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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780380715688 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 10/01/1994 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.19(w) x 6.75(h) x 0.76(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
<p>All this happened a long time ago.</p>
<p>Abe Beame was living in Gracie Mansion, though even seemed to have trouble believing he was really the mayor of the city of New York. Ali was in his prime, and the Knicks had a year or so left in Bradley and DeBusschere. I was drinking in those days, of course, and at-the time it seemed doing more for me than it was doing to me.</p>
<p>I had already left my wife and kids, my home in Syosset and the NYPD I was living in the hotel on West Fifty-seventh where I still live, and I was doing most of my drinking the corner in Jimmy Armstrong's saloon. Billie was nighttime bartender. A Filipino youth named Dennis was d the stick most days.</p>
<p>And Tommy Tillary was one of the regulars.</p>
<p>He was big, probably 6'2", full in the chest, big in the
too. He rarely showed up in a suit but always wore a et and tie, usually a navy or burgundy blazer with grayslacks or white duck pants in warmer weather. He had 'loud voice that boomed from his barrel chest and a big, -shaven face that was innocent around the pouting mouth and knowing around the eyes. He was somewhere in date forties and he drank a lot of top-shelf scotch. Chivas, as I remember it, but it could have been Johnnie Black. Whatever it was, his face was beginning to show it, with patches of permanent flush at the cheekbones and a tracery of broken capillaries across the bridge of the nose.</p>
<p>We were saloon friends. We didn't speak every time we ran into each other, but at the least we always acknowledged each other with a nod or a wave. He told a lot of dialect jokes and told them reasonably well,and I laughed at my share of them. Sometimes I was in a mood to reminisce about my days on the force, and when my stories were funny, his laugh was as loud as anyone's.</p>
<p>Sometimes he showed up alone, sometimes with male friends. About a third of the time, he was in the company of a short and curvy blonde named Carolyn. "Carolyn from the Caroline was the way he occasionally introduced her, and she did have a faint Southern accent that became more pronounced
as the drink got to her.</p>
<p>Then, one morning, I picked up the Daily News and lead that. burglars had broken into a house on Colonial Road, in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. They had stabbed to death the only occupant present, one Margaret Tillary. Her husband, Thomas J. Tillary a salesman, was not at home at the dune.
I hadn't known Tommy was a salesman or that he'd had a wife. He did wear a wide yellow-gold band on the appropriate finger, and it was clear that he wasn't married to Carolyn from the Caroline, and it now looked as though he was a widower. I felt vaguely sorry for him, vaguely sorry for the wife rd never even known of, but that was the extent of it. I drank enough back then to avoid feeling any emotion very strongly.</p>
<p>And then, two or three nights later, I walked into Arnnstrong's and there was Carolyn. She didn't appear to be waiting for him or anyone else, nor did she look as though she'd jug breezed in a .few minutes ago. She had a stool by herself at the bar and she was drinking something dark from a lowball glass.</p>
<p>I a seat a few stools drawn from her. I ordered two double shots of bourbon, drank one and poured the other into the black coffee Billie brought me. I was sipping the coffee when a voice with a Piedmont softness said, 'T forget your name "</p>
<p>I looked up. "I believe we were introduced," she said, "but I don't recall your name.,</p>
<p>"It's Matt," I said, "and you're right, Tommy introduced us.</p> <p>You're Carolyn."</p>
<p>"Carolyn Cheatham. Have you seen him?"</p>
<p>"Tommy? Not since it fined."</p>
<p>'"Neither have I. Were you-all at the funeral?"</p>
<p>"No. When was it?"</p>
<p>"This afternoon. Neither was I. There. Whyn't you come sit next to me so's I don't have to shout. Please?"
She was drinking a sweet almond liqueur that she took on the rocks. It tastes like dessert, but it's as strong as whiskey.</p>
<p>"He told me not to come," she said. "To the funeral. He said it was a matter of respect for the dead." She picked up her glass and stared into it. I've never known what people hope to see there, though it's a gesture I've performed often enough myself.</p>
<p>"Respect," she said. "What's he care about respect? I would have just been part of the office crowd; we both work at Tannahill far as anyone there knows, we're just friends. And all we ever were is friends, you know."</p>
<p>"Whatever you say."</p>
<p>"Oh, shit," she said. "I don't mean I wasn't fucking him, for the Lord's sake. I mean it was just laughs and good times. He was married and he went home to Mama every night and that was jes' fine, because who in her right mind'd want Tommy Tillary around by the dawn's early light? Christ in the foothills, did I Spill this or drink it?"</p>
<p>We agreed she was drinking them a little too fast. It was this fancy New York sweet-drink shit, she maintained, not like the bourbon she'd grown up on You knew where you stood with bourbon.</p>
<p>I told her I was a bourbon drinker myself,-and it pleased her to learn this. Alliances have been forged on thinner bonds than that, and ours served to propel us out of Armstrong's, with a stop down the block for a fifth of Maker's Mark-her choice--and a four-block walk to her apartment. There were exposed brick walls, I remember, and candles stack in strawwrapped bottles, and several travel posters from Sabena, the Belgian airline.</p>
<p>We did what grown-ups do when they find themselves alone together. We drank our fair share of the Maker's Mark and went to bed. She made a lot of enthusiastic noises and more than a few skillful moves, and afterward she cried some.
A little later, she dropped off to sleep. I was tired myself, but I put on my clothes and sent myself home. Because who in her right mind'd want Matt Scudder around by the dawn's early light?</p>
<p>Over the next couple of days, I wondered every time I entered Armstrong's if rd run into her, and each tune I was more relieved than disappointed when I didn't. I didn't encounter Tommy, either, and that, too, was a relief and in no sense disappointing.</p>
<p>Then, one morning, I picked up the News and read that they'd arrested a pair of young Hispanics from Sunset Park for the Tillary burglary and homicide: The paper ran the usual photo-two skinny kids, their hair unruly, one of them trying to hide his face from the camera, the other smirking defiantly, and each of them handcuffed to a broad-shouldered, grimaced Irishman in a suit. You didn't need the careful caption to tell the good guys from the .bad guys.</p>
<p>Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, I went over to Armstrong's for a hamburger and drank a beer with it. The phone behind the bar rang and Dennis put down the glass he was wiping and answered ft. "He was here a minute ago," he said. "I'll see if he stepped out." He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and looked quizzically at me. "Are you still here?" he asked. "Or did you slip away while my attention was diverted?"</p>
<p>"Who wants to know?</p>
<p>"Tommy Tillary."</p>
<p>You never know what a woman will decide to tell a man or how a man will react to it. I didn't want to find out, but I was better off learning over the phone than face-to-face. I nodded and took the phone from Denni</p>s.
<p>I said, "Matt Scudder, Tommy. I was sorry to hear about your wife."</p>
<p>"Thanks, Matt. Jesus, it feels like it happened a year ago. It was what, a week?"</p>
<p>"At least they got the bastards." There was a pause. Then he said, "Jesus. You haven't seen a paper, huh?,.</p>
<p>"That's where I read about it. Two Spanish kids."</p>
<p>"You didn't happen to see this afternoons Post."</p>
<p>"No. Why, what happened? They turn out to be clean?"</p>
<p>"The two spics. Clean? Shit, they're about as clean as the men's room in the Times Square subway station. The cops hit their place and found stuff from my house everywhere they looked. Jewelry they had descriptions of, a stereo that I gave them the serial number, everything. Monogrammed shit. I mean, that's how clean they were, for Christ's sake."</p>
<p>So.</p>
<p>"They admitted the burglary but not the murder."</p>
<p>"That's common, Tommy."</p>
<p>"Lemme finish, huh? They admitted the burglary, but according to them it was a put-upjob. According to them, I hired them to hit my place. They could keep whatever they got and I'd have everything out and arranged for them, and in return I got to clean up on the insurance by overreporting the loss."</p>
<p>"What did the loss amount to?"</p>
<p>"Shit, 1 don't know. There were twice as many things turned up in their apartment as I ever listed when I made out a report. There's things I missed a few days after I filed the report and others I didn't know were gone until the cops found them. You don't notice everything right away, at least I didn't, and on top of it, how could I think straight with Peg dead? You know?"</p>
<p>"It hardly sounds like an insurance setup. "</p>
<p>"No, of course it wasn't. How the hell could it be? All I had was a standard homeowner's policy. It covered maybe a third of what I lost. According to them, the place was empty when they hit it. Peg was out."</p>
<p>..And?"</p>
<p>"And I set them up. They hit the place, they carted everything away, and I came home with Peg and stabbed her six, eight times, whatever it was, and left her there so it'd look like it happened in a burglary."</p>
<p>"How could the burglars testify that you stabbed your wife?"</p>
<p>"They couldn't. </p> Some Days You Get the Bear. Copyright © by Lawrence Block. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
What People are Saying About This
For clean, close-to-the-bone prose, the line goes from Dashiell Hammett to James M. Cain to Lawrence Block. He's that good.