Eight Million Ways to Die (Matthew Scudder #5)

My ex-wife Anita. Chance, the pimp who'd killed Kim Dakkinen. And somebody named Faber. I didn't know anybody named Faber, unless he was some drunk who'd become a long-lost buddy during my drunken wanderings.

I discarded the slip with his number and weighed a trip downstairs against the hassle of placing a call through the hotel operator. If I hadn't poured out the bourbon I might have had a drink just about then. Instead I went downstairs and called Anita from the lobby booth.

It was a curious conversation. We were carefully polite, as we often are, and after we'd circled one another like first-round prizefighters she asked me why I'd called. "I'm just returning your call," I said. "I'm sorry it took me awhile."

"Returning my call?"

"There's a message that you called Monday."

There was a pause. Then she said, "Matt, we spoke Monday night. You called me back. Don't you remember?"

I felt a chill, as if someone had just scraped a piece of chalk on a blackboard. "Of course I remember," I said. "But how did this slip get back in my box? I thought you'd called a second time."

"No."

"I must have dropped the message slip and then some helpful idiot returned it to my box, and it got handed to me just now and I thought it was another call."

"That's what must have happened."

"Sure," I said. "Anita, I'd had a couple drinks when I spoke to you the other night. My memory's a little vague. You want to remind me what we talked about in case there's anything I forgot?"

We had talked about orthodontia for Mickey. I'd told her to get another opinion. I remembered that part of the conversation, I assured her. Was there anything else? I had said I was hoping to send more money soon, a more substantial contribution than I'd made lately, and paying for the kid's braces shouldn't be any problem. I told her I remembered that part, too, and she said that was about all, except that of course I'd talked to the children. Oh, sure, I told her. I remembered my conversation with the boys. And that was all? Well, then, my memory wasn't so bad after all, was it?

I was shaking when I hung up the phone. I sat there and tried to summon up a memory of the conversation she had just described and it was hopeless. Everything was a blank from the moment just before the third drink Sunday night to the time I'd come out of it in the hospital. Everything, all of it, gone.

I tore up the message slip, tore it in half again, put the scraps in my pocket. I looked at the other message. The number Chance had left was his service number. I called Midtown North instead. Durkin wasn't in but they gave me his home number.

He sounded groggy when he answered. "Gimme a second, lemme light a cigarette," he said. When he came back on the line he sounded all right. "I was watching teevee," he said, "and I went and fell asleep in front of the set. What's on your mind, Scudder?"

"That pimp's been trying to reach me. Chance."

"Trying to reach you how?"

"By phone. He left a number for me to call. His answering service. So he's probably in town, and if you want me to set him up-"

"We're not looking for him."

For an awful moment I thought I must have spoken to Durkin during my blackout, that one of us had called the other and I didn't remember it. But he went on talking and I realized that hadn't happened.

"We had him over at the station house and we sweated him," he explained. "We put out a pickup order but he wound up coming in on his own accord. He had a slick lawyer with him and he was pretty slick himself."

"You let him go?"

"We didn't have one damn thing to hold him on. He had an alibi for the whole stretch from several hours before the estimated time of death to six or eight hours after. The alibi looks solid and we haven't got anything to stack up against it. The clerk who checked Charles Jones into the Galaxy can't come up with a description. I mean he can't say for sure if the man he signed in was black or white. He sort of thinks he was white. How'd you like to hand that to the D.A.?"

"He could have had someone else rent the room. Those big hotels, they don't keep any track of who goes in and out."

"You're right. He could have had someone rent the room. He also could have had someone kill her."

"Is that what you figure he did?"

"I don't get paid to figure. I know we haven't got a case against the son of a bitch."

I thought for a moment. "Why would he call me?"

"How would I know?"

"Does he know I steered you to him?"

"He didn't hear it from me."

"Then what does he want with me?"

"Why don't you ask him yourself?"

It was warm in the booth. I cracked the door, let a little air in. "Maybe I'll do that."

"Sure. Scudder? Don't meet him in a dark alley, huh? Because if he's got some kind of a hard-on for you, you want to watch your back."

"Right."

"And if he does nail you, leave a dying message, will you? That's what they always do on television."

"I'll see what I can do."

"Make it clever," he said. "but not too clever, you know? Keep it simple enough so I can figure it out."

I dropped a dime and called his service. The woman with the smoker's rasp to her voice said, "Eight-oh-nine-two. May I help you?"

I said, "My name's Scudder. Chance called me and I'm returning his call."

She said she expected to be speaking to him soon and asked for my number. I gave it to her and went upstairs and stretched out on the bed.

A little less than an hour later the phone rang. "It's Chance," he said. "I want to thank you for returning my call."

"I just got the message an hour or so ago. Both of the messages."

"I'd like to speak with you," he said. "Face to face, that is."

"All right."

"I'm downstairs, I'm in your lobby. I thought we could get a drink or a cup of coffee in the neighborhood. Could you come down?"

"All right."

Chapter 10

He said, "You still think I killed her, don't you?"

"What does it matter what I think?"

"It matters to me."

I borrowed Durkin's line. "Nobody pays me to think."

We were in the back booth of a coffee shop a few doors from Eighth Avenue. My coffee was black. His was just a shade lighter than his skin tone. I'd ordered a toasted English muffin, figuring that I probably ought to eat something, but I hadn't been able to bring myself to touch it.

He said, "I didn't do it."

"All right."

"I have what you might call an alibi in depth. A whole roomful of people can account for my time that night. I wasn't anywhere near that hotel."

"That's handy."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Whatever you want it to mean."

"You're saying I could have hired it done."

I shrugged. I felt edgy, sitting across the table from him, but more than that I felt tired. I wasn't afraid of him.

"Maybe I could have. But I didn't."

"If you say so."

"God damn," he said, and drank some of his coffee. "She anything more to you than you let on that night?"

"No."

"Just a friend of a friend?"

"That's right."

He looked at me, and his gaze was like a too-bright light shining in my eyes. "You went to bed with her," he said. Before I could respond he said, "Sure, that's what you did. How else would she say thank you? The woman only spoke one language. I hope that wasn't the only compensation you got, Scudder. I hope she didn't pay the whole fee in whore's coin."

"My fees are my business," I said. "Anything that happened between us is my business."

He nodded. "I'm just getting a fix on where you're coming from, that's all."

"I'm not coming from anyplace and I'm not going anywhere. I did a piece of work and I was paid in full. The client's dead and I didn't have anything to do with that and it doesn't have anything to do with me. You say you had nothing to do with her death. Maybe that's true and maybe it isn't. I don't know and I don't have to know and I don't honestly give a damn. That's between you and the police. I'm not the police."

"You used to be."

"But I'm not anymore. I'm not the police and I'm not the dead girl's brother and I'm not some avenging angel with a flaming sword. You think it matters to me who killed Kim Dakkinen? You think I give a damn?"

"Yes."

I looked at him.

He said, "Yes, I think it matters to you. I think you care who killed her. That's why I'm here." He smiled gently. "See," he said, "what I want is to hire you, Mr. Matthew Scudder. I want you to find out who killed her."

I took a while before I believed he was serious. Then I did what I could to talk him out of it. If there was any kind of trail leading to Kim's killer, I told him, the police had the best chance of finding and following it. They had the authority and the manpower and the talent and the connections and the skills. I had none of the above.

"You're forgetting something," he said.

"Oh?"

"They won't be looking. Far as they're concerned, they already know who killed her. They got no evidence so they can't do anything with it, but that's their excuse not to kill themselves trying. They'll say, 'Well, we know Chance killed her but we can't prove it so let's work on something else.' God knows they got plenty other things to work on. And if they did work on it, all they'd be looking for is some way to hang it onto me. They wouldn't even look to see if there's somebody else on earth with a reason for wanting her dead."

"Like who?"

"That's what you would be looking to find out."

"Why?"

"For money," he said, and smiled again. "I wasn't asking you to work for free. I have a lot of money coming in, all of it cash. I can pay a good fee."

"That's not what I meant. Why would you want me on the case? Why would you want the killer found, assuming I had any chance of finding him? It's not to get you off the hook because you're not on the hook. The cops haven't got a case against you and they're not likely to come up with one. What's it to you if the case stays on the books as unsolved?"

His gaze was calm, steady. "Maybe I'm concerned about my reputation," he suggested.

"How? It looks to me as though your reputation gets a boost. If the word on the street is that you killed her and got away with it, the next girl who wants to quit your string is going to have something else to think about. Even if you didn't have anything to do with her murder, I can see where you'd be just as happy to take the credit for it."

He flicked his index finger a couple times against his empty coffee cup. He said, "Somebody killed a woman of mine. Nobody should be able to do that and get away with it."

"She wasn't yours when she got killed."

"Who knew that? You knew it and she knew it and I knew it. My other girls, did they know? Did the people in the bars and on the street know? Do they know now? Far as the world knows, one of my girls got killed and the killer's getting away with it."