Lawrence Block - Even the Wicked

Probably, I decided, but I weighed that against the possibility that someone would break into the house and steal the gun in the meantime, and concluded it was better to have the weapon in my possession. Even if some judge disallowed it, along with his taped confession and a few other things, it seemed to me there ought to be more than enough hard evidence to make a case against him.

He climbed up into the attic crawl space and came down holding the gun wrapped in a red-and-white-checkered cloth. The dish towel, I guess it mut have been. He presented it to me like that, and I could smell the gun without unwrapping it. He hadn’t cleaned it since firing it, and it still smelled of the gunshots that had killed Byron Leopold.

I went out to Jason’s car and locked it in my suitcase.

We killed time playing hearts, and Havemeyer made another pot of tea, and Jason drove us to the station early, getting us there almost an hour before train time. I gave him some money, and he told me he thought he ought to be paying me for the experience. I told him not to be silly and he put the money in his pocket.

Havemeyer insisted on buying our train tickets, even as he had insisted on paying for the pizza. “Two one-way tickets,” he announced. “You won’t be coming back to Cleveland. And neither will I.”

The train was crowded and we couldn’t get two seats together. I took the conductor aside and told him I was a private detective escorting a material witness back to New York. He got a fellow to switch his seat, and I gave Havemeyer the window and sat down next to him.

We talked for an hour or so. He wanted to know what to expect, and I told him as much as I knew. I told him he would want an attorney, even if all he was going to do was cooperate with the police and plead guilty. He said there was a man in Cleveland he’d used in the past, but the man didn’t take criminal cases, and anyway he was in Cleveland. “But I suppose he could recommend someone,” he said. I said that was very likely true, and that I could recommend several New York lawyers.

He said he supposed he’d be spending the rest of his life in prison. I said that wasn’t necessarily true, that he could very likely plead to a lesser charge than murder two, that a lawyer could argue that the strain of his wife’s death constituted some sort of mitigating circumstances, and that his previously unblemished record (not even a traffic violation, aside from a couple of parking tickets) would certainly work to his advantage.

“You’ll have to go to prison,” I said, “but it’ll probably be minimum-security, and the bulk of the other cons will be white-collar criminals, not child molesters and strong-arm thugs. I’m not saying you’ll like it, but it won’t be some hellhole out of The Shawshank Redemption. And I’d be surprised if you wound up serving more than five years.”

“That doesn’t seem very long,” he said, “for killing an innocent man.”

It would seem longer once he was doing it, I thought. And if it still didn’t seem long enough, he could always reenlist.

Some forty-five minutes out of Cleveland Havemeyer took a Valium, which was evidently his custom on long train trips. He offered me one but I passed. I would have liked one, but then I would have liked a pint of Early Times, as far as that goes. Havemeyer swallowed his Valium and put his seat back and closed his eyes, and that was the last I heard from him for the next five or six hours.

I’d picked up a paperback at Newark before they called my flight, and I’d never even opened it en route to Cleveland. I got it from my bag now and read for a while, pausing now and then to put the book down on my lap and look off into the distance, thinking long thoughts. Train travel lends itself to that sort of thing.

Sometime before dawn I closed my eyes, and when I opened them it was light outside and we were pulling into Rochester. I slipped off to the diner for a cup of coffee. Havemeyer was still sleeping when I got back.

He woke up not long after that and we got some breakfast and returned to our seats. He stayed awake the rest of the way but still seemed faintly tranquilized, not talking much. He read the Amtrak magazine, and when he’d exhausted its possibilities I gave him the paperback I’d given up on.

Around noon, shortly after we left Albany, I made a phone call. You could do that, they had a phone you could use, just running your credit card through a slot. I called the Sixth Precinct and managed to get Harris Conley. I told him I was on my way back from Cleveland with a suspect in the killing of Byron Leopold. I didn’t even have to remind him who Byron Leopold was, but then it’s a name that sticks in your mind.

He said, “What did you do, arrest him? I’m not sure of the legal status of that.”

“He’s with me voluntarily,” I said. “I’ve got a full confession on tape. I’m not sure of the legal status of that, either, but I’ve got it, along with the gun he used.”

“That’s pretty amazing,” he said. He offered to have the train met by a contingent of cops, but I didn’t think that was necessary. Havemeyer was coming in voluntarily, and I thought he’d be more comfortable surrendering at the precinct. Besides, I’d promised to keep him out of handcuffs as long as possible.

I wanted to second-guess myself when we got to Grand Central. There was a light rain falling and it had the usual effect of making the taxis disappear. But before too long one pulled up to discharge a passenger and we grabbed it and headed downtown.

I didn’t have to stick around too long at the Sixth. I turned over the gun (which, unwrapped, turned out to be a .38 revolver, with live rounds in three of its six chambers) to Conley, along with the tape of Havemeyer’s confession. I answered a battery of questions, then dictated a statement.

“I’m glad I was around when you called,” Conley told me, “and lucky I even remembered what you were talking about. I don’t suppose I have to tell you we weren’t exactly pushing this one.”

“That’s no surprise.”

“Triage,” he said. “You put in your time on the ones you stand a chance of breaking. And the ones where there’s a lot of heat from up top.”

“That’s how it’s always been.”

“And always will be, would be my guess. Point is, this wasn’t a front-burner case, not after the first seventy-two hours. And the whole city’s so nuts today, especially the department, it’s a wonder I remember my own name, let alone yours and Byron Leopold’s.”

“Why is the city so nuts?”

“You don’t know? Where the hell did you spend the past twelve hours?”

“On a train.”

“Oh, right. But even so, didn’t you see a newspaper? Listen to the radio? You came through Grand Central, you must have walked past a newsstand.”

“I had luggage to carry and a confessed murderer to escort,” I reminded him. “I didn’t have time to care what was happening in Bosnia.”

“Forget Bosnia. Bosnia didn’t make the headlines today. It was all Will this morning.”

“Will?”

He nodded. “Either it’s Number One back from the dead or Number Two’s more dangerous than anybody thought. You know the theater critic?”

“Regis Kilbourne.”

“That’s the one,” he said. “Will got him last night.”

You could almost say he’d been asking for it.

I’d somehow missed the column he wrote. It had appeared toward the end of the previous week, not in the Arts section where his reviews always ran, but on the Times’s oped page. I’ve since had a look at that issue of the paper, and it seems to me I read Safire’s column that day, an inside-the-mind-of piece on a pair of presidential hopefuls. So I very likely took a look at what Regis Kilbourne had to say, and probably stopped reading before I got to the payoff.