Lawrence Block - The Devil Knows You’re Dead

“I thought you enjoyed the classes.”

“They’re not my life.”

“No.”

“They can’t be my life. I don’t have a life. That’s the problem.”

I didn’t know what to say, what to suggest. And, while I was trying to think of something, her mood changed. It was as if she’d hit a button on her own personal remote and switched herself to another channel.

“Enough of that,” she said. “No long faces, no soul-searching in public places. People like to see you smile. At least that’s what they taught us in Call Girl School.”

Every few days I would pick up the phone and call Lisa. Sometimes I called her in the afternoon, sometimes late at night. She was almost always home. I would ask if I could come over. She would always tell me to come.

After a while she changed the message on her machine, replacing Glenn’s final phrases with some equally bland lines of her own. My first reaction, once I’d realized that I hadn’t dialed a wrong number, was one of relief that I wouldn’t have to listen to that voice from the spirit world anymore, wouldn’t have to hear the man out before I got to speak with his wife.

But the next time I heard her message I could hear his voice along with it, intoning lines from “Flanders Fields.”

I never saw her outside of the apartment, never called her to talk, never took her downstairs for a cup of coffee or a bite to eat. I would go over there, early or late. She might be wearing anything — jeans and a sweatshirt, a skirt and sweater, a nightgown. We would talk. She told me about growing up in White Bear Lake, and about the way her father had started coming to her bed when she was nine or ten. He did everything but put it inside her. That would be wrong, he told her.

I told her war stories, sketched word portraits of some of the characters I’d known over the years, the unusual specimens I’d encountered on either side of the law. That way I could hold up my end of the conversation without revealing very much of myself, which was fine with me.

And we would go to bed.

One afternoon, with a Patsy Cline record playing in the background, she asked me what I figured we were doing. Just being together, I suggested.

“No,” she said. “You know what I mean. What’s the point? Why are you here?”

“Everybody’s got to be someplace.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are. I don’t have any answers. I’m here because I want to be here, but I don’t know why that is.”

Patsy was singing about faded love.

“I hardly leave this apartment,” Lisa said. “I sit at the window and look at New Jersey. I could be out making the rounds, showing my book to art directors, calling the people I know, trying to get some work. Tomorrow, I tell myself. Next week, next month. After the first of the year. What the hell, everybody knows there’s no work now. The economy’s a mess. Everybody knows that.”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been looking for work, so how do I know it’s not out there? But how can I work up any enthusiasm for the struggle when I’ve got all that money just sitting there?”

“If you’re not under any pressure—”

“I could be doing my own work,” she said. “But I don’t do that either. I sit around. I look at TV. I watch the sun go down. I wait for you to call. I hope you won’t call, but that’s what I’m waiting for. For you to call.”

I waited in similar fashion, waited for my own action, to call or not to call. I won’t call her today, I would decide. And sometimes I’d stick to my decision. And sometimes I wouldn’t.

“Why do you come over here, Matt?”

“I don’t know.”

“What am I, do you figure? Am I a drug? Am I a bottle of booze?”

“Maybe.”

“My father drank. I know I told you that.”

“Yes.”

“The other day when you kissed me I had the sense that there was something missing, and I realized what it was. It was the smell of whiskey on your breath. We don’t need a psychiatrist to figure that one out, do we?”

I didn’t say anything. I remember our faded love , sang Patsy Cline.

“So I guess that’s what’s in it for me,” she said. “I get to have Daddy in bed with me, and I don’t have to worry that Mommy’ll hear us because she’s all the way across town. And he wouldn’t put it in. He thought it was a sin.”

“So do I.”

“You do?”

I nodded. “But I do it anyway,” I said.

Later that same day she talked about her late husband. We never talked about Elaine, I had ruled out that topic of conversation, but I couldn’t presume to tell her I didn’t want to hear about him either.

“I wonder if he expected this,” she said.

“This?”

“Us. I think he did.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know. He admired you, I know that much.”

“He thought I could be useful.”

“It was more than that. He put it in my mind to call you. You called me, I realize that, but I was going to call you. I remember he told me once that if a person was ever in a jam, you’d be a good person to call. He said it with a certain intensity, too, as if he wanted to make sure I would remember later. It’s as if he was telling me to call you if anything ever happened to him.”

“You could be reading more into his words than he put there.”

“I don’t think so,” she said, burrowing into the crook of my arm. “I think that was exactly what he meant. In fact I’m surprised there wasn’t a note in the strongbox, along with the money. ‘Call Matt Scudder, he’ll tell you exactly what to do.’ ” Her hand reached for me. “Well? Aren’t you going to tell me exactly what to do?”

And when I left her apartment that day I walked a block to Eleventh Avenue and down to the corner where he died. I stood there while the lights changed several times, then walked on down to DeWitt Clinton Park to pay my respects to the Captain. I read McCrae’s misquoted words:

Had I broken faith, with Glenn Holtzmann, with George Sadecki? Was there more I could do, and was my inaction keeping their spirits restless?

What action could I take? And how could I bring myself to take it, if I was afraid of where it might lead?

Two weeks before Christmas Elaine and I had dinner with Ray and Bitsy Galindez at a Caribbean restaurant in the East Village. Ray is a police artist; working with eyewitnesses, he produces drawings of unidentified perpetrators for Wanted posters and NYPD circulars. His is an uncommon craft, and Ray is uncommonly good at what he does. I have used him twice in cases of my own, and on both occasions he did an extraordinary job of dredging up faces from some broom closet in my mind and making them visible on paper.

After dinner we went back to Elaine’s, where the sketches he’d made for me were framed and hanging on the wall. They made a curious group. Two of the drawings showed murderers, the third a boy who had been a victim of one of the men. The other man — his name was James Leo Motley — had come very close to killing Elaine.

Bitsy Galindez had never been to Elaine’s apartment before and had never seen the sketches. She looked at them and shuddered, saying she couldn’t understand how Elaine could bear to look at them every day. Elaine told her they were works of art, that they transcended their subject matter. Ray, a little embarrassed, said they were decent draftsmanship, good likenesses, that it was true he had a knack, but that it was a hell of a stretch to call it art.