Lawrence Block - Even the Wicked

“Tell me.”

“I thought it didn’t matter,” he said. “I thought he was going to die anyway. And he was!”

“Yes.”

“And so are we all, every last one of us. We’re all mortal. Does that mean it’s no crime to kill us?”

No crime for God, I thought. He does it all the time.

“I told myself I was doing him a favor,” he went on bitterly. “That I was giving him an easy out. What made me think that was what he wanted? If he’d been ready to die he could have taken pills, he could have put a plastic bag over his head. There are enough ways. For God’s sake, he lived on a high floor, he could have gone out the window. If that’s what he wanted.” He frowned. “You can tell he wasn’t eager to die. There was only one reason for him to sell that policy. It was to get money to live on. He wanted his life to be as comfortable as possible for as long as it lasted. So I provided the money,” he said, “and then I took away the life.”

He’d removed his glasses in the course of that speech, and now he put them on again and peered through them at me. “Well?” he said. “Now what happens?”

Always the beautiful question.

“You have some choices,” I said. “There’s a Cleveland police officer, a friend of a friend, who’s familiar with the situation. We can go to the stationhouse where you’ll be placed under arrest and officially informed of your rights.”

“The Miranda warning,” he said.

“Yes, that’s what they call it. Then of course you can have your attorney present, and he’ll explain your options. He’d probably advise you to waive extradition, in which case you’ll be escorted back to New York for arraignment.”

“I see.”

“Or you can accompany me voluntarily,” I said.

“To New York.”

“That’s right. The advantage in that, as far as you’re concerned, is chiefly that it cuts out a certain amount of delays and red tape. And there’s another personal consideration.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, I won’t use handcuffs,” I said. “If you’re officially in custody you’ll have to be cuffed throughout, and that can be both embarrassing and uncomfortable on the plane. I don’t have any official standing so I’m not bound by rules of that sort. All we’ll have to do is get two seats together.”

“On a plane,” he said.

“Oh, that’s right. You don’t fly.”

“I suppose it strikes you as terribly silly. Especially now.”

“If it’s a phobic condition the rules of logic don’t apply. Mr. Havemeyer, I don’t want to talk you into anything, but I’ll tell you this. If you’re officially taken into custody and escorted to New York, they’ll make you get on a plane.”

“But if I were to go with you—”

“How long does it take on the train?”

“Under twelve hours.”

“No kidding.”

“The Lake Shore Limited,” he said. “It leaves Cleveland at three in the morning and arrives at ten minutes of two in the afternoon.”

“And that’s how you went to New York?”

“It’s not that bad,” he said. “The seats recline. You can sleep. And there’s a dining car.”

You can fly it in a little over an hour, but even if I left him in a holding cell in Cleveland, I wouldn’t be able to catch a flight back until sometime the next morning.

“If you want,” I said, “I’ll take the train with you.”

He nodded. “I suppose that would be best,” he said.

It was a long night.

I left Havemeyer alone long enough to duck across the street to the car and bring Jason Griffin up to speed. He had plans for the evening but insisted it was no problem to cancel them, and that he’d be glad to take me and my prisoner to the train station. I told him he might as well join us inside the house, and he agreed that it would be more convenient than sitting in the car with the wide-mouthed jar his uncle had recommended.

While he locked the car, I hurried back to the house myself, anxious about having left Havemeyer alone. I was afraid I might find him dead by his own hand, or on the phone with his lawyer. It was hard to say which of the two prospects was more troubling, but both fears proved groundless. I found him in the kitchen, rinsing out our teacups.

I told him I’d invited my driver in to join us, and moments later there was a knock on the door and I opened it for Jason. I didn’t know what the three of us were going to talk about, but that settled itself when Havemeyer determined that Jason was a student at Western Reserve. That led to a conversation about the college’s football team, which turned easily enough into a spirited discussion of Cleveland’s pro team, the Browns, and their perfidious owner’s decision to pack the franchise off to Baltimore.

“The nicest thing I can find to say about that man,” Havemeyer said, “is that he’s an utter son of a bitch.”

That led me almost inevitably to an analysis of the character and probable ancestry of Walter O’Malley, and gave rise to a more theoretical discussion of just what a team was, and the extent to which athletes belonged to it, or it to its fans. This would have been interesting enough all by itself, but circumstance gave it a special spin. The room was thick with two conversations, the one we were having and the one we were choosing not to have. The former was about sport and its illusions, the latter about homicide and its consequences.

Jason made a couple of phone calls to cancel his plans for the evening. I called Amtrak to book two Cleveland-to-New York seats on the Lake Shore Limited, then called Elaine in New York and got to hear my own voice on our answering machine; I left word that I’d be back in the city sometime the following afternoon. When I got back to the living room, Jason and Havemeyer were weighing prospects for dinner. Jason offered to go out for pizza, and Havemeyer said it was quicker and simpler to have it delivered. He made the phone call himself, and the kid from Domino’s was there well within the statutory twenty-minute time limit. Havemeyer drank a bottle of Amstel Light with his pizza, while Jason and I had Cokes. I had the sense that Jason would have preferred a beer, and wondered what had kept him from taking one. Did he feel it was inappropriate to drink on duty? Or had his uncle described me as a sober alcoholic, leading him to assume it was bad form to drink in front of me?

After we’d eaten, Havemeyer remembered that he ought to pack for the trip. I went into the bedroom with him and leaned against the wall while he took his time selecting articles of clothing and arranging them in his suitcase. When he was done he closed it and hefted it and made a face. He said he’d been meaning to get one of those suitcases on wheels you saw everybody using these days, but he hadn’t gotten around to it.

“But I don’t suppose I’ll be making many more trips,” he said.

I asked if the suitcase was heavy.

“It’s not too bad,” he said. “I’ve got more clothes in here than the last time I went, but I don’t have the gun, and that was heavier than you’d think. That reminds me. What should I do about the gun?”

“You still have it?”

“I suppose that’s foolish, isn’t it? I was going to get rid of it. Drop it down a sewer, or heave it into the lake. But I kept it. I thought I might, oh, need it.”

“Where is it?”

“In the attic. Do you want me to get it? Or should I just leave it where it is?”

I considered the question. There was a time when the answer would have been obvious, but a lot of court decisions had changed the rules regarding admissibility of evidence. Would it be better to leave the gun where it was for the time being, so that it could be found in due course after a proper warrant had been obtained?