Even the Wicked

* * *



That night Elaine and I walked over to Armstrong's for dinner. She had a big salad. I had a bowl of chili and stirred a large side order of minced Scotch bonnet peppers into it. It must have been hot enough to blister paint, but you couldn't have proved it by me. I was barely aware of what I was eating.



She talked some about her day at her shop, and about what TJ had said when he dropped by to jive with her. I talked about my day. And then we both fell silent. Classical music played over the sound system, barely audible through the buzz of conversations around us. Our waiter came around to find out if we wanted more Perrier. I said we didn't, but he could bring me a cup of black coffee when he had a moment. Elaine said she'd have herb tea. "Any kind," she said. "Surprise me."



He brought her Red Zinger. "What a surprise," she said.



I tried my coffee, and something must have shown in my face, because Elaine's eyebrows went up a notch.



"For an instant there," I said, "I could taste booze in the coffee."



"But it's not really there."



"No. Good coffee, but only coffee."



"What they call a sense-memory, I guess."



"I guess."



You could say I came by it honestly. Years ago, before Jimmy lost his lease and relocated a long block to the west, Armstrong's had been situated on Ninth Avenue around the corner from my hotel, and it had functioned for me almost as an extension of my personal living space. I socialized there, I isolated there, I met clients there. I put in long hours of maintenance drinking there, and sometimes I did more than maintain and got good and drunk at the bar or at my table in the back. My usual drink was bourbon, and when I didn't drink it neat, the way God made it, I would stir it into a mug of coffee. Each flavor, it seemed to me then, complemented and enhanced the other, even as the caffeine and alcohol balanced one another, the one keeping you awake while the other softened the edges of consciousness.



I have known people who, when quitting smoking, have had to give up coffee temporarily because they so strongly associate the two. I had problems of my own getting sober, but coffee was not one of them, and I have been able to go on drinking it with pleasure, and apparently with impunity, at an age when most of my contemporaries have found it advisable to switch to decaf. I like the stuff, especially when it's good, the way Elaine makes it at home (although she hardly ever has a cup herself) or the way they brew it in the Seattle-style coffee bars that have sprouted up all over town. The coffee's always been good at Armstrong's, rich and full-bodied and aromatic, and I took a sip now, savoring it, and wondered why I'd tasted bourbon.



"There was nothing you could have done," Elaine said. "Was there?"



"No."



"You told him he ought to leave the country."



"I could have pushed a little harder," I said, "but I don't think he would have done anything differently, and I can't blame him for that. He had a life to live. He took all the precautions a man could be expected to take."



"Reliable did a good job for him?"



"Even in hindsight," I said, "I can't point to a thing they did wrong. I suppose they could have posted men around the clock in his apartment, whether or not there was anybody in it, but even after the fact I can't argue that that's what they should have done. And as far as my own part in all this is concerned, no, I can't see anything I left undone that might have made a difference. It would have been nice if I'd had some brilliant insight that told me who Will was, but that didn't happen, and that gives me something in common with eight million other New Yorkers, including however many cops they've got assigned to the case."



"But something's bothering you."



"Will's out there," I said. "Doing what he does, and getting away with it. I guess that bothers me, especially now that he's struck down a man I knew. A friend, I was going to say, and that would have been inaccurate, but I had the sense the last time I spoke with him that Adrian Whitfield might have become a friend. If he'd lived long enough."



"What are you going to do?"



I drank the rest of my coffee, caught the waiter's eye and pointed to my empty cup. While he filled it I thought about the question she'd asked. I said, "The funeral's private, just for the family. There'd be a crowd otherwise, with all the headlines he's getting. I understand there'll be a public memorial service sometime next month, and I'll probably go to that."



"And?"



"And maybe I'll light a candle," I said.



"It couldn't hoit," she said, giving the phrase an exaggerated Brooklyn pronunciation. It was the punch line to an old joke, and I guess I smiled, and she smiled back across the table at me.



"Does the money bother you?"



"The money?"



"Didn't he write you a check?"



"For two thousand dollars," I said.



"And don't you get a referral fee from Reliable?"



"Dead clients don't pay."



"I beg your pardon?"



"A basic principle of the personal-security industry," I said. "Someone used it for the title of a book on the subject. Wally took a small retainer, but it won't begin to cover what he has to pay in hourly rates to the men he's had guarding Whitfield. He's legally entitled to bill the estate, but he already told me he's going to eat it. Since he'll wind up with a net loss, I won't be picking up a referral fee."



"And you're just as glad, aren't you?"



"Oh, I don't know. If he'd made money on the deal I'd have been comfortable taking a share of it. And if the two grand Whitfield paid me starts bothering me I can always give it away."



"Or try to earn it."



"By chasing Will," I said, "or by hunting for the man who shot Byron Leopold."



"On Horatio Street."



I nodded. "Whitfield suggested there might be a link, that maybe Will killed Byron at random, more or less for practice."



"Is that possible?"



"I suppose it's possible. It's also possible Byron was gunned down by an extraterrestrial, and every bit as likely. It was his way of telling me to keep his money and investigate whatever the hell I wanted to investigate. It made as much sense for me to be working one case as the other. Either way I wasn't going to accomplish anything, was I?"



"That's it, isn't it? That's what's making you taste alcohol that isn't there. That you can't accomplish anything."



I thought about it. I sipped some coffee, put the cup in the saucer. "Yeah," I said. "That's it."



* * *



Outside, I took her hand as we waited for the light to change. I glanced at the building diagonally across the street, and my eyes automatically sought out a window on the twenty-ninth floor. Noticing my glance, or perhaps just reading my mind, Elaine said, "You know what that shooting in the Village reminds me of? Glenn Holtzmann."



He'd lived in that twenty-ninth-floor apartment. His widow, Lisa, had gone on living there after his death. She hired me, and after I was through working for her I continued to return occasionally to her apartment, and to her bed.



When Elaine and I were married we went to Europe for a honeymoon. We were in Paris, lying together in our hotel room, when she told me that nothing had to change. We could go on being ourselves and living our lives. The rings on our fingers didn't change anything.



She said this in a way that made the unspoken subtext unmistakable. I know there's someone else, she'd been saying, and I don't care.



"Glenn Holtzmann," I said. "Killed by accident."



"Unless Freud's right and there's no such thing as an accident."



"I thought about Holtzmann when I was poking around the edges of Byron's life. The idea of someone killed by mistake."



"It's bad enough being killed for a reason."



"Uh-huh. Somebody heard the shooter call Byron by name."



"Then he knew who he was."



"If the witness got it right."



We walked the rest of the way home, not saying much. Upstairs in our apartment I put a hand on her shoulder and turned her toward me, and we were in each other's arms. We kissed, and I put a hand on her hindquarters and drew her against me.



Nothing has to change, she'd told me in Paris, but of course things change over time. We have been many things to each other over many years, Elaine and I. When we met I was a married cop and she was a sweet young call girl. We were together, and then we were apart for years, until the past drew us together again. After a while she quit hooking. After a while we found an apartment together. After a while we got married.



Passion, after all those years, was different from what it had been when I'd made those first visits to her Turtle Bay apartment. Then our desire for each other had been fierce and urgent and undeniable. Now it had been tempered by time and custom. The love, present from the beginning, had grown infinitely broader and deeper with time; the delight we had always taken in each other's company pany was keener than ever. And our passion, if it had grown less furious, was richer as well.



We kissed again, and her breath caught in her throat. We moved to the bedroom, shed our clothes.



"I love you," I said. Or maybe she said it. After a while you lose track.



* * *



"You know," she said, "if we keep on like this, I can see where we might acquire a certain degree of proficiency."



"Never happen."



"You're my bear and I love you. And you're about to drop off to sleep, aren't you? Unless I keep you awake by glowing in the dark. I almost could, the way I feel. Why does sex wake women up and put men to sleep? Is it just bad planning on God's part or does it somehow contribute to the survival of the species?"



I was turning the question over and over in my mind, trying to form an answer, when I felt her breath on my cheek and her lips brushing mine.



"Sleep tight," she said.



8



The big news over the weekend had to do with the results of the autopsy performed on Adrian Whitfield. The cause of death was no surprise. It had been confirmed as having resulted from the ingestion of a dose of potassium cyanide which, according to the Post, would have been enough to kill a dozen lawyers. (Monday night Leno read that item in his opening monologue, rolled his eyes heavenward, and got a laugh without saying a word.)



What the autopsy also established was that Will had done little more than anticipate Nature. At the time of his death, Adrian Whitfield had already been stricken with a malignant tumor that had metastasized from its initial site on one of the adrenal glands and invaded the lymph system. Will had cheated him, at most, out of a year of life.



"I wonder if he knew," I said to Elaine. "It would have been largely asymptomatic, according to the story in the Times."



"Had he been to the doctor?"



"His doctor's out of town. Nobody can get hold of him."



"Doctors," she said with feeling. "He never said anything?"



"He said something. What was it?" I closed my eyes for a moment. "The last time I talked with him, right before he drank the poison, he said something about wishing we'd had more time. To get to know each other, was what he meant. Or maybe he meant he wished he'd had more time in general."