I thought about reaching out to Vince, and I didn’t, and I’ve regretted it on occasion, although it never kept me up at night. There were good reasons not to reach out, as any contact I initiated might prompt some eager beaver to take a look at me, and even if it didn’t go anywhere it would be attention I’d rather avoid.

  And what could I say, or do? What good would it do either of us?

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I did see the man one more time.

  It was a year or two after my move to the Northwestern, and I’d long since settled into what seemed to be my new career as an unlicensed and essentially unprofessional private detective. I’d think of myself and sometimes describe myself as doing favors for friends, but not everybody who hired me was in any sense a friend, and I got paid for the favors I did. It was, I guess, a way to go on being a cop, and a way to go on eating and drinking and having a roof over my head. I couldn’t think of anything that might suit me better, and still can’t.

  Sometimes the favors I did sent me out of Manhattan, and not infrequently to Brooklyn. A few of those ventures wound up in books; one that didn’t sent me back to Park Slope, and actually led me to the site of my first apartment, on Garfield Place. That gave me a turn, and something made me check out Polhemus Place while I was in the neighborhood, and there I was, remembering moods and incidents that hadn’t crossed my mind in ages.

  Then I got back to business, and with a little effort I found my way to the Chemical Bank branch on Ovington Avenue, where I was hoping to get some information out of an assistant manager. I went through the revolving door and walked some ten or twenty steps past the uniformed guard when something registered sufficiently to make me turn and look at him, and it was Vince Mahaffey.

  For a moment I thought he’d managed to get reinstated, because the uniform he was wearing wasn’t that different from the one he’d worn on the job. But the cut was different, and the color was softer than NYPD blue, and the badge on his chest was a rent-a-cop special that could have come out of a box of Captain Crunch.

  But it was definitely Vince. He looked older, and he’d put on a few pounds, and something else—he looked somehow diminished, as if this paler uniform made him a less forceful man.

  I stood there looking at him, and I was still enough of a cop that it didn’t occur to me to try not to stare. Maybe he felt my gaze, maybe he was just accustomed to scanning the room, but he turned toward me and I saw recognition come into his eyes. He said my name and I went over and we shook hands.

  He said, “Jesus, Mattie, I hope you’re not here to hold us up. All the time I been here I never once had to put my hand on my gun, let alone draw it.”

  I told him what I was there for, and who I’d be seeing.

  “Oh, him,” he said. “Guy’s a pussy. He’ll tell you anything you want to know, and if you push him he’ll give you the keys to the vault. Let me look at you. You look okay.”

  “So do you, Vince.”

  “I read about you a few years back. That was a righteous shooting, up in Washington Heights, but it must have given you grief.”

  We talked some about that, just skimming the surface, and he said I must have heard or read about his troubles, and I acknowledged that I had. He said the PBA’s lawyer had been all you could ask for, and he’d come out of it with his pension and health insurance, and if he’d wanted to he could have gone straight to Florida.

  “I could have afforded it,” he said, “though just barely, and every morning the big decision would be the beach or the golf course, but either way that’s more sun than my Irish skin’s happy with. So every morning I come here instead, and I point customers in the right direction and stare down the ones who look like they don’t belong here, and maybe once a month some drunk or nut job comes in and I take him by the arm and escort him outside.”

  I said it sounded okay.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “It’s not the most interesting work in the world, but how interesting does a job have to be? The time passes, and it’s hard to believe, but before you know it I’ll be collecting two pensions and getting two checks every month. And you know what? I still won’t go to Florida.”

  “And meanwhile,” I said, “you get to wear the uniform.”

  He nodded, and was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You know, when I was a kid, I never said to myself I wanna be a bank guard when I grow up. If there’s ever been anyone who did, I never heard about it. But kids, the young ones, they come in here holding their mother’s hand, their father’s hand, you know what they see? They see a cop.”

  My turn to nod.

  “So yeah, Mattie, I get to wear a uniform. And it’s not the genuine article, and there’s no question it’s a comedown, but it’s not so bad. It’s really not so bad.”

  That was the last time I ever saw him. I don’t know if he got his twenty years in, but if he did manage to qualify for a second pension he stayed in Brooklyn, because he was sitting quietly with a shot and a beer in a Park Slope tavern when he slumped to one side. The bartender knew CPR, remarkably enough, but he was gone and there was no bringing him back.

  His was a funeral I’d have gone to, but it came and went weeks before I got news of his death.

  Elaine was right. She wondered what had become of Vince, as anyone reading this might wonder. So it’s as well I spent a couple of days remembering it and getting it written down.

  But I can’t say I found much joy in it.

  Have I completed this assignment, such as it is? Have I written enough?

  I wonder. I’ve covered, in as much detail as seems appropriate, the first thirty-five years of my life, from the cradle to what looked to be my professional grave. I’ve had a second life since then, and perhaps a third, and half a century has passed, but it seems to me that there’s already a sufficient printed record of those more recent years.

  It runs to a whole shelf of books, something like seventeen novels and another volume’s worth of shorter stories. They have Lawrence Block’s name on the cover, but they have mine as protagonist and narrator, and they’re told in LB’s approximation of my voice. They are properly described as works of fiction, with the understanding that fiction does not imply lack of truth so much as a willingness to refashion factuality in the service of drama, and perhaps in search of a higher truth.

  That last sentence has the ring of blather, but I’ll let it stand. I can’t think of a better way to say what I mean.

  A whole shelf of books, as I’ve said, and I can’t see the point now in repeating their contents here, stringing one after another to tell my life story. I don’t want to do that, and I’m even less inclined to pick those books apart, whining that this one had the time sequence twisted and that one has me working two cases at once, while in fact they took place several months apart.

  I’ll let the books stand. And, you know, I’ve read them all, and most of them more than once. Memory is a shape-shifter, and by now the novels and stories are as much a part of what I remember as the actual original events.

  But for all the years I lived across the street at the Northwestern, the drinking years and the sober years, surely there were interesting things that happened, personally and professionally, that never found their way into print. Wouldn’t some of them make interesting reading, even as they filled in the picture of how I spent those years?

  Well, perhaps. Episodes come to mind, one involving an Armstrong’s regular I haven’t thought of in years, but when I think of summoning up the memories and fitting words to them, all I feel is an abiding weariness.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  But I keep thinking about Motley.

  James Leo Motley, of whom I’ve already written; it was he who tried to move in on Elaine’s life, and whom I very deliberately framed for a variety of charges, including the attempted murder of a police officer. I falsified evidence, I prepared to offer up perjured testimony in court, and I’d have done so with an untroubled conscience but for the plea agreement that aborted his trial. He went off to prison, and it would be hard to argue that there was a more appropriate place for him anywhere above ground, and I didn’t feel anything but satisfaction in watching him led off in handcuffs.

  What I felt was triumph. I’d been painstaking and resourceful, and I’d made good use of the skills I’d learned on the job, and I’d solved a problem.

  Just like that.

  And it certainly didn’t keep me up nights. It wasn’t something to think about when I was looking into a glass of bourbon for an answer that wasn’t there, nor did I ever feel the need to talk about it at an AA meeting. When I did the program’s fourth and fifth steps, essentially reviewing my life and coming to terms with the parts of it that disturbed me, I don’t think JLM even came to mind. If I ever thought of him, he’d have been in the column of matters I’d handled successfully and well, and so I could feel free to forget him.

  As if.

  Motley, I have to say, spent a dozen years doing everything he could to stay forgotten. He served more time than his maximum sentence, the extra years earned by bad behavior. He contrived to kill two or three of his fellow prisoners during his confinement, his guilt manifest if unprovable. He certainly stood a good chance of dying within the stone walls, of natural or unnatural causes, but he survived, and eventually he got out.

  Sustained, perhaps, by a single-minded passion for revenge.

  Because, in his mind, I had cheated. I hadn’t played the game fairly. I was a police officer, sworn not merely to uphold the law but to obey it, and instead I’d fabricated evidence and brought charges against him that I knew to be false.

  That’s not fair! That’s a cry that rings out over the years on every school playground, because if there’s one thing every child seems to be born knowing, it’s that life is supposed to be fair.

  And, if there’s one lesson he learns sooner or later, it’s that it’s not.

  The last thing Motley said, before they took him out of that courtroom, was that he and I had unfinished business, that he’d settle up with me and all my women. Most men on their way to prison keep their mouths shut, but not a few offer up a threat on their way out the door, and maybe it makes them feel better. Cops and judges and officers of the court, the recipients of those threats, learn early on not to take them seriously.

  Still, you notice. And what resonated with me at the time was not any actual danger his words might represent but the nagging thought that the sonofabitch wasn’t altogether wrong.

  Oh, make no mistake. Even if you waste a moment with the observation that he, like everybody else in this and any other narrative, was doing the best he could, that doesn’t change the fact that he was a very bad man on his way to the place he truly belonged.

  But he was right. I had not played fair, I had broken the rules, I had violated my own sworn oath. I had in fact employed unlawful and unethical and—yes—an unfair means to bring about what I believed to be a desirable end, an end I thought justified that means.

  Well, you got me there, I could have said. You’re right, I broke the rules, I didn’t play fair. And you know what? Fuck you.

  Well, it’s all there in the novel. He served his time, his full sentence and then some, and walked out of there with just one thing on his mind. I won’t say that thoughts of revenge kept him going through all those years, I can’t know that, but he never ceased to entertain them.

  And he didn’t waste time acting on them, either. He started with Connie Cooperman, Elaine’s best friend, who’d managed the very rare but not unheard-of feat of falling in love with a john, a decent man who was at once sophisticated enough to embrace her and her past and innocent enough in his heart to love her. He took her to a town in Ohio, and married her, and had three children with her, and the five of them were somewhere in the middle of Happily Ever After when Motley tracked them down and butchered the lot of them.

  The details don’t matter, not here, not now. Motley literally added insult to injury, so arranging the scene that the Massillon police concluded from the jump that local businessman Philip Sturdevant had for unfathomable reasons murdered his wife and children before taking his own life.

  Horrible, certainly, but clear-cut, and an easy case to close. And while they were wrapping it up and signing off on it, Motley was cutting a story out of the newspaper, addressing an envelope to Elaine, and heading for New York.

  Where he killed a lot of people, the bastard. He’d have killed me, he had his chances, but he was saving me for last. He very nearly killed Elaine.

  “She has a good heart,” the surgeon told me, when it was clear she was going to live.

  No kidding.

  And, at the end, if there’s ever an end to anything, I tracked him down to the apartment where he was holing up. He’d gained access by killing the lawful occupant, because why not, but I found him, and the same glass jaw that had betrayed him years earlier on East Fiftieth Street let me knock him out.

  LB wanted to change that in the novel, said it was all a little too Achilles-heel for his taste. I said that was what happened, which ought to count for something, and how could you write about Achilles and forget to mention his heel?

  I remember that apartment, though I couldn’t tell you the neighborhood, let alone the address. Not now, though it may very well come to me. But what I remember more than anything else is the mean musky stench of the place. It stank like an animal’s lair, some foul-breathed predator’s with a stash of half-gnawed bones in one corner.

  I don’t know how long I sat there, breathing that air, cradling his unconscious form. I’d once again put a gun in his hand, but I didn’t fire shots into the wall. Instead I put the muzzle of the gun in his mouth and laid my fingers on top of his. And I waited, knowing what I had to do and somehow unable to get it done.

  Until he began to stir, and I did what I had to do.

  And do I regret so doing? No, and why on earth should I? I wasn’t even cheating, not this time. I was playing fair. The rules of the game had changed, they were Kill Or Be Killed, and it wasn’t a difficult choice to make.

  If I regret anything, it was the action I’d taken years earlier in Elaine’s apartment. I regret what I did—the false evidence, the perjured testimony—not because of the unfair means but of their long-term end. When I’d staged that scene, I’d started a process that would lead to the deaths of five people in Ohio and several more in New York. How could I fail to regret all that?

  Here’s what I wish I’d done. I wish I’d set the scene, firing those shots into the wall, and then I wish I’d drawn my gun, my service revolver, and put a single bullet where it would do the most good. His head, his heart. Whatever.

  I’ve lived a long life, and in its course I’ve killed some people. One was an innocent child, and I could hardly fail to regret that, but it was never anything but accidental, and the scars it left me with have faded over the years.

  I can’t say the others bother me. Perhaps their failure to do so points to a defect in my character. I don’t suppose it’s for me to say.

  But I’ve apparently reserved my deepest regret for a sin of omission, an instance where I might have killed but didn’t. I think of the lives that might have been spared, the harm that might have been averted. Why, for the love of God, didn’t I kill James Leo Motley the first time I had the chance?

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  And yet.

  After the shooting in Washington Heights, it was years before I saw Elaine again. When I’d moved out of my life and into a room at the Hotel Northwestern, I did speak with her a couple of times, in connection with one case or another. Our phone conversations were cordial, but brief and to the point, and neither of us ever suggested we get together for a drink or a meal.

  Then Motley turned up, and Elaine’s immediate response was to call me, and we were flung violently together.

  And we’ve been together ever since.

  I think it surprised us both about equally, not just that we wound up in bed together but that each of us had been unwittingly waiting for us to find our way back to one another. Her life had changed less than mine, she was still in the same apartment and still engaged in what the world had not yet come to call sex work, while I’d been on an extended odyssey to a quasi-career as a private detective in sobriety. The people we’d initially been had fallen in love without having the wit to realize it; the people our lives had made us were at least bright enough to cling to each other until our eyes were open and we could see what was going on.

  It doesn’t really need to be talked about here, nor do the words come all that easily. But the point is that I can’t say with conviction that all of this would have happened without the unwelcome intervention of James Leo Motley. I might contend that our bond was too strong not to reassert itself sooner or later, that we were destined for one another irrespective of circumstances, and perhaps that’s true, but when I think the thought I can’t block out the line Hemingway wrote for Jake Barnes:

  “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

  One of the promises of AA is that we will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. My own view is that nobody who pays attention to his life can be entirely free of regret, but there’s another way to look at it, and that’s that anyone genuinely happy with the present has to be grateful for every turn in the road that got him here.

  My life, even as I see it drawing to a close, is richer and more gratifying than anything I could have thought to hope for. I never expected to live this long, or to find myself so content.

  There are aspects that are less than perfect. I’ve lost people to death, and have drifted away from others. I rarely see Michael, my elder son, and for all the warmth I feel for him and his wife and my grandchildren, I find myself with little to say to any of them.

  I can’t even remember when I last heard from his brother. I have no idea where Andy might be, he never seems to stay in one place for very long, and the existence of another Andrew Scudder, who’s evidently achieved some prominence in Mixed Martial Arts, makes a Google search for my Andy unavailing. For a while he stayed in loose touch with Mike, but then he stopped calling, perhaps embarrassed by how much money he owed his brother.