“How does George feel about it?”
“He’s okay with it. He says he might as well plead, seeing as he figures he did it.”
“Then he admits he killed Holtzmann.”
“No, he figures he did it, figures he must have done it. He doesn’t remember it but he understands the evidence against him and he’s not stupid, he knows how strong their case is. His take on it is he can’t swear he did it but he can’t swear he didn’t, either, so they’re probably right.”
“Was he in a blackout?”
“No, but his memory is never what you’d call reliable. He’ll recollect events but be completely wrong about their sequence, or he’ll misremember something, he’ll have an incident or a conversation different from the way it actually happened.”
“I see.”
“You’ve been very patient with me, Matt, and I appreciate it. I know I’m taking all day to get to the point.”
“That’s all right, Tom.”
“The thing is,” he said, “everybody’s satisfied, you know? The cops have the case cleared and the press off their backs. The D.A.’s looking at either a plea bargain or a trial he can’t lose. George is ready to go along with whatever his lawyer decides, and the lawyer’s ready to get the case off his desk with a minimum of aggravation, at the same time knowing he’s doing the best thing for all concerned. My sister says once he’s in a mental institution she won’t have to lie awake worrying he’s not getting enough to eat, or that he’s in some sort of physical danger, dying of exposure or somebody hurting him. My wife says the same thing, and she also says that he’s probably belonged in an institution for years, for his own protection and for the good of society. We’re just lucky he didn’t kill an innocent child, she says, and the real tragedy is that he wasn’t put away earlier so that Glenn Holtzmann would be alive today.
“So everybody’s telling everybody else how it’s all working out for the best, and I’m sitting here feeling like the only fly in the ointment. I’m the pain in everybody’s ass. You think my brother’s crazy? I’m the crazy one.”
“Why’s that, Tom?”
“Because I don’t believe he did it,” he said. “I know how ridiculous that sounds. I can’t help it. I just do not believe he killed that man.”
Chapter 5
“I appreciate this,” he said. He spooned sugar into his coffee as he talked, stirred, added milk, stirred some more. “You know,” he said, “I almost let it go. I came this close to not calling. I looked up private investigators in the Yellow Pages. Well, all I knew was your first name, and I didn’t see any guys listed named Matt, and I figured maybe I’m supposed to keep my hands off this one. Let go and let God, right?”
“That’s what the bumper stickers say.”
“Then I thought, Tommy, take one shot and see what happens. Don’t knock your brains out, don’t go and hire another detective to look for this detective, but at least pick up the phone and see where it gets you. Don’t push the river, but at least get your feet wet, and who knows? Maybe you catch a wave, maybe you can go with the flow.”
The flow thus far had led him to the Flame, where we were sharing a booth in the smoking section. Years ago I used to meet prospective clients in bars. Now I meet them in coffee shops. I’ve gone with the flow myself, and look how far it’s carried me.
“So I called Intergroup,” he said, “and I asked for a contact person at Keep It Simple, because I knew that was your home group. Unless you switched home groups since then, or moved to another neighborhood or out of the city altogether. Or even picked up a drink, because who knows, right?”
“Right.”
“Anyway, they gave me a guy to call, and I called it and I told a lie. I said I met you at a meeting and you gave me your number and I lost it, and that I never did get your last name. He didn’t know your last name either, but he knew right off who I meant, so that let me know you were still sober and still in the area. He gave me another number to call, a fellow named Rich, and I don’t know his last name either, but he knew your last name, and he had your number in his book. So I called, last night and again this morning, and you called back, and here I am.” He drew a breath. “And now you can tell me I’m crazy and I’ll go home.”
“Are you crazy, Tom?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “You tell me.”
He looked sane enough. He was about five-eight or — nine, the same height but a little thicker in the body than those welterweights I was currently missing on Wide World. He had a round face, its boyishness offset by frown lines on his forehead and creases at the corners of his mouth. His light brown hair was worn short and thinning on top. He had wire-rimmed eyeglasses, and I guess they should have been bifocals, because he took them off to study the menu before ordering his cup of coffee.
He wore a light blue sport shirt tucked into pleated chinos. His shoes were brown penny loafers with crepe soles. On the seat next to him he’d placed his jacket. It was teal trimmed in navy, with an L.L. Bean logo over the breast pocket. He wore a plain gold wedding band on the appropriate finger and a Timex digital watch with a stainless-steel band, and he had a pack of Camels in his shirt pocket and a lit one in the ashtray. He didn’t look like a style-setter, but he certainly looked all of a piece, a Brooklyn neighborhood guy, a family man who worked hard and made a living at it. He didn’t look crazy.
I said, “Why don’t you tell me why you think George is innocent?”
“I don’t even know if I got a reason.” He picked up his cigarette, flicked ashes from it, put it back down again. “He’s five years older’n me,” he said. “Did I mention that? There was him, then my sister, then me. Growing up, of course I looked up to him. I was fourteen when he went into the service, and by then I knew there was something different about George, the way he had of staring off into the distance and sometimes not responding to questions. I knew this, but still I looked up to him.” He frowned. “What am I trying to say? That I know him and he could never kill another human being? Anybody could. I came this close myself.”
“What happened?”
“This is maybe two years before I got sober, okay? I’m in a bar. Nothing unusual in that, right? So there’s an argument, guy pushes me, I push back, he shoves, I shove, he swings, I swing. He goes down, not because I give him such a good shot. He more or less trips over his own feet. Wham, hits his head on something, the bar rail, base of a barstool, I don’t know what, and he’s in a coma for three days and they don’t know if he’s gonna live, and if he dies I’m on the hook for manslaughter. What am I gonna say, I didn’t mean for it to happen? That’s what manslaughter is, when you don’t mean it.” He shook his head at the memory. “Long story short, he comes out of it on the third day and refuses to press charges. Wouldn’t hear of it. Next thing you know I run into him in a bar. I buy him a drink, he buys back, and now we’re the best of friends.” He picked up his cigarette, looked at it, stubbed it out. “He wound up getting killed about a year after that.”
“Another bar fight?”
“A holdup. He was assistant manager of a check-cashing place on Ralph Avenue and there was three of them shot, him and a security guard and a customer. He was the only one died. Well, shit happens, and maybe his number was up, but if his number’d been up a year earlier I’d be a guy’d done time in prison, a guy you’d describe as having a history of violent behavior, and all because a guy gave me a push and I pushed him back.”