Lawrence Block - The Devil Knows You’re Dead

“Were you disappointed?”

“I suppose I must have been. I’d envisioned him as another Howard Waddell, and he was a far cry from that. And I had thought my own retirement might come about sooner rather than later. As things stand I expect to hang on to the reins for five more years, and I think I know who’ll take them from me when the time comes.”

“Your foreign-rights person,” I said.

“That’s exactly right! And by then her typing won’t stand in her way, because she’ll have a secretary of her own. Now tell me how you knew that.”

“Just a lucky guess.”

“Nonsense. You weren’t guessing. You spoke with absolute assurance. How on earth did you know?”

“Something in your voice when you were talking about her. And a look in your eye.”

“Nothing more concrete than that?”

“No.”

“Remarkable. She doesn’t know what I have planned for her, and neither does anyone else. You must be very good at what you do, Mr. Scudder. Is that your whole job, talking to people and listening to what they say? And watching their faces while they say it?”

“That’s most of it,” I said. “It’s the part I like the best.” We talked a little about my work, and then I asked about Glenn Holtzmann’s salary.

“He got annual raises,” she said, “but he was still earning considerably less than the large corporate law firms pay to associates fresh out of law school. Of course they get seventy or eighty hours a week out of their people, and I’ve told you how little we demanded of Glenn. He earned enough to live decently. He was single when he started here, and then when he did marry he was clever enough to pick someone with money. Have I said something wrong?”

“Did he tell you his wife was rich?”

“Perhaps not in so many words, but that was certainly the impression I got.”

“She was an artist,” I said, “supporting herself as a free-lance illustrator. She lived in a run-down tenement on the Lower East Side.”

“That’s extraordinary.”

“He met her here,” I went on. “She came to show samples of her work to your art director, and he spotted her, and I gather it was quite romantic, though in a very different way from your own courtship.”

“If courtship is even the right word for it,” she said. “But please go on. This is fascinating.”

“He swept her off her feet. He proposed a month after they met.”

“I had the impression they kept company longer than that.”

“You never met his wife?”

“No. I know she was from Denver, and the wedding took place there. No one from the office attended. I gathered that it was a family affair.”

“She’s from a suburb of Minneapolis,” I said, “but I get the impression she cut her ties with her family when she moved to New York. They were married at City Hall and honeymooned in Bermuda.”

“I don’t suppose her father built ski resorts in Vail and Aspen.”

“I can’t recall that she told me anything about her father, but no, I don’t think he did anything of the sort. When they got back from the honeymoon Glenn surprised her with a new apartment. He made the down payment with money left over from his parents’ estate.”

“My impression was that he’d had barely enough to get him through law school.”

“Maybe he saved his lunch money.”

“The apartment—”

“A small two-bedroom condo with a spectacular view. I’d say a minimum of a quarter of a million dollars.”

“It’s a new building, isn’t it? The builders arrange financing with as little as ten percent down. He would only have needed twenty-five thousand dollars. But wouldn’t he have had trouble with the payments?”

The payments, I explained, had been a cinch; he’d bought the property outright for cash.

She stared at me. “Where did he get the money?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course the first thing I have to think is that he might have embezzled it. A quarter of a million dollars? I’m tempted to say it’s impossible, but everybody always says that. I’ve heard of two embezzlements in publishing in the past year or so. One of them ran into six figures. Both were very quickly hushed up, and both involved cocaine, which seems to foster that sort of behavior. It creates a compelling economic motive and undermines character and judgment at the same time. Did Glenn use cocaine?”

“Did you suspect him of it?”

“Certainly not. I don’t even think he drank very much.”

I asked about cash. Was there ever much around?

“We keep substantial funds on deposit,” she said. “They would be listed as cash assets on a balance sheet. But I don’t suppose that’s what you mean.”

“I was talking about currency,” I said. “Green money.”

“ ‘Green money.’ Well, Mr. Scudder, my secretary keeps a petty-cash box in the top right-hand drawer of her desk. She dips into it when we have to tip a delivery boy. I suppose there’s fifty dollars in there on a good day, but it would take an extremely resourceful person to steal a quarter of a million dollars out of it.”

“I think Holtzmann got his money in cash. If he found some way to steal from you it would have involved unwarranted payments to dummy accounts, and I don’t see any sign of any of that.”

“That relieves my concern but not my curiosity. Where do you suppose he got the money?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe he just had it all along. Maybe his parents were wealthy, maybe they left him a really substantial amount of money, and he didn’t want anyone to know. He used some of the money to get through law school and he just kept the rest.”

“In cash? There would be bank accounts, certificates of deposit. Unless it was already in cash when he inherited it.”

“How could that be?”

“Maybe it was fruit-jar money, untaxed cash his parents squirreled away that came to him upon their death. When is he supposed to have come to New York? Ten years ago?”

“At least that long. I could have Enid look it up.”

“It’s not important. Ten years. The bills I saw looked recent enough, but I didn’t check the series dates or the signatures, so—”

“The bills you saw?”

I hadn’t meant to let that out. “There was some cash in the apartment,” I said.

“A substantial amount?”

“I’d call it that.”

We both fell silent. At length she asked me who my client was. I told her. She wanted to know if this meant that George Sadecki was innocent. Not necessarily, I said. It might only mean that he was guilty of killing a man with a secret. I might know more when I unearthed Glenn Holtzmann’s secret, but at this point all I’d managed to establish was that he had one.

“He worked late frequently,” I said. “At least that’s what he told his wife. But if his work load was as light as you’ve said—”

“I don’t know that he ever stayed at his desk past five o’clock.”

“I wonder where he went.”

“I’ve no idea.”

“He had some evening appointments as well. Business appointments, but I gather the business wasn’t Waddell & Yount’s.”

She shook her head. “This is all so incomprehensible to me,” she said. “I don’t think I’m particularly naive. But if there was ever an unlikely candidate for the title role in A Double Life , it was Glenn.”

“I met him once.”

“You hadn’t mentioned that.”

“Well, it didn’t amount to much. My girlfriend and I saw them socially, him and his wife. That was in the spring. Then I ran into him a couple of times in the neighborhood. I live just a block from him. He wanted to talk to me about writing a book.”

“Are you a writer?”