Even the Wicked

"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-cafи 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."



Our drinks came. He picked up the shot and tossed it off, took a small sip of the beer. "Anyway, that's my theory, take it or leave it, and it's got nothing to do with Will's letter, anyway. He got the zip code wrong."



"He put an oh for a zero?"



"No, no, no. He wrote down the wrong number entirely. The right address, 450 West Thirty-third Street, but for some goddam reason he put one-oh-oh-one-one instead of one-oh-oh-oh-one. One-oh-oh-eleven's the zip for Chelsea and part of the West Village."



"I see," I said, but I didn't. "But what difference does it make? He did get the street number right, and you're the New York Daily News, for God's sake. You shouldn't be that hard to find."



"You would think that," he said, "and I take back what I said before, because it's all of a piece with people saying zero instead of oh, and having to get the keystrokes right. It's fucking technology getting in everybody's face is what it is."



I waited for him to explain.



"It delayed the letter," he said, "if you can believe it. I'd hate to guess how many pieces of mail a day get sent to the News, most of them written in crayon. So you'd think the dorks who sort the mail could figure out where we were, especially since it's no more than a long five-iron shot from the main post office. But all you have to do is put a one where an oh ought to be, pardon me all to hell, I mean a zero, and they're lost. They're fucking stymied."



"There must have been a postmark," I said.



"More than one," he said. "There was the original one, when it went through the machine at the intake station before it got shipped uptown to the Old Chelsea station on West Eighteenth, which is where they ship the mail for delivery to the one-oh-oh-one-one zips. Then it went out in somebody's route bag and came back again, and then it picked up a second postmark when they bounced it from Old Chelsea to the Parley building on Eighth Avenue, which is where the one-oh-oh-oh-one mail gets delivered out of. The second one was handwritten, which probably makes it a collector's item in this day and age, but what you're interested in, what anybody'd be interested in, is the first postmark."



"Yes."



He knocked back his glass of beer. "I wish I had it to show it to you," he said, "but of course the cops took it. It tells you two things, the zip for the intake station and the date it went through the stamping machine. The zip was one-oh-oh-thirty-eight, indicating the station was Peck Slip."



"And the date?"



"Same night Whitfield was killed."



"What time?"



He shook his head. "Just the date. Which escapes me at the moment, but it was that night, the night he died."



"Thursday night."



"Was it a Thursday? Yeah, of course it was, and we were on the street with it Friday morning."



"But the postmark was Thursday."



"Isn't that what I just said?"



"I just want to make sure I've got this right," I said. "It went through the stamping machine before midnight, and as a result it had Thursday's date on it and not Friday's."



"You've got it right." He pointed to my glass. "What's that, Coca-Cola? You want a refill?" I shook my head. "Well, I damn well do," he said, and got Darlene's attention and signaled for another round.



I said, "Whitfield died around eleven that night, and the first news flash was on New York One just before midnight. Unless I'm missing something, the letter went in the mail before Whitfield was dead."



"Probably true."



"Just probably?"



"Well, you're assuming the post office did everything right," he said, "and you already know how long it took them to deliver the fucking letter, so why should they be letter-perfect in any other area of operations? Meaning it's entirely possible somebody neglected to advance the date on the postmark at the stroke of midnight. But I'd certainly say it's odds-on that Adrian Whitfield still had a pulse when Will mailed the letter."



"Peck Slip," I said. "That's down by the Fulton Fish Market, isn't it?"



"That's right. But the post office serves the whole three-eight zip code, and that includes a big chunk of downtown. One Police Plaza, City Hall-"



"And the Criminal Courts Building," I said. "He could have been in court that afternoon, watching while Adrian entered a guilty plea for Irwin Atkins. He's already poisoned the whiskey and written the letter, and now he drops it in the mail. Why doesn't he wait?"



"We already know he's cocky."



"But not half-cocked. He's mailing the letter before his victim's dead. Suppose Adrian goes out and drinks a bottle of wine with dinner and doesn't want to mix the grape and the grain when he gets home? Suppose Adrian's still alive and kicking when Will's letter turns up on your desk? Then what?"



"Then I call the cops and they run over to Whitfield's apartment and grab the scotch bottle before he can take a drink from it."



"Does he ever say anything about the scotch?" I'd clipped the piece from the News and I got it out now and scanned it. Our own drinks had come by this time, with Darlene setting them down and removing their predecessors without interrupting us. She didn't have to collect any money. Joints like that used to make you pay when they served you, but that was back before everyone paid for everything with a credit card. Now they run a tab, just like everybody else. "There's a reference to poison," I said, "and he talks about the security setup at Whitfield's apartment. He doesn't specifically say the poison's in the whiskey."



"Still, once he mentions poison and talks about the Park Avenue apartment-"



"They'd search everything until they found cyanide in the scotch."



"And Will winds up looking like a horse's ass."



"So why take the chance? What's the big hurry that he has to get the letter in the mail?"



"Maybe he's leaving town."