Lawrence Block - After the First Death

Inside her apartment, she said again, “You don’t want to see this,” and disappeared into the bedroom. I walked around the living room until she came back. I thought about what it was like to need something more man any person should need anything. A drink, or a woman. I thought first that those needs were different, that they didn’t make one shake that much or sweat that way. Then I decided that they were the same after all, that one hangup is the same as another, that the shakes were always there.

When she came into the living room she told me that she wished she was dead. I told her to cut it out. She said she meant it. I kissed her, and she started to cry, and I held onto her and kissed her until she stopped.

I left her sitting on the couch, eyes closed, while I made us some coffee. When I sat down next to her I asked her how she knew the man would not tip off Phil.

“The same reason he finally told you. He’s scared.”

“That I’ll come back and kill him? I think I meant it when I said it but-”

“Not that. You didn’t see his face.”

“I thought I did.”

Then you didn’t read it right. When you said that to him he was looking right at you, at your face, and that’s when he got it. He recognized you, Alex. He knows who you are.”

“Oh, no-”

“I should of thought of it right away. Maybe I would of been afraid of it. The one thing he doesn’t want is to get involved in a murder. That would put him up tight all around, he couldn’t stand it. So all he can do is put you onto Phil and hope the two of you kill each other or something and that it doesn’t ever get back to him.”

“He won’t call the police?”

“Never.”

“He could call anonymously. Tell them I’m wearing an army uniform, something like that.”

She shook her head. “He wants you to get away for now. If you get picked up now, he knows you’re going to talk about that watch. All he wants is to keep out of it.” She sighed heavily. “I don’t think he would ever of told us otherwise. You want to know something, baby? People are just too much. When he thought we were just a couple of people who got robbed he wouldn’t even tell us what time it was. But as soon as you’re a murderer, then he wants to give us his right arm on a silver dish. People are beautiful.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Alex? I got to fall out for a little while. I won’t be asleep, just sitting. But I can’t talk. You want to watch the television? Or put on some music on the radio?”

“Maybe some music.”

“Something slow and quiet. I had a little more just now than I should of.”

“Are you all right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You sure?”

“Ummm.”

I took the cigarette from between her fingers and put it out. She sat virtually motionless for a little over an hour, now and then nodding her head slightly in time to the music. When she came up out of it she asked me for a cigarette. I lit one for her. She took two puffs on it and gave it back and asked me to put it out. I did.

She said that I must hate her. I said I loved her, and we went to bed.

SHE SAID, “YOU SLEEP, BABY, I GOT TO GO OUT FOR A WHILE. I’ll be back. You just sleep.” I dozed for a few more hours. She had not returned when I finally dragged myself out of bed. I showered, then poked around in the medicine cabinet until I found her little electric razor and shaved with it. I was hungry, but the cupboard was bare. I made myself a cup of coffee and took it into the living room.

There wasn’t much to read, just a stack of paperbacks. A couple of novels about American nurses in the Far East. Had my Jackie wanted, in the years before needles and commercial love, to tend the sick? To comfort the wounded? There was a reprint of a big best seller and a few sex-fact books, including one psychoanalytical study of a prostitute. I skimmed this last, but I couldn’t concentrate on what I was reading. The words didn’t register. I put the books back and made more coffee.

We were going to find this Phil. Someone had hired him, and we would find out who and why, and we would wrap it all up and hand it to the police and it would be over, all of it.

I was very certain of this now. Before I had possessed the knowledge of my own innocence and little more than that. There was no place to get started, nothing but random facts and inferences that refused to add up to anything concrete. Jackie had changed this. Because of her, we knew who sold my watch. That gave us a handle, and we could pull the rest of it along.

She was out now, talking to people, finding out who this Phil might be.

I lit a cigarette. Once I was cleared, it would be no great problem getting a university job again. I had been a good scholar and a good teacher. They would want me back. Of course there were wasted years, and they made a difference. I had been close to a departmental chairmanship, and now it was unlikely that I would ever rise that high. I was starring fresh, in a sense, and starting at a less than tender age.

The hell, it hardly mattered. I’d have a job again, I’d do my work again, I’d be a person again.

My mind played with plans. Should I stay in New York? There was an undeniable appeal in the idea of a little college town somewhere in New England or the Midwest, a comfortable retreat away from the smell and taste of New York. But the city had things of its own going for it. It was a place to hide, a place where people let you alone.

But I didn’t have to hide any more.

Of course a small town might be a better place for someone trying to shake a drug habit. I remembered having read that the worst danger for cured addicts was a return to old haunts, that this made it all too easy for old patterns to reestablish themselves. In another town, where heroin was presumably hard to find, where she didn’t know the source of supply-

All of which, I told myself, was stupid sloppy romanticism. I was confusing loneliness and gratitude and mutual back-scratching with something deeper and more permanent. Stupid.

I kept getting hungrier and she kept not coming home, and after a while I wrote out a note for her and left it on top of the coffee table. I had to walk all the way over to Broadway to find an all-night diner. I had a couple of hamburgers and a plate of french fries and still more coffee. I walked back to the place. I had left the door unlatched, and it was still unlatched, and the note was on the coffee table and Jackie wasn’t home yet.

It was past six by the time she unlocked the door and came in, and I had gone through a full pack of cigarettes by then. I couldn’t keep from worrying. I got all the worst images-Jackie tracking down Phil, and he with a knife in his hand, and she with her hand at her throat, and the knife flashing. Jackie picked up for possession of heroin, arrested, clapped in a cell Jackie hurt in any of a thousand idiot ways. But she came home, and I went to her and kissed her and told her I had worried about her.

“Worried?”

“You were gone so long.”

“I thought you’d still be sleeping.”

“No, I’ve been up for hours. I went out and got something to eat a little while ago. Where were you?”

“I had to find out about this Phil. You know, look around, talk to people. And then I had to work a little, you know, and I had to find a dealer and make a buy. The stuff I used before was the last of what I had around, and I had to work for awhile and then buy some more. And-”

“I had some money.”

“Only twenty dollars.”

“Wouldn’t that have been enough?”

“I like to buy for a few days at a time. And I don’t want to take money from you, Alex. I wouldn’t want to do that.”

“You went to bed with me and then you went out tricking.”