Lawrence Block - In the Midst of Death

"You've lived here a long time?"

"All my life. Well, not quite. We moved here when I was about two and a half years old. Of course my father was alive then. This was his room, his study."

I looked around. There were English hunting prints on the walls, several racks of pipes, a few framed photographs. I walked over to the door and closed it. Lorbeer noted this without commenting.

I said, "I spoke to your employer."

"Mr. Prejanian?"

"Yes. He was very pleased to hear that Jerry Broadfield will be released soon. He said he's not sure how much use he'll get out of Broadfield's testimony but that he's glad to see the man won't be convicted of a crime he didn't commit."

"Mr. Prejanian's a very generous man."

"Is he?" I shrugged. "I didn't get that impression myself, but I'm sure you know him better than I do. What I sensed was that he's glad to see Broadfield proved innocent because his own organization doesn't look so bad now. So he was hoping all along that Broadfield would turn out to be innocent." I watched him carefully. "He says he'd have been glad to know earlier that I was working for Broadfield"

"Really."

"Uh-huh. That's what he said."

Lorbeer moved closer to the television set. He rested a hand on top of it and looked down at the back of his hand. "I've been having hot chocolate," he said. "Sundays are days of complete regression for me. I sit around in comfy old clothes and watch sports on television and sip hot chocolate. I don't suppose you'd care for a cup?

"No, thank you."

"A drink? Something stronger?"

"No."

He turned to look at me. The pairs of parenthetical lines on either side of his little mouth seemed to be more deeply etched now. "Of course I can't be expected to bother Mr. Prejanian with every little thing that comes up. That's one of my functions, screening him from trivia. His time is very valuable, and there are already far too many demands on it."

"That's why you didn't bother to call him yesterday. You told me you'd spoken with him, but you hadn't. And you warned me to route inquiries through you so as to avoid antagonizing Prejanian."

"Just doing my job, Mr. Scudder. It’s possible I committed a judgmental error. No one is perfect, nor have I ever claimed perfection."

I leaned over, turned off the television set. "It's a distraction," I explained. "We should both pay attention to this. You're a murderer, Claude, and I'm afraid you're not going to get away with it. Why don't you sit down?"

"That's a ridiculous accusation."

"Have a seat."

"I'm quite comfortable standing. You've just made a completely absurd charge. I don't understand it."

I said, "I suppose I should have thought about you right at the beginning. But there was a problem. Whoever killed Portia Carr had to connect up with Broadfield in one way or another. She was killed in his apartment, so she had to be killed by someone who knew where his apartment was, somebody who took the trouble to decoy him out of it first and send him off to Bay Ridge on a wild-goose chase."

"You're assuming Broadfield is innocent. I still don't see any reason to be sure of that."

"Oh, I knew he was innocent for a dozen reasons."

"Even so, didn't the Carr woman know about Broadfield's apartment?"

I nodded. "As a matter of fact, she did. But she couldn't have led her killer there because she was unconscious when she made the trip. She was hit on the head first and then stabbed. It stood to reason that she'd been hit elsewhere. Otherwise the killer would have just gone on hitting her until she was dead. He wouldn't have stopped to pick up a knife. But what you did, Claude, was knock her out somewhere else and then get her to Broadfield's apartment. By then you'd disposed of whatever you'd hit her with, so you finished the job with a knife."

"I think I'll have a cup of chocolate. You're sure you wouldn't care for some?"

"Positive. I didn't want to believe a cop would kill Portia Carr in order to frame Broadfield. Everything pointed that way, but I didn't like the feel of it. I preferred the idea that framing Broadfield was a handy way to get away with murder, that the killer's main object was to get rid of Portia. But then how would he know about Broadfield's apartment and phone number? What I needed was somebody who was connected to both of them. And I found somebody, but there was no motive apparent."

"You must mean me," he said calmly."Since I certainly had no motive. But then I didn't know the Carr person either, and barely knew Broadfield, so your reasoning breaks down, doesn't it?"

"Not you. Douglas Fuhrmann. He was going to ghostwrite Broadfield's book. That's why Broadfield had turned informer — he wanted to be somebody important and write a bestseller. He got the idea from Carr because she was going to go the Happy Hooker one better. Fuhrmann got the idea of playing both ends and got in touch with Carr to see if he could write her book, too. That's what tied the two of them together — it has to be — but it's not a murder motive."

"Then why am I elected? Because you don't know of anyone else?"

I shook my head. "I knew it was you before I really knew why. I asked you yesterday afternoon if you knew anything about Doug Fuhrmann. You knew enough about him to go over to his house last night and kill him."

"This is remarkable. Now I'm being accused of the murder of a man I never heard of."

"It won't work, Claude. Fuhrmann was a threat to you because he'd been talking with both of them, with Carr and with Broadfield. He was trying to reach me last night. If I'd had time to see him, maybe you wouldn't have been able to kill him. And maybe you would have, because maybe he didn't know what he knew. You were one of Portia Carr's clients."

"That's a filthy lie."

"Maybe it's filthy. I wouldn't know. I don't know what you did with her or what she did with you. I could make some educated guesses."

"Damn you, you're an animal." He didn't raise his voice, but the loathing in it was fierce. "I will thank you not to talk like that in the same house with my mother."

I just looked at him. He met my eyes with confidence at first, and then his face seemed to melt. All the resolve went out of it. His shoulders sagged, and he looked at once much older and much younger. Just a middle-aged little boy.

"Knox Hardesty knew," I went on. "So you killed Portia for nothing. I can pretty much figure out what happened, Claude. When Broadfield turned up at Prejanian's office, you learned about more than police corruption. You learned through Broadfield that Portia was in Knox Hardesty's pocket, feeding him her client list in order to escape deportation. You were on that list and you figured it was just a question of time before she handed you over to him.

"So you got Portia to press charges against Broadfield, accusing him of extortion. You wanted to give him a motive for killing her, and that was an easy one to arrange. She thought you were a cop when you called her, and it was easy enough for her to go along with it. One way or another, you managed to scare her pretty well. Whores are easy to scare.

"At this point you had Broadfield set up beautifully. You didn't even have to be particularly brilliant about the murder itself because the cops would be so anxious to tie it to Broadfield. You decoyed Portia to the Village at the same time that you sent Broadfield off to Brooklyn. Then you knocked her out, dragged her into his apartment, killed her, and got out of there. You dropped the knife in a sewer, washed your hands, and came on home to Mama."

"Leave my mother out of this."

"That bothers you, doesn't it? My mentioning your mother?"

"Yes, it does." He was squeezing his hands together as if to control them. "It bothers me a great deal. That's why you're doing it, I suppose."