Lawrence Block - The Devil Knows You’re Dead

“You don’t even know how good you are,” Elaine countered. “I wish I had a gallery. I’d give you a show.”

“A gallery,” he said. “Have to be a rogues’ gallery, wouldn’t it?”

“I’m serious, Ray. In fact I was thinking of having you do a portrait of Matt.”

“Who’d he kill? Just a joke.”

“You do portraits, don’t you?”

“When somebody asks.” He held up his hands. “This is no false modesty, Elaine, but there’s a hundred guys out on the street with easels and drawing pads who can do your portrait as good as I can, and maybe better. You sit for me and I do your portrait, it’s not gonna be anything special. Believe me.”

“That’s probably true,” she said, “because what makes your work unique is the way you draw a person without seeing him. What I was thinking was that you could draw Matt by working with me, as if he were a suspect and I an eyewitness.”

“But I’ve already seen him.”

“I know.”

“So that would get in the way. But I see what you’re saying, I do. It’s an interesting idea.”

“My father,” she said.

“Beg your pardon?”

“You could do my father,” she said. “He’s dead, he died years ago. I have some photographs of him, of course. He’s in one of the framed photos to the right of the front door, but don’t look at it.”

“I won’t.”

“In fact I’m going to take it down so you don’t happen to glance at it by accident later on your way out. This is an exciting idea for me, Ray. Could you do that, do you think? Could the two of us sit down and you’d do a drawing of my father?”

“I guess so,” he said. “I don’t see why not.”

To me she said, “That’s what I want for Christmas. I hope you didn’t buy my present yet because this is what I really want.”

“It’s yours,” I said.

“My daddy,” she said. “You know, it’s hard to picture him in my mind. I wonder if I’ll be able to do it.”

“The memory will come back when you need it.”

She looked at me. “It’s starting already,” she said, and her eyes filled with tears. “Excuse me,” she said, and got to her feet.

After they left she said, “I’m not crazy, you know. He really has an uncanny ability.”

“I know.”

“It’ll be emotional, working with him. You saw how I got just thinking about it. But it’s something I really want to do. If I cry a little, so be it. Kleenex is cheap, right?”

“Right.”

“If I could, I’d give him a show.”

“Why don’t you?” She looked at me. “You’ve said that before,” I said, “and not just about Ray. Maybe you ought to open a gallery.”

“What a wacky idea.”

“Maybe it’s not so wacky.”

“I’ve thought of it,” she admitted. “It would be another fucking hobby, though, wouldn’t it? And more expensive than taking courses at Hunter.”

“Chance made a good thing out of it.”

Chance was a friend of ours, a black man who had collected African art for years and now sold it quite successfully out of a gallery on upper Madison Avenue.

“Chance is different,” she said. “By the time Chance went into the business he knew more about his field than ninety percent of the people who were dealing in it. But what the hell do I know about anything?”

I pointed at a large abstract canvas hanging near the window. “Tell me again what you paid for that one,” I said, “and what it’s worth now.”

“That was luck.”

“Or a good eye.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know enough about art. And I don’t know a thing about merchandising it. Let’s be realistic, okay? All I ever sold was pussy.”

It was funny how the mood flattened out. We’d had a good time with Ray and Bitsy, and the prospect of collaborating on a portrait of her father had excited her, but now the blues rolled in like cloud cover. I had been planning on staying over, but a little before midnight I told her I felt the need for a meeting. “I’ll just go back to the hotel afterward,” I said, and she didn’t try to talk me out of it.

There are two regular midnight meetings in Manhattan, one on West Forty-sixth Street, one downtown on Houston. I picked the closer of the two and sat on a rickety chair for an hour drinking bad coffee. The fellow who led the meeting had started out sniffing airplane glue at seven and had left no mind-altering substance unexplored in the years since then. He’d hit his first detox at fifteen, had arrested in an emergency room at eighteen, and had twice almost died of endocarditis contracted via IV heroin use. He was now twenty-four, had been sober two years and change, had sustained some permanent cardiovascular damage, and had just recently been diagnosed as HIV-positive.

“But I’m sober,” he said.

At one point I looked around the room and realized I was the oldest man in the room by a considerable margin, except for a wispy white-haired fellow in the corner who was arguably the oldest man in America. A couple of times during the discussion I was on the point of raising my hand, but something stopped me. I was at least as close to leaving before the meeting was over, but I didn’t do that either, dutifully remaining until the hour was up.

Afterward I walked over to Tenth Avenue, and up to Grogan’s Open House.

Mick said, “Do you remember the first time we talked? I made you take off your shirt.”

“You wanted to make sure I wasn’t wearing a wire.”

“I did,” he said. “By God, I hope you’re not wearing one tonight.”

Burke had gone for the night. The floor was swept, and all the tables but ours were topped with chairs. One light still burned. Mick had just told me a story that would have put him in jail if he’d told it in court. It had happened long ago, but it involved acts for which there is no statute of limitations.

“No wires,” I said. I looked down into my glass. It held club soda, but the way I was gazing into it you’d have thought it was filled with something stronger. I used to stare like that into glasses of whiskey, as if they contained coded answers. All they did was dissolve the questions, but there was a time when that was enough. “No wires. No strings, either.”

“Are you all right, man?”

“I suppose so,” I said. “I finished up three days of per diem for Reliable yesterday. Then I spent this afternoon comforting a widow.”

“Oh?”

“Or she comforted me. Right now it seems cold comfort all around.”

He waited.

“A former client,” I said finally. “You remember the fellow who was shot on Eleventh Avenue.”

“I do. I thought you were done with that.”

“I don’t seem to be done with his wife.”

“Ah.”

Someone tried the door. It was locked and gated, but the one light burning and ourselves at a table was enough to kindle hope in the breast of some poor drunk every now and then. Mick stood, walked halfway to the door, and motioned for the fellow to go away. He tried the knob one more time before he gave up and moved on.

Mick sat down again and filled his glass. “He came in here a time or two,” he said. “Did I ever tell you that?”

“Holtzmann?”

“Himself. This past summer we got our share of them that don’t belong here. Part of it’s the neighborhood changing, and then there was that fucking newspaper article.”

Newsday had run a column on Grogan’s, an affectionately Runyonesque report on the raffish crowd, with special emphasis on the legends surrounding Mick himself. I said, “That drew people? You’d have thought it would have scared them away.”

“You would,” he said, “but humans are a strange race of men. Your man came in around that time, looking around the way they’ll do. As if he might spy a corpse in the corner.”