Lawrence Block - A Stab in the Dark

("Perhaps he has a phone and perhaps it's in the book. You could look it up. I know you'll excuse me if I don't offer to look it up for you.")

The answer was floating out there. I could very nearly reach out and touch it. But my mind wouldn't fasten onto it.

He said, "My wife is blind."

It turned out to be a long night, although the trip to Twentieth Street was the least of it. I shared a cab down with Burton Havermeyer. We must have talked about something en route but I can't remember what. I paid for the cab, took Havermeyer to the squad room and introduced him to Frank Fitzroy, and that was pretty much the extent of my contribution. I, after all, was not the arresting officer. I had no official connection with the case and had performed no official function. I didn't have to be around while a stenographer took down Havermeyer's statement, nor was I called upon to make a statement of my own.

Fitzroy slipped away long enough to walk me down to the corner and buy me a drink at P. J. Reynolds.

I didn't much want to accept his invitation. I wanted a drink, but I wasn't much more inclined to drink with him than with Havermeyer. I felt closed off from everyone, locked up tight within myself where dead women and blind women couldn't get at me.

The drinks came and we drank them, and he said, "Nice piece of work, Matt."

"I got lucky."

"You don't get that kind of luck. You make it. Something got you onto Havermeyer in the first place."

"More luck. The other two cops from the Six-One were dead. He was odd man in."

"You could have talked to him on the phone. Something made you go see him."

"Lack of anything better to do."

"And then you asked him enough questions so that he told a couple lies that could catch him up further down the line."

"And I was in the right place at the right time, and the right shop sign caught my eye when the right pair of cops walked in front of me."

"Oh, shit," he said, and signaled the bartender. "Put yourself down if you want."

"I just don't think I did anything to earn a field promotion to Chief of Detectives. That's all."

The bartender came around. Fitzroy pointed to our glasses and the bartender filled them up again. I let him pay for this round, as he had paid for the first one.

He said, "You won't get any official recognition out of this, Matt. You know that, don't you?"

"I'd prefer it that way."

"What we'll tell the press is the reopening of the case with the arrest of Pinell made him conscience-stricken, and he turned himself in. He talked it over with you, another ex-cop like himself, and decided to confess. How does that sound?"

"It sounds like the truth."

"Just a few things left out is all. What I was saying, you won't get anything official out of it, but people around the department are gonna know better. You follow me?"

"So?"

"So you couldn't ask for a better passport back onto the force is what it sounds like to me. I was talking to Eddie Koehler over at the Sixth. You wouldn't have any trouble getting 'em to take you on again."

"It's not what I want."

"That's what he said you'd say. But are you sure it isn't? All right, you're a loner, you got a hard-on for the world, you hit this stuff—" he touched his glass " — a little harder than you maybe should. But you're a cop, Matt, and you didn't stop being one when you gave the badge back."

I thought for a moment, not to consider his proposal but to weigh the words of my reply. I said, "You're right, in a way. But in another way you're wrong, and I stopped being a cop before I handed in my shield."

"All because of that kid that died."

"Not just that." I shrugged. "People move and their lives change."

"Well," he said, and then he didn't say anything for a few minutes, and then we found something less unsettling to talk about. We discussed the impossibility of keeping three-card monte dealers off the street, given that the fine for the offense is seventy-five dollars and the profit somewhere between five hundred and a thousand dollars a day. "And there's this one judge," he said, "who told a whole string of them he'd let 'em off without a fine if they'd promise not to do it again. 'Oh, Ah promises, yo' honah.' To save seventy-five dollars, those assholes'd promise to grow hair on their tongues."

We had a third round of drinks, and I let him pay for that round, too, and then he went back to the station house and I caught a cab home. I checked the desk for messages, and when there weren't any I went around the corner to Armstrong's, and that's where it got to be a long night.

But it wasn't a bad one. I drank my bourbon in coffee, sipping it, making it last, and my mood didn't turn black or ugly. I talked to people intermittently but spent a lot of time replaying the day, listening to Havermeyer's explanation. Somewhere in the course of things I gave Jan a call to tell her how things had turned out. Her line was busy. Either she was talking to someone or she had the phone off the hook, and this time I didn't get the operator to find out which.

I had just the right amount to drink, for a change. Not so much that I blacked out and lost my memory. But enough to bring sleep without dreams.

By the time I got down to Pine Street the next day, Charles London knew what to expect. The morning papers had the story. The line they carried was pretty much what I'd expected from what Fitzroy had said. I was mentioned by name as the fellow ex-cop who'd heard Havermeyer's confession and escorted him in so he could give himself up for the murder of Barbara Ettinger.

Even so, he didn't look thrilled to see me.

"I owe you an apology," he said. "I managed to become convinced that your investigations would only have a damaging effect upon a variety of people. I thought—"

"I know what you thought."

"It turned out that I was wrong. I'm still concerned about what might come out in a trial, but it doesn't look as though there will be a trial."

"You don't have to worry about what comes out anyway," I said. "Your daughter wasn't carrying a black baby." He looked as though he'd been slapped. "She was carrying her husband's baby. She may very well have been having an affair, probably in retaliation for her husband's behavior, but there's no evidence that it had an interracial element. That was an invention of your former son-in-law's."

"I see." He took his little walk to the window and made sure that the harbor was still out there. He turned to me and said, "At least this has turned out well, Mr. Scudder."

"Oh?"

"Barbara's killer has been brought to justice. I no longer have to worry who might have killed her, or why. Yes, I think we can say it's turned out well."

He could say it if he wanted. I wasn't sure that justice was what Burton Havermeyer had been brought to, or where his life would go from here. I wasn't sure where justice figured in the ordeal that was just beginning for Havermeyer's son and his blind ex-wife. And if London didn't have to worry that Douglas Ettinger had killed his daughter, what he'd learned about Ettinger's character couldn't have been monumentally reassuring.

I thought, too, of the fault lines I'd already detected in Ettinger's second marriage. I wondered how long the blonde with the sunny suburban face would hold her space in his desk-top photo cube. If they split, would he be able to go on working for his second father-in-law?

Finally, I thought how people could adjust to one reality after another if they put their minds to it. London had begun by believing that his daughter had been killed for no reason at all, and he'd adjusted to that. Then he came to believe that she had indeed been killed for a reason, and by someone who knew her well. And he'd set about adjusting to that. Now he knew that she'd been killed by a near-stranger for a reason that had nothing much to do with her. Her death had come in a dress rehearsal for murder, and in dying she'd preserved the life of the intended victim. You could see all that as part of some great design or you could see it as further proof that the world was mad, but either way it was a new reality to which he would surely adjust.