Lawrence Block - The Devil Knows You’re Dead

Drew Kaplan obtained authorization to open the box, and he and Lisa did so, accompanied by the inescapable representative of the Internal Revenue Service. I suppose everyone was hoping for cash and Krugerrands, but there was nothing inside to quicken anybody’s pulse. A birth certificate, a marriage license. Old snapshots of unidentified persons, school pictures of Glenn.

“The prick from the IRS couldn’t stand it,” Drew reported. “Why have a box if he didn’t have anything to keep in it? And why not have the smallest size? There must have been something else in there, he said. Obviously we got into the box, scooped the cash, and then called Uncle Sam. I suggested he look at the bank’s records and confirm that no one had obtained access to the box since the boxholder’s death. Which he already knew, the irritating little bastard, but he figured one way or another the government was getting screwed.”

“Which they must have been.”

“I would say so,” he said. “If I had to guess, I’d say the money she found in the closet used to live in the safe-deposit box. Their records put him there a week to the day before he got hit. I’d say he went in there and took out his money and put it in a tin box and stuck it in his closet. Now why would he do that?”

“In case he needed it in a hurry.”

“That’s one. For a cash transaction, or just because he wanted to be able to cut and run. The other thought comes to me is maybe he had a premonition.”

“I like that the best,” I said. “He realizes he’s in danger and wants to make sure she gets the money. That would explain why there was nothing else in the box that could embarrass anybody. He was already imagining the IRS, looking over his widow’s shoulder.”

“And we know he knows all about the IRS, ever since he sicced them on Uncle Al.”

“And we know he had good feelings toward her,” I said, “because he picked their wedding anniversary for the strongbox combination.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Five-eleven,” I said. “May eleventh.”

“Nice touch,” he said. “And nice job finding the keys.”

“Oh, they’d have turned up sooner or later.”

“Don’t bet on it,” he said. “You ever want to hide where you’ll never be found, check into a police department warehouse and stretch out on a shelf. They got Peter Stuyvesant’s wooden leg there, and you can use Boss Tweed’s wallet for a pillow.”

That should have been the end of it.

I’d done what I’d been hired to do. I hadn’t established who’d pulled the trigger, but that had not been my assignment. I’d signed on to protect the financial interests of Lisa Holtzmann, and it seemed as though I’d done that. The last act I performed on her behalf consisted of accompanying her once more to Drew’s office, where we collected the strongbox. We cabbed back to Manhattan and went to a bank on Second Avenue where she still had an account in her maiden name. She rented a safe-deposit box there and stowed the cash in it. It could stay there forever if it had to, or until someone figured out a good way to launder it.

I had been generously paid for my time, but it wasn’t the most I’d ever earned for the least amount of work, and I don’t think I felt grossly overpaid.

Anyway, it averages out. A week or so after I helped Lisa stash her money, I did some work for a woman who lived in a housing project in Chelsea. The job came to me through someone I knew from AA; this woman was the friend of a sister, or the sister of a friend, something like that. The woman had thrown out her live-in boyfriend when she found out he was molesting her nine-year-old daughter. The boyfriend didn’t want to stay thrown out. He’d come back twice and beaten her up. After the second time she got an order of protection, but that’s only useful after the fact; he’d promptly violated it, and violated the daughter while he was at it. She reported this, and the police had a warrant for the guy’s arrest, but no one knew where he was living and they weren’t about to launch a major manhunt over what the cops were inclined to categorize as a domestic disturbance.

I moved into the woman’s apartment, staking it out from within. The woman was pretty in a lush, overblown way. She drank enough wine to stay permanently unfocused, smoked Newport Lights one after another, played solitaire by the hour, and never turned off the television set in the five days I spent in her apartment.

I would sit in a chair all day, reading a book or watching the TV if she happened to have it tuned to something I could stand. I used the phone a lot to keep from going crazy. Around midnight Eddie Rankin would come over. He’s an occasional employee of the Reliable agency, a big towhead with quick reflexes and an appetite for violence. I figured the boyfriend was most likely to come around at night, and Eddie would be good if it got physical. He and I would tell lies for an hour or two, until I got drowsy enough to nap on the couch. At five he would wake me and I’d pay him a hundred dollars and send him home.

I don’t think I could have stood it for more than a week, but the boyfriend showed up on the fifth night. It was around two-thirty. The kid was asleep in her bedroom. The woman had passed out in her chair in front of the TV, as she did every night. The set was still on, and Eddie was watching it while I was dozing lightly. I heard a key in the lock, and I was sitting up and throwing my legs over the side of the couch when the door burst open and the boyfriend came in, wild-eyed and roaring.

I never had to move. Eddie was on him before he got two steps in the door. He hit him with a hard left just below the rib cage, and he must have found the liver because it took the poor son of a bitch completely out of the play. He fell as if he’d been gutshot, and caught Eddie’s knee in his face on the way down.

We could have called the cops and she could have pressed charges, assuming she would wake up enough to follow through with it. But he would have made bail, people like that always make bail, and he probably would have come over and killed her. He might have done that this time if we hadn’t been there; I frisked him while he was lying there moaning, and took a seven-inch folding knife off him.

The idea was to keep him from coming back. “Maybe he fell off the roof,” Eddie said, dragging the clown over to the window as he talked. “He strikes me as the kind of guy, he walks on roofs a lot, he tends to fall off.”

But of course we didn’t throw him off the roof, or out the window. What we did do was a pretty good job of beating the crap out of him. Eddie did it, actually — kicking him in the groin, in the ribs, stepping down hard on his hands. I’d have had to have been in a rage to do any of that, and once the situation itself was under control, so were my emotions. Eddie, on the other hand, was never far from rage, and could turn it on at will, with no provocation whatsoever.

If pressed, I could probably guess what kind of childhood he had.

When he’d had enough we got the boyfriend on his feet and out the door. In the stairwell I took hold of him by the front of his shirt and told him I never wanted to see him again. “If you ever come around here again,” I said, “I’ll break your arms and your legs, and I’ll put your eyes out, and I’ll cut your dick off and make you eat it.”

We got out of there and rode in Eddie’s car to a diner he liked. “I was gonna have knockwurst,” he said, “until you said that shit about making him eat his dick. You want to tell me something? How come the fucker had a key?”

“I guess she didn’t change the lock.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Well, it costs. She’s not rolling in dough, as you may have guessed from a look around the place.”