'I think they said four, five days. What's your interest?'
'Getting him on prints, I figured it had to be fairly recent.'
'Oh, prints'll hold a week, easy. Longer sometimes, depending on the fish.
Imagine fingerprinting a floater—shit, if I did that I'd be a long time before I wanted anything to eat. Imagine doing the autopsy.'
'Well, that shouldn't be hard. Somebody must have hit him on the head.'
'Considering who he was, I'd say there's no question. He wasn't the type to go swimming and accidentally hit his head on a pier. What'll you bet they don't come up with a conclusive homicide tag for it, though?'
'Why's that?'
'Because they don't want this sitting in the open file for the next fifty years, and who wants to bust their balls finding out what happened to an asshole like the Spinner? So he's dead, so nobody's gonna cry for him.'
'I always got along with him.'
'He was a cheap little crook. Whoever bumped him did the world a favor.'
'I suppose you're right.'
I got the manila envelope out from under the rug. The tape didn't want to budge, so I got my penknife from the dresser and slit the envelope open along the fold. Then I just sat on the edge of the bed with the envelope in my hand for a few minutes.
I didn't really want to know what was in it.
After a while I opened it, and I spent the next three hours in my room going over the contents. They answered a few questions, but not nearly as many as they asked. Finally I put everything back in the envelope and returned it to its place under the rug.
The cops would sweep Spinner Jablon under the rug, and that's what I wanted to do with his envelope.
There were a lot of things I could do, and what I most wanted to do was nothing at all, so until my options had time to sort themselves out in my head the envelope could stay in its hiding place.
I stretched out on the bed with a book, but after I'd gone through a few pages I realized I was reading without paying attention. And my little room was beginning to feel even smaller than usual. I went out and walked around for a while, and then I hit a few places and had a few drinks. I started out in Polly's Cage, across the street from the hotel, then Kilcullen's, then Spiro and Antares.
Somewhere along the way I stopped at a deli for a couple of sandwiches. I wound up in Armstrong's, and I was still there when Trina ended her shift. I told her to sit down and I'd buy her a drink.
'But just one, Matt. I got places to go, people to see.'
'So do I, but I don't want to go there and I don't want to see them.'
'You could be just the slightest bit drunk.'
'It's not impossible.'
I went to the bar and got our drinks. Plain bourbon for me, a vodka and tonic for her. I came back to the table, and she picked up her glass.
She said, 'To crime?'
'You've really only got time for one?'
'I don't even have time for the one, but one's got to be the limit.'
'Then let's not make it to crime. Let's make it absent friends.'
Chapter 3
I suppose I had a fair idea what was in the envelope before I opened it.
When a man who sidesteps through life by keeping his ears open suddenly turns up wearing a three-hundred- dollar suit, it's not hard to figure out how he got it. After a lifetime of selling information, the Spinner had come up with something too good to sell. Instead of peddling information, he had turned to peddling silence.
Blackmailers are
richer than stool pigeons, because their commodity is not a one-time thing; they can rent it out to the same person over and over for a lifetime.
The only problem is that their lifetimes tend to shrink. The Spinner became a bad actuarial risk the day he got successful. First aggravation and ulcers, then a dented skull and a long swim.
A blackmailer needs insurance. He has to have some leverage that will convince his victim not to terminate the blackmail by terminating the blackmailer.
Somebody—a lawyer, a girlfriend, anyone—sits in the background with whatever evidence has the victim squirming in the first place. If the blackmailer dies, the evidence goes to the cops and the shit hits the fan. Every blackmailer makes a point of letting the victim know about this added element. Sometimes there's no confederate, no envelope to be mailed, because evidence lying around is dangerous to all concerned, so the blackmailer just says that there is and figures the mark won't call his bluff. Sometimes the mark believes him, and sometimes he doesn't.
Spinner Jablon probably told his mark about the magic envelope from the beginning. But in February he had started to sweat. He had decided that somebody was trying to kill him, or was likely to try, so he had put his
