Time to Murder and Create

Page 17

He said, "Come on, Scudder. Try and take me."
"I've got all night."
He rubbed his thumb across the blade of the knife. "It's sharp," he said.
"I'll take your word for it."
"Oh, I'll prove it to you, man."
He backed off a little, moving in the same shuffling gait, and I knew what was coming. He was going to commit himself to one headlong rush, and that meant it wouldn't be a fencing match any more, because if he didn't stab me on the first lunge he'd wind up tumbling me to the ground and we'd wrestle around there until only one of us got up. I watched his feet and avoided getting taken in by the shoulder fakes, and when he came I was ready.
I dropped to one knee and went way down after he'd already committed himself, and his knife hand went over my shoulder and I came up under him, my arms around his legs, and in one motion I spun and heaved. I got my legs into it and threw him as high and as far as I could, knowing he'd drop the knife when he landed, knowing I'd be on him in time to kick it away and put a toe into the side of his head.
But he never did drop the knife. He went high into the air and his legs kicked at nothing and he turned lazily in midair like an Olympic diver, but when he came down there was no water in the swimming pool. He had one hand extended to break the fall, but he didn't land right. The impact of his head on the concrete was like that of a melon dropped from a third-floor window. I was fairly sure he'd have a skull fracture, and that can be enough to kill you.
I went over and looked at him and knew it didn't matter if his skull was fractured or not, because he had landed on the back of his head while falling forward, and he was now in a position you can't achieve unless your neck is broken. I looked for a pulse, not expecting to find one, and I couldn't get a beat. I rolled him over and put my ear to his chest and didn't hear anything. He still had the knife in his hand, but it wouldn't do him any good now.
"Holy shit."
I looked up. It was one of the neighborhood Greeks who did his drinking at Spiro and Antares. We would nod at each other now and then. I didn't know his name.
"I saw what happened," he said. "Bastard was tryin' to kill you."
"That's just what you can help me explain to the police."
"Shit, no. I didn't see nothin', you know what I mean?"
I said, "I don't care what you mean. How hard do you think it'll be for me to find you if I want to? Go back into Spiro's and pick up the phone and dial nine one one. You don't even need a dime to do it. Tell 'em you want to report a homicide in the Eighteenth Precinct and give 'em the address."
"I don't know about that."
"You don't have to know anything. All you have to do is what I just told you."
"Shit, there's a knife in his hand, anybody can see it was self-defense. He's dead, huh? You said homicide, and the way his neck's bent. Can't walk the fuckin' streets any more, the whole fuckin' city's a fuckin' jungle."
"Make the call."
"Look-"
"You dumb son of bitch, I'll give you more aggravation than you'd ever believe. You want cops driving you crazy for the rest of your life? Go make the call."
He went.
I kneeled down next to the body and gave it a fast but thorough frisk. What I wanted was a name, but there was nothing on him to identify him. No wallet, just a money clip in the shape of a dollar sign. Sterling silver, it looked like. He had a little over three hundred dollars. I put the ones and fives back into the clip and returned it to his pocket. I stuffed the rest into my own pocket. I had more of a use for it than he did.
Then I stood there waiting for the cops to show and wondering if my little friend had called them. While I was waiting, a couple of cabs stopped from time to time to ask what had happened and if they could help. Nobody'd taken the trouble while the Marlboro man was waving the knife at me, but now that he was dead everybody wanted to live dangerously. I shooed them all away and waited some more, and finally a black-and-white turned at Fifty-seventh Street and ignored the fact that Ninth Avenue runs one way downtown. They cut the siren and trotted over to where I was standing over the body. Two men in plainclothes; I didn't recognize either of them.
I explained briefly who I was and what had happened. The fact that I was an ex-cop myself didn't hurt a bit. Another car pulled up while I was talking, with a lab crew, and then an ambulance.
To the lab crew I said, "I hope you're going to print him. Not after you get him to the morgue. Take a set of prints now."
They didn't ask who I was to be giving orders. I guess they assumed I was a cop and that I probably ranked them pretty well. The plainclothes guy I'd been talking to raised his eyebrows at me.
"Prints?"
I nodded. "I want to know who he is, and he wasn't carrying any I.D."
"You bothered to look?"
"I bothered to look."
"Not supposed to, you know."
"Yes, I know. But I wanted to know who would take the trouble to kill me."
"Just a mugger, no?"
I shook my head. "He was following me around the other day. And he was waiting for me tonight, and he called me by name. Your average mugger doesn't research his victims all that carefully."
"Well, they're printing him, so we'll see what we come up with. Why would anybody want to kill you?"
I let the question go by. I said, "I don't know if he's local or not. I'm sure somebody'll have a sheet on him, but he may never have taken a fall in New York."
"Well, we'll take a look and see what we got. I don't think he's a virgin, do you?"
"Not likely."
"Washington'll have him if we don't. Want to come over to the station? Probably a few of the boys you know from the old days."
"Sure," I said. "Gagliardi still making the coffee?"
His face clouded. "He died," he said. "Just about two years ago. Heart attack, he was just sitting at his desk and he bought it."
"I never heard. That's a shame."
"Yeah, he was all right. Made good coffee, too."
Chapter 16
My preliminary statement was sketchy. The man who took it, a detective named Birnbaum, noticed as much. I'd simply said that I had been assaulted by a person unknown to me at a specific place and time, that my assailant had been armed with a knife, that I had been unarmed, and that I had taken defensive measures which had involved throwing my assailant in such a way that, though I had not so intended, the ensuing fall had resulted in his death.
"This punk knew you by name," Birnbaum said. "That's what you said before."
"Right."
"That's not in here." He had a receding hairline, and he paused to rub where the hair had previously been. "You also told Lacey he'd been following you around past couple of days."
"I noticed him once I'm sure of, and I think I saw him a few other times."
"Uh-huh. And you want to hang around while we trace the prints and try to figure out who he was."
"Right."
"You didn't wait to see if we turned up any I.D. on him. Which means you probably looked and saw he wasn't carrying anything."
"Maybe it was just a hunch," I suggested. "Man goes out to murder somebody, he doesn't carry identification around. Just an assumption on my part."
He raised his eyebrows for a minute, then shrugged. "We can let it go at that, Matt. Lot of times I check out an apartment when nobody's home, and wouldn't you know it that they got careless and left the door open, because of course I wouldn't think of letting myself in with a loid."
"Because that would be breaking-and-entering."
"And we wouldn't want that, would we?" He grinned, then picked up my statement again. "There's things you know about this bird that you don't want to tell. Right?"
"No. There's things I don't know."
"I don't get it."
I took one of his cigarettes from the pack on the desk. If I wasn't careful I'd get the habit again. I spent some time lighting up, getting the words in the right order.
I said, "You're going to be able to clear a case off the books, I think. A homicide."
"Give me a name."
"Not yet."
"Look, Matt-"
I drew on the cigarette. I said, "Let me do it my way for a little while. I'll fill in part of it for you, but nothing goes on paper for the time being. You've got enough already to wrap what happened tonight as justifiable homicide, don't you? You got a witness and you've got a corpse with a knife in his hand."
"So?"
"The corpse was hired to tag me. When I know who he is I'm probably going to know who hired him. I think he was also hired to kill somebody else a while ago, and when I know his name and background I'll be able to come up with evidence that should lock right into the person who's paying the check."
"And you can't open up on any of this in the meantime?"
"No."
"Any particular reason?"
"I don't want to get the wrong person in trouble."
"You play a very lone hand, don't you?"
I shrugged.
"They're checking downtown right now. If he doesn't show there, we'll wire the prints down to the Bureau in D.C. It could add up to a long night."
"I'll hang around, if it's all right."
"I'd just as soon you did, matter of fact. There's a couch in the loot's office if you want to close your eyes for a while."
I said I'd wait until the word came back from downtown. He found something to do, and I went into an empty office and picked up a newspaper. I guess I fell asleep, because the next thing I knew, Birnbaum was shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes.
"Nothing downtown, Matt. Our boy's never taken a bust in New York."
"That's what I thought."
"I thought you didn't know anything about him."
"I don't. I'm running hunches, I told you that."
"You could save us trouble if you told us where to look."
I shook my head. "I can't think of anything faster than wiring Washington."
"His prints are already on the wire. Might be a couple of hours anyway, and it's getting light outside already. Why don't you go home, and I'll give you a call soon as anything comes in."
"You got a full set. Doesn't the Bureau do this sort of things by computer these days?"
"Sure. But somebody has to tell the computer what to do, and they tend to take their time down there. Go home and get some sleep."
"I'll wait."
"Suit yourself." He started for the door, then turned to remind me about the couch in the lieutenant's office. But the time I'd dozed in the chair had taken the edge off the urge to sleep. I was exhausted, certainly, but sleep was no longer possible. Too many mental wheels were starting to turn, and I couldn't shut them off.
He had to be Prager's boy. It just had to add up that way. Either he had somehow missed the news that Prager was dead and out of the picture, or he was tied in close to Prager and wanted me dead out of spite. Or he had been hired through an intermediary, somehow, and didn't know that Prager was a part of it. Something, anything, because otherwise-
I didn't want to think about the otherwise.