Time to Murder and Create

I flipped the dollar into the air and caught it. "I'm not George Raft, either," I said. "Who were you expecting?"

He looked at me, and I tried to get something out of his face. He looked even better than his newspaper photos, and a lot better than the candid shots I had of him. He was sitting behind a gray steel desk in an office furnished with standard City-issue goods. He could have afforded to redecorate it himself—a lot of people in his position did that. I don't know what it said about him that he hadn't, or what it was supposed to say.

I said, "Is that today's Times? If you were expecting a different man with a silver dollar, you couldn't have read the paper very carefully. Third page of the second section, toward the bottom of the page."

"I don't understand what this is all about."

I pointed at the paper. "Go ahead. Third page, second section."

I stayed on my feet while he found the story and read it. I'd seen it myself over breakfast, and I might have missed it if I hadn't been looking for it. I hadn't known whether it would make the paper or not, but there were three paragraphs identifying the corpse from theEast River as Jacob "Spinner" Jablon and giving a few of the highlights of his career.

I watched carefully while Huysendahl read the squib. There was no way his reaction could have been

anything other than legitimate. The color drained instantly from his face, and a pulse hammered in his temple. His hands clenched so violently that the paper tore. It certainly seemed to mean that he hadn't known Spinner was dead, but it could also mean he hadn't expected the body to come up and was suddenly realizing what a pot he was in.

"God," he said. "That's what I was afraid of. That's why I wanted—oh, Christ!"

He wasn't looking at me and he wasn't talking to me. I had the feeling that he didn't remember I was in the room with him. He was looking into the future and watching it go down the drain.

"Just what I was afraid of," he said again. "I kept telling him that. If anything happened to him, he said, a friend of his would know what to do with those…

those pictures. But he had nothing to fear from me, I told him he had nothing to fear from me. I would have paid anything, and he knew that. But what would I do if he died? 'You better hope I live forever,' that's what he said." He looked up at me. "And now he's dead," he said. "Who are you?"

"Matthew Scudder."

"Are you from the police?"

"No. I left the department a few years ago."

He blinked. "I don't know… I don't know why you're here," he said. He sounded lost and helpless, and I wouldn't have been surprised if he had started to weep.

"I'm sort of a freelance," I explained. "I do favors for people, pick up the odd dollar here and there."

"You're a private detective?"

"Nothing that formal. I keep my eyes and ears open, that sort of thing."

"I see."

"Here I read this item about my old friend Spinner Jablon, and I thought it might put me in a position to do a favor for a person. A favor for you, as a matter of fact."

"Oh?"

"I figured that maybe Spinner had something that you'd like to have your hands on. Well, you know, keeping my eyes and ears open and all that, you never know what I might come up with. What I figured was that there might be some kind of a reward offered."

"I see," he said. He started to say something else, but the phone rang. He picked it up and started to tell the secretary that he wasn't taking any calls, but this one was from His Honor and he decided not to duck it. I pulled up a chair and sat there while Theodore Huysendahl talked with the Mayor of New York. I didn't really pay much attention to the conversation. When it ended, he used the intercom to stress that he was out to all callers for the time being. Then he turned to me and sighed heavily.

"You thought there might be a reward."

I nodded. "To justify my time and expenses."

"Are you the… friend Jablon spoke of?"

"I was a friend of his," I admitted.

"Do you have those pictures?"

"Let's say I might know where they are."

He rested his forehead on the heel of his hand and scratched his hair. The hair was a medium brown, not too long and not too short; like his political position, it was designed to avoid irritating anyone. He looked at me over the tops of his glasses and sighed again.

Levelly he said, "I would pay a substantial sum to have those pictures in hand."

"I can understand that."

"The reward would be… a generous one."

"I thought it probably would be."

"I can afford a generous reward, Mr.… I don't think I got your name."

"Matthew Scudder."

"Of course. I'm usually quite good at names, actually." His eyes narrowed.

"As I said, Mr. Scudder, I can afford a generous reward. What I cannot afford is for that material to remain in existence." He drew a breath and straightened up in his chair. "I am going to be the next governor of the State ofNew York ."

"So a lot of people say."