Still, I couldn’t attribute my presence in front of Armstrong’s to a talkative disease or a restless monster. As far as I knew, I’d never had a drink of anything stronger than cranberry juice on the northwest corner of Fifty-seventh and Tenth. I had stopped drinking by the time Jimmy moved from his original Ninth Avenue location. There had been other gin mills at Tenth and Fifty-seventh before his, including one I could remember called The Falling Rock. (It got the name when a neighborhood guy bought it and started remodeling the facade. While he was working on a ladder, a chunk of stone flaked off and fell, conking him on the head and almost knocking him cold. He figured it would be good luck to name the joint after the incident, but the luck didn’t hold; a little while later he did something that irritated a couple of the Westies, and they hit him harder and more permanently than the rock had. The next owner changed the name to something else.)
I didn’t want a drink, and I wasn’t hungry, either. I shrugged it off and turned around, looking across the intersection at what I suppose I’ll always think of as Lisa Holtzmann’s building. Was that what I wanted? An hour or so with the Widow Holtzmann, sweeter than whiskey and easier on the liver, and almost as certain a source of temporary oblivion?
No longer an option. Lisa, when I last spoke to her, had told me that she was seeing someone, that it looked serious, that she thought the relationship might have a future. I’d been surprised to discover that the news came as less of a blow than a relief. We agreed that we’d stay away from each other and give her new romance a chance to flower.
For all I knew it had gone to seed by now. The new man was by no means the first she’d dated since her husband’s death. She’d grown up with a father who came to her bed at night, thrilling and disturbing her at once, always stopping short of intercourse because “it wouldn’t be right,” and she would be awhile working her way out of the residue of those years. I didn’t need a shrink to tell me that I was a component of that process. It was not always clear, though, whether I was part of the problem or part of the solution.
In any case, Lisa’s relationships did not tend to last, and there was no reason to believe the latest was still viable. I could without difficulty imagine her sitting by the phone now, wishing it would ring, hoping it would be me on the other end of it. I could make the call and find out if what I imagined was true. It was easy enough to check. I had a quarter handy, and I didn’t need to look up the number.
I didn’t make the call. Elaine has made it clear that she does not expect me to be strictly faithful. Her own professional experience has led her to believe that men are not monogamous by nature, and that extracurricular activity need not be either a cause or a symptom of marital disharmony.
For now, though, I chose not to exercise that freedom. Now and then I felt the urge, even as once in a while I felt the desire for a drink. There is, I have been taught, all the difference in the world between the desire and the act. The one is written on water, the other carved in stone.
Glenn Holtzmann.
Unaccountably pleased with myself for having resisted the slenderest of temptations, I marched east on Fifty-seventh and got almost to the corner of Ninth Avenue before the penny dropped. I had been dreaming a dream which I was somehow certain had some bearing on Adrian Whitfield’s murder, and Elaine had somehow managed to coax and tease the subject of that dream out of some dark corner of my mind. It was Glenn Holtzmann I’d dreamed about, and I’d stood staring at the building he’d lived in without making the connection.
Glenn Holtzmann. Why was he disturbing my sleep, and what could he possibly be trying to tell me? I’d hardly had time to consider the point when Will’s latest letter drove the question clear out of my mind.
I stopped at the Morning Star and sat at a window table with a cup of coffee. I took a sip and remembered one of the few meetings I’d had with Holtzmann. I’d been sitting in that very window, and perhaps at that very table, when he’d tapped on the glass to get my attention, then came inside and shared my table for a few minutes.
He’d wanted to be friends. Elaine and I had spent one evening with him and Lisa, and I hadn’t liked him much. There was something off-putting about him, though I’d have had trouble defining it. I couldn’t recall everything he’d said that time at the Morning Star, although it seemed to me that was when he’d informed me that Lisa had had a miscarriage. I’d felt sympathy for him then, but it hadn’t made me want his friendship.
Not too long after that he was dead. Shot down on Eleventh Avenue while making a call from a pay phone. That had been a case of mine, and in its course, oddly enough, I’d found myself working for the brother of the chief suspect and the widow of the victim. I don’t know how well I served either client, but by the time it was over I’d learned who killed Glenn Holtzmann. (It turned out he’d been killed by mistake, in what Elaine characterized as a perfect postmodern homicide. I’m not sure what she meant.)
Glenn Holtzmann, Glenn Holtzmann. He was a lawyer, in-house counsel for a publisher of large-print books. He’d floated the idea of my writing a book based on my experiences, but I’d been no more likely to write such a book than his firm would have been to publish it. He’d been on a fishing expedition, perhaps in the hope that I’d drop some kernel of information that might prove profitable for him.
Because, as I was to learn, information meant profit to Holtzmann. He’d supplemented his income nicely as a bearer of tales, getting his start when he ratted out his uncle to the IRS. It was a profitable enterprise, if high in risk and low in prestige, and when he died on the sidewalk on Eleventh Avenue he left behind a two-bedroom high-rise apartment to which he had clear title and a metal strongbox in which he’d stowed something like $300,000 in cash.
Why the hell was I dreaming about him? I let the waiter refill my coffee cup, stirred it, stared out the window at my own apartment building, and tried to free-associate. Glenn Holtzmann. Lawyer. Publisher. Large-print. Failing vision. White cane, tap tap tap...
Glenn Holtzmann. Blackmail. Except it wasn’t blackmail, not so far as I knew. He wasn’t a blackmailer, he was an informer, a paid informer...
Glenn Holtzmann. Lisa. Legs, tits, ass. Stop it.
Glenn Holtzmann. Closet. Strongbox. Money. Too much money.
I sat up straight.
Too much money.
The phrase rang like a bell. Glenn Holtzmann had had too much money, and that was what had made his death look like something other than the act of random violence it appeared to be. It was the money that led his wife to call me, and it was the money that started me looking beneath the ordinary surface of his life for something that might explain his death.
I closed my eyes and tried to conjure up his face. I couldn’t bring the image into focus.
Too much money. What the hell did that have to do with Will? How could there be a money motive behind the murders? How, really, could there be any kind of motive for the killings, behind the particular mania which led the man to perceive himself as a righter of social wrongs?
Did anybody benefit from the deaths, singly or collectively? I considered the victims in turn. Richie Vollmer’s death was good news for whatever children he would have otherwise gone on to kill, but they couldn’t know who they were. It was, I suppose, good news as well for all the rest of us, who were spared having to go on sharing a planet with Richie. But nobody made a dime out of his death, except the people with newspapers to sell. Richie died with nothing to leave and nobody to leave it to.