A Ticket To The Boneyard

"Come on," he said. "Grab your coat, we'll get some air."

He kept his car in a twenty-four-hour lot on Eleventh Avenue. It was a big silver Cadillac with tinted glass all around. The attendant treated it and its owner with respect.

The city was still, the streets next to empty. We cruised across town, turned right at Second Avenue. As we crossed Thirty-fourth Street he said, "You ought to look at the house he's staying in. As much as you paid for the address, you'll want to know it's not an empty lot."

"That's not a bad idea. The last empty lot I went into didn't turn out so well for me."

He parked in a bus stop and I checked my notebook and walked around the corner to the address Brian had given me. The building was a six-story tenement, its ground floor now occupied by a tailor. A sign, hand-lettered, promised reasonable alterations and fast service. I went into the vestibule and checked the names. There were four apartments to a floor, and the tenant in 4-C was Lepcourt.

"The right name's on the bell," I told Mick. "That doesn't mean Motley's living here, but if my guy was making up a story at least he wove a little truth into it."

"Ring the bell," Mick said. "See if he's home."

"No, I don't want to do that. Watch the street, would you? I want to look around."

He stood at the street door while I got the lobby door open, slipping the lock with a credit card. I walked the length of a narrow hallway, past the staircase, and between the doors of the two rear apartments. One-C was the right rear apartment. All the way at the back was a fire door leading to the rear courtyard. I pressed the panic bar and pushed it open, then wedged a toothpick into the locking mechanism to avoid locking myself out.

My presence in the courtyard alarmed a couple of rats and sent them scuttling for cover. I made my way to the back of the tiny area and counted windows to determine which was 4-C. My view was imperfect, largely obscured by the fire escape, but I would have been able to tell if there was a light on in the Lepcourt apartment. There wasn't. Not in the room with the rear window, anyway.

If you moved one of the garbage cans and stood on it you could reach the fire escape and either lower the ladder or swing up onto the metal stairs. I actually considered this for a moment before ruling it out as too much risk with too little point. I went back into the building, leaving my toothpick in the lock in case I felt the need to get into the building from the back at some later time. I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor and looked at the keyhole, and under the door. No light showed through. I put my ear to the door and couldn't hear anything.

I put a hand in my pocket and touched the little Smith, working it with my fingers like a worry stone while I tried to figure out what to do next. He was either in there or he wasn't. If I knew he was home I could force the door and try to take him by surprise. If I knew the apartment was empty I could try to gain entrance by stealth. I couldn't do either unless I knew if he was there, and I couldn't find that out without running the risk of alerting him. And that was too great a risk. My one edge at this point was that he didn't know I had his address. It wasn't much of an advantage, but I couldn't afford to give it away.

When I got downstairs the entryway was empty. Ballou was outside, leaning against a streetlamp, his butcher's apron a vivid white.

We went to his car and he said he was hungry and that he knew a place I'd like. "And they'll pour you a drink without checking the clock first,"

he said. "That's if they know you."

"I ought to get to sleep," I said.

"You're not even tired."

He was right. I wasn't. I don't know how he knew it, because I must have looked tired, but the whole evening had somehow energized me. He drove downtown and west and parked at a fire hydrant in front of an old-fashioned diner across from the river a few blocks south of the entrance to the Holland Tunnel.

A white-haired waitress brought us menus. He ordered steak and eggs, the steak rare, the eggs over easy. They had Philadelphia-style scrapple on the menu, and I ordered that with scrambled eggs. And coffee, I said.

"Did you want the special coffee?"

I asked what it was. She looked uncomfortable, and Ballou told her I'd have plain black coffee, but that he'd like the special coffee. At that point I caught on, and I wasn't surprised when the special coffee turned out to be straight scotch served in a coffee mug.

He said, "You can give the police his address."

"I could. I don't know what they'd do with it. I tried to press charges against him and Durkin wouldn't even listen to me."

"There's more," he said. "You have to do this alone."

"Do I?"

"I think you do. It's between the two of you, and that's how it has to be settled."

"That's how it feels to me, too," I admitted. "But it doesn't make sense. It's not as though he's a worthy foe and I have to meet him as an equal. He's a murderous psychopathic son of a bitch and I'd love it if he got hit by a bus crossing the street."

"I'd buy the driver a drink."

"I'd buy him a new bus. But I can't wait for a bus to get him, and there's as much chance of that as the cops bagging him. I got a call earlier from the police lieutenant in Ohio. He did some work on his own, found a motel clerk who ID'd Motley. But nothing like that is going to make a difference in this case. I have to face him myself and I wish I knew why."

"Your business with him is personal."

"Is it? I'm not even in a rage. I was before, God knows, but I used it all up on that big stupid kid in the park. It ran away from me, Mick. I could have killed him."

"Small loss."

"A big loss to me if I went away for it. Anyway, my rage went away somewhere after that. I must be carrying a lot of anger, but I swear to God I can't feel it. I must hate the bastard, but I don't feel that, either. I just feel—"

"What?"

"Driven."

"Ah."

"He's my problem and I have to solve him. Maybe it's because I set him up twelve years ago. I didn't play according to the rules, and everything that's happened since has to be charged to my account. Or maybe it's simpler than that. It's personal to him, and maybe there's no way to avoid buying into his perception of it. Either way, I have to do something about him. He's the boulder in front of my door. If I don't shove him out of the way I'll never leave the house again." I drank the rest of my coffee. The grounds were like sludge on the bottom of the cup. "Except he's an invisible boulder," I said. "I've got a sketch of him based on a pair of twelve-year-old memories. I never get to see him. I keep looking over

my shoulder and he's never quite there."

"He was there the other night. In the empty lot."

"Was he? I think back on it and it might as well have happened in a dream. I never quite got to see him.

He was behind me almost all the time. The one time I took a swing at him I couldn't really see what I was doing. It was dark as a coal mine in there, all I saw was a shape. Then I was facedown in the dirt, and then I was unconscious, and then I was all by myself. I suppose I should be grateful for the aches and bruises. They were proof the whole thing really happened. Every time I pissed blood I knew I hadn't made it all up."

He nodded, and ran his right forefinger over a scar on the back of his left hand. "Sometimes pain's a great comfort," he said.

"I went to take him down and bring him in," I said. "In a funny way I have a better shot than the cops do.

I'm a private citizen, so none of the Supreme Court rulings get in my way. I don't need probable cause to search his dwelling, and I can enter the premises illegally without disqualifying any evidence I turn up.

I don't have to read him his rights. If I get a confession out of him, they can't disallow it on the grounds that he didn't get to consult an attorney. I can record anything he says without getting a court order first, and I don't even have to tell him I'm doing it."

The waitress brought me more coffee. I said, "I want him in cuffs and leg irons, Mick. I want to see him sent away and know he won't be coming out again. And I think you're right. I think I have to bring him in myself."

"You may not be able to. You may have to use the gun."

"I'll use it if I have to."

"I'd use it first chance. I'd shoot him in the back."

Maybe I would, too. I couldn't really say what I'd do, or when I might get to do it. Chasing after him was like pursuing mist once the sun came up. So far all I had was an address and an apartment number, and I didn't even know if he really lived there.

When I was a working cop there had been restaurants where I didn't get a check. The owners liked having us around, and I guess they thought our presence was worth the occasional free meal. Evidently some establishments feel similarly about career criminals, because there was no check for us at the diner.

We each left five dollars for the waitress, and Mick stopped at the counter to pick up a couple of containers of coffee.

The Cadillac had a ticket on the windshield. He folded it and tucked it in a pocket without comment.

The sky was growing light, the morning still and fresh around us.

He drove up along the river and over the George Washington Bridge to the Jersey side, then headed north on the Palisades Parkway, pulling off at an overlook high above the Hudson. He parked with the big car's nose against the guardrail and we sat and watched the dawn come up over the city. I don't think either of us had said more than a dozen words since we left the diner, and we didn't speak now.

After a while he got our coffees out of the paper sack and handed one to me. He reached across me to open the glove compartment and removed a half-pint silver flask. He uncapped it and added an ounce or two of whiskey to his coffee. I must have reacted visibly because he turned and raised his brows at me.

"I used to drink coffee that way," I said.

"With twelve-year-old Irish?"

"With any kind of whiskey. Bourbon, mostly."

He capped the flask, took a long pull of the sweetened coffee.

"Sometimes," he said, "I wish to God you'd take a drink."

"So you've said."

"But do you know something? If you reached for the flask right now I'd break your arm."

"You just don't want me drinking up your whiskey."

"I don't want you drinking any man's whiskey. And I couldn't tell you why. Have you been up here before?"

"Not in years. And never at this hour."

"It's the best time. In a little while we'll go to mass."

"Oh?"

"The eight o'clock at St. Bernard's. The butchers' mass. You went with me once before. What's so funny?"

"I spend half my life in church basements, and you're the only person I know who goes to church."

"Your sober friends don't go?"

"I suppose some of them must, but if so I haven't heard them talk about it. What do you want to drag me to mass for, Mick? I'm not even a Catholic."

"Weren't you raised one?"

I shook my head. "I was brought up sort of half-assed Protestant.

Nobody in the family went regularly."

"Ah. Well, what difference does it make? You don't have to be a fucking Catholic to go to the fucking mass, do you?"

"I don't know."

"I don't go for God. I don't go for the fucking church. I go because my father went every morning of his life." He took a short pull straight from the flask. "God, that's good. It's too good to put in coffee. I don't know why the old man went and I don't know why I go. Sometimes it's where I want to be after a long night, and it's a good night we've just had. Come to mass with me."

"All right."

He drove back into town and left the car on West Fourteenth in front of Twomey's funeral parlor. The eight o'clock mass was held in a small chapel off the main sanctuary at St. Bernard's. There were less than two dozen people in attendance, perhaps half of them dressed like Mick in white butcher's aprons.

When the mass ended they would go to work in the meat markets just south and west of the old church.

I took my cues from the others, standing or sitting or kneeling when they did. When they handed out the communion wafers I stayed where I was. So did Mick, along with three or four of the others.

Back at the car he said, "Where now? Your hotel?"

I nodded. "I ought to get some sleep."

"Wouldn't you sleep better in a place unknown to him? I've an apartment you could use."

"Maybe later," I said. "I'm safe enough for now. He's saving me for last."

In front of the Northwestern he shifted the car into park but left the engine running. He said, "You've got the gun."

"In my pocket."

"If you need more shells—"

"If I need more shells I'm in deep trouble."

"Well, if there's anything you need."

"Thanks, Mick."

"Sometimes I wish you drank," he said, "and then I'm glad you don't." He looked at me. "Why is that?"

"I don't know, but I think I understand. Sometimes I wish you didn't drink, and sometimes I'm glad you do."

"I never have nights like this with anybody else."

"Neither do I."

"The mass was all right, wasn't it?"

"It was fine."

He fixed his eyes on me. "Do you ever pray?" he demanded.

"Sometimes I talk to myself. Inside my head, I mean."

"I know what you mean."

"Maybe that's praying. I don't know. Maybe I do it in the hope that something is listening."

"Ah."

"I heard a new prayer the other day. A fellow said it was the most useful one he knew. 'Thank you for everything just as it is.' "

His eyes narrowed and he mouthed the words silently. Then his lips curled into a slow smile. "Oh, that's grand," he said. "Wherever did you hear that one?"

"At a meeting."

"That's the sort of thing you hear at those meetings, is it?" He chuckled, and for a moment I thought he was going to say something else. Then he straightened up in his seat. "Well, I won't keep you," he said.

"You'll want to get some sleep."

In my room I shucked off my topcoat and hung it up, then drew the gun out of my jacket pocket. I swung the cylinder out, dumped the shells into the palm of my hand. They were hollow points, designed to expand upon impact. That made them do more damage than standard rounds, but it also lessened the likelihood of a dangerous ricochet, because the slug would shatter into fragments upon impact with a solid surface instead of ricocheting intact.

If I'd had hollow points in my gun some years ago I might not have caused the death of that child in Washington Heights, and who could say what a difference that might have made in all our lives? There was a time when I could drink away hours on end running that one through my mind.

Now I reloaded the gun and aimed at objects in the room, getting the feel of the weapon. I took off my jacket and tried to find a convenient and comfortable way to tuck the gun under my belt. A shoulder holster might be best, I decided, and I made a note to go get one later in the day. There were other things I could use, too. Handcuffs, certainly, so that I could immobilize Motley while I questioned him, and neutralize the unnatural strength in those hands of his. I could pick up a set of cuffs at a store specializing in police items. There was at least one such store downtown near One Police Plaza, and I seemed to remember another in the East Twenties, near the Academy. I could stop there on my way to the Lepcourt apartment, and they could very likely supply a shoulder holster as well. Some of their goods were available only to working cops, but most were unrestricted, for sale to anyone who wanted them, and handcuffs were certainly in that category.

You could buy body armor there, too, and I wondered if a Kevlar vest might be a wise purchase. I didn't think he'd be shooting at me, and the mesh won't do much to stop a knife thrust, but would it be likely to afford me any protection against his fingers? I didn't know, and I couldn't quite see myself trying to pry that information from a clerk.

"Will this protect me if somebody pokes me in the ribs?" "What's the matter, sir, you ticklish or something?"

A small tape recorder would be good. One of those pocket-size models that take the microcassettes.

They had them at the Reliable office, and maybe they'd let me check one out for a couple of days. Or maybe it would be simpler if I went to Radio Shack and bought my own. I didn't need state-of-the-art equipment, so how much could it cost me?

I set the gun on top of the dresser and got undressed. I went into the bathroom to run a tub of hot water, and while it filled I came back and switched on the television set and scanned the dial. I caught a newscast on one of the independent channels. The lead item was something about a crisis in the savings-and-loan industry, and then a cheerful girl reporter with a Pepsodent smile came on to tell me that police believed there might be a connection between last night's bizarre murder of an Auxiliary Police officer in the West Village and this morning's pre-dawn assault in exclusive Turtle Bay.

I'd missed hearing about the AP officer earlier, so I paid attention.

I was hooked in tighter when she went on to say that police were speculating further about the possibility of a connection between both crimes and the brutal rape and murder of Elizabeth Scudder earlier in the week at her home on Irving Place. The victim in this morning's assault, an unmarried woman residing at 345 East Fifty-first Street, had been rushed to New York Hospital with multiple stab wounds and other unspecified injuries.

The screen filled with a shot of the building entrance, with paramedics rushing a stretcher out to a waiting ambulance. I tried to make out the face of the woman on the stretcher but I couldn't see anything.

Then the reporter was back, showing what was probably supposed to be a serious smile. The victim, she chirped, was currently undergoing emergency surgery, and a police-department spokesman rated her survival chances as slim. Her identification was being withheld pending notification of next of kin.

I hadn't been able to see her face, but I'd seen the building entrance. Anyway, I'd recognized the address. And I think I'd have known anyway. I think I knew from the moment the item began.

It couldn't have taken me more than five minutes to get dressed and out the door. As it closed behind me the phone started ringing. I let it ring.

Here's how it must have happened:

At ten o'clock Thursday night, around the time we were closing the meeting at St. Paul's, Andrew Echevarria and Gerald Wilhelm finished their tour of duty and reported back to their commanding officer at the Sixth Precinct on West Tenth Street. Since six that evening the two men had comprised one of five Auxiliary Police patrols walking assigned beats in the precinct, carrying nightsticks and walkie-talkies, and serving as the eyes and ears of the regular police while providing a visible police presence on the streets of the city.

Gerald Wilhelm left his uniform in a locker and went home in civilian clothes. Andrew Echevarria wore his uniform to and from his weekly service, as was his right. He left the station house around twenty minutes after ten and walked north and west toward a converted warehouse on Horatio Street between Washington and West, where he shared a one-bedroom apartment with his lover, a textile designer named Clarence Freudenthal.

Maybe Motley started tailing him early in the evening. Maybe he picked him up for the first time shortly after he left the station house.

Then again, maybe the whole thing was a matter of impulse. Motley was certainly a frequent habitué of the western edge of the Village, and God knows he was capable of spur-of-the-moment indecency.

What's evident is that he lured Echevarria into a darkened passage between two buildings, probably by asking for help. Echevarria, still in uniform, would expect to be asked for assistance. Then, before the young airlines ticket agent could guess what was happening, Motley immobilized him and very likely rendered him unconscious by manually constricting his throat.

That's not how he killed him, though. For that he used a long narrow-bladed knife, but he didn't do this until he'd removed the young man's jacket and shirt. Then he killed Echevarria with a single thrust to the heart.

He stripped the corpse of everything but the underwear and socks.

He took the shoes off in order to remove the trousers, but either they were the wrong size or he preferred his own, because he left them behind. (Surprisingly enough, they were still there when the body was discovered. If a street person had been first on the scene, those shoes probably would have walked.) He left Echevarria in the alley, dressed in socks and underwear and quite dead. The undershorts were down around the victim's thighs and some sort of indignity had been performed upon him, but a subsequent examination did not reveal the presence of semen in the dead man's anus. He had been penetrated anally, but either the assailant failed to ejaculate or the agent of penetration was Echevarria's own hardwood nightstick.

In any event, Motley took the nightstick away with him, along with his other gear— handcuffs and key, notebook, walkie-talkie, AP shield, and, of course, shirt and jacket and pants and cap. He probably wore his own clothing and carried these articles, and he may have had some sort of shopping bag with him to facilitate this task. (If so, that would support the conjecture that he planned the attack on Echevarria, that he deliberately picked out a uniformed officer similar to himself in height and build and then stalked him.)

Echevarria's death evidently took place between 10:30 and 10:45, and his killer was probably out of the passageway and off into the night before eleven o'clock. It was another hour before police from the Sixth Precinct, responding to an anonymous phone tip, discovered the body where the killer had left it. One of the officers on the scene happened to recognize the victim, having seen him just a couple of hours earlier; but for this bit of luck, he might not have been identified, or known to have been an auxiliary cop, for a considerable time.

At this point James Leo Motley was a full hour away from the murder scene, with few clues left behind to point to him. He probably went directly to the Lepcourt apartment on East Twenty-fifth, where he stowed his street clothes and dressed in Echevarria's uniform. Did he look at himself in his new uniform?

Did he stride to and fro across the floor, slapping his nightstick against the palm of his hand? Did he, like every rookie cop since Teddy Roosevelt was commissioner, try twirling his nightstick?

One can only imagine. Just what he did is uncertain, as is the time he arrived at the Twenty-fifth Street apartment and the time he left it. He may have been there while I stood in the courtyard behind the building, peering up through the fire escape at his window and listening to the rats scuttling among the garbage cans. He may have been on the other side of the apartment door while I was in front of it, looking for light under the door, listening for sounds within. I doubt it myself. I don't think he stayed in the apartment for very much longer than the time it took him to change his clothes for his victim's, but there's no way to know.

At four-thirty, while Mick Ballou and I were having an early breakfast at the diner, he was entering the lobby at 345 East Fifty-first.

He found the easy way to get through all those locks. He got her to open them for him.

First he presented himself to the doorman. He showed up in full police regalia and announced that he'd come to talk with one of the building's tenants, a woman named— and here he flipped his notebook's black leather cover and read the name off— a woman named Elaine Mardell.

The doormen were never supposed to let anyone in unannounced, and they'd received special instructions recently as far as visitors for Miss Mardell were concerned. Even so, the doorman might not have called on the intercom if Motley had cautioned him against it. A blue uniform cuts through a lot of rules and regulations.

Any NYPD officer looking at him would have seen an Auxiliary Police uniform. If you knew what to look for it wasn't hard to spot the difference. His badge was a seven-pointed star instead of a shield, his shoulder patch was different, and of course he wasn't wearing a holstered firearm. But everything else was right, and there are so many different kinds of cops in the city, Transit Police and Housing Police and all, that he looked good enough to get by.

In any event, he asked the doorman to use the intercom. The attendant had to ring a few times— she was sound asleep at the time—

but eventually she came to the phone and the doorman told her that a police officer was asking to speak to her. And handed the phone to Motley.

He probably changed the pitch of his voice. This wouldn't have been necessary. Her intercom distorted voices all by itself, but he might not have known that. Anyway, except for a couple of phone calls she hadn't heard his voice in twelve years, and her doorman had just announced that the caller was a cop, and she was fresh out of bed and barely had her eyes open.

He told her he had to ask her some questions regarding an urgent matter. She asked for more details, and he let out that there had been a homicide earlier that evening, and that the victim was someone presumably known to her. She asked him who it was. He said it was a man named Matthew Scudder.

She told him to come up. The doorman pointed him to the elevator.

When she looked through the peephole she saw a cop. His brimmed cap concealed the shape of the top of his head. He was wearing a pair of drugstore glasses, and he had the notebook in front of him so that the shape of his chin was concealed. That was probably unnecessary, because she was expecting a cop, she'd just talked to him, for God's sake, and here he was in uniform. And she was in a state anyway because somebody was trying to kill her and the man she'd been counting on for protection was dead.

So she unlocked all her locks and let him in.

He was in her apartment for over two hours. He had the knife with which he'd killed Andy Echevarria, a spring-powered stiletto with a five-inch blade. He had Echevarria's nightstick. And of course he had his own two hands, with their long strong fingers.

He used them all on Elaine.

I haven't wanted to think too much about what he did, or the order in which he did it. I suspect there must have been intervals during which she was unconscious, and I'm sure he spent a fair part of the time talking to her, telling her just how strong and brilliant and resourceful he was.

Maybe he quoted Nietzsche, or some other genius from the prison library.

When he walked out of there he left her sprawled on her living-room floor with her blood soaking into the white rug. It's possible he thought she was already dead. She would have been in shock, with her breathing imperceptibly shallow and all her vital signs muted. She was still breathing, though, and her heart was still beating, but she would have died there on the floor if it hadn't been for the doorman.

He was a Brazilian, tall and heavyset, with a headful of glossy black hair and a belly that strained the buttons of his uniform. His name was Emilio Lopes. Something began bothering Lopes an hour or so after he showed Motley to the elevator. Finally he picked up the intercom and called upstairs to make sure everything was all right.

He rang a few times and no one picked up. The ringing of the intercom may have prompted Motley to hurry his work and get out of there. When he did leave, striding hurriedly through the lobby around seven o'clock, something in his manner set off Lopes's internal alarm.

He rang through on the intercom again, and of course there was no answer. Then he remembered the sketch he'd been shown, the portrait of the one man who most emphatically was not to be given access to Miss Mardell's apartment, and it struck him that the police uniform might have covered that very man. The more he thought about it, the surer he was.

He abandoned his post and went upstairs. He rang the bell and pounded on the door. He tried the door, and it was locked; Motley had pulled it shut. The police locks were unengaged, as was the deadbolt, but the spring lock was enough to secure the door and it engaged automatically when you closed the door.

He turned away, intending to go back downstairs and root around for a passkey. Failing to find one, perhaps he would phone the local precinct. But then something made him turn back again and do what not one doorman in twenty would have done.

He drew back his foot and kicked the door. He kicked a second time, hard, and he was a big man and his legs were strong from carrying his bulk around all day long. They'd always been strong; when he was younger and lighter his legs had been strong from soccer.

The spring lock gave and the door flew open. He saw her on the rug and ran across the room to kneel at her side. Then he got up and crossed himself and picked up the phone and called 911. He knew it was too late but he did it anyway.

And that's what must have happened while I was drinking coffee at the Flame and walking uptown to Mother Goose, while I sat there listening to quiet jazz, while I paid out money to Brian and to Danny Boy. While I traded stories with Mick Ballou, and scared the rats away from their garbage feast, and breakfasted on scrapple in view of the Hudson. While I sat in a car on the other side of that river and watched the sun come up over the city.

I may have some of the details wrong, and I'm sure there are things that happened that I don't know about, and never will. But I think that's pretty close to the way it went down. In any case, I'm sure of one thing. It happened just the way it was supposed to happen. Andy Echevarria might argue the point, and so might Elaine, but just check with Marcus Aurelius. He'll explain the whole thing to you.

New York Hospital is at York and Sixty-eighth. My cab dropped me at the emergency-room entrance and the woman behind the desk determined that Elaine Mardell had come down from surgery and was in the intensive-care unit. She pointed to a floor plan of the building and showed me how to get to the ICU.

A nurse there told me they only allowed immediate family in the ICU. I said the patient didn't have any family, that I was probably as close to family as she had. She asked the nature of our relationship, and I said we were friends. She asked if we were intimate friends. Yes, I said.

Intimate friends. She wrote my name on a card, and made a notation.

She showed me to a waiting room. There were several other people there, smoking, reading magazines, waiting for their loved ones to die. I leafed through a copy of Sports Illustrated, but none of the words registered. Every once in a while I turned the page out of force of habit.

After a while a doctor came into the waiting room and looked around and asked for me by name. I stood up and he motioned me into the hallway. He had a very young face and a head of hair already thickly shot with gray.

He said, "This is a rough one. I don't know what to tell you."

"Is she going to live?"

"She was in surgery for almost four hours. I forget how many units of blood we gave her. She'd lost a lot of blood by the time we got her and there was a lot of internal bleeding. She's still bleeding now and still receiving transfusions." He had his hands clasped in front of his lab coat, and he was wringing them together. I don't think he was aware that he was doing it.

He said, "We had to remove her spleen. You can live without a spleen, there are thousands of people who manage. But she sustained considerable trauma to her entire system. Her renal function's off, her liver's damaged—"

He went on, cataloguing her injuries. I only caught about half of what he said and only understood a fraction of that. "She's intubated," he said, "and we've got her on a respirator. Her lungs failed. That happens sometimes, it's what they call Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome.

You see it sometimes in accident victims. Traffic accidents, I mean. The lungs quit."

There was more, too technical for me to understand. I asked how bad it was.

"Well, it's bad," he said, and he told me all the things that could go wrong.

I asked if I could see her.

"For a few minutes," he said. "She's completely sedated, and as I said we've got her hooked up to a respirator. It's doing the breathing for her." He led me toward a door at the far side of the ICU. "It may be a shock for you to see her like this," he said.

There were machines everywhere, and tubes strung all over the place. Dials flashed numbers, machines beeped and whirred, needles jumped. In the midst of it all she lay still as death, her skin waxy, her color awful.

I asked my first question again. "Is she going to live?"

He didn't answer, and when I looked up he was gone and I was alone with her. I wanted to reach out and touch her hand but I didn't know if that was allowed. I went on standing there, a nurse came into the room and began doing something to one of the machines. She told me I could stay for a few more minutes. "You can talk to her," she said.

"Can she hear me?"

"I think there's a part of them that hears everything, even when they're deep in coma."

She went out, and I stayed for five or ten minutes. I talked some. I don't remember what I said.

The same nurse came in a second time to tell me she'd have to ask me to leave. I could wait in the waiting room and they would call me if there was any change in the patient's condition.

I asked what kind of change she expected.

She didn't answer either, not exactly. "There are just so many things that can go wrong," she said. "In a case like this. He hurt her so badly in so many ways. I'm telling you, this city we live in—"

It wasn't the city. The city didn't do it to her. It was one man, and he could have turned up anywhere.

Joe Durkin was in the waiting room. He got to his feet when I walked in. He hadn't shaved that morning, and he looked as though he'd slept in his clothes.

He asked how she was.

"Not good," I said.

"She say anything?"

"She's out cold and she's got tubes up her nose and down her throat. It limits her conversation."

"That's what they told me but I wanted to check. Be nice if she said it was Motley, but we don't need her to ID him. The doorman confirmed it was him."

He told me a little about what had happened. Echevarria's murder, and how Motley had gained access to the building on East Fifty-first.

He said, "We got an all-points out, we're using your sketch, putting it out all over the city. He killed an auxiliary cop. That damn well ought to turn the heat up."

Most cops think the auxiliaries are a joke, a bunch of starry-eyed buffs who come around once a week to play Dress-up. Then every once in a while one of them gets killed and is instantly inducted into that glorious band of blue-coated martyrs. There's nothing like death for lowering the barriers and opening the doors.

"He's killed nine people, minimum," I said. "Ten, if you count Elaine."

"Is she going to die?"

"Nobody's quite coming out and saying that yet. I think it's against their religion to speak that plainly. But if this were Las Vegas they'd take the game off the boards. That's how much of a chance they seem to think she has."

"I'm sorry, Matt."

I thought of a couple of things to say and left them unsaid. He cleared his throat and asked me if I had any kind of line on Motley's possible whereabouts.

"How would I know?"

"I thought you might have scouted something up."

"Me?" I looked at him. "How could I do that, Joe? He got an order of protection against me,

remember? If I went looking for him and found him, somebody like you would have to show up and arrest me."

"Matt—"

"I'm sorry," I said. "Elaine's good people and I've known her a lot of years. I think it probably got to me, seeing her like that."

"Of course it did."

"And I'm running on empty. I was up all night, in fact I was just getting ready for bed when I caught a newscast."

"Where were you? Out looking for Motley?"

I shook my head. "Just sitting up all night telling old stories with Mickey Ballou."

"Why him, for Christ's sake?"

"He's a friend of mine."

"Funny friend for you to have."

"Oh, I don't know," I said. "When you think about it, all I am is a guy who used to be a cop a long time ago. And what I am now is a sort of shady character with no visible means of support, so—"

"Cut it out."

I didn't say anything.

"I'm sorry, all right? I played it the way it looked as though it had to be played. You were on the job long enough to know how it works."

"Oh, I know how it works, all right."

"Well," he said. "If you think of anything, you'll let me know, right?"

"If I think of anything."

"Meantime, why don't you go home and get some sleep? You can't do her any good here. Go get some rest."

"Sure," I said.

We walked out of there together. They were paging some doctor on the intercom. I tried to remember the name of the one I'd talked to.

He'd been wearing one of those plastic badges with his name on it, but it hadn't registered.

Outside the sun was shining, the air, a little warmer than it had been lately. Durkin said he had a car parked around the corner and offered me a ride downtown. I said I'd take a cab, and he didn't press.

I didn't have to loid the door at 288 East Twenty-fifth. A woman was on her way out as I came in from the street. From the smile she gave me, I think she must have thought she recognized me. She held the door for me and I thanked her and went on in.

I walked the length of the hallway. The door to the rear courtyard was as I'd left it, with my toothpick wedged in place to keep it from locking. I pushed it shut behind me and stood at the back of the yard and looked up at his window.

I'd made two stops on the way downtown. As a result, I had a pair of standard-issue NYPD handcuffs in one of my topcoat pockets and a miniature tape recorder in the other. I found room in one of my pants pockets for the cuffs and put the recorder in a jacket pocket, where it shared space with Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, which I seemed as incapable of getting rid of as I was of reading. My other jacket pocket held the .38 Smith. I took off my topcoat, folded it, and set it down on top of one of the garbage cans. It was too bulky for what I had in mind.

No rats scuttled as I moved among the garbage cans. They were probably hidden away somewhere, sleeping off the effects of the long night. Maybe Motley was doing the same.

Making as little noise as possible, I positioned one garbage can beneath the fire escape and clambered on top of it. I straightened up and reached overhead to grasp the descending ladder. I pulled on it and nothing happened. I gave a yank and it creaked a little in protest, and there was a screech of metal scraping against metal as it lowered itself for my ascent.

I waited, but no heads emerged from the windows overlooking the courtyard. The noise was minimal, and most of the tenants were probably at work at that hour, while the night workers would be asleep.

Over on Second Avenue somebody leaned on a car horn, and another driver answered with a series of staccato beeps. I hauled myself upward, pulling myself hand over hand until I could get a foot onto the lowest rung. The Smith in my pocket clanged against the metal railing. I climbed onto the first horizontal walkway, leaned my weight against the brick wall of the building, and tried to catch my breath.

After a minute or two I was ready to go the rest of the way. I climbed up to the fourth floor and kept a low profile when I reached it, hunkering down on the metal parapet and peering over the windowsill.

The apartment was dark within. There were window gates to render the place burglar-proof, but they were unfastened, and the window itself was open a few inches at the bottom. I got up close to the window and looked in, first through the space at the bottom, then through the glass. I was looking into a small bedroom. There was an old-fashioned metal bedstead, a chest of drawers, a pair of milk crates set on end to serve as bedside tables. One of them held a phone, the other a digital clock-radio.

I sat perfectly still for what the clock-radio assured me was a full minute. The seconds ticked silently but visibly away, and not a sound issued from the apartment within. And the bed was empty, and unmade.

But it was the right apartment, and Brian's information was good.

And he'd been back since his visit to Elaine's apartment.

A jacket with a New York Auxiliary Police shoulder patch hung from the knob of the closet door.

So he had been there. And he would be back. And I would be waiting for him.

Slowly, carefully, I gripped the window at the bottom and lifted. It went up readily and made hardly any sound at all. I turned to look around, on the chance that someone was watching all of this from a neighboring building. I could envision myself waiting in there for him, only to have to open the door to some cops dispatched by some public-spirited citizen.

But there was nobody paying any attention. I opened the window the rest of the way and stepped in over the sill.

Inside, the bedroom smelled like some animal's lair. It was a woman's apartment, you could see that from the clothes in the closet and the clutter on the dresser top, but the scent was masculine and predatory.

I couldn't tell how recently he'd been here but I could feel his presence in the room, and without even thinking about it I dipped into my jacket pocket and brought out the Smith. The butt was snug in my palm and my index finger found the trigger.

I walked over to the closet door and took Echevarria's jacket from the knob. I don't know what I expected to glean from it. I studied the shoulder patches, poked around in the pockets, put it back where I'd found it.

I moved to the dresser and looked at the articles on its top. Coins, subway tokens, earrings, ticket stubs, perfume bottles, cosmetics, lipstick tubes, hairpins. I wondered who Ms. Lepcourt might be, and how she'd gotten involved with James Leo Motley. And what the involvement might have cost her. I reached to open the top dresser drawer, then told myself to quit wasting time. I wasn't going to find her in there, or him either.

The apartment layout was typical for tenements of that sort, three small rooms in a row, with the

doorways lined up. From the apartment's front door you could see straight through to the window I'd entered through, and for a moment I considered closing the window so that he wouldn't spot the change the minute he walked in. But that was silly, he wouldn't notice it, and as soon as he opened the door I'd be standing in front of him with a gun in my hand, so what possible difference could an open window make?

Even so, I took my time getting into position to wait for him. I passed through the middle room, and checked the little bathroom with its clawfooted tub. I hesitated at the archway leading to the front room. I stood there, holding the gun out in front of me like a torch, wishing it would cast a beam. Still, I could see well enough in the darkness. There was some light coming from the bedroom window behind me, and more light from windows in the living room that faced onto an airshaft between the building and the one next door.

I started into the room.

Something came out of nowhere and slammed down onto my arm a few inches above the wrist. My hand went dead and the .38 went flying.

Two hands fastened on my arm, one in the middle of the forearm, one near the shoulder. He heaved, and I went stumbling across the room as if launched by a catapult. I careened into a table, upending it, and my feet went out from under me. I reached out for support, grabbed at empty air, bounced off a wall and wound up on the floor.

He stood there and laughed at me.

"Come on," he said. "Get up."

He was wearing Echevarria's uniform, everything but the jacket.

The shoes were wrong, though. The uniform code calls for plain black shoes with laces. He was wearing brown wing tips. He'd switched on a lamp; otherwise I wouldn't have noticed the color of his shoes.

I got to my feet. He just didn't look like a cop, I thought, and it wouldn't make any difference what shoes he wore. There are a lot of cops who don't look like cops either, not since they killed the height requirement and allowed facial hair, but he didn't look like any kind of cop, regular or auxiliary, old or

new style.

He leaned in the doorway, flexing his fingers, looking at me with evident amusement. "So noisy," he said.

"You're not much good at sneaking up on people, are you?

Climbing on garbage cans and running up fire escapes at your age. I was worried about you, Scudder. I was afraid you might fall and break a bone."

I looked around, trying to track the Smith. I spotted it on the other side of the room, half-hidden under an armchair with a needlepoint back and seat. My eyes went from it to him, and his smile flashed.

"You dropped your gun," he said. He picked up Echevarria's nightstick and slapped his palm with it. My forearm was still numb where he'd struck it with the stick. It would hurt for days once the feeling returned.

If I lived that long.

"You could try to get it," he said, "but I don't think your odds are very good. I'm closer to it than you are, and I'm faster. I'd have you before you got the gun. All in all, I think you'd have a better chance of getting out the door."

He nodded toward the front door, and I obediently glanced over toward it. "It's unlocked," he said. "I had the chain on but I took it off when I heard you making a racket in the backyard. I was concerned that you might see the chain and know somebody was home. But I don't think you'd have noticed.

Would you?"

"I don't know."

"I hung the jacket on the closet doorknob for your benefit, you know. Otherwise you might have gone into the apartment next door.

You're such a buffoon, Scudder, that I've had to make things as easy for you as possible."

"You're making it all very easy," I said.

I looked within myself, scanning for fear, and I couldn't find any. I felt curiously calm. I wasn't afraid of him. I didn't have anything to be afraid of.

I shot a glance at the door, as if I was considering making a run for it. It was a ridiculous idea. It very likely wasn't unlocked, even if the chain was off, but even if it were he'd be on me before I could get the door open and myself through it.

Besides, I hadn't come here to run away from him. I'd come here to take him down.

"Go ahead," he said. "Let's see if you can get out the door."

"We'll go through it together, Motley. I'm taking you in."

He laughed at me. He raised the nightstick and pointed it at me and laughed again. "I think I'll stick this up your ass," he said. "Do you think you'll like it? Elaine liked it."

He was looking at me carefully, watching for a reaction. I didn't give him one.

"She's dead," he said. "She died hard, the poor darling. But I guess you know that."

"You're wrong about that one," I said.

"I was there, Scudder. I could report in detail, if I thought you could stand hearing it."

"You were there but you left early. The doorman got there in time and called an ambulance. She's in New York Hospital and doing fine.

She already gave them a statement, and the doorman backed up her ID."

"You're lying."

I shook my head. "But I wouldn't worry about it," I said.

"Remember what Nietzsche said. It'll just make you stronger."

"That's true."

"Unless it destroys you, of course."

"You're becoming tiresome, Scudder. I like you better when you're begging for mercy."

"Funny," I said. "I don't remember doing that."

"You'll be doing it soon."

"I don't think so. I think you've had your run and now you're finished. You were very careful early on.

Lately you've been getting sloppy. You're ready for it to end, and you know how things always end for you. You wind up losing."

"I'll tape your mouth," he said, "so nobody can hear the screams."

"You're done," I said. "You lost the momentum when you left Elaine alive. You had her for two hours and you couldn't even manage to make sure she was dead when you left. Now all you can do is stand there and make threats, and threats don't mean much when the person you threaten isn't afraid of you.

You have to back them up, and you can't do that anymore."

I turned away, as if to show contempt for him. He stood there, getting ready to do something about it, and I reached down for a bronze Chinese incense burner. It was about the size of a half-grapefruit and it had been on top of the table until I'd come crashing into it.

I picked it up and threw it at him, and I went in under it.

This time he didn't make the mistake of trying to catch what I tossed his way. He swung out a hand, knocking the incense burner aside, then moved forward to meet my charge. I feinted at his head, ducked in and hammered punches at his middle. There was no softness there, nothing but ridged muscles. He swung a fist that caught me on the side of the head. It was a glancing blow and it didn't do much. I ducked the next punch he threw, tucked my chin into my chest and hit him just below the navel, then swung a knee up at his crotch.

He pivoted, blocking with his hip. He grabbed at my shoulder and his fingers dug in. His grip was as strong as ever but he wasn't on a pressure point now and the pain was nothing I couldn't stand.

I hit him again in the gut. He tensed in response, and I bulled forward, shoving him back against the wall.

He rained blows on my shoulders and the top of my head, but he was better at pressing and probing and squeezing than he was at infighting. I tried for his groin again, and when he moved to protect himself I stomped down on his instep. That hurt him, and I pressed the advantage and did it again, raking his shin with the heel of my shoe, stomping down hard on his foot, trying to break a couple of its small bones.

His hands moved, one settling on my upper arm, the other fastening on the back of my neck. He let his fingers look for hot spots now and he hadn't lost his touch. His thumb dug in behind my ear and the pain came in Technicolor.

But it was somehow different. It was there, God knows, and it could not have been more intense, but this time I was able to feel it without feeling it. I was aware of it but unaffected by it. Something enabled me to allow it to pass through me and leave me whole.

He shifted his grip, both of his hands on my neck now, the thumbs at the base of my ears, the fingers reaching to circle my throat. Maybe the pain wouldn't stop me, but if he shut off my air or blocked the flow of blood through the carotid I'd be just as dead as if I died in agony.

I went for his foot again. His grip loosened a little, and I crouched lower. He loomed over me, his hands finding their grip again, and I gathered my legs under me and thrust straight up, leading with the top of my head, using it as a battering ram.

Some things don't change. He still had fingers like eagle's talons, the strongest I'd ever encountered.

And, thank God, he still had a glass jaw.

I butted him a couple of times, but I think the first one was all it took. When I let go of him and took a step back he slid down the wall like a dead man. His long jaw was slack and saliva trailed from one corner of his mouth.

I dragged him out into the middle of the room and cuffed him. I used the cuffs I'd just bought to fasten his hands behind his back, and I used Echevarria's set, hanging from his belt in their leather case, to shackle his ankles together. I got my little tape recorder out of my pocket and made sure it still worked, then cued a cassette so I could start recording when he came to.

Then I sat back and gave myself time to catch my breath. I started thinking about what would happen now. If Elaine lived, her testimony ought to be enough to ensure conviction. If she died—

I called New York Hospital and they put me through to the ICU.

Her condition was critical, they told me. That was all I could get from them over the phone.

But she was still alive.

If she died, the doorman could identify Motley. And, once the department put its full resources into the case, any of a number of witnesses might turn up to put him on the scene when Echevarria got stabbed, when Elizabeth Scudder was butchered, when Toni Cleary went out the window. No end of physical evidence might come to light if enough trained personnel looked in the right places for it. And a full-scale investigation in New York would almost certainly tip the balance in Massillon, where Tom Havlicek's chief would okay reopening the Sturdevant case. And Ohio was a death penalty state, wasn't it?

Still, a confession would make a big difference. All I had to do was wait until he came to and get him talking. No question the bastard liked to talk.

He was lying facedown, his hands cuffed behind him. I rolled him over onto his back and lifted an eyelid with my thumb. His eye was rolled way back up into its socket, with only the white part showing. He was out cold, and looked as though he'd be out for a while.

I went and got the Smith. I looked at it and I looked at him. I thought of everything he'd done and I looked within myself, trying to summon up the hate I felt for him. But it didn't seem to be there. At least it wasn't anywhere that I could find it.

And that had been oddly true a few minutes ago, when he had been far removed from the inert bundle in the middle of the floor. I had been very literally fighting for my life, and all the same I'd been oddly calm, and fresh out of hate and anger. I hadn't hated him then. I didn't seem to hate him now.

I put the gun to his temple and let my finger test the tension in the trigger. I withdrew my finger from the trigger and put the gun down on the floor.

I thought it all over. I must have spent several minutes running it through my mind. Then I took a breath deep enough to hurt my ribs, and then I let it all out, and then I picked up the Smith and broke it open.

I unloaded all six chambers. I got out my handkerchief and wiped off the bullets and the gun itself, cleaning every surface that might have held a print. Then I made sure he wasn't playing possum before removing the cuffs from his wrists. I took hold of his fingers and touched them to the bullets, then loaded them back into the gun.

I put the gun down and took hold of him under the arms. I dragged him a few yards, then hauled him onto his feet and dropped him in the needlepoint chair. He started to slide back onto the floor but I pulled him up into a seated position and balanced him there. I went back for the Smith, wiped it again with the handkerchief, and fitted it into his right hand. I slipped his finger inside the trigger guard. With my own left hand I worked his jaw to get his mouth open, and then I got the short barrel of the little revolver between his teeth.

I made sure I had the angle right. Cops eat their guns all the time, it's their favorite single method of committing suicide, and sometimes they miss, sometimes the bullet goes on through without doing mortal damage. I wanted to do this properly, and I was only going to get one chance. I wanted the bullet to go right up through the roof of the mouth and into the brain.

When I had the gun the way I wanted it, I just stayed in position for a moment. There was something I seemed to want to say, but whom was I going to say it to?

I thought, Say it to him. And I remembered what the ICU nurse had told me. According to her, patients in coma understood what was said to them.

I said, "I'm not sure this is a good idea. But suppose you got out again. Suppose your lawyer pulled off some kind of half-assed insanity defense. Or suppose you went away for life and escaped. How can I take that kind of chance?"

I paused for a moment, then shook my head. "I'm not even sure that's it. I just don't want you to be alive anymore.

"And I want to be the one who sees to it, and that's how all this shit started in the first place, isn't it? I had to play God and frame you for attempted murder. What would have happened if I'd just let things take their course back then? Would it have made a difference?"

I waited, as if he might answer. Then I said, "And here I am playing God again. I know better and I'm doing it anyway."

That was all I said. I stayed there at his side, down on one knee, the gun in his mouth, his finger on the trigger, my finger on his. I don't know how long I waited, or what I was waiting for.

Eventually his breathing changed slightly and he started to stir. My finger moved, and so did his, and that was that.

I set the stage before I left. I got Echevarria's cuffs loose from Motley's ankles and returned them to the case on his belt. I righted the table that had gotten upended earlier and straightened out other articles disturbed during our struggle. I went around the apartment, handkerchief in hand, and removed my prints from every surface where I might have left them.

While I was doing this, I picked up a lipstick tube from the dresser in the bedroom and used it to leave a

last message on the living-room wall. In block caps three inches tall I printed, it has to end. i make my peace with god. sorry i kill so many. You couldn't prove it was his writing, but I couldn't see how you could prove that it wasn't. Just to keep it neat I capped the lipstick tube, got his prints on it, and tucked it into his shirt pocket.

I fastened the chain lock on the apartment's front door and left the same way I'd come in, via the window. This time I drew it all the way shut after me. I went down the fire escape, lowered the ladder, descended it. Someone had moved the garbage can to its original position, so I had to drop the last few feet, but that was easy enough.

Someone had also removed my topcoat. I thought at first someone had walked off with it, but something made me lift the lid of one of the garbage cans and there it was, reposing under a layer of eggshells and orange peels. The person who'd put it there had evidently assumed it had been discarded, and decided further that it wasn't worth rescuing. It had been a perfectly respectable coat, or at least I'd thought so, but now I figured it was time to buy myself a new one.

I thought the same conscientious tenant who'd tossed my topcoat might have removed my toothpick from the lock, but it was still in place and all I had to do was draw the door open. I retrieved the toothpick and let the door lock behind me, went on out through the front of the building, and walked over to First Avenue where I caught a cab headed uptown. I got out at the hospital's main entrance and went directly to the ICU. The nurse said Elaine's condition was unchanged but wouldn't let me go in to see her.

I sat down in the waiting room and tried to look at a magazine.

I would have liked to pray but I couldn't think how to go about it.

AA meetings generally close with either the Lord's Prayer or the serenity prayer, but neither seemed especially appropriate at the moment, and giving thanks for everything just as it was felt like a joke, and not a very tasteful one. In the course of things I did say some prayers, even including that one, but I don't really think anyone was listening.

Every now and then I would go to the desk, only to be told that nothing had changed and that she couldn't have anyone in the room with her just yet. Then I'd go back to the waiting room and wait some more. I dozed off in my chair a couple of times but never got deeper than a sort of waking dream state.

Around five in the afternoon I got hungry, which wasn't too surprising given that I hadn't had anything since Mick and I ate breakfast. I got some change and bought coffee and sandwiches from machines in the lobby. I couldn't manage more than half a sandwich, but the coffee was good. It wasn't good coffee, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it was good to get it inside me.

Two hours after that a nurse came in with a grave expression on her pale face. "Maybe you'd better see her now," she said.

On the way I asked her what she meant by that. She said it looked as though they were losing her.

I went in and stood at her bedside. She didn't look any better or any worse than she had before. I picked up her hand and held it and waited for her to die.

"He's dead," I told her. There were nurses around but I don't think any of them could hear me. They were too busy to listen. Anyway, I didn't care what they heard. "I killed him," I told her. "You don't ever have to worry about him again."

I suppose you can believe people in comas hear what's said to them. You can believe God hears prayers, too, if that's what you want.

Whatever makes you happy.

"Don't go, anywhere," I told her. "Don't die, baby. Please don't die."

I must have been with her for half an hour before one of the nurses told me to return to the waiting room.

A few hours after that another nurse came in and talked some about Elaine's medical condition. I don't remember what she said and didn't understand much of it at the time, but the gist of it was that she had passed a crisis, but that an infinite number of crises lay ahead of her.

She could develop pneumonia, she could throw an embolism, she could go into liver or kidney failure— there were so many ways she could die that it seemed impossible for her to dodge them all.

"You might as well go home," she said. "There's nothing you can do, and we have your number, we'll call you if anything happens."

I went home and slept. In the morning I called and was told that her condition was about the same. I showered and shaved and got dressed and went over there. I was there all morning and part of the afternoon, and then I rode a crosstown bus through the park and went to Toni's memorial service at Roosevelt.

It was all right. It was like a meeting, really, except that everybody who spoke said something about

Toni. I talked briefly about our trek out to Richmond Hill and back, and mentioned some of the funny things Toni had said in her talk.

It bothered me that everybody thought she'd killed herself, but I didn't know what to do about that. I would have liked to tell her relatives in particular what the real circumstances had been. Her family was Catholic, and it might have mattered to them. But I couldn't think how to handle it.

Afterward I went out for coffee with Jim Faber, and then I went back to the hospital.

I was there a lot during the next week. A couple of times I was on the verge of making an anonymous call to 911 to tip them off about the dead body at 288 East Twenty-fifth Street. As soon as Motley's corpse was discovered, I could phone Anita and tell her she could stop worrying. I couldn't reach Jan, but sooner or later she would reach me, and I wanted to be able to say it was all right to come home. If I said as much to either of them ahead of schedule, I might someday be called upon to explain myself.

What kept me from calling 911 was the knowledge that all such calls were taped, and that I could be identified as the caller through voiceprint comparison. I didn't think anyone would ever check, but why leave the possibility open? At first I'd thought Ms. Lepcourt would come home to her apartment and discover the body, but when that didn't happen over the weekend I had to consider the possibility that she'd never be coming home.

That just meant I had a couple more days to wait. On Tuesday afternoon a neighbor finally realized that the odor she was smelling was not a dead rat in the wall, and that it wasn't going to go away of its own accord. She called the police, they broke the door down, and that was that.

On Thursday, almost a week after Motley left her bleeding on her rug, a resident internist told me he thought Elaine was going to make it.

"I never thought she would," he said. "There were so many things that kept threatening to go wrong. The stress she underwent throughout was enormous. I was afraid her heart might fail, but it turns out she has a real good heart."

I could have told him that.

A little later, around the time she came home from the hospital, I had dinner with Joe Durkin at the Slate.

He said it was on him and I didn't argue. He downed a couple of martinis to start, and he told me how neatly Motley's suicide had closed out a batch of files. They were hanging Andrew Echevarria and Elizabeth Scudder on him, and there was an unofficial understanding that he'd caused the deaths of Antoinette Cleary and Michael Fitzroy, the young man Toni'd landed on. They also figured him as the probable killer of one Suzanne Lepcourt, who'd floated to the surface of the East River earlier that week.

It was hard to tell what had caused her death— as a matter of fact, without dental records it would have been next to impossible to tell who she was, let alone what had killed her. But there wasn't much doubt that she'd died as the result of foul play, or that the foul player was Motley.

"Decent of him to kill himself," Durkin said. "Since nobody seemed capable of doing it for him. He saved us a lot of aggravation."

"You had a good case against him."

"Oh, we would have put him away," he said. "I've got no doubts of that. Still, this makes it simpler all around. Did I tell you there was a note?"

"On the wall, you said. In lipstick."

"Right. I'm surprised he didn't use the mirror. I bet the landlord wishes he had. It's a lot easier scraping it off a mirror than covering it with paint. There's a mirror on the wall next to the door, too. You must have noticed it."

"I was never in the apartment, Joe."

"Oh, of course. I forgot." He gave me a knowing look. "Anyway,"

he said, "offing himself was the first decent thing the bastard ever did.

You wouldn't figure a guy like him to do it, would you?"

"Oh, I don't know," I said. "Sometimes a man will have that one moment of clarity, when all the illusions fall away and he sees clearly for the first time."

"That moment of clarity, huh?"

"It happens."

"Well," he said, picking up his drink, "I don't know about you, but whenever I feel a moment of clarity coming on, I just reach out for one of these and let the clouds roll in."

"That's probably wise," I said.

Of course he was hoping I'd tell him what happened on Twenty-fifth Street. He had his suspicions and he wanted me to confirm them. If that's what he wants, he's going to have a long wait.

I've told two people. I told Elaine. In a sense I'd already told her in Intensive Care, but if a part of your mind really does hear what's said at such times, it doesn't tell the rest of your mind later on. I let her think Motley had killed himself until she was home from the hospital. Then, the same day I brought her her Christmas present, I told her what really happened.

"Good," she said. "Thank God. And thank you. And thank you for telling me."

"I don't see how I could not tell you. I don't know if I'm glad I did it, though."

"Why not?"

I told her how my framing him had set it all in motion in the first place, and how I'd done the same thing all over, playing God again.

"Honey," she said, "that's crap. He would have come back at us anyway. This way it took him twelve years instead of a couple of months. And killing the son of a bitch pretty much guarantees he won't cause any more trouble. Not in this world, anyway, and that's the only world I'm going to worry about right now."

Around the middle of January Mick and I had a long night together, but after we closed the bar we didn't go to the butchers' mass. It had snowed a few days earlier, and he wanted to show me how pretty his place upstate looked with snow covering the hills. We drove up there and I stayed over and rode back with him the following afternoon. It was peaceful up there, and as beautiful as he'd said it was.

On the way up I told him how Motley's life had ended. It didn't come as a surprise to him. After all, he knew I had the address, and he knew too that I'd had to handle my business with Motley on my own.

I called Tom Havlicek after Motley's body was discovered, but I didn't give him anything beyond the official version. At that point, of course, they reopened the case in Massillon— now that it didn't make any difference. It did clear Sturdevant's name, however, which I suppose was of value to his friends and relatives. At the same time it sullied Connie's, because the local paper came up with the fact that she'd been a hooker years back and shared this tidbit with their readers.

Tom said I ought to come out and he'd take me hunting, and I said that really sounded nice, but I think we both knew how unlikely I was to take him up on it. He called the other day when the Bengals got beaten in the Super Bowl and said he might be getting down to New York one of these days. I told him to make damn sure he gets in touch with me when he does, and he said I could count on it, that he'd make a point of it. And perhaps he will.

I haven't told Jim Faber yet.

We have dinner at least once a week, and I've come close to telling him a couple of times. I suppose I'll get around to it one of these days.

I'm not sure what's stopped me so far. Maybe I'm afraid of his disapproval, or that he'll do what he so often does and put me face-to-face with my own conscience, a sleeping dog I let lie as much as I possibly can.

Oh, I'll get it off my chest sooner or later. After a particularly meaningful meeting, say, when I'm just overflowing with enough spirituality to drown a saint in.

But in the meantime the only people I've told are a career criminal and a call girl, and they seem to be the two people in the world to whom I'm closest. I don't doubt that says something about them, and I should think it would say even more about me.

It's been a cold winter, and they say we've got a lot more of the same coming. It's hard on the street people, and a couple of them died last week when it went down below zero. But for most of us it's not that bad. You just dress warm and walk through it, that's all.

The End