Lawrence Block - The Devil Knows You’re Dead

Probably. It very likely changed everything.

I hadn’t called Elaine, either. You’ll call me in the morning , she’d said, but I hadn’t. It seemed to me that, while the evening had been strained and uncomfortable, we’d resolved it well enough and had parted on good terms, with no unfinished business.

We had some now.

I decided I’d call them both as soon as I got the chance, but not from the street, not with traffic noise for background music. Right now I didn’t want to talk to anybody, anyway. I just wanted to walk. It was the best exercise, walking. That’s what all the authorities were saying lately. Just get out there, forget your troubles, and walk.

Right.

It must have been around six when I walked into an Italian-style coffeehouse on Tenth Street east of Second Avenue. The place called itself Caffè Literati, and along with the usual bentwood chairs and marble-topped tables and Quattrocento reproductions they had a couple of floor-to-ceiling bookcases, with real books in them. A sign advised that the books were there for customers’ reading pleasure, but all were available for purchase as well at the marked prices.

There was only one other customer in the place, a fellow in his thirties who already had one of those horse-player faces you see in the OTB parlor. He had a folded newspaper on the table in front of him and he was working something out on a pocket calculator.

The room smelled of cigarettes and fresh-ground coffee, and the faint but unmistakable trace of one of those little De Nobili cigars hung in the still air.

Classical music played. It sounded familiar but I couldn’t guess what it was. I asked the waitress who brought my double espresso. She looked as though she’d be likely to know, dressed all in black, with her long blond hair in a braid and her no-nonsense glasses.

“I think it’s Bach,” she said.

“Really?”

“I think.”

I sipped my coffee and tried to figure out what the hell I was doing. I dug out my notebook and paged through it, making what I could of it.

What was the US Asset Reduction Corporation? Liquidators of foreclosed properties, most likely, and there were plenty of those lately, given the state of the economy. Why would Glenn Holtzmann, a single fellow comfortably ensconced in a studio apartment in Yorkville, make a private deal with a liquidator? It had very likely been a bargain, but how did he happen to be in the market? And where did he get the money to pay for it? And why wasn’t there any record of the transaction?

Assume he had cash. Maybe US Asset Reduction had a profitable sideline as a money laundry. You paid them with a suitcase full of green money and then you sold the apartment, or mortgaged it for the maximum and walked away with legitimate reportable money. Maybe you mortgaged it with them, and they could foreclose again, run the same game over and over.

Would that work?

Even if it would, why weren’t the numbers a matter of public record? Wouldn’t anybody trying to make dirty money look clean want to be on the record?

Of course they would have given him documentation, paper that would say whatever he wanted it to say, paper that would look just fine at an IRS audit. But how did they do that and at the same time manage to keep it out of the city records?

And where did he get the money, the son of a bitch? I still didn’t have a clue where he got the money.

“Boccherini.”

I looked up, puzzled.

“Not Bach,” she said. “Boccherini. I like walked away and listened to it for the first time, and I’m like, That doesn’t sound like Bach. So I checked, and it’s Boccherini.”

“It’s pretty,” I said.

“I guess.”

I tried to think about Holtzmann some more but I had lost the thread. No go. I sipped my coffee and listened to Boccherini. There was a pay phone on the wall across from the rest room, and my eyes kept being drawn to it. Boccherini was still playing when I gave up and made my calls.

“Thank God,” Elaine said. “I’ve been worried about you. Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right. Why were you worried?”

“Because last night was a mess. Because I thought you were going to call this morning. Because George Sadecki was killed.”

I explained how I’d only found that out a couple of hours ago. “The detective,” I said, “is always the last to know.”

“I was afraid of how you might take it.”

“Afraid it would drive me to drink?”

“Mostly just concerned that you’d feel bad.”

“I felt pretty stupid,” I admitted, and told her about the conversations I’d had with Joe Durkin and Tom Sadecki. She agreed that the whole thing was pretty embarrassing.

“But if you think about it,” she said, “all it really shows is how dedicated you are to your work. If you’d been sitting around in your underwear watching TV, or if you just took time to eat a decent breakfast and read the paper—”

“I might have known what everybody else in town knew. That’s pretty good spin control you’ve got there, but I still don’t think this is something I’m going to trot out years from now to impress prospective clients.”

“No.”

“Anyway, I’m not walking around racked with guilt. I didn’t contribute to George’s death. I just took a long time to find out about it.”

“It’s sad, isn’t it?”

“It’s sad but it’s not tragic, except in the sense that his whole life was tragic. I’m sorry for Tom, but he’ll get over it. And this simplifies his life, and he’s enough of a realist to know it. He loved his brother, but George must have been a hard guy to love. It’ll be easier to love his memory.”

I told her what Tom had told me, about his recollection of George having been changed by the fact of his death, with brighter early memories supplanting the later ones. We talked about that some.

She said, “You know, you caught me on my way out the door. There’s a lecture at Town Hall. In fact you could meet me there, I’m sure there are still tickets available, except you’d be bored to tears. Do you want to meet afterward? But not at Chien Bizarre.”

“You’ll be coming from Town Hall, and I want to get to a meeting. Paris Green? Say a quarter after ten?”

“Perfect.”

“I’ve had a busy day,” I told Lisa. “George Sadecki was stabbed to death by another prisoner, but I suppose you knew that.”

“It was on CNN this morning.”

That figured. I told her a little of what I’d found and hadn’t found in various government records. She said she’d heard from Drew, but as far as I could tell his call had been designed just to keep the client happy.

Maybe you could say the same for my call.

“I’m going to be busy tonight,” I said. “I’ll talk with you tomorrow.”

While I was on the phone, one of the library books caught my eye. It was an anthology of twentieth-century British and American poetry, and I’d recognized the volume because Jan Keane owned a copy. I thought I might be able to find the Robinson Jeffers poem about the wounded hawk, but it wasn’t in there. There were half a dozen others by Jeffers included. I read one called “Shine, Perishing Republic” that suggested he had a low opinion of human beings, Americans in particular.

I read the opening of “The Waste Land,” with its observations about April’s cruelty. October, I thought, could be fairly savage in its own right. I read a few other things, and then I read a poem of the First World War, “I Have a Rendezvous With Death,” by Alan Seeger. I had read it before, but that was no reason not to read it again.

It reminded me of the poem at the base of the statue in DeWitt Clinton Park. I didn’t know the author, but there was a title index and I found it that way. The author was John McCrae, and the lines on the monument were from the third and final stanza. Here’s the complete poem: