A Drop of the Hard Stuff by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online

tell me anything. But I can make an educated guess right now as to who killed Jack.”
    “You can?”
    “Not by name,” I said. “Maybe it’s more accurate to say I can guess why he was killed. Somebody wanted to shut him up.”
    “He was shot in the mouth.”
    “At very close range. Essentially, somebody stuck the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, and this would have been after the forehead shot killed him. Put that together with the Ninth Step work Jack kept talking about and the message is pretty clear.”
    “I was afraid of that,” he said.
    “Oh?”
    He looked at his hands, then raised his eyes to meet mine. “I got him killed,” he said.

VI
     
    D ENNIS REDMOND WAS a detective attached to the Nineteenth Precinct, on East Sixty-seventh Street. I reached him at his desk, and let him pick a time and a place to meet.
    “I got a few calls to make,” he said, “and then I can get out of here. You know the Minstrel Boy?”
    “I know the song.”
    “On Lexington,” he said, “right around the corner from us. Say two o’clock?”
     
The minstrel boy to the war has gone
    In the ranks of death you will find him…
     
    It was, not surprisingly, an Irish tavern, and I got there a few minutes early and took a booth on the side, sitting where I could see him come in. I walked over to the jukebox while I waited forthe waiter to bring me my club soda. There were a lot of Irish selections, and among them was “The Minstrel Boy,” the Thomas Moore song, with “The Rose of Tralee” on the flip side, both of them performed by John McCormack. I spent a quarter and listened to that great tenor voice from the past singing about a war that was before my time or his.
    The record ended and I sipped my club soda and glanced now and then at my watch, and wondered how McCormack would do with “The Rose of Tralee” and thought about spending another quarter to find out, and then at 2:12 Redmond came through the door. I recognized him right away from Jack’s memorial service, and he may even have been wearing the same suit. He took a moment to scan the bar and tables—there wasn’t much of a crowd—and came right over.
    “Dennis Redmond,” he said. “And you’re Matt Scudder, and you didn’t happen to mention you were at the service yesterday.”
    “I saw you there,” I said, “with another fellow—”
    “That’d be Rich Bikelski.”
    “—but I didn’t know it was you, not until you walked in just now.”
    “No, how would you?” He shook his head. “Been a long day. I can use something. What’s that you got there, vodka tonic?”
    “Club soda.”
    He straightened up. “I don’t think I’m gonna follow your lead on that one,” he said, and went over to the bar. He came back with a tall glass of pale amber liquid over ice. Whiskey and water, from the look of it, and I found myself wondering what kind of whiskey it was, and which brand.
    He sat down, raised his glass to me, and took a sip. He was a bulky man with a beefy face and a whiskey drinker’s ruddy complexion, but a look at his eyes let you know there was a working brain in there. “Joe Durkin called to put in a word for you,” hesaid. “Says you’re all right. You were on the job, had a gold shield. That how you came to know Joe?”
    I shook my head. “We didn’t meet until a little over a year ago. I was a few years off the force by then.”
    “Working private.”
    “That’s right.”
    “But I guess the two of you got along. That what you’re doing now? Working private?”
    “When something comes my way,” I said. “But my interest in Ellery is personal.”
    “Oh?” He frowned in concentration. “You were at the Six, and it seems to me he took a bust down there once. Nothing came of it, but was that your case? Years ago, that would have been.”
    I told him that was a good guess, that it hadn’t been my case but that I’d been present as a spectator when the witness blew the ID. “We went back a little further