Lawrence Block - The Devil Knows You’re Dead

“I don’t see why not. You’re her attorney. What’s in her best interests?”

He thought about it. “To let it lie,” he said.

“That’s what I would have said.”

“Put in another few days looking for hidden assets. But I don’t think we’re going to find any.”

“No, neither do I.”

“On the other hand, I don’t think we’re going to get any static from the IRS, either. I see her coming out of this with the deed to an apartment and a box full of money. That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“No.”

“You want it to come out neat,” he said. “Be nice to know who killed him and how and why. Be even nicer to see the killer go away for it. I have to tell you, though, the best interests of the client are served with the whole thing closed out on the spot. Make a case out of this, generate a little press, and you just know some schmuck from the tax office is going to turn up with a million questions, and who needs that?”

“Nobody.”

“Never get a conviction anyway. Whoever did it, by now he’s sure to be alibied from here to St. Louis. Probably got proof he was playing pinochle with the pope and the Lubavitcher rebbe when Holtzmann got hit.”

“Must have been some game.”

“Well, you know the pope,” Drew said. “No card sense, but he loves to play.”

A few days later I put on a suit and tie and went to the window, trying to guess if the weather would hold. It was sunny now, cool and clear, and I hoped it would stay that way.

Something drew my eye down to the benches alongside the Parc Vendôme, and I saw a familiar silhouette hunched over one of the stone cubes. I went downstairs, and instead of turning left for the subway I crossed the street and approached the lean black man with the white hair. He had a copy of the Times folded open to the chess column, and he was working out the problem with his own board and chessmen.

“You look nice,” he said. “I like your necktie.”

I thanked him. I said, “Barry, they’re having a service for George this afternoon. I’m going out to Brooklyn for it.”

“That right?”

“His brother called and told me about it. Just family, but he said I’d be welcome.”

“Be a nice day for it,” he said. “ ‘less it rains.”

“You’d be welcome, too.”

“At the funeral?”

“I thought maybe we could go together.”

He looked at me, a long, appraising look. “No,” he said. “I guess not.”

“If you’re thinking you won’t fit in,” I said, “well, hell, you’ll fit in as well as I will.”

“Guess you’re right,” he said. “We’re both the same color, and dressed about the same.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“Thing is,” he said, “it don’t matter, fitting in or not fitting in. I don’t care to go. You come back, tell me how it was. How’s that?”

I rode out on the D train. They buried him out of a funeral parlor on Nostrand Avenue, and there were more people in attendance than I would have expected, close to fifty in all. Tom, his wife, his sister, their relatives. Neighbors, employees, AA friends. The crowd was mostly white and a majority of the men wore ties and jackets, but there were a few black faces, a few gentlemen in shirtsleeves. Barry would not have been greatly out of place.

The casket was closed, the service brief. The clergyman who officiated hadn’t known George, and he spoke of death as a liberation from the bondage of physical and mental infirmity. The veils drop away, he said, and blind eyes can see again. The spirit soars.

Tom followed him and said a few words. In a sense, he said, we’d all lost George a long time ago. “But we went on loving him,” he said. “We loved the sweetness of him. And there was always the hope that someday the clouds would blow away and we’d get him back. And now he’s gone and that can never happen. But in another sense we do have him back with us. He’s with us now and he’ll never lose his way again.” His voice broke, but he squeezed the last words out. “I love you, George,” he said.

There were two hymns, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “Abide With Me.” A heavyset woman with dark hair to her waist sang them both unaccompanied, her voice filling the room. During the first hymn I thought of George in his army jacket, his pocket full of shell casings. The old soldier, fading away. Listening to the second, I remembered a version on a Thelonious Monk album, just eight bars long, just the melody. Haunting. Jan Keane owned the record. I hadn’t heard it in years.

After the service there was a procession of cars following the hearse to a cemetery in Queens, but I passed on that and caught a train back to Manhattan. I found Barry right where I’d left him. I sat down across from him and told him all about George’s funeral. He heard me through and suggested we play a little chess.

“One game,” I said.

It didn’t take him long to beat me. When I tipped my king over he suggested a toast to George’s memory might be fitting. I gave him five dollars and he came back with a quart of malt liquor and a cup of coffee. After several long swallows he capped the bottle and said, “See, I don’t never go to funerals. Don’t believe in ’em. What’s the point?”

“It’s a way to say goodbye.”

“Don’t believe in that either. People come and people go. Just the way of the world.”

“I suppose so.”

“Matter of what you get used to, is all it is. George came around and I got used to him. Got used to him being around. Now he’s gone and I’m used to that. Get used to anything, if you give yourself half a chance.”

Early the following week they finally released Glenn Holtzmann’s remains. I think they might have done so earlier if his widow had asked. I made a few calls for Lisa and arranged to have the body picked up at the morgue and cremated. There was no service.

“It seems incomplete,” Elaine said. “Shouldn’t there be some sort of service? There must be people who would come.”

“You could probably round up a contingent from his office,” I said, “but I don’t think he had any friends as such. The easiest thing for her is a quick private cremation and no service.”

“Will she have to attend? Do you think you ought to go with her?”

“She seems to have it all under control,” I said, “and I’d just as soon start letting go.”

So I didn’t keep Lisa Holtzmann company when she picked up her husband’s ashes. A day or two later, though, I left an AA meeting at ten o’clock and felt a restlessness I couldn’t walk off, or talk myself out of.

I picked up the phone. “This is Matt,” I said. “Do you feel like company?”

The following morning I walked over to Midtown North. Joe Durkin wasn’t around, but I didn’t need him for the task at hand. I talked to several different cops, explaining that I was working for Holtzmann’s widow and that the personal effects returned to her had been incomplete. “She never got his keys back,” I said. “He definitely would have had his keys with him, and she never got them back.”

Nobody knew anything. “Well, shit,” one cop said. “Tell her to change the locks.”

I went through the same thing at Manhattan Homicide, and at Central Booking. I spent most of the day bothering people who had more important things to do, but by late afternoon I walked out of a police station with a set of keys in my pocket. It wasn’t hard to establish that the keys were Holtzmann’s — one of them fit the door to his and Lisa’s apartment. It was easy to pick out the key to his safe-deposit box, and an officer at my own bank had a chart which enabled us to determine the bank and branch where we would find that box.