but even if it was the right apartment it didn’t necessarily prove anything. I returned to the vestibule and buzzed him, and I’d given up and started for the door when the intercom cleared its mechanical throat. I stayed put, and whatever somebody said in 3-A was completely garbled by the time it worked its way downstairs. I couldn’t make out a word of it.
I answered in kind, making some noises that weren’t designed to be understood, and there was a long silence. Then, with what I could only assume was some reluctance, he buzzed me in.
I guess the neighborhood hadn’t changed too much, because I picked up the scent of mice and cabbage in the stairwell. Three-A was where I’d thought it would be, and I approached the door quietly and was standing well to the side when I knocked. I didn’t really expect him to shoot through the door, but Jack probably hadn’t expected to catch two bullets in the head either.
I heard footsteps not much louder than my own, and the sound of a peephole being drawn back. A judas, they sometimes call it, though I’ve never known why. Betrayal? Thirty pieces of silver?
I was standing where I couldn’t be shot, and hence couldn’t be seen either. I had my wallet out, open to an old card proclaiming my membership in the Fraternal Order of Police. Its only use, as far as I know, is to induce an impressionable officer to cut an errant motorist some slack. I said my name, Matthew Scudder, and held the card to the peephole. “Like to talk to you about Jack Ellery,” I said, and I had my wallet back in my pocket well before he’d managed to get the door open.
He was tall, six-two or six-three, big in the shoulders, small in the waist and hips. He had a rough-hewn face, but the big brown eyes could have belonged to Bambi; he looked not so much like a knockaround guy as like an actor who kept getting cast in that kind of role. He was holding the door with his left hand, and a look at his elaborately bandaged right hand explained why it had taken him so long to open it.
He looked at once frightened and relieved, and that fit his opening words: “I’ve been expecting you.”
But how? I hadn’t left a message. I said something to that effect, and he said, “Well, you or someone like you. A police officer.”
He waited for me to say something, and I didn’t, and he said, “Ever since I heard about Jack.”
I looked at him, his face, his bandaged hand, and I got it. I said, “You’re the guy who beat him up.”
XIII
BEFORE HE COULD tell me any more, I undid the work of the FOP card I’d flashed at him. I’d never said I was a cop, and there were times when I was willing to let someone retain that impression, but we were past the point where I felt comfortable sailing under the blue flag. I told him I was a former police officer now working privately, that I’d known Jack Ellery when we were boys together in the Bronx. “So you’re under no obligation to talk to me,” I said.
That last would have been just as true if I’d been the commissioner himself. And it was safe to say, because I could tell he was ready to talk. Eager, even.
First, though, he wanted me to come in and make myself comfortable. His apartment was the
He took me to the living room and pointed me toward an upholstered chair. He was going to make himself a cup of tea, he said, and would that suit me? Or there was beer, if I’d prefer that. I said tea would be fine.
There were two posters on the wall, both from shows at the Whitney, both artists even I could recognize— Mark Rothko and Edward Hopper. I studied them in turn, and I was still going back and forth between them when he put a cup of tea on the table beside me. He said it was Earl Grey and I said that was fine. The posters, he said, belonged to a woman who’d lived with him for just about two years.
“Then out of the blue she decided she was a lesbian. I mean, she was no kid. Younger’n me, but well up in her thirties, you know? How can you get to be that old and all along you’re a lesbian and you haven’t got a clue? How does that happen?”
“I gather it happens a lot.”
“Does it happen to guys?”
“I think everything happens to everybody,” I said, “but it seems to happen more often with women.”
He thought about it, shrugged. “Well, she left the posters here,” he said. “ ‘I’m done with ’em, Mark. You don’t want ’em, toss ’em.’ Why would I do that? They look okay. I’m used to them. That tea okay?”
“It’s fine.”
“You ever bust your hand? Just about everything you do becomes complicated. I still can’t tie my shoes. Thank God for loafers, huh?”
“Where did it happen, Mark?”
“Right here. He called me on the phone, said he’s got something to tell me, can he come over? I tried to get him to tell me over the phone, because it’s like he’s from a past life, you know? And I don’t remember him or that life with a whole lot of affection, so I’d just as soon hear whatever he’s got to say and be done with him. But no, this has to be face-to-face. I tell him I’m busy and he says okay, pick a time that works, just about any time at all will work for him. And I’m this close to telling him fuck off, leave me alone, whatever it is I don’t want to hear about it. This close.”
“But you told him to come over.”
“There was something made me think he’d be harder to shake than a summer cold, and I’m better off seeing him and getting it over and done with. And after I got off the phone with him I’m thinking, Hey, we used to be friends, and just because I’m living a different life these days, and there’s probably no place in it for a guy like High-Low Jack, that doesn’t mean I can’t be civil to him.”
High-Low Jack.
“So he comes in, and there’s something different about him, some light in his eyes. Makes me a little uneasy. But it’s been years, you know? Come in, good to see you, take a load off, have a beer. Of course he wouldn’t have a
