The Devil Knows You're Dead (34 page)

“No.”

“And do ye care for her? The other one, I mean.”

“She’s a decent woman,” I said. “I wish her well.”

He waited.

“No,” I said. “I don’t care for her. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing in her life. I don’t know what the hell she’s doing in mine.”

“Ah, Jesus,” he said. “You don’t drink.”

As if that explained everything.

“So?”

“So a man has to do something, some fucking thing or other.” He turned the key in the ignition, fed gas to the big engine. “It’s nature,” he said.

There was a message at the hotel desk.
Call Jan Keane
.

“Happy anniversary,” she said. “I’m what, a month late?”

“A little less than that.”

“Close enough. You know, I remembered the date, I had myself all set to call you, and then it slipped my mind entirely. Fell right through a hole in my brain.”

“It happens.”

“With increasing frequency, as a matter of fact. I’d be afraid it was the early stages of Alzheimer’s, but you know what? That’s really not something I’m going to have to worry about.”

I said, “How are you, Jan?”

“Oh, Matthew, I’m not so bad. Not so hot but not so bad. I’m sorry I missed your anniversary. Was it a good one?”

“It was fine.”

“I’m glad,” she said. “Can I ask you a favor? And I promise it’s a less exacting favor than the last one I asked you. Can you come see me?”

“Sure,” I said. “When?”

“The sooner the better.”

I’d been up all night but I wasn’t tired. “Now?”

“Perfect.”

“It’s what, twenty to ten? I’ll be there sometime around eleven.”

“I’ll be here,” she said.

I was a few minutes early, showered and shaved and wearing clean clothes. I rang her bell and went out to wait for the key. She tossed it straight at me and I caught it on the fly. She applauded, and clapped her hands some more when I got off the elevator.

“It was a lucky catch,” I said.

“That’s the best kind. Okay, now say it. ‘You look like hell, Jan.’ ”

“You don’t look so bad.”

“Oh, come on. My eyes still work and so does the mirror. Although I’ve been thinking of covering mine. Jews do that, don’t they? When somebody dies?”

“I think the Orthodox do.”

“Well, I’d say they’re on the right track but their timing’s off. It’s when you’re dying that the mirror ought to be covered. After you’re dead what difference does it make?”

I wasn’t going to say it, but she didn’t look good. Her complexion was off, sallow, with a yellow cast to it. The skin on her face had drawn closer to the bone, and her nose and ears and brow seemed to have grown, even as her eyes had sunk back into her skull. Her impending death had been real enough before, but now it was undeniable. It stared you in the face.

“Hang on,” she said. “I’ve got fresh coffee made.” And, when we each had a cup, she said, “First things first. I want to thank you one more time for the gun. It has made all the difference.”

“Oh?”

“All the difference. I wake up in the morning and I ask myself, well, old girl, do you have to use that thing? Is it time? And I say to myself, no, not yet, it’s not time yet. And then I’m free to enjoy the day.”

“I see.”

“So I thank you again. But that’s not what I dragged you down here for. I could have managed that part over the phone. Matthew, I’m leaving you my Medusa.”

I looked at her.

“You have only yourself to blame,” she said. “You admired her extravagantly the first night we met.”

“You warned me not to look her in the eye. Her gaze turns men to stone, you said.”

“I may have been warning you about myself. Either way, you didn’t listen. Stubborn bastard, aren’t you?”

“That’s what everybody tells me.”

“Seriously,” she said, “you’ve always been drawn to that piece, so either you genuinely like it—”

“Of course I do.”

“—or you’re trapped in your own lies, because I want you to have it.”

“It’s a great piece of work,” I said, “and I am indeed very fond of it, and I hope I have to wait a long time for it.”

“Ha!” She clapped her hands. “That’s why you’re here this morning. She’s going home with you. No, don’t argue. I don’t want to go through all that crap of codicils in my will and everybody waiting until it goes through probate. I remember how much fun it was when my grandmother died and the family fought pitched battles over the table linens and the silverware. My own mother went to her grave convinced that her brother Pat slipped Grandma’s good earrings in his pocket the morning of the wake. And nobody in the family
had
anything, so it’s not as though they were fighting over the Hope diamond. No, I’m distributing all my specific bequests in advance. That’s one of the good things about knowing you’ve got a date with the Reaper. You can get all that stuff out of the way, and make sure things wind up where you want.”

“Suppose you live.”

She gave me an incredulous look, then let out a bark of laughter. “Hey, a deal’s a deal,” she said. “You still get to keep the statue. How’s that?”

“Now you’re talking.”

She had had the piece crated, and the wooden box stood on the floor alongside the plinth. The plinth was mine, too, she said, but it would be easier if I came back another time for it. The crated bronze was compact but heavy, the plinth easy to lift but hard to maneuver. Could I even manage the statue unassisted? I got a grip on the crate, hoisted it up onto my shoulder. The weight was substantial but manageable. I carried it through the loft and set it down in front of the elevator to catch my breath.

“Better take a cab,” she suggested.

“No kidding.”

“Let me look at you. You want to know something? You look like hell.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m serious. I know I look awful but I’ve got an excuse. Are you all right?”

“I was up all night.”

“Couldn’t sleep?”

“Didn’t try. I was on my way to bed when I got your message.”

“You should have said something. This could have waited.”

“I wasn’t all that sleepy. Tired, but not sleepy.”

“I know the feeling. Most of my waking hours are like that these days.” She frowned. “It’s more than that, though. Something’s bothering you.”

I sighed.

“Look, I don’t mean to—”

“No,” I said. “No, you’re right. Is there more of that coffee?”

I must have talked for a long time. When I ran out of words we sat in silence for a minute or two. Then she carried our coffee cups to the kitchen and brought them back full again.

She said, “What do you figure it is? Not sex.”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. What, then? The old boys-will-be-boys syndrome?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe not.”

“When I’m with her,” I said, “everything else is off in some other world where I don’t have to deal with it. The sex is nothing special. She’s young and beautiful, and that was exciting at first, just as the newness of it was exciting. But the sex is better with Elaine. With the other one—”

“You can say her name.”

“With Lisa, I can’t always perform. And sometimes the act is perfunctory. I’m there, we’re having an affair, so we’d better get down to it or her presence in my life becomes even more inexplicable.”

“ ‘Let’s get away from it all.’ ”

“Uh-huh.”

“Who have you told?”

“Nobody,” I said. “No, that’s not entirely true. I’ve told you, of course—”

“A nobody if there ever was one.”

“And a few hours ago I told the fellow I sat up all night drinking with. Well, he was the one drinking. I stuck to club soda.”

“Thank God for small mercies.”

“I’ve wanted to talk about it with Jim. It sticks in my throat. See, he knows Elaine. It’s bad enough keeping something from her, but if other people know about it and she doesn’t—”

“Not good.”

“No. And of course there’s the fact that talking about it makes it real, and I don’t want it to be real. I want it to be a place I go in dreams, if it has to be anything at all. Lately every time I leave her apartment I tell myself it’s over, that I won’t go back there again. And then a couple of days later I pick up the phone.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve talked about it at meetings.”

“No. Same reasons.”

“You could try going to a meeting where nobody knows you. Some remote section of the Bronx where they’ve been marrying their cousins for the past three hundred years.”

“And the children are born with webbed feet.”

“That’s the idea. You could say anything there.”

“I could.”

“Right. But you won’t. Have you been going to meetings?”

“Of course.”

“As many as usual?”

“I may have lightened up a little, I don’t know. I’ve, uh, felt a little detached. My mind wanders. I wonder what the hell I’m doing there.”

“Doesn’t sound good, kiddo.”

“No.”

“You know,” she said, “I think you may have picked just the right person to talk to. Dying turns out to be a very instructive process. You learn a lot this way. The only problem is you don’t have any time to act on your newfound knowledge. But isn’t that always the way? When I was fifteen years old I said to myself, ‘Oh to be twelve again, knowing what I know now.’ What the hell did I know when I was fifteen?”

“What do you know now?”

“I know that time’s much too scarce to waste. I know that only the important things are important. I know not to sweat the small stuff.” She made a face. “All these brilliant insights, and they come out sounding like bumper stickers. The worst part is it seems to me that I knew these things at fifteen. Maybe I knew them when I was twelve. But I know them differently now.”

“I think I understand.”

“Jesus, I hope you do, Matthew.” She put a hand on my arm. “I care about you, you know. I really do. I don’t want you to fuck it up.”

SOMETHING in the newspapers. Something in the past couple of days.

I thought about it in the cab heading uptown, the crated bronze on the seat beside me. In front of my hotel I paid the driver and got the thing onto my shoulder again. I found a spot on the floor of my room where I wouldn’t be likely to trip over it. I’d have to uncrate it, but that could wait. I’d have to go back for the plinth, but that could wait, too.

I went to the library, and it didn’t take me long to find the story I was looking for. It had run three days earlier. I couldn’t be sure where I’d read it, because all the local papers had it, and none of them offered much in the way of detail.

A man named Roger Prysock had been shot to death early the previous evening on the corner of Park Avenue South and East Twenty-eighth Street. According to the police, witnesses at the scene stated that the victim had been making a telephone call when a car pulled up alongside. A gunman emerged from the car, shot Prysock several times in the chest, fired a final shot into the back of the head, and got back into the car, which drove off. With ts tires screaming, according to the
Post
. The deceased was said to have been thirty-six years old, and had a lengthy criminal record, with convictions for aggravated assault and possession of a stolen property.

“HE was a pimp,” Danny Boy said. “I think he must have gotten his job through affirmative action.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was white.”

“He’s not the first white pimp.”

“No, but they’re pretty scarce at the street level, and Dodger Prysock was strictly street.”

“Dodger?”

“His
nom de la rue
. Damn near inevitable, isn’t it? Roger the Dodger, and he was originally from Los Angeles.”

“I’d have thought Brooklyn.”

“That’s because you have a sense of history. Mr. Prysock was not what you’d call a dominant figure in his chosen field, but he made a living.”

“Enough to keep him in purple hats and zoot suits?”

“Not his style at all. The Dodger left that sort of thing for the brothers. Dressed very J. Press himself.”

“Who killed him?”

“No idea,” Danny Boy said. “Last I heard he was out of town. Then the first news I got of him was the story in the paper. Who killed him? Beats me. You didn’t do it, did you?”

“No.”

“Well, neither did I,” he said, “but that still leaves a whole lot of people.”

IT was the middle of the afternoon when I got to the top floor at 488 West Eighteenth, but it would have looked the same in the middle of the night. No daylight came through the windows. The glass panes in their lower halves had been replaced with mirrors, the upper panes painted the same lemon yellow as the walls.

“We can’t have anyone seeing in here,” Julia said. “Not even the sun. Not even the Lord God.”

She gave me a cup of tea, put me in a chair, sat on the daybed with her feet tucked under her. No harem pajamas this time. She was wearing snug black slacks and a fuchsia blouse. The blouse was silk, unbuttoned at the throat, and there didn’t look to be anything under it that God or the surgeons hadn’t given her.

I had beeped TJ, and there had been several phone calls back and forth. And now I had been granted an audience with Her Majesty.

“Roger Prysock,” I said.

“Wasn’t there an Arthur Prysock?” she wondered. “A musician, I seem to recall.”

“This one’s Roger.”

“A relative, perhaps.”

“Anything’s possible,” I said. “Roger the Dodger, they call him.”

“Called him. He’s dead.”

“Shot down on the street while he was using the phone. Three or four in the chest and an extra for insurance. In the back of the head. Does that sound familiar?”

“It might ring a muted bell. How’s that tea?”

“It’s fine. He was a tall man, dark hair and eyes. Good-looking. Dressed well, if not as flashily as other members of his profession.”

“Profession,” she said archly.

“He died on a street that’s been a hookers’ stroll for as long as I can remember. Now who else do we know who was tall and dark and an Ivy League dresser and died just like that, on the same kind of street?”