A Time to Scatter Stones
- Автор: Блок Лоуренс
- Серия: Matthew Scudder #19
- Год: 2019
- Язык: английский
- Год: Subterranean
- ISBN: 978-1-59606-893-3
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «A Time to Scatter Stones». Краткое содержание книги:
But he did so by flying out to Ohio to rape and murder her friend Connie Cooperman, and then he came back to New York and killed a bunch of other people. He capped it by stabbing Elaine, and very nearly killing her. The crew in the Emergency Room saved her, but it was touch and go for a while.
I wound up in the apartment where Motley had touched down, and he wound up unconscious after I’d almost wound up dead. I hated him, not surprisingly, for what he’d done and what he tried to do. But I didn’t kill him out of hate, or out of a desire to see him punished.
But I knew that, even if he went back to prison, there would be a day when he got out. And he’d go on doing what he’d been doing, because that was what he did and who he was. There was really only one way I knew to stop him, one way that was sure to work. If there was another, I couldn’t think of it.
And so I did what I had to do.
“I don’t think he’ll give you any more trouble,” I told Ellen. “But if he does, yes. I’ll find him and I’ll kill him.”
Ellen had to use the bathroom, and Elaine went off to the kitchen and started water boiling for pasta. They’d come straight home from the meeting, she said, and hadn’t eaten. I admitted that I hadn’t either.
“Plus you had an arduous day,” she said, “with all that walking, and then kicking the crap out of whatshisname.”
“Everett Allen Paulsen,” Ellen supplied. “I guess his last name is where the Paul came from.”
“Probably.”
“You’re right about Rumpelstiltskin,” she said. “It’s empowering, knowing his name. You didn’t leave him there, did you? In my apartment?”
“No. I took off the ski mask, because I’d stopped caring if he saw my face. Then I took the tape off his mouth and got him up on his feet. He couldn’t really walk, he could barely stand up, but I put an arm around his waist and walked him down the stairs.”
Elaine said that must have been tricky.
“The Mahaffey method would have been a lot easier,” I said. “I had trouble keeping my balance, so a couple of times we both came close to taking a tumble. And it was a little dicey when we ran into somebody on the stairs. I said my friend had a little too much to drink.”
“And he believed it?”
“She,” I said. “Five-seven or eight, slender build, late twenties. Dark hair, eyeglasses—”
Ellen thought she knew who I meant, but not her name. “She usually has her earbuds in,” she said, “so she probably didn’t hear a word you said.”
“I got him downstairs,” I went on, “and I walked him to the corner and put him in a taxi. I told the driver a similar story, that my friend wasn’t feeling too well. His main concern was that the son of a bitch would puke in his cab, but I assured him that wouldn’t be a problem, my friend wasn’t drunk, he had this condition from injuries sustained in the service of his country. He’d have spells like this periodically, and the only thing that helped was quiet and rest.”
“So don’t ask him questions,” Elaine said.
“I gave the driver Paulsen’s address in Teaneck and a hundred bucks to cover his fare. And off they went.”
“And you came home.”
“Not right away. First I went down to the basement to let Henry know everything was settled, and he wouldn’t be seeing any more of your brother.”
“Her faux brother,” Elaine said. “Didn’t Henry see you schlepping Paulsen down the stairs?”
“I think he made a point of staying in his apartment. He was relieved to have it all over with, and happy to lend me the key rather than go upstairs with me.”
“You went back upstairs?”
“To straighten up, and to retrieve what I’d brought with me. Oh, that reminds me.”
I went to the other room and returned with the backpack. I had dropped a like-new kitchen mallet in one trashcan and a worn-once ski mask in another, so there was only one item in the backpack, and I took it out and handed it to her.
“My alligator bag,” she said.
“I didn’t know what else you might need or want,” I said, “and when I started looking around, it felt like an invasion of privacy.”
“You might have found panties,” Elaine said. “Can I see? Oh, it’s a beauty. You wouldn’t want to leave this behind.”
“I thought I would never want to look at it again,” she said, and clutched the handbag to her chest. “Because he touched it.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Elaine said. “He had his hands all over your pussy, too, and you’re not gonna get rid of that, are you? This is a gorgeous bag. You hang on to it.”
The pasta was the sort that looks like little bedsprings. Fusilli, I think it’s called. It was topped with Paul Newman’s marinara, which Elaine had pepped up a little with Dave’s Insanity hot sauce. She’d thrown together a salad, too.
“My default setting,” she said. “Pasta and a salad. It’s a good thing everybody likes it, because it’s the only thing I ever seem to cook.”
No one complained. Hunger’s the best sauce, even better than Paul’s and Dave’s, and we all brought good appetites to the table.
Afterward we had our tea in the living room. Ellen talked about her apartment, and tried to figure out if she wanted to return to it. “Just in case he’s crazier than we think,” she said, “maybe I shouldn’t be too easy to find.”
“On the other hand,” Elaine pointed out, “it’s rent-stabilized, isn’t it?”
“For the next eight months. Then the built-in increase takes it over the edge, and the landlord can ask full market value for it.”
‘Then the hell with it,” Elaine said. “You can live anywhere.”
“I can, can’t I? I like where I am now, on the Upper West Side. I’ll stay there for the full period of the sublet, and by then I might be able to find something in the neighborhood. Or Brooklyn, which seems to be where everybody is moving these days.”
“Except for the ones moving to Harlem, or the South Bronx.”
“I really could go anywhere, couldn’t I? Figuring out where I want to live is the least of it. What I really have to figure out is who I want to be.”
“No rush on that one,” Elaine said.
“No. That woman this evening, the one who’s going back to school? I could do that.”
“I wouldn’t make her a role model just yet.” They both laughed, and to me Elaine said, “She told us how she blew her professor to get her grade changed.”
“But it wasn’t really prostitution,” Ellen said, “because she didn’t take any money for it.”
“And besides she really deserved an A.”
“Plus he was sweet, and she might have done him anyway.”
“Speaking of money,” Ellen said, “you spent a lot of it. I want to pay you back.”
I told her not to worry about it.
“But that’s not right,” she said. “A hundred dollars to the cab driver, and I don’t know how many hundreds you gave my super. Plus the mallet and the mask and the backpack, and why should you be out of pocket for all that?”
“I’m not out of pocket,” I told her. “Quite the reverse. I came out ahead.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Our friend had more in his wallet than ID and credit cards. He had over eighteen hundred dollars, most of it in hundreds and fifties.”
“And you took it.”
“Just the large bills.”
“Good for you,” Elaine said. “What do we need with chump change?”
She refilled our teacups, and then the two of them got to talking about other things various Tarts had said. In AA this would have been considered breaking a person’s anonymity, but Tarts didn’t have AA’s formal traditions, and anyway I didn’t know the people they were talking about.