Lawrence Block - Time to Murder and Create

“But you never got any more complaints.”

“No. Maybe she’s got a friend at Chase Manhattan.” He laughed hard at his own line, then chopped it off abruptly. “Let’s see what’s in the box, Scudder.”

I handed it to him. “Open it yourself,” I said.

He did, and I watched his face while he looked through everything. He had some interesting comments on the pictures he saw, and he gave the written material a fairly careful reading. Then he looked up suddenly.

“This is all the stuff on the Ethridge dame.”

“Seems that way,” I said.

“What about the others?’ “

“I guess these safe-deposit vaults aren’t as foolproof as they’re supposed to be. Somebody must have come in and taken everything else.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“You’ve got everything you need, Guzik. No more and no less.”

“You took a different box for each one. How many others are there?”

“What difference does it make?”

“You son of a bitch. So we’ll walk back and ask the guard how many other boxes you have here, and we’ll take a look at all of them.”

“If you want. I can save you a little time.”

“Oh?”

“Not just three different boxes, Guzik. Three different banks. And don’t even think about shaking me for the other keys, or running a check on the banks, or anything else you might have in mind. In fact, it might be a good idea if you stopped calling me a son of a bitch, because I might get unhappy, and I might decide not to cooperate in your investigation. I don’t have to cooperate, you know. And if I don’t, your case goes down the drain. You can possibly tie Ethridge to Lundgren without me, but you’ll have a hell of a time finding anything a D.A. is going to want to take to court.”

We looked at each other for a while. A couple of times he started to say something, and a couple of times he figured out that it wasn’t a particularly good idea. Finally something changed in his face, and I knew he’d decided to let it go. He had enough, and he had all he was going to get, and his face said he knew it.

“The hell,” he said, “it’s the cop in me, I want to get to the bottom of things. No offense, I hope.”

“None at all,” I said. I don’t suppose I sounded very convincing.

“They probably hauled Ethridge out of bed by now. I’ll get back and see what she’s got to say. It should make good listening. Or maybe they didn’t haul her out of bed. These pictures, you’d have more fun hauling her into bed than out. Ever get any of that, Scudder?”

“No.”

“I wouldn’t mind a taste myself. Want to come back to the station house with me?”

I didn’t want to go anywhere with him. I didn’t want to see Beverly Ethridge.

“I’ll pass,” I said. “I’ve got an appointment.”

I spent half an hour under the shower with the spray as hot as I could stand it. It had been a long night, and the only sleep I’d had had been when I dozed off briefly in Birnbaum’s chair. I had come close to being killed, and I had killed the man who’d been trying for me. The Marlboro man, John Michael Lundgren. He’d have been thirty-one next month. I would have guessed him at younger than that, twenty-six or so. Of course, I’d never seen him in particularly good light.

It didn’t bother me that he was dead. He had been trying to kill me and had seemed pleased at the prospect. He had killed Spinner, and it wasn’t unlikely that he’d killed other people before. He might not have been a pro at killing, but it seemed to be something he enjoyed. He certainly liked working with the knife, and the boys who like to use knives usually get a sexual thrill out of their weaponry. Edged weapons are even more phallic that guns.

I wondered if he’d used a knife on Spinner. It wasn’t inconceivable. The Medical Examiner’s office doesn’t catch everything. There was a case a while ago, a then-unidentified floater they fished out of the Hudson, and she was processed and buried without anyone’s noticing that there was a bullet in her skull. They found out only because some yoyo severed her head before burial. He wanted the skull for a desk ornament, and ultimately they found the bullet and identified the skull from dental records and found out the woman had been missing from her home in Jersey for a couple of months.

I let my mind wander with all these thoughts because there were other thoughts I wanted to avoid, but after half an hour I turned off the shower and toweled myself off and picked up the phone and told them to hold my calls, and to put me down for a wake-up call at one sharp.

Not that I expected to need the call, because I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep. All I could do was stretch out on the bed and close my eyes and think about Henry Prager and how I had murdered him.

Henry Prager.

John Lundgren was dead and I had killed him, had broken his neck, and it did not bother me at all, because he had done everything possible to earn that death. And Beverly Ethridge was being grilled by the police, and it was very possible that they would wind up with enough on her to put her away for a couple of years. It was also possible that she would beat it, because there probably wasn’t all that much of a case, but either way it didn’t matter much, because Spinner would have his vengeance. She could forget about her marriage and her social position and cocktails at the Pierre. She could forget about most of her life, and that didn’t bother me either, because it was nothing she didn’t deserve.

But Henry Prager had never killed anybody, and I had pressured him enough to make him blow his brains out, and there was really no way I could justify that. It had bothered me enough when I’d believed him guilty of murder. Now I knew he was innocent, and it bothered me infinitely more.

Oh, there were ways to rationalize it. Evidently his business had turned sour. Evidently he had made a lot of bad financial judgments recently. Evidently he had been up against several different kinds of walls, and evidently he had been a marginal manic-depressive with suicidal tendencies, and that was all well and good, but I had put extra pressure on a man who was in no position to handle it and that had been the last straw, and there was no rationalizing my way out of that one, because it was more than coincidence that he had picked my visit to his office to put the gun in his mouth and pull the trigger.

I lay there with my eyes closed and I wanted a drink. I wanted a drink very badly.

But not yet. Not until I kept my appointment and told an up-and-coming young pederast that he didn’t have to pay me a hundred thousand dollars, and that if he could just fool enough of the people enough of the time he could go right ahead and be governor.

By the time I was done talking to him, I had the feeling he might not make bad governor at that. He must have realized the minute I sat down across the desk from him that it would be to his advantage to listen to what I had to say without interrupting. What I had to say must have come as a complete surprise to him, but he just sat there looking absorbed, listening intently, nodding from time to time as a way of punctuating my sentences for me. I told him that he was off the hook, that he had never really been on it, that it had all been a device designed to trap a killer without washing other people’s dirty laundry in public. I took my time telling him, because I wanted to get it all said on the first try.

When I was done, he leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. Then he turned his eyes to meet mine and said his first word.

“Extraordinary.”

“I had to pressure you the same as I had to pressure everyone else,” I said. “I didn’t like it, but it was what I had to do.”