Even the Wicked

Page 13

"You sound a little blue."
"Do I? I think it's just that I'm running out of gas. The trial was keeping me going. Now that it's over I feel like a puppet with the strings cut."
"You just need some rest."
"I hope you're right. I have this superstitious sense that the trial was holding Will at bay, that he couldn't take me out as long as I had work that had to be done. Now all of a sudden I've got a bad feeling about the whole situation that I never had before."
"You just didn't allow yourself to feel it before."
"Maybe. And maybe I'll feel better after a good night's sleep. I know goddam well I'll feel better after a drink."
"Most people do," I said. "That's why they put the stuff in bottles."
"Well, I'm going to uncap the bottle and let the genie out. It'll be the first one today. If you were here I'd pour you a club soda."
"I'll have one here," I said, "and think of you."
"Have a Coke. Make it a real celebration."
"I'll do that."
There was a pause, and then he said, "I wish I knew you better."
"Oh?"
"I wish there were more time. Forget I said that, all right? I'm too tired to make sense. Maybe I'll skip that drink and just go to bed."
* * *
But he didn't skip the drink.
Instead he went into the front room, where one of his bodyguards was posted. "I'm going to have a drink," he announced. "I don't suppose I can talk you into joining me."
They'd gone through this ritual before. "Mean my job if I did, Mr. Whitfield."
"I wouldn't tell anybody," Whitfield said. "On the other hand, I want you razor-sharp if our boy Will comes through that door, so I shouldn't be pushing drinks at you. How about a soft drink? Or some coffee?"
"I got a pot brewing in the kitchen. I'll have some after you turn in. Don't worry about me, Mr. Whitfield. I'll be fine."
Whitfield took a glass from on top of the bar, went into the kitchen for ice cubes, came back and uncapped the bottle of scotch. He filled the glass and put the cap on the bottle.
"Your name's Kevin," he said to the bodyguard, "and I must have heard your last name, but I don't seem to remember it."
"Kevin Dahlgren, sir."
"Now I remember. Do you like your work, Kevin?"
"It's a good job."
"You don't find it boring?"
"Boring's just fine with me, sir. If something happens I'm ready, but if nothing happens I'm happy."
"That's a healthy attitude," Whitfield told him. "You probably wouldn't have minded starting Tony Furillo's car."
"Sir?"
"Never mind. I ought to drink this, wouldn't you say? I poured it, I ought to drink it. Isn't that how it works?"
"Up to you, Mr. Whitfield."
"Up to me," Whitfield said. "You're absolutely right."
He raised the glass in a wordless toast, then took a long drink. Dahlgren's eyes went to the bookcase. He was a reader, and there was a lot to read in this apartment. It was no hardship, sitting in a comfortable chair with a good book for eight hours, helping yourself to coffee when you wanted it. It was nice to get paid for something you'd do on your own time.
That's what he was thinking when he heard the man he was guarding make a sharp sound, a sort of strangled gasp. He turned at the sound and watched Adrian Whitfield clutch his chest and pitch forward onto the carpet.
7
"It's like he saw it coming," Kevin Dahlgren said. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his early thirties, his light brown hair cropped close to his broad skull, his light brown eyes alert behind his eyeglasses. He looked at once capable and thoughtful, as if he might be a studious thug.
"I was the last person to talk to him," I said. "Except for yourself, of course."
"Right."
"He was tired, and I think that soured his outlook. But maybe he had a premonition, or just some sense that he'd reached the end of the line."
"He offered me a drink. Not that I even considered taking it. On the job, and a bodyguard job at that? They'd drop me like a hot rock if I ever did anything like that, and they'd be right to do it. I wasn't even tempted, but now I'm picturing what would have happened if I said yes. We clink glasses, we drink up, and boom! We hit the deck together. Or maybe I'd have been the first to take a drink, because he was sort of stalling. So I'd be dead and he'd be here talking to you."
"But that's not how it happened."
"No."
"When you met him and entered the apartment…"
"You want me to go over that? Sure thing. My shift started at ten P.M., and I reported to the Park Avenue residence, where I met up with Samuel Mettnick, who was sharing the ten-to-six shift with me. We stationed ourselves downstairs in the lobby. The two fellows on the previous shift brought Mr. Whitfield home in the limo and turned him over to us at ten-ten. Sam Mettnick and I rode upstairs with Mr. Whitfield, observing the usual security procedures as far as entering and exiting the elevator, and so forth."
"Who opened the door of the apartment?"
"I did, and went in first. There was a whistle indicating the burglar alarm was set, so I went to the keypad and keyed in the response code. Then I checked all the rooms to make sure the place was empty. Then I returned to the front room and Sam went downstairs and I locked the door and made sure it was secure. Then Mr. Whitfield went off through his bedroom to use the bathroom, and I guess stopped in his bedroom and used the phone before returning to the front room. And you know the rest."
"You'd been in the apartment before."
"Yes, sir, for several nights running. From ten o'clock on."
"And you didn't notice anything out of place when you entered."
"There were no signs of intrusion. Anything like that and I'd have grabbed Mr. Whitfield and got him the hell out of there. As for anything out of place, all I can say is everything looked normal to me, same as on previous nights. The thing is, I'd been relieved at six that morning, so my counterpart on the six A.M.-to-two P.M. shift would have been the last person in there. Whether anything had been moved around since he and Mr. Whitfield left to go to court, that's something I couldn't say."
"But there was nothing about the appearance of the room that drew a comment from Whitfield."
"You mean like, 'What's this bottle doing over here?' No, nothing like that. Though to tell you the truth I'm not sure he would have noticed. You know the mood he was in."
"Yes."
"He seemed abstracted, if that's the word I want. Sort of out of sync. Right before he took the drink-" He snapped his fingers. "I know what it reminded me of."
"What's that, Kevin?"
"It's a scene in a movie I saw, but don't ask me the name of it. This one character's an alcoholic and he hasn't had a drink in, I don't know, months or years, anyway a long time. And he pours one and looks at it and drinks it."
"And that's how Whitfield looked at his drink."
"Kind of."
"But he had a glass of scotch every night, didn't he?"
"I guess so. I wasn't always there to see him have it. Some nights he was already home when my shift started, so I would just come up and relieve the man from the earlier shift. Other times he'd already had his drink before I got him. As far as being an alcoholic, I'd say he was anything but. I never saw him take more than one drink a night."
"When I talked to him," I said, "he said he was about to have his first drink of the day."
"I think he said as much to me. I wasn't with him earlier, but I can testify he didn't have it on his breath."
"Would you have noticed it if he had?"
"I think so, yes. I was standing right next to him in the elevator, and I've got a pretty good sense of smell. I can tell you he had Italian food for dinner. Plus I hadn't had anything to drink all that day, and when you're not drinking yourself it makes you much more aware of the smell of alcohol on somebody else."
"That's true."
"It's the same thing with cigarettes. I used to smoke, and all those years I never smelled smoke on anybody, me or anybody else. I quit four years ago, and now I can just about smell a heavy smoker from the opposite side of an airport. That's stretching it, but you know what I mean."
"Sure."
"So I guess it was his first drink of the night. Jesus."
"What, Kevin?"
"Well, it's not funny, but I was just thinking. One thing for sure, it was his last."
* * *
I didn't have to take Kevin Dahlgren's word about the acuity of his sense of smell. He'd proved it shortly after Adrian Whitfield collapsed. Dahlgren's immediate assumption had been that he was in the presence of a man having a heart attack, and he reacted as he'd been trained to react and began performing CPR.
At the onset of the procedure, he had of course smelled alcohol on Whitfield. But there was another odor present as well, the odor of almonds, and while Dahlgren had never smelled this particular almondy scent before, he was sufficiently familiar with its description to guess what it was. He picked up Whitfield's empty glass from where it had fallen and noted the same bitter almond scent. Accordingly, he discontinued CPR and called the Poison Control number, although his instincts told him there was nothing to be done. The woman he spoke to told him essentially the same thing; about the best thing she could suggest was that he try to get the victim breathing again, and his heart beating. He took a moment to call 911, then resumed CPR for lack of anything better to do. He was still at it when the cops got there.
That was shortly after eleven, and New York One was on the air with a news flash well before midnight, beating Channel Seven by a full five minutes. I didn't have the set on, however, and Elaine and I went to bed around a quarter of one without knowing that a client of mine had died a couple of miles away from the ingestion of a lethal dose of cyanide.
Sometimes Elaine starts the day with "Good Morning America" or the "Today" show, but she's just as likely to play classical music on the radio, and when I joined her in the kitchen the next morning she was listening to what we both thought was Mozart. It turned out to be Haydn, but by the time they said as much she had left for the gym. I turned off the radio-if I'd left it on I'd have heard a newscast at the top of the hour, and Whitfield's death would have been the first or second item. I had a second cup of coffee and the half bagel she had left unfinished. Then I went out to get a paper.
The phone was ringing when I left the apartment, but I was already halfway out the door. I kept going and let the machine answer it. If I'd picked it up myself I'd have received word of Whitfield's death from Wally Donn, but instead I walked to the newsstand, where twin stacks of the News and the Post rested side by side on adjacent upended plastic milk crates. "LAWYER WHITFIELD DEAD" cried the News, while the Post went right ahead and solved the crime for us. "WILL KILLS #5!"
I bought both papers and went home, played Wally's message and called him back. "What a hell of a thing," he said. "Personal security work's the most clear-cut part of the business. All you have to do is keep the client alive. Long as he's got a pulse, you did your job right. Matt, you know the procedures we set up for Whitfield. It was a good routine, and I had good men on it. And there's cyanide in the fucking scotch bottle and we come off looking like shit."