After the First Death - Lawrence Block [6]
HOTEL MAXFIELD, 324 WEST 49TH STREET, NEW YORK CITT. DROP IN ANY MAILBOX, WE PAY POSTAGE. That would be between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, on the downtown side of the street. I turned to my right and walked half a block to Eighth Avenue. I crossed Forty-ninth Street and walked a block north, and on the comer of Fiftieth and Eighth I found a drugstore. I went inside and broke Edward Boleslaw’s five-dollar bill to buy a pack of cigarettes. I would need a razor, too, and blades, but I did not buy them now. I only had five dollars—$4.56 now, after buying the cigarettes, and the money would have to feed me and clothe me and shelter me until—
Until I gave up and called the police.
No. No, I would not call the police, I would not give myself up, I would not go back inside again.
No.
I lit a cigarette. I drew smoke into my lungs, and my head throbbed, and my hands shook. I went back to the counter and bought a tin of aspirin and took three tablets without water. It was difficult getting them down but I managed it. I put the aspirins in a pocket of Edward Boleslaw’s trousers and put the cigarettes and matches in a pocket of Edward Boleslaw’s shirt and left the drugstore and stood in the sunlight.
I did not know where to go.
3
HOME IS WHERE, WHEN YOU HAVE TO GO THERE, THEY HAVE to take you in. That is the best definition of the word that I have ever heard. By its terms, I had no home. I had been born and raised in Chillicothe, Ohio, in which town my only living relative, a widowed aunt, still made her home. When I was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Evangeline Grant, my Aunt Caroline had written me a brief note: I hoped and prayed you would be hanged to spare you and all your family many years of shame. May you make your peace with God, and may He some day grant you rest. By all your family she meant, I presume, herself.
I plotted a telephone conversation in my mind. “Aunt Caroline? This is Alex. You may have heard that I’ve been released. Yes, several months ago. No, I haven’t gone back to teaching. No, nothing like that But the reason I called, you see, is that I’ve gone and done it again. Gone and killed another girl; yes. Cut her throat, just like the last one. And why I’m calling, you see, is that this time I’m not going to give myself up to the police. Not this time. Instead I figured on coming out to Chillicothe and staying with you for a spell. Just while I pull myself together—”
Christ.
Before the murder—the first murder, the Evangeline Grant murder—I had had a wife. She was very good throughout the ordeal of arrest and trial. She stood by me through it all, Gwen did, and I have always felt that she quite forgave me for killing Evangeline Grant while never absolving me of my guilt for having had coitus with the girl. In any event she remained true-blue until I was safely inside, and visited me there twice, and divorced me in Alabama, moved to the West Coast, met someone in Los Angeles, and married him. I did not recall her married name, although I must have learned it at one time or another.
Hers was another doorstep on which I could not turn up. There were also the doorsteps of friends, though few remained, and few of those in New York. I had called a handful of men since I left prison. I had seen one of them, Doug MacEwan, and him only two or three times. And I had been only a little more successful at making new friends than at keeping the old. While I had made no enemies in prison, neither had I formed any firm relationships. Once I saw a fellow prisoner on the street and we passed one another without speaking. Another time Turk Williams looked me up. He offered me a job, not, I don’t think, because he felt my talents were particularly adaptable to the wholesale heroin business but out of some impulse of gratitude. My own legal actions had opened the door to his cell,