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

pausing along the way for a hot dog and a papaya drink. I checked at the desk for messages but nobody had called. I picked up a container of coffee at the deli next door and carried it across the street to the little park adjacent to the Parc Vendôme. I found a place to sit and took the lid off my coffee, but it was too hot to drink. I set it down alongside me on the bench and got out my notebook.
    I jotted things down, thinking on paper, beginning with the assumption that George Sadecki was innocent. Trying to prove it was a waste of time; what I had to do was find someone else who could have done it. Someone with a reason to kill Glenn Holtzmann, or someone who might have done so with no more reason than George had.
    Glenn Holtzmann. From where I sat I could see the top floors of his apartment building. If I turned around I could see the table at the Morning Star where we’d had our last conversation. Lisa had lost the baby, he’d told me. I had felt for him that afternoon, but still had remained disinclined to get close to him. I’d felt distanced from him, and was happy to keep him at a distance. I hadn’t wanted to get to know him.
    Now it looked as though I had to. A homicide investigation, I’d reminded Joe, properly starts with the victim. To find a killer you look for someone with a reason to kill. To learn the reason you first learn who the victim is.
    If someone had a reason.
    But maybe he had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He could have been the victim of a failed robbery attempt. Joe had made it sound unlikely, ridiculing the notion of a holdup man who would take the time for a
coup de grâce
, then dash off without retrieving the money. What he’d said made sense, but that’s more than most criminals do. They’re disorganized. They act impulsively, operate irrationally, and change course abruptly. A relative handful are stable and well organized, but the great majority do something stupid every time they leave the house.
    Not that a would-be mugger was the only sort of person who might have killed Holtzmann for no good reason. He could simply have spoken out of turn in a city where altogether too many people walk about armed. Any kind of argument—over the use of a public telephone, for example—had the potential to turn violent.
    Or he could have been killed by mistake. That had happened a few years back at a restaurant in Murray Hill. Four men, three of them furriers and the fourth their accountant, had just taken a table and ordered a round of drinks. Two men came in the door and one took out an automatic weapon and sprayed the furriers’ table, killing the four men and wounding a woman at the table next to theirs.
    It was a very obvious mob hit, and for a week or two investigators probed for mob infiltration of the fur industry, or evidence linking any of the dead men with one of the five crime families. As it turned out, none of them had ever come any closer to organized crime than buying a candy bar from a vending machine. The intended target had been four other men, principals in a mobbed-up construction firm in Jersey City, who had been sitting on the other side of the restaurant when the hit occurred. The shooter, it turned out, was dyslexic, and had turned left when he should have turned right. (A DEADLY MISKATE was the
Post
’s headline.)
    Well, these things happen. Everybody makes miskates.
     
     
    SO there were two ways to approach it. I could look to the victim or at the event itself. I was about ready to flip a coin when I saw a familiar face no more than twenty yards away. Hair like white Brillo, high cheekbones, a narrow nose, hornrimmed glasses, skin the color of my coffee. It was Barry, George Sadecki’s friend, and he was sitting on an upturned milk crate, with a three-foot concrete cube serving him for a table. He had a chessboard set up on it and he was smoking a cigarette and studying the pieces on the board.
    I walked over and greeted him by name and he