Lawrence Block - The Devil Knows You’re Dead

I counted out bills, palmed them to him. He dropped his hand into his lap so it wasn’t visible from the street and fanned the bills, then looked quizzically across at me. “Three hundred,” I said. “A hundred’s for the work you’ve done so far, just to keep us current. The rest is for the gun. It may cost more than you think. Whatever it costs, you can keep the difference.”

“That’s cool.”

“Something’s bothering you,” I said. “If you don’t feel you’re getting paid enough, let me know about it.”

“Shit,” he said. “That ain’t it.”

“All right.”

“You want to know what it is? It’s that Julia, man.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, what is she? She a man or a woman?”

“Well, we keep saying ‘she.’ We wouldn’t do that if we didn’t think of her as female.”

“She ain’t like no dude I ever met.”

“No.”

“Don’t look like none, either. See her on the street, you never ‘spect she anything but a woman.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Even up close you wouldn’t. Lot of ’em, you can tell right away, but she’d fool you.”

“I agree.”

“Say a dude goes with her, what do that make him?”

“Probably make him happy.”

“Be serious, man. Would it make him gay?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you was gay,” he said, “then you be wantin’ men, right? So why’d you be lookin’ to get down with someone looks like a woman?”

“You wouldn’t.”

“But if you wanted a woman,” he went on, “why would you pick one’s got a dick on her?”

“Beats me.”

“And why’d she say that shit about how I’d make a good girl?” He held his hands in front of his chest as if cupping breasts and frowned down at them. “Crazy damn thing to say to me,” he said.

“She just gets a kick out of being outrageous.”

“Yeah, well, she good at it. You ever been with somebody like her?”

“No.”

“Would you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You with Elaine now, but if you wasn’t—”

“I don’t know.”

“You know what she said to me, whisperin’ in my ear like she did?”

“She said to come back once you got rid of me.”

“You heard her, huh?”

“Just a guess.”

“Pretty good guess, Bess. Place is nice, way she got it all fixed up. Never seen no red floor before, ‘less it was linoleum.”

“No.”

“All them pictures. Take you days to look at ’em all.”

“Are you going back?”

“Thinkin’ on it. Bitch’s got me all mixed up. I don’t know what I want to do, you know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean.”

“If I go I gone feel weird, and if I don’t go I gone feel weird. You know?” He shook his head, clucked his tongue, sighed heavily. “Maybe I scared,” he said. “Scared of what I apt to find there.”

“And if you don’t look?”

He grinned suddenly. “Scared what I might miss.”

I found Danny Boy at Poogan’s, a regular spot of his on West Seventy-second Street. He was at his usual table, with an iced bottle of vodka alongside. He had his right leg folded so that the foot was propped up on his left knee, and he was studying his shoe. It was a half-boot, actually, beige in color, with a slight heel.

“I don’t know about this,” he said. “You recognize the leather?”

“Ostrich, isn’t it?”

“It is,” he said, “and that’s what bothers me. Ever see an ostrich?”

“Years ago at the zoo.”

“I’ve only seen them on Channel Thirteen. Nature. National Geographic specials. Spectacular creatures. Can’t fly, but they can run like hell. Imagine killing something like that just so you can skin it and make boots.”

“I understand they’re doing remarkable things these days with Naugahyde.”

“It’s not the killing that bothers me,” he said. “It’s the waste. All they use is the outside, for God’s sake. It’d be different if they ate the meat, but it can’t be very tasty or they’d have it on the menu all over town.”

“Ostrich piccata,” I suggested.

“I was thinking of Ostrich Wellington. But you follow me, don’t you? I have this vision of the flayed corpses of ostriches rotting by the thousands, like buffalo on the Great Plains.”

“Victims of rapacious ostrich skinners,” I said.

“Led by the legendary Ostrich Bill Cody. Don’t you agree with me that it’s wasteful?”

“I suppose so. They’re good-looking boots.”

“Thank you. Long-wearing, they tell me. Makes a great leather, ostrich. And maybe it’s a good thing we kill them for their hides. Otherwise I suppose we’d be up to here in ostriches. They’d be worse than rats. God knows they’re bigger.”

“Probably run faster, too.”

“They’d ruin Jones Beach,” he said. “Be no place to put your towel. Every few yards you’ve got another fucking ostrich with his head in the sand.”

Maybe he’d seen Jones Beach on Channel Thirteen. It was a sure bet he’d never been there. Danny Boy Bell, short in stature and elegant in dress, is the albino son of black parents, and he is no more apt than Dracula to venture out in daylight. At night you can find him at Poogan’s or Mother Goose, drinking Stoly or Finlandia and brokering information. In the daytime you can’t find him at all.

I asked him what he’d heard about Glenn Holtzmann. Nothing, he said. All he knew was what he read in the papers, a story of an innocent victim, an armed derelict, and crime-ridden streets. I let out that it might not have happened that way, and that the deceased had handled a lot of cash for someone who got paid by check.

“Ah,” Danny Boy said. “Lived life off the books, did he? I never heard a word.”

“Maybe you could ask around.”

“Maybe I could. And how’s your life, Matthew? How is the beautiful Elaine, and when are you going to make an honest woman of her?”

“Gee, I was going to ask you that, Danny Boy,” I said. “You’re the man with all the answers.”

I took a couple of cabs and dropped in on a couple of other people who kept their ears open as assiduously as Danny Boy. They didn’t dress as well or run as engaging a line of small talk, but sometimes they heard things and that made them worth a visit.

By the time I was finished it was past midnight and I was at the counter at Tiffany’s, not the jeweler on Fifth Avenue but the all-night coffee shop on Sheridan Square. There’s a midnight meeting a short walk from there on Houston Street, in premises occupied for years by the Village’s most notorious after-hours club. I thought about dropping in, but I’d already missed half the meeting. They had a two A.M. meeting, too, but I didn’t want to stay up that late.

Too late to call Elaine.

Much too late to call Tom Sadecki, although it was time I let him hear from me. What had originally looked a lot like tilting at windmills was turning out to be a halfway rational mission. The more I thought about it, the more persuaded I was that George Sadecki was innocent of Glenn Holtzmann’s murder.

With a little luck I’d be able to prove it. If I turned over Holtzmann’s life I’d find someone with a motive, and that’s half the battle, as often as not. Once you know who did it all you need to do is prove it, and I didn’t need enough proof to get a conviction in a court of law. I just had to persuade people in a position to get the charges dropped. Then George could go back to his life’s work of being a danger to himself and a nuisance to others.

I ordered another cup of coffee. A man and woman got up from a front booth and went to the cashier’s desk. The man gave me a nod. I waved back. I recognized him from the Perry Street meeting a few blocks away. I went there sometimes when I was in the neighborhood.