Time to Murder and Create (11 page)

But the impulse was surely present. I looked at Henry Prager, his body slumped over his desk, his features contorted in death, and I knew that I was looking at a man I had killed. His finger had pulled the trigger, but I'd put the gun in his hand by playing my game a little too well.

I had not asked to have his life intertwined with mine, nor had I sought to be a factor in his death. Now his corpse confronted me; one hand was stretched across the desk, as if pointing at me.

He had bribed his daughter's way out of an unintentional homicide. The bribery had laid him open to blackmail, which had provoked another homicide, this one intentional. And that first murder had only sunk the barb deeper--he was still being blackmailed, and he could always be tagged for Spinner's murder.

And so he had tried to murder again, and had failed. And I turned up in his office the next day, and so he told his secretary he wanted five minutes, but he'd taken only two or three of them.

He'd had the gun at hand. Perhaps he'd checked it earlier in the day to make sure it was loaded. And perhaps, while I waited in the outer office, he entertained thoughts of greeting me with a bullet.

But it is one thing to run a man down on a dark street at night or to knock a man unconscious and throw him in the river. And it is something else again to shoot a man in your own office with your secretary a few yards away. Perhaps he had measured out these considerations in his mind. Perhaps he had already resolved on suicide. I couldn't ask him now, and what did it matter? Suicide protected his daughter, while murder would have exposed everything. Suicide got him off a treadmill that turned faster than his legs could travel.

I had some of these thoughts as I stood there regarding his corpse, others in the hours that followed. I don't know how long I looked at him while Shari sobbed against my shoulder. Not all that long, I suppose. Then reflexes took over, and I steered the girl back to the outer office and made her sit on the couch. I picked up her phone and dialed 911.

THE crew that caught it was from the Seventeenth Precinct over on East Fifty-first. The two detectives were Jim Heaney and a younger man named Finch--I didn't catch his first name. I had known Jim enough to nod to, and that made it a little easier, but even with total strangers I didn't look to be in for much trouble. Everything added up to suicide to begin with, and the girl and I could both confirm that

Prager was all alone when the gun went off.

The lab boys went through the motions all the same, although their hearts weren't in it. They took a lot of pictures and made a lot of chalk marks, wrapped and bagged the gun, and finally zipped Prager into a body bag and got him out of there. Heaney and Finch took Shari's statement first so that she could go home and collapse on her own time. All they really wanted was for her to plug the standard gaps so that the coroner's inquest could return a verdict of suicide, so they fed her questions and confirmed that her boss had been depressed and edgy lately, that he had been evidently worried about business, that his moods had been abnormal and out of character, and, on the mechanical side, that she had seen him a few minutes before the shot sounded, that she and I had been sitting in the outer office at the time, and that we had entered simultaneously to find him dead in his chair.

Heaney told her that was fine. Someone would be around for a formal statement in the morning, and in the meantime Detective Finch would see her home. She said that wasn't necessary, she'd get a cab, but Finch insisted.

Heaney watched the two of them leave. "You bet Finch'll take her home," he said. "That's quite an ass on that little lady."

"I didn't notice."

"You're getting old. Finch noticed. He likes the black ones, especially built like that. Myself, I don't fool around, but I got to admit I get a kick out of working with Finch. If he gets half the ass he tells me about, he's gonna fuck himself to death. Tell you the truth, I don't think he makes any of it up, either. The broads go for him." He lit a cigarette and offered the pack to me. I passed. He said, "That girl now, Shari, I'll give you odds he nails her."

"Not today he won't. She's pretty shaky."

"Hell, that's the best time. I don't know what the hell it is, but that's when they want it the most. Go tell a woman her husband got killed, like breaking the news, now would you make a pass at a time like that?

Whatever she looks like, would you do it? Neither would I. You should hear the stories that son of a bitch tells. Couple of months ago we had this ironworker falls off a girder, Finch has to break the news to the wife. He tells her, she cracks up, he gives her a hug to comfort her, pets her a little, and the next thing he knows she's got his zipper down and she's blowing him."

"That's if you take Finch's word for it."

"Well, if half what he says is true, and I think he's straight about it. I mean, he tells me when he strikes out, too."

I didn't much want to have this conversation, but neither did I want to make my feelings obvious, so we went through a few more stories of Finch's love life and then wasted a few minutes reviewing mutual friends. This might have taken longer had we known each other better. Finally he picked up his clipboard and concentrated on Prager. We went through the automatic questions, and I confirmed what Shari had told him.

Then he said, "Just for the record, any chance he could've been dead before you got here?" When I looked blank, he spelled it out. "This is off the wall, but just for the record. Suppose she killed him, don't ask me how or why, and then she waits for you or somebody else to come in, and then she fakes talking to him, and she's sitting with you, and she triggers a gun, I don't know, a thread or something, and then the two of you discover the body together and she's covered."

"You better cut out all that television, Jim. It's affecting your brain."

"Well, it could happen that way."

"Sure. I heard him talking to her when she went inside. Of course, she could have set up a tape recorder--"

"All right, for Christ's sake."

"If you want to explore all the possibilities--"

"I said it was just off the wall. You watch what they do on Mission Impossible and you wonder how criminals are so stupid in real life. So what the hell, a crook can watch television too, and maybe he picks up an idea. But you heard him talking, and we can forget tape recorders, and that settles that."

Actually, I hadn't heard Prager talking, but it was a lot simpler to say that I had. Heaney wanted to explore possibilities; all I wanted to do was get out of there.

"How do you fit into this, Matt? You working for him?"

I shook my head. "Checking out some references."

"Checking on Prager?"

"No. On somebody who used him for a reference, and my client wanted a fairly intensive check. I saw Prager last week and I was in the neighborhood so I dropped in to clear up a couple of points."

"Who's the subject of the investigation?"

"What's the difference? Somebody who worked with him eight or ten years ago. Nothing to do with him knocking himself off."

"You didn't really know him, then. Prager."

"Met him twice. Once, come to think of it, since I didn't really get to see much of him today. And I talked briefly with him on the phone."

"He in some kind of trouble?"

"Not any more. I can't tell you much, Jim. I didn't know the guy or much about his situation. He seemed depressed and agitated. As a matter of fact, he impressed me as thinking the world was after him. He was very suspicious the first time I saw him, as if I was part of a plot to harm him."

"Paranoia."

"Like that, yes."

"Yeah, it all fits together. Business troubles and the feeling everything's closing in on you, and maybe he thought you were going to hassle him today, or maybe he reached a point, you know, he's had it up to here and he just can't stand to see one more person. So he takes the gun out of the drawer and there's a bullet in his brain before he has time to think it over. I wish to God they'd keep those handguns off the market. They truck 'em in by the ton out of the Carolinas. What do you bet that was an unregistered gun?"

"No bet."

"He probably thought he was buying it for protection. Little rinky-dink Spanish gun, you could hit a mugger six times in the chest and not stop him, and all it's good for is blowing your brains out. Had a guy about a year ago, it wasn't even good for that. Decided to kill himself and only did half the job and he's a vegetable now. Now he oughta kill himself, the life he's got left to him, but he can't even move his hands."

He lit another cigarette. "You want to drop around tomorrow and dictate a statement?"

I told him I could do better than that. I used Shari's typewriter and knocked out a short statement with all the facts in the right places. He read it over and nodded. "You know the form," he said. "Saves us all some time."

I signed what I'd typed up, and he added it to the papers on his clipboard. He shuffled through them and said, "His wife's where? Westchester. Thank Christ for that. I'll phone the cops up there and let them have the fun of telling her her husband's dead."

I caught myself just in time to keep from volunteering the information that Prager had a daughter in Manhattan. It wasn't something I was likely to know. We shook hands, and he said he wished Finch would get back. "The bastard scored again," he said. "He figured to. Just so he don't stick around for seconds. And he might. He really likes the spades."

"I'm sure he'll tell you all about it."

"He always does."

I went to a bar, but stayed only long enough to throw down two double shots, one right after the other.

There was a time factor involved. Bars remain open until four in the morning, but most churches close up shop by six or seven. I walked over to Lexington and found a church I couldn't remember having been to before. I didn't notice the name of it. Our Lady of Perpetual Bingo, probably.

They were having some sort of service, but I didn't pay any attention to it. I lit a few candles and stuffed a couple of dollars in the slot, then took a seat in the rear and silently repeated three names over and over. Jacob Jablon, Henry Prager, Estrellita Rivera, three names, three candles for three corpses.

During the worst times after I shot and killed Estrellita Rivera, I had been unable to keep my mind from going over and over what had happened that night. I kept trying to repeal time and change the ending, like an antic projectionist reversing the film and drawing the bullet back into the barrel of the gun. In the new version that I wanted to superimpose on reality, all my shots were on target. There were no ricochets, or if there were they spent themselves harmlessly, or Estrellita spent an extra minute picking out peppermints in the candy store and wasn't in the wrong place at the wrong time, or--

There was a poem I'd had to read in high school, and it had nagged at me from somewhere in the back of my mind until one day I went to the library and ran it down. Four lines from Omar Khayyam: The moving finger writes, and having writ

Moves on. Nor all your piety and wit

Can call it back to cancel half a line

Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.

I had tried hard to blame myself for Estrellita Rivera, but in a certain sense it wouldn't stick. I had been drinking, certainly, but not heavily, and my overall marksmanship that night could not be faulted. And it was proper for me to shoot at the robbers. They were armed, they were fleeing from one killing already, and there were no civilians in the line of fire. A bullet ricocheted. Those things happen.

Part of the reason I left the force was that those things happen and I did not want to be in a position where I could do wrong things for right reasons. Because I had decided that, while it might be true that the end does not justify the means, neither do the means justify the end.

And now I had deliberately programmed Henry Prager to kill himself.

I hadn't seen it that way, of course. But I couldn't see that it made too much difference. I had begun by pressuring him into attempting a second murder, something he would never have done otherwise. He had killed Spinner, but if I had simply destroyed Spinner's envelope I'd have left Prager with no need ever to kill again. But I'd given him reason to try, and he had tried and failed, and then he'd been backed into a corner and chosen, impulsively or deliberately, to kill himself.

I could have destroyed that envelope. I had no contract with Spinner. I'd agreed only to open the envelope if I failed to hear from him. I could have given away the whole three thousand instead of a tenth of it. I had needed the money, but not that badly.

But Spinner had made a bet, and he'd turned out a winner. He had spelled it all out: "Why I think you'll follow through is something I noticed about you a long time ago, namely that you happen to think there is a difference between murder and other crimes. I am the same. I have done bad things all my life but never killed anybody and never would. I have known people who have killed which I've known for a fact or a rumor and would never get close to them. It is the way I am and I think that you are that way too..."

I could have done nothing, and then Henry Prager would not have wound up in a body bag. But there is a difference between murder and other crimes, and the world is a worse place for the murderers it allows to walk unpunished, as Henry Prager would have walked had I done nothing.

There should have been another way. Just as the bullet should not have ricocheted into a little girl's eye.

And try telling all that to the moving finger.

Mass was still going on when I left. I walked a couple of blocks, not paying much attention to where I was, and then I stopped at a Blarney Stone and took communion.

IT was a long night.