Even the Wicked

"He was ill," she said. "Some kind of lymphatic cancer, wasn't it?"



"It metastasized to the lymph system. I believe the original site was one of the adrenals."



"Maybe he couldn't drink as much as he used to. Because of the cancer."



"I suppose that's possible."



"And he was in denial about his health, wasn't he? Or at least he wasn't telling people about it."



"So?"



"So maybe that would lead him to pretend he was more of a drinker than he was."



"But the first thing he did was tell me he wasn't much of a drinker."



"You're right." She frowned. "I give up. I don't get it."



"I don't get it, either."



"But you don't give up, do you?"



"No," I said. "Not yet."



* * *



Over dinner she said, "Was Glenn Holtzmann a drinker?"



"Not that I ever noticed. And where did that question come from?"



"Your dreams."



"You know," I said, "I'm having enough trouble making sense out of the thoughts I have while I'm awake. What was it Freud said about dreams?"



" 'Sometimes it's only a cigar.' "



"Right. If there's any connection between Glenn Holtzmann and the liquor Adrian Whitfield didn't have on his breath, I'm afraid it's too subtle for me."



"I was just wondering."



"Holtzmann was a phony," I said. "He betrayed people and sold them out."



"Was Adrian a phony?"



"Did he have some secret life besides practicing criminal law? It doesn't seem very likely."



"Maybe you sensed that he was hiding something about himself."



"By pretending to be more of a drinker than he was. Or at least by pretending to have had more to drink on that one night than he had."



"Right."



"So my unconscious mind immediately made the leap from him to Glenn Holtzmann."



"Why?"



"That was going to be my next question," I said. "Why indeed?" I put down my fork. "Anyway," I said, "I think I figured out what Glenn Holtzmann was trying to tell me."



"In the dream, you mean."



"Right, in the dream."



"Well?"



" 'Too much money.' "



"That's it?"



"What did we just say? Sometimes it's only a cigar?"



"Too much money," she said. "You mean like the line about a cocaine habit is God's way of telling you you've got too much money?"



"I don't think cocaine's got anything to do with it. Glenn Holtzmann had too much money, that's what made me dig deeper and find out about his secret life."



"He had all that cash in the closet, didn't he? How does that apply to Adrian Whitfield?"



"It doesn't."



"Then-"



"Sometimes it's only a cigar," I said.



* * *



I don't remember any dreams that night, or even a sense of having dreamed. Elaine and I went home and finished what we'd started in her shop, and I slipped right off into a deep sleep and didn't stir until dawn.



But there had been a thought nagging at me before we went to bed, and it was still there when I woke up. I took it out and examined it, and I decided it wasn't something I had to devote my time to. I had a second cup of coffee after breakfast and considered the matter again, and this time I decided it wasn't as though there were too many other matters with a greater claim on my time. I had, as they say, nothing better to do.



And the only reason not to pursue it was for fear of what I might find out.



* * *



I made haste slowly. I went to the library first to check my memory against what the Times had run, noting down dates and times in my notebook. I spent a couple of hours at that, and then I went outside and sat on a bench in Bryant Park and went over my notes. It was a perfect fall day, and the air had the tang of a crisp apple. They'd been forecasting rain, but you didn't even have to look at the sky to know that it wasn't going to rain that day. It felt in fact as though it would never rain, or turn any colder than it was now. The days wouldn't get any shorter, either. It felt like eternal autumn, stretching out in front of us until the end of time.



Everybody's favorite season, and you always think it's going to last forever. And it never does.



* * *



Enough time had passed since Whitfield's death for them to have taken the NYPD seals off the door. All I had to do was find someone with the authority to let me in. I don't know precisely where that authority was vested-Whitfield's heirs, the executor of his estate, or the co-op's board of directors. I'm sure it wasn't the building superintendent's decision to make, but he took it upon himself to make it, his resolution buttressed by the portrait of U.S. Grant I palmed him. He found a key and let me in and lingered at the door while I poked around in drawers and closets. After a while he coughed discreetly, and when I looked up he asked me how long I'd be. I told him that was hard to say.



"Because I'll have to let you out," he said, "and lock up after you, only I got a few things I have to be doing."



He jotted down a phone number, and I agreed to call him. I felt a lot less pressed for time once he was out of there, and it's better if you're not in a hurry, especially when you don't know what you're looking for or where you're likely to find it.



It was close to two hours later when I used the phone in the bedroom to call the number he'd left me. He said he'd be up in a minute, and while I waited for him I retraced the route from the phone, the one Whitfield had used to call me that last night, into the room where he'd died. There were no bottles on or in the bar-I guess they'd removed everything for lab tests-but the bar was there, and I stood where he'd have stood to make himself his last drink, then stepped over to where he was when he collapsed. There was nothing on the carpet to indicate where he had lain, no chalk outline, no yellow tape, no stains he'd left behind, but it seemed to me I knew just where he'd fallen.



When the super came I gave him an extra $20 along with an apology for having taken so long. The bonus surprised him, but only a little. It also seemed to reassure him that I hadn't appropriated any property of Whitfield's during his absence, although he still felt compelled to ask.



I hadn't taken a thing, I told him. Not even snapshots.



* * *



I didn't take anything from Whitfield's office, either, nor did I find anyone to let me in. Whitfield had shared an office suite and secretarial and paralegal staff with several other attorneys in an old eight-story office building on Worth Street. I went to a noon meeting on Chambers Street the day after my visit to his apartment, then walked over to Worth and checked out his offices from the fifth-floor corridor. I weighed a few possible approaches and found them all unlikely to work on lawyers or legal secretaries, so I got out of there and walked clear up to Houston Street and saw a movie at the Angelika. When it broke I called Elaine and told her I'd get dinner on my own.



"TJ called," she said. "He wants you to beep him."



I would have if the phone I was using had a number on it. Most of them have had their numbers removed from the dials, and even if you manage to worm the number out of a cooperative operator, it won't do you any good; NYNEX has rigged the bulk of their pay phones so that they can no longer receive incoming calls. This is all part of the never-ending war on drugs, and its twin effects, as far as I can tell, have been a momentary inconvenience for the dealers, all of whom promptly went out and bought cellular phones, and a slight but irreversible decline in the quality of life for everybody else in town.



I had a plate of jerked chicken and peas and rice at a West Indian lunch counter on Chambers Street and went back to Whitfield's building on Worth. It was past five o'clock so I had to sign in with the guard downstairs. I scribbled something illegible on the sheet and rode up on the elevator. There were lights on in the law offices and a quick glance in passing showed me a man and two women seated at desks, two of them plugging away at computers, one talking on the phone.



I wasn't surprised. Lawyers keep late hours. I walked the length of the corridor and tried the men's room door. It was locked. The lock seemed unlikely to pose much of a challenge-it was designed, after all, to keep out the homeless, not to protect the crown jewels. On the other hand, if I was going to commit illegal entry I ought to be able to spend the next couple hours in a pleasanter spot than a lavatory.



At the opposite end of the hall I found the one-room office of one Leland N. Barish. His name was painted on the frosted glass, along with "CONSULTANT." The lock looked to be the building's original equipment, shaped to take a skeleton key. I've carried a couple on my key ring for years, although I'd be hard put to tell you the last time I had occasion to use one of them. I didn't expect them to work now, but I tried the larger of the two and it turned the lock.



I let myself in. There was nothing to show who Barish was or who'd want to consult with him. The desk, its top uncluttered except for a couple of magazines, had a coating of dust that looked a good two weeks old. A stack of glassed-in bookshelves held only a few more magazines and eight or ten paperback science fiction novels. There was a wooden chair on casters that went with the desk, and an overstaffed armchair on which a cat had once sharpened its claws. The gray-beige walls showed rectangles and squares of a lighter shade, indicating where a previous tenant had displayed pictures or diplomas. Barish had neither repainted nor hung up anything of his own, not even a calendar.



I'd have gone through the desk drawers out of the idle curiosity that is an old cop's stock in trade. But the desk was locked, and I left it that way, unable to think of a reason to break in.



I'd switched the light on when I entered, and I left it on. No one could make out more than a silhouette through the frosted glass, but even if they could I had little to worry about, because it was odds-on nobody in the building had seen enough of Barish to remember what he looked like.



My guess was that "consultant" was what it so often is, a euphemism for "unemployed." Leland Barish had lost a job and took this little office while he looked for another one. By now either he'd found something or he'd given up looking.



Maybe he'd found employment that took him to Saudi Arabia or Singapore, and had left without bothering to clear out his office. Maybe he'd stopped paying rent months ago and his landlord hadn't gotten around to evicting him.



Whatever the actual circumstances, I didn't look to be running much of a risk cooping in his office for a couple of hours. I thought of TJ and decided to beep him, figuring it was perfectly safe for him to call me back, perfectly all right for Barish's phone to ring. I lifted the receiver and couldn't get a dial tone, which tended to confirm my guesses about Barish. I picked out the most recent magazine, a ten-week-old issue of The New Yorker, and settled myself in the easy chair. For a few minutes I tried to guess just what had become of Leland Barish, but then I got interested in an article about long-haul truckers and forgot all about him.



* * *



After an hour or so I noticed, a key hanging from a hook on the wall next to the light switch. I guessed that it would unlock the door to the men's room, and it turned out I was right. I used the John, and checked Whitfield's office going and coming. It was still occupied.