“He figured he could clip you for tax evasion, huh? What would they seize, your extra pair of shoes?”
“It was my occupation that fascinated him,” I said. “He told me he wanted to publish my memoirs. Well, that was a lot of crap. His firm didn’t publish originals. What he wanted was to find out how a detective operates. He wanted me to teach him the tricks of the trade. He may have envisioned the two of us as partners, digging up dirt on people and transmuting it into gold. I never found out what he had in mind because I didn’t like him enough to offer him any encouragement.”
“So he nosed around on his own.”
“Evidently.”
“Who killed him?”
“I don’t know.”
“No idea?”
“None,” I said. “I assume he was prospecting, sticking his nose in where it didn’t belong. Someone must have tipped to what he was doing.”
“And shot him.”
“It’s a chance you take when you run around setting up dope dealers. You run less of a risk turning in relatives for cheating on their taxes. But sooner or later you’re going to run out of relatives, and dabblers like the lawyer in White Plains. When the other players are pros, you can wind up getting killed.”
“An occupational hazard.”
“I would say so. On the other hand, it’s still odds-on that it happened the way the police figured it from the start.”
“George Sadecki.”
“There’s a good chance he did it, and what difference does it make if he didn’t? Clearing his name’s not worth a dime to anybody. My guess is he’s innocent, but I couldn’t begin to back that up, let alone tell you who’s guilty. Glenn didn’t leave notes, or one of those traditional sealed envelopes to be opened in the event of his death.”
“Some people have no consideration. You want some more coffee?”
I shook my head. “Somebody’s probably getting away with murder,” I said, “but that happens all the time.”
“And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”
“I don’t know how bad a guy he was. On the one hand he was a paid rat, but you could make a case that he was an unheralded yuppie hero, collecting a bounty on bad guys. However you look at it, I don’t have this sense of his ghost crying out for revenge.”
“What about our mutual client? Can she sleep nights if her husband’s killer goes unpunished?”
“I don’t see why not. You’re her attorney. What’s in her best interests?”
He thought about it. “To let it lie,” he said.
“That’s what I would have said.”
“Put in another few days looking for hidden assets. But I don’t think we’re going to find any.”
“No, neither do I.”
“On the other hand, I don’t think we’re going to get any static from the IRS, either. I see her coming out of this with the deed to an apartment and a box full of money. That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“No.”
“You want it to come out neat,” he said. “Be nice to know who killed him and how and why. Be even nicer to see the killer go away for it. I have to tell you, though, the best interests of the client are served with the whole thing closed out on the spot. Make a case out of this, generate a little press, and you just know some schmuck from the tax office is going to turn up with a million questions, and who needs that?”
“Nobody.”
“Never get a conviction anyway. Whoever did it, by now he’s sure to be alibied from here to St. Louis. Probably got proof he was playing pinochle with the pope and the Lubavitcher rebbe when Holtzmann got hit.”
“Must have been some game.”
“Well, you know the pope,” Drew said. “No card sense, but he loves to play.”
Chapter 22
A few days later I put on a suit and tie and went to the window, trying to guess if the weather would hold. It was sunny now, cool and clear, and I hoped it would stay that way.
Something drew my eye down to the benches alongside the Parc Vendôme, and I saw a familiar silhouette hunched over one of the stone cubes. I went downstairs, and instead of turning left for the subway I crossed the street and approached the lean black man with the white hair. He had a copy of the Times folded open to the chess column, and he was working out the problem with his own board and chessmen.
“You look nice,” he said. “I like your necktie.”
I thanked him. I said, “Barry, they’re having a service for George this afternoon. I’m going out to Brooklyn for it.”
“That right?”
“His brother called and told me about it. Just family, but he said I’d be welcome.”
“Be a nice day for it,” he said. “ ‘less it rains.”
“You’d be welcome, too.”
“At the funeral?”
“I thought maybe we could go together.”
He looked at me, a long, appraising look. “No,” he said. “I guess not.”
“If you’re thinking you won’t fit in,” I said, “well, hell, you’ll fit in as well as I will.”
“Guess you’re right,” he said. “We’re both the same color, and dressed about the same.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“Thing is,” he said, “it don’t matter, fitting in or not fitting in. I don’t care to go. You come back, tell me how it was. How’s that?”
I rode out on the D train. They buried him out of a funeral parlor on Nostrand Avenue, and there were more people in attendance than I would have expected, close to fifty in all. Tom, his wife, his sister, their relatives. Neighbors, employees, AA friends. The crowd was mostly white and a majority of the men wore ties and jackets, but there were a few black faces, a few gentlemen in shirtsleeves. Barry would not have been greatly out of place.
The casket was closed, the service brief. The clergyman who officiated hadn’t known George, and he spoke of death as a liberation from the bondage of physical and mental infirmity. The veils drop away, he said, and blind eyes can see again. The spirit soars.
Tom followed him and said a few words. In a sense, he said, we’d all lost George a long time ago. “But we went on loving him,” he said. “We loved the sweetness of him. And there was always the hope that someday the clouds would blow away and we’d get him back. And now he’s gone and that can never happen. But in another sense we do have him back with us. He’s with us now and he’ll never lose his way again.” His voice broke, but he squeezed the last words out. “I love you, George,” he said.
There were two hymns, “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “Abide With Me.” A heavyset woman with dark hair to her waist sang them both unaccompanied, her voice filling the room. During the first hymn I thought of George in his army jacket, his pocket full of shell casings. The old soldier, fading away. Listening to the second, I remembered a version on a Thelonious Monk album, just eight bars long, just the melody. Haunting. Jan Keane owned the record. I hadn’t heard it in years.
After the service there was a procession of cars following the hearse to a cemetery in Queens, but I passed on that and caught a train back to Manhattan. I found Barry right where I’d left him. I sat down across from him and told him all about George’s funeral. He heard me through and suggested we play a little chess.
“One game,” I said.
It didn’t take him long to beat me. When I tipped my king over he suggested a toast to George’s memory might be fitting. I gave him five dollars and he came back with a quart of malt liquor and a cup of coffee. After several long swallows he capped the bottle and said, “See, I don’t never go to funerals. Don’t believe in ’em. What’s the point?”
“It’s a way to say goodbye.”