Even the Wicked: A Matthew Scudder Novel (Matthew Scudder Mysteries) Read online

  “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.”

  “It was cyanide? The account I read just said poison.”

  “Cyanide. My guy knew it from the smell, called Poison Control right away. A shame he didn’t sniff the glass before Whitfield drank it.”

  “A shame Whitfield didn’t sniff the glass.”

  “No, he just knocked it right back, and then it knocked him on his ass. On his face, actually. He pitched forward. Dahlgren had to roll him over to start CPR.”

  “Dahlgren’s your op?”

  “I had two working. He’s the one was upstairs with Whitfield. Other guy was in the lobby. If I’d have put them both upstairs…but no, what are they gonna do, sit up all night playing gin rummy? The procedure was the correct one.”

  “Except the client died.”

  “Yeah, right. The operation was a success but the patient died. How do you figure poison in the whiskey? The apartment was secure. It was left empty that morning and the burglar alarm was set. My guy swears he set it, the one who picked Whitfield up yesterday morning, and I know he did because my other guy, Dahlgren, swears it was set when he opened up last night. So somebody got in there between whenever it was, eight or nine yesterday morning and ten last night. They got through two locks, a Medeco and a Segal, and bypassed a brand-new Poseidon alarm. How, for Christ’s sake?”

  “The alarm was new?”

  “I ordered it myself. The Medeco cylinder was new, too, on the top lock. I had it installed the day we came on the job.”

  “Who had keys?”

  “Whitfield himself, of course, not that he needed a key. Coming or going, he was never the first one to go through the door. Then there were two sets of keys, one for each of the men on duty. When they were relieved they passed on their keys to the next shift.”

  “What about the building staff?”

  “They had keys to the Segal, of course. But we didn’t give them a key to the new lock.”

  “He must have had a cleaning woman.”

  “Uh-huh. Same woman’s been coming in and cleaning for him every Tuesday afternoon for as long as he’s had the apartment. And no, she didn’t get a key to the Medeco, or the four-digit code for the burglar alarm, and not because I figured there was much chance of Will turning out to be a nice old Polish lady from Greenpoint. She didn’t get a key because nobody got one who didn’t need one. On Tuesday afternoons one of our men would meet her there, let her in, and stick around until she was done. He’s sitting there reading a magazine while she’s vacuuming and ironing and on her hands and knees scrubbing out the bathtub, and you know his hourly rate’s three or four times what she’s getting. Don’t you ever let anybody tell you life is fair.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said.

  “Let me answer a question or two before you ask it, because the cops already asked and I already answered. The alarm’s not just on the door. The windows are also wired in. That was probably excessive, since there’s no fire escape, and do we really figure Will to be capable of doing a human fly act, coming down from the roof on a couple of knotted bedsheets?”

  “Is that what flies do?”

  “You know what I mean. I been up all night talking to cops and not talking to reporters, so don’t expect me to sound like Shakespeare. It doesn’t cost that much more to hook up the alarm to the windows, so why cut corners? That was my thinking. Besides, if this guy could get Patsy Salerno and Whatsisname in Omaha, who’s to say he can’t walk up a brick wall?”

  “What about a service entrance?”

  “You mean the building or the apartment? Of course there’s a service entrance for the building, and a separate service elevator. There’s also a service entrance for the apartment, and nobody went in or out of it from the time we got on the case. One of the first things I did was throw a bolt on it and keep it permanently shut, because as soon as you got two ways in and out of a place you’ve got the potential for headaches from a security standpoint. Sooner or later somebody forgets to lock the service door. So I had it all but welded shut, and that meant Mrs. Szernowicz had to take the long way around when she took the trash to the compactor chute, but she didn’t
seem to mind.”

  We talked some more about the security at the apartment, the locks and the alarm system, and then we got back to the cyanide. I said, “It was in the whiskey, Wally? Do we know that for sure?”

  “He drank his drink,” he said, “and flopped on the floor, so what could it be but the drink? Unless somebody picked that particular minute to plink him with a pellet gun.”

  “No, but—”

  “If he was drinking tequila,” he said, “and he was one of those guys goes through the ritual with the salt and the lemon, takes a lick of each after he does the shot of tequila, then I could see how we could check and see if the lemon’s poisoned, or maybe the salt. But nobody drinks tequila that way anymore, at least nobody I know, and anyway he was drinking scotch, so where the hell else would the poison be but in the whiskey?”

  “I was at his place once,” I said. “The night he got the letter from Will.”

  “And?”

  “And he had a drink,” I said, “and he used a glass, and if I remember correctly he had ice in it.”

  “Aw, Jesus,” he said. “I’m sorry, Matt. I was up all night, and it’s shaping up to be a bitch of a day. Could it have been in the glass or the ice cubes? I don’t know, maybe. I’m sure they’re running an analysis of the booze in the bottle, if they haven’t done it already. Dahlgren smelled cyanide on the guy’s breath, and I think he said he smelled it in the glass, or maybe on the ice cubes. Did he smell what was left in the bottle? I don’t think so. It was on top of the bar and he was on the floor with Whitfield, trying to get him to start breathing again. Neat fucking trick, that would have been.”

  “Poor bastard.”

  “Which one, Whitfield or Dahlgren? Both of them, I’d have to say. You know, I was concerned about food in restaurants. You remember that case where there was poison in the salt?”

  “I must have missed that one.”

  “It wasn’t local. Miami, I think it was. Mobbed-up businessman, he’s having dinner at his favorite restaurant, next thing you know he’s facedown in his veal piccata. Looks like a heart attack, and if it happened to Joe Blow it would have gone as that, but this guy’s the target of an investigation so of course they check, and they establish that cyanide killed him and find cyanide on the food that’s left on his plate, and there’s a surveillance tape, because this is the restaurant he always goes to and the table he always sits at, the dumb bastard, and the feds or the local cops, whoever it was, were set up to tape it. And the tape shows this guy come over to the table and switch salt shakers, but you can’t be absolutely certain that’s what he’s doing, and anyway they didn’t find any cyanide in the salt shaker, because evidently somebody switched them again afterward. So they couldn’t get a conviction, but at least they knew who did it and how it was done.” He sighed. “Whitfield never sat down to a meal without one or two of my guys at the table with him, primed to make sure nobody switched salt shakers. It’s like generals, isn’t it? Always preparing for the last war. Meantime, somebody got in his house and poisoned his whiskey.”

  We were on the phone for quite a while. He anticipated most of my questions, but I thought of a few others as well, and he answered them all. If there was a weak link in the security, he’d set up for Adrian Whitfield, I couldn’t spot it. Short of posting a man full-time in the apartment itself, I didn’t see how it could have been rendered more completely secure.

  And yet someone had managed to get enough cyanide into Whitfield’s drink to kill him.

  It was late afternoon by the time I got to talk with Kevin Dahlgren, and by then I’d been interrogated myself by two detectives from Major Cases. They’d spent close to two hours learning everything I could tell them about my involvement with Adrian Whitfield, from the cases I’d worked on for him to the contact I’d had with him since he was the target of Will’s open letter.

  They found out everything I knew, which wasn’t much. It was more than I learned from them. I didn’t ask many questions, and the few I asked went largely unanswered. I did manage to learn that cyanide had been found in the residue of scotch left in the bottle, but I’d have learned that shortly thereafter anyway by turning on the television set.

  I was worn out from my session with the two of them, and what I went through was nothing compared with what Dahlgren had to undergo. He’d been up all night, of course, and had spent most of the time either answering questions or waiting for them to get around to interrogating him some more. He managed to get a couple of hours sleep before I saw him, and he seemed alert enough, but you could tell he was pretty well stressed-out.

  He was a suspect, of course, along with the several other men who’d had access to Whitfield’s apartment in their capacity as bodyguards. Each of them was subjected to an intensive background check and interrogated exhaustively, and each voluntarily underwent a polygraph examination as well. (It was voluntary as far as the police were concerned. It was compulsory if they wished to remain employees of Reliable.)

  Mrs. Sophia Szernowicz, Whitfield’s cleaning woman, was interrogated as well, though not subjected to a polygraph test. They talked to her more to rule out the possibility of anyone else having visited the apartment while she was cleaning it than because anyone thought she might be Will. She’d been there on Tuesday afternoon, and he’d swallowed the poisoned scotch Thursday night. No one could testify with absolute certainty that Whitfield had poured a drink from that bottle on either Tuesday or Wednesday evening, so the possibility existed that the cyanide could have gone into the bottle during her visit.

  She told them she’d seen no one in the apartment while she cleaned it, no one except for the man who’d let her in and out, and who’d sat watching talk shows on television all the time she was there. She could not recall seeing him anywhere near where the bottles of liquor were kept, although she couldn’t say what he’d done when she was in one of the other rooms. For her part, she had been at the bar, and might even have touched the bottle while dusting it and its fellows. Had she by any chance sampled it, or any of the other bottles, while she was dusting? The very suggestion outraged her, and they’d been a while calming her down to the point where they could resume questioning her.

  The only fingerprints on the bottle were Whitfield’s. All that suggested was that the killer had wiped the bottle off after adding the cyanide, and one could hardly have assumed otherwise. It also implied that no one but Whitfield had touched the bottle after its contents were poisoned, but, as far as anyone knew, no one but Whitfield had laid a hand on that particular bottle since it had come into the house.

  It had been delivered two weeks before Will mailed his threat against Whitfield to Marty McGraw. A liquor store on Lexington Avenue had delivered the order, consisting in all of two fifths of Glen Farquhar single-malt scotch, one quart of Finlandia vodka, and a pint of Ronrico rum. The rum and vodka remained unopened, and Whitfield had worked his way through one bottle of the scotch and was a third of the way into the second bottle when he drank the drink that killed him.

  “You don’t drink,” he’d said to me. “Neither do I.” He’d been enough of a drinker to order two bottles of his regular tipple at a time, but a light enough hitter that it had taken him over a month to drink as much as he had. A fifth holds twenty-six ounces, or something like eighteen drinks if you figure he poured approximately an ounce and a half of scotch over his two ice cubes. Eighteen drinks from the bottle he’d finished, another six or so from bottle #2—I decided the math worked out right. There were nights when he had his drink before he came home, and other nights when he evidently didn’t drink at all.

  That night Elaine and I walked over to Armstrong’s for dinner. She had a big salad. I had a bowl of chili and stirred a large side order of minced Scotch bonnet peppers into it. It must have been hot enough to blister paint, but you couldn’t have proved it by me. I was barely aware of what I was eating.

  She talked some about her day at her shop, and about what TJ had said when he dropped by to jive with her.
I talked about my day. And then we both fell silent. Classical music played over the sound system, barely audible through the buzz of conversations around us. Our waiter came around to find out if we wanted more Perrier. I said we didn’t, but he could bring me a cup of black coffee when he had a moment. Elaine said she’d have herb tea. “Any kind,” she said. “Surprise me.”

  He brought her Red Zinger. “What a surprise,” she said.

  I tried my coffee, and something must have shown in my face, because Elaine’s eyebrows went up a notch.

  “For an instant there,” I said, “I could taste booze in the coffee.”

  “But it’s not really there.”

  “No. Good coffee, but only coffee.”

  “What they call a sense-memory, I guess.”

  “I guess.”

  You could say I came by it honestly. Years ago, before Jimmy lost his lease and relocated a long block to the west, Armstrong’s had been situated on Ninth Avenue around the corner from my hotel, and it had functioned for me almost as an extension of my personal living space. I socialized there, I isolated there, I met clients there. I put in long hours of maintenance drinking there, and sometimes I did more than maintain and got good and drunk at the bar or at my table in the back. My usual drink was bourbon, and when I didn’t drink it neat, the way God made it, I would stir it into a mug of coffee. Each flavor, it seemed to me then, complemented and enhanced the other, even as the caffeine and alcohol balanced one another, the one keeping you awake while the other softened the edges of consciousness.