“As seriously as our lot takes suicide.” He drank, regarded me over the brim of the glass. “Let me ask you this. What would you do in her position?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not in her shoes, and that makes it impossible for me to say what I’d do if I were. I think I’d take painkillers, but on the other hand I’d want a clear head at the end. As for killing myself, well, I don’t think that’s a choice I would make. But who can say? I’m not in her shoes.”
“Nor am I, thanks be to God. And I’m just as glad not to be in yours, either.”
“What would you do, Mick?”
“Ah, Jesus, that’s a good question. If I loved her, how could I refuse her? Yet how could I do her such a horrible service? I’m sorry for her trouble, but I’m grateful it’s not me she asked.”
“And if it were I that asked you?”
“God, what a question,” he said. “It’s not, is it? You that’s asking.”
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
We talked of other things, but not for too much longer. I made it a fairly early night.
On the way home I thought about Lisa Holtzmann and the money she had shown me. I wondered where it had come from and what was going to become of it.
Did Kaplan even have a safe in his office? It seemed to me he must, that any lawyer would require one. I hoped his was roomy, and as secure as Mick’s huge old Mosler.
I’d seen that Mosler open on more than one occasion. I knew some of the items it typically contained. Money, of course, both U.S. and foreign. Records of his outstanding loans — money he had out working on the street, yielding usurious interest and collected, if need be, by violence or the threat of violence. Occasional articles of value — watches, jewelry, presumably stolen.
And guns, of course. He always had a few guns in the safe. Now and then I’d needed a gun, and he’d provided one without question, and refused to take any money for it. Sitting in his office, talking on the phone with the old-fashioned rotary dial, I’d looked over at the safe and figured I’d get the gun from Mick.
He’d have furnished it with no questions asked. But now I’d have to get it somewhere else.
Because now he would know what I wanted it for. He might provide it, but my asking for it would be an abuse of our friendship. And that is something I take seriously. Like sobriety, or suicide.
Chapter 14
Waddell & Yount had offices on the eighth floor of a twelve-story building at Nineteenth and Broadway. Two stores shared the ground floor, one selling cameras and darkroom supplies, the other a stationer. The building directory included a supplier of advertising specialty items and an environmentalist magazine. The floor immediately below Waddell & Yount was occupied by a men’s discount clothier, offering closeouts and bankrupt stock at bargain prices.
The building was an old one, and the Waddell & Yount offices had not been recently refurbished. The carpet was maroon and threadbare, and the furniture ran to scarred sixty-inch wooden desks with matching swivel chairs and glassed-in stacking mahogany bookshelves. The overhead lighting consisted of bare bulbs in green metal shades. The period look was convincing, with technology providing the only anachronism; there were computers and digital phones on the old desks, and here and there a FAX and a copier. But at least one Luddite still clung to an old-fashioned typewriter. I could hear it clacking away as I followed Eleanor Yount through a maze of cubicles to her office.
She was a handsome woman in her early sixties, stout now, with iron-gray hair and alert blue eyes. She wore a cameo brooch on the lapel of her navy suit, a gold band set with diamonds on her left ring finger. When I’d called at ten that morning to ask for an appointment she had told me to come in an hour. I’d taken my time walking there, stopping for a cup of coffee along the way, and now it was eleven and she was seating herself at her desk and pointing to a chair for me.
She said, “Here’s a funny thing. After we spoke I began to wonder about the propriety of this meeting. I wanted advice, and the first thought I had was that I ought to consult Glenn.” She smiled gently. “But of course that’s not possible, is it? I called my personal attorney and explained the situation to him. He pointed out that, since I had nothing either to conceal or reveal, I needn’t worry about being indiscreet.” She picked up a pencil from the desk top. “So there’s my good and bad news, Mr. Scudder. It’s all right for me to talk with you, but I’m afraid I have next to nothing to say.”
“How long did Glenn Holtzmann work for you?”
“A little over three years. I hired him shortly after my husband’s death. Howard died in April, and I believe Glenn started here the first week in June. I interviewed him right before ABA. That’s the annual booksellers’ convention, it’s always Memorial Day weekend.” She turned the pencil in her hand. “My husband was his own in-house attorney. He was a graduate of Columbia Law School and a member of the bar, so of course he trusted himself to read contracts.”
“And after Mr. Yount died—”
“Mr. Waddell,” she said. “At home we were Mr. and Mrs. Waddell, while here we were Mr. Waddell and Ms. Yount. Of course that was Miss Yount for many years, before Ms. became a part of the language. To Howard’s great dismay, I might add, and not for reasons of male chauvinism. He just couldn’t brook the notion of an abbreviation that wasn’t an abbreviation of anything.” Her eyes aimed themselves somewhere past my left shoulder, gazing down the years. “Eisenhower was president when we moved into these offices,” she said. “And we had only half our present space, we shared the suite with a man named Morrie Kelton who was a booking agent for dance bands and strippers and the most hopeless sort of latter-day vaudevillians. The strangest people in New York were apt to walk in that door. Did you ever see Broadway Danny Rose? We saw it and thought right away of Morrie. I wonder what happened to him. I suppose he’s gone. He’d have to be close to ninety by now.”
The typewriter clattered in the distance. “Morrie Kelton,” she said. “He was a crude, hard-bitten little man, but he had a sweetness about him. Do you wear reading glasses, Mr. Scudder?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You’re of an age to need them. Do you wear glasses to read?”
“No,” I said. “I could probably use them, but I can get by without them. As long as the light’s not too dim.”
“Then I don’t suppose you’re a customer of ours. If you don’t need reading glasses, you probably don’t buy large-print editions.”
“Not yet.”
“You’re a patient man,” she said. “Letting me traipse down Memory Lane and putting up with my impertinent questions. I asked because I was thinking of the firm’s early days. When I met Howard Waddell he was drawing contracts and selling subsidiary rights at Newbold Brothers. They were a small trade house, acquired a few years ago by Macmillan, but still thriving when Howard went out on his own. And do you know what propelled him?”
“What?”
“Presbyopia. He was squinting at fine print, holding the paper at arm’s length, avoiding paperbacks because the print was too small. A week after he got his first pair of reading glasses he started looking for office space. Within a month he’d signed a lease here and given notice at Newbold. I was an assistant in the production department there, on the phone every day arguing with printers while I dreamed about becoming the next Maxwell Perkins and fanning some young spark into the next literary bonfire. ‘Ellie,’ he said, ‘the world is filling up with old farts with weak eyes and there’s nothing out there for them to read. Once you get past thirty-odd editions of the Bible, the only large-type books are The Power of Positive Thinking and The Book of Mormon. If this isn’t an opportunity I don’t know what one is. Why don’t you come work for me? You’ll never get to meet a real writer or wear out a blue pencil, and I don’t figure we’ll ever get rich, but I bet we have fun.’ ”