Lawrence Block - The Devil Knows You’re Dead

“No, but they’re pretty scarce at the street level, and Dodger Prysock was strictly street.”

“Dodger?”

“His nom de la rue. Damn near inevitable, isn’t it? Roger the Dodger, and he was originally from Los Angeles.”

“I’d have thought Brooklyn.”

“That’s because you have a sense of history. Mr. Prysock was not what you’d call a dominant figure in his chosen field, but he made a living.”

“Enough to keep him in purple hats and zoot suits?”

“Not his style at all. The Dodger left that sort of thing for the brothers. Dressed very J. Press himself.”

“Who killed him?”

“No idea,” Danny Boy said. “Last I heard he was out of town. Then the first news I got of him was the story in the paper. Who killed him? Beats me. You didn’t do it, did you?”

“No.”

“Well, neither did I,” he said, “but that still leaves a whole lot of people.”

It was the middle of the afternoon when I got to the top floor at 488 West Eighteenth, but it would have looked the same in the middle of the night. No daylight came through the windows. The glass panes in their lower halves had been replaced with mirrors, the upper panes painted the same lemon yellow as the walls.

“We can’t have anyone seeing in here,” Julia said. “Not even the sun. Not even the Lord God.”

She gave me a cup of tea, put me in a chair, sat on the daybed with her feet tucked under her. No harem pajamas this time. She was wearing snug black slacks and a fuchsia blouse. The blouse was silk, unbuttoned at the throat, and there didn’t look to be anything under it that God or the surgeons hadn’t given her.

I had beeped TJ, and there had been several phone calls back and forth. And now I had been granted an audience with Her Majesty.

“Roger Prysock,” I said.

“Wasn’t there an Arthur Prysock?” she wondered. “A musician, I seem to recall.”

“This one’s Roger.”

“A relative, perhaps.”

“Anything’s possible,” I said. “Roger the Dodger, they call him.”

“Called him. He’s dead.”

“Shot down on the street while he was using the phone. Three or four in the chest and an extra for insurance. In the back of the head. Does that sound familiar?”

“It might ring a muted bell. How’s that tea?”

“It’s fine. He was a tall man, dark hair and eyes. Good-looking. Dressed well, if not as flashily as other members of his profession.”

“Profession,” she said archly.

“He died on a street that’s been a hookers’ stroll for as long as I can remember. Now who else do we know who was tall and dark and an Ivy League dresser and died just like that, on the same kind of street?”

“Oh, dear,” she said. “Do you suppose we could fast-forward through the establishing shots?”

“Who killed him, Julia?”

“Well,” she said, “it certainly sounds as though it was the same person who killed our friend Glenn, and I already told you I didn’t know who that was.”

“ ‘Didn’t.’ ”

“Have I made a mistake in my tenses, Matthew?”

I shook my head. “You didn’t know who killed him,” I said, “but I think you do now. Because I think Glenn Holtzmann was killed by mistake. The man who killed him was looking for Roger Prysock. Maybe he only knew the Dodger by description, or maybe they were close enough in appearance to fool him in that light.”

“I was all the way across the street,” she said. “He didn’t look like Dodger Prysock to me.”

“You already knew he wasn’t. You’d seen him up close earlier.”

“That’s true,” she said. She examined a fingernail, then gnawed at the cuticle. “I didn’t connect the two killings,” she said. “The first one, Glenn, I haven’t even thought about it in weeks now. And I didn’t hear any details of the second shooting. I didn’t know about the bullet in the back of the head.”

“Sort of a signature.”

“Yes.” She studied her nails some more and blew on them, as if the polish were still wet. “I didn’t even know he was back in town.”

“Prysock.”

“Yes. I haven’t seen him in months. I heard he’d gone back to Los Angeles. I think that’s where he’s from.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“The first I heard he was back,” she said, “was when I heard he was dead.”

“Who had a beef with him?”

Her eyes avoided mine. “I don’t have a pimp,” she said. “Or a manager, as some of them like to be called these days. And I barely knew Roger the Dodger, and I didn’t think very much of him. His clothes were conservatively cut, but he could put on a suit from Tripler and look like a ten-dollar whore in a bridesmaid’s gown. Trust me.”

“All right.”

“Anything I could tell you would be secondhand. And you didn’t get it from me, because I will never repeat any of this. Are we very clear on that?”

“Crystal clear.”

“What I heard,” she said, “and I didn’t hear it until well after the Dodger disappeared, was that he’d gone to California for health reasons. In other words, somebody wanted to kill him.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know the man. All I have’s his street name, and I never met him because he doesn’t walk down the same mean streets as this girl.”

“What do they call him?”

“Zoot.”

“Zoot,” I said.

“After the sartorial statement he likes to make, which is far removed from that of the late Mr. Prysock.”

“He wears a zoot suit.”

“A genuine zoot suit,” she said, “if you even know what that is. People tend to stick that label to anything really tasteless and flashy, anything that goes with a floppy magenta hat and a pink Cadillac with fur upholstery, but the zoot suit was a particular style of the forties.”

“With a drape shape and a reet pleat,” I said.

“You astonish me, my darling. It’s tacky of me to say this, but you didn’t strike me as terribly fashion-conscious. And now you turn out to be a veritable historian of the masculine couture.”

“Not quite,” I said. “Tell me about Zoot. Is he black?”

“And you never told me you were psychic.”

“Dark skin tone,” I said. “Long pointed chin, more noticeable in profile than full face. Little button nose.”

“It sounds as though you know him.”

“I never met him either,” I said. “But I saw him once wearing a powder-blue zoot suit and wraparound mirrored sunglasses. And a hat.” I closed my eyes and focused. “A straw hat, cocoa brown, very narrow brim. And a very loud hatband.”

“When did this happen?”

“A year ago, or maybe it was more like a year and a half. I heard a name for him, but it wasn’t Zoot.”

“What was he doing?”

“Sitting at a table with a friend of mine. Then he went away and I took his seat.”

“And learned his name.”

“But not his street name.”

“And now for the big-money question. What color was the hatband?”

I frowned, concentrating, then shook my head. “Sorry,” I said.

“Believe me, so am I,” she said, “but it’s not a total loss. You still get to keep the microwave oven and the home-entertainment unit. And thanks for being our guest on Try to Remember. ”

“Nicholson James,” I told Joe Durkin. “He started out in life with the name James Nicholson, and somewhere along the way the name got reversed on some official document. My guess is it was a bench warrant, because that’s the kind of official document he probably saw the most of. Whatever it was, he liked the look of it. As soon as he could he got his name changed legally, which may be the last legal thing he ever did.”

“And his last illegal act?”