All the Flowers Are Dying

All the

Flowers

AreDying

LAWRENCE BLOCK

For a pair of Knockaround Guys:

b r i a n k o p p e l m a n

&

dav i d l e v i e n

O Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are callin’, From glen to glen, and down the mountainside, The summer’s gone, the roses all are fallen, And now ’tis you must go, and I must bide.

But come ye back when spring is in the meadow, Or when the hills are hushed and white with snow, Ye’ll find me there, in sunshine or in shadow, O Danny Boy, O Danny Boy, I love you so.

But if ye come, and all the flowers are dyin’, And I am dead, as dead I well may be,

Then you will find the place where I am lyin’, And kneel and say an Ave there for me.

And I will hear, though soft you tread above me, And then my grave will warmer, softer be, And you will bend and tell me that you love me, And I will wait in peace until you come to me.

—Frederic Edward Weatherly, “Danny Boy”

Listen, O judges: here is yet another madness, and that comes before the deed. Alas, you have not yet crept deep enough into this soul.

Thus speaks the red judge, “Why did this criminal murder?

He wanted to rob.” But I say unto you: his soul wanted blood, not robbery; he thirsted after the bliss of the knife.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra Translated by Walter Kaufmann

Contents

1.

When I got there, Joe Durkin was already holding down a

corner tabl

e...

1

2.

He’d originally suggested dinner at seven, but I’d pushed

it bac

k to...

9

3.

The Greensville Correctional Center is located just

outside of J

arr

att...

17

4.

The cell is larger than he’d expected, and more comfortably

appointed.

25

5.

At a meeting over the weekend a woman whom I knew

by sigh t cam e up..

.

33

6.

There’s a Red Roof Inn just outside of Jarratt, at the exit

off

I-95,

but

on...

44

7.

The first thing TJ tried was the phone number. It was his

cell pho

ne...

60

8.

He’s up before the alarm rings. He showers, shaves, dresses.

He’s sav

ed a…

70

9.

It’s noon, and no one has yet made an appearance on the

other side of t

he.. .

79

10.

Monday night I was having a cup of coffee in front of the

television set.. .

89

11.

He holds the bronze letter opener in his hands, turns it over,

runs a fi

ng er...

98

12.

I didn’t much want to give my client a report of the night’s

proceedings,...

101

13.

Downstairs, he gives his name. He gets off the elevator to

find her

fra

med...

108

14.

Mother Blue’s was either half full or half empty, depending

I sup

pose...

116

15.

I woke up to the smell of coffee, and when I got to the

kitchen

Elaine...

123

16.

They weren’t really set up for viewing. The autopsy wasn’t

finished...

129

17.

In a Kinko’s on Columbus Avenue, he sits at a computer

terminal,

where...

144

18.

TJ said, “You already thought of this, and it don’t make

sense any

way,...

153

19.

“I guess you’ll want to get upstairs,” I said. “Don’t you have

to see

how ...

161

20.

The letter opener was sealed in a clear plastic evidence bag.

Sussman...

168

21.

The Canarsie line runs east from Eighth Avenue and

Fourteenth...

172

22.

After they left I checked Elaine’s appointment book.

I start ed to c

op

y...

181

23.

Knives

are

beautiful.

185

24.

I went first to Grogan’s, the uncompromising old Irish bar

at Fifti eth...

192

25.

I took the long way home from Grogan’s, up Tenth Avenue

to...

200

26.

That was Friday, and according to the Times it was the

longest

day

of...

206

27.

It is, he has to admit, a disturbingly good likeness. It’s

in

the

papers

and…

213

28.

“I see your wife’s shop is closed until further notice,”

Sussman said .

221

29.

He had a rough time,” I said. “He had a job and a girlfriend,

and he...

227

30.

“You know,” Ira Wentworth said, “I can’t tell you how

many tim

es I’ve ...

238

31.

He sits in the coffee shop. He has a table next to the window,

and

he

can...

245

32.

It was late morning when Mark Sussman called. Had I

caught

the

item...

247

33.

Sometimes it seems to him that there truly are guardian

angels, and that

...

251

34.

The phone call came a few minutes after five. I let the

machine pick ...

257

35.

The

bastard’s

wary.

261

36.

I slept poorly, and kept slipping in and out of a drinking

dream.

I

woke...

269

37.

He is completely tuned in, perfectly focused, and he hears

the turn ing of...

272

38.

Could

I

have

heard

something?

276

39.

I’m floating. I’m in empty sky, or in a sea of nothingness.

I’m floa ting.

279

40.

There may have been other times when I recovered

consciousness,

or...

283

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by Lawrence Block

Cover

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

When I got there, Joe Durkin was already holding down a corner table and working on a drink—vodka on the rocks, from the looks of it. I took in the room and listened to the hum of conversation at the bar, and I guess some of what I was feeling must have found its way to my face, because the first thing Joe asked me was if I was all right. I said I was fine, and why?

“Because you look like you saw a ghost,” he said.

“Be funny if I didn’t,” I said. “The room is full of them.”

“A little new for ghosts, isn’t it? How long have they been open, two years?”

“Closer to three.”

“Time flies,” he said, “whether you’re having fun or not. Jake’s Place, whoever Jake is. You got a history with him?”

“I don’t know who he is. I had a history with the place before it was his.”

“Jimmy Armstrong’s.”

“That’s right.”

“He died, didn’t he? Was that before or after 9/11?” That’s our watershed; everything in our lives is before or after that date. “After,” I said, “by five or six months. He left the place to a nephew, who tried running it for a few months and then decided it wasn’t the life he wanted for himself. So I guess he sold it to Jake, whoever Jake is.” 2

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“Whoever Jake is,” he said, “he puts a good meal on the table. You know what they’ve got here? You can get an Irish breakfast all day long.”

“What’s that, a cigarette and a six-pack?”

“Very funny. You must know what an Irish breakfast is, a sophisticated guy like yourself.”

I nodded. “It’s the cardiac special, right? Bacon and eggs and sausage.”

“And grilled tomato.”

“Ah, health food.”

“And black pudding,” he said, “which is hard to find. You know what you want? Because I’ll have the Irish breakfast.” I told the waitress I’d have the same, and a cup of coffee. Joe said one vodka was enough, but she could bring him a beer. Something Irish, to go with the breakfast, but not Guinness. She suggested a Harp, and he said that would be fine.

I’ve known Joe for twenty years, though I don’t know that ours is an intimate friendship. He’s spent those years as a detective at Midtown North, working out of the old stationhouse on West Fifty-fourth Street, and we’d developed a working relationship over time. I went to him for favors, and returned them, sometimes in cash, sometimes in kind. Now and then he steered a client my way. There were times when our relations had been strained; my close friendship with a career criminal never sat well with him, while his attitude after one vodka too many didn’t make me relish his company. But we’d been around long enough to know how to make it work, overlooking what we didn’t like to look at and staying close but not too close.

Around the time our food arrived, he told me he’d put in his papers. I said he’d been threatening to do so for years, and he said he’d had everything filled out and ready to go a few years ago, and then the towers came down. “That was no time to retire,” he said. “Although guys did, and how could you blame ’em? They lost their heart for the job. Me, I’d already lost my heart for it. Shoveling shit against the tide, all we ever do.

Right then, though, I managed to convince myself I was needed.”

“I can imagine.”

“So I stayed three years longer than I intended, and if I did anything useful in those three years I can’t remember what it was. Anyway, I’m All the Flowers Are Dying

3

done. Today’s what, Wednesday? A week from Friday’s my last day. So all I have to do now is figure out what the hell to do with the rest of my life.” Which was why he’d asked me to meet him for dinner, in a room full of ghosts.

It had been over thirty years since I put in my papers and retired from the NYPD, and shortly thereafter I’d retired as well from my role as husband and father, and moved from a comfortable suburban house in Syosset to a monastic little room at the Hotel Northwestern. I didn’t spend much time in that room; Jimmy Armstrong’s saloon, around the corner on Ninth between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth, served as a combination of living room and office for me. I met clients there, I ate meals there, and what social life I had was centered there. I drank there, too, day in and day out, because that’s what I did back then.

I kept it up for as long as I could. Then I put the plug in the jug, as the old-timers say, and began spending my idle hours not at Jimmy’s joint but two blocks north of there, in the basement of St. Paul the Apostle. And in other church basements and storefronts, where I looked for something to put in the empty places alcohol used to fill.

Somewhere along the way, Jimmy lost his lease and moved half a block south and a long block west, to the corner of Fifty-seventh and Tenth. I’d kept my distance from the old place after I sobered up, and I avoided the new one for a while as well. It never did become a hangout, but Elaine and I would drop in for a meal from time to time. Jimmy always served good food, and the kitchen stayed open late, which made it a good choice after an evening at the theater or Lincoln Center.

I’d been to the service, at a funeral parlor on West Forty-fourth, where someone played a favorite song of his. It was “Last Call,” by Dave Van Ronk, and I’d first heard it when Billie Keegan played it for me after a long night of whiskey. I’d made him play the song over and over. Keegan worked for Jimmy back then, tending bar on weekday evenings; he’d long since moved out to California. And Van Ronk, who wrote the song and sang it a capella, had died a month or so before Jimmy, and so I’d sat there listening to one dead man sing a song to another dead man.

4

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A week or two later they had a wake for Jimmy at the bar, and I went to that and didn’t stay long. Some people showed up I hadn’t seen for years, and it was good to see them, but it was a relief to get out of there and go home. One night in the summer, after the lease had been sold, they closed things out by letting everybody drink free.

Several different people told me to be sure and show up, and I didn’t even have to think about it. I stayed home and watched the Yankees game.

And here I was, in a roomful of ghosts. Manny Karesh was one of them. I’d known him in the old days on Ninth Avenue, and he’d never moved out of the neighborhood. He dropped in at Jimmy’s just about every day, to drink one or two beers and chat up the nurses. He was at the wake, of course, and he’d have been there for the final night, but I don’t know if he made it. He told me at the wake that he didn’t have much time left. They’d offered him chemotherapy, he said, but they didn’t hold out much hope that it would do any good, so he couldn’t see any reason to subject himself to it. He died sometime that summer, not too long after the bar closed, but I didn’t hear about it until the fall. So that’s one funeral I missed, but these days there’s always another funeral to go to. They’re like buses. If you miss one, there’ll be another coming your way in a few minutes.

“I’m fifty-eight,” Joe said. “That’s plenty old enough to retire, but too young to be retired, you know what I mean?”

“You know what you’re going to do?”

“What I’m not gonna do,” he said, “is buy a little house in fucking Florida. I don’t fish, I don’t play golf, and I got this County Waterford skin, I can get a sunburn from a desk lamp.”

“I don’t think you’d like Florida.”

“No kidding. I could stay here and live on my pension, but I’d go nuts without something to do. I’d spend all my time in bars, which is no good, or I’d stay home and drink, which is worse. This is the best, this black pudding. There aren’t many places you can get it. I suppose the old Irish neighborhoods, Woodside, Fordham Road, but who’s got the time to chase out there?”

All the Flowers Are Dying

5

“Well, now that you’re retired.”

“Yeah, I can spend a day looking for black pudding.”

“You wouldn’t have to go that far,” I said. “Any bodega can sell you all you want.”

“You’re kidding. Black pudding?”

“They call it morcilla, but it’s the same thing.”

“What is it, Puerto Rican? I bet it’s spicier.”

“Spicier than Irish cuisine? Gee, do you suppose that’s possible?

But it’s pretty much the same thing. You can call it morcilla or black pudding, but either way you’ve got sausage made from pig’s blood.”

“Jesus!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Do you fucking mind? I’m eating.”

“You didn’t know what it was?”

“Of course I know, but that doesn’t mean I want to fucking dwell on it.” He drank some beer, put the glass down, shook his head. “Some of the guys wind up working private security. Not at the rent-a-cop level, but higher up. Guy I knew put his papers in ten years ago, went to work overseeing security at the stock exchange. Regular hours, and better money than he ever made on the job. Now he’s retired from that, and he’s got two pensions, plus his Social Security. And he’s down in Florida, playing golf and fishing.”

“You interested in something like that?”

“Florida? I already said . . . oh, the private security thing. Well, see, I carried a gold shield for a lot of years. I was a detective, and the job he had, it’s more administrative. I could do it, but I don’t know that I’d love it. Probably a fair amount of chickenshit involved, too.” He picked up his empty glass, looked at it, put it down again. Without looking at me he said, “I was thinking about a private ticket.” I’d seen this coming.

“To do it right,” I said, “you have to be a businessman, keeping records and filing reports and networking in order to get cases. That’s if you’re in business for yourself, but the other way, going to work for one of the big agencies, you’re mostly doing boring work for short money, and doing it without a badge. I don’t think it would suit you.” 6

Lawrence Block

“Neither would the reports and the record keeping. But you didn’t do all that.”

“Well, I was never very good at doing things by the book,” I said. “I worked for years without a license, and when I finally got one I didn’t hang on to it very long.”

“I remember. You got by okay without it.”

“I guess. It was hand to mouth sometimes.”

“Well, I got that pension. It’s a cushion.”

“True.”

“What I was thinking . . .”

And what he was thinking, of course, was that the two of us could work together. I had the experience on the private side, and he’d be bringing much fresher contacts within the department. I let him pitch the idea, and when he’d run through it I told him he was a few years too late.

“I’m pretty much retired,” I said. “Not formally, because there’s no need. But I don’t go looking for business, and the phone doesn’t ring very often, and when it does I usually find a reason to turn down whatever’s on offer. Do that a few times and people quit calling, and that’s okay with me. I don’t need the dough. I’ve got Social Security, plus a small monthly check from the city, and we’ve got the income from some rental property Elaine owns, plus the profits from her shop.”

“Art and antiques,” he said. “I pass it all the time, I never see anyone go in or out. Does she make any money there?”

“She’s got a good eye, and a head for business. The rent’s no bargain, and there are months she comes up short, but now and then she spots something for ten bucks at a thrift shop and sells it for a few thousand.

She could probably do the same thing on eBay and save the rent, but she likes having the shop, which is why she opened it in the first place.

And whenever I get tired of long walks and ESPN, I can take a turn behind the counter.”

“Oh, you do that?”

“Now and then.”

“You know enough about the business?”

All the Flowers Are Dying

7

“I know how to ring a sale and how to process a credit card transac-tion. I know when to tell them to come back and see the proprietor. I know how to tell when someone’s contemplating shoplifting or robbery, and how to discourage them. I can usually tell when somebody’s trying to sell me stolen goods. That’s about as much as I need to know to hold down the job.”

“I guess you don’t need a partner in the gumshoe business.”

“No, but if you’d asked me five years ago . . .” Five years ago the answer would still have been no, but I’d have had to find a different way to phrase it.

We ordered coffee, and he sat back and ran his eyes around the room. I sensed in him a mixture of disappointment and relief, which was about what I’d feel in his circumstances. And I felt some of it myself. The last thing I wanted was a partner, but there’s something about that sort of offer that makes one want to accept it. You think it’s a cure for loneliness. A lot of ill-advised partnerships start that way, and more than a few bad marriages.

The coffee came, and we talked about other things. The crime rate was still going down, and neither of us could figure out why. “There’s this moron in the state legislature,” he said, “who claims credit for it, because he helped push the death penalty through. It’s hard to figure that one out, given that the only time anybody gets a lethal injection in New York State is when he buys a bag of smack laced with rat poison.

There’s guys upstate on Death Row, but they’ll die of old age before they get the needle.”

“You figure it’s a deterrent?”

“I figure it’s a pretty good deterrent against doing it again. To tell you the truth, I don’t think anybody really gives a shit if it’s a deterrent.

There’s some guys that you’re just happier not having them breathe the same air as the rest of us. People who just ought to be dead. Terrorists, mass murderers. Serial killers. Fucking perverts who kill children. You can tell me they’re sick people, they were abused as children themselves, di dah di dah di dah, and I won’t disagree with you, but the truth is I don’t care. Let ’em be dead. I’m happier when they’re dead.”

“You’re not going to get an argument from me.” 8

Lawrence Block

“There’s one set to go a week from Friday. Not here, nobody gets it in this fucking state. In Virginia, that son of a bitch who killed the three little boys. Four, five years ago it was. I forget his name.”

“I know who you mean.”

“The one argument I’ll even listen to is suppose you execute an innocent man. And I guess it does happen. This guy, though. You remember the case? Open and shut.”

“So I understand.”

“He fucked these kids,” he said, “and he tortured them, and he kept souvenirs, and the cops had enough physical evidence to convict him a hundred times over. A week from Friday he gets the needle. I put in my last day on the job, and I go home and pour myself a drink, and somewhere down in Virginia that cocksucker gets a hot shot. You know what? It’s better than a gold watch, far as I’m concerned.”

2

He’d originally suggested dinner at seven, but I’d pushed it back to six-thirty. When the waitress brought the check he grabbed it, reminding me that dinner had been his idea. “Besides,” he said, “I’m off the job in a matter of days. I better get in practice picking up the tab.” All the years I’d known him, I was the one who picked up the checks.

“If you want,” he said, “we could go somewhere else and you can buy the drinks. Or dessert, or some more coffee.”

“I’ve got to be someplace.”

“Oh, right, you said as much when we made the date. Taking the little woman out on the town?”

I shook my head. “She’s having dinner with a girlfriend. I’ve got a meeting I have to go to.”

“You’re still going, huh?”

“Not as often as I used to, but once or twice a week.”

“You could miss a night.”

“I could and would,” I said, “but the fellow who’s leading the meeting is a friend of mine, and I’m the one who booked him to speak.”

“So you pretty much have to be there. Who’s the guy, anybody I know?”

“Just a drunk.”

“Must be nice to have meetings to go to.” 10

Lawrence Block

It is, though that’s not why I go.

“What they ought to have,” he said, “is meetings for guys who drink a certain amount, and have no reason to stop.”

“That’s a terrific idea, Joe.”

“You think so?”

“Absolutely. You wouldn’t need to hang out in church basements, either. You could hold the meetings in a saloon.”

“My name is Joe D.,” he said, “and I’m retired.” The meeting was at my home group at St. Paul’s, and I was there in plenty of time to open it up, read the AA Preamble, and introduce the speaker. “My name’s Ray,” he said, “and I’m an alcoholic,” and then he spent the next fifteen or twenty minutes doing what we do, telling his story, what it used to be like, what happened, and what it’s like now.

Joe had asked if the speaker was anyone he knew, and I’d avoided a direct answer. If he didn’t know Ray Gruliow personally, he certainly knew him by reputation, and would recognize the long Lincolnesque face and the rich raspy voice. Hard-Way Ray was a criminal lawyer who’d made a career out of representing radicals and outcasts, cham-pioning the country’s least sympathetic defendants by putting the system itself on trial. The police hated him, and hardly anyone doubted that it had been a cop, some years ago, who’d fired a couple of shots through the front window of Ray’s Commerce Street town house. (No one was hurt, and the resultant publicity was a bonanza for Ray. “If I’d known I’d get that much of a bounce out of it,” he’d said, “I might have done it myself.”)

I’d run into Ray in May, at the annual dinner of the Club of Thirty-one. It had been a happy event, we hadn’t lost any members since last year’s gathering, and toward the end of the evening I told Ray I was booking the speaker every other Wednesday at St. Paul’s, and when would he like to speak?

There were forty or fifty people at the meeting that night, and at least half of them must have recognized Ray, but the tradition of anonymity runs deep among us. During the discussion that followed his lead, no one gave any indication that he knew more about him than All the Flowers Are Dying

11

he’d told us. “Guess who I heard at St. Paul’s last night,” they might tell other members at other meetings, because we tend to do that, although we’re probably not supposed to. But we don’t tell friends outside of the program, as I had not told Joe Durkin, and, perhaps more to the point, we don’t let it affect how we relate to one another in the rooms. Paul T., who delivers lunches for the deli on Fifty-seventh Street, and Abie, who does something arcane with computers, get as much attention and respect in that room as Raymond F. Gruliow, Esq.

Maybe more—they’ve been sober longer.

The meeting breaks at ten, and a few of us generally wind up at the Flame, a coffee shop on Ninth Avenue almost directly across the street from Jimmy’s original saloon. This time there were seven of us at the big table in the corner. These days I’m often the person in the room with the longest continuous sobriety, which is the sort of thing that’s apt to happen to you sooner or later if you don’t drink and don’t die.

Tonight, though, there were two men at our table who’d been sober longer than I by several years, and one of them, Bill D., had very likely been at my first meeting. (I didn’t remember him from that night, having been only peripherally aware of my own presence.) He used to share with some frequency at meetings, and I always liked what he said; I might have asked him to be my sponsor if Jim Faber hadn’t emerged as the clear choice for that role. Later, after Jim was killed, I decided that if I ever felt the need of a sponsor I’d ask Bill. But so far I hadn’t.

These days he didn’t talk much, although he went to as many meetings as ever. He was a tall man, rail thin, with sparse white hair, and some of the newer members called him William the Silent. That was an adjective that would never be attached to Pat, who was short and stocky and sober about as long as Bill. He was a nice enough fellow, but he talked too much.

Bill had retired a while ago after fifty years as a stagehand; he’d probably seen more Broadway plays than anyone I knew. Pat, also retired, had worked downtown in one of the bureaucracies quartered in City Hall; I was never too clear on which agency he worked for, or 12

Lawrence Block

what he did there, but whatever it was he’d stopped doing it four or five years ago.

Johnny Sidewalls had worked construction until a job-related in-jury left him with two bad legs and a disability pension; he got around with the help of two canes and worked from his home, carrying on some sort of Internet-based mail-order business. He’d been very sullen and embittered when he showed up at St. Paul’s and Fireside and other neighborhood meetings a few years ago, but his attitude leveled out over time. Like Bill, he was a neighborhood guy, who’d lived all his life in and around Hell’s Kitchen and San Juan Hill. I don’t know why they called him Johnny Sidewalls, and I think he may have had the name before he got sober. Some sort of sobriquet’s almost inevitable when your name is John, but no one seems to know where this one came from.

When your name is Abie, on the other hand, neither a nickname nor an initial is required. Abie—short for Abraham, I supposed, but he always gave his name as Abie, and corrected you if you truncated it to Abe—was sober ten years and change, but new in New York; he’d sobered up in Oregon, then relocated to northern California. A few months ago he moved to New York and started showing up at St. Paul’s and a few other West Side meetings. He was in his early forties, around five-eleven, with a medium build and a clean-cut face that was hard to keep in your mind when you weren’t looking at him. There were no strong features there for the memory to grab onto.

It seemed to me he had a personality to match. I’d heard his AA qualification at a noon meeting in the Sixty-third Street Y, but all I could remember of his drinking story was that he used to drink and now he doesn’t. He didn’t share often, but when he did it tended to be bland and unexceptionable. I figured it was probably a matter of style.

The sharing tends to be less personal and more pro forma at small-town meetings, and that’s what he was used to.

At one of the first meetings I went to, a gay woman talked about having realized that drinking might be a problem for her when she noticed that she kept coming out of blackouts on her knees with some guy’s dick in her mouth. “I never did that when I was sober,” she said. I All the Flowers Are Dying

13

have a feeling Abie never got to hear anything like that in Dogbane, Oregon.

Herb had been coming around about as long as Abie had, and he’d made ninety days the previous week. That’s a benchmark of sorts; until you’ve put together ninety days clean and dry, you can’t lead a meeting or take on a service commitment. Herb had qualified at a daytime meeting. I hadn’t been there, but I’d probably get to hear his story sooner or later, if he and I both stayed sober. He was around fifty, pudgy and balding, but almost boyish with the enthusiasm that’s characteristic of some members’ early sobriety.

I hadn’t been that way myself, nor was I as bitter about the whole thing as Johnny had been. Jim Faber, who’d watched the process, had told me I was at once dogged and fatalistic, sure I would drink again but determined not to. I couldn’t tell you what I was like. I just remember dragging myself from one meeting to the next, scared it would work for me and scared it wouldn’t.

I don’t remember who brought up capital punishment. Somebody did, and somebody made one of the standard observations on the subject, and then Johnny Sidewalls turned to Ray and said, “I suppose you’re against it.” That could have been said with an edge, but it wasn’t. It was just an observation, with the tacit implication that, given who Ray was, he’d be opposed to the death penalty.

“I’m against it for my clients,” Ray said.

“Well, you’d have to be, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course. I’m against any penalty for my clients.”

“They’re all innocent,” I said.

“Innocent’s a stretch,” he allowed. “I’ll settle for not guilty. I’ve tried a few capital cases. I never lost one, and they weren’t cases where the death penalty was a real possibility. Still, even the slimmest chance that your client might go to the chair concentrates an attorney’s mind wonderfully. ‘Go to the chair’—that dates me, doesn’t it? There’s no chair anymore. They let you lie down, in fact they insist on it. Strap you to a gurney, make a regular medical procedure out of it. And the odds against you are even worse than in regular surgery.” 14

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“What I always liked,” Bill said, “is the alcohol swab.” Ray nodded. “Because God forbid you might get a staph infection.

You have to wonder what latter-day Mengele thought that one up. Am I against the death penalty? Well, aside from the fact that it can’t be established to have any deterrent effect, and that the whole process of appeals and execution costs substantially more than feeding and housing the sonofabitch for the rest of his natural life, that it’s essentially barbaric and puts us on the same side of the line as China and the Muslim dictatorships, and that, unlike the rain which falls equally upon the just and the unjust, it falls exclusively upon the poor and un-derprivileged. Aside from all that, there’s the unfortunate fact that every once in a while we get our signals crossed and execute the wrong person. It wasn’t that long ago that nobody even heard of DNA, and now it’s getting a ton of convictions reversed. Who knows what the next step in forensics will be, and what percentage of the poor bastards the state of Texas is busy killing will turn out innocent?”

“That would be awful,” Herb said. “Imagine knowing you didn’t do something, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it from happening to you.”

“People die all the time,” Pat said, “for no good reason at all.”

“But the state doesn’t do it to them. That’s different, somehow.” Abie said, “But sometimes there’s just no fit response short of death.

Terrorists, for example. What would you do with them?”

“Shoot them out of hand,” Ray said. “Failing that, hang the bastards.”

“But if you’re against capital punishment—”

“You asked me what I would do, not what I think is right. When it comes to terrorists, home-grown or foreign, I don’t care what’s right.

I’d hang the fuckers.”

This made for a spirited discussion, but I tuned out most of it. In the main I enjoy the company of my fellow sober alcoholics, but I have to say I like it less when they talk politics or philosophy or, indeed, anything much beyond their own immediate lives. The more abstract the conversation got, the less attention I paid to it, until I perked up a little when Abie said, “What about Applewhite? Preston Applewhite, All the Flowers Are Dying

15

from Richmond, Virginia. He killed those three little boys, and he’s scheduled for execution sometime next week.”

“Friday,” I said. Ray gave me a look. “It came up in a conversation earlier tonight,” I explained. “I gather the evidence is pretty cut-and-dried.”

“Overwhelming,” Abie said. “And you know sex killers will do it again if they get the chance. There’s no reforming them.”

“Well, if life without parole really meant life without parole . . .” And I tuned out again. Preston Applewhite, whose case hadn’t interested me much at the time and of whose guilt or innocence I had no opinion, had unwittingly found his way into two very different conversations. That had caught my attention, but now I could forget about him.

“I had the Irish breakfast,” I told Elaine, “complete with black pudding, which Joe is crazy about so long as he can manage to forget what it is.”

“There’s probably a kosher vegetarian version,” she said, “made out of wheat gluten. Did it feel strange going there?”

“A little, but less so as the evening wore on and I got used to it. The menu’s not as interesting as Jimmy’s, but what I had was pretty good.”

“It’s hard to screw up an Irish breakfast.”

“We’ll go sometime and you can see what you think. Of the place—

I already know what you would think of the Irish breakfast. You’re home early, incidentally.”

“Monica had a late date.”

“The mystery man?”

She nodded. Monica’s her best friend, and her men run to type: they’re all married. At first it would bother her when they’d hop out of her bed to catch the last train to Upper Saddle River, and then she realized that she liked it better that way. No bad breath in your face first thing in the morning, plus you had your weekends free. Wasn’t that the best of all worlds?

Usually she showed off her married beaus. Some of them were proud and some were sheepish, but what this one was we seemed unlikely to find out, as he’d somehow impressed upon her the need for secrecy.

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She’d been seeing him for a few weeks now, and Elaine, her confidante in all matters, couldn’t get a thing out of her beyond the admission that he was extremely intelligent and—no kidding—very secretive.

“They don’t go out in public together,” she reported, “not even for a charming little dinner in a charming little bistro. There’s no way she can reach him, not by phone or e-mail, and when he calls her the conversations are brief and cryptic. He won’t say her name over the phone, and doesn’t want her to use his. And she’s not even sure the name he gave her is his real name, but whatever it is she won’t tell me.”

“It sounds as though she’s getting off on the secrecy.”

“Oh, no question. It’s frustrating, because she’d like to be able to talk about him, but at the same time she likes that she can’t. And since she doesn’t know who he is or what he does, she can make him into anything in her mind. Like a government agent, and she can’t even be sure what government.”

“So he calls her and comes over and they go to bed. End of story?”

“She says it’s not just sex.”

“They watch Jeopardy together?”

“If they do,” she said, “I bet he knows all the answers.”

“Everybody knows the answers.”

“Smartass. The questions, then. He knows all the questions. Because he’s superintelligent.”

“It’s a shame we’ll never get to meet him,” I said. “He sounds like a whole lot of fun.”

3

The Greensville Correctional Center is located just outside of Jarratt, Virginia, an hour’s drive south of Richmond. He pulls up to the gate-house, rolls down his window, shows the guard his driver’s license and the letter from the warden. His car, a white Ford Crown Victoria with a moonroof, is immaculate; he spent the previous night in Richmond, and before he left this morning he ran it through a car wash. This car’s a rental, and it hadn’t gotten all that dirty in a few hundred miles of high-way travel, but he likes a clean car, always has. Keep your car washed, your hair combed, and your shoes shined, he likes to say, because you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

He parks where the guard indicates, no more than thirty yards from the main entrance, over which the facade is filled with the institution’s name: greensville / correctional / center. The name’s scarcely necessary, the structure could hardly be anything else, squat and rectilinear and hinting at confinement and punishment.

There’s a briefcase on the seat beside him, but he’s already decided not to take it inside, to avoid the nuisance of having to open it time and time again. He opens it now, takes out a small spiral-bound notebook. He doubts he’ll need to take notes, but it’s a useful prop.

Before leaving the car he checks himself again in the rearview mirror.

Adjusts the knot of his silver tie, smoothes his mustache. Tries on a few expressions, settling on a rueful half-smile.

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He locks the car. Hardly necessary, as the likelihood of someone breaking into a car in a prison parking lot in the very shadow of the guards’

tower strikes him as infinitesimal. But he always locks the car upon leaving it. If you always lock it, you’ll never leave it unlocked. If you’re always early, you’ll never be late.

He likes catchphrases like that. Pronounced with the right degree of certainty, even of solemnity, they can make a remarkable impression on others. Repeated over time, their effect can verge on the hypnotic.

He strides across the tarmac toward the entrance, a trimly built man wearing a gray suit, a crisp white shirt, an unpatterned silver tie. His black cap-toe shoes are freshly shined, and the rueful half-smile is in place upon his thin lips.

The warden, one John Humphries, is also wearing a gray suit, but there the resemblance ends. Humphries is the taller by several inches and heav-ier by fifty or sixty pounds. He carries the weight well and has the look of an ex–college athlete who never lost the habit of gym workouts. His handshake is firm, his authority unmistakable.

“Dr. Bodinson,” he says.

“Warden.”

“Well, Applewhite’s agreed to see you.”

“I’m glad of that.”

“For my part, I wish I had a better sense of your interest in him.” He nods, grooms his mustache with his thumb and forefinger. “I’m a psychologist,” he says.

“So I understand. Yale doctorate, undergraduate work at UVA. I was at Charlottesville myself, though that would have been before your time.” Humphries is fifty-three, ten years his senior. He knows the man’s age, just as he knew he’d graduated from the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. The Internet’s wonderful, it can tell you almost anything you need to know, and this particular bit of knowledge is responsible for his having included UVA on his own résumé.

“Yale tends to impress people,” he says, “but if I ever amount to anything in this world, the credit should go to the education I got here in Virginia.”

All the Flowers Are Dying

19

“Is that a fact?” Humphries looks at him, and it seems to him that his gaze is less guarded, more respectful. “And are you a Virginian yourself?” He shakes his head. “Army brat. I grew up all over the place, and mostly overseas. My four years in Charlottesville was the longest I ever stayed in one spot in my whole life.”

They reminisce briefly about the old school, and it turns out that their respective fraternities were friendly rivals. He’d considered making himself a fellow member of Sigma Chi, but decided that would be pushing it.

He’d picked another house, just two doors away on Fraternity Row.

They finish with their old school ties, and he explains his interest in Preston Applewhite. This interview, he tells Humphries, will be one part of an extensive study of criminals who steadfastly maintain their innocence in the face of overwhelming evidence of their guilt. He is particularly interested, he says, in murderers facing the death penalty, insisting on their lack of culpability right up to the very moment of execution.

Humphries takes this in, frowns in thought. “In your letter to Applewhite,” he says, “you indicate that you believe him.”

“I was attempting to give that impression.”

“What’s that mean, Doctor? You think he’s innocent?”

“Certainly not.”

“Because the evidence offered at his trial—”

“Was overwhelming and conclusive. It convinced the jury, and well it might have.”

“I have to say I’m relieved to hear you say that. But I don’t know that I understand your motive in suggesting otherwise to Applewhite.”

“I suppose one could argue the ethics of it,” he says, and smoothes his mustache. “I’ve found that, in order to win the confidence and cooperation of the men I need to interview, I have to give them something. I’m not prepared to offer them hope, or anything tangible. But it seems to me permissible to let them think that I believe in the veracity of their protestations of innocence. It’s easier for them to pour their revelations into a sympathetic ear, and it may even do them some good.”

“How do you figure that?”

“If I believe a man’s story, it’s that much easier for him to believe it himself.”

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“But you don’t. Believe their stories, that is.” He shakes his head. “If I had the slightest doubt of a man’s guilt,” he says, “I wouldn’t include him in my study. I’m not investigating the unjustly accused. The men I’m looking at have been justly accused and justly convicted and, I must say, justly condemned to death.”

“You’re not opposed to capital punishment.”

“Not at all. I think the social order requires it.”

“Now there,” Humphries says, “I wish I had your certainty. I don’t disagree with you, but I’m in the unfortunate position of being able to see both sides of the issue.”

“That can’t make your job easier.”

“It can’t and it doesn’t. But it’s part of my job, and only a small part, although it takes up a disproportionate amount of my time and thought.

And I like my job, and like to think I’m good at it.” He lets Humphries talk about the job, its trials and its satisfactions, providing the nods and responses and sympathetic facial expressions that would encourage the flow of words, There’s no hurry. Preston Applewhite isn’t going anywhere, not until Friday, when it’s time for them to put the needle in his arm and send him off to wherever people go.

“Well, I didn’t mean to go into all that,” Humphries says at length. “I was wondering how you’d get Applewhite to talk to you, but I don’t guess you’ll have much trouble drawing him out. Look how you drew me out, and you weren’t even trying.”

“I was interested in what you were saying.” Humphries leans forward, puts his hands together on his desk blotter.

“When you talk to him,” he says, “you’re not going to offer him any false hope, are you?”

False hope? What other kind is there?

But what he says is, “My abiding interest is in what he has to say. For my part, I’ll do what I can to help him reconcile the impossible contra-diction of his situation.”

“That being?”

“That he’s going to be put to death in a matter of days, and that he’s innocent.”

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21

“But you don’t believe he’s innocent. Oh, I see. His innocence is something in which you’re both pretending to believe.”

“It’s pretense on my part. He may very well believe it.”

“Oh?”

He leans forward, folds his own hands, purposely mirroring the warden’s own body language. “Some of the men I’ve interviewed,” he confides, “will actually admit, with a wink or a nod or in so many words, that they’ve done the deeds for which they’re condemned to death. But there have only been a few of those. Others, probably the greater portion, know they’re guilty. I can see it in their eyes, I can hear it in their voices and read it in their faces, but they won’t admit it to me or to anyone else.

They’re holding out deliberately, waiting for a stay from the Supreme Court, an eleventh-hour phone call from the governor.”

“This one’s up for reelection next fall, and Applewhite’s the most hated man in the state of Virginia. If there’s a phone call, it’ll be for the doctor, wishing him luck in finding a good vein.” That thought seems to call for the rueful half-smile, and he supplies it.

“But what I’ve come to realize,” he says, “is that a substantial minority of condemned men honestly believe they’re innocent. Not that they had just cause, not that it was the victim’s own fault, not that the Devil made them do it. But that they didn’t do it at all. The cops must have framed them, the evidence must have been planted, and if only the real killer can turn up then the world will recognize their own abiding innocence.”

“This facility houses three thousand inmates,” Humphries says, “and I don’t know how many committed crimes they can’t consciously recall.

They were in a blackout, drug- or alcohol-induced. They don’t necessarily deny their actions, but they don’t remember them. But that’s not what you mean.”

“No. There are some instances, especially in sex crimes of the sort Applewhite committed, where the perpetrator’s in an altered state during the performance of the act. But that’s rarely enough to keep him from being aware of what he did. No, the phenomenon I’m talking about happens after the fact, and it’s a case of the wish being father to the thought.”

“Oh?”

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“Let me put myself in Applewhite’s place for a moment. Suppose I killed three boys over a period of—what was it, two months?”

“I believe so.”

“Abducted them one by one, committed forcible sodomy, tortured them, killed them, concealed the bodies, and covered up evidence of the murders. Either I found a way to make this acceptable to my conscience or I was sufficiently sociopathic as not to be burdened with a conscience in the first place.”

“I grew up certain that everyone had a conscience,” Humphries reflects. “That’s an illusion you lose in a hurry in this line of work.”

“These people are sane. They just lack a piece of standard human equipment. They know right from wrong, but they don’t feel the distinc-tion applies to them. It strikes them as somehow beside the point.”

“And they can be quite charming.”

He nods. “And can act convincingly normal. They know what a conscience is, they understand the concept, so they can behave as though they have one.” The rueful smile. “Well. I’ve killed these boys, and it doesn’t bother me in the least, but then I’m caught, and placed under arrest, and it turns out there’s an abundance of evidence of my culpability. I’m in a jail cell, with the media damning me as the blackest villain of the century, and all I can do is protest my innocence.

“And I do so, with increasing conviction. I have to do more than insist I’m innocent, I have to do so with utter certainty, for how am I to convince anyone if I am not myself convincing? And how better to be convincing than to believe myself in the truth of my arguments?”

“Other words, you wind up believing your own lies.”

“That’s what appears to happen. I’m not entirely certain of the mechanics of the process, but that’s how it manifests itself.”

“It sounds almost like self-hypnosis.”

“Except that self-hypnosis is generally a conscious process, while what I’ve described is largely unconscious. But there are elements of self-hypnosis, certainly, and elements of denial as well. ‘I could not have done this, ergo I did not do it.’ The mind’s reality trumps the reality of the physical world.”

“Fascinating. You make me wish I’d taken more psych courses.” All the Flowers Are Dying

23

“I’d say you’re getting a crash course on the job.”

“I’m an administrator, Dr. Bodinson, and—”

“Arne.”

“Arne. I’m an administrator, the plant manager at a factory. My job is to keep the line running and handle problems as they arise. But you’re right, it’s a crash course in the intricacies of the human psyche. You know, if Applewhite believes he didn’t do it—”

“Which I haven’t yet established, but which strikes me as likely.”

“Well, that means there won’t be any last-minute confession.”

“How could there be, if in his mind he has nothing to admit to?”

“It ordinarily wouldn’t matter,” Humphries says, “because either way he gets the needle, but I was thinking of the parents of the one boy, the first victim. I don’t recall his name, and I should. I’ve heard it often enough.”

“Jeffrey Willis, wasn’t it? The one whose body was never found.”

“Yes, of course. Jeffrey Willis, and his parents are Peg and Baldwin Willis, and they’re having a terrible time of it. They can’t get closure.

That’s one good thing about capital punishment, it provides closure for the victim’s family in the way a life sentence never does, but for the Willises it’ll be only partial closure, because they’re deprived of the opportunity to bury their son.”

“And in their minds they can’t shake off the slim hope that he’s alive.”

“They know he’s not,” Humphries says. “They know he’s dead and they know Applewhite killed him. There was a manila envelope in a locked drawer of the man’s desk, and in it were three glassine envelopes, each containing a lock of hair. One was the Willis boy’s, and the others were from the other two victims.” He shakes his head. “Of course Applewhite had no explanation. Of course someone must have planted the trophies in his desk.

Of course he’d never seen them before.”

“He may believe that.”

“All anyone wants from him now, all he can do in the world on his way out of it, is tell those poor people where their son’s body is buried. That might get him a call from the governor, at the very least staying his execution long enough to recover the body. But if he honestly believes he didn’t do it—”

24

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“Then he can’t admit it. And couldn’t locate the body, because he no longer knows where it is.”

“If that’s what he believes, I don’t suppose there’s anything to be done in that regard. But if he’s just putting on an act, and if he were somehow convinced that it’s in his own best interests to provide us with the where-abouts of the body . . .”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he says.

4

The cell is larger than he’d expected, and more comfortably appointed.

There’s a built-in concrete platform to support the mattress, a built-in kneehole desk. There’s a television set mounted high on the wall, out of reach, with a remote control pointed toward it and bolted to the desktop.

A single molded plastic chair—white, stackable if there were another to stack upon it—is the cell’s only movable furniture. After a tentative handshake, Applewhite motions him to the chair, takes a seat for himself on the bed.

He is a handsome man, is Preston Applewhite, although the years in confinement have taken a toll. He’s five years older than when he was arrested, and they’ve been hard years, soul-deadening years. They’ve rounded his broad shoulders, bowed his back. They’ve put some gray in his dark blond hair, even as they’ve etched vertical lines at the sides of his full-lipped mouth. Have they washed some of the blue from his eyes? Perhaps, or it could be that it’s not the color but the expression in those eyes that has faded. The thousand-yard stare, the unfocused gaze into the middle distance, and on into the abyss.

When he speaks, his voice is flat, uninflected. “I hope this isn’t a ruse, Dr. Bodinson. I hope you’re not from the media.”

“Certainly not.”

“I’ve turned down their requests. I don’t want to be interviewed, I don’t want a chance to tell my story. I don’t have a story to tell. My only story is 26

Lawrence Block

that I’m innocent, that I’m living in a nightmare, and that’s not a story anyone wants to hear.”

“I’m not from the media.”

“Or from the boy’s parents? They want to know where their son is buried, so they can dig him up and bury him again. For the love of God, don’t they think I’d tell them if I knew?”

“They think you’re unwilling to own up to knowing.”

“Why? Friday they’re going to pump a mix of chemicals into me, and what little life I’ve got is going to come to an end. That’s going to happen no matter what I do. I don’t deserve it, I never harmed anyone in my life, but that’s beside the point. Twelve men and women looked at the evidence and decided I was guilty, and then they thought it over and decided I deserved to die for it, and I can’t really blame them for either of those decisions. I mean, look at the evidence.”

“Yes.”

“Child pornography on my computer hard drive. Little envelopes of hair from the dead boys in my desk drawer. A bloody handkerchief found at the burial site, and the blood’s mine. There was even a file on my computer, an elaborate obscene third-person account of one of the murders. It had been erased, but they managed to recover it, and only a monster could have written it. It contained details of the crime that could only have been known to the person who committed it. If I’d been on that jury, I wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment. A guilty verdict was the only verdict possible.”

“They didn’t spend much time in deliberations.”

“They didn’t have to. I read an account, an interview with one of the jurors. They went around the room, and everyone said guilty. Then they discussed the evidence, trying to find arguments refuting some of it, and they voted again, and it was unanimous again. And then they discussed it some more, just to make absolutely certain they were all on the same page, and then they voted formally, and it was twelve for conviction and none for acquittal, and there was really no reason to waste any more time.

So they filed back into the courtroom and announced the verdict. Then my lawyer insisted the jury be polled, and one by one they said the same thing, over and over. Guilty, guilty, guilty. What else did he expect them to say?”

All the Flowers Are Dying

27

“And the penalty phase?”

“My lawyer wanted me to change my story. He’d never believed me, although he wouldn’t come right out and say so. Well, why should he have believed me? To take my story at face value would have been evidence of incompetence on his part.”

“He thought you’d have a better chance at escaping a death sentence if you said you’d done it.”

“Which is nonsense,” he says, “because the sentence would have been the same either way. He wanted me to express remorse. Remorse! What remorse could possibly match the enormity of those crimes? And how could I express remorse for something I hadn’t done? I asked him as much and he just looked at me. He wouldn’t come right out and tell me I was full of shit, but that’s what he was thinking. But he didn’t push it, because he knew it wouldn’t make any difference. The death sentence didn’t take them any more time than the guilty verdict.”

“Did it surprise you?”

“It shocked me. Later, when the judge pronounced sentence, that shocked me, too. Shock’s not the same thing as surprise.”

“No.”

“The idea of it. ‘You’re going to die.’ Well, everybody’s going to die. But when someone sits there and tells you, well, it has an impact.”

“I can imagine.”

“Remorse. Could you express remorse by proxy? Because I couldn’t be sorry that I’d killed those boys, because I hadn’t, but I was damn well sorry that someone had.” He frowns, a vertical line in his forehead forming to match the ones at the sides of his mouth. “He told me it would be a great help if I could tell them where to find the third body. But how could I do that if I’d never set eyes on the Willis boy and had no idea where he might be? I could tell him, he said, and he could say I let it slip while still maintaining my innocence. I told him I couldn’t quite see the logic of that. I’d be sticking to a lie while admitting it was a lie. He hemmed and hawed, and I said it hardly mattered, because I couldn’t tell what I didn’t know.

You know, I didn’t care if he believed me, or if anyone else believed me.

My wife didn’t believe me, she couldn’t even look at me. She’s divorced me, you know.”

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“So I understand.”

“I haven’t seen her or my children since I was taken into custody. No, I take that back. I saw her once. She came to the jail and asked me how I could do such a thing. I said I was innocent and she had to believe me.

But she didn’t, and something died in me, and from that point on it didn’t really matter what anyone else believed or didn’t believe.” Fascinating, just fascinating.

“You wrote that you believed me.”

“Yes.”

“I suppose that was just a way to get me to approve the visit. Well, it worked.”

“I’m glad it got me here,” he says, “but it wasn’t a ruse. I know you didn’t commit those barbarities.”

“I almost think you’re serious.”

“I am.”

“But how can you possibly be? You’re a rational man, a scientist.”

“If psychology’s a science, and there are those who’d argue that it’s not.”

“What else could it be?”

“An art. A black art, some would say. There were those, you know, who wanted to give Freud the Nobel, not in medicine but in literature. A backhanded compliment, that. I like to think there’s a scientific basis to what I do, Preston, but—I’m sorry, is it all right if I call you Preston?”

“I don’t mind.”

“And my name is Arne. That’s A-R-N-E, the Scandinavian spelling, though it’s pronounced like the diminutive for Arnold. My parents were English and Scots-Irish on both sides, I can’t think why they thought to give me a Swedish name. But that’s off the point, and I’m afraid I’ve lost track of what I was saying.”

“A scientific basis to what you do.”

“Yes, of course.” He hadn’t lost track, but is pleased to note that Applewhite’s been paying attention. “But even pure science has an intuitive element. Most scientific discovery comes out of intuition, out of an inspired leap of faith that owes little to logic or scientific method. I know you’re innocent. I know it with a certainty that leaves no room for doubt.

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29

I can’t explain how I know it, to you or to myself, but I know it.” He treats Applewhite to a gentler version of the rueful smile. “I’m afraid,” he says,

“that you’ll have to take my word for it.” Applewhite just looks at him, his face soft now, defenseless. And, unbidden and quite unexpected, tears begin to flow down his cheeks.

“I’m sorry. I haven’t cried in, hell, I couldn’t even guess how long it’s been.

Ages.”

“It’s nothing to apologize for. Perhaps I’m the one who should apologize.”

“For what? For being the first person to believe me?” He laughed shortly. “Except that’s not strictly true. I’ve received letters from half a dozen women over the years. They just know I couldn’t have done such things, and their hearts go out to me, and they want me to know how strongly they support me in my hour of need. I’m told everyone on Death Row gets letters like that, and the nastier and more publicized your crimes, the more mail you get.”

“It’s a curious phenomenon.”

“Most of them sent their pictures. I didn’t keep the photos, or the letters, for that matter, and I didn’t even think about answering them, but a couple of them kept writing all the same. They wanted to visit me, and one just wouldn’t give up. She wants to marry me. Now that my divorce is final, she explained, we can get married. And it’s my constitutional right, according to her. It’s a right I’m somehow not tempted to exercise.”

“No, I wouldn’t think you would be.”

“And I don’t really think for a moment that she or any of the others really believed I was innocent. Because they don’t want a romance with some poor bastard who’s going to die for no reason whatsoever. They want an affair, or the fantasy of an affair, with a man who’s the very personifi-cation of evil. Each of them wants to be the one selfless woman able to see the good in this worst of men, and if there’s a chance I might wring her neck, well, the danger just adds spice to the mix.” They talk some more about the vagaries of human behavior. Applewhite is intelligent, as he’d known he would be, with an extensive vocabulary and a logical mind.

“Tell me again why you’re here, Arne.”

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He thinks for a moment. “I guess because you meet the criteria for what seems to be my interest these days.”

“And that is?”

“There must be a better phrase, but what comes to mind is ‘doomed innocence.’ ”

“Doomed innocence. You and I are the only two people on earth who think I’m innocent. The doomed part, that’s pretty clear to everyone.”

“I’m interested,” he says, “in how a person in your position faces the inevitable.”

“Calmly.”

“Yes, I can see that.”

“When I think about it, everybody with a pulse is under a death sentence. Some of us are under more immediate ones. People with terminal illnesses. They’re as innocent as I am, but because some cell went haywire and nobody caught it in time, they’re going to die ahead of schedule. They can beat themselves up, they can say they should have quit smoking, they shouldn’t have put off that annual physical, they should have eaten less and exercised more, but who knows if that would have made any difference? The bottom line is they’re going to die, and it’s not their fault. And so am I, and it’s not my fault.”

“And every day . . .”

“Every day,” he says, “I get a day closer to the end. I told my lawyer not to bother trying for any more stays. I could drag it out for another year or two, if I pushed, but why? All I’ve been doing is marking time, and all it would get me is a little more time to mark.”

“So how do you get through the days, Preston?”

“There aren’t that many. Friday’s the day.”

“Yes.”

“Until then, I get through the hours. Three times a day they bring me something to eat. You’d think I’d have lost my taste for food, but one’s appetite doesn’t seem to have much to do with one’s long-term prospects.

They bring the food and I eat it. They bring a newspaper and I read it.

They’ll bring books if I ask for them. Lately I haven’t felt much like reading.”

“And you have the TV.”

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“There’s a channel that has nothing but reruns of cop shows. Homicide, Law & Order, NYPD Blue. For a while I was addicted, I watched them one after another. Then I realized what I was doing.”

“Seeking escape?”

“No, that’s what I’d assumed, but that wasn’t it. I was looking for an answer, a solution.”

“To your own dilemma.”

“Exactly. Surely one of those programs would hold the key. I’d see something, and there’d be that aha! Moment, that instant of revelation that would enable me to save myself and pinpoint the real killer.” He shakes his head. “Listen to me, will you? ‘The real killer.’ I sound like OJ, for Christ’s sake.” He purses his lips, emits a soundless whistle. “Once I knew why I was watching the shows, I couldn’t watch them anymore. Lost my taste for them completely. There’s not much I can watch, actually. Football, during the season, but that’s over until the fall. I’ve seen my last football game.”

“Other sports? Baseball? Basketball?”

“I used to play a little basketball.” His eyes narrow for a moment, as if reaching for a memory, but it eludes him and he lets it go. “I watched the college games. The tournament, the Final Four. When the college season ended I lost interest. I put a pro game on a few days ago but I couldn’t keep my mind on it. And I never could work up an interest in baseball.”

“So you don’t watch much television.”

“No. It passes the time, which is part of its appeal, but it wastes the time, and I don’t have that much time left that I can afford to waste any of it. You asked how I get through the days. There’s nothing to it. I just sit here, and one way or another the hours pass. And the next thing you know it’s Friday, and that’s as far as I have to go.”

“I’d better go,” he says, rising from the white plastic chair. “I’m taking up all your time, and you already said you don’t have that much of it left.”

“I’ve enjoyed this, Arne.”

“Have you?”

“This is the first time I’ve been in the company of anybody who thought I was innocent. I can’t tell you what a difference that makes.”

“Really?”

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“Oh, absolutely. There’s been an element of stress in every conversation I’ve had since they cuffed me and read me my rights, because every single person, even the ones who’ve tried to help me, have believed me to be this monster. It was always there, you know? And today for the first time it wasn’t, and I could have an unguarded conversation and relate to another human being. I haven’t talked like this in, well, I couldn’t say how long. Since I was arrested, but maybe longer than that. I’m glad you came, and I’m sorry to see you leave.”

He hesitates, then says, tentatively, “I could come back tomorrow.”

“You could?”

“I don’t have anything I have to do for the next several days. I’ll come back tomorrow, if you’d like, and as often as you want after that.”

“Well, Jesus,” Applewhite says. “Yes, I’d like that. Damn right I’d like that. Come anytime. I’m not going anywhere.”

5

At a meeting over the weekend a woman whom I knew by sight came up to me and said she’d heard I was a private investigator. Was that true?

“Sort of,” I said, and explained that I was semiretired, and didn’t have a license, which meant I lacked any official standing.

“But you could investigate someone,” she said.

“Anyone in particular?”

“I have to think about this,” she said. “Is there a number where I can reach you?”

I gave her a card, one of the new ones with my cell phone number on it, along with the phone in our apartment. I avoided a cell phone as long as I possibly could, until the realization that I was being ridiculous gradually overcame the stubbornness that seems to be an irre-ducible part of me. I still forget to carry it half the time, and don’t always remember to turn it on when I do, but I’d done both Monday morning, and when it rang I even managed to answer it without disconnecting the caller.

“This is Louise,” she said. “You gave me your card. The other night, I asked if you could investigate someone, and—”

“I remember. You had to think about it.”

“I’ve thought all I need to, and I’d like to talk to you. Could we meet somewhere?”

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I was having breakfast with TJ, who’d kept a remarkably straight face while I’d fumbled with the phone. “I’m at the Morning Star,” I said.

“Are you really? Because I’m at the Flame.” The Morning Star’s on the northwest corner of Ninth and Fifty-seventh; the Flame’s at the Fifty-eighth Street end of the same block.

They’re both New York–style Greek coffee shops, and neither one’s a candidate for the next edition of Zagat, but they’re not terrible, and God knows they’re handy.

She said, “Will you still be there in fifteen minutes? I want to finish this cup of coffee, and then I want to stand around outside long enough to smoke a cigarette, and then I’ll come to the Morning Star, if you’ll still be there.”

“They haven’t even brought my eggs yet,” I told her. “Take your time.”

“I feel funny about this,” she said. “Here I’m having this romance, and it feels as though it might really go somewhere, and a relationship ought to be based on trust, and how trusting am I if I hire a detective to investigate the guy? It’s like I’m sabotaging the whole process from the get-go.”

Louise was somewhere in her late thirties, medium height and build, with dark brown hair and light brown eyes. She’d had acne in adolescence, and its legacy was a light pitting on her cheeks and pointed chin. She was dressed for the office in a skirt and blouse, and she’d put on some cologne, a floral scent that blended imperfectly with the smell of cigarette smoke.

She’d joined us at our table, a little taken aback to discover that I wasn’t alone. I introduced TJ as my assistant, and that mollified her some. He’s a black man in his twenties—I don’t know his exact age, but then I still don’t know his last name, for all that he’s a virtual member of the family—and this morning he was dressed for comfort in baggy bleached denim shorts and a black T-shirt with the sleeves and neckband cut off. He didn’t look much like my assistant, or anybody else’s, except perhaps a dope dealer’s. I could tell she’d be more com-All the Flowers Are Dying

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fortable if it were just the two of us, but I’d only have to fill TJ in afterward, and I figured she could get over it, and she did.

I said, “Trust is at the basis of most enduring relationships.”

“That’s what I keep telling myself, but—”

“It’s also a key component of most scams and con games. They couldn’t work without it. You might have an easier time trusting this guy if you can establish that there’s no abiding reason not to trust him.”

“And that’s the other thing I keep telling myself,” she said. “It seems tacky, but I can’t get past the fact that I don’t really know a thing about him. It’s not like my parents and his parents are friends, or I met him at a church social.”

“How did you meet?”

“On the Internet.”

“One of the dating services?”

She nodded, and gave its name. “I don’t know how the hell else peo -

ple are supposed to hook up in this city,” she said. “I work all day. In fact I’m supposed to be at my desk in twenty minutes, but Tinkerbell’s not gonna die if I’m ten minutes late. I spend my days at the office and my nights at AA meetings. My last relationship was with somebody I knew from the program. That gets you past the small talk, but then when things don’t work out one of you has to start going to different meetings.” She glanced at my left hand. “You’re married, right? Is she in the program?”

“No.”

“How’d you meet, if you don’t mind my asking?” We met in an after-hours gin joint, at Danny Boy Bell’s table. She was a young call girl then, and I was a cop with a wife and two kids. But that was a lot more than she needed to know, and what I said was that Elaine and I had known each other years ago, that we’d met up again after having lost contact, and that this time it had worked out for us.

“That’s romantic,” she said.

“I suppose it is.”

“Well, the men in my past, I hope to God they stay there. My boyfriend in high school was cute, but he never got over it when I 36

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threw up in the middle of . . . well, never mind. Jesus, I wish you could smoke in here. If you can have a cup of coffee you ought to be able to have a cigarette with it. Our tightass mayor should go fuck himself.

Can you believe he wants to ban smoking outside, too? Like it’s not bad enough you have to go out in the street for a smoke? I mean, who does he think he is?”

She didn’t wait for an answer, which was just as well, as I didn’t have one handy. “I should get to the point, Matt. I met this guy on the Internet, and we had a lot of exchanges, first by e-mail and then with Instant Messaging. You know what that is, right? Sort of an online conversation?”

I nodded. TJ and Elaine IM back and forth regularly, like a couple of kids with two cans and a wire. He lives right across the street from us, in the hotel room I occupied for years, and he comes over a couple of nights a week for dinner, and he and Elaine are both easy enough to reach by phone, but evidently there’s something irresistible about Instant Messaging. One of them will notice that the other’s online, and the next thing you know they’re chatting like magpies.

“It can get very intimate, or at least it seems that way. People let their guard down in e-mails, or forget to put it up in the first place. I mean, it’s so easy. You type something out like you’re writing in a diary, and before you have time to think about it you hit the Send button, and it’s gone. You can’t even check the spelling, let alone give some thought to whether you really wanted to tell him you had an abortion your senior year in high school. So it seems intimate, because you’re finding out a lot about the person, but it’s only what he chooses to tell you, and you’re just reading it on the screen. It’s just words, there’s no tone of voice to go with it, no facial expressions, no body language. You fill in the rest in your mind, and you make it what you want it to be.

But it may not be an accurate reflection of the real person. Sooner or later you trade jpegs, that’s online photographs—”

“I know.”

“—so you know what he looks like, but that’s just the visual equivalent of words on the screen. You still don’t know him.”

“But you’ve met this man.”

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“Oh, of course. I wouldn’t be wasting your time if this was still just an online flirtation. I met him about a month ago and I’ve seen him seven or eight times since then. I didn’t see him this weekend because he was out of town.”

“I gather the two of you hit it off.”

“We liked each other. The attraction was there. He’s nice-looking but not handsome. Handsome puts me off. A therapist once told me it’s a self-esteem issue, that I don’t think I deserve a handsome boyfriend, but I don’t think that’s it. I just don’t trust men who are too good-looking. They always turn out to be narcissists.”

“Been a real problem for me,” TJ said.

She grinned. “But you’re dealing with it.”

“Best I can.”

“I like the guy,” she said. “He didn’t rush me into bed, but we both knew that’s where we were going, and it didn’t take us that long to get there. And it was nice. And he likes me, and I’d love to jump up and down and tell the world I’m in love, but something holds me back.”

“What don’t you know about him?”

“I don’t know where to start. Well, what do I know about him? He’s forty-one, he’s divorced, he lives alone in a fifth-floor walk-up in Kips Bay. He’s self-employed, he creates direct-mail advertising packages for corporate clients. Sometimes he has to work long hours and sometimes he has dry spells with no work at all. Feast or famine, he says.”

“Does he have an office?”

“A home office. That’s one reason we always go to my place. His is a mess, he says, with a sofa that he sleeps on. It’s not even a convertible because there’s no room to open it up, with his desk and filing cabinets taking up so much floor space. There’s a fax, there’s a copying machine, there’s his computer and printer and I don’t know what else.”

“So you’ve never been there.”

“No. I said I’d like to see it and he just said it was a mess, and a mess you have to climb four flights of stairs to get to. And it’s plausible enough, it could certainly be true.”

“Or he could be married.”

“Or he could be married and live anywhere at all. I thought I could 38

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go to his building and at least see if his name’s on the mailbox, but I don’t even know the address. I have a phone number for him, but it’s his cell. He could be married, he could be an ex-con, he could be a fucking axe murderer for all I know. I don’t honestly think he’s any of those things, but the problem is I don’t know for sure, and I can’t let go emotionally if I’ve got these worries in the back of my mind.”

“And not that far back, from the sound of it.”

“No, you’re right. It’s always there, and it gets in the way.” She frowned. “I get this spam, everybody does, links to these websites where they claim you can find out the truth about anybody, I’ve gone to the sites, and I’ve been tempted, but that’s as far as I’ve gone. I don’t know how reliable those things are, anyway.”

“They probably vary,” I said. “What they do is access various publicly available data bases.”

“You can find out anything on the Internet,” TJ put in, “but only part of it is true.”

“His name’s David Thompson,” she said. “Or at least I think his name’s David Thompson. I did a Yahoo People search, and it’d be a lot easier if his name was Hiram Weatherwax. You wouldn’t believe how many David Thompsons there are.”

“Common names make it tough. You must know his e-mail address.”

“DThomps5465 at hotmail.com. Anybody can set up a free account at Hotmail, all you have to do is go to their site and register. I have a Yahoo account, FareLady315. That’s F-A-R-E, as in subway fare, because I ride it to and from work every day.” She glanced at her watch.

“I’m all right. I live on Eighty-seventh Street, I rode down to Columbus Circle. Then I had a bagel and coffee, and then I came here, and my office is a five-minute walk from here. I’ll smoke a cigarette on the way over there, because it goes without saying we’re not allowed to smoke in the fucking office. I could keep a bottle in my desk and drink, that’d be fine, but God forbid I should smoke a cigarette. Did I mention that he smokes? David?”

“No.”

“I specified that in my ad. Not just that I smoked, but that I was looking to meet a smoker. People say they’re tolerant, but then they All the Flowers Are Dying

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wind up waving their hand in the air, or run around opening windows.

I don’t need that. I don’t drink a day at a time, and I don’t take drugs, I won’t even take fucking Midol for cramps, so I figure I can smoke all I want, and the hell with the mayor.” She let out a sudden yelp of laughter. “Jesus, listen to me, will you? ‘Hey, Louise, why don’t you tell us how you really feel?’ The thing is, I know one of these days I’m going to quit. I don’t even like to talk about it, but one of these days when I’m good and ready it’s gonna happen. And, just my luck, it’ll most likely happen in the middle of a terrific relationship with a guy who smokes like a chimney, and the last thing he’ll want to do is quit, and his cigarettes’ll wind up driving me crazy.”

It’s a hard old world. “Does David know you’re in the program?”

“Dave, he likes to be called. And yes, that was one of the first things I told him, when we were just DThomps and FareLady. He’d said something about it’d be nice to share a bottle of wine, and I wanted to let him know that wasn’t gonna happen. He’s a light social drinker. Or at least he is when he’s around me, but that’s another thing I don’t know about him, because he could be controlling it when we’re together and knocking back the silver bullets when we’re not.” She gave me a picture, one he’d sent her that she’d downloaded and printed. It was, she assured me, a pretty good likeness. It showed the head and shoulders of a man with the forced expression most people have when trying to smile for the camera. He looked pleasant enough, with a square jaw, a neatly trimmed mustache, and a full head of dark hair. He wasn’t movie-star handsome, certainly, but he looked okay to me.

For a moment I thought she was going to ask for the photo back, but she made her decision and sat back. “I hate doing this,” she said, “but I’d hate myself more if I didn’t. I mean, you read things.”

“Yes.”

“And I’m no heiress, but I have some investments and a few dollars in the bank. I own my apartment. I’ve got something to lose, you know?” After she left I called the waiter over and got the check. She’d tried to leave a buck for her cup of coffee, but I figured I could afford to treat 40

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her. She’d given me five hundred dollars as a retainer, and all she got in return was a receipt, along with an explanation of the ground rules: I wouldn’t be giving her elaborate written reports, but would let her know what I found out, and would make my inquiries in a manner designed to keep him from getting wind of their source. I’d cover my own expenses, which didn’t figure to amount to much anyway, and if I wound up putting in more time than the five hundred bucks covered, I’d let her know, and she could decide whether or not to pay it. That’s a little unstructured for some people, but she didn’t have a problem with it. Or maybe she was just in a hurry to get outside where she could smoke.

“Glad I never got the habit,” TJ said. “You a smoker, back in the day?”

“Once or twice a year,” I said, “I would drink myself into the kind of mood that led me to buy a pack of cigarettes and smoke six or eight of them one right after the other. Then I’d throw the rest of the pack away, and I wouldn’t want another for months.”

“Weird.”

“I guess.”

He laid a finger on the photo of the putative David Thompson. “You want me to see what shows up online?”

“I was hoping you would.”

“You know,” he said, “ain’t nothing I can do that you couldn’t do for yourself. Just get on Elaine’s Mac and let yourself go. You don’t even have to log on, ’cause now that she’s got the DSL line you’re logged on all the time. You just start with Google and poke around some and see where it takes you.”

“I’m always afraid I’ll break something.”

“Won’t even break a sweat, Chet. But it’s cool, I’ll take a shot at it.

What say we go over what we know about the dude.” That didn’t take long because we didn’t know much. I suggested some lines of inquiry that might lead somewhere, and we both made some notes, and he pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’d best get back to my room,” he said. “Market opened ten minutes ago.”

“You still doing okay?”

“Some days be better than others. Some days the whole market goes All the Flowers Are Dying

41

up, and you look like a genius whatever you do. ’Less you went short, in which case you look like a fool.”

I have two grown sons, Michael and Andrew. Michael and June live in Santa Cruz, California, and Andy was in Wyoming the last time I heard from him. I’m not sure of the city; he’d recently moved, but whether it was from Cheyenne to Laramie or the other way around I can’t be sure, and I don’t suppose it’s too important, because that was around Christmas and he’s probably moved again since then. I haven’t seen him in four or five years, when he flew east for his mother’s funeral. Michael’s been back once since then, on a quick business trip the summer before last, and then last year Elaine and I flew out there shortly after their second daughter was born.

Antonia, they called her. “We wanted to name her for Mom,” Michael told me, “but neither of us really liked the name Anita, and Antonia has all the same letters, plus an O and an extra N. June says that means Anita is living on.”

“Your mother would like that,” I said, wondering if it was true. I’d left the woman thirty years ago, and even then I had never been too clear on what she would or wouldn’t like.

“We were sort of hoping for a boy. To keep the name going, you know? But to tell you the truth we were both a little relieved when the sonogram indicated we were going to have a girl. And Melanie, well, she was very clear on the subject. She wanted a baby sister, period, end of story. A brother would not be an acceptable substitute.”

“They might have another, you know,” Elaine said on the flight home. “To continue the Scudder name.”

“It’s not that uncommon a name,” I told her. “Last time I looked, there were hundreds scattered all over the country. Maybe thousands, for all I know, plus a whole family of mutual funds.”

“You don’t mind not having a grandson?”

“Not at all, and I’ve got to say I think Antonia goes a lot better with Scudder than Antonio would.”

“Well,” she said, “I’ve got to agree with you there.” The point is that there’s a distance between me and my sons, and 42

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geography is only a part of it. I didn’t really get to watch them become the men they are today, and I can only view their continuing evolution as from across a great divide. All of which makes TJ’s company especially gratifying. For all that I don’t know about him—like his last name, and what, if anything, the T and the J stand for—I get to see him up close and watch at point-blank range his continuing self-realization.

A few years ago he started hanging out on the Columbia campus, apparently having mastered the art of flimflamming the campus security forces. He audited classes over a whole range of subjects, did almost all of the assigned reading, and probably got more from the enterprise than ninety percent of the kids who were taking the same courses for credit. Now and then he wrote a paper, just for the hell of it, and, when the instructor struck him as sufficiently sympathetic, he’d hand it in. One professor in the history department was desperate to have him enroll and was sure he could put together an aid package that would give TJ an Ivy League education at virtually no cost. TJ

pointed out that he was already getting just that, plus he got to pick his courses. When Elaine suggested that a Columbia diploma could open a lot of doors, he countered that they led to rooms he didn’t want to go into.

“Besides,” he’d say, popping his eyes, “I’s a detective, I’s already gots a career.”

More recently he’d sampled some classes at the business school. He dressed the part, and left the hip-hop patter behind when he got off the train at 116th Street, but I suspect at least some of the professors knew he didn’t belong there. If so, they would have to realize that they were dealing with someone who actually wanted to attend their lec-tures without the goal of a Columbia MBA. Why on earth would they want to discourage him?

I don’t think their program focuses much on the stock market, but he got interested, and found books and magazines to read, and by the time classes broke for the summer he was set up in his room at the Northwestern as a day trader, with CNBC running all day on the little television set and his computer—a high-powered successor to the one we’d given him for Christmas some years ago—all set up for online All the Flowers Are Dying

43

trading. He had an Ameritrade account, though I can’t imagine he had much capital to fund it with, but it was enough to get him started, and he evidently managed to keep his head above water.

“He’ll probably go broke,” Elaine said, “but so what if he does? If you’re gonna go broke, that’s the right age to be when it happens. And who knows? He could turn out to be a genius at it.” He didn’t talk much about his wins or losses, so it was hard to tell how he was doing. He wasn’t driving a BMW or wearing bespoke suits, and neither was he missing any meals. I figured he’d do it until he didn’t want to do it anymore, and that he’d get something out of it, one way or the other. He always does.

6

There’s a Red Roof Inn just outside of Jarratt, at the exit off I-95, but on reflection he decides that’s closer than he wants to be. Twenty miles to the south is the North Carolina state line, and he drives across it and a few miles beyond, to the exit for the town of Roanoke Rapids, where he has several motels to choose among. He picks a Days Inn, gets a room. He registers as Arne Bodinson and gives the clerk a Visa card in that name, telling her he’ll be checking out Friday morning.

His room’s in the rear and on the top floor, as he’d requested. He parks in back and carries his briefcase and his blue canvas duffel bag up to his room. He unpacks, puts his clothes away, sets his laptop on the desk and the bottle of Scotch on the bedside table. Packing for this trip, he remembered that the South is a curious region, with unfathomable liquor laws that change every time you cross a county line. In some places you can only get beer, in others you can’t get anything at all, and liquor stores, if they even exist, are apt to keep strange and limited hours. In order to drink at a bar, you might be required to purchase a nominal membership in what calls itself a private club. For a one-time charge of five or ten dollars, you are entitled to all the rights and privileges of membership, which is to say you can buy drinks there for as long as your money lasts.

None of it makes any sense to him, but that’s not the point. It’s the way things work, and what he has to do—what he always has to do—is determine how things work and act accordingly.

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He takes the plastic bucket the hotel provided and goes down the hall for ice cubes, then frowns at the disposable plastic tumbler. You’d think they could give you a proper glass for what they charged, but they hadn’t, so you do what you always do. You deal with what life deals you.

He makes himself a drink, takes a sip. It would taste better out of a glass container, but there’s no point in dwelling on that fact. It will only get in the way of his enjoyment of the Scotch, and it is in fact very good Scotch indeed, full-bodied and smoky and bracing. He’s had an arduous day, and it’s a long hard road that has no drink at the end of it.

He takes his time with the drink, savoring it, sitting in a chair with the plastic tumbler in his hand. He closes his eyes and regulates his breathing, matching the exhale to the inhale, tuning in to the rhythms of his body. He lets himself feel the effects of the drink, of the alcohol in his bloodstream, and he chooses to imagine it as the equivalent for the human body and spirit of one of those space-age polymers you add to the engine of an old car, so that it can fill all the scrapes and pits in tired old metal, coating the inner surfaces, eliminating friction, increasing efficiency, smoothing out and cushioning the ride.

When he opens his eyes he reaches for his cell phone and makes a call.

His party answers on the third ring. He says, “Hey, Bill. It’s me. Oh, nothing much, just thought I’d give a ring and check in with you. I got a desk-ful of work in front of me and I don’t know when I’m gonna get out of here. Well, I thought I’d see you tonight but it doesn’t look like it. No, I’m fine, just busy as a one-armed paperhanger with the hives. Well, you too, my friend. Take care.”

He rings off, sits down at the desk, hooks up his laptop and gets online to check his e-mail. When he’s done, he makes another phone call, then fixes himself another drink.

It’s midmorning when he gets back to Greensville. Applewhite seems surprised to see him, but genuinely pleased. They shake hands, and assume their places, Applewhite on the bed, he in the white plastic chair. The conversation, tentative at first, starts with the weather and moves to the previous Super Bowl, then subsides into an awkward stillness.

Applewhite says, “I didn’t think I’d see you today.” 46

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“I said I’d come.”

“I know. And I believed you meant it, but I thought you’d change your mind after you left. You’d want to get home to your wife and kids.”

“No wife. No kids either, as far as I know.”

“As far as you know.”

“Well, who’s to say what fruit might have been borne of a youthful in-discretion? But there weren’t so many of those, and I think I’d have been informed if I’d been the cause of any abdominal swellings. In any event, nothing to draw me home.”

“Where’s home, Arne? I don’t think you told me.”

“New Haven. I did my doctoral work at Yale and never managed to get away from the place.”

Which leads them to college reminiscences, always a useful topic for men who have nothing of substance to say to one another. It serves now as it served yesterday, with the warden. He talks about Charlottesville—one might as well be consistent. Applewhite is a graduate of Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, and that leads them into a discussion of country music. It’s not what it used to be, they agree. It’s too commercial, too polished, too Top Forty.

There’s something that goes unmentioned, and it’s a matter of time before someone brings it up, and a question as to who it will be. He comes close to raising the subject himself, but waits, and finally it is Applewhite who sighs and announces, “Today’s Tuesday.”

“Yes.”

“Tomorrow and tomorrow,” he intones, “and tomorrow. Macbeth’s so-liloquy. ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow / creeps in this petty pace from day to day / to the last syllable of recorded time.’ Except that the petty pace runs out on the third tomorrow.”

“Do you want to talk about death, Preston?”

“What’s there to talk about?” He considers his own question, shakes his head. “I think about it all the time. I could probably find things to say about it.”

“Oh?”

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“There are days when I almost look forward to it. To get it over with, you know? To get on to the next thing. Except, of course, that in this case there’s not going to be a next thing.”

“Are you sure of that?”

The man’s eyes narrow, and his expression turns guarded. “Arne,” he says, “I appreciate the friendship you’ve offered, but there’s something I have to know. You’re not here to save my fucking soul, are you?”

“I’m afraid salvation’s a little out of my line.”

“Because if you’re here selling fear of hell or hope of heaven, I’m not in the market. There’ve been a couple of clergymen who’ve tried to get in to see me. Fortunately the state gives a man a certain amount of control over things to compensate for the fact that they’re planning to take his life. I don’t have to see anyone I don’t want to see, and I’ve been able to keep the gentlemen of the cloth out of this cell.”

“I swear I’m not a priest, minister, or rabbi,” he says, smiling gently.

“I’m not even a religious member of the laity. I might be concerned with saving your soul if I were more nearly convinced that you have one, and that souls can be saved, or need saving.”

“What do you believe happens when you die?”

“You first.”

His words brook no argument, and Applewhite seems indisposed to offer one. “I think it ends,” he says. “I think it’s just over, like a movie after the last reel runs out.”

“No final credits?”

“Nothing at all. I think the rest of the world goes on, the same as it does when anybody else dies. Subjectively, I think it’s a resumption of the same nonexistence one had before birth. Or before conception, if you prefer.

It’s hard at first to accept the notion that you’re not going to exist anymore, but it gets a little easier when you think of all the centuries, all the millennia, when you hadn’t yet been born and the world got along just fine without you.”

“One hears of near-death experiences . . .”

“The tunnel, the white light? Some sort of hallucination, very likely with a physiological basis to it, and one that medical science will no 48

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doubt be able to explain to us at some future date. I won’t get to hear the explanation, but I guess I can live without it. Or die without it, come to think of it.”

“Gallows humor.”

“There’s a phrase due for an update. Hard to find a proper gallows in our enlightened age. Well, better the needle than the rope. But now it’s your turn. What do you think happens when we die?” He doesn’t hesitate. “I think we go out like a light, Preston. I think it’s like going to sleep, but with no dreams and no awakening. And why should that be so hard to believe? Do we think cattle go from the abattoir straight to cow heaven? What’s so special about our consciousness that it should be permitted to survive?” The rueful half-smile. “Although I expect I’ll be drawn down the tunnel to the white light. But when I pop through at the end of the tunnel I’ll cease to be. I’ll become part of that light, perhaps, or I won’t, and what possible difference will it make either way?”

“I’d like to come again tomorrow, Preston.”

“I’ll be grateful if you do. Do you think they’ll let you?”

“I don’t anticipate any problem. The warden thinks I might accomplish something.”

“Help me resign myself to my fate?”

He shakes his head. “It’s his hope that you’ll tell me where the Willis boy’s body is buried.”

“But—”

“But if I truly believe in your innocence, how can I possibly attempt that? Is that what you were going to say?” A nod.

“I’m afraid I may have dissimulated some with Warden Humphries. I may have led him to think that I believe you believe in your innocence.” Briefly, he sketches what he’d postulated for the warden, explained how the wish could be father to the thought, how a man, in the course of denying his crimes, could genuinely convince himself that he had not in fact committed them.

“Is that what you think?”

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“Do I think it ever happens that way? I know for a fact that it does. Do I think that’s what’s operating in your case? Absolutely not.” Applewhite ponders this. “But how could you be sure?” he wonders.

“Even if you’ve got some kind of built-in lie detector, all that would tell you is that I’m speaking what I believe to be the truth. But if I’ve sold myself a bill of goods—”

“You haven’t.”

“You sound so certain.”

“I’ve never been more certain of anything.” On the way out, he gets the guard to take him to the warden’s office. “I think I’m making progress,” he tells Humphries. “I think it’s just a matter of time.”

It’s raining when he leaves the prison, a light rain that’s not much more than a mist. He has difficulty finding the right setting for the windshield wiper, and it makes driving less of a pleasure and more of a chore than it has been.

It’s midafternoon when he gets to the Days Inn, and the parking lot is virtually empty. He parks in back and goes to his room. It’s a little early for a drink, he decides, but not too early for a phone call.

It turns out there’s a message on his voice mail. He listens to it, deletes it. He makes three calls, all to numbers on his speed dial. The third is to a woman, and now his voice is different, the tone deeper, the phrasing more deliberate.

“I’ve been thinking of you,” he says. “More than I should, actually. I have challenging work to do, and I should be giving it a hundred percent of my attention, but instead I’ll find myself thinking of you. God, I wish I knew. Four or five days, I would think. I wish I could tell you where I am. It’s a place where they have a different attitude toward privacy. I wouldn’t be surprised if this phone is tapped. My cell? I left it home, it wouldn’t work here. If you left me a message, it’ll be waiting for me when I get home. So there are things I’d say, but I’d better not. Yes, as soon as I know. And I miss you, too. More than I can say.” 50

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He rings off, wondering if he’s made a mistake by denying that he’s calling from his cell phone. It’s set up to block Caller ID, so anyone with that feature should get a number unavailable or caller out of area message, but glitches happen. Does she have Caller ID? He’s never thought to check, and that, he decides, is a sin of omission. Not necessarily a grievous sin, it shouldn’t matter, but he’d rather leave as little as possible to chance.

He’s checking his e-mail when it strikes him that he hasn’t eaten in over twenty-four hours. He’s not hungry, he never gets hungry, but his body ought to have regular feedings.

Emporia’s not a large town, the population’s around five thousand, but it’s the county seat of Greensville County, and it’s got an Outback Steakhouse. He’s noted the sign several times now, near the Interstate exit for U.S. 58. He drives ten miles into Virginia, finds his way to the place, and orders a rare rib eye steak with fries and salad, and a big glass of unsweetened iced tea. Everything’s good, and the steak they bring him is actually rare, just as he ordered it, a welcome surprise in a part of the country where everything’s overcooked, and almost everything’s fried.

Driving back to his motel, he wonders what Preston Applewhite will want for his last meal.

Wednesday morning. It’s getting on for noon, and Applewhite has clearly been anxiously awaiting his arrival. They shake hands, and he lets his left hand cup Applewhite’s shoulder.

He’s no sooner seated in the white chair than Applewhite says, “I’ve been thinking about what you said yesterday.”

“I said a number of things,” he says, “and I rather doubt any of them is worth thinking about.”

“About the theory you proposed to Humphries. That a man can be guilty but truly believe himself innocent.”

“Oh, that.”

“The one thing I’ve been sure of, from the first moment on, is that they were all making a horrible mistake. I knew I didn’t kill those boys.”

“Of course you didn’t.”

“But if what you say is true—”

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“For some people. Sociopaths, men with something missing inside them. You’re not like that.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

“Well, how do I know? Believe me, I’d like to take your word for it, but failing that, how can I be sure? You can see where logic leads. It’s a co-nundrum. If I’m innocent, I’d know I was innocent. But if I was guilty, and had managed to convince myself I was innocent, I’d also know I was innocent.”

“Look at yourself, Preston.”

“At myself?”

“At the sort of man you are, the sort of man you always have been.

Have you ever committed a violent act?”

“If I killed those boys—”

“Before. Did you abuse your wife?”

“I shoved her away from me once. It was when we were first married, we’d argued and I was trying to leave the house. I wanted to go for a walk and clear my head, and she wouldn’t let go of me, you’d have thought I was on my way to Brazil, and I pushed her to make her let go. And she fell down.”

“And?”

“And I helped her up, and we had a cup of coffee, and, well, it worked out.”

“That’s the extent of your history of spousal abuse? How about your children? Did you beat them?”

“Never. We didn’t believe in it, either of us. And I never felt the kind of anger toward them that you’d want to express physically.”

“Let’s look at your childhood, shall we? Ever torture animals?”

“God, no. Why would anyone—”

“Ever set fires? I don’t mean Boy Scout campfires. I mean anything ranging from mischief to pyromania.”

“No.”

“You wet the bed as a kid?”

“Maybe, when my parents were toilet training me. I don’t honestly remember, I was, I don’t know, two or three years old—” 52

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“How about when you were ten or eleven?”

“No, but what does that have to do with anything?”

“The standard profile of the serial killer or lust murderer. Bedwetting, fire-setting, and animal abuse. You’re batting oh-for-three. How about your sexual orientation? Ever have sex with young boys?”

“No.”

“Ever want to?”

“The same answer. No.”

“Young girls?”

“No.”

“Really? When you approached middle age, didn’t teenagers start looking good to you?”

Applewhite thinks it over. “I won’t say I never noticed them,” he said,

“but I was never interested. All my life, the girls and women I’ve been attracted to have been around my own age.”

“And the males?”

“I’ve never had relations with a man.”

“Or a boy?”

“Or a boy.”

“Ever wanted to?”

“No.”

“Ever found a male attractive, even without having any desire to act on it?”

“Not really.”

“ ‘Not really’? What does that mean?”

“I’ve never been attracted to a man myself, but I might notice that a man is or is not generally attractive.”

“You sound awfully normal, Preston.”

“I always thought I was, but—”

“How about sexual fantasies? And don’t tell me you never had any.

That’s too normal to be normal.”

“Some.”

Ah, he’d touched a nerve. “If you’d rather not go there, Preston—”

“We were married a long time,” he says. “I was faithful. Sometimes, though, when we made love—”

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“You entertained fantasies.”

“Yes.”

“That’s hardly unusual. Other women?”

“Yes. Women I knew, women I just . . . imagined.”

“Did you ever discuss your fantasies with your wife?”

“Of course not. I couldn’t do that.”

“Were there men in the fantasies?”

“No. Well, sometimes there were men present. Sometimes the fantasy was a party, all our friends, and people would take off their clothes, and it would be sort of a free-for-all.”

“Would you have liked to transform that fantasy into reality?”

“If you knew the people,” he says, “you’d know how inconceivable that is. It was hard enough to make them act like that in my own mind.”

“And you never had sex with another man in these fantasies?” He shakes his head. “There was nothing like that. The closest was sharing a woman with another man.”

“And you never did that outside of the world of your imagination?”

“No, of course not.”

“Never suggested it to your wife?”

“Jesus, no. I wouldn’t have wanted to do it, but in fantasy it was exciting.”

“Any children in those fantasies?”

“None.”

“Neither girls nor boys?”

“No.”

“Any violence? Any rape, any torture?”

“No.”

“Any forcing a woman to do something she didn’t want to do?”

“Never. They didn’t have to be forced. They all wanted to do everything. That’s one way you could tell it was a fantasy.” They join in laughter, perhaps more than the line calls for.

He says, “Preston? Have you been listening to yourself? It’s inconceivable that you could have done what they said you did.”

“I’d always known as much, but—well, I’m relieved, Arne. You had me worried there, or perhaps I should say that I had myself worried.” He 54

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manages a smile. “Of course the bad news,” he says, “is that the day after tomorrow they’re still going to give me the needle.”

“It’ll be around noon,” Applewhite says. “I always assumed midnight. I mean all my life, when I thought of executions, which wasn’t something I thought about often, I must say, I thought they happened in the middle of the night. Somebody throws a switch and lights go dim all over the state. I must have seen a movie at an impressionable age. And I seem to remember newsreel footage outside a penitentiary, with one crowd there to protest the death penalty and another bunch having tailgate parties to celebrate that some poor bastard’s getting the shock of his life. You can’t have parties like that in the middle of the day. You need a dark sky so everyone can get a good view of the fireworks.” The words are bitter, the tone lacking in affect. Interesting.

“The judge who sentenced me never said anything about the time, just the date. The particulars are up to the warden, and I guess Humphries doesn’t want to keep anybody up late.”

“Have they told you what to expect?”

“More than once. They don’t want any surprises. They’ll come here sometime between eleven and eleven-thirty to collect me. They’ll walk me to the chamber and strap me to the gurney. There’ll be a physician in attendance, among others, and there’ll be some spectators on the other side of a glass wall. I’m not sure what the purpose of the glass wall is. Not soundproofing, because there’s going to be a microphone, so they can hear my last words. I get to make a speech. I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to say.”

“Whatever you want.”

“Maybe I’ll stand mute. ‘Mr. Chairman, Alabama passes.’ On the other hand, why miss a chance to deliver a message? I could come out for national health insurance. Or against capital punishment, except that I’m not so sure I’m against it.”

“Oh?”

“I never was, before all this happened. And if I did what they say I did, then I ought to pay with my life. And if I didn’t, and there was no death penalty, well, I could spend the rest of my life in a cell that’s noisier and All the Flowers Are Dying

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a lot less comfortable than this one, roundly despised by people I wouldn’t want to associate with in the first place. I’d probably be killed in prison, like Jeffrey Dahmer.”

“The people behind the glass wall,” he prompts.

“Some reporters, I suppose. And relatives of the victims, looking to see justice done, looking for closure. I remember what some of them said during the penalty phase of the trial, and my immediate response was to hate them, but hell, how can I blame them for hating me? They don’t know I didn’t do it.”

“No.”

“If they get some relief from my death, some of that blessed commodity they call closure, well, then I could say my death won’t be entirely in vain. Except it will.”

“Any other witnesses?”

Applewhite shakes his head. “Not that I know of. They told me I could invite somebody. Isn’t that rich? I tried to think who would possibly welcome an invitation like that, and if there is such a person, how could I stand to be in the same room with him? My parents are long gone—and thank God for that, incidentally—and even if my wife had stuck by me, even if I was getting regular visits with my kids, would I want their last sight of me to be with a needle in my arm?”

“Still, it strikes me as an awful time to be alone.”

“My lawyer offered to come. I guess that comes under the heading of professional noblesse oblige, something you have to do at the end of one of your less successful cases. I told him I didn’t want him there and he had to work hard not to look relieved.”

Come on, he urges silently. What are you waiting for?

“Arne? Do you think—”

“Of course,” he says. “I’m honored to be chosen.” He’s up late Wednesday night watching pay-per-view porn on the motel set. Even in the Bible Belt, money calls the tune. A man’s home is his cas-tle, even if it’s a cubicle rented for the night, and within its confines you can do as you please, as long as you’re willing to pay $6.95 for each XXX-rated feature.

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The films don’t arouse him. Pornography almost never does. But nevertheless it diverts him. Not the plots, such as they are. To those he pays no attention. The dialogue is a nuisance, and he’d mute the sound if it didn’t mean losing other sounds as well—the background music, the sound effects of a zipper being lowered, a vibrator humming, a slap.

He watches it all, takes it all in, and lets his mind wander at will. There’s a glass of Scotch on the table beside him, and he takes a sip from time to time. There’s still a little left in the glass, diluted by the now-melted ice cubes, when the last film ends. He pours it down the sink and goes to bed.

Thursday he spends several hours in Applewhite’s cell. Their ritual handshake has by now become an embrace. Applewhite, in a reminiscent mood, talks at length about his childhood. It’s interesting enough, for all that it’s predictably ordinary.

There are interruptions. A doctor is admitted to the cell, carrying an ordinary bathroom scale, on which he duly weighs Applewhite, the weight jotted down in his notebook.

“So that he can calibrate the right dose,” Applewhite says after the man has left. “Though wouldn’t you think they’d just err on the side of caution and give everybody three or four times the lethal dose? What are they trying to do, save a few dollars on chemicals?”

“They want to maintain the illusion of scientific method.”

“That must be it. Or else they’re making sure they get a gurney stout enough so it won’t buckle under me. You know, they’d save themselves a lot of trouble and expense if they made it possible for a man to kill himself. You could braid a rope out of strips of bed linen, but what would you hang it from?”

“Would you kill yourself if you could?”

“I think about it. I read a book years ago, a thriller, and in it a man, I think he was Chinese, killed himself by swallowing his tongue. Do you suppose it’s possible?”

“I have no idea.”

“Neither have I. I was going to try it but . . .”

“But what, Preston?”

“I didn’t have the nerve. I was afraid it might work.”

.

.

.

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“I can have whatever I want for dinner tonight. Within reason, they said.

You know, I’ve had no trouble eating whatever’s on the tray. But now that they’re giving me a choice I don’t know what to ask for.”

“Whatever you want.”

“The guard slipped me a wink, told me he could probably bring me a drink if I wanted. I haven’t had a drink since they arrested me. I don’t think I want one now. You know what I think I’ll have?”

“What?”

“Ice cream. Not for dessert. A whole meal of ice cream.”

“With sauce and toppings?”

“No, just plain vanilla ice cream, but a lot of it. Cool, you know? And sweet, but not too sweet. Vanilla ice cream, that’s what I’ll have.”

“Do you ever think about the real killer?”

“I used to. That was the only way I could be exonerated, if they were to find him. But they weren’t looking for him, and why should they? All the evidence pointed to me.”

“It must have been maddening.”

“It was exactly that. It was driving me mad. Because it wasn’t just coincidence. Someone had to have gone to great length to plant evidence implicating me. I couldn’t think of anyone who would have had reason to hate me that way. I didn’t have many close friends, but I didn’t have any enemies, either. None that I knew of.”

“He not only framed you, but he killed three innocent boys in a horrible fashion.”

“That’s it—it’s not as though he embezzled money from a company and cooked the books to implicate a coworker. You could understand something like that, there’s a rational underpinning to it. But this guy would have had to be a sociopath or a psychopath, whatever the right term is, and he’d also have to have been fixated on me, on blaming me for it. I must sound paranoid, talking about this faceless enemy, but somebody must have done all of this, and that would make him an enemy, and I can’t put a face on him.”

“He won’t be able to stop.”

“How’s that?”

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“He must have taken pleasure in the killing,” he explains. “Destroying you was part of his plan, obviously, but he killed those boys the way he did because he’s a sick bastard. He’ll do it again, one way or another, and sooner or later he’ll get caught. He might wind up confessing to all his crimes, that type often turns boastful once he’s caught. So the day may come when you’re exonerated after all.”

“It’ll be too late to do me any good.”

“I’m afraid that’s true.”

“But maybe the Willises will find out where their kid’s buried. I suppose that’s something.”

And, “Arne? Is there something on your mind?”

“There is, actually.”

“Oh?”

“There’s something I haven’t told you, and I honestly don’t know whether or not to mention it. Hell. Now I more or less have to, don’t I?”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, how could you? Here’s the thing, Preston. There’s a piece of information I have, and it might upset you to know it, but you might be more upset later if you don’t know it.”

“After the tunnel and the white light, there’s another cell just like this one.”

“God, what a thought. Actually, that helps me make the decision. Your strength, your tough-mindedness.”

“Whatever it is, Arne, let’s hear it.”

“It has to do with the procedure tomorrow. The lethal injection. It’s a three-part procedure, as you know. Three drugs are administered intra-venously. The first is thiopental sodium, more commonly known as sodium pentothal, and popularly if inaccurately thought of as truth serum. It’s classed as a hypnotic, it calms and sedates you and keeps you from feeling anything. The second, Pavulon, is derived from curare, which South American Indians use to tip their arrows. It’s a paralytic, it paralyzes the lungs and brings your breathing to a halt. Finally, a massive dose of potassium chloride stops the heart.”

“And you die.”

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“Yes, but there’s a strong argument to the effect that the procedure is not painless as advertised, that it’s actually hideously painful. Onlookers get no indication of this, as the subject’s facial expression never changes, but that’s because it can’t, the muscles are paralyzed by the Pavulon. The subject actually feels excruciating pain, and it goes on almost to the moment of death.”

“Jesus.”

“Now I don’t see how they can possibly know this,” he says. “No one’s ever returned to furnish a firsthand report. So what I’m saying, I guess, is that you should be aware of the possibility of pain. And I’ve told you because it seems to me it would be worse coming as a complete surprise, but maybe I’ve made a mistake. Maybe I’ve just given you something unnecessary to worry about during your final hours.”

“Except I won’t,” Applewhite says. “Pain almost seems beside the point.

Once you get used to the idea of dying, what difference does it make if it hurts a little? Or even more than a little? It won’t last long, no matter what it feels like.”

“That’s a wonderful attitude, Preston.”

“It’s not going to spoil my ice cream, Arne. I’ll tell you that much.” Driving south on I-95, he slows down when he sees the sign for the Outback Steakhouse, then decides to keep going. There’s a Circle K near his Days Inn, and he can stop there for a pint of vanilla ice cream and bring it back to his room.

7

The first thing TJ tried was the phone number. It was his cell phone, Louise had told us, and the prefix was 917, which is one of two area codes set aside for mobile phones in the New York area. There’s an online reverse directory TJ knows how to use, and that’s where he went, hoping to find a name and address. But there was no listing for that number.

“Might be he walked into a store, bought a phone with prepaid minutes on it. You dealing in product, that’s how you do. Walk into one of those stores on Fourteenth Street, pay cash for a phone, and you in business. Don’t even have to give a name, ’cause you ain’t opening an account, you just buying a phone with the minutes already on it. They start to run out, you go back where you bought it and give the man more money, and they give you some more minutes.”

“And it’s all off the books.”

“Far as you’re concerned, it is. Whether the store declares the cash, well, we don’t care about that part, do we?”

“It won’t keep us up nights. I don’t suppose you have to be a dope dealer to get a phone that way.”

“Way I got mine. It’s simpler and you don’t get no bill every month.

Don’t get no telemarketers, either. Don’t have to get on the Do Not Call list, ’cause you ain’t on the Call list to begin with.”

“Those are definite advantages,” I had to admit. “The only way to All the Flowers Are Dying

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improve on it would be not to have a phone at all. For David Thompson, though, you wouldn’t think he’d want to play hard to get. He’s a freelance copywriter. If nobody knows his phone number, how does he get work?”

“His clients would have the number. Same as the dope dealers.”

“What about new business?”

“Be a problem.”

“He told Louise it’s feast or famine in his line of work. During famine times, I wouldn’t think you’d want to make it hard for people to get in touch with you. He’s got to have more than one phone.”

“ ’Less he stupid.”

“He’d have a land line in his office. He might not give her the number because that’s his business line.”

“Or because he ain’t who he says he is.”

“Always a possibility.”

“Whole lot of David Thompsons in the phone book. Plus all the D Thompsons.”

“It’s a place to start,” I said.

And it didn’t require computer skills, either, just a sedentary version of the kind of doggedness I’d learned fresh out of the Police Academy.

GOYAKOD was the acronym, and it stood for Get Off Your Ass and Knock On Doors. I did just that, albeit metaphorically, and made phone calls, working my way through the D and David Thompsons in the Manhattan white pages.

“I’m not sure I have the right party,” I’d tell whoever answered. “I’m trying to reach the David Thompson who writes direct-mail advertising copy.”

One man pointed out that the one thing to be said for direct-mail advertising was that it didn’t interrupt your day the way a phone call did. But most of the people I reached were polite enough, if unhelpful; they weren’t the David Thompson I was looking for, nor had they heard of the fellow. I thanked them and put a check mark next to their names and moved on to the next listing.

That’s how it went when I got an actual person on the phone, which didn’t happen all that often. Most of the time I got a machine or a 62

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voice mail system, in which case I left a message saying essentially what I’d have said to a human being, and adding my phone number. I didn’t expect a lot of callbacks, but you never know, and there was always the chance someone might be monitoring his machine, waiting to see who it was before picking up. That happened once; I was halfway through my spiel when a woman came on the line to tell me her husband was not a copywriter but an insurance agent with Vermont Life.

But maybe she could help me after all, she suggested. How long had it been since I’d had a thorough review of my insurance needs?

“I suppose I had that coming,” I said. “I’ll make you a deal. I won’t call you anymore, and you don’t call me.” She said that sounded fair enough, and I put a check mark next to her husband’s name.

I’ve known a few people in advertising over the years, but if I’d met them in AA I rarely knew their last names, or where they worked.

There was a fellow named Ken McCutcheon I’d known when I first got sober, but I’d long since lost touch with him, and I spent a lot of time calling people I thought might have kept track of him. Eventually one of them remembered he’d moved to Dobbs Ferry, in Westchester County. I found a listing for him, not in Dobbs Ferry but nearby in Hastings, and reached a woman who turned out to be his widow. Ken had died six, no, seven years ago, she told me. I said I was sorry to hear it. She asked my name, and how I’d known him.

He was dead, and anyway she’d been his wife, so preserving his anonymity wasn’t an issue, and I’ve never made much of a thing out of preserving my own. I said I’d known him in AA, and she surprised me by asking if I was still sober. I said I was.

“Then you’re one of the lucky ones,” she said. “Ken had nine years, nine wonderful years, and then I guess he thought he was cured. And he just couldn’t stop drinking. He was in and out of treatment, he went out to Hazelden for thirty days. He flew home, and I met him at the airport, and he got off the plane drunk. And drank for another year or two after that, and then he had a seizure and died.” I apologized for disturbing her, and she apologized for telling me All the Flowers Are Dying

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more than I may have wanted to know. “I should change the listing,” she said. “In the phone book. But I never get around to it.”

“They don’t like to call it direct mail anymore,” Bob Ripley told me.

“Don’t ask me why. Nowadays it’s either direct marketing or direct-response advertising. And that’s very nearly the extent of my knowledge of the subject, but I know a guy who can tell you anything you need to know, including why you get six copies of the Lands’ End catalog every goddam month.”

I suppose I should have thought of Bob sooner. I’d seen him less than two months ago, the same night I’d booked Ray Gruliow to speak at St. Paul’s. Bob, like Ray, was a fellow member of the Club of Thirty-one, and a vice president of Fowler & Kresge. I didn’t know what he did in that capacity, but I knew F&K was an advertising agency, and that was enough.

Mark Safran, the fellow he referred me to, was in a meeting, but I left my number and mentioned Bob’s name, and that got me a callback within the hour. “I could tell you a lot about direct marketing,” he said,

“but you’re looking to find a particular guy, is that right?”

“Or to find out that there is no such guy.”

“That’d be tough, because there’s a ton of freelance copy guys out there, and it’d be hard to prove he’s not one of them. It’s not like doctors or lawyers, there’s no single professional organization you have to belong to. No state or municipal licensing bureau, like I guess there is in your field.”

I let that pass.

“The thing is,” he said, “we do almost everything in-house, and when we’re in a hurry and need to go outside, we use somebody we’ve worked with in the past. So we’ve got our own list of six or eight guys, and then there are the big corporate shops, but your guy’s not there because he’s a freelance. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to put you in touch with one of the guys we use.” He gave me a name and number, and it was easy to believe the guy was a freelance because he actually answered his own phone. “Peter Hochstein,” he said, and when I explained my quest he asked the 64

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name of my quarry. “Never heard of him,” he said, “but that doesn’t prove anything. I don’t go out and meet my colleagues. Mostly I stay home and work. And if I had heard of him, it’s not a name that sticks in your mind.”

“No.”

“He might belong to the DMA, but probably not. Most of the members are corporate, because membership’s expensive. But he could have a free listing in Who’s Charging What. Or he could be the kind of guy who runs small-space ads offering his services in DM News or Direct or Target Marketing. You could check there, and also in the classifieds in Adweek and Advertising Age.”

He was full of suggestions, and I wrote everything down. If David Thompson had won an award or made a speech, he’d probably turn up on a Google search, but that might be tricky because his name was such a common one. “You could find me that way,” he said, “along with the Peter Hochstein who’s serving a life sentence for a contract killing in Nebraska, not to mention Peter Hochstein the German scientist.” There was a good chance, he said, that David Thompson might fly under the radar. “I have a listing in Who’s Charging What,” he said,

“because it’s free, so what could it hurt? But I don’t run classifieds in Ad Age, and I don’t run ads in the direct marketing publications. I don’t think it’s worth the money, and I’m not the only one. Most of us who’ve been doing this for a while seem to feel that way. It’s almost as if we’ve stopped believing in the power of advertising, which is funny, when you think about it. I don’t belong to any trade organizations, either. The business I get is all referrals, and what kind of client is going to pick you because he saw your ad? That’s as unlikely as getting business from a listing in the Yellow Pages.” I thanked him, and the first thing I did was something I should have done earlier. I looked for Thompson in the Yellow Pages—not the consumer book but the business-to-business edition. There was no separate listing for direct marketing copywriters, but there was a section of advertising copywriters, and I wasn’t surprised not to find David Thompson there.

I didn’t find him in the back pages of Advertising Age or Adweek, ei-All the Flowers Are Dying

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ther, which were the two publications he’d mentioned that you could find on the newsstand. I bit the bullet and sat down at Elaine’s computer, and I Googled my way to some of the sites he’d mentioned.

Everybody tells me what a timesaver the Internet is, and how they can’t believe they ever got along without it. And I know what they mean, but every time I use it I wind up wondering what people did with their spare time before computers came along to suck it all up. I sat down at the damn thing in the middle of the afternoon, and I couldn’t get away from it until Elaine was putting dinner on the table.

She said she’d wanted to check her e-mail but hadn’t wanted to disturb me. I told her I’d have welcomed a disturbance, that I’d spent hours without accomplishing much of anything. “I couldn’t find the son of a bitch,” I said, “and I couldn’t find half the websites I was looking for, and I wound up Googling Peter Hochstein, don’t ask me why, and he wasn’t kidding, there really is somebody with the same name doing life in Nebraska for murder for hire. He was sentenced to death originally, and the sentence was changed on appeal, and it was a pretty interesting case, though why I spent the better part of an hour reading about it is something I’d be hard put to explain.”

“You know what I think? I think we should get a second computer.”

“That’s funny,” I said, “because what I think is we should get rid of the one we’ve got.”

New York neighborhoods rarely have sharply delineated boundaries.

They’re formed by a shifting consensus of newspapermen, realtors, and local inhabitants, and it’s not always possible to say with assurance where one leaves off and the next one begins. Kips Bay, where David Thompson lived—or where the man who claimed to be David Thompson claimed to be living—is that area in the immediate vicinity of Kips Bay Plaza, a housing complex that fills the three-block area bounded by Thirtieth and Thirty-third streets and First and Second avenues.

The neighborhood known as Kips Bay probably runs south from Thirty-fourth Street and east from Third Avenue. Bellevue and the NYU Medical Center take up the space between First Avenue and the FDR Drive. The southern edge of Kips Bay is hardest to pinpoint, but 66

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if you occupied an apartment at Twenty-sixth Street and Second Avenue, say, I don’t think you’d tell people you lived in Kips Bay.

The overall area was pretty small no matter how you figured it, and it didn’t take me much more time to cover it on foot than I’d spent learning next to nothing on the Internet the day before. It’s predomi-nantly residential, with a good sprinkling of the service businesses and neighborhood restaurants that cater to local residents, and that’s where I went, showing David Thompson’s photograph in bodegas and delis, dry cleaners and newsstands. “Have you seen this fellow around?” I asked Korean greengrocers and Italian shoe repairmen. “You know this man?” I asked Dominican doormen and Greek waiters. None of them did, nor did a mail carrier in the middle of his rounds, a clerk at a copy shop, or a beat cop who started out thinking that he ought to be the one asking the questions, but who lost the attitude when he found out I’d been on the job myself, especially when it turned out I’d known his father.

“He looks like a lot of guys,” the cop said. “What’s his name?” I told him, and he shook his head and said that was a big help, wasn’t it? His own name was Danaher, and I remembered his father as a backslap-ping gladhander who could have doubled as a ward boss. He was living in Tucson, the son said, and playing golf every day unless it rained.

“And it never rains,” he said.

It rained that night, in New York if not in Tucson. I stayed in and watched a lackluster fight card on ESPN. The next day dawned cool and clear, and the city felt bright with promise. TJ and I met for breakfast and compared notes, and decided we were making the kind of progress Thomas Edison described, when he asserted that he now knew twelve thousand substances that wouldn’t make an effective fila-ment for a lightbulb. We’d established about that many ways not to find David Thompson, and I was starting to wonder if he was there to be found.

I didn’t have anything for TJ to do, so he went home to sit in front of his computer and I got home myself in time for a phone call from one All the Flowers Are Dying

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of the David Thompsons for whom I’d left a message. He was calling to let me know that he wasn’t the David Thompson I was looking for.

Then why had he bothered calling? I thanked him and rang off.

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon it occurred to me that the only hook I had for Louise’s David Thompson was his phone number, so why didn’t I use it? I couldn’t trace it, I couldn’t attach a name or address to it, but the one thing I could do was dial it and see who answered. I did, and at first no one did, and then after five rings his voice mail kicked in and a computer-generated voice invited me to leave a message. I rang off instead.

I thought I might run into Louise at a meeting that night, and when I didn’t I gave her a call. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I jumped the gun, hiring you when I did. I haven’t heard from the guy since. I hate it when a person dumps you and doesn’t even tell you.”

“Have you tried calling him?”

“If he’s dumping me,” she said, “I don’t want to give him the satisfaction, you know? And if he’s not, I don’t want to crowd him. I’m old-fashioned when it comes to girls calling guys.”

“Okay.”

“But screw that. If I can sic a detective on him, what’s so extreme about calling him? Hang on, Matt, I’ll get back to you.” She called back in no time at all. “No answer. Just his voice mail, and no, I didn’t leave a message. I didn’t even ask. Did you find out anything about him?”

I said I’d put in some hours on the case, but didn’t have much to show for them. I didn’t tell her how close I was to inventing the lightbulb.

“Well,” she said, “maybe you shouldn’t keep the meter running, you know? Because if I never hear from him again, the whole thing becomes academic. If I’m gonna forget about a guy, it’s not like I need to know a whole lot about him.”

I tend to relate to a case like a dog to a bone, and have been known to keep at it after a client has told me to let it go, but in this instance it was easy to stop. It might have been harder if I could have thought of 68

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something productive to do, but all I could come up with was waiting until he had a date with her and following him home afterward. I couldn’t very well do that if he never called her again.

Late the following afternoon I was at the Donnell Library on West Fifty-third, reading a book on direct marketing. It wouldn’t help me find David Thompson, but I’d grown interested enough in some aspects of the subject from what I’d encountered online to spend an hour or two skimming the subject. I walked from there to Elaine’s shop on Ninth Avenue, figuring I’d keep her company and walk her home when she closed up, but she wasn’t there.

Monica was, and had been for most of the afternoon. “I just dropped in,” she explained, “figuring we’d kill an hour with girl talk. I stopped at Starbucks for a couple of mocha lattes, and as soon as she’d finished hers she said I was an angel sent from heaven, and could I mind the store while she ran out to an auction at Tepper Galleries.

And I’ve been stuck here ever since, and one latte only goes so far, and I’ve been positively jonesing for a cup of coffee.”

“Why didn’t you lock up for fifteen minutes and go get one?”

“Because to do that, dear Matthew, one would have to have had the key, which your good wife didn’t see fit to leave with me. I’m sure there’s a spare tucked away somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. You want to hold the fort while I get us both a couple of coffees?”

“No, I’ll go. Did you say a mocha latte?”

“I did, but that was then and this is now. Get me something really disgusting, will you? Something along the lines of a caramel mocha frappuccino, so gooped up with sugar crap that you can’t taste the coffee, but with a couple of extra shots of espresso in there to kick ass.

How does that sound?”

It sounded horrible, but she was the one who was going to drink it.

I repeated the order verbatim, and the ring-nosed blond barista took it in stride. I brought it back to the shop, and we found things to talk about until Elaine breezed in, reporting a successful afternoon at the auction.

Monica’s reward for shop-sitting was a good dinner at Paris Green.

The two of them did most of the talking, with one or the other of them All the Flowers Are Dying

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periodically apologizing to me for all the girl talk. What no one talked about was Monica’s mystery man.

We put her in a cab and walked home, and as we walked in the door my cell phone rang.

It was Louise. “He called,” she said. “Late last night, very apologetic for the hour and the long silence. Busy busy busy, and he’s out of town this weekend, but we’ve got a date Monday night. It was too late to call you last night, and then today I was the one who was busy busy busy, and besides I wanted to think about it.”

“And?”

“Well, he’s evidently not dumping me after all, and I really like him, and I think what we’ve got might have a future. And there’s a point where you have to have faith, you have to be able to let go and trust somebody.”

“So you want to call off the investigation?”

“What, are you out of your mind? I just said I have to trust him, and how can I trust the son of a bitch when I don’t know for sure who he is? I called to tell you to go ahead.”

8

He’s up before the alarm rings. He showers, shaves, dresses. He’s saved a change of clothes for this day—clean underwear, a fresh white shirt. He puts on the dark gray suit he wore on his first visit to the prison, and re-jects the silver tie in favor of a textured black one. Somber, he decides.

You can’t go wrong with somber.

He checks himself in the mirror and is pleased with what he sees.

Could his mustache use a trim? He smiles at the thought, grooms the mustache with thumb and forefinger.

His shoes aren’t dirty, but they could use polishing. Is there a bootblack within fifty miles? He rather doubts it. But when he picked up the ice cream at the Circle K (and he’d bought two pints, not one, and ate them both) he’d also picked up a flat tin of Kiwi black shoe polish.

Some motel amenities include a disposable cloth for polishing your shoes, provided less for the guest’s convenience than to save the hotel’s towels. This Days Inn has been remiss, and it’s their loss. He uses a wash-cloth to apply the polish, a hand towel to buff it to a high sheen.

Before he leaves, he uses another towel to wipe surfaces he may have touched. It’s not his habit to touch things unnecessarily, and there’s not going to be anyone dusting his room for prints, but this is the sort of thing he does routinely, and why not? He’s got plenty of time, and it’s never a mistake to take precautions. Better safe than sorry.

He boots up his computer a final time, logs on, checks his e-mail. Vis-All the Flowers Are Dying

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its the several Usenet newsgroups to which he subscribes, reads a few entries. There’s been a flurry of activity in a thread dealing with the im-pending execution of Preston Applewhite, and he catches up on the new posts. He finds a few provocative observations, tucked in among the usual predictable cries of outrage from the diehard foes of capital punishment, balanced by the cheers of death penalty fans whose only regret is that the proceedings won’t be televised.

Pay-per-view, he thinks. Just a matter of time.

He logs off, finishes packing, leaves the motel by the rear door. No need to check out, as they took an imprint of his credit card. Nor is there any need to return the plastic key card. He’s read that a lot of information is automatically coded into the card, that one could in theory use it to re-construct a guest’s entrances and exits. He’s not sure this is actually true, and even if it were, he knows the cards are automatically recycled, their coded data erased forever when they’re reprogrammed for another guest and another room. But why leave anything to chance? He’ll bring the key along and discard it in another state.

It’s twenty minutes past ten when he pulls up at the penitentiary gate-house, where the guard recognizes him and welcomes him with a grim smile. He parks in what has become his usual spot, checks himself in the mirror, smoothes his mustache, and walks to the entrance. The sun is high in a virtually cloudless sky, and there’s no breeze. It’s going to be a hot day.

But not inside, where climate controls keep the air cool and dry year-round. He passes through the metal detector, shows his ID to men who already know him by sight, and is escorted to the little room where witnesses sit to view the application of society’s ultimate sanction.

He’s ushered into the room at ten-forty-five, a full hour and a quarter before the proceedings are scheduled to begin, and there are already half a dozen people present, four men and two women. One man a few years his junior, wearing a shirt and tie but no jacket, makes conversational overtures. He’s sure the man is a journalist, and he doesn’t want to talk to him, or indeed to anyone. He dismisses the man with a shake of his head.

There is, he’s surprised to note, a refreshment table laid out for the 72

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spectators, with a coffee urn and a pitcher of iced tea, along with a plate of doughnuts and another of corn and bran muffins. He doesn’t want to eat anything, the whole idea is faintly distasteful, but does help himself to a cup of coffee.

And takes a chair. There are no bad seats; the viewing gallery is long and narrow, with every chair adjacent to the big plate-glass window. He’s struck immediately by how close they are to what they’re going to watch.

But for the intervening glass, they’d be able to smell the breath of the attending physician, and the fear of his unfortunate patient.

The equipment is in place, the gurney, the apparatus holding three suspended bottles and an array of medical equipment. He glances to his right, at a middle-aged man and woman whose eyes are fixed upon a framed photograph the woman is holding. Their son, of course. One of Applewhite’s three victims.

He shifts in his seat, manages a glimpse of the photo. The shock of blond hair is an unmistakable field mark; these are the Willises, parents of the first boy slain, the one whose remains were never found.

The body’s location is the secret Preston Applewhite is evidently determined to take with him to the grave.

The door opens to admit another man, who takes a seat, then sees the refreshment table and helps himself to coffee and a doughnut. “That looks good,” someone says, and goes to the table.

And the coffee is in fact better than one might expect, weaker than he’d prefer but otherwise acceptable, and freshly made. He finishes it, sets the cup aside, and gazes through the pane of glass.

And allows the memories to come . . .

Richmond, Virginia, no more than fifty miles away, but further removed in time than in distance. Years ago, when the Willis boy—Jeffrey?—is alive, when Preston Applewhite is a free man, a husband and father, a respected member of his community. And a man who still enjoys a game of basketball once or twice a week at the municipal outdoor recreation area a few blocks from his office.

And he himself, Arne Bodinson (although he has another name then, and it would take some concentration to conjure it up from his memory), All the Flowers Are Dying

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happens to be passing through the grounds. He’s never walked there before, he’s barely arrived in Richmond, and he pauses to watch the men play a boys’ game.

Two men leap for a rebound. The elbow of one collides with the face of the other, and the second man cries out in pain and crumples to the pavement, blood streaming from his nose.

Why do things happen? Why does one man live while another dies, one prosper while another fails? It seems self-evident that one of two operating principles must apply. Either everything happens for a reason or nothing happens for a reason. Either it was all coded in the molecules from the very instant of the Big Bang or every bit of it, every left or right turn, every lightning strike, every broken shoelace, is the product of nothing but random chance.

He could argue the question either way, but more often than not he leans toward the latter version. Random chance rolls the dice. Things happen because they happen. You get what you get.

Consider this, then: Anyone could have paused to watch that basketball game, but it is not just anyone, it is he himself, the future Arne Bodinson, with his particular history and personality. And, although the weather renders it superfluous, he is nevertheless wearing a sport jacket, and in its breast pocket, atypically for him, there is a neatly folded white handkerchief. He’s put it there that morning, so he realizes he has it, and without conscious thought he rushes across the court to the fallen man, drawing the hanky from his pocket, using it to stanch the flow of blood from the injured (but not, it will turn out, broken) nose.

Others, teammates and opponents, are also quick to assist Applewhite, and in no time at all they have him on his feet and are leading him away to get medical attention. And he’s left there with a bloody handkerchief in his hand, and he looks at it, and, wondrous to say, he is able to foresee everything that is to follow. Another man would have disposed of the handkerchief in the nearest trashcan, but he sees it at once as an unpar-alleled opportunity.

He bears it carefully away. As soon as he conveniently can, he tucks it away in a plastic Ziploc bag.

.

.

.

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A man in a brown suit, evidently a subordinate of the warden’s, enters the room and clears his throat, explaining in some detail just what is going to take place shortly on the other side of the window. He’s heard it all before, and suspects that’s as true of the others, the bereaved, the members of the press, and whoever else has contrived to get one of these precious front-row seats.

But the fellow is not just there to refresh everybody’s memory. He’s the approximate equivalent of the chap whose task it is to warm up a television show’s studio audience, telling jokes to heighten their spirits, exhort-ing them to respond enthusiastically to the promptings of the applause sign. The man in the brown suit doesn’t tell jokes, of course, and his goal is to mute and muffle emotions, not amplify them. “Remember the solemnity of the occasion,” he urges them. “You may feel the impulse to say something. Whatever it is, keep it to yourself until after we’ve finished here. The sight of this man who’s brought you so much pain may move you to cry out. If you feel you won’t be able to control yourself, I’m going to ask you to tell me now, and I’ll have you escorted to another part of the facility.”

No one is moved to do so.

“We’re going to witness the end of a man’s life. The process will be as painless as we know how to make it, but even so you’re going to watch a man make the transition from life to death. If that’s more than you care to see, let me know now. All right. If you discover when the time comes that you don’t want to watch, close your eyes. That sounds obvious, but sometimes people forget that they have the option.” There’s more, but he tunes it out. The clock, after all, is ticking, and he has more to remember . . .

With the bloody handkerchief zipped in a plastic bag, all of what will follow is clear in his mind, as if the script is already written, as if he need merely follow the directions.

When he first began to kill, he did so as a means to the twin ends of money and power. Those were the two things he thought he wanted, and killing was an occasionally useful technique for acquiring them. He was not surprised to discover that it did not bother him to kill, he’d somehow All the Flowers Are Dying

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expected as much, but what he had not anticipated was the pleasure and satisfaction that accompanied the act. It brought excitement and a sense of accomplishment beyond anything attainable by other means.

It is hard to say with certainty just when he turned the corner, coming to the realization that money and power were secondary, that killing itself was its own reward. But he suspects it’s around the time that he bought the knife.

He holds the knife, grips it in his hand. It looks like any other bowie-type hunting knife, but he paid over two hundred dollars for it, and he can feel the value in its balance and the way it fits his hand. It was hand-crafted by a man named Randall, something of a legend among the makers and collectors of bench-made knives.

He’s used it several times since he bought it. It’s always served its purpose admirably. And on each occasion he’s cleaned it afterward, scrubbing every trace of blood from its surface. It’s stainless steel, of course, and impregnable, but blood could find its way into the seam of blade and hilt, so he’s taken the additional precaution of soaking his knife overnight in a dilute Clorox solution. No blood, no DNA, nothing to implicate the knife or its owner in any of the several killings it has occasioned.

Now, knowing he’s soon to use it again, and knowing the how and why of it, he feels the stirrings of excitement.

That night and the following day he drives around Richmond, getting his bearings. He learns where the prostitutes gather. There’s no easier quarry, and he’s taken prostitutes before—off the street, in a massage parlor—when the hunger for killing has demanded quick satisfaction, and there’s been no time to make the act something special. One of them scarcely seemed surprised by her imminent fate, and he wondered if she and her sisters didn’t expect to end that way, wondered if serial murder might rank as an occupational illness, like black lung disease for coal miners.

He comes close to selecting a prostitute the first night, a slender thing dressed for success in red hot pants and a skimpy halter top. All he has to do is stop the car. She’ll get in, and the moment he pulls away from the curb her fate will be sealed. She’ll be the first unfortunate victim of the man with the bloody nose.

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But he needs to know more. The course is clear, but the particulars need to be determined. One has to plan.

He learns much that he needs to know. He learns the name and address of the man with the bloody nose, and he discovers more about him through some diligent Internet research. A husband and father, Preston Applewhite has been leading an essentially blameless life. How ironic, then that he should abduct, sodomize, and murder a string of equally blameless boys.

Because he has come to see that a prostitute is not a good choice. So many of them are infected with one thing or another that it’s unappealing to contemplate close contact with them and their bodily fluids. And what if the whore he picks is a surrogate police officer?

More to the point, there’s insufficient outrage attendant upon a whore’s death. That fellow in Oregon had needed to kill a couple of dozen of them before anybody noticed, and even then the police didn’t lose sleep hunting for him.

Then, driving slowly past the scene of yesterday’s inspiration, he sees another basketball game in progress. But the players are boys. Kids, really, wearing gym shorts. Half the boys sport singlets, while the others have bare chests. No hair on those chests, no five o’clock shadow on those cheeks. Youth, innocence.

Kill a prostitute and nobody will notice. But kill a child?

Once he’d written this:

I have killed both men and women. Killing men, I would say, provides me with more of a sense of accomplishment. On the other hand, for sheer pleasure, there’s nothing like killing an attractive woman.

And a boy? He looks at the basketball players and is unable to perceive them as sexually desirable. Still, there’s undeniable excitement at the thought of harvesting one of them. He can fake the sexual aspect, can press a suitably shaped object into service as a surrogate penis. He needn’t experience lust himself in order to stage a convincing lust murder.

In the end, he surprises himself.

It’s several days later that he finds his victim, by which time he’s pur-All the Flowers Are Dying

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chased several items. Most of them—tape, a blanket, a garden spade, a rubber mallet—are from the local Wal-Mart, but there are two more expensive articles, an automobile and a computer. The car’s a Japanese import the same size and shape as the one Preston Applewhite drives, while the computer’s a laptop, a bargain-priced IBM clone. He buys the car anonymously for cash from a private owner—it’s been hit, it needs body work and has probably suffered damage to the frame. But it’s fine for his purposes, and it’s cheap.

He’s found a place near the high school where some boys wait to hitch rides, and he manages to spot a boy standing all by himself, his thumb extended. He looks to be thirteen or fourteen. Too young to drive, at any rate.

He stops the car, lets the boy in. He’s a good-looking young man, his hair blond, his face and forearms lightly tanned. There’s downy hair on his arms, and his face is as smooth as a girl’s.

Is the boy a hustler? That’s possible, hitchhiking is a time-honored way for boys to arrange liaisons with older men. This one seems innocent, however.

He chats with the boy, asks him about sports, about school. “How about girls?” he says. “You like girls?” I like men better, the boy might say, but he doesn’t, he says girls are okay. He is, by all indications, entirely oblivious to what’s going on.

At a stop sign, he brings the car to a halt and points to the floor on the passenger side. “There’s a glove there,” he says. “Can you reach it?” The boy bends forward, looking for the glove that isn’t there, and he swings the rubber mallet in an easy arc and hits the boy solidly on the back of the skull. Hard enough to kill him? No, but hard enough to knock him out. In no time at all the boy’s hands are taped behind his back, and another piece of duct tape covers his mouth.

Five minutes later they’re at the preselected killing ground.

And, he discovers, there’s no need to employ a surrogate penis. His own is more than equal to the task. The boy’s skin is as soft and smooth as a woman’s, and his helplessness, his utter vulnerability, is exciting. He hasn’t thought to bring a condom, an absurd oversight resulting from his assumption that the boy wouldn’t arouse him. Never assume, he reminds himself. Never take anything for granted. Prepare for all contingencies.

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So he takes his pleasure with the boy, but stops short of orgasm. And takes up the knife, the beautiful knife that Randall made.

After the knife, a scissors, to snip a lock of hair. After the scissors, the garden spade. Not to dig the grave, he did that ahead of time, anticipating a need for it, but to fill it in. The killing ground’s an abandoned farm, west of the city and just beyond the Southside Speedway. Its own private family cemetery is off to the side of the ruined old farmhouse. The grave-stones are so badly weathered you can’t make out the inscriptions, and now there’s one new grave among the other dozen or so, and he fills it in and presses the sod in place over it. Right now it’s a fresh grave, but soon it will be indistinguishable from the others.

By nightfall he’s placed the battered old Camry in the storage shed he rented the previous day. If anyone finds it there, they’ll find a vehicle with no fingerprints on it. There’ll be no prints on the tools in the trunk, either—the spade, the mallet, the splendid knife. The roll of duct tape.

He retrieves his own car, a beige square-back Ford Tempo with his lug-gage in its trunk. He drives west on I-64 and north on I-81, the cruise control set at four miles over the speed limit. He doesn’t stop except for gas until he’s across the Pennsylvania state line. There, in a mom-and-pop motel with a front office that smells of curry, he takes a long hot shower and makes a bundle of all the clothes he wore, to be donated to Goodwill in the morning. He slips into bed naked and lets himself relive each moment of the afternoon’s entertainment, starting with the boy’s getting into the car and ending with the last stroke of the knife.

This time there’s no need to deny himself. His climax is fierce in its intensity, and he cries out like a girl in pain.

9

It’s noon, and no one has yet made an appearance on the other side of the long window. It is as if the curtain has risen upon an insistently empty stage.

Where is everybody?

Has there been a call from the governor? No, surely not, because the governor wants to go on being governor, and may even hope for higher office someday. He won’t be making any calls. Nor is there a lawyer out there with a last-ditch appeal to a high court. The appeal process has long since ended for Preston Applewhite.

Is Applewhite all right? He’s a young man, a man just over the threshold of middle age, but old enough for a stroke, old enough for a heart attack. He pictures the man struck down in his cell at the eleventh hour, imagines the ambulance ride, the race to save his life. And then of course the stay of execution, until he’s deemed in good enough condition to be put to death.

But surely it’s just his own imagination, having a field day. The other spectators aren’t fidgeting in their chairs or checking their watches. Perhaps executions are like rock concerts, perhaps everyone knows they never start precisely on time.

It’s not as though anyone has a train to catch. But there would seem to be time for a further stroll down Memory Lane . . .

.

.

.

80

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Two days after the Willis boy’s death, he rents a furnished house in York, Pennsylvania. It’s a few days short of a month before he returns to Richmond.

But it’s not an idle month. He has a DSL line installed for his computer, and he’s often online, researching subjects on the Internet, checking his e-mail, keeping up with his news groups.

At least once a day he disconnects his own laptop and boots up the one he’s bought, which he thinks of as Preston Applewhite’s computer. In MS-Word, he writes out a breathless account of the boy’s abduction and murder, departing from reality only in that he tells of the weeks he spends leading up to the event, how he wrestles with the impulse, how he determines he has no choice but to go through with it.

And he’s deliberately vague about the killing ground: I took him to a fine and private place. I knew no one would disturb us there. He’ll simply disappear. No one will think to look for him there.

Online, he opens an e-mail account for Applewhite, ScoutMasterBates at Hotmail.com. On the registration form, he calls himself John Smith, unimaginatively enough, but the street address he provides is 476

Elm Street. Applewhite’s actual street number, while not on Elm Street, is indeed 476. For city and state he enters Los Angeles, California, but includes Applewhite’s Richmond zip code.

As ScoutMasterBates, he surfs the net looking for porn sites, and they don’t prove terribly elusive. It’s only a matter of days before his mailbox begins to fill up with porn spam, and by visiting the sites that promise young male models, that talk of man-boy love, he increasingly becomes the target of purveyors of kiddy porn. “All models over eighteen (wink!

wink!)” one site declares.

He downloads porn, pays for it with a credit card that can’t be traced back to him. Weeks ago he was in a restaurant, where he saw a patron at another table pay her check with a credit card and walk off without her receipt. He got to it before the waitress, passing the table on an unnecessary trip to the men’s room, palming and pocketing the yellow scrap of All the Flowers Are Dying

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paper. It shows her account number and expiration date, and that’s all he needs for small online purchases. In a month or two she’ll go over her statement and, if she notices, call her credit card company to complain.

But he’ll be done with her account by then.

Back in Richmond, he sets about getting access to Applewhite’s house and car and office.

That turns out to be easy. Applewhite’s a monthly client at the parking garage around the corner from his office. He goes there himself, inquires about rates and hours and access, and finds questions to ask until the attendant’s attention is diverted, at which time he snatches Applewhite’s keys off the numbered hook. He needs a full set for his girlfriend, he tells a locksmith, and the man grins and says he’s a trusting man, that he’s been married eighteen years himself and his wife still doesn’t have a key to his car.

A single key opens the door and the trunk. There are other keys on the ring as well, and he has them all duplicated, knowing one will be a house key and another a key to the office. Inside of an hour he makes another visit to the parking garage, where it’s a simple matter to put Applewhite’s keys on a table, where they might have fallen if dislodged from the hook.

Late at night, long after the lights have been turned off in the Applewhite home, he lets himself into the unlocked garage and opens the trunk of the car. He has an old army blanket with him, purchased at the Salvation Army store in York, and he spreads it out in Applewhite’s trunk, rubs it here and there in the trunk’s interior, takes it out and returns it to its plastic bag.

Two days later he exchanges cars, picking up the dark Camry, leaving the beige Tempo in the storage shed. He starts cruising when school lets out and soon picks up an older, more knowledgeable boy than Jeffrey Willis. Scott Sawyer is fifteen, with knowing eyes and a crooked smile.

His T-shirt is too small, the worn blue jeans provocatively tight on his thighs and buttocks. When he gets in the Camry, he drapes an arm over the seatback and tries to look seductive.

The effect is comical, but he doesn’t laugh.

I think you’ll find something interesting in the glove compartment, he tells the boy. And, at the right moment, he swings the rubber mallet.

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There’s a failed country club north and west of the city, off Creighton Road on the way to Old Cold Harbor. The property’s for sale, and the sign to that effect has been there long enough to have served for drive-by target practice. The nine-hole golf course is all weeds, the greens neglected, the fairways overgrown. Earlier he scouted the place, picked a spot. Halfway there the youth comes to, tries to scream through the duct tape, tries to free his hands, thrashes around within the confines of his seat belt.

He tells him to stop it, and when the thrashing continues he takes up the rubber mallet and hits the boy hard on the knee. The thrashing stops.

Out on the golf course, he drives into the rough bordering the fifth hole, hauls the boy out of the car and drags him deep into the woods. He immobilizes the boy by smashing his kneecaps with the spade, strips him, and positions him appropriately, then dons a condom and rapes him.

The younger boy, Jeffrey Willis, was more appealing. Softer, smaller, his innocence more palpable. Too, there was the novelty of sex with a male. But for all that the experience with Scott Sawyer is savagely exciting, and there’s no need to hold back his climax. Straining for it, he reaches down, picks up the knife—how sweetly it fits his hand—and strikes, and strikes again.

He wraps the body in a blanket, the one that’s been in the trunk of Applewhite’s car, where it could pick up fibers from the trunk lining and leave fibers of its own. Every contact involves the transfer of fibers, that’s why he did what he did with the blanket, and why he jettisoned the clothes he wore when he killed the Willis boy. He’ll do the same with these clothes, everything down to the sneakers on his feet. They’ll pick up fibers, they’ll carry grass stains and soil residue, and none of that will matter because they’ll wind up in a clothing donation box in Pennsylvania and no crime lab will ever look at them.

He starts to dig a grave, but it’s getting dark and he’s tired, and the ground underneath is a maze of tree roots, impossible to dig in. Besides, he’s going to want this body to be found.

He snips a lock of hair, tucks it into a glassine envelope. He stashes it in the trunk of the Camry, along with the tools he’ll need for his next visit to Richmond.

He leaves the body shrouded in the army blanket, piles loose brush over All the Flowers Are Dying

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it, and heads for the storage shed, where he switches the Camry for the Tempo. He takes I-64, then I-81. The condom he used, its end knotted to secure its contents, is on the seat beside him; when he’s crossed the state line into Maryland he lowers the window, tosses it, and drives on.

After two more weeks he’s had enough of York. He’s paid up through the end of the month, so he keeps the keys to leave himself the option of returning, but erases all traces of his occupancy so that he need not come back. He drives to Richmond and begins setting the stage, dressing the sets.

By now the cheap laptop contains on its hard drive a description of the second murder. He’s still somewhat vague concerning the location of the killing ground and dump site, but does call it a golf course, and he downloads and saves on his hard drive a MapQuest close-up map of the failed country club. There are also two drafts of an essay in which he, as Applewhite, expounds on the morality of murder, justifying his actions through a line of reasoning that, he has to admit, owes a good deal to the Marquis de Sade, for all that he dredges up supporting arguments from Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. One draft of the essay, including specific references to the killings of Willis and Sawyer, he erases, knowing it will prove recoverable; the other, which covers the same ground but is less damning, he saves on the hard drive, adding to the file the notation: Publish this? Where???

One afternoon he drives to Applewhite’s suburban neighborhood. Both cars are gone, and school’s still in session. He lets himself into the house, tingling with excitement as he walks from room to room. Applewhite has a den, which his tax return no doubt identifies as a home office, and he leaves the computer in a desk drawer.

In the bedroom, he takes socks and underwear from Applewhite’s dresser, a shirt and a pair of khaki trousers from his closet. The shirt has a laundry mark, he notes, and the pants, hanging on a peg, have been worn at least once since their last washing.

Shoes? He considers a pair, then remembers some ragged sneakers he spotted on an earlier visit to the garage, no doubt reserved for gardening and yard work. And ideal for his purposes.

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The selection and disposal of the third victim is almost beside the point, because by now his chief concern is the web he’s weaving for Preston Applewhite. Slow down, he admonishes himself. Take time to smell the flowers. And, remembering how Scott Sawyer had amused him less than Jeffrey Willis, he takes pains this time to select a boy from the younger, more innocent end of the spectrum.

The online newsgroups and bulletin boards for pedophiles (and yes, he’s found his way to them, and ScoutMasterBates has contributed observations of his own to more than one) have taught him a new vocabulary.

A boy on the threshold of adolescence, he has learned, is said to be in his bloom, the dew of youth still on him. That is what he seeks, and what he finds in the thirteen-year-old person of Marcus Leacock. Who is not hitchhiking at all when he finds him, but merely walking home from school.

He’s driving the Camry now. And he changed clothes at the storage shed. He’s rolled up the sleeves of Applewhite’s shirt, turned up the cuffs of the khaki trousers. The sneakers are a little large, too, and he experimented with tissue paper in the toes, but decided against it. They’re not that big, and it’s not as if he’s going to be walking long distances in them.

“Son? Come here a minute, will you? There’s an address I’m having trouble finding.”

Delicious. He’s spent enough time on the man-boy bulletin boards to have little regard for the pedophiles, but their enthusiasm is not entirely incomprehensible. Out at the abandoned golf course, he takes his time with Marcus, and, while that increases his own enjoyment of the enterprise, it perforce adds to the boy’s pain and suffering. Well, sometimes it does appear to be a zero-sum universe, doesn’t it? A gain for one is a loss for another, and one knows on which side of the equation one would prefer to be.

Anyway, it’s soon enough over, and once it’s done the boy has to endure neither pain nor the memory of pain. The boy is gone, wherever people go.

Wherever that is . . .

And the finishing touches: The body, minus a lock of hair, covered in brush and a blanket a few yards from Scott Sawyer’s body. Underneath it, apparently dropped and overlooked, the handkerchief that set all of this All the Flowers Are Dying

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in motion, his own handkerchief, soaked two months ago in Applewhite’s blood. The mallet, the spade, the tape, the scissors, stowed first in the Camry’s trunk and transferred in the dead of night to Applewhite’s, where they’ll be found hidden away in the spare tire well. The box of a dozen condoms, minus the two he used, stashed in Applewhite’s glove compartment, so they can be matched to the residue to be found on the bodies. The clothes he wore, the sneakers and socks and underwear, the khakis, the laundry-marked shirt, all go in a Hefty bag and the bag in the trunk, as if Applewhite were planning to dispose of them.

And does he dare enter the house one more time?

He does, moving slowly and silently. There’s no dog, no burglar alarm.

This is a safe neighborhood, a low-crime suburb, and the sleep of all the Applewhites is deep and untroubled. Standing there in their darkened house, an alternate plan suggests itself to him. He has the knife with him; how hard would it be to murder the children in their beds, to slit the throat of the sleeping wife, and to arrange a convenient suicide for the master of the house?

No, he decides. Better to stick with the original plan, better to let the Commonwealth of Virginia handle the business of punishment.

He tapes the three glassine envelopes to the underside of a desk drawer.

The knife, the magnificent knife that Randall made, wiped clean of visible blood and prints but surely bearing blood traces from all three victims, proves difficult to part with.

All the more reason to part with it. One must never allow oneself to become too deeply attached to anything—not a place, not a person, not a possession. One’s only attachment, and it must be total, should be to oneself. If thy right eye offend thee, get over it; if thy house or car or custom-made knife delight thee overmuch, cast it out.

The knife goes in a desk drawer. As he leaves the house, moving slowly and silently, he transforms the pain of losing the knife into the satisfaction of having chosen the right course of action. And it’s only a knife, after all, a tool, a means to an end. In the course of time there will be other knives, and he’ll like some of them as much as he’s liked this one.

He’s been driving the Camry, and he keeps it and takes I-95 into Washington. It’s morning by the time he gets there. He runs the car 86

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through a car wash, then leaves it parked on the street a few blocks from Dupont Circle, with the key in the ignition and the windows rolled down. He takes the Metro to Union Station, confident that the car will have been stolen by the time his train departs for Richmond.

He goes to the rented storage shed, reclaims his Ford, and drives off.

Two days later, after the boy’s disappearance has made the newspaper headlines and led the TV news, after an eyewitness has turned up who saw a boy fitting Marcus Leacock’s description getting into a small dark sedan, he uses an untraceable phone to call the number provided for tips in the case. He reports having noticed a dark-colored car leaving the grounds of the old Fairview Country Club on the evening of the boy’s disappearance, and that there was something about the incident that made him suspicious enough to jot down the first four digits of the license number, which was as much as he could get.

And of course it is enough . . .

And here’s the guest of honor. Here’s Preston Applewhite, the star of our little spectacle, making his belated entrance. He’s wearing leg shackles and wrist restraints, so it’s a less elegant entrance than it might be, but he’s here now, and the show can go on.

His face is expressionless, his mood unreadable. What fills his mind now? Dread of the unknown? Fury at the failure of the system to exonerate an innocent man? Hope, however unwarranted, that some miracle may come along to save his life?

A week ago he, Arne Bodinson, could have furnished just such a miracle. He might have confessed, openly or anonymously, and proved his claim by offering up the location of the Willis boy’s grave. Now, having spent so many hours with Applewhite, anything he might say would be discredited out of hand. You say you know where the body is, Dr. Bodinson? If so, it’s because Applewhite told you. You’re only confirming his guilt.

The warden, his face lined with the demands of his office, recites a few pro forma words, then asks the condemned man if he has anything to say.

There is an extended pause. Applegate—they’ve not yet strapped him to the gurney, he’s evidently allowed to be on his feet while he voices his last All the Flowers Are Dying

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words—has his eyes lowered in thought, then raises them to look for the first time at the faces behind the glass. He finds his new friend Arne, and his eyes brighten in recognition, but only for a moment.

When he speaks, his voice is soft, as if he doesn’t intend it to reach his audience. There’s a microphone, however, so it’s audible in the witness chamber.

“You’re all certain I did these things,” he says. “I know otherwise, but there’s no reason for anyone to believe me. I almost wish I were guilty.

Then I could confess, I could beg forgiveness.” A pause, and the attendants move in, thinking he’s finished, but a quick shake of his head halts them. “I forgive you,” he says. “All of you.” And at the end his eyes fix on those of the one man who professes to believe in his innocence. Has he figured it out? Is that the meaning of those final three words? But no, he’s looking for approval of his eloquence, and he gets it, a nod of acknowledgment from behind the glass. And Applewhite registers the nod, and seems grateful for it.

Applewhite lies down on the gurney and they adjust the straps. The physician finds a good vein in his arm, swabs the skin with alcohol-soaked cotton, gets the IV inserted on the second attempt.

And then he sits transfixed, watching, while a man dies before his eyes.

There’s very little to see. The first drug, the pentothal, has no apparent effect. The second, the Pavulon, induces paralysis, rendering Applewhite incapable of breathing—or of changing expression. And the final ingre-dient, the potassium chloride, burns or does not burn, it’s impossible to tell, but what is evident, at least to those close enough to see the heart monitor, or the physician who checks the pulse, is that it does what it is supposed to do.

Preston Applewhite is dead.

And, behind the glass, the man who will soon discard forever the name Arne Bodinson is careful to maintain the expression he has worn throughout, one of somber detachment. He has an erection, but he’s fairly certain no one has noticed it.

I-95, he knows, will be a nightmare on a Friday. He takes Interstates 64

and 81 instead, spends what’s left of the night at a motel in Pennsylvania, 88

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then drives east on I-80 Saturday morning, aiming to hit the George Washington Bridge when traffic’s likely to be light. And it works out as he’d planned.

Lately, everything’s been working out as he planned.

As he’d thought it would. He’d done the hard work years ago in Richmond, made his kills, planted the incriminating evidence, fitted the frame precisely around a man whose only mistake was to sustain a bloody nose at the worst possible moment. This past week came under the heading of unfinished business.

He has unfinished business of another sort in New York.

10

Monday night I was having a cup of coffee in front of the television set when my cell phone rang.

“I feel like a fucking spy,” Louise said. “I’m in the ladies’ room at the restaurant. We’re about to go back to my place. You’ve got the address?” I said I did.

“This is so deeply weird. I’m going to take him home and have sex with him, and meanwhile you’ll be lurking outside waiting to follow him home. Tell me that’s not weird.”

“If you’d prefer—”

“No, it makes sense, it’s just totally weird. If he’s who he says he is, then he never has to know about this. If he’s not, then I have to know about it.”

I asked if he was likely to stay overnight.

“If he does, it’ll be a first. He usually comes over and stays for three or four hours, but this time we had dinner, which we usually don’t, so we’re getting a late start. What time is it, eight-thirty? No, closer to nine. My guess is he won’t stay past eleven-thirty.” I asked what he was wearing, to make sure I didn’t follow the wrong guy. Designer jeans and a navy-blue polo shirt, she said. I suggested she could flick the lights on and off a half dozen times as soon as he left the apartment, and she said it was a great idea, but her apartment 90

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was in the rear of the building, so I’d never be able to see it from the street.

“But I may just do it anyway,” she said, “because it’s such a cool Mata Hari–type thing to do. Hey, wait a minute. Won’t you have your cell phone with you? So why don’t I just call you when he leaves? And then I’ll flick the lights, too, just for fun.” Her estimate wasn’t off by much. It was twenty to twelve when my cell phone rang.

“Mata Hari speaking,” she said. “He’s all yours. I have to tell you, dinner was good but the dessert was better. Do me a favor, will you? Call me tomorrow to tell me that he’s David Thompson and he’s single and the only secret he’s keeping from me is that he’s fabulously wealthy.” I told her I’d see what I could do, and then I rang off and the door opened and he came out. I’d probably have made him without the phone call. He was wearing jeans and a dark polo shirt, and the photo I had of him was a good likeness.

Tailing somebody is complicated enough when you’ve got a full team, half a dozen in cars and about as many on foot. I had TJ along for company, and an off-duty cabby named Leo whom I’d promised fifty bucks for a couple of hours of chauffeur duty.

Louise lived on the third floor of a brownstone on the uptown side of West Eighty-seventh Street between Broadway and West End. Like most odd-numbered streets, Eighty-seventh is one-way westbound. If David Thompson lived in or around Kips Bay, he’d probably take a cab home, and he’d probably walk to Broadway to catch it. The same was true if he wanted to go somewhere else by cab. If he wanted the subway, he’d catch it at Eighty-sixth and Broadway, so once again he’d be walking toward Broadway, and against the flow of traffic.

We’d set up accordingly. TJ and I were standing in the doorway of a building directly opposite Louise’s, while Leo’s car was parked next to a hydrant on Broadway. If a cop rousted him he’d circle the block, but it wasn’t likely, not at that hour. All he had to do was say he was waiting on a fare.

When Thompson left the building, we’d tag him to Broadway, then All the Flowers Are Dying

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get in Leo’s car and follow whatever cab he hailed. If he walked down to Eighty-sixth and took the subway, TJ would go down into the tunnel after him. He’d try to stay in touch by cell phone, and we’d try to be there when he and Thompson got off the train.

So Thompson came out the door and down the stoop, looked at his watch, hauled out a cell phone, and made a call. At first no one answered, but then someone did, or voice mail kicked in, because he talked with animation for a moment or two before snapping it shut. He held it out, looked at it, then put it away, got out a cigarette and lit it, blew out a cloud of smoke, and started walking, but not toward Broadway. He headed the other way, toward West End Avenue.

Shit.

“Plan B,” I said, and took off after Thompson, while TJ sprinted to the corner of Broadway and around it to where Leo was waiting with the bulldog edition of the Daily News open on the steering wheel. He had the motor running before TJ was in his seat. New York’s the one place in the country when you can’t make a right turn at a red light, the traffic’s just too chaotic for that to work here, but David Letterman pointed out once that New Yorkers think of traffic laws as guidelines, and Leo figures a grown man ought to be able to use his own judgment.

He slid around the corner and picked me up halfway down the block.

I got in back, and Leo coasted to the corner, where the light was red against us. Thompson, when he reached the corner, could have stepped to the curb to flag a southbound taxi, or he might have crossed Eighty-seventh Street himself, or waited for the light and crossed West End and headed for Riverside Drive.

If he’d done any of those things we could have followed him with no trouble, but instead he turned right on West End and headed uptown.

Leo might have been willing to push his luck and run another red light, but he’d be going the wrong way on a one-way street, and we couldn’t do that.

“Son of a bitch,” he said with feeling.

“Shoot across to Riverside and come back on Eighty-eighth,” I said, opening the door and getting out again. “I’ll try to stay with him.” By the time I got going he had a half-block lead on me, which 92

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shouldn’t have been a problem, but I lost sight of him when he turned right at Eighty-eighth Street. I increased my pace and got to the corner where he’d turned and he was gone.

Leo, who ran us back to Ninth and Fifty-seventh, wouldn’t take any money. “I thought we was gonna have an adventure,” he said. “ ‘Follow that cab!’ I thought I’d show off my driving skills and tail the bastard through parts of Brooklyn even Pete Hamill’d get lost in. All I did was drive around the fucking block.”

“It’s not your fault I lost him.”

“No, it’s his fault, for turning out to be such an elusive bastard. Put your money back in your pocket, Matt. Call me again sometime, and we’ll have fun, and you can pay me double. But this one’s on the house.” He’d dropped us in front of the Morning Star, but neither of us felt like going there. We crossed the street to the Parc Vendôme and went upstairs. Elaine was on the couch with a novel Monica had recommended as a perfect guilty pleasure. “She called it the prose equivalent of a three-handkerchief movie,” she said, “and I have to say she was right. What’s the matter?”

“The guy walked around the block and lost us,” I said.

“The nerve of the son of a bitch. You want something?”

“I wouldn’t mind starting the night over,” I said, “but that would be tricky. I don’t want more coffee. I don’t think I want anything. TJ?”

“Maybe a Coke,” he said, and went off to fetch it himself.

I joined him in the kitchen and the two of us tried to make sense out of what had happened to us up in the West Eighties. “It’s like he made us,” he said, “but he didn’t exactly act like it.”

“What I can’t figure out,” I said, “is how he disappeared like that.”

“Magician walks down the street and turns into a drugstore.”

“It was something like that, wasn’t it? He wasn’t that far ahead of me when he turned the corner. Maybe a hundred feet? Not much more than that, and I would have cut the distance some, because I walked faster once the corner building blocked my view of him. And then I got there and he was gone.”

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“Even if he turns the corner and starts bookin’, you’d get a look at him soon as you come round the corner yourself.”

“You would think so.”

“ ’Less he ducked into that building.”

“The apartment house on the corner? I thought of that. The street door’s not locked, anybody can get into the vestibule. Then you’d need a key, or for someone to buzz you in. I looked in and didn’t see him, but I didn’t do that right away, not until I’d spent some time trying to spot him on the street. You know, it seemed strange that he would walk to West End instead of Broadway, but if he lived there—”

“Then he just a man going home.”

“A man who lives around the corner from a woman and tells her he lives a couple of miles away in the East Thirties.”

“Maybe he don’t want her coming over every other day to borrow a cup of sugar.”

“More likely a pack of cigarettes. I can see that, actually. You go fishing for a girlfriend online, hoping she doesn’t live in the outer reaches of Brooklyn or Queens, some bus-and-subway combination away from you, and then you find out she’s right around the corner, and you realize there’s such a thing as too close.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Wouldn’t she recognize him? From seeing him in the neighborhood?”

“You’d think so. New Yorkers may not know our next-door neighbors, but we’re generally able to recognize them by sight. He made a phone call, let’s not forget that part.”

“Right before he lit up a cigarette.”

Elaine had come in to fix herself a cup of tea. “He was phoning his wife,” she said, “to find out if he should pick up a quart of milk on the way home.”

“Or a cup of sugar,” I said. “Or a carton of Marlboros. If he was married, would he get himself a girlfriend around the corner?”

“Not unless he had a well-developed death wish,” she said. “Who was he talking to on the phone, a man or a woman?”

“We couldn’t even hear him,” I said.

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“Couldn’t you tell by his body language? Whether it was a man or a woman on the other end of the call?”

“No.”

“TJ?”

“I had to guess, I’d say a woman.”

“You would?” I said. “Why?”

“Dunno.”