Even the Wicked (14 page)

Meanwhile, there was still Will to be considered. Even if Adrian Whitfield had died by his own hand, you had to give Will an assist at the very least. One columnist argued, perhaps facetiously, that the anonymous killer was getting more powerful every time. He’d had to get out there and kill his first three victims all by himself, but all he’d had to do was point a finger at numbers four and five. Once targeted by Will, they were struck down with no effort on his part, Rashid by an enemy within his gates, Whitfield by an even more intimate enemy, the one who lived within his own skin.

“Pretty soon he won’t even have to write letters,” Denis Hamill concluded. “He’ll just think his powerful thoughts in private, and the bad guys’ll be dropping like flies.”

Funny, I thought, that we hadn’t heard from him.

Tuesday morning I was up before Elaine, and I had breakfast on the table when she got out of the shower. “Great cantaloupe,” she pronounced. “Much better than yesterday.”

“It’s the other half of the one we had yesterday,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “I guess it’s the preparation.”

“I put it on a plate,” I said, “and I set it in front of you.”

“Yes, that’s just what you did, you old bear. And nobody could have done it better, either.”

“It’s all in the wrist.”

“Must be.”

“Combined with a sort of Zen approach,” I said. “I was concentrating on something else while I just let breakfast happen.”

“Concentrating on what?”

“On a dream I can’t remember.”

“You hardly ever remember your dreams.”

“I know,” I said, “but I woke up with the feeling that there was something this dream was trying to tell me, and it seemed to me it was a dream I’d had before. In fact—”

“Yes?”

“Well, I have the sense of having been dreaming this dream a lot lately.”

“The same dream.”

“I think so.”

“Which you can’t remember.”

“It had a familiarity to it,” I said, “as if I’d been there before. I don’t know if it’s the same dream each time, but I think I keep dreaming about the same person each time. He’s right there, and he’s looking very earnest and trying to tell me some thing, and I wake up and he’s gone.”

“Like a puff of smoke.”

“Sort of.”

“Like your lap when you stand up.”

“Well…”

“Who is he?”

“That’s the problem,” I said. “I don’t remember who he is, and no matter how much I
try
to remember—”

“Quit trying.”

“Huh?”

She rose, moved to stand behind me. She smoothed my hair back with the tips of her fingers. “There’s nothing to remember,” she said. “Just ease up. So don’t try to remember. Just answer the question. Who’d you dream about?”

“I don’t know.”

“That’s okay. Imagine Adrian Whitfield.”

“It wasn’t Adrian Whitfield.”

“Of course it wasn’t. Imagine him anyway.”

“All right.”

“Now imagine Vollman.”

“Who?”

“The one who killed those kids.”

“Vollmer.”

“Fine, Vollmer. Imagine him.”

“It wasn’t—”

“I know it wasn’t. Humor me, okay? Imagine him.”

“All right.”

“Now imagine Ray Gruliow.”

“I didn’t dream about Ray,” I said, “and this isn’t going to work. I appreciate what you’re trying to do—”

“I know you do.”

“But it’s not going to work.”

“I know. Can I ask you a couple of questions?”

“I suppose so.”

“What’s your name?”

“Matthew Scudder.”

“What’s your wife’s name?”

“Elaine Mardell. Elaine Mardell Scudder.”

“Do you love her?”

“Do you have to ask?”

“Just answer the question. Do you love her?”

“Yes.”

“Who’d you dream about?”

“Nice try, but it’s not going to…”

“Yes?”

“I’ll be a son of a bitch.”

“So? Are you going to tell me?”

“Pleased with yourself, aren’t you?”

“Pleased beyond measure, and—now stop that!”

“I just want to touch it for a minute.”

“Say the name, will you? Before it slips your mind again.”

“It won’t,” I said. “Now why in the hell would I dream about him?”

“Fine, keep me in suspense.”

“Glenn Holtzmann,” I said. “How did you do that?”

“Ve haff vays of making you remember.”

“So it would seem. Glenn Holtzmann. Why Glenn Holtzmann, for Christ’s sake?”

I was no closer to the answer an hour later when I went downstairs for the papers. Then I forgot Glenn Holtzmann for the time being.

There had been another letter from Will.

“An Open Letter to the People of New York.”

That’s how Will headed it. He had addressed and mailed it, like all the others, to Marty McGraw at the Daily News, and they were the ones with the story. They gave it the front-page headline and led with it, under McGraw’s byline. His column, “Since You Asked…” ran as a sidebar, and the full text of Will’s letter appeared on the page opposite. It was a long letter for Will, running to just under eight hundred words, which made it just about the same length as McGraw’s column.

He started out by claiming credit (or assuming responsibility) for the murder of Adrian Whitfield. His tone was boastful; he talked at first about the elaborate security set up to protect Whitfield, the burglar alarm, the three shifts of bodyguards, the armor-plated limousine with the bulletproof glass. “But no man can prevail against the Will of the People,” he proclaimed. “No man can run from it. No man can hide from it. Consider Roswell Berry, who fled to Omaha. Consider Julian Rashid, behind his fortified walls in St. Albans. The Will of the People can reach across vast space, it can slip through the stoutest defenses. No man can resist it.”

Whitfield, Will went on, was by no means the worst lawyer in the world. It had simply been his lot to serve as representative of an ineradicable evil in the legal profession, an apparent willingness to do anything, however abhorrent and immoral, in the service of a client. “We nod in approval when an attorney defends the indefensible, and even tolerate behavior in a client’s interest which would earn the lawyer a horsewhipping were he so to act on his own behalf.”

Then Will launched into an evaluation of the legal system, questioning the value of the jury system. There was nothing startlingly original about any of the points he raised, though he argued them reasonably enough so that you found yourself ready to forget you were reading the words of a serial murderer.

He ended on a personal note. “I find I’m tired of killing. I am grateful to have been the instrument selected to perform these several acts of social surgery. But there is a heavy toll taken on him who is called upon to do evil in the service of a greater good. I’ll rest now, until the day comes when I’m once again called to act.”

I had a question, and I made half a dozen phone calls trying to get an answer. Eventually I got around to calling the News. I gave my name to the woman who answered and said I’d like to talk to Marty McGraw. She took my number, and within ten minutes the phone rang.

“Marty McGraw,” he said. “Matthew Scudder, you’re the detective Whitfield hired, right? I think we might have met once.”

“Years ago.”

“Most of my life is years ago. What have you got for me?”

“A question. Did the letter run verbatim?”

“Absolutely. Why?”

“No cuts at all? Nothing held back at the cops’ request?”

“Now how could I tell you that?” He sounded aggrieved. “For all I know, you could be Will yourself.”

“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “On the other hand, if I were Will, I’d probably know whether or not you cut my copy.”

“Jesus,” he said, “I’d hate to be the one to do something like that. I know how I get when that mutt at the big desk cuts
my
copy, and I’m not a homicidal maniac.”

“Well, neither am I. Look, here’s what I’m getting at. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing in the letter to disprove the suicide theory.”

“There’s Will’s word on the subject. He says he did it.”

“And he’s never lied to us in the past.”

“As far as I know,” he said, “he hasn’t. With Roswell Berry in Omaha he refused to confirm or deny, but he was being cute.”

“He mentioned that Berry’d been stabbed, if I remember correctly.”

“That’s right, and that was information the police had held back, so that certainly suggested he’d had a hand in it.”

“Well, is there anything like that in the latest letter? Because I couldn’t spot it. That’s why I wondered if anything had been cut.”

“No, we ran it verbatim. I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d hate to be the one to cut his copy. I’m already getting more attention than I want from the guy.”

“I can see where it must have cost you a lot of readers.”

His laugh was like a terrier’s bark. “In that respect,” he admitted, “it s a fucking godsend. My only regret is he didn’t get this rolling before my recent contract negotiations. Same time, a person gets nervous being Will’s window on the world. I have to figure he’s reading me three times a week. Suppose he doesn’t like what I write? Last thing I want to do is piss off an original thinker like him.”

“An original thinker?”

“Case in point. While I’m saying the sentence, the phrase I’ve got in mind is ‘nut job.’ And the thought strikes me that maybe he’s got my phone tapped and he’ll resent me for casting aspersions on his state of mind. So I do a spot edit in midsentence, strike out ‘nut job’ and pencil in ‘original thinker.’

“The journalistic mind at work.”

“But on second thought I don’t really believe he has my phone tapped, and what does he care what I call him? Names will never hurt him. I’m not sure sticks and stones will, either. What makes you think he’s lying about getting Whitfield?”

“The amount of time it took him to write. It’s been a full week since Whitfield died.”

He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “That’s what proves it.”

“Proves what? That he did it? Because I don’t see how.”

“We just got this,” he said, “or it would have run along with the rest of the story. So I don’t want to say anything over the phone because we’d like to be first with it tomorrow. You right here in the city? You know where the News is, don’t you?”

“Thirty-third between Ninth and Tenth. But if you hadn’t asked I might have gone to the old place on East Forty-second. That’s still the first thing that comes to mind when I think of the News.”

“What’s the zip code?”

“The zip code? You want me to write to you?”

“No, not particularly. Look, you haven’t got anything against tits, have you? There’s a joint called Bunny’s Topless on Ninth and Thirty-second that’s quieter than a sulky Trappist this time of day. Why don’t you meet me there in half an hour?”

“All right.”

“You won’t have any trouble recognizing me,” he said. “I’ll be the guy with a shirt on.”

I don’t know what Bunny’s Topless is like at night. It would almost have to be livelier, with more young women displaying their breasts and more men staring at them. And it’s probably sad at any hour, deeply sad in the manner of most emporia that cater to our less-noble instincts. Gambling casinos are sad in that way, and the glitzier they are the more palpable is their sadness. The air has an ozone-tainted reek of base dreams and broken promises.

Early in the day, the place made no sense at all. It was a cave of a room, the door and windows painted matte black, the room within not so much decorated as thrown together, its furnishing a mix of what the previous owner had left and what had come cheap at auction. Two men occupied stools at either end of the bar, dividing their attention between the TV set (CNN with the sound off) and the bartender, whose breasts (medium size, with a slight droop) looked a good deal more authentic than her bright red hair.

There was a little stage, and they probably had dancers at night, but the stage was empty now and a Golden Oldies station on the radio provided the music. A waitress, clad like the bartender in cottontailed hot pants and rabbit ears and high heels and nothing else, worked the booths and tables. Maybe things would pick up some at lunchtime, but for now she had two men each at a pair of tables in front and one man all by himself in a corner booth.

The loner was Marty McGraw, and anybody would have recognized him. A little photo of him, head cocked and lip curled, ran three times a week with his column. There was gray in his hair that didn’t show in the photo, but I knew about that for having seen him so many times on television since the Will story first broke. Aside from that, the years hadn’t changed him much. If anything, time had treated him as a caricaturist would have done, accenting what was already there, making the eyebrows a little more prominent, pushing out the jaw.

He’d shucked his suit jacket and loosened his tie, and he had one hand wrapped around the base of a glass of beer. There was an empty rocks glass next to the beer glass, and the raw smell of cheap blended whiskey rose straight to my nostrils.

“Scudder,” he said. “McGraw. And this little darling”—he waved to summon the waitress—“assures me her name is Darlene. She’s never lied to me in the past, have you, sweetie?”

She smiled. I had the feeling she was called upon to do that a lot. She had dark hair, cut short, and full breasts.

“The bartender’s name is Stacey,” he went on, “but she’d probably answer to Spacey. You don’t want to ask her to do anything terribly complicated. Order a pousse-café and you’re taking your life in your hands. A shot and a beer’s a safe choice here, and you want to make the shot some cheap blend, because that’s what you’re gonna get anyway, no matter what it says on the bottle.”

I said I’d have a Coke.

“Well, that’s safe,” he said, “if not terribly adventurous. Another of the same for me, Darlene. And don’t ever change, understand?”

She walked off and he said, “The zip code’s one-oh-oh-oh-one, or should I say one-zero-zero-zero-one? You notice how they been doing that lately?”

“Doing what?”

“Saying zero. You give a credit card number over the phone, say ‘oh’ for ‘zero,’ and they’ll replace all your ohs with zeroes when they read it back to you for confirmation. You know what I think it is? Computers. You copy down a number by hand, what’s it matter whether you make an oh or a zero on the page? They both look the same. But when it’s keystrokes, you’re hitting different keys. So they have to make sure.”