Lawrence Block - Eight Million Ways to Die

"Maybe he didn't kill her."

"Oh, sure he did." He dismissed the possibility of Chance's innocence with a wave of his hand. "She says she's quitting him and he says okay and the next day she's dead. Come on, Matt. What's that if it's not cut and dried?"

"Then we get back to your question. Why'd he hire me?"

"Maybe to take the heat off."

"How?"

"Maybe he'll figure we'll figure he must be innocent or he wouldn't have hired you."

"But that's not what you figured at all."

"No."

"You think he'd really think that?"

"How do I know what some coked-up spade pimp is gonna think?"

"You figure he's a cokehead?"

"He's got to spend it on something, doesn't he? It's not gonna go for country-club dues and a box at the charity ball. Lemme ask you something."

"Go ahead."

"You think there's a chance in the world he didn't kill her? Or set her up and hire it done?"

"I think there's a chance."

"Why?"

"For one thing, he hired me. And it wasn't to take the heat off because what heat are we talking about? You already said there wasn't going to be any heat. You're planning to clear the case and work on something else."

"He wouldn't necessarily know that."

I let that pass. "Take it from another angle," I suggested. "Let's say I never called you."

"Called me when?"

"The first call I made. Let's say you didn't know she was breaking with her pimp."

"If we didn't get it from you we'd of gotten it somewhere else."

"Where? Kim was dead and Chance wouldn't volunteer the information. I'm not sure anybody else in the world knew." Except for Elaine, but I wasn't going to bring her into it. "I don't think you'd have gotten it. Not right off the bat, anyway."

"So?"

"So how would you have figured the killing then?"

He didn't answer right away. He looked down at his near-empty glass, and a couple of vertical frown lines creased his forehead. He said, "I see what you mean."

"How would you have pegged it?"

"The way we did before you called. A psycho. You know we're not supposed to call 'em that anymore? There was a departmental directive went out about a year ago. From now on we don't call 'em psychos. From now on it's EDPs."

"What's an EDP?"

"Emotionally Disturbed Person. That's what some asshole on Centre Street's got nothing better to worry about. The whole city's up to its ass in more nuts than a fruitcake and our first priority is how we refer to them. We don't want to hurt their feelings. No, I'd figure a psycho, some new version of Jack the Ripper. Calls up a hooker, invites her over, chops her up."

"And if it was a psycho?"

"You know what happens then. You hope you get lucky with a piece of physical evidence. In this case fingerprints were hopeless, it's a transient hotel room, there's a million latents and no place to start with them. Be nice if there was a big bloody fingerprint and you knew it belonged to the killer, but we didn't have that kind of luck."

"Even if you did-"

"Even if we did, a single print wouldn't lead anywhere. Not until we had a suspect. You can't get a make from Washington on a single print. They keep saying you're gonna be able to eventually, but-"

"They've been saying that for years."

"It'll never happen. Or it will, but I'll have my six years by then and I'll be in Arizona. Barring physical evidence that leads somewhere, I guess we'd be waiting for the nut to do it again. You get another couple of cases with the same MO and sooner or later he fucks up and you got him, and then you match him to some latents in the room at the Galaxy and you wind up with a case." He drained his glass. "Then he plea bargains his way to manslaughter and he's out in three years tops and he does it again, but I don't want to get started on that again. I honest to Christ don't want to get started on that again."

I bought our next round. Any compunctions he had about having a pimp's money pay for his booze seemed to have been dissolved by the same alcohol that had given rise to them. He was visibly drunk now, but only if you knew where to look. The eyes had a glaze on them, and there was a matching glaze on his whole manner. He was holding up his end of a typical alcoholic conversation, wherein two drunks take polite turns talking aloud to their own selves.

I wouldn't have noticed this if I'd been matching him drink for drink. But I was sober, and as the booze got to him I felt the gulf widening between us.

I tried to keep the conversation on the subject of Kim Dakkinen but it wouldn't stay there. He wanted to talk about everything that was wrong with New York.

"You know what it is," he said, leaning forward, lowering his voice, as if we weren't the only two customers in the bar by now, just us and the bartender. "I'll tell you what it is. It's niggers."

I didn't say anything.

"And spics. The blacks and the Hispanics."

I said something about black and Puerto Rican cops. He rode right over it. "Listen, don't tell me," he said. "I got a guy I been partnered with a lot, Larry Haynes his name is, maybe you know him-" I didn't "- and he's as good as they come. I'd trust the man with my life. Shit, I have trusted him with my life. He's black as coal and I never met a better man in or out of the department. But that's got nothing to do with what I'm talking about." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Look," he said, "you ever ride the subway?"

"When I have to."

"Well, shit, nobody rides it by choice. It's the whole city in a nutshell, the equipment breaks down all the time, the cars are filthy with spray paint and they stink of piss and the transit cops can't make a dent in the crime down there, but what I'm talking about, shit, I get on a subway and I look around and you know where I am? I'm in a fucking foreign country."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean everybody's black or Spanish. Or oriental, we got all these new Chinese immigrants coming in, plus there's the Koreans. Now the Koreans are perfect citizens, they open up all these great vegetable markets all over the city, they work twenty hours a day and send their kids to college, but it's all part of something."

"Part of what?"

"Oh, shit, it sounds ignorant and bigoted but I can't help it. This used to be a white city and now there's days when I feel like I'm the only white man left in it."

The silence stretched. Then he said, "They smoke on the subway now. You ever notice?"

"I've noticed."

"Never used to happen. A guy might murder both his parents with a fire axe but he wouldn't dare light up a cigarette on the subway. Now you got middle-class people lighting their cigarettes, puffing away. Just in the last few months. You know how it started?"

"How?"

"Remember about a year ago? A guy was smoking on the PATH train and a PATH cop asked him to put it out, and the guy drew a gun and shot the cop dead? Remember?"

"I remember."

"That's what started it. You read about that and whoever you are, a cop or a private citizen, you're not in a rush to tell the guy across the aisle to put out his fucking cigarette. So a few people light up and nobody does anything about it, and more people do it, and who's gonna give a shit about smoking in the subway when it's a waste of time to report a major crime like burglary? Stop enforcing a law and people stop respecting it." He frowned. "But think about that PATH cop. You like that for a way to die? Ask a guy to put out a cigarette and bang, you're dead."

I found myself telling him about Rudenko's mother, dead of a bomb blast because her friend had brought home the wrong television set. And so we traded horror stories. He told of a social worker, lured onto a tenement roof, raped repeatedly and thrown off the building to her death. I recalled something I'd read about a fourteen-year-old shot by another boy the same age, both of them strangers to each other, the killer insisted that his victim had laughed at him. Durkin told me about some child-abuse cases that had ended in death, and about a man who had smothered his girlfriend's infant daughter because he was sick of paying for a baby-sitter everytime the two of them went to the movies. I mentioned the woman in Gravesend, dead of a shotgun blast while she hung clothes in her closet. There was an air of Can You Top This? to our dialogue.