The Devil Knows You're Dead by Lawrence Block Page A

apartment?”
    “Maybe he was trying to call his apartment, tell his wife when he’d be home.”
    “How come he didn’t reach her?”
    “Maybe the line was busy. Maybe he had the number half-dialed when Boy George shot him. Who the hell knows, and what the hell difference does it make? God damn it, you’re doing just what I knew you would do, you’re trying to pick holes in a perfectly solid case.”
    “If it’s really solid I won’t be able to, will I?”
    “No, but you’ll make a real pain in the ass of yourself in the meantime.”
    I’m the one fly in the ointment, Tom Sadecki had said. I’m the pain in everybody’s ass.
    I said, “What do you know about Holtzmann, Joe?”
    “I don’t have to know anything about him. He’s the victim.”
    “That’s where a homicide investigation starts, isn’t it? With the victim?”
    “Not when you can cut to the chase. When you’ve already got the killer in custody, you don’t have to turn the victim inside out. Why the thoughtful expression?”
    “You know what’s wrong with the case, Joe?”
    “The only thing wrong with it is you’re taking an interest. Aside from that it’s perfect.”
    “What’s wrong with it,” I said, “is you solved it too fast. There are a lot of things you would have learned—about Holtzmann, about other people in the area—but you never had to pursue them because why bother? You already had the killer in custody.”
    “You think we’ve got the wrong man?”
    “No,” I said. “I think you’ve got the right man.”
    “You think the police work was slipshod? You think we missed something?”
    “No, I think the police work was excellent. But I think there are some avenues you haven’t needed to explore.”
    “And you figure you’ll take a little walk down them.”
    “Well, I took the man’s money,” I said. “I have to do something.”
     
     
    THE Donnell branch library is on Fifty-third off Fifth. I spent a couple of hours in the second-floor reading room going through all the local papers for the past ten days. Once I got past the hard news, most of which was already familiar to me, the bulk of the stories turned out to be non-stories, pieces about homelessness, about neighborhood gentrification, about crime in the streets. There were interviews with people who’d lived for years in the area’s tenements and apartment houses, with others who’d recently moved into Holtzmann’s high-rise, and with a few who lived on the street. Every columnist with an ax to grind found a way to hone it here. Some of it made interesting reading, but it didn’t tell me much I hadn’t already known.
    There was one essay I particularly liked, a
Times
Op-Ed piece by an advertising copywriter who was identified as residing within two blocks of the Holtzmann apartment building. He had been unemployed since late May, and he explained how his economic circumstances altered his perspective.
    “With every passing day,” he wrote, “I identify a little less strongly with Glenn Holtzmann, a little more closely with George Sadecki. When the news first broke, I was shocked and horrified. That could have been me on the sidewalk, I told myself. A man just past entering the prime of life, a professional man with a bright future, living in Clinton, the most exciting area of the most stimulating city in the world.
    “And as the hours and days slip by,” he went on, “it is a subtly different mirror in which I see myself. That could be me on Rikers Island, I find myself thinking. A man on the verge of middle age, an unemployed idler in a dwindling job market, drifting through the days in Hell’s Kitchen, the most unsettling area in the most desperate city on God’s earth. I still ache for the man who was killed, but I ache too for the man who killed him. I could have found myself in either man’s shoes, in Glenn Holtzmann’s well-polished wing tips or in George Sadecki’s thrift-shop sneakers.”
     
     
    I walked back to my hotel,