Lawrence Block - Even the Wicked

I thought I’d have trouble with Elaine’s present — I always do — but then I saw a pair of earrings in a shop window and knew instantly that they’d look great on her. Chunky little hearts in frosted glass, accented with deep blue stones. They were Lalique, the saleswoman informed me, and I nodded solemnly as if I knew what that meant. I gathered it was good.

The next morning, or the one after that, I went out after breakfast and read the paper across the street at the Morning Star. Then I walked on down to the main library at Fifth and Forty-second. I stayed there until I got hungry, had lunch on a bench in Bryant Park, eating quickly because it was a little too cold to sit there comfortably. When I was done I went back inside again and spent some more time looking things up and making notes.

Walking home, I stopped at a glitzy diner at Fifty-sixth and Sixth and had a cup of coffee and a piece of pie. I thought about what I knew, or thought I knew, and tried to figure out what I was going to do with it.

There was nothing about Will on the news that night, and nothing in the morning papers. Marty McGraw’s column was given over to his thoughts on the latest tussle between the city’s mayor and the state’s junior senator. They were both Republicans, both Italian Americans, and they couldn’t have had more contempt for each other if one were a Serb and the other a Croat.

I picked up the phone and called a few cops, including Harris Conley and Joe Durkin. Then I tried Marty McGraw, but I couldn’t reach him and nobody knew where he was.

I had an idea where I’d find him.

“Well, look who’s here,” he said. “I’m flattered all to hell and back, because unless you turned into a pervert or developed a taste for low company, you must have come here just to see me.”

“I figured there was a chance I’d find you here.”

He tilted back his head, looked at me through half-lidded eyes. He had an empty shot glass and half a glass of beer in front of him, and I gathered it wasn’t his first of the morning. But he looked and sounded entirely sober.

“You figured there was a chance you’d find me here,” he said. “Well, I always said you were a great detective, Mattie. Tomorrow you’ll show up with Judge Crater, and the day after that you’ll tell the world who really snatched the Lindbergh baby. You figure there’s a connection?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“Sure. Those could even be real.”

I looked where he was gesturing, and saw a waitress in the standard Bunny’s Topless getup — high heels, mesh panty hose, scarlet hot pants with white cottontail, and nothing above the waist but the rabbit ears and too much eye makeup. Her face, for all the makeup, was impossibly young, and her breasts had the gravity-defying insouciance of silicon.

“Clear up a point for me,” he said when she came over to our table. “What’s your order?”

“You’ve got it backwards. I’m supposed to take your order.”

“I don’t want to take your order, I just want to know what it is. Are you a Carmelite or are you one of the Little Sisters of the Poor?” When she looked confused he said, “I’m just joking, honey. Don’t mind me. I know you’re new here, but they must have told you I’m harmless.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I bet you’re armed and dangerous.”

He grinned, delighted. “Hey, you’re okay,” he said. “You give as good as you get. I’ll tell you what. Bring me another round, a double shot and a beer, but what you can do, you can make it two double shots, and two beers.” My face must have shown something, because he said, “Relax, Mattie. I know you wouldn’t touch a drop to save your soul, you self-righteous fuck. And please pardon my French, sweetheart, and whatever you do don’t tell your Mother Superior what I just said. I want you to bring me two rounds at once so we won’t have to disturb you later, and you can also bring my sobersided father here whatever he’s having.”

“Club soda will be fine,” I told her.

“Bring him two club sodas,” he said, “and the devil take the hindmost.” She walked off, her cottontail bobbing, and he said, “I don’t know how I feel about silicone. They all look perfect but they don’t look real. And what’s the effect on the next generation? Do teenage boys grow up expecting perfect tits?”

“When you’re a teenage boy,” I said, “all tits are perfect.”

“Not if all you ever see is silicone. Used to be girls would go out and get their tits done so they could get a guy. Now there’s married men asking their wives to call the plastic surgeon, make an appointment. ‘What do I want for Christmas, Mona? Well, now that you mention it, big knockers’d be nice.’ Make sense to you?”

“Hardly anything does,” I said.

“Amen to that, brother.”

“And yet you come here,” I said.

“I like tawdry,” he said, “and I like tacky, and I have a passion for paradox. And, even though I barely look at the tits, it’s nice to know they’re there if I get the urge. Plus this place is three blocks from the fucking office and yet no one from the paper would be caught dead here, so I don’t get disturbed. That’s my story, Monsieur Poirot. Now what’s your excuse?”

“I came here to see you.”

She brought the drinks. “On my tab,” he said, and gave her a five-dollar tip. “I’m a class guy,” he said. “You notice I just gave her the money. I didn’t try to stuff it down the front of her spandex shorts, as I’ve seen some of the customers do. I more or less assumed you came here to see me, O Great Detective. What I wondered is why.”

“To see what you could tell me about Will.”

“Ah, I see. You want the hat trick.”

“How’s that?”

“You unmasked one killer and brought another back alive. What’s it like in Lakewood, Ohio, anyway? Do the natives wear shoes?”

“For the most part.”

“Glad to hear it. You got Adrian, you got this Havemeyer, and now you want Will Number Two. Adrian’s understudy, if you want to stay with the theatrical image Regis invoked so nicely in his oped piece.” His eyes widened. “Wait a minute,” he said.

“Havemeyer’s first name is William, isn’t it? What do they call him?”

“When I called him anything,” I said, “it was Mr. Havemeyer.”

“So it could be Bill or Willie. Or even Will.”

“It could be anything at all,” I said. “I told you what I called him.”

“I thought cops always call perps by their first names.”

“I guess I’ve been off the job too long.”

“Yeah, you’ve turned respectful. It’s good you’re not still wearing the uniform or you’d be a disgrace to it. If they call him Will, and who’s to say they don’t, that’d be the hat trick all right, wouldn’t it? Three guys named Will, and Mattie gets ’em all.”

“I’m not chasing Will Number Two.”

“You’re not?”

I shook my head. “I’m just your average concerned citizen,” I said. “All I know is what I read in the papers.”

“You and Will Rogers.”

“And I was wondering what you might know that they’re not reporting. For instance, has there been another letter from the guy?”

“No.”

“He always sent a letter after each killing. Like a terrorist group claiming credit for a bombing.”

“So?”

“It’s surprising he’d break the pattern.”

He rolled his eyes. “It’s Adrian’s pattern,” he said, “and Adrian’s not writing letters these days. Why expect the new guy to operate, the same way?”

“That’s a point.”

“Adrian didn’t threaten three guys at once, either. There’s a lot of differences between them, including the psychological gobbledygook everybody’s been spouting.” He had already thrown down one double shot, and now he took a dainty sip of the other and chased it with an equally dainty sip of beer. “That’s why I wrote what I did,” he said.