.”

I took another sip of the coffee. It was really something special.

I said, “Adrian killed himself. He wrote the letter. He wrote all those letters, he killed all those people. He was Will.”

“It could have been murder,” I said, “even if I couldn’t figure out how Will had managed to pull it off. Assume he had his ways, assume he could scale the side of the building and get in through a window, or unlock the door and disarm the burglar alarm system and reset it afterward. It was a real locked-room puzzle, though, any way you looked at it.

“But if it was suicide, the hell, what’s simpler than poisoning your own whiskey? He could have done it whenever he had a few minutes alone, and that gave him plenty of opportunity. Just uncap the bottle, pour in the cyanide crystals, and put the cap back on.”

“And be sure not to drink from that particular bottle until you’re ready to catch the bus.”

“That’s right,” I said. “But we’re back to the points you raised earlier. Why, in the absence of any kind of a financial motive, go to all that trouble to make suicide look like murder? And, motive aside, why wrap it up in a locked-room puzzle? Why make it look like an impossible murder?”

“Why?”

“So that Will would get the credit, and look good in the process. This would be Will’s last hurrah. Why not make it a good one and go out with a bang?”

He thought about it, nodded slowly. “Makes a kind of sense if he’s Will. But only if he’s Will.”

“Granted.”

“So how did you get that part? Because if it’s just a hypothesis that you dreamed up because it’s the only way to make sense out of the locked-room-murder-that-has-to-be-suicide...”

“It’s not. There’s something else that got me suspicious.”

“Oh?”

“That first night at his apartment,” I said, “he didn’t have booze on his breath.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “Why didn’t you say so earlier? Jesus, I’m surprised you didn’t arrest the son of a bitch right then and there.”

But he listened without interrupting while I explained my recollection of that first visit to Whitfield’s Park Avenue apartment. “He made a point of saying he’d been drinking when he hadn’t,” I explained. “Now why the hell would he lie about something like that? He wasn’t a heavy drinker, and he didn’t claim to be a heavy drinker, but he did drink, and he even took a drink in front of me. So why the subterfuge, why pretend to have had a couple of drinks earlier in the evening?

“I didn’t have to be able to answer that in order to conclude that he’d lied to me, and I didn’t think he’d do that without a reason. Well, what did the lie accomplish? It underscored his claim of having been really rattled by Will’s threat. What was he saying, really? Something along the lines of, ‘I’m truly and righteously scared, in fact I’m so scared that I’ve already had a couple of drinks today, and now I’m going to have another one and you can stand there and watch me do it.’

“Why would he want me to think he was scared? I busted my head on that one. What I came up with was that the only reason he’d have for going out of his way to impress me with his fear was because it didn’t exist. That’s why he had to lie about it. He wanted me to think he was afraid because he wasn’t.”

“Why bother? Wouldn’t you assume he was afraid, getting marked for death by some clown who was riding a hot streak? Wouldn’t anybody?”