Lawrence Block - The Devil Knows You’re Dead

I called Lisa. I said hello and she said hello, and she waited for me to invite myself over.

Instead I told her how her husband had been shot to death by someone who’d mistaken him for a pimp. “The case won’t be reopened,” I said. “The only person who might have wanted it was George Sadecki’s brother, and he’s decided against it. God knows the cops would rather leave well enough alone, and so would we.”

“So it doesn’t change anything.”

“It ties off the loose ends,” I said. “And it’s reassuring to know Glenn wasn’t killed by someone he’d informed on, or somebody he was trying to set up. But in practical terms, no, it doesn’t change anything.”

“It’s funny the way he had a premonition.”

“If that’s what he had. Maybe he was working on something he thought might get him killed, and maybe it would have if the pimp hadn’t gotten him first.”

We talked some more. She asked me if I wanted to come over.

“Not tonight,” I said. “I’m exhausted.”

“Get some sleep.”

“I will,” I said. “I’ll call you.”

I hung up the phone. I walked over to the window and stood looking out of it for a few minutes. Then I picked up the phone and made another call.

“Hi,” I said. “Okay if I come over?”

“Now?”

“Did I pick a bad time?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

I said, “I really want to see you. I’m exhausted, I haven’t been to bed since the night before last.”

“Is something the matter?”

“No, but I’ve been busy. But I suppose it can wait until tomorrow.”

“No,” she said. “It’s all right.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s all right,” she said.

“He was killed by accident,” I told Elaine. “That’s how it looked from the beginning, that’s how the police saw it. A guy from the twenty-eighth floor in the wrong place at the wrong time, a guy in a suit taking a walk on the wild side.

“They thought he ran into George Sadecki, and no matter how hard I tried I could never completely rule that out. But there was something wrong about Glenn Holtzmann, and the more I learned about him the more likely it seemed that he’d furnished somebody with a much better reason to kill him than poor George ever had. And the killing certainly felt purposeful to me. That last shot into the back of the head didn’t seem characteristic of a mugging gone wrong, or a panhandler turned nasty. It was an execution. It was the sort of thing you don’t do unless you damn well want somebody dead.”

“And that’s what it was after all,” she said.

“That’s exactly what it was. Nicholson James had what he must have felt was a very good reason to take out Roger Prysock, and that’s what he thought he was doing when he killed Glenn. Then, when George shuffled along to take the rap for him, he must have felt God was watching over him. And of course he never went and told anyone what he’d done, because shooting the wrong fellow by mistake isn’t good bragging material in the bars. He’d killed a stranger and another stranger was in custody for it, so it was the easiest thing in the world to pretend it never happened.

“Then Prysock turned up, figuring it was safe to come home, and Nicholson James found out about it and hit the Replay button. Same M.O., pay phone, three in the chest and a coup de grâce , only this time he got the right guy.”

“And nobody made the connection?”

“No reason they should,” I said. “There have been close to five hundred homicides in the five boroughs between Holtzmann’s murder and Prysock’s. Most of those have come as the result of gunfire, and a lot of them have taken place on the street. The similarities are striking, but you only see them if the Holtzmann killing is in the forefront of your mind, and every cop involved had other things to think about. Remember, Prysock was killed on the other side of town. Nobody on that case had had any connection to the Holtzmann case. And don’t forget, Holtzmann’s death was history. The case was closed, the perpetrator had not only been arrested but he was actually dead and gone. If you found a husband and wife murdered with an ax, you might think of Lizzie Borden. But you wouldn’t try to make a case against her.”

“I see what you mean.”

“There was really only one person around who should have heard the penny drop. That was me, because I never really bought the idea that George did it. And, no matter how many homicides there’d been in the past few months, I had only one of them on my mind. So if anyone was going to draw a connection between Holtzmann and Prysock, it was me.”

“And you did.”

“No,” I said, “that’s the point. I didn’t. The report of the Prysock killing ran in all four local papers, so I read it at least once. I obviously read it, because I remembered it a couple of days later. It even rang a bell, but I managed not to hear it.”

“Why?”

“Because I went conveniently deaf. Irish deaf, my aunt Peg used to say. That’s when you don’t hear what you don’t want to hear.”

“Why didn’t you want to hear it?”

“I’ll tell you how I overcame my Irish deafness, and that should give you an idea of what caused it. After I left here last night I went to the midnight meeting at Alanon House. Then I went over to see Mick.”

I told her about the hours I’d spent at Grogan’s, and recapped the part of our conversation that had to do with Glenn Holtzmann. And I told her how the two of us had watched the sky turn light, and how we’d gone to St. Bernard’s for the butchers’ mass.

“But Mick was the only man there in a white apron,” I said. “It was pretty much just us and the nuns.”

“You thought he’d killed Holtzmann,” she said.

“I was afraid of it. It was one of the first thoughts that struck me when I finally reached somebody in Altoona who could tell me where the money for law school came from. Here was Holtzmann, a career rat, and here was my friend Mick, with his car and his home and his place of business all deeded to other people so the government couldn’t seize them. And he talked about it all the time, how they’d confiscate your assets if they could prove you had any, how his lawyer wanted him to make sure he didn’t lose the farm if his tenants died on him and willed it to somebody else.

“I ran into Glenn once at Grogan’s. I was drinking a Coke at the bar and he thought it was a glass of Guinness, which shows how well he blended in at your basic Hell’s Kitchen saloon. But he knew who owned the place, and he was full of questions about Butcher Ballou until I told him it was bad form to ask them. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t have asked other people, and he might have learned something, and might have tried to use what he’d learned.

“Now it didn’t really make sense to figure Mick killed him. Glenn did what he did in the shadows, and the two people he screwed that we know about never even knew what hit them. He certainly wouldn’t have exposed himself to a man known to all as a stone killer. And if Mick did somehow get wind of what he was up to, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to warn him off.

“Here’s where I went wrong,” I said. “Instead of thinking it through, I shut down. I grabbed hold of the idea that my work was complete because I’d done all I could for both my clients. Lisa Holtzmann’s money was safe and there was nothing more I could do for George Sadecki. And I had no leads to the real killer, so I could stop looking for him.

“Meanwhile, it gnawed at me. I couldn’t stay out of Grogan’s. I was seeking out Mick’s company every couple of days, and I would sit up with him and never talk about what was foremost on my mind. And, as far as that goes, it wasn’t foremost on my mind, not consciously, because I wasn’t letting myself think about it.