Even the Wicked

"Let's say I had a grudging admiration for him. He was a kind of urban folk hero, wasn't he? Almost like Batman."

"Batman never killed anybody."

"Not in the comic books. He does in the movies, but Hollywood'll fuck up anything, won't they? No, the real Batman never killed anybody.

Listen to me, will you? 'The real Batman.' But when you grew up on the comic book that's how it seems."

"I know."

"For Christ's sake," he said, "I'm Adrian Whitfield, I'm a fucking lawyer. That's all I am. I'm not the

Joker, I'm not the Penguin, I'm not the Riddler. What's Batman got against me?"

4

Elaine was still up when I got home, watching a wildlife documentary on the Discovery channel. I joined her for the last ten minutes of it. During the credit crawl she made a face and switched off the set.

"I should have done that when you came in," she said.

"Why? I didn't mind watching."

"What I have to learn," she said, "is always to skip the last five minutes of those things, because it's always the same. You spend fifty-five minutes watching some really nice animal, and then they ruin the whole thing by telling you it's endangered and won't last out the century. They're so determined to leave you depressed you'd think they had Prozac for a sponsor. How was Adrian Whitfield?"

I gave her a summary of the evening. "Well, he's not depressed,"

she said. "Bemused, it sounds like.

'Why me?' "

"Natural question."

"Yeah, I'd say. How much did you say the retainer was? Two thousand dollars? I'm surprised you took it."

"Cop training, I guess."

"When somebody hands you money, you take it."

"Something like that. He wanted to pay me for my time, and when I turned him down he decided he wanted to hire me. We can use the money."

"And you can use the work."

"I can, and maybe I'll be able to figure out something to do. I just hope it won't involve buying a computer."

"Huh?"

"TJ. He was on my case earlier. When did he leave?"

"Half an hour after you did. I offered him the couch, but he didn't want to stay over."

"He never does."

" 'What you think, I's got no place to sleep?' I wonder where he does sleep."

"It's a mystery."

"He must live somewhere."

"Not everybody does."

"I don't think he's homeless, do you? He changes his clothes regularly and he's clean about his person.

I'm sure he doesn't bed down in the park."

"There are a lot of ways to be homeless," I said, "and they don't all involve sleeping on the subway and eating out of Dumpsters. I know a woman who drank her way out of a rent-controlled apartment. She moved her things to a storage locker in Chelsea. She pays something like eighty dollars a month for a

cubicle eight feet square. That's where she keeps her stuff, and that's where she sleeps."

"They let you sleep there?"

"No, but how are they going to stop you? She goes there during the day and catches four or five hours at a time that way."

"That must be awful."

"It's safer than a shelter, and a lot more private. Probably cleaner and quieter, too. She changes her clothes there, and there's a coin laundry in the neighborhood when she needs to do a load of wash."

"How does she wash herself? Don't tell me she's got a shower in there."

"She cleans up as well as she can in public rest rooms, and she's got friends who'll occasionally let her shower at their place. It's hit or miss. A shower isn't necessarily a daily occurrence in her life."

"Poor thing."

"If she stays sober," I said, "she'll have a decent place to live sooner or later."

"With a shower of her own."

"Probably. But you get a lot of different lifestyles in this town.

There's a fellow I know who got divorced six or seven years ago, and he still hasn't got his own place."

"Where does he sleep?"

"On a couch in his office. That'd be a cinch if he was self-employed, but he's not. He's some kind of mid-level executive at a firm with offices in the Flatiron Building. I guess he's important enough to have a couch in his office."

"And when somebody catches him sleeping on it—"

"He yawns and tells them how he stretched out for a minute and must have dozed off. Or he was working late and missed the last train to Connecticut. Who knows? He belongs to a fancy gym two blocks from there, and that's where he has his shower every morning, right after his Nautilus circuit."

"Why doesn't he just get an apartment?"

"He says he can't afford it," I said, "but I think he's just being neurotic about it. And I think he probably likes the idea that he's getting over on everybody. He probably sees himself as an urban revolutionary, sleeping in the belly of the beast."

"On a leather sofa from Henredon."

"I don't know if it's leather or who made it, but that's the idea. In the rest of the country people with no place to live sleep in their cars.

New Yorkers don't have cars, and a parking space here costs as much as an apartment in Sioux City. But we're resourceful. We find a way."

* * *

In the morning I deposited Adrian Whitfield's check and tried to think of something I could do to earn it.