Lawrence Block - The Devil Knows You’re Dead

No visible bloodstains.

I could picture him standing there, lifting the receiver, digging in his pocket for a quarter, dropping the coin in the slot. Then something makes him turn — a sound, perhaps, or movement glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. He starts to turn, and even as he’s turning a shot rings out, and he’s hit.

The bullet takes him on the right side below the rib cage. It pierces the liver and severs the portal vein, the large blood vessel that services that organ.

A mortal wound, in all likelihood, but he won’t live long enough to die of it. He reels toward the shooter, who fires twice more from point-blank range. One slug glances off a rib and plows through muscle tissue, doing little serious damage. The other finds the heart and causes virtually instantaneous death.

He’s on the ground now, sprawled full length on the sidewalk with his feet at the base of the post on which the phone is mounted. There’s a fourth and final shot, a coup de grâce , fired into the back of his neck. It’s as loud as the others, but he doesn’t hear it.

Hard to say how long he lay there, or how much blood spilled out of him. Dead bodies don’t bleed much, as a rule, and the heart wound would have brought death quickly, but I couldn’t guess how much blood might have gouted from the liver wound before the heart stopped its pumping. In any event he lay there, first bleeding and then not bleeding, until someone picked up the dangling receiver and phoned it in.

Tom Sadecki had given me the address of the building where his brother rented a room. It was on Fifty-sixth just off the avenue, a red-brick old-law tenement with an identical building on its right and a rubble-strewn vacant lot on its left. A flight of steps led down to the basement entrance. The door at the bottom of the stairs had a glass window set at eye level, but I couldn’t see anything through it. The door was locked. It didn’t look as though it would be terribly hard to force it, but I didn’t try. I don’t know that I would have wanted to go in even if it had been unlocked.

I went back to the corner of Fifty-fifth and Eleventh, got out my notebook and made a rough sketch of the scene. There was a Honda dealership on the corner where Holtzmann was killed, a Midas Muffler franchise directly across the street. I remembered Tom Sadecki’s scenario and tried to figure out where George might have lurked in the shadows while somebody else did the shooting. I didn’t see any doorways, but there was a spot alongside the entrance to the Honda showroom where a person might have stood or crouched without being too conspicuous. There was a trash can on the corner, not ten yards from the pay phone, and others on the opposite curb and ranging alongside the muffler shop.

The sun had been shining when I left Elaine’s apartment. Clouds obscured it by the time I reached the site of the murder, and the sky kept getting darker by the minute. The temperature was dropping, too, and it occurred to me that the jacket I was wearing wasn’t going to be warm enough. I headed back to my hotel to change, and pick up an umbrella while I was at it.

But when I got to Ninth Avenue there was a bus just pulling up and I ran and caught it. Maybe the rain would hold off, I told myself. Maybe the sun would come out and warm things up again.

Sure.

It was almost twelve-thirty when I walked into a room on Houston Street, filled a Styrofoam cup with coffee, and took a couple of cookies from a chipped china plate. I found a chair, and someone stood up and read the AA preamble and introduced the speaker.

The group was mostly gay, and a lot of the sharing was about AIDS and HIV. At one-thirty we held hands and had a moment of silence, followed by the Serenity Prayer. The young man on my right said, “Do you know how they close the meetings at the agnostics’ group? They have a moment of silence, followed by another moment of silence.”

I walked down through SoHo, stopping at a pizza stand for a Sicilian slice and a Coke. Lispenard Street is just below Canal and only two blocks long, and Jan’s loft is on the fifth floor of a six-story building wedged between two larger and more modern buildings. I stepped into the vestibule and rang her bell, then went back onto the sidewalk and waited for her to open the window and throw down the key.

That’s what she’d done the night I met her, and on quite a few subsequent occasions. Then for a while I’d had a key of my own. I’d used it a final time on the afternoon I came to pick up my things. I had filled two shopping bags with my clothes and left the key on the kitchen counter, right next to the Mr. Coffee machine.

I looked up. The window opened and the key sailed out, hit the pavement, bounced, clattered, lay still. I picked it up and let myself into the building.

“Come on in,” she said. “It was sweet of you to come. You’re looking well, Matthew.”

“So are you,” I said. “You’ve lost weight.”

“Hah,” she said. “Finally.” She tilted her head and looked me in the eye. “What do you think? Is it an improvement?”

“You’ve always looked good to me, Jan.”

Her face clouded and she turned from me, saying that she’d just made a fresh pot of coffee. Did I still drink it black? I said I did. No sugar, right? Right, no sugar.

I went to the front of the loft, where floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over Lispenard Street. Her bronze head of Medusa, the hair a writhing mass of snakes, stood on its plinth to the right of the low sofa. It was early work; I’d seen it and remarked on it the night we met. Don’t look her in the eye, Jan had told me, for her gaze turns men to stone.

Her own gaze when she brought the coffee, out of those large unflinching gray eyes, was almost as intimidating. She had lost weight, and I wasn’t sure it was an improvement. She looked older than the last time I’d seen her.

Her hair was part of it. It was completely gray now. It had been liberally salted with gray when I first met her, and never seemed to get any grayer. Now there were no dark hairs visible, and that coupled with the weight loss added years to her appearance.

She asked if the coffee was all right.

“It’s fine,” I said. “Aren’t you having any?”

“I haven’t been drinking much coffee lately,” she said. Then she said, “Oh, what the hell. Why not?” She disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a cup of her own. “It is good,” she said. “I’d almost forgotten how much I like the stuff.”

“What have you been doing, trying to switch to decaf?”

“I pretty much got away from coffee altogether,” she said. “But let’s not have one of those deadly AA conversations about all the things we don’t do anymore. What’s that story about the old guy in the Salvation Army band? ‘Yes, brothers and sisters, I used to drink, I used to smoke, I used to gamble, I used to go with wild, wild women, and now all I do is beat this goddamn drum.’ ” She took another sip of coffee and set the cup down. “Bring me up to date, Matthew. What have you been doing?”

“Beating my goddamn drum. Doing a little day work for a big agency. Working when I get a client, coasting when I don’t. Going to meetings. Hanging out. Keeping company with Elaine.”

“That’s going well, then? I’m glad. She seemed very nice. Matthew, I told you I wanted to ask a favor.”

“Yes.”

“So I’ll just come right out and ask it. I was wondering if you could get me a gun.”

“A gun.”

“There’s so much crime these days,” she said levelly. “You can’t pick up the paper without seeing something awful on every page. It used to be that people were safe in decent neighborhoods, but now it doesn’t seem to matter where you are or what time of day it is. The incident last week, with the young publisher. Right in your neighborhood, wasn’t it?”