Lawrence Block - The Devil Knows You’re Dead

“Say he ratted out Joe Blow and had a six-figure fee coming. And somebody said, ‘Look, you need a decent place to live, and here’s a list of confiscated properties up for grabs, why don’t you pick one and we’ll deed it to you?’ ”

“Virtue rewarded.”

“It always is.”

He got the waiter’s attention and pointed to our empty coffee cups. When they’d been filled he said, “So who was Joe Blow? Any ideas?”

“No.”

“Look at his résumé. He went from selling cars in Altoona to practicing law in White Plains. Where did he turn up next, this latter-day Jonah?”

“In the legal department of a publisher. That ship sank when a foreign conglomerate took them over.”

“How’d he manage that?”

“I don’t think he had a thing to do with it. From there he went to Waddell & Yount, and he was working there when he died. A publisher’s legal department is a funny career slot for a professional snitch.”

“So?”

“Well, I have a theory,” I admitted. “It fits the facts, and I think it meshes with my own sense of Glenn Holtzmann.”

“I keep forgetting you knew the guy.”

“I didn’t, really. I met him a couple of times, that’s all.”

“Let’s hear your theory.”

“I think he fell into it,” I said. “I think he found out what his uncle was pulling and he felt a mixture of righteous anger and personal resentment. He did a job on Uncle Al and got himself out of Altoona in the process. He didn’t take the IRS money and buy himself a Mercedes, either. He pieced it out, put himself through law school. He said it was an inheritance that enabled him to get his law degree, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he saw the money as a sort of patrimony. Maybe he managed to tell himself the money should have been his in the first place, that Al Benziger got the gold mine while Glenn’s mother got the shaft.

“He went to work in White Plains. Not his first choice, he’d have preferred a firm in the city, but it was the best he could do. He made a good initial impression but he turned out to have less drive than he led people to expect. The same thing happened at Waddell & Yount, incidentally. Eleanor Yount saw him as a possible successor when she took him on, but it didn’t take long before she realized he didn’t have it in him.

“In White Plains, he found out one of the partners was into coke in a big way. And maybe he was a little disillusioned with his job, and with the way his career was shaping up. Maybe his expenses were starting to edge out in front of his income. And here’s this hotshot, using his nose for a vacuum cleaner, missing meals and doing deals. Glenn remembers Uncle Al and how satisfying it was to give him what he deserved. Profitable, too.”

“So he drops a dime on him.”

“Funny how we still call it that, considering how long a phone call’s cost a quarter. But that’s what he does. Once again he’s out of there when the shit hits the fan. He gets a job with a publishing house, stays there as long as he can, then settles in with another publisher. He’s not ambitious and he’s no high liver. He’s in a small studio apartment in the East Eighties.

“Somewhere along the way he sees another chance to make a buck. My first thought was that he met Lisa, decided they needed a place to live, and quick found someone to sell out. But the timing’s wrong. I think he was minding his own business when an opportunity came along and he grabbed it.”

“ ‘I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.’ ” When I looked blank Drew said, “George Washington Plunkett, Tammany hack of the last century. He wrote this strangely candid political memoir, honest and self-serving at the same time. That’s what he said. He seen his opportunities and he took ’em. I wonder what opportunity our friend saw.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “If I had to guess, I’d say it had nothing to do with his work. It probably involved somebody he knew in Yorkville.”

“Because he moved.”

“That was his pattern, wasn’t it? Screw somebody and then get the hell out. He did a job on someone and had a nice fee coming. ‘Well, Glenn, how would you like the money?’ ‘Maybe you could pay me in real estate. What’s available these days?’ ‘Let’s see, here’s something nice in a two-bedroom condo. High floor, river view, owned by a Corsican gentleman who only drove it on Sundays. Here’s the keys, why don’t you take it around the block?’ ”

“Is that how it works? They show you what’s available and let you pick?”

“I don’t know how it works. But I think that’s essentially how he got the condo. This was right around the time he met Lisa. When that got serious he told them to push the paperwork, and by the time they got back from Bermuda the place was ready for them to move in.”

“And the money in the strongbox?”

“Another job, I suppose. Or the same one. My guess is that something shifted for him when he got married, if it hadn’t already. He began to see this sideline of his as a profession, not just something he’d fallen into once or twice. He started looking for opportunities.”

“How do you know that?”

“From his schedule. At work he had all he could do to fill eight hours, but he told Lisa stories about a heavy work load that kept him at his desk nights and weekends. I think he was out prospecting. I think that’s why he was interested in me.”

“He figured he could clip you for tax evasion, huh? What would they seize, your extra pair of shoes?”

“It was my occupation that fascinated him,” I said. “He told me he wanted to publish my memoirs. Well, that was a lot of crap. His firm didn’t publish originals. What he wanted was to find out how a detective operates. He wanted me to teach him the tricks of the trade. He may have envisioned the two of us as partners, digging up dirt on people and transmuting it into gold. I never found out what he had in mind because I didn’t like him enough to offer him any encouragement.”

“So he nosed around on his own.”

“Evidently.”

“Who killed him?”

“I don’t know.”

“No idea?”

“None,” I said. “I assume he was prospecting, sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong. Someone must have tipped to what he was doing.”

“And shot him.”

“It’s a chance you take when you run around setting up dope dealers. You run less of a risk turning in relatives for cheating on their taxes. But sooner or later you’re going to run out of relatives, and dabblers like the lawyer in White Plains. When the other players are pros, you can wind up getting killed.”

“An occupational hazard.”

“I would say so. On the other hand, it’s still odds-on that it happened the way the police figured it from the start.”

“George Sadecki.”

“There’s a good chance he did it, and what difference does it make if he didn’t? Clearing his name’s not worth a dime to anybody. My guess is he’s innocent, but I couldn’t begin to back that up, let alone tell you who’s guilty. Glenn didn’t leave notes, or one of those traditional sealed envelopes to be opened in the event of his death.”

“Some people have no consideration. You want some more coffee?”

I shook my head. “Somebody’s probably getting away with murder,” I said, “but that happens all the time.”

“And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”

“I don’t know how bad a guy he was. On the one hand he was a paid rat, but you could make a case that he was an unheralded yuppie hero, collecting a bounty on bad guys. However you look at it, I don’t have this sense of his ghost crying out for revenge.”

“What about our mutual client? Can she sleep nights if her husband’s killer goes unpunished?”