I told her war stories, sketched word portraits of some of the characters I’d known over the years, the unusual speci-mens I’d encountered on either side of the law. That way I could hold up my end of the conversation without revealing very much of myself, which was fine with me.
And we would go to bed.
One afternoon, with a Patsy Cline record playing in the background, she asked me what I figured we were doing. Just being together, I suggested.
“No,” she said. “You know what I mean. What’s the point? Why are you here?”
“Everybody’s got to be someplace.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know you are. I don’t have any answers. I’m here be-cause I want to be here, but I don’t know why that is.”
Patsy was singing about faded love.
“I hardly leave this apartment,” Lisa said. “I sit at the win-dow and look at New Jersey. I could be out making the rounds, showing my book to art directors, calling the people I know, trying to get some work. Tomorrow, I tell myself. Next week, next month. After the first of the year. What the hell, everybody knows there’s no work now. The economy’s a mess. Everybody knows that.”
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been looking for work, so how do I know it’s not out there? But how can I work up any enthu-siasm for the struggle when I’ve got all that money just sit-ting there?”
“If you’re not under any pressure—”
“I could be doing my own work,” she said. “But I don’t do that either. I sit around. I look at TV. I watch the sun go down. I wait for you to call. I hope you won’t call, but that’s what I’m waiting for. For you to call.”
I waited in similar fashion, waited for my own action, to call or not to call. I won’t call her today, I would decide. And sometimes I’d stick to my decision. And sometimes I wouldn’t.
“Why do you come over here, Matt?”
“I don’t know.”
“What am I, do you figure? Am I a drug? Am I a bottle of booze?”
“Maybe.”
“My father drank. I know I told you that.”
“Yes.”
“The other day when you kissed me I had the sense that there was something missing, and I realized what it was. It was the smell of whiskey on your breath. We don’t need a psychiatrist to figure that one out, do we?”
I didn’t say anything. I remember our faded love, sang Patsy Cline.
“So I guess that’s what’s in it for me,” she said. “I get to have Daddy in bed with me, and I don’t have to worry that Mommy’ll hear us because she’s all the way across town. And he wouldn’t put it in. He thought it was a sin.”
“So do I.”
“You do?”
I nodded. “But I do it anyway,” I said. Later that same day she talked about her late husband. We never talked about Elaine, I had ruled out that topic of con-versation, but I couldn’t presume to tell her I didn’t want to hear about him either.
“I wonder if he expected this,” she said.
“This?”
“Us. I think he did.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I don’t know. He admired you, I know that much.”
“He thought I could be useful.”
“It was more than that. He put it in my mind to call you. You called me, I realize that, but I was going to call you. I remem-ber he told me once that if a person was ever in a jam, you’d be a good person to call. He said it with a certain intensity, too, as if he wanted to make sure I would remember later. It’s as if he was telling me to call you if anything ever happened to him.”
“You could be reading more into his words than he put there.”
“I don’t think so,” she said, burrowing into the crook of my arm. “I think that was exactly what he meant. In fact I’m surprised there wasn’t a note in the strongbox, along with the money. ‘Call Matt Scudder, he’ll tell you exactly what to do.’ ” Her hand reached for me. “Well? Aren’t you going to tell me exactly what to do?”
And when I left her apartment that day I walked a block to Eleventh Avenue and down to the corner where he died. I stood there while the lights changed several times, then walked on down to DeWitt Clinton Park to pay my respects to the Captain. I read McCrae’s misquoted words:
if ye break faith
with those who died
we shall not sleep . . .
Had I broken faith, with Glenn Holtzmann, with George Sadecki? Was there more I could do, and was my inaction keeping their spirits restless?
What action could I take? And how could I bring myself to take it, if I was afraid of where it might lead?
Chapter 23
Two weeks before Christmas Elaine and I had dinner with Ray and Bitsy Galindez at a Caribbean restaurant in the East Village. Ray is a police artist; working with eyewitnesses, he produces drawings of unidentified perpetrators for Wanted posters and NYPD circulars. His is an uncommon craft, and Ray is uncommonly good at what he does. I have used him twice in cases of my own, and on both occasions he did an extraordinary job of dredging up faces from some broom closet in my mind and making them visible on paper.
After dinner we went back to Elaine’s, where the sketches he’d made for me were framed and hanging on the wall. They made a curious group. Two of the drawings showed murderers, the third a boy who had been a victim of one of the men. The other man—his name was James Leo Mot-ley—had come very close to killing Elaine.
Bitsy Galindez had never been to Elaine’s apartment be-fore and had never seen the sketches. She looked at them and shuddered, saying she couldn’t understand how Elaine could bear to look at them every day. Elaine told her they were works of art, that they transcended their subject matter. Ray, a little embarrassed, said they were decent draftsman-ship, good likenesses, that it was true he had a knack, but that it was a hell of a stretch to call it art.