The Devil Knows You're Dead (3 page)

Burke brought the drink with the water on the side in a small glass pitcher. Holtzmann added water to his glass, held the drink to the light, then took a sip. I got a rush of sense-memory. The last thing I wanted was a drink, but for a second there I could damn well taste it.

“I like this place,” he said, “but I hardly ever come here. How about yourself?”

“I like it well enough.”

“Do you get here often?”

“Not too often. I know the owner.”

“You do? Isn’t he the guy they call ‘the Butcher’?”

“I don’t know that anybody actually calls him that,” I said. “I think some newspaperman came up with the name, possibly the same one who started calling the local hoodlums ‘the Westies.’ ”

“They don’t call themselves that?”

“They do now,” I said. “They never used to. As far as Mick Ballou is concerned, I can tell you this much. Nobody calls him ‘Butcher’ in his own joint.”

“If I spoke out of turn—”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I’ve been in here, I don’t know, a handful of times. I’ve yet to run into him. I think I’d recognize him from his pictures. He’s a big man, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“How did you come to know him, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Oh, I’ve known him for years,” I said. “Our paths crossed a long time ago.”

He drank some of his scotch. “I bet you could tell some stories,” he said.

“I’m not much of a storyteller.”

“I wonder.” He got a business card from his wallet, handed it to me. “Are you ever free for lunch, Matt? Give me a call one of these days. Will you do that?”

“One of these days.”

“I hope you will,” he said, “because I’d love to really kick back and have a real conversation, and who knows? It might lead to something.”

“Oh?”

“Like a book, for instance. The experiences you’ve had, the characters you’ve known, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a book there waiting to be written.”

“I’m no writer.”

“If the material’s there it’s no big deal to hook you up with a writer. And I’ve got a feeling the material’s there. But we can talk about all that at lunch.”

He left a few minutes later, and I decided to pack it in myself when the movie ended, but before that happened Mick showed up and we wound up making a night of it. I had told Holtzmann I wasn’t much of a storyteller but I told my share that night, and Mick told a few himself. He drank Irish whiskey and I drank coffee and we didn’t quit when Burke put the chairs up on the tables and closed for the night.

The sky was light by the time we got out of there. “And now we’ll get something to eat,” Mick said, “and then ‘twill be time for the butchers’ mass at St. Bernard’s.”

“Not for me it won’t,” I said. “I’m tired. I’m going home.”

“Ah, ye’re no fun at all,” he said, and gave me a ride home. “ ‘Twas a good old night,” he said when we reached my hotel, “for all that it’s ending too early.”

“THE last thing I want to do,” I told Elaine, “is write a book about my fascinating experiences. But even if I were open to the idea he’s the person least likely to get me to do it. All he has to do is ask me a question and I automatically look for a way not to answer it.”

“I wonder why that is.”

“I don’t know. Why would he want to talk to me about writing a book? His company publishes large-print editions. And he’s not an editor, he’s a lawyer.”

“He could know people at other houses,” she suggested. “And couldn’t he have a book-packaging operation going on the side?”

“He’s got something going.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that he’s got a hidden agenda. He wants something, and he doesn’t let you know what it is. I’ll tell you something, I don’t believe he wants me to write a book. Because if that was what he really wanted he would have proposed something else.”

“So what do you figure he wants?”

“I don’t know.”

“Be easy to find out,” she said. “Have lunch with him.”

“I could,” I said. “I could also live without knowing.”

I didn’t see him again until the first week in August. It was the middle of the afternoon and I was at a window table at the Morning Star, eating a piece of pie and drinking a cup of coffee and reading a copy of
Newsday
that someone had left on an adjacent table. A shadow fell on the page and I looked up, and there was Holtzmann on the other side of the glass. He had his tie loosened and his collar open and his suit jacket over his arm. He smiled, pointed at himself and at the entrance. I figured this meant he was about to join me, and I was right.

He said, “Good to see you, Matt. Mind if I sit? Or were you expecting someone?”

I pointed to the chair opposite mine and he took it. The waitress came over with a menu and he waved it off and said he’d just have coffee. He told me he’d been hoping I’d call, that he’d looked forward to our getting together for lunch. “I guess you’ve been busy,” he said.

“Pretty busy.”

“I can imagine.”

“And,” I said, “I don’t honestly think I’d be interested in doing a book. Even if I had one to write, I think I’d be happier leaving it unwritten.”

“Say no more,” he said. “I can respect that. Still, who says you have to have a book in the works in order for us to have lunch? We could probably find other things to talk about.”

“Well, when my work schedule thins out a little—”

“Sure.” The coffee came and he frowned at it and wiped his brow with his napkin. “I don’t know why I ordered coffee,” he said. “Iced tea would have made more sense in this heat. Still, it’s cool enough in here, isn’t it? Thank God for air-conditioning.”

“Amen to that.”

“Do you know that we keep our public places cooler in the summer than in the winter? If this place was the same temperature in January that it is right now we’d complain to the management. And people wonder why we’ve got an energy crisis.” He grinned engagingly. “See? We can find plenty of things to talk about. The weather. The energy crisis. Quirks in the American national character. Be a cinch for us to get through a lunch hour.”

“Unless we use up all our topics ahead of time.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about that. How’s Elaine, by the way? Lisa hasn’t seen her since school let out.”

“She’s fine.”

“Is she taking any courses over the summer? Lisa wanted to, but she decided her pregnancy might get in the way.”

I said that Elaine would probably enroll for something or other in the fall, but that she’d decided to keep the summer open so that we could take long weekends.

“Lisa was talking about calling her,” he said, “but I don’t think she got around to it.” He stirred his coffee. Abruptly he said, “She lost the baby. I guess you wouldn’t have heard.”

“Jesus, no. I’m sorry, Glenn.”

“Thanks.”

“When did it—”

“I don’t know, ten days ago, something like that. She was just into her seventh month. Bright side, it could have been worse. They told us the baby was malformed, it couldn’t have lived, but suppose she carried it to term, even had a live delivery? Would have been twice the heartache, the way I figure it.”

“I see what you mean.”

“She was the one who wanted a kid,” he said. “I got along this long without any, I more or less figured I could go the distance. But it was important to her, so I figured why not. The doctor says we can try again.”

“And?”

“And I don’t know if I want to. Not right away, anyhow. It’s funny, I didn’t mean to tell you all this. Shows what a good detective you are, you get people talking even without trying. I’ll let you get back to your paper.” He stood up, pushed two dollars across the table at me. “For the coffee,” he said.

“That’s too much.”

“So leave a big tip,” he said. “And call me when you get the chance. We’ll have that lunch.”

WHEN I recounted the conversation to Elaine, her immediate response was to call Lisa. She made the call, got the answering machine, and rang off without leaving a message.

“It occurred to me,” she explained, “that she can deal with her grief just fine without my help. All she and I ever had in common was the class, and it ended two months ago. I feel for her, I really do, but why do I have to get involved?”

“You don’t.”

“That’s what I decided. Maybe I’m actually getting something out of Al-Anon. I’d probably get even more if I went more than once every three or four weeks.”

“It’s a shame you don’t like the meetings.”

“All that whining. They make me want to vomit. Other than that they’re great. What about you? Do you like Glenn any better now that he shared his grief with you?”

“You’d have to,” I said. “But I still don’t want to have lunch with him.”

“Oh, you won’t have any choice,” she said. “He’ll keep grinding away at you until you wake up one day and realize he’s your new best friend. You’ll see.”

BUT that’s not what happened. Instead six or seven weeks passed during which I never caught a glimpse of Glenn Holtzmann, or gave him a passing thought. And then somebody with a gun changed everything, and from that point on Glenn was on my mind more than he’d ever been in life.

Within the hour, I knew as much as Lisa Holtzmann did.

Elaine and I had gone out to dinner after an early movie. We got back to her place in time for all but the first five minutes of
L.A. Law
. “I hate to say this,” she said when it was over, “and I know it’s not politically correct, but I’ve had it up to here with Benny. He’s so relentlessly dim.”

“What do you want from him?” I said. “He’s retarded.”

“You’re not supposed to say that. You’re supposed to say he has a learning disability.”

“Okay.”

“But I don’t care,” she said. “You could find a higher IQ growing in a petri dish. I wish he would smarten up or ship out. But then I feel that way about most of the people I meet. What do you want to do now? Is there a ball game on?”

“Let’s watch the news.”

And we did, half watching, half listening. I paid a little more attention when the perky anchorwoman began talking about a Midtown shooting, because I still respond to local crime news like an old Dalmatian to the ringing of the fire bell. When she mentioned the site of the shooting Elaine said, “That’s your neighborhood.” The next thing I knew she was reading the victim’s name off the teleprompter. Glenn Holtzmann, thirty-eight, of West Fifty-seventh Street in Manhattan.

They went to a commercial and I triggered the remote and turned off the set. Elaine said, “I don’t suppose there’s more than one Glenn Holtzmann on West Fifty-seventh Street.”

“No.”

“That poor girl. The last time I saw her she had a husband and a baby on the way, and now what has she got? Should I call her? No, of course not. I didn’t call her when she lost the baby and I shouldn’t call her now. Or should I? Is there anything we can do?”

“We don’t even know her.”

“No, and she’s probably surrounded by people right now. Cops, reporters, film crews. Don’t you think?”

“Either that or she hasn’t heard yet.”

“How could that be? Don’t they hold back the name of the victim pending notification of next of kin? You hear them say that all the time.”

“They’re supposed to,” I said, “but sometimes somebody screws up. It’s not supposed to happen that way, but lots of things happen that aren’t supposed to.”

“Isn’t that the truth. He wasn’t supposed to get shot.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for God’s sake,” she said. “He was a bright young guy with a good job and a great apartment and a wife who was crazy about him, and he went out for a walk and—did they say he was making a phone call?”

“Something like that.”

“Probably to find out if she needed anything from the corner deli. God, do you figure she heard the shots?”

“How do I know?”

She frowned. “I just find the whole thing very disturbing,” she said. “It’s different when you know the person, isn’t it? But that’s not all. It just seems wrong.”

“Murder’s always wrong.”

“I don’t mean morally wrong. I mean in the sense of a mistake, a cosmic error. He wasn’t the kind of person who gets shot down on the street. Do you know what this means? It means we’re all in trouble.”

“How do you figure that?”

“If it could happen to him,” she said, “it could happen to anybody.”

THE whole city saw it that way.

The morning papers were full of the story. The tabloids led with it, and even the
Times
stuck it on the front page. Local television stations gave it the full treatment; several of them had studios within a few blocks of the murder scene, which gave it a little added impact for their employees, if not for their viewers.

I didn’t stay glued to the set myself, but even so I saw interviews with Lisa Holtzmann, with people from the neighborhood, and with various police officials, including a detective from Manhattan Homicide and the precinct commander at Midtown North. All the cops said the same thing—that this was a terrible crime, that such outrages could not be allowed to go unpunished, and that all available police personnel would be working the case in around-the-clock shifts until the killer was in custody.

It didn’t take long. The official estimate of the time of death was 9:45 Thursday night, and within twenty-four hours they were able to announce an arrest. “Suspect charged in Hell’s Kitchen homicide,” the newsbreaks chirped. “Film at eleven.”

And at eleven we watched the film. We saw the suspect with his hands cuffed behind him, his face pointed toward the camera, his eyes wide and staring.

“Jesus, will you look at him,” Elaine said. “The man’s a walking nightmare. Honey, what’s the matter? You can’t possibly know him.”

“I don’t know him,” I said, “but I recognize him from the neighborhood. I think his name is George.”

“Well, who is he?”

I couldn’t answer that, but they could and did. His name was George Sadecki, and he was forty-four years old, unemployed, indigent, a Vietnam veteran, a fixture in the West Fifties. He had been charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of Glenn Holtzmann.