Lawrence Block - Everybody Dies

"Oh."

"But you thought…"

"I know what I thought. I'm sorry I went off like that."

"Well, you didn't yell and scream, but your face got so dark I was afraid you were going to stroke out on me."

"I guess I'm more exhausted than I realized," I said. "You're saying the shooter could have got the wrong man?"

"It's always possible when the shooter doesn't know the vic personally. Faber was what, a couple of years older?"

"I'm taller by a few inches, and he was heavier, and thicker in the middle. I don't think we looked much alike. Nobody ever called me Jim by mistake, I'll tell you that much."

"You have any old enemies? From when you were on the job, say?"

"That's over twenty years ago, George. I'm off the job longer than I was ever on it."

"Well, what enemies have you made lately? You're a PI. You working on any mob-related cases?"

"No."

"Anything at all where you might have rubbed some hard case the wrong way?"

"Nothing," I said. "These days I work mostly for lawyers, checking out witnesses in personal injury and product liability lawsuits. I got a kid with a computer who does most of the heavy lifting for me."

"So you can't think of a thing."

"No."

"Well, why don't you run on home, then? Sleep on it, see what comes to you overnight. You know how it's probably going to turn out, don't you?"

"How?"

"Mistaken identity. I got a feeling what happened, and God knows it wouldn't be the first time. Somebody saw your friend, mistook him for a mope who burned him in a drug deal, or dicked his wife, some damned fool thing. Or, and I've known of cases, there's a contract out on some guy, some poor bastard looked nothing like your friend, and somebody spots him and drops a dime on him, and the guy who gets the call goes to the wrong fucking Chinese restaurant. He shows up at the Lucky Panda on Eighth instead of the Golden Rabbit on Seventh or the Hoo Flung Poo on Ninth."

"Maybe."

"The moon's full, you know."

"I didn't notice."

"Well, it's overcast. You can't see it, but it's on the calendar. Tomorrow night, actually, but that's close enough. That's when weird shit happens."

I remembered the moon Wednesday night, the gibbous moon. And now it was full.

"So go on home. There's uniforms chasing down witnesses now, taking testimony from people who were on the street when it went down, or maybe looking out their windows, wondering is it ever gonna rain. You know how it works. We'll check everything out, we'll see what our snitches have to tell us, and if we get lucky we'll come up with the shitbag who pulled the trigger." He worried his chin. "It won't bring him back, your friend," he said, "but it's what we do. It's all we can do."

I walked home on Ninth Avenue. I passed a few bars along the way, and each time I felt my heart race just the least little bit at the sight of them. It was an appropriate response. I couldn't stand the movie that was playing in my head, and booze was a sure bet to drown the sound track and fade the image to black.

Here's looking at you, Jim. Down the hatch. Bombs away. Mud in your eye, fella.

Thanks for helping me stay sober for the past sixteen years. Who's to say I could have done it without you? And now I'll honor your memory by forgetting everything you taught me

No, I don't think so.

Jim stopped watching NYPD Blue when Sipowicz drank after his son's death. What a jerk, he said. What a fucking asshole.

He can't help it, I said. He's just a character, all he can do is what it says in the script.

I'm talking about the writer, he said.

So I wasn't going to pick up a drink, but I couldn't pretend the desire wasn't there. My eyes took note of each gin joint, each winking neon beer sign. My mouth may have watered a little. But my feet kept on walking.

I looked for the moon, the full moon, but couldn't see it.

Anxiety grabbed me as I walked into the lobby of our building, and in the elevator I had a sudden vision of what I was going to find on the fourteenth floor. The door kicked in, furniture overturned, pictures slashed.

And worse…

The door was shut and locked. I rang the bell before I used my key, and Elaine was on the other side of the door when I got it open. She started to say something and stopped when she got a look at my face.

"Jim's dead," I said. "I got him killed."

"I suppose I was in shock," I said, "and I suppose I still am, to some extent. But no matter how thick the fog got, I never lost sight of my commitment to the obstruction of justice."

"Because you didn't tell them everything?"

"Because I deliberately misled them and withheld information I knew to be pertinent. I sat there parrying questions about Jim's printing business when it was crystal clear to me why he was killed. The shooter made a mistake, all right, and it had nothing to do with phases of the moon. He was supposed to shoot a middle-aged guy in khakis and a windbreaker and a red polo shirt, and that's what he did."

"Why couldn't you tell them that?"

"Because it would tie me to Mick Ballou and drop both of us in the middle of a full-scale homicide investigation. They'd want to know where all the bodies were buried, and that's not a figure of speech. I'd be on the spot for failing to report the murders of Kenny and McCartney, and for in fact actively covering up their deaths. We broke a lot of laws the night we dug up Mick's back yard."

"You'd lose your license."

"That's the least of it. I could face criminal charges."

"I didn't think of that."

"It seems to me I committed a couple of felonies," I said, "and we crossed a state line with a trunkful of corpses, so there might be a federal charge involved as well. Even so, I might have taken my chances if I'd thought leveling with Wister would do any good."

"It won't bring Jim back."

"No, but neither will anything else. It won't catch his killer, either. Jim was an innocent bystander who walked into the middle of a gang war."

"Is that what it is? Gang warfare?"

"That's what it looks like. That's what it looked like in the storage room in Jersey. If I'd had any sense I'd have bowed out then and there."

"I wish you would stop blaming yourself."

I let that pass. She'd said it more than once, and I still didn't have a response to it. I said, "There are things the cops are good at, but solving gang-related homicides isn't one of them. Even when they get lucky and learn who gave the order and who pulled the trigger, they can't put together a case that'll hold up in court."

"I guess they're helpless against organized crime."

"Not exactly helpless. The RICO laws gave them broad powers, and in the past few years they've made some major cases and put away a lot of mob guys. They'll get somebody to wear a wire, they'll get somebody else to roll over on his boss, and next thing you know there's one more guy in the federal joint at Marion, complaining that nobody there can make a decent marinara sauce. That works, and so do some of the local stings they run, like renting a storefront and receiving stolen goods, then locking up all the people who walked in the door with minks and TV sets."

"They get a lot of press when they do that."

"And I'm sure that's one of the things they like about it. But it's good police work just the same. Some of my contemporaries might disagree, but I think the NYPD's better than when I was a part of it. They're doing a superior job. But that doesn't mean they're going to come up with the guy who shot Jim."

"Still," she said, "it bothers you that you held out on them."

"I think it would bother me more if I hadn't. I'd have had fun explaining a lot of things, including the gun I was carrying."

"I was wondering about that. Nobody spotted it?"

"I wasn't a suspect and nobody had any reason to pat me down. I kept my windbreaker zipped up. It was chilly in the restaurant and on the street, but it was warm and stuffy in the squad room at Midtown North. I kept waiting for Wister to tell me to take off my jacket and get comfortable, but he never did."