“If there’s a chance he’s innocent—”
“That’s another thing,” I said. “You believe he’s innocent, in part because that’s what you’d prefer to believe. Well, let’s suppose that he is, and that if you just sit back and do nothing he’s going to go away for the rest of his life for a crime he didn’t commit.”
“That’s the thought that drives me crazy.”
“Well, is it the worst thing in the world, Tom? You said yourself that he wouldn’t be in a conventional penitentiary, that he’d wind up in some sort of mental facility where his needs would be met and he’d get some sort of help. Even if he’s innocent, even if he got there for the wrong reason, is that so bad? They’ll feed him, they’ll see that he bathes and takes care of himself, he’ll get treatment—”
“Thorazine’s what he’ll get. They’ll turn him into a fucking zombie.”
“Maybe.”
He took off his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose. “You don’t know my brother,” he said. “You’ve seen him but you don’t know him. He’s not homeless, he’s got a room, but he might as well be homeless for all the time he spends there. He can’t take being cooped up. He’s got a bed that he hardly ever sleeps in. He doesn’t sleep like a normal person, lies down at night and gets up in the morning. He sleeps like an animal, half an hour or an hour at a time, on and off throughout the day and night. He’ll stretch out on a bench or curl up in a doorway and nap like a cat.
“He likes the open air. Even in the winter he’s out of his room all the time. It’s only the coldest nights’ll drive him inside. As bitter as it gets he’ll just put on more clothes until he’s got everything he owns stuffed under that army jacket of his. And he’ll walk to keep warm. Hours on end he’ll walk, mile after mile.
“Day in, day out, he wore that army jacket. I never saw him without it. Well, they took it away from him and they burned it. They took everything he was wearing and tossed it in the incinerator. What else were they gonna do? When I saw him they had him in all clean clothes. They’d bathed him and cleaned him up. They didn’t shave him or cut his hair because they’re not allowed to do that, not without his consent, but that’s Bellevue and Rikers. When he’s in a permanent facility the rules’ll be different.
“They burned up his army jacket. Well, what else were they supposed to do with it, the state it was in? But it’s hard to imagine George without it.
“You can say my brother’s crazy, and I guess he is, but he’s been this way all his life and they’re not about to change him now. I’m not saying it’ll kill him to be locked up because maybe it won’t, maybe he’ll just pull himself a little further away from reality and crawl deeper inside his own mind and create his own world in there.”
He looked straight at me. With his glasses off he looked more vulnerable, but somehow tougher, too.
He said, “I don’t want to glamorize the life he leads, make him sound like some kind of Noble Savage. It’s a horrible life. He lives like an animal, he lives in fear and torment. If he doesn’t wind up in a locked ward with a Thorazine straitjacket he’ll fall in front of a subway train or die of exposure, unless he gets really lucky and some teenage sadists set him on fire. Jesus Christ, Matt, I wouldn’t lead his life for the world, but it’s his life, do you follow me? It’s his fucking life so let him fucking live it.”
Chapter 6
“So I said I’d look into it,” I told Elaine. “He put a thousand dollars on the table and I picked it up. Don’t ask me why.”
“Compassion,” she said. “A sense of social responsibility. The need to see justice done.”
“What else could it be?”
“Maybe you wanted the money.”
“I was taught to grab what came my way,” I allowed, “but it’s a hard way to turn a buck. You work overtime trying to give the client his money’s worth and walk away feeling fraudulent because you haven’t accomplished anything. The fact that there was nothing to accomplish ought to carry some weight, but somehow it doesn’t.”
“You think George did it?”
“I think so, yes. For all the reasons I gave Tom.”
“But there’s room for doubt.”
“Not much room,” I said. “Not much doubt.”
We had dinner in the Village and hit a couple of jazz clubs on Bleecker Street, then caught a cab back to her place. In the morning she made a pot of strong coffee, toasted a couple of poppy-seed bagels, and cut a papaya in half. Sunlight streamed in through the living-room window, but Elaine, reading the Times we’d picked up on the way home, informed me it wouldn’t last. Cloud cover would settle in by midday, with a strong probability of showers in the late afternoon and evening. “Clearing tomorrow,” she said. “A lot of good that does me. Tomorrow’s Monday. The museum’s closed.”
She was taking another photography course, this one called “The Urban Landscape Through the Camera’s Eye.” There was a display uptown at the Museum of the City of New York and she was supposed to see it before her next class.
“I guess I’ll get rained on,” she said. “What about you?”
“I think I’ll go walk around my neighborhood.”
“I figured you might. Hell’s Kitchen or Clinton?”
“Maybe a little of each. I’ll wear out some shoe leather and start earning the thousand dollars Tom Sadecki gave me. And I want to get to a meeting, and then tonight I’ve got my usual Sunday dinner date with Jim Faber.”
“Well, I might go to the gym,” she said, “or I might say the hell with it and go straight to the museum. Then I’ll come home and plant myself in front of the television set. How come a television binge doesn’t seem nearly as degenerate when the programs are British?”
“It’s the way they talk.”
“It must be. American Gladiators would feel like an edifying experience if they got Alistair Cooke to introduce it. Call me tonight, if you get the chance, or I’ll talk to you in the morning. And say hello to Jim for me.”
I said I would. I somehow failed to mention my two o’clock date with an old girlfriend.
Ages ago, when phone calls cost a dime, you made them from little glassed-in booths with doors that closed against traffic noise and weather. Maybe it’s still that way in other parts of the country, but in New York the phone booths gradually evolved out of existence, providing less and less shelter with each model change. Now all you get is a phone mounted on a post, and one of these days they’ll get rid of the post.
The phone I was interested in was on the southwest corner of Eleventh Avenue and West Fifty-fifth Street, and I knew it was the one Glenn Holtzmann had been using on the night he died because it was the only one around. It was about ten-thirty by the time I walked across town from Elaine’s. I looked over at the phone while I waited for the light to change, then crossed the street and took the receiver off the hook. I listened to the dial tone and put it back.
For all the years I’d lived at the Northwestern, I had spent precious little time on Eleventh Avenue. This stretch of it ran to auto showrooms and warehouses, building-supply outlets and collision repair shops. They were all closed now, as they would have been on the night of the shooting.
I walked around some, trying to get the feel of the crime scene. There was nothing to identify it as such, no chalk outline to mark where the body had lain, no yellow plastic Crime Scene tape.
No visible bloodstains.
I could picture him standing there, lifting the receiver, digging in his pocket for a quarter, dropping the coin in the slot. Then something makes him turn — a sound, perhaps, or movement glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. He starts to turn, and even as he’s turning a shot rings out, and he’s hit.