Even the Wicked (18 page)

“I remember when I had the chocolate.”

“The chocolate…oh, with the liquid center.”

She nodded. “Monica and I were visiting this friend of hers who was recovering from a mastectomy, and she passed around these chocolates someone had given her. And I got piggy, because these were very good chocolates, and I had four of them, and the last one had a cherry-brandy filling. And I had it half swallowed before I realized what it was, and then I swallowed the rest of it, because what was I going to do, spit it out? That’s what you’d have done, you’d have had reason to, but I’m not an alcoholic, I’m just a person who doesn’t drink, so it wouldn’t kill me to swallow it.”

“And it didn’t make you take off all your clothes.”

“It didn’t have any effect whatsoever, as far as I know. There couldn’t have been very much brandy involved. There was a cherry in there, too, so that didn’t leave much room for brandy.” She shrugged. “Then I came home and gave you a kiss and you looked as startled as I’ve ever seen you.”

“It took me by surprise.”

“I thought you were going to sing me a chorus of ‘Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine.’”

“I don’t even know the tune.”

“Do you want me to hum a little? But we’re straying from the subject. The point is you’re super aware of the smell of booze and you didn’t smell it on Adrian Whitfield. Could it be, Holmes, that the man hadn’t been drinking?”

“But he said he had.”

“Oh?”

“It was a funny conversation,” I recalled. “He started out by announcing that he didn’t drink, and that got my attention because he was uncapping the scotch bottle even as he said it. Then he qualified it by saying he didn’t drink the way he used to, and that he pretty much limited himself to one drink a day.”

“That would be enough for anybody,” she said, “if you had a big enough glass.”

“For some of us,” I said, “you’d need a bathtub. Anyway, he went on to say that this particular day had been an exception, what with the letter from Will, and that he’d had a drink when he left the office and another when he got home to his apartment.”

“And you didn’t smell them on his breath.”

“No.”

“If he brushed his teeth—”

“Wouldn’t matter. I’d still smell the alcohol.”

“You’re right, he’d just wind up smelling like crème de menthe. I notice alcohol on people’s breath, too, because I don’t drink. But I’m nowhere near as aware of it as you are.”

“All the years I drank,” I said, “I never once smelled alcohol on anybody’s breath, and it hardly ever occurred to me that anyone could smell it on mine. Jesus, I must have gone around smelling of it all the time.”

“I kind of liked it.”

“Really?”

“But I like it better this way,” she said, and kissed me. After a few minutes she went back to her chair and said, “Whew. If we were not in a semi-public place—”

“I know.”

“Where anyone could ring the bell at any moment, even though no one has in the longest time—” She heaved a sigh. “What do you think it means?”

“I think we’re still hot for each other,” I said, “after all these years.”

“Well, I
know
that. I mean the booze that wasn’t on Whitfield’s breath, which is uncannily like the dog that didn’t bark in the nighttime, isn’t it? What do you make of it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re sure you noticed it at the time? Noticed the absence of it, I mean, and the contradiction between what he said and what you observed. It wasn’t just something your imagination supplied when you were lighting candles and cursing the darkness?”

“I’m positive,” I said. “I thought of it at the time, and then I just plain forgot about it because there were too many far more important things to think about. Here was a man sentenced to death by a iller who’d built up a pretty impressive track record. He wanted me to help him figure out a way to stay alive. That had more of a claim on my attention than the presence or absence of booze on his breath.”

“Of course.”

“I smelled the scotch when he opened the bottle and poured the drink. And it struck me that I hadn’t smelled it on his breath when he let me into the apartment. We shook hands, our faces weren’t all that far apart. I’d have smelled it if it had been there to smell.”

“If the man hadn’t been drinking,” she wondered, “why would he say he had?”

“I have no idea.”

“I could understand if it was the other way around. People do that all the time, especially if they think the person they’re talking to might have a judgment on the subject. He knew you didn’t drink so he might assume you disapprove of others drinking. But you don’t, do you?”

“Only when they throw up on my shoes.”

“Maybe he wanted to impress you with the gravity of the situation. ‘I’m not much of a drinker, I never have more than one a day, but this creep with the poisoned pen has me so rattled I’ve had a few already and I’m about to have another.’”

“‘And then I’ll stop, because stress or not I’m no rummy.’ I thought of that.”

“And?”

“Why would he think he needed to do that? He just got a death threat from a guy with maximum credibility. Will’s been all over the front pages for weeks, and so far he’s batting a thousand. And here you’ve got Adrian Whitfield, a worldly man, certainly, and one professionally accustomed to the company of criminals, but all the same a far cry from a daredevil.”

“You wouldn’t mistake him for Evel Knievel.”

“You wouldn’t,” I said, “because when all is said and done he’s a lawyer in a three-piece suit, and the chances he takes tend not to be physical in nature. Of course he’s going to take a letter from Will seriously. He doesn’t have to prove it to me by pretending to have had drinks earlier.”

“You don’t suppose…”

“What?”

“Could he have been a closet teetotaler?”

“Huh?”

“You said he poured a drink in front of you. Are you sure he actually drank it?”

I thought about it. “Yes,” I said.

“You saw him drink it.”

“Not in a single swallow, but yes.”

“And it was whiskey?”

“It came out of a scotch bottle,” I said, “and I got a whiff of it when he poured it. It smelled like booze. In fact it smelled like a single-malt scotch, which is what it claimed to be on the label.”

“And you saw him drink it, and you smelled it on his breath.”

“Yes to the first part. Did I smell it on his breath afterward? I don’t remember one way or the other. I didn’t have occasion to notice.”

“You mean he didn’t kiss you goodnight?”

“Not on the first date,” I said.

“Well, shame on him,” she said. “
I
kissed you goodnight, on
our
first date. I can even remember what you had on your breath.”

“You can, huh?”

“Whiskey,” she said. “And
moi
”

“What a memory.”

“Well, it was memorable, you old bear. No, what I was getting at, I know there are people who drink but try to hide it. And I wondered if there might also be people who don’t drink, and try to hide that.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Why does anybody do anything?”

“I’ve often wondered.” I thought about it. “A lot of us maintain our anonymity to one degree or another. There’s a longstanding tradition against going public about being a member of AA, though lately that’s getting honored in the breach.”

“I know. All these Hollywood types go straight from Betty Ford to Barbara Walters.”

“They’re not supposed to do that,” I said, “but it’s your own business to what extent you stay anonymous in your private life. I don’t tell casual acquaintances unless I have a reason. And if I’m at a business meeting and the other fellow orders a drink, I’ll just order a Coke. I won’t issue an explanation.”

“And if he asks if you drink?”

“Sometimes I’ll say ‘Not today,’ something like that. Or, ‘It’s a little early for me,’ if I’m feeling particularly devious. But I can’t imagine pouring a drink and pretending to drink it, or keeping colored water in a scotch bottle.” I remembered something. “Anyway,” I said, “there were the liquor store records, the deliveries he’d had over the past months. They confirmed that he was just what he claimed to be, a guy who had one drink a day on the average.”

“He was ill,” she said. “Some kind of lymphatic cancer, wasn’t it?”

“It metastasized to the lymph system. I believe the original site was one of the adrenals.”

“Maybe he couldn’t drink as much as he used to. Because of the cancer.”

“I suppose that’s possible.”

“And he was in denial about his health, wasn’t he? Or at least he wasn’t telling people about it.”

“So?”

“So maybe that would lead him to pretend he was more of a drinker than he was.”

“But the first thing he did was tell me he wasn’t much of a drinker.”

“You’re right.” She frowned. “I give up. I don’t get it.”

“I don’t get it, either.”

“But you don’t give up, do you?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

Over dinner she said, “Was Glenn Holtzmann a drinker?”

“Not that I ever noticed. And where did that question come from?”

“Your dreams.”

“You know,” I said, “I’m having enough trouble making sense out of the thoughts I have while I’m awake. What was it Freud said about dreams?”

“‘Sometimes it’s only a cigar.’”

“Right. If there’s any connection between Glenn Holtzmann and the liquor Adrian Whitfield didn’t have on his breath, I’m afraid it’s too subtle for me.”

“I was just wondering.”

“Holtzmann was a phony,” I said. “He betrayed people and sold them out.”

“Was Adrian a phony?”

“Did he have some secret life besides practicing criminal law? It doesn’t seem very likely.”

“Maybe you sensed that he was hiding something about himself.”

“By pretending to be more of a drinker than he was. Or at least by pretending to have had more to drink on that one night than he had.”

“Right.”

“So my unconscious mind immediately made the leap from him to Glenn Holtzmann.”

“Why?”

“That was going to be my next question,” I said. “Why indeed?” I put down my fork. “Anyway,” I said, “I think I figured out what Glenn Holtzmann was trying to tell me.”

“In the dream, you mean.”

“Right, in the dream.”

“Well?”

“‘Too much money.’”

“That’s it?”

“What did we just say? Sometimes it’s only a cigar?”

“Too much money,” she said. “You mean like the line about a cocaine habit is God’s way of telling you you’ve got too much money?”

“I don’t think cocaine’s got anything to do with it. Glenn Holtzmann had too much money, that’s what made me dig deeper and find out about his secret life.”

“He had all that cash in the closet, didn’t he? How does that apply to Adrian Whitfield?”

“It doesn’t.”

“Then—”

“Sometimes it’s only a cigar,” I said.

I don’t remember any dreams that night, or even a sense of having dreamed. Elaine and I went home and finished what we’d started in her shop, and I slipped right off into a deep sleep and didn’t stir until dawn.

But there had been a thought nagging at me before we went to bed, and it was still there when I woke up. I took it out and examined it, and I decided it wasn’t something I had to devote my time to. I had a second cup of coffee after breakfast and considered the matter again, and this time I decided it wasn’t as though there were too many other matters with a greater claim on my time. I had, as they say, nothing better to do.

And the only reason not to pursue it was for fear of what I might find out.

I made haste slowly. I went to the library first to check my memory against what the Times had run, noting down dates and times in my notebook. I spent a couple of hours at that, and then I went outside and sat on a bench in Bryant Park and went over my notes. It was a perfect fall day, and the air had the tang of a crisp apple. They’d been forecasting rain, but you didn’t even have to look at the sky to know that it wasn’t going to rain that day. It felt in fact as though it would never rain, or turn any colder than it was now. The days wouldn’t get any shorter, either. It felt like eternal autumn, stretching out in front of us until the end of time.

Everybody’s favorite season, and you always think it’s going to last forever. And it never does.

Enough time had passed since Whitfield’s death for them to have taken the NYPD seals off the door. All I had to do was find someone with the authority to let me in. I don’t know precisely where that authority was vested—Whitfield’s heirs, the executor of his estate, or the co-op’s board of directors. I’m sure it wasn’t the building superintendent’s decision to make, but he took it upon himself to make it, his resolution buttressed by the portrait of U.S. Grant I palmed him. He found a key and let me in and lingered at the door while I poked around in drawers and closets. After a while he coughed discreetly, and when I looked up he asked me how long I’d be. I told him that was hard to say.

“Because I’ll have to let you out,” he said, “and lock up after you, only I got a few things I have to be doing.”

He jotted down a phone number, and I agreed to call him. I felt a lot less pressed for time once he was out of there, and it’s better if you’re not in a hurry, especially when you don’t know what you’re looking for or where you’re likely to find it.

It was close to two hours later when I used the phone in the bedroom to call the number he’d left me. He said he’d be up in a minute, and while I waited for him I retraced the route from the phone, the one Whitfield had used to call me that last night, into the room where he’d died. There were no bottles on or in the bar—I guess they’d removed everything for lab tests—but the bar was there, and I stood where he’d have stood to make himself his last drink, then stepped over to where he was when he collapsed. There was nothing on the carpet to indicate where he had lain, no chalk outline, no yellow tape, no stains he’d left behind, but it seemed to me I knew just where he’d fallen.

When the super came I gave him an extra $20 along with an apology for having taken so long. The bonus surprised him, but only a little. It also seemed to reassure him that I hadn’t appropriated any property of Whitfield’s during his absence, although he still felt compelled to ask.