The Devil Knows You're Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

get shot.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, for God’s sake,” she said. “He was a bright young guy with a good job and a great apartment and a wife who was crazy about him, and he went out for a walk and—did they say he was making a phone call?”
    “Something like that.”
    “Probably to find out if she needed anything from the corner deli. God, do you figure she heard the shots?”
    “How do I know?”
    She frowned. “I just find the whole thing very disturbing,” she said. “It’s different when you know the person, isn’t it? But that’s not all. It just seems wrong.”
    “Murder’s always wrong.”
    “I don’t mean morally wrong. I mean in the sense of a mistake, a cosmic error. He wasn’t the kind of person who gets shot down on the street. Do you know what this means? It means we’re all in trouble.”
    “How do you figure that?”
    “If it could happen to him,” she said, “it could happen to anybody.”
     
     
    THE whole city saw it that way.
    The morning papers were full of the story. The tabloids led with it, and even the
Times
stuck it on the front page. Local television stations gave it the full treatment; several of them had studios within a few blocks of the murder scene, which gave it a little added impact for their employees, if not for their viewers.
    I didn’t stay glued to the set myself, but even so I saw interviews with Lisa Holtzmann, with people from the neighborhood, and with various police officials, including a detective from Manhattan Homicide and the precinct commander at Midtown North. All the cops said the same thing—that this was a terrible crime, that such outrages could not be allowed to go unpunished, and that all available police personnel would be working the case in around-the-clock shifts until the killer was in custody.
    It didn’t take long. The official estimate of the time of death was 9:45 Thursday night, and within twenty-four hours they were able to announce an arrest. “Suspect charged in Hell’s Kitchen homicide,” the newsbreaks chirped. “Film at eleven.”
    And at eleven we watched the film. We saw the suspect with his hands cuffed behind him, his face pointed toward the camera, his eyes wide and staring.
    “Jesus, will you look at him,” Elaine said. “The man’s a walking nightmare. Honey, what’s the matter? You can’t possibly know him.”
    “I don’t know him,” I said, “but I recognize him from the neighborhood. I think his name is George.”
    “Well, who is he?”
    I couldn’t answer that, but they could and did. His name was George Sadecki, and he was forty-four years old, unemployed, indigent, a Vietnam veteran, a fixture in the West Fifties. He had been charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of Glenn Holtzmann.
     
Chapter 4
     
    Saturday morning I rented a car and we got out of the city and drove a hundred miles up the Hudson. We stayed three nights at a refurbished colonial inn in Columbia County, sleeping in a canopied four-poster bed in a room that had a dry sink and a porcelain chamber pot, but no television. We didn’t look at TV or read a newspaper all the time we were there.
    It was Tuesday afternoon by the time we got back to New York. I dropped Elaine and turned in the car, and when I got to my hotel there were two old guys in the lobby discussing the Holtzmann shooting. “I seen the killer around for years,” one was saying. “Wiping windshields, hustling spare change. All along I said there was something wrong with the son of a bitch. You live in this town, you develop an instinct.”
    The Slaughter on Eleventh Avenue, as one of the tabloids felt compelled to call it, was still very much in the news, even in the absence of continuing developments in the case. Two elements combined to give it a hold on the public imagination: The victim was a young urban professional, the sort of person to whom such things were not supposed to happen, and the killer was a particularly unattractive