Lawrence Block - The Devil Knows You’re Dead

In the doorway she said, “Call me if you find out anything I should know about.”

“I will.”

“Or just to talk,” she said. “I get lonely.”

Before I left my hotel, I slipped the deck of fifty hundred-dollar bills into the top drawer of my dresser. That’s the first place they’ll look , a little voice told me. That was fine, I decided. Let them find it right away instead of tearing up the whole place. I closed the drawer and went out to catch a cab to Elaine’s.

Dinner wasn’t a great success. The restaurant she picked was indeed a little place around the corner, a French bistro that called itself Chien Bizarre, its logo featuring a severely clipped and presumably deranged poodle. Elaine, a vegetarian, couldn’t find anything on the menu that hadn’t flown or swum or crept sometime in recent memory. This has happened before, and she is generally cheerful about it and orders a vegetable plate. On this occasion she wasn’t cheerful about it, nor did her spirits brighten when I reminded her who had picked the restaurant. The waiter helped out by being deliberately obtuse when she explained what she wanted, and the kitchen overcooked the vegetables and then overcharged for them.

The service was slow, too, and neither of us was in a mood that fostered conversation. There were a lot of long silences. Sometimes that’s fine. There’s an AA group I go to occasionally structured along Quaker lines, with members speaking up when moved to do so. The silence is apt to stretch between speakers, and nobody gets nervous about it. The silence is considered a part of the meeting. Elaine and I have shared silences that enhance the conversation in much the same fashion.

Not this time. These were edgy silences, uncomfortable and disquieting. I tried not to look at my watch, but there were times when I couldn’t help myself, and when she caught me at it the silence only deepened.

On the way home she said, “The one thing I’m glad of is that they’re in the neighborhood. I’d hate for us to have spent cab fare on that meal.”

“If they weren’t in the neighborhood,” I said, “we wouldn’t have gone.”

“That was supposed to be a joke,” she said.

“Oh. Sorry.”

The doorman that evening was an old Irishman who’d been with the building since V-J Day. “Evening, Miss Mardell,” he said cheerily, his eyes not registering my presence.

“Evening, Tim,” she said. “Lovely out, isn’t it?”

“Ah, beautiful,” he said.

In the elevator I said, “You know, the son of a bitch makes me feel invisible. Why doesn’t he acknowledge my presence? Does he think you’re trying to keep me a secret?”

“He’s an old man,” she said. “It’s just the way he is.”

“Everybody in the world’s either too young to know better or too old to change,” I said. “Have you noticed that?”

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “I have.”

There was a message on her machine. It was TJ, leaving a number for me to call. I told Elaine I should probably call him right away. Go ahead, she said.

I dialed the number and it was answered on the second ring. Someone with a throaty voice said, “How may I help you, dear?”

I asked for TJ. He came on the line and said, “Here’s the deal, Lucille. Now’s a good time to come on down and see us.”

I glanced at Elaine. She was sitting in the black-and-white wing chair, making faces at the clothes in the Lands’ End catalog. I covered the mouthpiece and said, “It’s TJ.”

“Isn’t that who you called?”

“He’s managed to track down a witness. I probably ought to run over there and question her before she lights out again.”

“So? You’re going, right?”

“Well, we had plans.”

“I guess we’d better change them, wouldn’t you say?”

“Let me have the address,” I said to TJ.

“Four eighty-eight West Eighteenth, ‘tween Ninth and Tenth. No name on the buzzer, but you ring number forty-two. It’s up on the top floor.”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“We be waitin’, Dayton. Oh, ‘fore I forget.” His voice dropped. “What I told her, I said there be a couple dollars in it for her. Was that cool?”

“No problem.”

“Because I know we on a tight budget.”

“It’s a little looser than it was,” I said. “We got another client.”

I hung up and got my topcoat from the front closet. Elaine asked me about my new client.

“Lisa Holtzmann,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Glenn was sneakier than we thought. He bought that apartment of theirs for cash.”

“Where did he get the cash?”

“That’s one of the things she wants me to find out,” I said.

“So you’ve got two clients now.”

“Right.”

“And a witness. Things are really looking up.”

“I guess. I don’t know how long I’ll be.”

“Where do you have to go?”

“Chelsea. I shouldn’t be gone much more than an hour.”

“And then you’re planning to come back here?”

“That was the idea, yes.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Is something wrong?”

She was still holding the Lands’ End catalog. She threw it down and said, “We got off on the wrong foot tonight. I don’t know why. It’s probably my fault. But at this point it’s impossible to get back on track. You’ll rush through the examination of this witness because you’ll feel you have to get home to me, and you’ll resent me for it—”

“No I won’t.”

“—and I’ll be pissed at you for staying out late, or for coming home with an attitude. And you’re really into your work right now, and there are probably other things you’d like to be doing tonight, after you get done with the witness. Am I right?”

“I probably ought to talk to Danny Boy,” I admitted. “Among others. But all of that can wait.”

“Why should it? Because we’re having so much fun together? Call me in the morning. How’s that?”

I told her it was fine.

The address TJ had given me turned out to be a redbrick tenement three doors from the corner of Tenth Avenue. When I’d climbed four flights of stairs TJ called down, “One more, my man. You can do it, Prewitt.”

The two of them were waiting in the doorway of a rear apartment on the top floor. TJ was beaming with a sort of self-conscious pride. He said, “Julia, like for you to meet Matthew Scudder, man I work for, man I told you about. Matt, this here is Julia.”

“Matthew,” she said, extending her hand. “It’s so lovely of you to come. Won’t you step inside?”

She led me into a room that had been done to a turn. The wide-board pine floors, sanded and painted and polyurethaned, were a rich scarlet. The walls were a pale lemon yellow, and so thickly hung with art that little of their color showed through. The artwork had been professionally matted and framed, and ranged from drawings and engravings a few inches square to a signed Keith Haring poster, and, over the daybed, a poster for the film Paris Is Burning . The lighting was indirect, supplied by a variety of floor and table lamps, including two with black panther bases and several with leaded-glass shades. Beaded curtains screened a Pullman kitchen and the doorway to the bathroom. Many of the beads were faceted glass, and sparkled like diamonds.

“It’s much,” she said, “but it’s home. Won’t you have a seat, Matthew? I think you’ll find that chair comfortable. And I think I’m going to have a glass of sherry. May I bring you one?”

“No, thank you.”

“He don’t drink,” TJ said. “Told you that.”

“I know you did,” Julia said, “but it’s only polite to offer. I also have Coke, Matthew. That’s Coca-Cola, of course.”