The Devil Knows You're Dead Read Online Free PDF

soldier in the vast army of the homeless.
    The homeless had been with us a little too long, and their numbers had grown too great. What charity fund-raisers call “compassion fatigue” had long since set in. Something within us made us long to hate the homeless, and now we had been given good reason. We had always sensed that they represented some sort of low-grade danger. They smelled bad, they had diseases, they were louse-ridden. Their presence gave rise to guilt, coupled with the disquieting intimation that the whole system was failing, that they were in our midst because our civilization was falling apart around them.
    But who would have dreamed that they might be armed and dangerous, apt to come out shooting?
    Round ’em up, for God’s sake. Get them off the streets. Get rid of them.
     
     
    THE story stayed in the news all week, but lost some of its hold when the suicide of a prominent real estate developer took over the headlines. (He invited his attorney and two close friends to his penthouse apartment, served them a round of drinks, said, “I wanted you here as witnesses, so there won’t be any of the usual horseshit about foul play.” Then, before they’d had time to digest what he’d said, he walked out onto the terrace and vaulted the railing, plunging sixty-two stories in utter silence.)
    Friday night Elaine and I wound up at her place. She made pasta and a salad and we ate in front of the television set. A woman on the late news tried to segue from one story to the other by contrasting the developer, who presumably had everything to live for but took his own life, and George Sadecki, who had nothing to live for yet took another man’s life. I said I didn’t quite see the connection, and Elaine said it was the only way to get both men into the same paragraph.
    Then they ran a taped interview with a man identified only as Barry, a rawboned black man with white hair and hornrimmed glasses, whom they described as a friend of the alleged killer.
    George, he said, was a mellow dude. Liked to sit on benches, go for walks. Didn’t bother people and didn’t care for people to bother him.
    “What a revelation,” Elaine said.
    George didn’t like panhandling, Barry went on. Didn’t like to ask nobody for nothing. When he wanted money for beer he’d collect aluminum cans and bring them back for deposit. He always put the rest of the trash back neat so folks wouldn’t get upset.
    “An environmentalist,” she said.
    And he was always peaceable, Barry said. Had George ever said anything about owning a gun? Well, Barry thought he might have said something along those lines. But, see, George said a lot of stuff. George’d been in Vietnam, see, and sometimes he got confused about then and now. He might be saying he did something, and it sounds like he’s talking about yesterday, and it’s something he maybe did twenty years ago, if he even did it at all. Like what? Well, like burning up huts with a flamethrower. Like shooting people. When it came down to huts and flamethrowers you knew it was twenty years ago if it happened at all, because huts and flamethrowers didn’t turn up much around West Fifty-seventh Street. But shooting people, well, that was something else.
    “This is Amy Vassbinder in Hell’s Kitchen,” the reporter said, “where there are no huts and flamethrowers, but where shooting people is something else.”
    Elaine hit the Mute button. “I notice they’re calling it Hell’s Kitchen again,” she said. “What happened to Clinton?”
    “When it’s a story about rising property values,” I said, “then the neighborhood is Clinton. That’s when they’re talking gentrification and tree planting. When it’s gunshots and crack vials, then it’s Hell’s Kitchen. Glenn Holtzmann lived in a luxurious high-rise apartment in Clinton. He died a couple of blocks away in Hell’s Kitchen.”
    “I figured it was something like that.”
    “I’ve seen Barry before,” I said.