Even the Wicked by Lawrence Block Page A

Donn at Reliable and see about getting my body guarded. What a thing to have to do. Can I tell you something? Don’t repeat this, but until this afternoon I sort of liked Will.”
    “You did?”
    “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’11 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