Even the Wicked

Once they caught him, one or more true-crime writers would publish books on the case, and just how fat they'd get on it would depend on how sensational the material was and how strong a hold Will still had on the public imagination. Until then, a lot of print and broadcast journalists were earning their salaries with Will's help, but without him they'd bring home the same money reporting on somebody else's misdeeds. Marty McGraw was on the top of the heap, glorying in his role in a story that was bigger than Bosnia, but his pay envelope hadn't gotten any thicker since Will went to work, and maybe he didn't care. All those moves from paper to paper had boosted his salary way up there already, and how much money did he need? You couldn't spend that much on blended whiskey, even if the girls who brought it to you didn't have shirts on.

Too much money. That struck me as the ultimate irrelevance, because Will looked to be a pure idealist, however misguided. It was frustrating—I'd managed to remember who it was I'd dreamed about, and I'd ferreted out the message the dream had for me, and it didn't mean anything.

Well, why should it? A friend of Elaine's had attended a séance, in the course of which a dead uncle of hers had counseled her to buy a particular over-the-counter computer stock. She'd risked a couple of thousand dollars, whereupon the stock plummeted.

Elaine had not been surprised. "I'm not saying it wasn't her Uncle Manny that spoke to her," she said,

"but when he was alive nobody ever called him the Wizard of Wall Street. He was a furrier, so why should he suddenly be a financial genius now that he's dead? Where is it written that death raises your IQ?"

Same goes for dreaming. Just because the subconscious mind sends a cryptic message doesn't mean it knows what it's talking about.

Too much money. Maybe Glenn Holtzmann was talking to me, maybe he thought I should spread the wealth around. Well, a word to the wise and all that. I paid for my coffee, and left the waiter twice as much as usual. Matt Scudder, last of the big spenders.

* * *

After dinner that night I watched a little television with Elaine.

There were a couple of cop shows on back to back, and I kept finding fault with their investigative procedure. Elaine had to remind me that it was only TV.

After the news at eleven I stood up and stretched. "I think I'll go out for a while," I said.

"Give Mick my love."

"How do you know I'm not going to the midnight meeting?"

"How do you know you won't run into him there?"

"Do Jewish girls always answer a question with a question?"

"Is there something wrong with that?"

I walked south and west to Grogan's Open House, a Hell's Kitchen bar stubbornly holding its own in the face of neighborhood gentrification. Now and then a salesman will walk in and ask to speak to Grogan, which is a little like asking for Mr. Stone at the Blarney Stone.

'There's no such person," I heard the day barman tell one such visitor.

"And for all that, he's not in at the moment."

Grogan's is the home turf of one Michael Ballou, although you won't find his name on the license or the deed. His criminal record would preclude his owning premises where liquor is sold, but Mick has extended the principle of nonownership to all areas of his life. Another man's name appears on the ownership papers for his car, and the deed to his farm in Sullivan County. What a man takes care not to own, I have heard him say, they cannot take away from him.

We met some years ago when I walked into Grogan's and asked him some questions, feeling a little like Daniel in the lion's den. That was the start of our unlikely friendship, and it has broadened and deepened over time. We are two men of very different backgrounds leading vastly different lives, and I have ceased to grope for an explanation of the satisfaction we find in each other's company. He is a killer and a career criminal, and he is my friend, and you can make what you will of that. I don't know what to make of it myself.

Sometimes we make a long night of it, sitting up past closing with the door locked and all but one of the lights out, sharing stories and silences until dawn. Sometimes he'll finish up at the early mass at St.

Bernard's on West Fourteenth Street, the Butchers' Mass, where he'll wear his late father's stained white apron and match the meat cutters who come there before they start work in the market down the street.

Now and then I've stayed the course and gone with him, kneeling when they kneel, rising when they rise.

Male bonding, I guess they call it. Guy stuff, according to Elaine.

This was an early night, and I was out of there and on my way home well before closing. I don't remember too much of what we talked about, but it seems to me the conversation rambled all over the place. I know we talked about dreams, and he recalled a dream that had saved his life, alerting him to a danger of which he'd been unaware.