Lawrence Block - The Devil Knows You’re Dead

“Meaning?”

“Just that it might could take a few days. Can’t be walkin’ up to people an’ askin’ questions right off. Got to take your time, build up to it.”

“Take all the time you want,” I said. “The only thing is that there’s not much money in the case. Tom Sadecki didn’t give me a great deal of it in advance, and I doubt there’ll be more coming. As a matter of fact, I have a feeling I’ll wind up giving all or part of his money back to him.”

“Hate to hear you talk like that. Givin’ money back.”

“It goes against the grain,” I said, “but sometimes I don’t seem to have any choice.”

“That case,” he said, pushing the check across the table at me, “I guess I best let you pay for lunch. Might as well get the money out of you while you still got some.”

After he’d headed off toward the park, I stood on the sidewalk in front of the coffee shop and looked at Glenn Holtzmann’s building. I told myself I should have picked another coffee shop for my meeting with TJ. It’s not as if my choices had been limited. There are almost as many coffee shops in Manhattan as there are Greeks in Astoria, all with essentially the same menu and about the same ambience, or lack thereof. Why did I have to pick one that would put me on this particular street corner, face-to-face with the task I least wanted to perform?

A homicide investigation begins with the victim. From where I stood I could count up twenty-eight stories and look at the victim’s windows, behind which I might well find the victim’s wife. Lisa Holtzmann was beyond question the first person I should be talking to, the one person most likely to have information I needed to know.

And she was the last person I wanted to talk to. I hadn’t called when she lost her unborn child. I hadn’t called when her husband was killed. I hadn’t spoken to her once since the evening the four of us spent together in April, and I had rebuffed her husband’s overtures of friendship, and I felt uncomfortable about all of that, if not precisely guilty. My discomfort grew geometrically at the thought of disturbing her now, intruding upon her grief with the kind of impolite questions it would be my duty to ask.

I looked up, counted windows. I knew their apartment — her apartment — was on twenty-eight, but that left me uncertain as to how many windows to count, because I hadn’t noticed whether or not the building had a thirteenth floor. Most New York high-rises omit the number, but a few builders over the years had refused to cater to the superstition. (Harmon Ruttenstein, who’d plunged from his terrace a week ago, had been particularly outspoken on the subject, and more than one article had quoted his assertion that life was too short for triskaidekaphobia, which sent people all over town running to their dictionaries. Since he’d lived in one of his own buildings, one of the obituary writers pointed out, his sixty-second floor had actually been on the sixty-second floor, not on the sixty-first as would have been the case in most comparable buildings.)

Either way, I’d told Elaine, it’s just the last half-inch or so that you have to worry about.

For all I knew, the Holtzmanns had lived in a Harmon Ruttenstein building, but for all I knew they hadn’t, so I couldn’t really be sure which windows were theirs. I was of course able to narrow it down to two possibilities, and in any case I couldn’t tell whether the apartments in question were lit because the lowering sun was reflected in all the windows on the building’s western face.

I thought, Jesus, spend a quarter, will you?

There were two pay phones on the corner but one was out of order and the other wasn’t built to accept coins, just NYNEX calling cards. They offered me a card with every monthly phone bill but I had thus far resisted, seeing it as just one more thing to carry, but if the coin phones keep disappearing I suppose I’ll have to get one. Then, as with everything else, I’ll wonder how I’d ever got along without it.

I crossed the street and made the call from Armstrong’s. In my early sobriety I’d made a great point of avoiding the place, having virtually lived there for so many years. In my absence Jimmy had lost his lease and moved the joint from the east side of Ninth just south of Fifty-eighth to its present location. I stayed out of the new place, too, and I also found myself avoiding the establishment that had replaced it, a perfectly innocent Chinese restaurant. (Once, when Jim Faber suggested it for our Sunday dinner, I told him I didn’t think it was a good idea. “I used to drink in that place before it existed,” I explained. He didn’t question either the language of that sentence or the logic of my argument. Only another alcoholic would have understood either.)

Then one night another friend, also a sober alcoholic, suggested Armstrong’s for a late supper, and since then I’d gone there when I had a reason. I had a reason now, but an inner voice challenged it. Weren’t there any other phones in the neighborhood? What was the matter with the one in the coffee shop? And why was I looking for an excuse to hang out in a ginmill?

A mind may be a terrible thing to waste, but it’s an even worse thing to have to listen to. I told mine Thanks for sharing and went ahead and made my phone calls, first to 411 and then to the number I copied down. Lisa Holtzmann’s phone rang four times, and then I got to hear her husband’s recorded voice advising me that no one was home and inviting me to leave my message at the beep. “Now be sure to wait for the beep,” he said. I waited for the beep, all right, and then I hung up.

It wasn’t the first time I’d listened to a ghost. Years ago an English call girl named Portia Carr got herself killed by a client — her client, not mine — and one night I got drunk enough to call her number, and got sober in a hurry when she answered. But of course it was her machine, and as soon as I figured that out I was able to go back to being drunk again.

Machines were scarcer then. Now everybody’s got one — everybody but me — and we’re used to voices that outlive their owners. Not long ago I called a friend and Humphrey Bogart answered his phone. I called him again a week later and got Tallulah Bankhead. There was a tape you could buy, a triumph of modern technology which allowed long-dead celebrities to answer your phone. “Here’s looking at you, shweetheart. My pal Jerry Palmieri can’t come to the phone right now, but if you leave your number he’ll get back to you when we round up the usual suspects.”

Glenn Holtzmann’s voice was less of a shock than Portia Carr’s and no more of a surprise than Tallulah’s. But I was a little off-balance to begin with, making a call I was loath to make from a joint I didn’t want to be in, and I’d jump at any excuse to short-circuit the process and get out of there. Under the circumstances, I’d have hung up on John Wayne.

Back at my hotel, I took another stab at it, but by the time I’d heard him again I’d talked myself out of leaving a message. Speaking to her was one thing, leaving word for her to call me was another. Once again I listened to the beep, and once again I left it unanswered.

I called Elaine and told her I couldn’t remember if we had anything planned for the evening. She said we didn’t. “But I’d love to see you,” she said. “Only I don’t really feel like leaving the house.”

“Neither do I.”

“That’s going to make it tough for us to get together,” she said. “Unless we spend the whole night on the phone, and that could really burn up the old message units.”

We got that sorted out. “I don’t mind leaving my house,” I said. “I just don’t want to leave yours.”

“Well, you never have to,” she said. “ Mí casa es su casa. Come over anytime, I’ll cook or we’ll order in, and we’ll spend a quiet evening at home.”