When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (8 page)

Then we talked and had a little more of the bourbon, and before long she dropped off to sleep. I covered her with the top sheet and a cotton blanket. I could have slept myself, but instead I put on my clothes and sent myself home. Because who in her rightmind'd want Matt Scudder around by the dawn's early light?

On my way home I stopped at the little Syrian deli and had the clerk loosen the caps on two bottles of Molson Ale. I went up to my room and sat with my feet up on the windowsill and drank from one of the bottles.

I thought aboutTillary. Where was he now? In the house where she died? Staying with friends or relatives?

I thought of him in the bars or Carolyn's bed while a burglar was killing his wife, and I wondered what he thought about that.Or if he thought about it.

And my own thoughts turned suddenly to Anita, out there in Syosset with the boys. I had a moment of fear for her, seeing her menaced, drawing back in terror from some unseen danger. I recognized the fear as irrational, and I was able after a moment to know it for what it was, something I'd brought home with me, something that clung to me now along with Carolyn Cheatham's scent. I was carrying around TommyTillary's guilt by proxy.

Well, the hell with that. I didn't need his guilt. I had plenty of my own.

The weekend was quiet. I talked to my sons, but they didn't come in. Saturday afternoon I earned a hundred dollars by accompanying one of the partners in the antique shop down the block from Armstrong's. Wecabbed together toEastSeventy-fourth Street, where we collected clothing and other possessions from his ex-lover's apartment. The lover was thirty or forty pounds overweight, bitter and bitchy.

"I don't believe this, Gerald," he said. "Did you actually bring a bodyguard or is this my summer replacement? Either way I don't know whether to be flattered or insulted."

"Oh, I'm sure you'll work it out," Gerald told him.

In the cab back to the West Side Gerald said, "I really loved thatcunt, Matthew, and I will be goddamned if I can figure out why. Thank you for this, Matthew. I could have hired aschlepper for five dollars an hour, but your presence was all the difference in the world. Did you see how ready he was to remember that the Handel lamp was his? The fucking hell it was his. When I met him he didn't know from Handel, not the lamps or the composer, either. All he knew was tohondle. You know that word,hondle? It means to haggle over a price, like if I were to try to pay you fifty dollars now instead of the hundred we agreed on. I'm just joking, dear. I have no problem with paying you thehundred, I think you were worth every penny of it."

SUNDAY night BobbyRuslander found me in Armstrong's. Skip was looking for me, he said. He was at Miss Kitty's, and if I got a minute why didn't I drop over? I had time then, and Bobby walked over there with me.

It was a little cooler; the worst of the heat wave had broken Saturday, and there had been some rain to cool the streets down a little. A fire truck raced past us as we waited for the light to change. When the siren died down, Bobby said, "Crazy business."

"Oh?"

"He'll tell you about it."

As we crossed the street he said, "I never see him like this, you know what I mean? He's alwayssupercool, Arthur is."

"Nobody else calls him Arthur."

"Nobody ever did. Back when we're kids, nobody calls him Arthur. It was like going against type, you know? Everybody calls him Skip, I'm his best friend,I call him by his formal name."

When we got there Skip tossed Bobby a bar towel and asked him to take over for him. "He's a lousy bartender," he announced, "but he doesn't steal much."

"That's what you think," Bobby said.

We went in back and Skip closed the door. There were a couple of old desks, two swivel chairs and a straight-backed chair, acoatrack, a file cabinet, and a big oldMosler safe that was taller than I was. "That's where the booksshoulda been," he said, pointing at the safe."Except we're too smart for that, me and John. There's an audit, that's the first place they'regonna look, right? So all that's in there is a thousand in cash and some papers and shit, the lease on this place, the partnership agreement, his divorce papers, shit like that.Terrific. We saved that crap and let somebody walk off with the store."

He lit a cigarette. "Safe was here when we took the place," he said. "Left over from when the joint was a hardware store, and it cost more to move than it was worth, so we inherited it. Massive fucker, isn't it? You could put a body in there if you had one around. That waynobody'd steal it. He called, the fucker who stole the books."

"Oh?"

He nodded. "It's a ransom pitch. 'I got something of yours and you can have it back.' "

"Hename a price?"

"No.Said he'll be in touch."

"You recognize the voice?"

"Uh-uh.Sounded phony."

"How do you mean?"

"Like it wasn't his real voice I was hearing. Anyway, I didn't recognize it." He clasped his hands, extended his arms to crack his knuckles. "I'm supposed to sit around until I hear from him."

"When did you get the call?"

"Couple hours ago.I was working, he called me here. Good start to the evening, I'll tell you."

"At least he's coming to you instead of sending the stuff straight to the IRS."

"Yeah, I thought of that. This way we get the chance to do something. If he went and dropped a dime on us, all we could do is bend over and take it."

"Did you talk to your partner?"

"Not yet. I called his house, he wasn't in."

"So you sit tight."

"Yeah.That's a switch. What the hell have I been doing, hanging loose?" There was a water tumbler on his desk, a third full with a brownish liquid. He took a last drag on his cigarette and dropped it into the glass. "Disgusting," he said. "I never want to see you do that, Matt. You don't smoke, do you?"

"Once in a great while."

"Yeah?You have one now and then and don't get hooked? I know a guy takes heroin that way. You know him, too, for that matter. But these little fuckers"- he tapped the pack- "I think they're more addictive than smack. You want one now?"

"No thanks."

He stood up. "The only things I don't get addicted to," he said, "are the ones I didn't like that much in the first place. Hey, thanks for coming by. There's nothing to do but wait, but I figured I wanted to keep you in the picture, let you know what's going on."

"That's fine," I said, "but I want you to know you don't owe me anything for it."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean don't go paying my bar tab for this."

"Are you sore?"

"No."

"It was just something I felt like doing."

"I appreciate it, but it wasn't necessary."

"Yeah, I guess." He shrugged. "When you're skimming you get to be very free with cash. You spend it on things that don't show.The hell with it. I can stand you a drink, though, can't I?In my own joint?"

"That you can do."

"C'mon then," he said, "beforefuckingRuslander gives the whole store away."

EVERY time I went into Armstrong's I wondered if I'd run into Carolyn, and each time I was more relieved than disappointed when I didn't. I could have called her, but I sensed that it was perfectly appropriate not to. Friday night had been just what each of us had evidently wanted, and it looked as though it had been complete in itself for both of us, and I was glad of that. As a fringe benefit, I was over whatever had had me bugged about Fran, and it was beginning to look as though it had been nothing much more complicated than old-fashioned horniness. I suppose a half-hour with one of the streetwalkers would have served me as well, if less pleasurably.

I didn't run into Tommy, either, and that, too, was a relief, and in no sense disappointing.

Then Monday morning I picked up the News and read that they'd pulled in a pair of young Hispanics fromSunsetPark for theTillary burglary and homicide. The paper ran the usual photo- two skinny youths, their hair unruly, one of them trying to hide his face from the camera, the other smirking defiantly, and each of them handcuffed to a broad-shouldered grimfaced Irishman in a suit. There was a caption to tell you which ones were the good guys, but you didn't really need it.

I was in Armstrong's that afternoon when the phone rang. Dennis put down the glass he was wiping and answered it. "He was here a minute ago," he said. "I'll see if he stepped out." He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and looked quizzically at me. "Are you still here?" he asked. "Or did you slip away while my attention was somehow diverted?"

"Who wants to know?"

"TommyTillary."

You never know what a woman will decide to tell a man, or how a man will react to it. I didn't much want to find out, but I was better off learning over the phone than face-to-face. I nodded and Dennis passed the phone across the bar.

I said, "Matt Scudder, Tommy. I was sorry to hear about your wife."

"Thanks, Matt. Jesus, it feels like it happened a year ago. It was what, a little over a week?"

"At least they got the bastards."

There was a pause. Then he said, "Jesus. You haven't seen a paper, huh?"

"Sure I did. Two Spanishkids, had their pictures."

"I guess you read this morning's News."

"I generally do. Why?"

"But not this afternoon's Post."

"No. Why, what happened? They turn out to be clean?"

"Clean," he said, and snorted. Then he said, "I figured you'd know. The cops came by early this morning, before I saw the story in the News, so I didn't even know about the arrest. Shit. Be easier if you already knew this."

"I'm not following you, Tommy."

"The two Latin lovers.Clean? Shit, the men's room in theTimes Square subway station, that's how clean they are. The cops hit their place and found stuff from my house everywhere they looked. Jewelry they had descriptions of, a stereo that I gave them the serial number, everything.Monogrammed shit. I mean that's how clean they were, for Christ's sake."

"So?"

"So they admitted the burglary but not the murder."

"Crooks do that all the time, Tommy."

"Lemmefinish, huh? They admitted the burglary, but according to them it wasn't really a burglary. I was giving them all that stuff."

"And they just came to pick it up in the middle of the night."

"Yeah, right.No, their story was they were supposed to make it look like a burglary so I could collect from my insurance. I could claim a loss on top of what they were actually taking, and that way everybody's to the good."

"What did the actual loss amount to?"

"Shit, I don't know. There were twice as many things turned up at their place as I ever listed when I made out a report.There's things I missed a few days after I filled out the report and other stuff I didn't know was gone until the cops found them. And they took things weren't covered. There was a fur of Peg's, we weregonna get a floater on it and we never did.And some of her jewelry, same story. I got a standard homeowner'spolicy, it didn't coveranywheres near everything they took. They got a set of sterling, it came down to us from her aunt,I swear I forgot we owned the stuff. And it wasn't covered, either."

"It hardly sounds like an insurance setup."

"No, of course not.How the hell could it be? Anyway, the important thing is according to them the house was empty when they hit it. Peg wasn't home."

"And?"

"And I set them up is their story. They hit the place, they carted everything away, and then I came home with Peg and stabbed her six, eight times, whatever it was, and left her there so it looked like it happened during a burglary."

"How could the burglars testify that you stabbed your wife?"

"They couldn't. All they said was they didn't and she wasn't home when they were there and I had it arranged with them to do the burglary. The cops pieced the rest of it together."

"What did they do, arrest you?"

"No. They came over to the hotel where I'm staying, it was early,I was just out of the shower. Now this was the first I knew that the spics were arrested, let alone that they were trying to do a job on me. They just wanted to talk, the cops, and at first I talked to them, and then I started to get the drift of what they were trying to put on me. So I said I wasn't saying anything more without my lawyerpresent, and I called him, and he left half his breakfast on the table and came over in a hurry, and he wouldn't let me say a word."

"And they didn't take you in or book you?"

"No."

"But they didn't entirely buy your story either?"

"No way.I didn't really tell 'ema story because Kaplan wouldn't let me say anything. They didn't drag me in because they don't have a case yet, but according to Kaplan they're going to be building one if they can. They told me not to leave town. You believe it? My wife's dead, the Post headline says 'Quiz Husband in Burglary Murder,' and what the hell do they think I'mgonna do? Am I going fishing for fucking trout inMontana? 'Don't leave town.' You see this shit on television, you think nobody in real life talks like that. Maybe television's where they get it from."

I waited for him to tell me what he wanted from me. I didn't have long to wait.

"Why I called," he said, "is Kaplan thinks we ought to hire a detective. He figures maybe these guys talked around the neighborhood, maybe they bragged to their friends, maybe there's a way to prove they did the killing. He says the cops won't concentrate on that end if they're too busy trying to nail the lid shut on me."

I explained that I didn't have any official standing, that I had no license and filed no reports.

"That's okay," he insisted. "I told Kaplan what I want is somebody I can trust,somebody'll do a job for me. I don't think they'regonna have any kind of a case at all, Matt, because I can account for my time and Icouldn'ta been where Iwouldahadda be to do what they said I did. But the longer this shit drags on the worse it is for me. I want it cleared up, I want it in the papers that these Spanish assholes did it all and I had nothing to do with anything. I want that for me and for the people I do business with and for my relatives and Peg's relatives and all the wonderful people who voted for me. You remember the old 'Amateur Hour'? 'I want to thank mom and dad and Aunt Edith and my piano teacher Mrs.Pelton and all the wonderful people who voted for me.' Listen, you'll meet me and Kaplan in his office, hear what the man has to say, do me a hell of a big favor, and pick up a couple of bucks for yourself. What do you say, Matt?"