Even the Wicked

Even the Wicked

A Matthew Scudder Crime Novel

Lawrence Block

For Bill Hoffman

With thanks to Joan Acocella,

Ron Brogan, andMemphis Jim Evans

Epigraph

1 On a Tuesday night in August I was sitting…

2 One newspaper column started the whole thing.

3 "I'll tell you," he said, "I just don't know what…

4 Elaine was still up when I got home, watching a…

5 The next day was Sunday, and I didn't have a…

6 Forty-eight hours later I'd made two more visits to the Horatio…

7 "It's like he saw it coming," Kevin Dahlgren said.

8 The big news over the weekend had to do with…

9 "An Open Letter to the People ofNew York ."…

10 It took me awhile to get away from Marty McGraw.

11 "The first night I went to Whitfield's place," I told Elaine.

12 Elaine was gone by the time I woke up.

13 It still didn't have to mean anything.

14 By the time we got out of there TJ was…

15 "It could have been murder," I said, "even if I…

16 The phone rang the next morning while we were having breakfast.

17 The letter had obviously been written after its author had….

18 The next couple of days were a three-ring circus for the media.

19 I couldn't do much in what was left of that afternoon.

20 I called Viaticom a few minutes after nine the next morning…

21 I stayed put over the weekend.

22 You'd have thought it was a social call.

23 It was a long night.

24 You could almost say he'd been asking for it.

25 "Well, look who's here," he said.

26 SCUDDER: Please state your name for the record.

27 "You like irony," I told Ray Gruliow.

Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.

—Willa Cather, One of Ours

1

On a Tuesday night in August I was sitting in the living room with TJ, watching two guys hit each other on one of the Spanish-language cable channels, and enjoying the fresh air more than the fight. A heat wave had punished the city for two weeks, finally breaking over the weekend. Since then we'd had three perfect days, with bright blue skies and low humidity and the temperature in the seventies. You'd have called it ideal weather anywhere; in the middle of a New York summer, you could only call it a miracle.

I'd spent the day taking advantage of the weather, walking around the city. I got home and showered in time to drop into a chair and let Peter Jennings explain the world to me. Elaine joined me for the first fifteen minutes, then went into the kitchen to start dinner. TJ dropped by just around the time she was adding the pasta to the boiling water, insisting that he wasn't hungry and couldn't stay long anyway.

Elaine, who had heard this song before, doubled the recipe on the spot, and TJ let himself be persuaded

to take a plate and clean it several times.

"Trouble is," he told her, "you too good of a cook. Now on, I wait to come by until mealtimes is come and gone. I don't watch out, I be fat."

He has a ways to go. He's a street kid, lean and limber, indistinguishable at first glance from any of the young blacks you'll see hanging around Times Square, shilling for the monte dealers, running short cons, looking for a way to get over, or just to get by. He's much more than that as well, but for all I know there may be more to many of them than meets the eye. He's the one I know; with the others, all I get to see is what's on the surface.

And TJ's own surface, for that matter, is apt to change, chameleon like, with his surroundings. I have watched him slip effortlessly from hip-hop street patter to a Brooks Brothers accent that would not be out of place on an Ivy League campus. His hairstyle, too, has varied over the several years I've known him, ranging from an old-style Afro through assorted versions of the high-top fade. A year or so ago he started helping Elaine at her shop, and on his own decided that a kinder, gentler

'do was more appropriate. He's kept it cropped relatively short ever since, while his dress ranges from the preppy outfits he wears to work to the in-your-face attire they favor on the Deuce. This evening he was dressed for success in khakis and a button-down shirt. A day or two earlier, when I'd seen him last, he was a vision in baggy camo trousers and a sequined jacket.

"Wish they was speakin' English," he complained. "Why they got to talk in Spanish?"

"It's better this way," I said.

"You tellin' me you know what they sayin'?"

"A word here and there. Mostly it's just noise."

"And that's how you like it?"

"The English-speaking announcers talk too much," I said. "They're afraid the audience won't be able to figure out what's going on if they're not chattering away all the time. And they say the same things over and over. 'He's not working hard enough to establish the left jab.' I don't think I've watched five fights in the past ten years when the announcer hasn't observed that the fighter should be using the jab more.

It must be the first thing they teach them in broadcasting school."

"Maybe this dude sayin' the same thing in Spanish."