A Drop of the Hard Stuff

everything after I’d established that the carpet hadn’t been hiding anything.

The next place I looked was the dresser, a dark wood chest of drawers, its top scarred by neglected cigarettes. I took out each drawer in turn, stacking its contents on the floor, turning over the empty drawer to check its bottom, then putting everything back. One drawer, the wood warped with age, didn’t want to come out, but I coaxed it, and had no more luck with it than with the one before it, but the next drawer, just one up from the bottom, was the charm. There was a 9?12 manila envelope Scotch-taped to its underside. An envelope just like it had held Jack’s Eighth Step.

I picked at the tape, freed the envelope. One wing of the metal clasp broke while I was opening it. If the contents turned out to be the new tenant’s can’t-miss formula for picking winners, I’d be hard put to leave it as I found it. But I wasn’t really worried on that score.

The envelope held three sheets of unlined notebook paper, covered in what I was able to recognize as Jack’s careful handwriting. There was a newspaper clipping as well, and I took a look at it before I read what Jack had written.

It was from the Post, and it ran to the better part of a full page. I read it all the way through, although I could have stopped after the first paragraph.

I remembered the case.

When I’d finished the clipping I read the first paragraph of what Jack had written, then decided the rest could wait. I put the dresser drawer back, then returned everything to the envelope, fastened it with what remained of the clasp, and tucked the envelope inside my shirt. I can’t say it improved the fit of that garment, but with the shirt buttoned over it there wasn’t much chance anyone would take notice. And I could leave Jack’s old room as empty- handed as I’d entered it.

I let myself out. Pardo was a few steps down the hall.

“Nothing,” I told him.

“What did I tell you? These people had anything, they’d live somewhere else.”

XXXVII

I WALKED DOWNTOWN, looking for someplace to have a cup of coffee while I read what Jack had written. I wound up at Theresa’s. I skirted the counter, where Frankie Dukacs was giving his full attention to a bowl of soup, and took a booth where all he’d see of me was the back of my head.

I didn’t want a meal, but I remembered the last time I’d been here and ordered a piece of pie with my coffee. They didn’t have strawberry-rhubarb, but they had pecan, and I decided that would do just fine.

The newspaper clipping told of a man and woman who’d been shot dead in what the Post called a “Bohemian love nest” on Jane Street. It was Bohemian because it was not only in the Village, but in a back house, a onetime carriage house located to the rear of the Federal-period town house that fronted on the street. And it was a love nest because the two victims were nude, and in bed, and the man was married to somebody else.

He was a big player in the financial world. His name was G. Decker Raines, with the G standing for Gordon, and his name got in the papers a lot in connection with corporate takeovers and leveraged buyouts. Her name was Marcy Cantwell, and she’d come to New York to be an actress. What she’d become instead was a waitress, but she’d taken some classes and had a turn in some showcase and workshop productions.

One night she waited on Raines’s table, and caught his eye, and he was back the next evening all by himself. He was still there at closing time, and walked her back to where she was staying at the Evangeline House, a residence for young women on West Thirteenth Street. Male guests weren’t allowed upstairs, but they were able to sit together in the parlor.

A week later she was living in the Jane Street back house, and she wasn’t waiting tables anymore.

A few months later she was dead, and so was he.

I didn’t get all of this from the clipping, or from Jack’s account of the incident. I read through everything a couple of times, then got myself down to the microfilm room at the library, where I read everything the Times had. The story had stayed alive a long time. It couldn’t really miss. She was a beauty and he was a rich guy, and his wife was socially prominent and his kids went to private schools, and best of all the case never got solved. That meant it might be just what it looked like, a home invasion that turned violent, but it might be something else—a contract killing arranged by a business rival of Raines’s, or something spawned by jealousy, either the wife’s or that of a prior boyfriend of Marcy’s. She’d had a couple, including a bartender with a history of violence toward women, and the cops knocked on a lot of doors and asked a lot of questions, but they never caught a break.

Or maybe I should say we and not they, because I was still with the NYPD when it happened, and in fact still attached to the Sixth Precinct. Our house caught the case, but I was never assigned to it, and we didn’t have it long before all the publicity led the Major Case Squad to take it away from us.

A while ago, this was. Before the bullet that killed Estrellita Rivera swept me along in its wake, out of my job and marriage and into a room at the Northwestern. Before Jack Ellery got tagged for something else, and went away for it, and came out and got sober. A full dozen years ago, and more than enough time for the case to go very cold. There were cold cases where you knew who did it, even though you couldn’t do anything about it. And there were cases where you didn’t know a thing, and this was one of those.

But I knew. Jack did it. Jack and Steve.

“I’m writing this out separately,” Jack’s account started out. “This is part of my Fourth Step, and I’ll discuss this in my Fourth Step and talk about it with G. when I do my Fifth Step. But there is someone else involved, so I am going to write this out now just for myself. And of course for my Higher Power, who might be reading over my shoulder, or listening to my thoughts.”

Then there was some speculation on the nature of that Higher Power, or God. It was interesting enough, but nothing special, and really just Jack thinking some thoughts of his own on paper.

After a couple of paragraphs of that, he got back to the matter at hand. He told how an acquaintance, whom he neither named nor identified, had pointed out Marcy Cantwell as a former actress-waitress who now had plenty of time for auditions and acting classes, because she’d found a sugar daddy with a fat wallet. And how he’d shared this information with a friend. “I will call him S.,” he added, and that’s what he called him for the rest of the document, never revealing any personal information about him, never describing or identifying him.

He didn’t say how they got the keys, only that they’d had access to the locked passage leading back to the carriage house and to the house itself. It was early evening when they let themselves in, and they burst into the bedroom before either of the two lovers was aware of their presence.