Read Online The Devil Knows You're Dead by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online

throughout the day and night. He’ll stretch out on a bench or curl up in a doorway and nap like a cat.
    “He likes the open air. Even in the winter he’s out of his room all the time. It’s only the coldest nights’ll drive him inside. As bitter as it gets he’ll just put on more clothes until he’s got everything he owns stuffed under that army jacket of his. And he’ll walk to keep warm. Hours on end he’ll walk, mile after mile.
    “Day in, day out, he wore that army jacket. I never saw him without it. Well, they took it away from him and they burned it. They took everything he was wearing and tossed it in the incinerator. What else were they gonna do? When I saw him they had him in all clean clothes. They’d bathed him and cleaned him up. They didn’t shave him or cut his hair because they’re not allowed to do that, not without his consent, but that’s Bellevue and Rikers. When he’s in a permanent facility the rules’ll be different.
    “They burned up his army jacket. Well, what else were they supposed to do with it, the state it was in? But it’s hard to imagine George without it.
    “You can say my brother’s crazy, and I guess he is, but he’s been this way all his life and they’re not about to change him now. I’m not saying it’ll kill him to be locked up because maybe it won’t, maybe he’ll just pull himself a little further away from reality and crawl deeper inside his own mind and create his own world in there.”
    He looked straight at me. With his glasses off he looked more vulnerable, but somehow tougher, too.
    He said, “I don’t want to glamorize the life he leads, make him sound like some kind of Noble Savage. It’s a horrible life. He lives like an animal, he lives in fear and torment. If he doesn’t wind up in a locked ward with a Thorazine straitjacket he’ll fall in front of a subway train or die of exposure, unless he gets really lucky and some teenage sadists set him on fire. Jesus Christ, Matt, I wouldn’t lead his life for the world, but it’s his life, do you follow me? It’s his fucking life so let him fucking live it.”
     
Chapter 6
     
    “So I said I’d look into it,” I told Elaine. “He put a thousand dollars on the table and I picked it up. Don’t ask me why.”
    “Compassion,” she said. “A sense of social responsibility. The need to see justice done.”
    “What else could it be?”
    “Maybe you wanted the money.”
    “I was taught to grab what came my way,” I allowed, “but it’s a hard way to turn a buck. You work overtime trying to give the client his money’s worth and walk away feeling fraudulent because you haven’t accomplished anything. The fact that there was nothing to accomplish ought to carry some weight, but somehow it doesn’t.”
    “You think George did it?”
    “I think so, yes. For all the reasons I gave Tom.”
    “But there’s room for doubt.”
    “Not much room,” I said. “Not much doubt.”
    We had dinner in the Village and hit a couple of jazz clubs on Bleecker Street, then caught a cab back to her place. In the morning she made a pot of strong coffee, toasted a couple of poppy-seed bagels, and cut a papaya in half. Sunlight streamed in through the living-room window, but Elaine, reading the
Times
we’d picked up on the way home, informed me it wouldn’t last. Cloud cover would settle in by midday, with a strong probability of showers in the late afternoon and evening. “Clearing tomorrow,” she said. “A lot of good that does me. Tomorrow’s Monday. The museum’s closed.”
    She was taking another photography course, this one called “The Urban Landscape Through the Camera’s Eye.” There was a display uptown at the Museum of the City of New York and she was supposed to see it before her next class.
    “I guess I’ll get rained on,” she said. “What about you?”
    “I think I’ll go walk around my neighborhood.”
    “I figured you might. Hell’s Kitchen or Clinton?”
    “Maybe a little of