Lawrence Block - Even the Wicked

“You must mean Will Number Two.”

“I mean the son of a bitch who wrote me a letter threatening three prominent New Yorkers, and nobody seems to give a shit. I don’t suppose you’ve been looking into it by any chance.”

“I don’t figure it’s any business of mine.”

“Hey, when did that ever stop you in the past?” I didn’t say anything right away, and he said, “That sounded wrong, the way it came out. Don’t take it the wrong way, will you, Matt?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“You read that crap in the competition this morning?”

“The competition?”

“The New York Fucking Post. That’s close to the original name of that rag, as a matter of fact. The New York Evening Post, that’s what used to grace that masthead.”

“Like the Saturday Evening Post?”

“That was a magazine, for Christ’s sake.”

“I know that, I just—”

“Slight difference, one’s a magazine, the other’s a newspaper.” I could hear the drink in his voice now. I suppose it had been there all along, but I hadn’t been aware of it before. “There’s a story about the Post,” he said. “Years ago, before you were born or your father before you, they were in an ass-kicking and hair-pulling contest with the old New York World. The Post had the rag on one day and ran an editorial calling the World a yellow dog. Now this was considered quite the insult. You know, yellow journalism? You familiar with the term?”

“Not as well as you are.”

“What’s that? Oh, a wiseass. You want to hear this or not?”

“I’d love to hear it.”

“So everybody was waiting to see what the World was going to come back with. And next day there’s an editorial in the World. ‘The New York Evening Post calls us a yellow dog. Our reply is the reply of any dog to any post.’ You get it, or is the subtlety of a bygone age lost on you?”

“I get it.”

“In other words, piss on you.”

“When was this?”

“I dunno, eighty years ago? Maybe more. Nowadays a newspaper could come right out and say, ‘Piss on you,’ and nobody’d turn a hair, the way standards have fucking crumbled. How the hell did I get on this?”

“The Post.”

“Right, the New York Fucking Post. They’ve got an analysis of the latest letter, supposedly proves the guy’s a phony, a talker and not a doer. Some expert, some college professor, needs to read the instructions on the roll of Charmin before he can figure out how to wipe his ass. What do you think of that?”

“What do I think of what?”

“Wouldn’t you say it’s irresponsible? They’re calling the guy a liar to his face.”

“Only if he reads the Post.”

He laughed. “And piss on them, huh? But you get what I mean, don’t you? They’re saying, ‘I dare you.’ Saying, ‘Go ahead, kill somebody, make my day.’ I call that irresponsible.”

“If you say so.”

“Why, you patronizing son of a bitch. Are you too much of a big shot now to have conversation with me?”

I resisted the impulse to hang up. “Of course not,” I said soothingly. “I think you’re probably right saying what you said, but it’s no longer something I’m involved in, not even peripherally. And I’m going nuts enough without it.”

“Oh, yeah? Over what?”

“Another case that’s not really any business of mine, but I seem to have taken it on. There’s a man I’m just about certain committed murder, and I’m damned if I can figure out why.”

“Gotta be love or money,” he said. “Unless he’s a public-spirited son of a bitch like my guy.”

“It’s money, but I can’t make it make sense. Suppose you’re insured and I’m the beneficiary. I gain if you die.”

“Why don’t we make it the other way around?”

“Just let me—”

“No, really,” he said, his voice rising as he got into it. “I know this is hypothetical, but why do I have to be the schmuck? Make it that I win if you die.”

“Fine. You gain if I die. So I jump out the window, and—”

“Why do a crazy thing like that?”

“And you shoot me on the way down. Why?”

“You jump out the window and I shoot you on the way down.”

“Right. Why?”

“Target practice? Is this some trick, you were wearing a parachute, some shit like that?”

“Jesus,” I said. “No, it’s not a trick question. It’s an analogy.”

“Well, excuuuuse me. I shoot you on the way down?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And kill you.”

“Right.”

“But you would have died anyhow when you landed. Because this is an analogy and not a trick question, so please tell me it’s not a first-floor window you just jumped out of.”

“No, it’s a high floor.”

“And no parachute.”

“No parachute.”

“Well, shit,” he said. “I don’t get the money if it’s suicide. How’s that for simple?”

“Doesn’t apply.”

“Doesn’t apply? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Suicide wouldn’t invalidate the policy,” I said. “Anyway, when I jump out the window it’s not suicide.”

“No, it’s an act of Christian charity. It’s a response to overwhelming public demand. Why isn’t it suicide when you jump out the window? You’re not a bird or a plane, let alone Superman.”

“The analogy was imperfect,” I allowed. “Let’s just say I’m falling from a great height.”

“What did you do, lose your balance?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Ha! Tell me about it. So it’s an accident, is that what you’re saying?... Where’d you go? Hey, Earth to Matt. Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“Well, you had me wondering. It’s an accident, right?”

“Right,” I said. “It’s an accident.”

I stayed put over the weekend. I went to a couple of meetings, and Saturday afternoon Elaine and I took the #7 train out to Flushing and walked around the new Chinatown. She complained that it wasn’t like Manhattan’s Chinatown at all, feeling neither quaint nor sinister but disturbingly suburban. We wound up eating at a Taiwanese vegetarian restaurant, and after two bites she put down her chopsticks and said, “I take back everything I said.”

“Not bad, huh?”

“Heaven,” she said.

Sunday I had dinner with Jim Faber for the first time in quite a few weeks, and that meant another Chinese meal, but in our own part of town, not way out in Queens. We talked about a lot of different things, including Marty McGraw’s column in that morning’s News, in which he’d essentially accused Will #2 of jerking us all around.

“I can’t understand it,” I said. “I talked to him a couple of days ago and he was pissed off at the Post for running a story suggesting that this Will is all hat and no cattle. And now he—”

“All hat and no cattle?”

“All talk and no action.”

“I know what it means. I’m just surprised to hear it coming out of your New York mouth.”

“I’ve been on the phone with a lot of Texans lately,” I said. “Maybe some of it rubbed off. The point is he called them irresponsible for writing Will off, and now he’s deliberately goading him himself, telling the guy to shit or get off the pot.”

“Maybe the police put him up to it.”

“Maybe.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“I think they’d be more inclined to let sleeping dogs lie. That’s more their style than using Marty as a cafs-paw.”

“Cats and dogs,” he said. “Sounds like rain. McGraw’s a drunk, isn’t he? Didn’t you tell me that?”

“I don’t want to take his inventory.”

“Oh, go ahead and take his inventory. ‘We are not saints,’ remember?”