Lawrence Block - The Devil Knows You’re Dead

“Trademark infringement?”

“Everything from fake Rolex watches to unauthorized logos on sweatshirts and baseball caps.”

“It sounds interesting.”

“It’s not,” I said. “It’s the street equivalent of writing somebody a stern letter.”

“You’d better have kids,” he said. “That’s a skill you’ll want to pass on.”

After dinner we walked to their apartment and did the requisite oohing and aahing over the view. Elaine’s apartment has a partial view across the East River, and from my hotel room I can catch a glimpse of the World Trade Center, but the Holtzmanns’ view had us badly outclassed. The apartment itself was on the small side — the second bedroom was about ten feet square — and it sported the low ceilings and construction shortcuts characteristic of most new housing. But that view made up for a lot.

Lisa made a pot of decaf and started talking about the personal ads, and how she knew perfectly respectable people who used them. “Because how are people supposed to meet nowadays?” she wondered. “Glenn and I were lucky, I was at Waddell & Yount showing my book to the art director and we happened to run into each other in the hallway.”

“I saw her from the other side of the room,” Glenn said, “and I made damn sure we happened to run into each other.”

“But how often does that happen?” Lisa went on. “How did you two meet, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“The personals,” Elaine said.

“Seriously?”

“No. As a matter of fact we were sweethearts years ago. Then we broke up and lost track of each other. And then we happened to run into each other again, and—”

“And the same old magic was still there? That’s a beautiful story.”

Maybe so, but it was on the thin side. We’d met years ago, all right, at an after-hours joint, when Elaine was a sweet young call girl and I was a detective attached to the Sixth Precinct, and a little less firmly attached to a wife and two sons on Long Island. Years later a psychopath turned up out of our shared past, dead set on killing us both. That threw us together, and yes, Lisa, the same old magic was still there. We stuck, and the bond seemed to be holding.

I’d call it a beautiful story, but since most of it went untold you couldn’t get much conversational mileage out of it. Lisa told about a friend of a friend, divorced, who responded to a personal ad in New York magazine, went to the designated meeting place at the appointed hour, and met her ex-husband. They took it as a sign and wound up getting back together again. Glenn said he didn’t believe it, it didn’t make sense, he’d heard half a dozen variations on the theme and didn’t believe any of them.

“Urban folklore,” he said. “There are dozens of stories like that. They always happened to a friend of a friend, never to somebody you actually know, and the truth of the matter is they never happened at all. Scholars collect these stories, there are books filled with them. Like the German shepherd in the suitcase.”

We must have looked puzzled. “Oh, c’mon,” he said. “You must know that one. Guy’s dog dies, he’s heartbroken, he doesn’t know what to do, he packs it up in a big Pullman suitcase and he’s on his way to a vet or a pet cemetery. And he sets the suitcase down to catch his breath when somebody grabs it and takes off with it. And ha-ha-ha, can’t you just picture the look on the poor bastard’s face when he opens the stolen suitcase and what does he find but a dead dog. I’ll bet you’ve all heard at least one version of that story.”

“I heard it with a Doberman,” Lisa said.

“Well, a Doberman, a shepherd. Any large dog.”

“In the version I heard,” Elaine said, “it happened to a woman.”

“Right, sure, and a helpful young man offers her a hand with the suitcase.”

“And inside the suitcase,” she went on, “is her ex-husband.”

So much for urban folklore. Lisa, indefatigable, shifted from personal ads to phone sex. She saw it as a perfect metaphor for the nineties, born of the health crisis, facilitated by credit cards and 900 numbers, and driven by a growing preference for fantasy over reality.

“And those girls make good money,” she said, “and all they have to do is talk.”

“Girls? Half of them are probably grandmothers.”

“So? An older woman would have an advantage. You wouldn’t need looks or youth, just an active imagination.”

“You mean a dirty mind, don’t you? You’d also need a sexy voice.”

“Is my voice sexy enough?”

“I’d say so,” he said, “but I’m prejudiced. Why? Don’t tell me you’re considering it.”

“Well,” she said, “I’ve thought about it.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Well, I don’t know. When the baby’s sleeping and I’m stuck here—”

“You’ll pick up the phone and talk dirty to strangers?”

“Well—”

“Remember before we were married when you were getting the obscene phone calls?”

“That was different.”

“You freaked out.”

“Well, he was a pervert.”

“Oh, really? Who do you figure your customers would be, Boy Scouts?”

“It would be different if I was getting paid for it,” she said. “It wouldn’t feel like a violation. At least I don’t think it would. What do you think, Elaine?”

“I don’t think I’d like it.”

“Well, of course not,” Glenn said. “You haven’t got a dirty mind.”

Back at Elaine’s apartment I said, “As a mature woman you’ve got a definite advantage. But it’s a shame your mind’s not dirty enough for phone sex.”

“Wasn’t that a hoot? I almost said something.”

“I thought you were going to.”

“I almost did. But cooler heads prevailed.”

“Well,” I said, “sometimes they do.”

When I first met Elaine she was a call girl, and she was still in the game when we got back together again. She went on turning tricks while we set about establishing a relationship, and I pretended that it didn’t bother me, and she did the same. We didn’t talk about it, and it became the thing we didn’t talk about, the elephant in the parlor that we tiptoed around but never mentioned.

Then one morning we had a mutual moment of truth. I admitted that it bothered me, and she admitted that she had secretly gotten out of the business several months previously. There was a curious “Gift of the Magi” quality to the whole affair, and there were adjustments to be made, and new routes to be drawn on what was essentially uncharted terrain.

One of the things she had to figure out was what to do with herself. She didn’t need to work. She had never been one to give her money to pimps or coke dealers, but had invested wisely and well, sinking the bulk of it into apartment houses in Queens. A management company handled everything and sent her a monthly check, and she netted more than enough to sustain her life-style. She liked to work out at the health club and go to concerts and take college courses, and she lived in comfort in the middle of a city where you could always find something to do.

But she had worked all her life, and retirement took some getting used to. Sometimes she read the want ads, frowning, and once she’d spent a week trying to put together a résumé, then sighed and tore up her notes. “It’s hopeless,” she announced. “I can’t even fill in the blanks with interesting lies. I spent twenty years diddling for dollars. I could say I spent the time as a housewife, but so what? Either way I’m essentially unemployable.”

One day she said, “Let me ask you a question. How do you feel about phone sex?”

“Well, maybe as a stopgap,” I said, “if we couldn’t be together for some reason. But I think I’d feel too self-conscious to get into the spirit of it.”