Lawrence Block - The Devil Knows You’re Dead

On the last Thursday in September, Lisa Holtzmann went shopping on Ninth Avenue. She got back to her apartment between three-thirty and four and made coffee. While it dripped through she replaced a burnt-out light bulb with one she’d just bought, put away her groceries, and read the recipe on the back of a box of Goya lentils. She was sitting at the window with a cup of coffee when the phone rang.

It was Glenn, her husband, calling to tell her he wouldn’t be home until around six-thirty. It was not unusual for him to work late, and he was very good about letting her know when she could expect him. He’d always been thoughtful in this regard, and his solicitousness had increased in the months since she’d lost the baby.

It was almost seven when he walked in the door, seven-thirty when they sat down to dinner. She’d made a lentil stew, enlivening the recipe on the box with garlic, fresh coriander, and a generous dose of Yucateca hot sauce, and she served it over rice, with a green salad. As they ate they watched the sun go down, watched the sky darken.

Their apartment was in a new high-rise on the southeast corner of Fifty-seventh Street and Tenth Avenue, diagonally across the street from Jimmy Armstrong’s saloon. They lived on the twenty-eighth floor with windows looking south and west, and the views were spectacular. You could see the whole West Side from the George Washington Bridge to the Battery, and on across the Hudson and halfway across New Jersey.

They were a handsome couple. He was tall and slender. His dark brown hair was combed back from a well-defined widow’s peak, with just the slightest touch of gray at the temples. Dark eyes, dark complexion. Strong features, softened the least bit by a slight weakness at the chin. Good even teeth, a confident smile.

He wore what he always wore to the office, a well-tailored dark suit and a striped tie. Had he taken off the suit jacket before sitting down to dinner? He might have hung it over the back of a chair, or on a doorknob. Or he might have used a hanger; he was careful with his things. I picture him sitting at the table in his shirtsleeves — a blue pinpoint Oxford shirt, a buttondown collar — and tossing his tie over one shoulder, to protect it from food stains. I’d seen him do that once, at a coffee shop called the Morning Star.

She was five-two and slender, with straight dark hair cut modishly short, skin like porcelain, and startling blue eyes. She was thirty-two but looked younger, even as her husband appeared a little older than his thirty-eight years.

I don’t know what she was wearing. Jeans, perhaps, turned up at the cuffs, showing a little wear at the knees and in the seat. A sweater, a yellow cotton crewneck, the sleeves pushed up to bare her arms to the elbow. Brown suede slippers on her feet.

But that’s just a guess, an exercise of the imagination. I don’t know what she was wearing.

Sometime between eight-thirty and nine he said he had to go out. If he had removed his suit jacket earlier, he put it on again now, and added a topcoat. He told her he’d be back within the hour. It was nothing important, he told her. Just something he needed to take care of.

I suppose she did the dishes. Poured another cup of coffee, turned on the television set.

At ten o’clock she started to worry. She told herself not to be silly and spent the next half hour at the window, looking out at their million-dollar view.

Around ten-thirty the doorman called upstairs to tell her that there was a police officer on his way up. She was waiting in the hall when he got off the elevator. He was a tall cleanshaven Irish kid in a blue uniform, and she remembered thinking that he looked just the way cops were supposed to look.

“Please,” she said. “What’s the matter? What happened?”

He wouldn’t say anything until they were inside the apartment, but by then she already knew. The look on his face said it all.

Her husband had been at the corner of Eleventh Avenue and West Fifty-fifth Street. He had evidently been in the process of making a telephone call from a coin-operated public phone at that corner, when someone, presumably attempting to rob him, had fired four bullets at close range, thereby causing his death.

There was more, but that was as much as she could take in. Glenn was dead. She didn’t have to hear any more.

I met Glenn Holtzmann for the first time on a Tuesday evening in April, which is supposed to be the cruelest month. T. S. Eliot said so, in “The Waste Land,” and maybe he knew what he was talking about. I don’t know, though. They all seem pretty nasty to me.

We met at the Sandor Kellstine Gallery, one of a dozen housed in a five-story building on Fifty-seventh between Fifth and Sixth. It was the opening of their spring group show of contemporary photography, and the work of seven photographers was on display in a large room on the third floor. The friends and relatives of all seven had turned out for the occasion, along with people like Lisa Holtzmann and Elaine Mardell, who were taking a course Thursday evenings at Hunter College called “Photography as Abstract Art.”

There was a table set with stemmed plastic goblets of red and white wine, and cubes of cheese with colored toothpicks stuck in them. There was club soda, too, and I poured myself some and found Elaine, who introduced me to the Holtzmanns.

I took one look at him and decided I didn’t like him.

I told myself that was ridiculous and shook his hand and returned his smile. An hour later the four of us were eating Thai food on Eighth Avenue. We had something with noodles, and Holtzmann drank a bottle of beer with his meal. The rest of us had Thai iced coffee.

The conversation never quite got off the ground. We started off talking about the show we’d just seen, then made brief forays into other standard topics — local politics, sports, the weather. I already knew he was a lawyer, and learned he was employed at Waddell & Yount, a publisher of large-print editions of books originally brought out by other publishers.

“Pretty dull stuff,” he said. “Mostly contracts, and then every once in a while I have to write a stern letter to somebody. Now there’s a skill I can’t wait to pass on. As soon as the kid’s old enough I’ll teach him how to write stern letters.”

“Or her,” Lisa said.

He or she was as yet unborn, due sometime in the fall. That was why Lisa was drinking iced coffee instead of a beer. Elaine was never much of a drinker, and doesn’t drink at all these days. And, one day at a time, neither do I.

“Or her,” Glenn agreed. “Male or female, the kid can plod along in Daddy’s boring footsteps. Matt, your work must be exciting. Or am I only saying that because I’ve watched too much TV?”

“It has its moments,” I said, “but a lot of what I do is a matter of routine. Like anything else.”

“You were a policeman before you went on your own?”

“That’s right.”

“And now you’re with an agency?”

“When they call me,” I said. “I work per diem for an outfit called Reliable and take whatever free-lance work comes my way.”

“I suppose you get a lot of industrial espionage. Disgruntled employees peddling company secrets.”

“Some.”

“But not much?”

“I’m unlicensed,” I said, “so I don’t tend to get corporate clients, not on my own. Reliable gets its share of corporate work, but most of the stuff they’ve used me on lately has involved trademark infringement.”