Read Online The Devil Knows You're Dead by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Lawrence Block
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective, Private Investigators, Short Stories, Hard-Boiled, Large Type Books, New York, New York (State), New York (N.Y.), Scudder; Matt (Fictitious character)
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each. I’ll wear out some shoe leather and start earning the thousand dollars Tom Sadecki gave me. And I want to get to a meeting, and then tonight I’ve got my usual Sunday dinner date with Jim Faber.”
“Well, I might go to the gym,” she said, “or I might say the hell with it and go straight to the museum. Then I’ll come home and plant myself in front of the television set. How come a television binge doesn’t seem nearly as degenerate when the programs are British?”
“It’s the way they talk.”
“It must be.
American Gladiators
would feel like an edifying experience if they got Alistair Cooke to introduce it. Call me tonight, if you get the chance, or I’ll talk to you in the morning. And say hello to Jim for me.”
I said I would. I somehow failed to mention my two o’clock date with an old girlfriend.
AGES ago, when phone calls cost a dime, you made them from little glassed-in booths with doors that closed against traffic noise and weather. Maybe it’s still that way in other parts of the country, but in New York the phone booths gradually evolved out of existence, providing less and less shelter with each model change. Now all you get is a phone mounted on a post, and one of these days they’ll get rid of the post.
The phone I was interested in was on the southwest corner of Eleventh Avenue and West Fifty-fifth Street, and I knew it was the one Glenn Holtzmann had been using on the night he died because it was the only one around. It was about ten-thirty by the time I walked across town from Elaine’s. I looked over at the phone while I waited for the light to change, then crossed the street and took the receiver off the hook. I listened to the dial tone and put it back.
For all the years I’d lived at the Northwestern, I had spent precious little time on Eleventh Avenue. This stretch of it ran to auto showrooms and warehouses, building-supply outlets and collision repair shops. They were all closed now, as they would have been on the night of the shooting.
I walked around some, trying to get the feel of the crime scene. There was nothing to identify it as such, no chalk outline to mark where the body had lain, no yellow plastic Crime Scene tape.
No visible bloodstains.
I could picture him standing there, lifting the receiver, digging in his pocket for a quarter, dropping the coin in the slot. Then something makes him turn—a sound, perhaps, or movement glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. He starts to turn, and even as he’s turning a shot rings out, and he’s hit.
The bullet takes him on the right side below the rib cage. It pierces the liver and severs the portal vein, the large blood vessel that services that organ.
A mortal wound, in all likelihood, but he won’t live long enough to die of it. He reels toward the shooter, who fires twice more from point-blank range. One slug glances off a rib and plows through muscle tissue, doing little serious damage. The other finds the heart and causes virtually instantaneous death.
He’s on the ground now, sprawled full length on the sidewalk with his feet at the base of the post on which the phone is mounted. There’s a fourth and final shot, a
coup de grâce
, fired into the back of his neck. It’s as loud as the others, but he doesn’t hear it.
Hard to say how long he lay there, or how much blood spilled out of him. Dead bodies don’t bleed much, as a rule, and the heart wound would have brought death quickly, but I couldn’t guess how much blood might have gouted from the liver wound before the heart stopped its pumping. In any event he lay there, first bleeding and then not bleeding, until someone picked up the dangling receiver and phoned it in.
Tom Sadecki had given me the address of the building where his brother rented a room. It was on Fifty-sixth just off the avenue, a red-brick old-law tenement with an identical building on its right and a rubble-strewn vacant lot on its left. A flight of steps led down to
“Well, I might go to the gym,” she said, “or I might say the hell with it and go straight to the museum. Then I’ll come home and plant myself in front of the television set. How come a television binge doesn’t seem nearly as degenerate when the programs are British?”
“It’s the way they talk.”
“It must be.
American Gladiators
would feel like an edifying experience if they got Alistair Cooke to introduce it. Call me tonight, if you get the chance, or I’ll talk to you in the morning. And say hello to Jim for me.”
I said I would. I somehow failed to mention my two o’clock date with an old girlfriend.
AGES ago, when phone calls cost a dime, you made them from little glassed-in booths with doors that closed against traffic noise and weather. Maybe it’s still that way in other parts of the country, but in New York the phone booths gradually evolved out of existence, providing less and less shelter with each model change. Now all you get is a phone mounted on a post, and one of these days they’ll get rid of the post.
The phone I was interested in was on the southwest corner of Eleventh Avenue and West Fifty-fifth Street, and I knew it was the one Glenn Holtzmann had been using on the night he died because it was the only one around. It was about ten-thirty by the time I walked across town from Elaine’s. I looked over at the phone while I waited for the light to change, then crossed the street and took the receiver off the hook. I listened to the dial tone and put it back.
For all the years I’d lived at the Northwestern, I had spent precious little time on Eleventh Avenue. This stretch of it ran to auto showrooms and warehouses, building-supply outlets and collision repair shops. They were all closed now, as they would have been on the night of the shooting.
I walked around some, trying to get the feel of the crime scene. There was nothing to identify it as such, no chalk outline to mark where the body had lain, no yellow plastic Crime Scene tape.
No visible bloodstains.
I could picture him standing there, lifting the receiver, digging in his pocket for a quarter, dropping the coin in the slot. Then something makes him turn—a sound, perhaps, or movement glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. He starts to turn, and even as he’s turning a shot rings out, and he’s hit.
The bullet takes him on the right side below the rib cage. It pierces the liver and severs the portal vein, the large blood vessel that services that organ.
A mortal wound, in all likelihood, but he won’t live long enough to die of it. He reels toward the shooter, who fires twice more from point-blank range. One slug glances off a rib and plows through muscle tissue, doing little serious damage. The other finds the heart and causes virtually instantaneous death.
He’s on the ground now, sprawled full length on the sidewalk with his feet at the base of the post on which the phone is mounted. There’s a fourth and final shot, a
coup de grâce
, fired into the back of his neck. It’s as loud as the others, but he doesn’t hear it.
Hard to say how long he lay there, or how much blood spilled out of him. Dead bodies don’t bleed much, as a rule, and the heart wound would have brought death quickly, but I couldn’t guess how much blood might have gouted from the liver wound before the heart stopped its pumping. In any event he lay there, first bleeding and then not bleeding, until someone picked up the dangling receiver and phoned it in.
Tom Sadecki had given me the address of the building where his brother rented a room. It was on Fifty-sixth just off the avenue, a red-brick old-law tenement with an identical building on its right and a rubble-strewn vacant lot on its left. A flight of steps led down to
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