Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“It was a masterpiece, Billy. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t easy to see through.”

“So now you dish it out and I take it,” Billy Croydon said, “until you get bored and end it, and I wind up in the grave you’ve already dug for me. And that’s the end of it. I wonder if there’s a way to turn it around.”

“Not a chance.”

“Oh, I know I’m not getting out of here alive, Paul, but there’s more than one way of turning something around. Let’s see now. You know, the letter you got wasn’t the first one I wrote to you.”

“So?”

“The past is always with you, isn’t it? I’m not the same man as the guy who killed your sister, but he’s still there inside somewhere. Just a question of calling him up.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just talking to myself, I guess. I was starting to tell you about that first letter. I never sent it, you know, but I kept it. For the longest time I held on to it and read it whenever I wanted to relive the experience. Then it stopped working, or maybe I stopped wanting to call up the past, but whatever it was I quit reading it. I still held on to it, and then one day I realized I didn’t want to own it anymore. So I tore it up and got rid of it.”

“That’s fascinating.”

“But I read it so many times I bet I can bring it back word for word.” His eyes locked with Paul Dandridge’s, and his lips turned up in the slightest suggestion of a smile. He said, “ ‘Dear Paul, Sitting here in this cell waiting for the day to come when they put a needle in my arm and flush me down God’s own toilet, I found myself thinking about your testimony in court. I remember how you said your sister was a goodhearted girl who spent her short life bringing pleasure to everyone who knew her. According to your testimony, knowing this helped you rejoice in her life at the same time that it made her death so hard to take.

“ ‘Well, Paul, in the interest of helping you rejoice some more, I thought I’d tell you just how much pleasure your little sister brought to me. I’ve got to tell you that in all my life I never got more pleasure from anybody. My first look at Karen brought me pleasure, just watching her walk across campus, just looking at those jiggling tits and that tight little ass and imagining the fun I was going to have with them.’ ”

“Stop it, Croydon!”

“You don’t want to miss this, Paulie. ‘Then when I had her tied up in the backseat of the car with her mouth taped shut, I have to say she went on being a real source of pleasure. Just looking at her in the rear-view mirror was enjoyable, and from time to time I would stop the car and lean into the back to run my hands over her body. I don’t think she liked it much, but I enjoyed it enough for the both of us.’ ”

“You’re a son of a bitch.”

“And you’re an asshole. You should have let the state put me out of everybody’s misery. Failing that, you should have let go of the hate and sent the new William Croydon off to rejoin society. There’s a lot more to the letter, and I remember it perfectly.” He tilted his head, resumed quoting from memory. “ ‘Tell me something, Paul. Did you ever fool around with Karen yourself? I bet you did. I can picture her when she was maybe eleven, twelve years old, with her little titties just beginning to bud out, and you’d have been seventeen or eighteen yourself, so how could you stay away from her? She’s sleeping and you walk into her room and sit on the edge of her bed.’ ” He grinned. “I always liked that part. And there’s lots more. You enjoying your revenge, Paulie? Is it as sweet as they say it is?”

The Knicks werehosting a first-year expansion team at the Garden, and when the two men arrived, thirty minutes before game time, half the seats were empty. “I’m afraid it’s not going to be much of a game,” the younger man said, “and it looks as though I’m not alone in that opinion. Last time I was here the Lakers were in town, and there wasn’t an empty seat.”

“We’re early,” the older man said. “They won’t sell out tonight, but they’ll come closer than you might guess. Remember, this is New York. A lot of guys don’t even leave their desks until seven-thirty for a game that starts at eight.”

“That’s me you’re describing. Not tonight, but the Laker game? There were points on the board by the time I got to my seat. And it would have been the same story tonight if I hadn’t put my foot down. Carrigan came into my office at half past six with something that had to be done and would only take me a minute, swear to God. ‘Not tonight,’ I told him. ‘I’m meeting my dad.’ ”

Anyone looking at them would have suspected they were father and son. The resemblance was unmistakable, in their faces and in the easy loose-limbed grace with which they moved. The son was a younger version of the father, his hair darker, his features less emphatic. Both were tall men, standing several inches over six feet. Both had been slim in their youth, and both had thickened some around the middle with age, the father more than the son. The son was perhaps an inch taller than the father, a fact which had not gone unremarked at their meeting a few minutes earlier.

“You’re taller,” Richard Parmalee had said. “I don’t suppose your pituitary gland kicked into overdrive when nobody was looking. Have you been taking growth hormone?”

The son, whose name was Kevin, shook his head and grinned.

“Then the odds are you’re not taller,” the father said. “So, unless you’ve got lifts in your shoes—”

“Just insoles, but they don’t make you any taller.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. Well, where does logic inexorably lead us? I’m shrinking.”

“You look the same to me.”

“Hell, I’m not melting away like the Wicked Witch of the West. Everybody shrinks, starting around forty or forty-five, but it takes fifteen or twenty years before it’s enough to notice. You’re not even forty for another year and a half, so you’ve got a while before your cuffs start scraping the pavement.”

“That hasn’t happened to you.”

“No, if I’ve lost half an inch that’s a lot. It’s enough to notice, but only just. And I only just noticed it myself within the past month or so. I knew it was something that happens to everybody, but I figured I was different, it wouldn’t happen to me. Same as right now you’re listening and nodding and telling yourself it won’t happen to you.”

The younger man laughed. “Got me. Exactly what I was telling myself.”

“And who knows? You might be right. You’ve got a few years, and by then they may have something to prevent it. I wouldn’t put it past them.”

As Richard Parmaleehad predicted, there were a lot of late arrivals, and most seats were occupied by game time. The Knicks, eleven-point favorites according to the line in the papers, jumped off to an early lead that opened up to twenty-two points at halftime. “Well, it’s not much of a game,” the son said. “I was afraid of that.”

“No, but it’s still fun to watch them. I remember coming here to see the Harlem Globetrotters when I was still in high school. They were playing an exhibition game against somebody, probably the Knicks. I couldn’t believe the things they did. Now everybody does that, but without the clowning.”

“They’re still around, the Globetrotters.”

“And they’re probably as entertaining as ever, but less remarkable, because everybody plays like that. It’s a completely different game than when I played it.”

“It looks completely different to me,” the son said, “so I can only imagine the difference from your point of view.”