A Drop of the Hard Stuff

“Half of that’s true.”

“The Jersey City part?”

“I spoke to a journalist who knows him. He hangs around the courthouse, does favors, arranges things.”

“Lot of guys like that,” Redmond said. “Hardly an endangered species on that side of the river. Vann, it says. How’d that turn into Steve?”

“His mother named him Evander,” I said, “and he knocked that down to one syllable, and put a second N on it to make it clear that it was his first name.”

“Could be Dutch otherwise. Van Steffens.”

“I can’t be sure of this,” I said, “but I think it dropped down to two syllables before one of them disappeared. From Evander to Evan.”

“Evan Steffens.” He nodded slowly. “Which doesn’t have far to go to become Even Steven.”

“When Jack wrote about it,” I said, “he started out by saying he’d call his partner S. And he did, just using the single initial all the way through. Toward the end, though, he referred to him as E.S.”

“Which could stand for Even Steven.”

“But who uses initials for a nickname? Once I thought of that—”

“Yeah, I can see how you got there. Okay, let me get another drink, because the one is barely a memory at this point. And then you can lay the whole thing out for me.”

By the time I was done his second drink was mostly gone. I’d switched from Coke to coffee, and my cup was empty, too.

“Ellery gets sober,” Redmond said, “and he wants to get right with God. What’s he gonna do, turn himself in for the Love Nest Murders?”

“Not necessarily. He hasn’t even gotten specific with his sponsor. But he wants to find some way to make amends for what he did that night.”

“How does Steffens find out?”

“They’re both in a world where word gets around,” I said. “ ‘Hey, you hear about High-Low Jack? He’s going up to all the assholes he gave a screwing to years ago, looking to make things up to them.’ Or he could have gone to Steffens himself. ‘I just wanted to tell you that something may come out about what we did on Jane Street, but you’ve got nothing to worry about, because I’ll be sure to keep your name out of it.’ ”

“If I’m Steffens, I don’t know that I find that tremendously reassuring.”

“No, of course not. If Jack ever tells anybody with a badge what he did, how long before they get the rest out of him?”

“Or even if he doesn’t, Matt. If it lands on my desk, first thing I do is look at his known associates. Maybe Steffens’s name comes up, maybe it doesn’t, but if you’re Steffens, how can you know it won’t?”

“One way to make sure.”

“And it would have worked if it hadn’t been for Stillman. Down-and-out ex-con living in a furnished room—you know how those get solved. Someone gets drunk and talks too much. Steffens never talked about Jane Street, so why should he talk about High-Low Jack?”

“He wouldn’t.”

“No, he’d have gotten away with it, and I’m not happy about it, but the fact is a lot of people get away with a lot of murders. Including the ones that don’t make it into the book as murders, which I guess is the case with Gregory Stillman. But the other one came first, didn’t it? Sattenstein?”

“And that’s a murder,” I said, “but it’ll wind up on somebody else’s tab.”

“The guy they grabbed for the other muggings. But you say he claims Sattenstein wasn’t his work. Well, they’ve got him cold on the others, and by the time he gets out of prison he’ll be too old to mug anybody, so it hardly matters. As far as the cops downtown are concerned, he did Sattenstein along with the others, and that case is closed.”

“Sattenstein called me,” I said. “The last thing I’d asked him was where the name High-Low Jack came from, and he didn’t know.”

“And then he remembered?”

“I’ll never know, because I didn’t get back to him in time. My guess is he didn’t, but he thought of someone who’d know.”

“Steffens.”

“Sattenstein was a fence,” I said. “If he knew Jack, he probably knew some of the people he worked with. ‘Hey, where’d Jack get that nickname? I figured you’d know, seeing as how they used to call you Even Steven.’ ”

“Not too hard for Steffens to set up a meeting in Sattenstein’s neighborhood. Not too hard to get into Stillman’s place either. ‘Hello, Gregory? I’m a police officer investigating the murder of a friend of yours. I collected some belongings of his from his super, and there are a couple of articles here that I’d like to turn over to you.’ Or ‘He had this notebook, and there’s something he wrote that I’d like to discuss with you.’ Stillman would have let him in.”

“No question.”

“And then a choke hold? That would work, and it wouldn’t show up, not after the poor bastard spent a few hours hanging with a belt around his neck. And then to top everything off the son of a bitch tried to buy you a drink.”

“Shows you the depths a person can sink to,” I said, “once he starts off with a simple act of murder.”

“Maker’s Mark, you said?”