Lawrence Block: Out on the Cutting Edge

“I got in the habit of using different names. My political background and all.”

“The buildings across the street have been a very unsafe place to live since you bought them. Five people have died over there in the past year and a half. One was a suicide. They found her with her head in the oven. The rest all died of natural causes. Heart attacks, respiratory failure. When frail old people die alone, no one looks too hard to see what did it. You can smother an old man in his sleep, you can haul an old lady across the floor and leave her with her head in the gas oven. That’s a little dangerous because there’s always the possibility of an explosion, and you wouldn’t want to blow up the building just to kill a tenant. That’s probably why you only used that method once.”

“There’s no evidence of any of this,” she said. “Old people die all the time. It’s not my fault if the actuarial tables caught up with some of my tenants.”

“They were all full of chloral hydrate, Willa.”

She started to say something. Her mouth opened, but something stopped the words. She breathed heavily, in and out, and then her hand moved to her mouth and her index finger rubbed at the gum above the two false teeth, replacements for the ones she’d lost in Chicago. She sighed again, heavily, and something went out of her face and the set of her shoulders.

She picked up her coffee cup, took it over to the sink and emptied it. She got the bottle of Teacher’s from the cabinet and filled the cup. She drank deeply and shuddered. “God,” she said, “you must miss this stuff.”

“Sometimes.”

“I’d miss it. Matt, they were just waiting to die, just hanging on and hanging on.”

“And you were doing them a favor.”

“I was doing everybody a favor, myself included. There are twenty-four apartments in this building, all with pretty much the same layout. Renovated and sold as co-ops, every apartment in the building would bring a minimum of a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. You could probably get a little more for the front ones. They’re a little nicer, they’re airier, the light’s better. Maybe you could up the numbers a little if you did a really nice renovation. Do you know what that comes to?”

“Two million dollars?”

“Closer to three. That’s for each building. Buying them cost me every cent I inherited from my parents, and they’re mortgaged to the hilt. The rent roll barely covers payments and taxes and maintenance. I have a few tenants in each building who are paying close to market, and otherwise I couldn’t keep the buildings. Matt, do you think it’s fair that a landlord has to subsidize tenants by letting them hang on to an apartment for a tenth of what it’s worth?”

“Of course not. The fair thing is for them to die and for you to make twelve million dollars.”

“I wouldn’t be making that much. Once I’ve got a large percentage of vacant apartments I can sell the buildings to somebody who specializes in co-op conversions. If everything comes together the way it should, my profit will be about a million dollars a building.”

“So you’ll make four million.”

“I might hang on to one of the buildings. I’m not sure, I haven’t decided. But either way I’ll make a lot of money.”

“It sounds like a lot to me.”

“It’s actually less than it sounds like. A millionaire used to be a really rich person. Now when the top prize in a lottery is a million dollars it’s considered small-time. But I could live nicely on a couple of million dollars.”

“It’s a shame you won’t be able to.”

“Why won’t I?” She reached out and took my hand, and I felt her energy. “Matt, there won’t be any more killings. That ended a long time ago.”

“A tenant in this building died not two months ago.”

“In this building? Matt, that was Carl White, he died of cancer, for God’s sake!”

“He was full of chloral, Willa.”

Her shoulders sagged. “He was dying of cancer,” she said. “He would have died of his own accord in another month or two. He was in pain all the time.” She raised her eyes to mine. “You can believe what you want about me, Matt. You can think I’m the reincarnation of Lucrezia Borgia, but you really can’t turn Carl White’s death into a murder for gain. All I did was lose whatever rent he would have paid in however many months of life he’d have had left to him.”

“Then why did you kill him?”

“You’ll try to find a way to twist this, but it was an act of mercy.”

“What about Eddie Dunphy? Was that an act of mercy?”

“Oh, God,” she said. “That was the only one I regret. The others were people who would have killed themselves if they’d had the wit to think of it. No, Eddie wasn’t an act of mercy. Killing him was an act of self-preservation.”

“You were afraid he would talk.”

“I knew he would talk. He actually waltzed in here and told me he would talk. He was in AA, the poor damned fool, and he was babbling like some kind of religious convert who had Jesus Christ appear to him on the side of his toaster oven. He said he had to sit down with someone and tell him everything, but that I didn’t have anything to worry about because he would keep my name out of it. ‘I killed somebody in my building so the landlady could get her apartment, but I won’t tell you who put me up to it.’ He said the person he was going to tell wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“He was right. I wouldn’t have.”

“You’d have overlooked multiple homicide?”

I nodded. “I’d have been breaking the law, but it wouldn’t be the first law I ever broke or the first homicide I overlooked. God never appointed me to go around the world righting wrongs. I’m not a priest, but anything he said to me would have been under the seal of the confessional as far as I was concerned. I told him I’d keep his confidence and I would have.”

“Will you keep mine?” She moved closer to me, and her hands fastened first on my wrists, then moved to my forearms. “Matt,” she said, “I invited you in here the first day to find out how much you knew. But I didn’t have to take you to bed to manage that. I went to bed with you because I wanted to.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I didn’t count on falling in love with you,” she said, “but it happened. I feel foolish saying it now because you’ll twist it, but it happens to be the truth. I don’t know if you’re in love with me. I think you were starting to be, and I think that’s why you’re angry with me now. But there’s been something real and strong between us from the beginning, and I feel it now, and I know you do, too. Don’t you?”

“I don’t know what I feel.”

“I think you do. And you’re a good influence on me, you’ve already got me making real coffee. Matt, why don’t you give us a chance?”

“How can I do that?”

“It’s the easiest thing in the world. All you have to do is forget everything we said tonight. Matt, you just told me you weren’t put on the planet to right all wrongs. You’d have let it go if Eddie had told you about it. Why can’t you do as much for me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why not?” She leaned a little closer, and I could smell the scotch on her breath, and remember how her mouth tasted. She said, “Matt, I’m not going to kill anybody else. That’s over forever, I swear it is. And there’s no real proof I ever killed anyone, is there? A couple of people had a non-lethal dose of a common drug in their systems. Nobody can prove I gave it to them. Nobody can even prove I had it in my possession.”

“I copied the label the other day. I’ve got the number of the prescription, the issuing pharmacy, the date of issue, the physician’s name—”