A Drop of the Hard Stuff: A Matthew Scudder Novel Read online

  I told him I’d taken a preliminary run at the step myself, and all I’d done to obliterate my own embryonic list.

  “All the king’s horses,” he said, “and all the king’s men. It’s hard to do the Eighth before you’ve done the Fourth.”

  “My sponsor said something along those lines.”

  “And yet most of us take a stab at it. If we don’t write anything down, at the very least we run names through our minds. It’s hard to be aware of the step without wondering who belongs on your own list.” He took a forkful of pie, a sip of tea. “Jack kept adding to his list, writing down new names as fast as he could check off the old ones. I wonder what his most recent version looked like.”

  “You mean the one you gave me—”

  “Isn’t the last word on the subject? I’m afraid not, but that doesn’t mean we missed a clue that would have pointed at his murderer. The ones he mentioned to me were all from his boyhood days. Family, friends, neighbors, and most of them were dead and he’d long since lost track of the others.” He put down his fork. “You’re not letting go of this, are you?”

  “I’ve let go of it.”

  “Really?”

  “When I was on the job,” I said, “it was said of me that I was like a dog with a bone. Just because I’ve let go of something doesn’t mean I can keep from thinking about it.”

  “I suppose there are different definitions of letting go.”

  “What I can’t stay away from,” I said, “is the thought that his murder somehow ties in to the amends process. Those five names from the list are all in the clear, and when I reread the list this afternoon I couldn’t find anyone who’d make a plausible suspect. But it has to be related.”

  “That was my original thought, Matt. That’s why I got all this started.”

  “He was running around making amends,” I said, “and one guy punched him out and wound up hugging him and weeping in his arms, and another guy told him to take his amends and shove them up his ass—”

  “And one said beating me on a coke deal was doing me a favor, and the other said hey, everybody fucked my wife. What was her name again?”

  “Lucille. And the other one’s locked up, and there’s no way Jack could have reached him to make amends, and even if he did, well, it doesn’t matter, because he didn’t. Five names and they’re all clear, but that doesn’t mean there’s no connection. It just means we haven’t found it.”

  “What you mean we, Kemo Sabe?”

  I sighed, nodded. “Point taken, Greg. It’s not on your plate, and it’s not on mine either.”

  “But it’s on your mind. Don’t apologize, for God’s sake. It’s on my mind too. How could it not be?”

  “I keep thinking of that second bullet.”

  “The one in the mouth.”

  I nodded. “To send a message, though why you’d kill a man first and then send the message is something I’ve often wondered. A message to whom?”

  “Like killing someone to teach him a lesson. He’s dead, so how can he possibly learn the lesson?”

  Something was trying to get through. Greg was saying something, but I tuned him out and let the thought take form, then held up a hand to stop him in midsentence. “It wasn’t retribution,” I said.

  “How’s that?”

  “The shooting. It wasn’t some aggrieved person on or off his list trying to get even. It was to keep him from talking.”

  “Not Don’t talk to me but Don’t talk to anybody.”

  “Has to be. There was no anger in the killing.”

  “No anger in putting two bullets into a man?”

  “There was a lot more anger in the beating Sattenstein gave him. That was anger, hitting a man in the face until you turn your own hand into hamburger. This was just quick efficient homicide.”

  “With a purpose.”

  “I’d say so, yes.”

  “To keep him from talking.”

  “It wasn’t something he’d said. It was something he might say.”

  “And this clearly would keep him from saying it. But…”

  “The Ninth Step,” I said. “How does it go?”

  He looked at me, puzzled. “How does it work? You take your Eighth Step list—”

  “No, I know how it works, how you do it. How does it go? The language of the step, I’ve heard it before every meeting, it’s in the chart that’s always hanging on the wall. How is it worded?”

  “Watch me get a word wrong, now that I’m called upon to perform. ‘Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.’ I think that’s word for word, but—”

  “Who would it injure?”

  “Jack’s amends? Only Jack, unless you want to count Mark Sattenstein’s hand. No, I understand, Matt. It’s not amends to any of the people we’ve been looking at. If it’s something else he did, it might not even be on the list we’re looking at.”

  “Didn’t you tell me he killed somebody?”

  “It was during a robbery. But I think there’s a special term for it. When you rob people in their own home?”

  “A home invasion.”

  “Yes, that’s right. It’s a term I’ve only heard recently. The news stories give the impression that it’s happening more lately. Part of the continuing decline of everything and everybody.”

  “Do you remember the details?”

  “I don’t think I heard them.” He frowned, as if to bring the memory into sharper focus. “He wrote about it in his Fourth Step, and I learned about it and everything else when I heard his Fifth Step.”

  He thought about it while I signaled the waitress for more coffee. After she’d filled our cups he said, “What I heard was vague. He didn’t read that part aloud. He read a sentence or two, then looked up from the page and summarized. So I just heard a condensed version.”

  “And?”

  “The person he robbed was another criminal. A drug dealer, I think. They broke in and—”

  “They?”

  “Jack had a partner. The two of them went into this home, I think it was somewhere on the Upper West Side, and held the man up, and he went for his gun and they shot him.”

  “Jack did the shooting?”

  “I can’t remember. I’m not sure he told me. Matt, I didn’t really want to hear this part. I wanted him to go through it, but I didn’t want to take in the information. He was a sponsee, he was a friend, he was someone I was trying to help, and I didn’t want to deal with the fact that he was also a killer.”

  “Just tell me what you remember.”

  “The man’s death didn’t bother him that much,” he said. “Maybe that’s why I can’t say whether it was Jack or his partner who did it.”

  “It didn’t bother him?”

  “There was a woman present. The dealer’s wife or girlfriend, I’m not sure which, and again I don’t know that Jack was specific.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “No.” He drew a breath. “She was there, she’d seen their faces. The partner shot her.”

  “Not Jack.”

  “He said he couldn’t pull the trigger. She was begging in Spanish. He didn’t understand the words but she was pleading for her life, and he had the gun in his hand and couldn’t shoot her.”

  “So his buddy did it.”

  “Matt, it’s strange, but I think he felt guilty twice over.”

  “For each victim?”

  “No, I’m just talking about the woman. For not being able to pull the trigger, and for the fact that she wound up dead. And he thought it was his fault the man went for a gun, that if he’d done something differently it wouldn’t have happened.”

  I knew how that worked. I remembered running out of that ginmill after the two holdup men, remembered emptying my gun at them. If I’d just done any of that the slightest bit differently, if I’d fired one bullet fewer, a little girl might have had a chance to grow up. Oh, I knew exactly how that worked, with the mind throwing up no end
of alternate scenarios, but remaining unable to rewrite the past.

  I said, “They never got arrested.”

  “No.”

  “Not him, not his partner.”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t see anything about this on his Eighth Step list.”

  “It may have made it into a later version. Or stayed in his mind, whether or not he wrote it down, because we’d talked about how one could make amends to the dead.”

  Someday I’d get to have that conversation with Jim.

  I said, “The partner.”

  “All I know about him is that he shot the woman. I’m pretty certain Jack never said his name. He went out of his way to use pronouns or just refer to him as his partner. As if he were protecting his anonymity.” He looked up. “Is that who killed him? His partner?”

  “For all we know,” I said, “this mysterious partner is long dead, or locked up tight in a cell upstate. But it might be good to know who he is.”

  “Would he have a motive? After all these years?”

  “There’s no statute of limitations on homicide.”

  “So he wouldn’t want Jack talking about it.”

  “No.”

  “And we know he’s capable of murder. Whichever of them shot the man, it was the partner who shot the woman.”

  “While she was begging for her life,” I said. “Because she’d seen him, and could identify him. What else did Jack have to say about this paragon of virtue?”

  But if he’d said anything else, Greg couldn’t remember it. I went home. There was a note in my box, and my first thought was that Jan had called to tell me our date was on after all. But the caller had been someone named Mark, who’d provided a phone number, along with an initial in lieu of a surname. An AA acquaintance, it would appear, and I wondered if it was Stuttering Mark or Motorcycle Mark.

  I went upstairs, looked at the message again, then crumpled the slip and tossed it in the wastebasket. Whoever he was, it was too late to call and find out more. And by now he’d found someone else to hear his problems and tell him not to drink, and by morning he’d have forgotten why he called me in the first place.

  XXV

  I PICKED UP the Times in the morning and read it while I had my breakfast. In Woodside, a family of Colombian immigrants had been murdered in what police believed to be a home invasion. Three adults dead, and four children, with the bodies mutilated. Authorities seemed uncertain as to whether the motive was robbery or revenge, and I decided it sounded like a little of both. Somebody in the drug world had cheated someone else, or constituted unacceptable competition. So why not kill him? And why not walk off with his cash and inventory while you were at it? And, of course, kill his family, because that was the way you did business.

  The first thing I thought of was Bill Lonergan. The Times story didn’t provide a street address, so I didn’t know how close he lived to the scene of the crime, but Woodside isn’t that large. I wondered how closely he followed the local crime scene, and decided he’d have trouble overlooking this one. Seven people murdered in their home, four of them children. It’d be on the TV news, at least until the police ran out of leads and some other horror displaced it from the public consciousness.

  After that, of course, I thought of Jack Ellery and his partner.

  I called Greg Stillman, who began the conversation by telling me he’d been trying to remember more about the partner. “But it seems to me he was trying to avoid saying anything that would make him identifiable,” he said. “I don’t know if they worked together more than that one time.”

  “Do you know when it happened?”

  “The killing? It was before he went to prison. And after he’d started committing crimes, but I guess that’s pretty obvious. There were a lot of years in there, but there was nothing chronological about his Fourth Step. If I had to guess, I’d say ten or twelve years ago.”

  “And all you know is it was uptown?”

  “And on the West Side. When I picture it I see an address on Riverside Drive, but I don’t know why.”

  “Did he say something about looking out at the Hudson after the other guy shot the woman?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “Was it a house? An apartment building?”

  “No idea. Matt?”

  “Because I can’t help being interested.”

  “Nice. You answered the question before I could ask it.”

  “Well, it’s one I’ve been asking myself. But there’s nowhere to go with this, is there? A man and a woman shot to death in their home somewhere north and west of Times Square.”

  “I seem to have the impression it was quite a ways uptown.”

  “Fine. Somewhere north and west of Central Park.”

  “Not much easier that way, is it?”

  “I don’t suppose he mentioned their names. The victims.”

  “No.”

  “Or anything to set them apart.”

  “Those kinds of details might have been in his Fourth Step, Matt.”

  “But he kept them to himself.”

  “Or if he told me, it sailed right by. I told you I was trying not to dwell on what I was hearing.”

  “Yes.”

  “A fine time to play Second Monkey.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You know, Hear No Evil. If I’d been paying closer attention—”

  “You don’t want to go there, Greg.”

  “No.”

  “It’s a shame you don’t have a copy of his Fourth Step.”

  “I never read it. I just got to hear it, or to hear the parts he read to me.”

  “I know. Then what did he do with it?”

  “I told him to throw it out.”

  “Toss it in the garbage?”

  “Well, tear it up first.”

  As I’d done with my own half-assed attempt at Step Eight.

  “That’s what I tell my sponsees,” he was saying. “ ‘You got all of that out of your system, and you shared it with God and with another person—’ ”

  “How do you share it with God?”

  “I’ve often wondered. I guess you just assume he’s listening when you share it with your sponsor. Where was I? Oh, right. ‘You shared it with another person, and now it’s time to let go of it.’ ”

  “And they take it home and burn it. Or shred it, or whatever. Is that what you did with yours?”

  “What else?”

  Shortly before noon I decided I could stand a change from Fireside, and that it was a nice enough day for a longer walk. I went to a group called Renaissance, on Forty-eighth off Fifth Avenue. The midtown location drew a lot of commuters whose offices were nearby and who would go home to the suburbs after work. That made for more suits and better grooming than was the norm at my meetings, but there was certainly no dress code, and the unshaven guy seated next to me had the air of having spent the night sleeping in a cardboard box.

  Afterward I called one of my cop friends. I told him I was looking for an unsolved home invasion, the double murder of a drug dealer and his wife or girlfriend. Both shot dead, and it would have taken place on the Upper West Side sometime in the early ’70s.

  He said, “My first thought is there’s been hundreds, but you got two people dead, both of gunshots, and the case is still open. That narrows it down. I’ll see if it rings a bell for anybody.”

  I had essentially the same conversation with two other old friends, and hung up fairly certain that I wasn’t going to get anywhere that way. I walked a few blocks down Fifth to the main library, where I spent an hour with bound volumes of the New York Times Index and another couple of hours in the microfiche room, hunting for a needle in a pasture full of haystacks.

  Pointless.

  At St. Paul’s that night a woman named Josie asked if I wasn’t getting pretty close to my one-year anniversary. Pretty soon, I said. She said she was sure it would be the first of many, and advised me to remember that it was a day at a time.

  Stu
ttering Mark wasn’t there, I was more apt to run into him at Fireside, but I caught up with Motorcycle Mark at the coffee urn and asked if he’d called the night before. He said he hadn’t, that he didn’t even have my number. I said it must have been someone else, and he said that since I’d brought up the subject, could I let him have my number? I gave him one of my minimalist cards and he found a home for it in his shirt pocket. Then he borrowed a pen and wrote out his own name and number on a scrap of paper. It seemed only polite to thank him and tuck it away in my wallet.

  Donna was there, and her clothes suggested she’d come straight from the office. Her hair was pinned back, and not falling over her eyes. She confirmed that I’d be able to show up as scheduled.

  “Three tomorrow afternoon,” I said. “Eighty-fourth and Amsterdam.”

  She reached out, gave my arm a squeeze.

  Maybe it was the habit she had of touching my arm, or maybe it was more the result of how she looked in the well-tailored skirt and jacket. The last conversation I’d had with Jan may have had something to do with it, too. Whatever it was, I spent the second half of the meeting wondering if she’d join the crowd at the post-meeting meeting, which is what some people had taken to calling the gathering afterward at the Flame.

  She didn’t show up, which was hardly surprising. I couldn’t recall that I’d ever seen her there in the past. I didn’t stay long myself. I had coffee and a sandwich—I’d managed to skip dinner—and said my good-byes and went home.

  No messages, but I wasn’t in my room for ten minutes before the phone rang. I thought first of Jan, then Donna, and finally Mark—Motorcycle Mark, making use of my number, or the Mark who’d called before.

  I settled the matter by picking up the phone, and it was Greg.

  Without preamble he said, “I gave a false impression before. I’ve written out several Fourth Step inventories in the course of my sobriety. I still have copies of two of them.”

  “You know,” I said, “I think that’s between you and your Higher Power.” I’d almost said sponsor, but remembered in time that his sponsor was filling a chair in the Big Meeting in the Sky.

  “That’s not the point.”