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“He was just with a woman,” I said, “and from what Louise said he gave a good account of himself. If he wasn’t calling his wife to say he’d had to stay late at the office—”

“And he wouldn’t,” TJ said, “not if he lived five minutes away. He’d just show up.”

“You’re right. So it wasn’t a wife he called.”

“ ’Less it was somebody else’s wife.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“He could have called his wife,” Elaine said. “In Scarsdale, to say he’d be late, or that he wasn’t going to make it home at all. And then he went to the building around the corner.”

“Who’s in the building around the corner?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You’re the detective.”

“Thanks.”

TJ said, “Could be another woman.”

“In the corner building?”

“Everybody got to be someplace.”

“So he’s two-timing Louise with somebody who lives around the corner from her?”

“Three-timing, if he got that wife in Scarsdale.”

“Maybe she’s a working girl,” Elaine offered.

“Louise? I honestly don’t think—”

“Not Louise. The late date, the woman around the corner. Maybe she’s in the game.”

“But he was just with Louise.”

“So?”

“From what she said—”

“He screwed her brains out?”

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“Not the words she used,” I said, “but that was the general impression I got, yeah.”

“Maybe the earth moved for her but not for him. Or maybe he was going for the hat trick. That’s what, hockey?” I nodded. “When one player scores three goals in a game.”

“I knew it was three goals, I just couldn’t remember if it was hockey or soccer.”

“It’s migrated into other sports, but it’s a hockey term.”

“I wonder where it comes from. Anyway, if he knows a working girl right around the corner from Louise, why not drop over and see her?” I summoned up the image of him in front of Louise’s brownstone, phone in hand. “He didn’t have to look up her number,” I said. “But he’d have it on his speed dial, wouldn’t he?”

“Probably. That’s what people have nowadays, instead of a little black book.”

“If he was still in the mood,” I said, “why didn’t he just stay upstairs a little longer?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” she said. “Do you suppose it could be that Y

chromosome he’s been carrying around all his life?”

“In other words, he’s a guy.”

“When I was working,” she said, “I’d have johns who would get themselves off before they came over, so they could last longer. I had one who was the opposite, he wanted me to keep him right on the edge for like an hour or more and not let him get off at all, so he could go home and give his wife a bounce she wouldn’t forget. That one baffled me, I’ve got to say. I felt like a picador at a bullfight.” I glanced at TJ to see what he made of her remembrance of things past. If it had any impact on him, it didn’t show on his face. He knew about her career history, he and Monica were about the only people we saw regularly who did, but she rarely talked about it in his presence as she was dong now.

TJ had never known his own mother. She’d died when he was less than a year old, and his grandmother had raised him until her own death. Things she’d told him had led TJ to speculate that his mother had been a working girl, and that he himself might have been a trick 96

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baby, an unplanned bonus from an unwitting client. No way to tell, he’d said, and he seemed comfortable enough with not knowing.

But the conversation had lost its way, having essentially abandoned David Thompson for a dissertation on the Men Are Strange theme. I said, “I’m not convinced he went into that building.”

“It might have been another one?”

“Or no building at all. Maybe he knew he was being followed.”

“He wouldn’t,” TJ said, “ ’less he was suspicious to start with. You think he picked up something from Louise?”

“Not if he used a condom,” Elaine said.

“If he’s married,” I said, “he might have suspected his wife was having him followed. That could have made him wary enough to sense us.”

“Way he stood there lighting that cigarette,” TJ said. “Like he wanted a minute to figure out what to do as much as he wanted that nicotine hit.”

“So he turned right instead of left,” I said, “and turned right again at West End, turned against traffic. Then he ducked into a building, or found a doorway or an alleyway to hide in.”

“Why would he do that? To shake the two of you, obviously, but why? Wouldn’t it be suspicious behavior, and wouldn’t you think the last thing he’d want to do if he thinks his wife is having him followed is act suspicious?”

“ ’Less it’s more important that she don’t know where he’s going next.”

I said, “Maybe there was a cab there. Around the corner on Eighty-eighth.”

“He had a cab waiting for him?”

“No, but there could have been one standing there, discharging a fare. And he could have grabbed it and been on his way by the time I turned the corner.”

“Wouldn’t you have seen a cab driving away?”

“If I was looking for it. If it was already halfway down the block, and I was looking around for a man on foot, well, I might not have noticed it. Or he could have had a car parked there.” All the Flowers Are Dying

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“And started it up and pulled out without being seen? Only if you was limpin’ round the corner.”

“He could have parked there,” I said, “and got in and pulled the door shut, but not started up. Because he didn’t want to be spotted.”

“Or because he had something to do first,” Elaine offered, “like make a phone call or look up an address.”

“Or smoke another cigarette,” I said, “or anything at all. There’s too much we don’t know and too many avenues for speculation.”

“Plus all the side streets,” TJ said.

We batted it back and forth a little more, and Elaine said he sounded to her like a man with something to hide, and her guess would be that he was a sex addict. That was a new term, she added, for what used to be just a guy who liked to party, or what earlier genera-tions had called a good-time Charlie, or a gentleman with an eye for the ladies.

That got us talking about how the world didn’t cut you much slack anymore, how yesterday’s pastimes were today’s pathologies. TJ finished his Coke and went home.

“Leo wouldn’t take any money,” I told Elaine, “and neither will I. Tonight’s not going to come out of Louise’s retainer.”

“The $500? Didn’t that get used up a while ago?”

“I’ve barely put a dent in it.”

“You’re a real hard-nosed businessman, aren’t you?”

“The money doesn’t really matter.”

“I know that, baby.”

“I just want to see if I can figure it out,” I said. “It shouldn’t be that hard.”

11

He holds the bronze letter opener in his hands, turns it over, runs a finger over the design in low relief on the handle. A pack of hounds are holding a stag at bay. It is, he notes, quite artfully executed.

The woman, every bit as artfully executed as the letter opener, stands patiently on the other side of the counter. He asks her what she can tell him about the piece.

“Well, it’s a paper knife, of course. Art Nouveau, probably French but possibly Belgian.”

“Belgian?”

“It’s signed,” she says. “On the reverse.” He turns it over and she hands him a magnifying glass with a staghorn handle. “It’s hard to see with the naked eye, or at least with my naked eye. See?”

“DeVreese.”

“Godfrey DeVreese,” she says, “or Godefroid, if you prefer. I’m not sure which he’d have preferred. He was Belgian. I had a bronze medallion of his for years, a gorgeous thing, a good three and a half inches in diameter.

Leopold the Second on one side, with a beard that was a hell of a lot nobler than the man sporting it. You know about Leopold the Second?” He grins easily. “I would suppose,” he says, “that he came between Leopold the First and Leopold the Third.”

“Actually his successor was his son, Albert. Leopold Three came a little later on. Number Two was the gentle fellow who ran the Belgian All the Flowers Are Dying

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Congo as his personal fief. He treated the local residents as slaves, and he’d have had more respect for the inhabitants of an ant farm. Remember all those photos of natives with their hands chopped off?” What can she be she talking about? “It rings a bell,” he says.

“But he looked good,” she says, “especially in bronze. There was a horse on the other side, and he looked even better than Leo. It was a draft horse, one of those big boys you don’t see anymore outside of a Budweiser commercial. Except this one was a Percheron and the Budweiser horses are Clydesdales. The medal was an award from some sort of agricultural fair. Probably the turn-of-the-century equivalent of a tractor-pulling contest.”

“You still have the medallion?”

“I thought I was going to own it forever, but some horse collector spotted it a few months ago and away it went. I’ll probably never see another one like it.”

He turns the letter opener in his hands. It’s quite beautiful, and he likes the heft of it.

“You said turn-of-the-century?”

“I suppose DeVreese would have said fin de siècle. Or the equivalent in Flemish, whatever that might be. I can’t date it precisely, I’m afraid, but it would have to be late nineteenth or early twentieth century.”

“So it’s about a hundred years old.”

“Give or take.”

He tests the point with his thumb. It’s quite sharp. The blade’s edges are not. It will serve to open a letter, but you couldn’t slice with it.

You could stab, however.

“May I ask the price?”

“It’s two hundred dollars.”

“That seems high.”

“I know,” she says disarmingly.

“Do you suppose I could get a discount?” She considers this. “If you pay cash,” she says, “I could absorb the sales tax.”

“So that would be two hundred dollars even as opposed to what, two-sixteen?”

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“A few dollars more than that, actually. If you want I could look it up for you, so you’ll know to the penny how much you’re saving.”

“But what I’d be paying,” he says, “is two hundred dollars.”

“And in return you’d be getting a piece of history.”

“It’s always nice to get a piece”—just the slightest pause here—“of history.” Has she even noticed the pause? This would seem to be a woman who doesn’t miss much, and his sense is that she took it in and decided to overlook it, all without any of this registering on her face.

He frowns, has another look at the bas-relief, notes the steadfast determination of both the hounds and their quarry. It would be the work of a moment, he thinks, to wrap his hand around the handle, to strike without warning. He visualizes the act, the underhand thrust, the sharpened bronze tip entering just below the lowest rib and reaching up for the heart. Visualizes himself turning and moving to the door before she slips to the floor behind the counter, even before the life fades from her eyes.

But he’s touched things. His prints are all over the top surface of the showcase, and nothing holds a print better than glass.

“I think I’d like to have it.”

“I don’t blame you.”

Besides, it would be too quick. It would be over before she knew it, and that can be very satisfying sometimes, the quick kill, but in this instance he’d want her to see it coming, want to watch her lose that confidence, that irritating self-possession.

His loins stir at the thought of what he’ll do to her, when the time comes.

But none of this shows in his face as he sighs with resignation and counts bills from his wallet. She takes the money, wraps the letter opener in tissue paper, tucks it into a paper bag. He tells her he won’t need a receipt, then slips his purchase into the inside breast pocket of his jacket.

“Thanks,” she says. “Just so you know, I don’t think you paid too much.

They’d ask something like five hundred in a shop on Madison Avenue.” He smiles, murmurs something, heads for the door. But oh, Christ, how he wants to kill her! He doesn’t want to wait. He wants to kill her right now.

12

I didn’t much want to give my client a report of the night’s proceedings, and not just because it might leave her wondering if she’d hired an incompetent. More to the point, any suggestion that her Mr.

Thompson had given me the slip would imply that he was not what he appeared, that he had something to hide. That’s how it felt to me, but it would be premature to pass that perception to Louise.

“Nothing conclusive,” I told her. “I should be able to tell you more in a day or so.”

I found Thompson’s number in my notebook, called him on my cell phone. I hoped he wouldn’t answer and felt relieved when I got his Voice Mail. “Hey, man,” I said. “We sent you a check, payment in full, and I’ve got it right here in front of me. It came back, we’ve got the wrong address for you. Oh, shit, I’ve got to take that. Listen, ring me back, if I don’t answer just leave your address on my voice mail. And while you’re at it—oh, hell, never mind. Later.” I’d tried to sound rushed, like some middle-management guy with everything happening at once, and I couldn’t tell if I’d pulled it off. I’d know more when he did or didn’t call me back.

I had my cell phone in my pocket when I left the house, but I paused on the sidewalk to turn it off. I was on my way to a meeting, and you have to turn off cell phones and pagers there; at most groups they make an announcement to that effect. But I wanted mine off, 102

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meeting or no meeting, because the last thing I wanted was to answer a call and have David Thompson on the other end of the line. The first thing he’d do was ask who I was and what company the check was from, and I’d be stuck for an answer. If he got my voice mail there’d be nobody to ask, and he’d figure somebody owed him money and he might as well collect it, and he’d leave his address.

This was assuming that at least a portion of his story was true, that he was in some sort of business in the course of which companies sent him checks. It might or might not be direct marketing, and his name might or might not be David Thompson, which was why I’d been as vague as I had in my message to him.

It ought to work. And if it failed, it would simply have succeeded in another direction. If he was that suspicious, then he really did have something to hide.

I walked up to the Y on West Sixty-third and caught the noon meeting of the Fireside group. The speaker told an abbreviated drinking story and spent most of her time talking about her current dilemma, which was whether or not to face that acting wasn’t working for her, that two lines in a Rolaids commercial and a few dozen days as an extra, along with nonpaying roles in showcase productions that nobody came to, wasn’t all that much to show for five years of devotion to the profession.

“I’m not an actress, I’m a waitress,” she said, “and that’s okay, there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s a respectable way to make a living, but I’m not sure it’s what I want to do with my life. I’m not even so sure anymore that acting’s what I want to do with my life, as if anyone’s going to give me a chance to do it.”

Abie was there; I hadn’t seen him since Ray Gruliow spoke at St.

Paul’s, and he said he’d been mostly going to noon meetings lately, plus one night he’d been booked to speak out in Middle Village. I had lunch around the corner with him and two women, an office temp named Rachel and a sharp-faced young woman who worked as a substitute teacher when she worked at all, which I gathered wasn’t very often. I never did catch her name.

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ventory. “The nice thing about all that theatrical training,” she said, “is that she speaks distinctly and with expression, and you can sit in the last row and hear every word. Unfortunately, every word is me me me.” Rachel said she looked familiar, and maybe she’d seen her in something. Abie said she didn’t look familiar to him, and that was odd, because he never missed a Rolaids commercial.

“She said she had two lines,” Rachel said, “but maybe it was a voice-over, and she wasn’t on camera at all.” It was hard to tell if she was taking him literally or matching his irony with her own.

I didn’t get around to turning on my cell phone until I was back home, and there was a voice mail message waiting for me. A voice I hadn’t heard before said, “Hey, thanks, man. Here’s the address.” I wrote it down: 755 Amsterdam #1217, New York NY 10025. “Don‘t forget the suite number,” he said, “or it won’t get here. That’s probably what happened the last time.”

In Manhattan, the numbered streets run east and west, and the numbers start at Fifth Avenue. If you know the house number, you can readily tell what avenues it lies between.

The avenues run north and south, and each one has a different numbering system, depending where it starts. But there’s a key, printed in street maps and pocket atlases, and to be found in most edi-tions of the White and Yellow Pages. There are slight variations for certain thoroughfares, but the basic idea is that you take the address, drop the last digit, divide the result by two, add the particular number listed for that particular avenue, and the result is the nearest cross street.

Some realtor had had the table printed on a wallet-sized plastic card, and it was a better giveaway than a calendar, because I’d had mine five years now and used it all the time. The realtor wouldn’t get much business from me, nothing was going to move us from the Parc Vendôme, but she had my thanks, whatever that was worth.

And I in turn had the knowledge that the address I had for David Thompson was a block or two north of Ninety-sixth Street. That was a 104

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little more than a half mile from the corner of West End and Eighty-eighth, and a whole lot farther from Kips Bay.

I got there on the subway, walked a block east from Broadway, and found 755 Amsterdam where Amalia Ferrante’s card said it should be, right in the middle of the block between Ninety-seventh and Ninety-eighth. The building was a five-story tenement, not yet noticeably affected by gentrification, but something was wrong, because even if they’d chopped it up into a rabbit warren over the years, there was no way there could be an apartment numbered 1217.

Maybe it was Thompson’s idea of a code; when an envelope came with #1217 on it, he’d know it was from the man who’d called him. But that didn’t make sense either.

I went into the vestibule and looked at the row of buzzers. There were sixteen, which worked out to four to a floor for floors two through five, with the ground floor given over to a store. Nine or ten of the sixteen had a name in the slot provided for that purpose. The rest were empty. I checked the names, and most were Hispanic. None was Thompson.

I went outside again and took a look at the store on the ground floor.

It wasn’t terribly inviting, with the merchandise on display faded by time or bleached by the sun, but it tried to make up for that by offering everything a marginal neighborhood could require—check cashing, passport photos, notary public, hardware and housewares, umbrellas, shoe polish, Pampers, and assorted snacks. Three neon beer signs, one for a brand they’d stopped making ten years ago, shared window space with a Café Bustelo poster. There was so much going on that it took me a while to notice the only relevant item in the window, a yellowing sheet of paper with the hand-lettered inscription private mailboxes available.

The inside of the store was about what you’d expect. I didn’t see any mailboxes, and wondered where all twelve hundred and seventeen of them could be hiding. A woman behind the counter, with a stocky build and hair like black Brillo, was keeping an eye on me. I don’t know what she thought I could possibly want to steal.

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I asked if she had mailboxes for rent and she nodded. I said I didn’t see them. Could she show me where they were?

“Is not a mail box,” she said, framing a box with her hands, the sides, the top and bottom. “Is a mail service.”

“How does it work?”

“You pay for the month, an’ you get a number, an’ you come in an’

tell me your number an’ I bring you your mail.”

“How much does the service cost?”

“Not so much. Fifty dollars. You pay three months in advance, you get the fourth month free.”

I flipped open my wallet and showed her a card Joe Durkin had given me. It was a Detectives Endowment Association courtesy card, and it wouldn’t keep a meter maid from tagging you for parking too close to a hydrant, but it looked official enough from a distance. “I’m interested in one of your customers,” I said. “His number is twelve-seventeen. That’s one two one seven.”

She looked at me.

“You know his name?”

She shook her head.

“You want to look it up for me?”

She thought about it, shrugged, went in the back room. When she returned her broad forehead was creased with a deep frown. I asked her what was the matter.

“No name,” she said.

I thought she couldn’t tell me, but that wasn’t it. She meant she didn’t have a name to go with the number, and I believed her. Her puzzlement over the situation was evident.

I said, “If there’s any mail for him—”

“That’s why I take so long. If there is mail for him, there is his name on it, yes? No mail for him. He come in one, two times a week. Sometimes mail, sometimes no mail.”

“And when he comes in he tells you his number.”

“Twelve-seventeen. An’ I give him his mail.”

“And when he gets a letter, is there a name on the envelope?” 106

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“I don’t pay attention.”

“If you heard the name, would you recognize it?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Is the name David Thompson?”

“I don’t know. Is not José Jiménez. He’s Anglo, but that’s all I know.” She excused herself, waited on another customer. She came back and said, “You buy the service, you get a number, we write your name in the book. Next to the number.”

“And there’s no name in the book next to 1217.”

“No name. Maybe he come in the first time when somebody else is working, somebody who forgets to write down the name. Is not right, but . . .” She shrugged, shook her head. I think it bothered her more than it did me.

I’d brought along the photo Louise gave me, and I took it out and showed it to her. Her eyes lit up.

“Yes!”

“It’s him?”

“Is him. Twelve-seventeen.”

“But you don’t know his name.”

“No.”

I gave her a card. Next time he got a letter, I told her, she should call me and read me the name off the envelope. She said she’d do that, and held my card as if it were a pearl of great price. She craned her neck, took another look at the photograph.

She said, “He do something bad, this man?”

“Not that I know of,” I said. “I just need to know who he is.” I got home before Elaine did. She called ahead to say she was running a little late, could I put a pot of water on the stove? I did, and lit a fire under it, and it was boiling when she walked in the door. She tossed a salad and made pasta, and we left the dishes in the sink and walked down Ninth to a small off-Broadway house on Forty-second Street, where we had complimentary tickets for a staged reading of a play called Riga, about the destruction of the Latvian Jews. I knew the play-All the Flowers Are Dying

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wright from around the rooms, that’s why we were there, and after the curtain we congratulated him and told him how powerful it was.

“Too powerful,” he said. “Nobody wants to produce it.” On the way home Elaine said, “Gee, I can’t imagine why anybody would pass up a chance to produce that play. Why, it just makes a person feel good all over.”

“I’m glad we saw it, though.”

“I don’t know if I am or not. I’m afraid it’s all going to happen again.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“The hell I don’t. There are whole sections of the Times I can’t read anymore. Anything with national or international news. I can manage the Arts section, except half the time the Book Review’s as bad as a news story. The Tuesday Science section’s okay, and the Wednesday one with the recipes and restaurants. I never want to go to the restaurants or try the recipes, but I can stand to read it.”

“It’s a shame you’re not interested in sports.”

“Yeah, it’d be something I could keep up on and not wind up think -

ing about Prozac. Does TJ read the business section?”

“I think so.”

“Maybe he’ll support us in our old age. If we have one.” I stepped to the curb, held up a hand. A cab pulled up.

She said, “I thought we were walking. What’s the matter, don’t you feel well, baby?”

“Not well enough to walk fifty blocks.” I told the driver to go up Tenth Avenue, that we wanted Amsterdam and Ninety-third.

“Mother Blue’s?”

“I was just a few blocks from there this afternoon,” I said, “but there’s no reason to go there at that hour. At night it’s got music.”

“And Danny Boy.”

“Unless tonight’s one of his nights at Poogan’s. Either way, I think we should go listen to some music.”

“I suppose you’re right,” she said. “I suppose that’s a better idea than going home and killing ourselves.”

13

Downstairs, he gives his name. He gets off the elevator to find her framed in the doorway of her apartment, leaning a little against the doorjamb.

She’s wearing a belted silk robe with a bold floral pattern. Her slippers are open-toed, and the polish on her toenails is blood red, a match for her lipstick.

He’s carrying a briefcase, and he’s also brought a bouquet from the Korean greengrocer, a bottle from the liquor store. “These will pale beside your robe,” he tells her, handing her the flowers.

“Do you like it? I can’t decide whether it’s elegant or trashy.”

“Why can’t it be both?”

“Sometimes I ask the same question of myself. These are lovely, dar -

ling. I’ll put them in water.”

She fills a vase at the sink, arranges the flowers in it, puts them on the mantel. He unwraps the bottle and shows it to her.

“Strega,” she reads. “What is it, a cordial?”

“A postprandial libation. Italian, of course. Strega means witch.”

“Moi?”

“You’re certainly enchanting.”

“And you’re a sweetie.”

She comes into his arms and they kiss. Her body, lush and full-breasted, presses against him. She’s naked under the robe, and he draws her close and runs a hand down her back, stroking her bottom.

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He’s hard already, in anticipation. He’s been like that all day, on and off.

“This is such a nice surprise,” she says. “Two nights in a row. You’ll spoil me.”

“I have very little free time,” he says. “I’ve told you that.”

“Yes.”

“And it’s unpredictable. Sometimes I have to go away for months at a stretch.”

“It must be a difficult life.”

“It has its moments. When I do have time to myself, I try to spend it in the most enjoyable way possible. And that’s why I’m here again tonight.”

“Believe me, I wasn’t complaining. Shall we sample the Strega? I don’t believe I’ve ever had any. Or would you rather have Scotch?” He says he’ll try the cordial, that he hasn’t had it in years. She finds a pair of suitable glasses and pours drinks for both of them, and they touch glasses and sip.

“Nice. A very complicated flavor, isn’t it? Herbs, but I can’t tell which ones. How clever you were to bring this.”

“Perhaps we can take our drinks to the bedroom.”

“More than clever,” she says. “The man’s a genius.” In her bedroom he embraces her, draws the robe from her shoulders.

She’s a few years older than he, and her body is that of a mature woman, but diet and exercise have kept her in good shape, and her skin is lovely, soft as velvet.

He removes his own clothes quickly, puts them on a chair. “Oh, my,” she says, in mock horror. “You’re not going to put that big thing in me, are you?”

“Not right away.”

She’s very responsive, has been since their first time together. He brings her to orgasm first with his fingers, then with his mouth.

“My God,” she says, after her second climax. “My God, I think you’re going to kill me.”

“Oh, not just yet,” he says.

He has her in a variety of postures, moving her from one to another, slipping out of her after each orgasm and taking her again in a new position.

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No effort is required for him to postpone his own climax. It will wait for the right moment.

At one point she takes him in her mouth. She’s good at this, and he lets her perform for a good length of time, then rolls her onto her stomach, preps her with a lubricant from the nightstand, and eases himself into her ass. They’ve done this before, they did it last night, in fact, and he’d gotten her to touch herself in front and make herself come.

Tonight she does so without being told.

She learns quickly, he thinks. He could probably get her to do anything he wants, and the thought is intriguing. Should he draw this out, keep her around for a few more days or weeks?

No, it’s time.

“Darling? Is there something I can do?”

“You’re doing fine,” he says.

“But I want you to come.”

“You can come for both of us.”

“I never came so much in my life, but it’s not fair. Now it’s your turn.”

“I’m having a good time.”

“I know you are, but—”

“I don’t need to have an orgasm to be satisfied.”

“That’s what you said last night.”

“It was true then and it’s true now.”

“But it thrills me when you come,” she says, her hand on him. “I love it, and you seem to enjoy it yourself.”

“Well, of course.”

“So tell me if there’s something I can do.”

“Well . . .”

“You’re not going to shock me,” she says. “I didn’t just get out of a convent.”

“No, I don’t suppose you did.”

“There’s something, isn’t there? Look, as long as it doesn’t involve bloodshed or broken bones, I’m up for it.” He hesitates, largely to enjoy the line she’s just delivered. Then he says,

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“Oh, wow.”

“Of course, if it’s too unsettling for you—”

“No, just the opposite. The whole idea’s a turn-on.” Her hand tightens on him. “For you, too, I can see. My God.”

“Well, it does add a little something.”

“The old je ne sais quoi, the French call it. I, uh, don’t have any special equipment for it.”

“I, uh, do.”

“Well, aren’t you the devil!”

He fetches the briefcase, opens it. They make a game of it, attaching the silk cuffs to her wrists and ankles, positioning her on the bed with a pillow under her bottom, fastening the cords, also silken, that secure her wrists and ankles to the bed’s four corners. Her eyes widen as he shows her some of the paraphernalia he’s brought. She looks excited, and he touches her, and yes, she’s wet, but then she’s always wet, this one, always ready and willing and able.

He flicks the riding crop across her abdomen. It hurts a little, he notes, but she likes it.

So far.

“My God,” she said, “you must have bought out the Pleasure Chest.

You really are a devil.”

He opens a condom, puts it on.

“Darling, you don’t need one of those. Why would you use one now?

Oh, don’t tell me that’s why you haven’t let yourself come! That’s so sweet, but the last thing you have to worry about is getting me pregnant.

I’m afraid those years are over.”

He’s beginning to tire of listening to her. So why not put an end to her prattling? He tears off a strip of duct tape, pins her head with one hand, tapes her mouth with the other. This is unexpected, and not entirely welcome, and he watches her eyes as she begins to realize the extent of her helplessness.

But that could be part of the turn-on. She’s not sure yet.

He gives her a look at the letter opener. Her eyes widen, and she’d gape if her mouth weren’t taped shut.

He gets on the bed with her, grips her breast, presses firmly with the let-112

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ter opener until its point breaks the skin at the outer rim of the aureole.

A bead of blood flows from the spot, and he takes it on the top of his index finger and shows it to her.

Oh, my, the look in her eyes . . .

“No bloodshed, you said, and I let you believe I agreed. A lie of omission, I’m afraid. You will be shedding some blood tonight after all.” He puts his finger in his mouth and tastes her blood, relishing it, relishing too the look on her face as she watches him do it. Did she read Dracula at an impressionable age? Did she find it erotic, as so many girls seem to do?

He uses the letter opener, enlarges the wound. He puts his mouth to it and sucks blood from her, letting it fill his mouth, letting it flow down his throat. He loves the taste of blood, loves the whole idea of drinking it.

The vampire myth is a powerful one, composed largely of nonsense, of course, like all myths. Eternal life, a need to shun daylight, to sleep in a coffin—amusing, certainly, but ridiculous.

And yet the satisfactions and benefits of blood would seem to transcend myth. What could be more nourishing than this vehicle that carries the very life force of its owner? Of course it rejuvenates the person who swallows it. How could it be otherwise?

He sucks greedily, careful not to yield to the impulse to bite the soft flesh. Bundy was a biter, he left tooth marks in his victims, and might have dodged Old Sparky if he hadn’t. There will be no tooth marks in this plump titty, toothsome though it unquestionably is.

She’s struggling against the bonds, trying to cry out against the strip of duct tape. It’s futile, of course. There’s nothing she can do.

He, on the other hand, may do as he will.

He props himself up, his face close to hers. “You never should have let me tie you up,” he says, his tone conversational. “But don’t blame yourself.

The die was cast the moment you opened the door. If you’d said no, if you’d tried to resist, well, it wouldn’t have done you any good. There would have been a struggle, and you’d have lost, and you’d wind up just as you are now, restrained and helpless.” He runs a hand over her flesh. Age may have softened her some, and gravity may have had an effect, but it’s left her with wonderfully soft skin.

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“How many times did you come this evening? I lost count. I hope you had a good time. Because I don’t think you’re going to enjoy the rest of this. I don’t think you’re going to care for it at all.” The coup de grace (though it’s not much of a coup, and a little late in the day for grace) is performed with the letter opener, of course, and it’s essentially the same blow he’d wanted to deliver to the woman in the shop, a deliberate thrust from just below the rib cage arcing upward into the heart. He’s inside her at the moment, and he tries to time his climax to coincide with her death, but the body insists on following its own timetable, and perhaps its wisdom is the greater.

Because this way his attention is fixed entirely upon the blade in his hand and the look in her eyes, and he feels her heart at the tip of the blade, feels it allow itself to be pierced, sees the light die in her eyes, and feels the life go out of her. And surely she’s a part of him now, as are all of them, all the ones he’s taken. Surely her loss is his gain, her pain his pleasure, her death his life.

And now he finishes, moving slowly now, slowly, tantalizingly, within the envelope of lifeless flesh, until at last there’s no holding back, no choice but surrender, and he cries out in pain or joy as he reaches his goal.

Fortunately, there’s no hurry. He’s eager to get away, to put distance between himself and the dead woman, but he knows not to rush his depar-ture. He wants to leave no traces, or at least to keep them to a minimum.

The police will give his efforts their full attention, and their forensic ca-pability is legendary. It is very much in his interest to provide them with as little to work with as possible.

He’s had two orgasms, one well before her death, one in its immediate aftermath, and has consequently filled two condoms. Both are knotted now, his DNA secured within. He can flush them down the toilet, surely the plumbing in a New York apartment building will be equal to the task, but suppose one gets caught in a clogged trap? Safer to pop the pair into a Ziploc bag, which can join the wrist and ankle restraints, the silk cords, the riding crop, and the rest of the Pleasure Chest playthings in his briefcase.

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There’s not much blood. Her breast bled some, beyond what he sucked from it, and he has managed to get some of it on his own chest and forearms. The final wound, the piercing and stopping of her heart, never had a chance to bleed, and the letter opener is still buried in her heart.

First a shower. But, as preparation, he’s brought along a five-inch square of fine-mesh screening, sold to enable a do-it-yourselfer to repair a hole in a window screen. He places this over the drain in the tub and secures it with duct tape. Any head or body hair, any trace evidence that might wind up in the trap, will now be prevented from reaching the drain in the first place.

He showers thoroughly, using her soap, her shampoo and conditioner.

He uses a big blue bath towel, bagging it when he’s finished for removal and safe disposal. He takes up the square of screening and the tape he used to hold it in place, and bags them as well.

In a closet he finds a vacuum cleaner. Will neighbors hear the vacuum running? Perhaps, and so what if they do? He vacuums the floors throughout the large one-bedroom apartment, then changes attachments and vacuums the bed, body and all.

Hair is the enemy, hair and sweat and other secretions. He imagines, not for the first time, how absurdly easy it must have been for a criminal a century or more ago, before DNA, before blood types, before ballistics, before forensics was a word, let alone a science. It was a wonder that anyone ever got caught.

And, really, how many did? Of the bright ones, the planners, the Übermenschen of murder? There must have been a multitude who got away with it, even as he gets away with it, year after year after year.

He bathed before coming here, bathed and shampooed, but one is forever losing hairs, shedding skin cells. He’s just finishing the vacuuming when he remembers that he was here the previous night, and God knows what hair and skin cells he may have left behind. And she’s changed the sheets since then, hasn’t she?

He finds yesterday’s sheets in the hamper, bundles them up, and, for good measure, adds everything else in the clothes hamper. A small detail, probably an unnecessary precaution, but why take a chance?

She keeps her cash, he discovers, in the drawer with her underclothes.

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It’s not a fortune, less than a thousand dollars, but he can find a use for it, and she manifestly cannot. He’s had expenses—$200 for the bronze paper knife, as much again for the erotic paraphernalia, plus the cost of the bottle and the bouquet. With her cash in his wallet, the night’s work becomes a self-liquidating enterprise. Except, of course, that hers is the self that’s been liquidated.

Next he wipes the place down for fingerprints. He hasn’t touched much, tonight or on previous visits. He wipes the bottle of Strega, and both of their glasses. He retrieves from her liquor cabinet the bottle of Glenmorangie Scotch she bought for him, pours and downs a drink, wipes and replaces the bottle. He leaves the vase of flowers on the mantel.

He never touched the vase, and flowers won’t hold a print.

But paper will, and he had his hands all over the paper they were wrapped in. He finds it in the kitchen wastebasket, adds it to one of his bags of trash.

Throughout this entire process he’s been naked. Now, the job done, he puts on the clothes he’d left on the chair in the bedroom. He gathers everything he means to take away with him and lines it up alongside the apartment’s front door. Is he done? Can he go now?

One more thing.

He picks up a manicure scissors from the top of her dresser, uses the wall-mounted magnifying mirror, and clips three hairs from his mustache. He leaves one on the bedsheet, alongside her right arm, and drops the other two into her nest of pubic hair.

Voilà!

14

Mother Blue’s was either half full or half empty, depending I suppose on whether or not you had money in the joint. It’s a rarity these days, a jazz club away from Midtown and SoHo and the Village, and not many out-of-towners find their way to it. Its clientele is an even-up mix of people who come from all over the city for the music, and neighborhood locals who don’t object to the music, and find it a pleasant place to kick back and get a buzz. It was always a pretty even mix of black and white, but lately the mixture’s been liberally spiced with Asians.

Danny Boy’s there three or four nights a week, giving the rest of his custom to Poogan’s Pub, on West Seventy-second between Columbus and Amsterdam. There’s no music at Poogan’s, except what sneaks out of the jukebox, and if there’s any charm to it beyond a certain raffish straightforwardness, I’ve never spotted it. I only go to Poogan’s if I’m looking for Danny Boy, but I’ll go to Mother Blue’s just for the music.

Danny Boy was at a table close to the bandstand, and he saw us before we saw him. He was smiling when my eyes picked him up, and beckoning us to his table.

He said, “Matt and Elaine. Sit down, sit down. This is Jodie. Jodie, Matt and Elaine.”

Jodie was Chinese, with utterly straight shoulder-length black hair and small perfect features in an oval face. She looked privately amused during the introductions, and indeed throughout the evening.

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I couldn’t decide if everything amused her or it was just her natural expression.

“They’re on their break,” Danny said, with a nod at the bandstand.

“You’ve heard the rhythm section here.” He named the musicians.

“And there’s a tenor player with them, and he’s very current, but I swear there are moments when he reminds me of Ben Webster. He’s a kid, I don’t know if he ever even heard of Ben Webster, and he certainly never caught a live performance, but wait and see if he doesn’t sound just like him.”

I’ve never known anyone like Danny Boy Bell, but then neither has anybody else. He’s barely five feet tall, small enough to buy his clothes in the boys’ department at Barneys, although for the past twenty years he’s had his suits made by a visiting Hong Kong tailor, which doesn’t cost any more and spares him embarrassment, along with the nuisance of leaving the house before dark. He’s the albino son of black West Indian parents, and strong light is hard on his eyes and bad for his skin.

He spends the daylight hours in his apartment, reading or sleeping or on the phone, and his nights at Poogan’s or Mother Blue’s.

His business is information. Most of his contacts have yellow sheets, but an arrest record doesn’t necessarily make a criminal. They are, I suppose, of the underworld, though Elaine thinks the French word demimonde is more suitable, if only because it’s French. Players and working girls, gamblers and grifters, people working angles or being worked by them, they all tend to turn up at Danny Boy’s table or call him on the phone. Sometimes he pays out money for the information he’s furnished, but this doesn’t happen often, and the sums are generally small. More often he pays his sources in favors, or in other information, if at all, as many people tell him things just to get the word around.

He was a source of mine on the job, and our relationship continued after I gave back my badge. We’ve become good friends over the forty years I’ve known him, and I think I’ve already said that I met Elaine at his table.

Elaine told him he was looking well, and he shook his head sadly.

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ized I was getting older. You ever hear anybody tell a kid in his twenties he’s looking well? Take Jodie here, she looks positively gorgeous, and I’ll tell her that, but I wouldn’t think of telling her she’s looking well.

Look at her, she’s got skin like a China doll, you should pardon the expression. It’ll be twenty years before she has to hear somebody say she’s looking well.”

“I take it back, Danny.”

“No, don’t do that, Elaine. I’m an alter kocker, that’s no secret, and at my age it does my heart good to hear I’m looking well. Especially from a beautiful young thing like yourself.”

“Thanks, but I’ve been looking well for a few years myself.”

“You’re still a sweet young thing. Ask your husband, if you don’t believe me. Matt, is this just social? I hope so, but if there’s any business we should get it out of the way before the band comes back.”

“Just social,” I said. “We’re hoping the music will change our mood.

We went to a play about the Holocaust, and Elaine left the theater convinced it was just Act One.”

He took it in, nodded. “I don’t look at the world any more than I have to,” he said, “but what I see I don’t like much.” Elaine asked him if he was still keeping his list.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “You know about that?”

“Matt told me.”

A few years ago Danny Boy had surgery for colon cancer, and whatever they give you afterward. Chemo, I guess. He was up and about again by the time I heard about it, but it gave him a peek at mortality to which he responded in an interesting fashion: He made a list of everybody he’d known who had died, starting with a kid at his school who’d been hit by a car. By the time I left his table that night it was a struggle to keep from making a mental list of my own.

Now, years later, both our lists would be longer.

“I gave it up,” he said, “when enough time passed without a recurrence so that I actually began to believe I might beat the damn thing.

But what really did it was the Trade Center. Two days after the towers came down, the guy on the corner, for twenty years now he sells me a newspaper every night on my way home, now he tells me how his kid All the Flowers Are Dying

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was in the North Tower on the same fucking floor that the plane hit. If you took a deep breath that day you got some of him in your lungs. I knew the kid, when he was younger he used to spend Saturday nights helping his old man with the Sunday Times, putting all the sections together. Tommy, his name was. I went home, I was gonna put him on my list, and I thought, Danny, what the fuck do you think you’re doing? They’re dying out there faster than you can write them down.”

“I’m glad we came here,” Elaine said. “I feel a lot better already.” He apologized, and she told him not to be silly, and he took his bottle of vodka from the silver ice bucket and filled his glass, and the waitress finally brought the drinks Elaine and I had ordered an eternity ago, a Coke for me and a Lime Rickey for her, along with another Sea Breeze for Jodie, and the band came out, not a moment too soon, and played “Laura” and “Epistrophy” and “Mood Indigo” and “ ’Round Midnight,” among other things, and Danny Boy was right, the tenor player sounded a whole lot like Ben Webster.

Right before they took a break, the piano player, a gaunt black man with horn-rimmed glasses and a precisely trimmed goatee, announced that they’d play themselves off with a song about a French girl in En-gland who was famous for her callipygian charms. “Ladies and gentlemen, for your enjoyment, ‘London Derriere.’ ” There were chuckles here and there, bafflement everywhere else.

He was goofing on “Londonderry Air,” of course, the old name of the tune that most people know as “Danny Boy,” and it’s one of the world’s most beautiful melodies but not often thought of as a good vehicle for jazz. They’d chosen it as a tip of the hat to Danny Boy Bell, who managed to look flattered and put upon at the same time. The tenor man played one chorus absolutely straight, and it was enough to break your heart, and then they took it up-tempo and worked changes on it, and it sounded okay to me, but it was essentially a novelty number. Except for the first tenor solo, which a man could listen to the whole night through, especially if he had a glass in his hand.

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didn’t mind, and Danny said of course not, and that they should hang on to the tenor man. “I wish,” the pianist said. “He’s here until a week from Thursday and then he’s on a plane to Stockholm.” Danny Boy asked what the hell he was going to do in Stockholm. “Eat blonde pussy,” the pianist said, and then he realized there were two women at our table and got all flustered, apologized profusely, and got out of there as quickly as possible.

Danny had some vodka and said, “Christ, how I always hated that fucking song.”

“It’s such a beautiful tune,” Elaine said.

“And the lyric’s a lovely thing, too,” he told her. “ ‘The summer’s gone, the roses all are fallen.’ But I heard it all the time when I was a little kid, I was fucking taunted with it.”

“Because of your name.”

“I was going to get taunted anyway,” he said, “because I was the funniest-looking kid anybody ever saw, this white-haired white-faced little pickaninny who couldn’t play sports and had to wear sunglasses and, on top of everything, was about ten times as bright as anyone else in the school, including the teachers. ‘Yo, Danny Boy! The pipes is callin’!’ ”

“But you kept the nickname,” Jodie said.

“It wasn’t a nickname. Daniel Boyd Bell is what I was christened.

That was my mother’s maiden name, Boyd, B-O-Y-D, like a Green-pointer trying to say Bird. I answered to Danny Boyd from the time I was old enough to answer to anything, and the D just got lost because people didn’t hear it, they assumed it was Danny Boy, B-O-Y, like the song.”

He frowned. “You know,” he said, “with all the people I know who got cornholed by their fathers and the crap kicked out of them by their mothers, I guess I got a pretty good deal. When you think about it.” We caught one more set, and Danny wouldn’t let me pay. “You had two Coca-Colas and one glass of soda water with a piece of lime in it,” he said. “I think I can cover it.” I said something about the cover charge, All the Flowers Are Dying

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and he said nobody at his table ever had to pay a cover charge. “They want to keep my business,” he said. “Don’t ask me why.” Something made me pull out the photo of the elusive David Thompson. I showed it to Danny and asked him if it rang any kind of a bell.

He shook his head. “Should it?”

“Probably not. He has a private mailbox a couple of blocks from here, so I thought he might have come in.”

“He’s got a face that would be easy to miss,” he said, “but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it. You want to make copies and I’ll show it around?”

“I don’t think it’s worth it.”

He shrugged. “Whatever. Who is he, anyway?”

“Either his name’s David Thompson,” I said, “or it isn’t.”

“Ah,” he said. “You know, the same can be said for almost everybody.” When we got home Elaine said, “You’re a genius, you know that? You took a sad evening and turned it around. Did you ever think you’d live to hear the same person in the course of a single night describe himself as an albino pickaninny and an alter kocker?”

“Now that you mention it, no.”

“And, but for you, we’d have missed that. You know what you’re gonna get, big boy?”

“What?”

“Lucky,” she said. “But I think you should get lucky with somebody who’s clean and smells nice, so I’ll go freshen up. And you might want to shave.”

“And shower.”

“And shower. So why don’t you meet me in the bedroom in a half an hour or so?”

That was around twelve-thirty, and it must have been close to one-thirty when she said, “See? What did I tell you. You got lucky.”

“The luckiest I ever got was the day I met you,” I said.

“Sweet old bear. Oh, wow.”

“Wow?”

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“I was just thinking. And you know, there’s not a soul I know in the business, so I couldn’t even go and ask somebody.”

“Ask somebody what?”

“Well, I was just wondering what the impact of Viagra’s been on working girls. I mean, it would have to have a major effect, wouldn’t you think?”

“I think you’re a fruitcake.”

“What? A fruitcake? How can you say that?”

“A fruitcake’s not a bad thing. Good night. I love you.” So it turned out to be a good night, a wonderful night. What I didn’t know was that there weren’t going to be any more of them.

15

I woke up to the smell of coffee, and when I got to the kitchen Elaine had a cup poured for me, and an English muffin in the toaster. The TV

was on, tuned to the Today show, and Katie Couric was trying to be reasonably cheerful while her guest talked about his new book on the genocide in the Sudan.

Elaine said, “That poor schnook. He’s on national television, he’s got a book out on a serious subject, and all anybody’s going to notice is that he’s wearing a rug.”

“And not a very good one, either.”

“If it was a good one,” she said, “we wouldn’t spot it so easily. And imagine how hot it must be under those studio lights with that thing clinging to your scalp like a dead muskrat.” She had a cup of coffee, but no breakfast. She was on her way to the yoga class she took two or three times a week, and felt it was more effective if she did it on an empty stomach. She was out the door and on her way by a quarter after eight, and that was something to be grateful for, as it turned out.

Because she wasn’t around when they broke for the local news at 8:25. I was half listening to it, and just enough got through to engage my attention. A woman had been killed in Manhattan, although they didn’t say who or where. That’s not rare, it’s a big city and a hard world, but something made me change the channel to New York One, where 124

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they give you a steady diet of local news around the clock, and I waited through a pronouncement by the mayor and an optimistic weather report and a couple of commercials, and then an off-camera reporter was talking about the savage torture-murder of an unmarried Manhattan woman, and I got a sinking feeling.

Then a shot of the building she lived in filled the screen, and that didn’t mean it had to be her, she wasn’t the building’s only tenant, and probably not the only single woman. It didn’t have to be her. It could have been someone else who’d been found nude in her bedroom, stabbed to death after what the reporter grimly described as “an apparent marathon session of torture and abuse.” But I knew it was her.

The name, I was told, was being withheld pending notification of kin. Did she have any kin? I couldn’t remember, and wasn’t sure if it was something I’d ever known. It seemed to me that her parents were dead, and she’d never had children. Wasn’t there an ex-husband, and was he someone they would need to notify? Were there brothers or sisters?

I picked up the phone and dialed a number I didn’t have to look up, and a voice I didn’t recognize said, “Squad room,” and it took until then for me to remember that Friday had come and gone and Joe Durkin wasn’t working at Midtown North anymore. I knew a couple of other cops there, though not terribly well. And it wasn’t their case, it hadn’t happened in their precinct. Joe would have helped me out, made a few phone calls, but I couldn’t expect anybody else over there to take the trouble. They just knew me as a friend of Joe’s, a guy who’d been off the job more years than he’d been on it, and they didn’t owe me a thing.

Who else did I know? The last cop I’d worked with at all closely was Ira Wentworth, a detective in the Two-Six on West 126th Street. We’d stayed in touch for a time after the case was resolved—actually, it pretty much resolved itself—and he liked to come over to our apartment, saying that Elaine made the best coffee in the city.

But we hadn’t kept up the contact, aside from cards at Christmas, and there was no point calling him now, because it hadn’t happened in his precinct, either.

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I had her number, though. I dialed it. If she picked up, I could think of something to say. But I pretty much knew that wasn’t going to happen.

It rang until voice mail cut in, and I hung up.

Sooner or later they’d have a tip line set up, a dedicated number for people to call with information on the case, but there’d been nothing like that on the news. I knew which precinct it happened in, I’d been assigned there myself for several years, although I’d long since lost touch with the people I’d worked with there. It might not be their case, Homicide might have taken it away from them, but they’d have caught the initial squeal and somebody there ought to know something.

I looked up the number, got whoever was holding down the desk. I gave my own name and phone number before he could ask and told him I’d caught an item on the news about a woman murdered in his precinct. I’d recognized the building and a friend of mine lived in it, and I hadn’t caught the name and was afraid it might be her.

He told me to hang on, came back to say they weren’t giving out the name yet.

I said I could understand that, I was a retired cop myself. Suppose I gave him the name of my friend. Could he tell me whether or not it was her?

He thought about it and decided that would be okay. I told him her name, and the moment of silence was answer enough.

“I hate to say it,” he said, “but that’s the name I’ve got here. You want to hang on? I’ll transfer you to someone connected to the case.” I held, and I guess he briefed the guy before he put him through to me, because he came on the line knowing who I was and what I wanted. His name was Mark Sussman and he and his partner were first up on the case, so it was theirs until somebody took it away from them.

Was I by any chance a relative? I said I wasn’t. Then did I have any contact information for the victim’s relatives? I said I didn’t, and wasn’t sure she had any living kin. I didn’t mention the ex-husband, since I wasn’t sure of his name and had no idea where—or even if—he was living.

“We got an ID from a neighbor,” he said, “and she looks like the 126

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photo on the passport in her drawer, so there’s no real doubt of her identity. It might not be a bad idea for you to make a formal identification, if you wouldn’t mind doing that.”

Was the body still at the apartment?

“No, we got her out of there once the ME had a look at her and the photographer was done taking pictures. She’s at the morgue, that’s . . .

well, you’d know where that is.”

I would indeed. I said it might take me a while, that I had to stay put until my wife got home. He said there was no rush.

“I’ll want to sit down and talk with you anyway,” he said. “Before or after you ID the body. If you knew the woman, maybe you can point us in a useful direction.”

“If I can.”

“Because we don’t even have a preliminary report from forensics, but it doesn’t looks like the cocksucker left us a lot of physical evidence. You could eat off the floor, the way it looked. If you had the appetite, which you wouldn’t, not after you saw what he did to her.” I didn’t know what the hell to do. Out of habit I poured myself another cup of coffee, but I already felt as though I’d been drinking coffee for days. I poured it out and turned on the TV again, as if I’d learn more from it than I had from Sussman. The announcer got on my nerves and I turned it off before they could get any further than the traffic report.

I kept picking up the phone and putting it down again. Who the hell was I going to call and what could I say? At one point I had Sussman’s number half-dialed before I second-guessed myself and hung up.

What could I tell him? That I had a pretty good idea who’d done it, but that I didn’t know his name or where to look for him?

I looked over at the phone and a number popped into my head, one I hadn’t called in years. It was Jim Faber’s, and I wished to God I could dial that number and hear my late sponsor’s voice on the other end of the line. What would he tell me? That was easy. He’d tell me not to drink.

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I did I was just as glad that Elaine and I don’t keep anything alcoholic in the house. Because why do they distill whiskey, why do they put it in bottles, if not for occasions like this one?

There were other program friends I could call, other men and women I could count on to tell me not to drink. But I wasn’t going to drink, and I didn’t want to have the rest of any of those conversations.

I called TJ, brought him up to speed. He said, “Oh, man, that’s terrible news.”

“Yes, it is.”

“I had the news on, I heard what they said, but I never made the connection.”

“Well, why would you?”

“Damn, I feel bad.”

“So do I.”

“Elaine home?”

“She had a yoga class. She should be home any minute.”

“ ’Less she go straight to the store. You want, I’ll come over, sit with you until she gets there.”

“Isn’t the market open?”

“They ’bout to ring the bell, but it don’t matter. New York Stock Exchange get along without me.”

“No, that’s all right,” I said.

“You change your mind, just call. Won’t take me a minute to close down here and come over.”

I rang off and tried her number at the store. I didn’t think she’d go there, she rarely opens up before eleven, but it was possible. When the machine picked up I tried to keep my voice neutral, telling her it was me and to pick up if she was there. She didn’t, and I was just as glad.

A few minutes later I heard her key in the lock.

I was standing a few feet from the door when she opened it, and she knew something was wrong as soon as she saw my face. I told her to come in, took her gym bag from her, told her to sit down.

I don’t know why we do that. Sit down, we say, pointing at chairs.

Are you sitting down? we want to know, before imparting bad news over 128

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the phone. What difference does it make? Are we really afraid our words will knock the recipient off his feet? Do that many people injure themselves, falling down when they hear bad news?

Brace yourself—that’s what we’re saying. As if a person can. As if one can prepare oneself for such awful intelligence.

“It was on the news,” I said. “Monica’s dead. She’s been murdered.”

16

They weren’t really set up for viewing. The autopsy wasn’t finished, and a woman who looked as though she spent too much time around dead people had us wait, then took us into a large room and led us to a table on which a mound was covered with a plain white sheet. She uncovered the head, and there was no mistake. It was Monica.

“Ah, no,” Elaine said. “No, no, no.”

Outside she said, “My best friend. The best friend I ever had. We talked every day, there wasn’t a day we didn’t talk. Who am I gonna talk to now? It’s not fair, I’m too fucking old to get another best friend.” A cab came along and I flagged it.

I hadn’t wanted to take her to the morgue, but then I hadn’t wanted to leave her alone, either. And it wasn’t my decision to make, anyway, it was hers, and she’d been adamant. She wanted to be with me, and she wanted to see her friend. At the morgue, when the woman warned us it wouldn’t be pretty, I told her she didn’t have to do this. She said she did.

In the cab she said, “It makes it real. That’s why they have open cas-kets at funerals. So you’ll know, so you’ll accept it. Otherwise there’d be a part of me that wouldn’t really believe she was gone. I’d go on thinking that I could pick up the phone and dial her number and there she’d be.”

I didn’t say anything, just held her hand. We rode another block and 130

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she said, “I’ll believe that anyway. On some level. But a little bit less than if I hadn’t seen her sweet face. Oh, God, Matt.” My first thought when we met Mark Sussman was that he was awfully young, and my second thought, a corrective to the first, was that he was within a couple of years of the age I’d been when I quit the job. He was short, with a well-developed upper body suggestive of frequent workouts with weights, and his dark brown eyes were hard to read.

He was a college graduate, which seems barely worth noting these days. I don’t think there was a single man in my class at the academy who’d been to college, let alone got all the way through it. There was a general feeling in the department that college was no good for a cop, that you learned too many of the wrong things and not enough of the right ones, that it unmanned you while suffusing you with an unwarranted feeling of superiority. That was all a lot of crap, of course, but so was most of what we believed about most subjects.

He’d had a split major at Brooklyn College, history and sociology, and was accepted at a couple of graduate schools when he realized he didn’t want a teaching career. He took a couple of graduate courses in criminology at John Jay and decided that was his field, but he didn’t want to study it, he wanted to get out there and do it. That was ten years ago, and now he had a gold shield and a desk in the detective squad room at the Sixth Precinct, on West Tenth Street in the Village.

He sat behind that desk, and we took chairs alongside it. “Monica Driscoll,” he said. “Now we also found documents referring to her as Monica Wellbridge.”

“That was her ex-husband’s name,” Elaine told him. “She never used it.”

“Took her maiden name back. When was the divorce, fairly recent?”

“Oh, God, no. Fifteen years ago? At least that, maybe twenty.” And no, Monica hadn’t been in touch with Derek Wellbridge, and she had no idea how to reach him, or if he was alive to be reached.

“It’s an unusual name,” Sussman said. “A computer search might turn him up, if there’s any reason to look for him. I think you said she was seeing somebody.”

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“Yes, and he was very secretive.”

“I don’t suppose you met him.”

“No. She wouldn’t even tell me his name. At first I figured it was because he was married, although we met a few of her married boyfriends over the years.”

“She did this a lot? Dated married guys?” It should have been an easy question to answer, but Elaine didn’t want to make her friend sound easy, or undiscriminating. “If she was dating somebody,” she said after a moment, “he generally turned out to be married.”

“She kept making the same mistake?”

“No, she liked it that way. She didn’t want to get married again, she didn’t want to be all wrapped up in another person.”

“This mystery man, how long had she been seeing him?”

“Not long. Two weeks? Three? Less than a month, anyway.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Oh, gosh, let me think. He was very secretive, he would have to leave town and not be able to tell her where he was going. She had the idea that he was working for the government. Or a government. You know, like some kind of an agent.”

“She give you any kind of a description?”

“He dressed nicely, he was well groomed. But then I never saw her with anybody who wasn’t. Oh, I know. He had a mustache.”

“Yeah, that fits.” He put down his pen, looked up at us. “The doorman sent somebody up to her apartment last night around nine-thirty or ten. Guy gave the doorman his name and she said send him up.”

“If he gave the doorman his name—”

“Yeah, well, I think we’re lucky this particular genius remembers the mustache. And the flowers.”

“Flowers?”

“Which checks out, because we found fresh flowers in a vase on the mantel. He must have had his hands full, too, because he had to set something down on the floor so he could stroke his mustache while he was waiting for the elevator.”

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“It was more like he was grooming it. You know, like this.” He put his thumb and forefinger together in the center of his bare upper lip, then spread them apart. “Making sure he looked all right before he went upstairs. Anyway, that’s how come”—he checked his notes—

“how come Hector Ruiz noticed the mustache.” He looked at Elaine.

“That’s all she mentioned about his appearance? He dressed nicely and wore a mustache?”

“That’s all I can remember. She said he was a good lover. Very force-ful, very imaginative.”

“More than she knew.” She looked questioningly at him, and he said, “You’re going to get this anyway from the media, as much as we’d like to keep a lid on it. There’s evidence of ligatures on her wrists and ankles, and tape residue in the area of her mouth. Was she into that whole scene, would you happen to know?”

“She was a sophisticated woman of a certain age,” she told him.

“Living alone in Greenwich Village. I mean, you do the math.”

“Okay, but—”

She stopped him. “I don’t think she was kinky,” she said. “I don’t think she was into anything in particular. I think, you know, if she liked a guy and he wanted to do something, she wouldn’t run out of there screaming for her mother.”

“That’s just a figure of speech, right? Because what I’ve got is both parents are deceased.”

“Yes, a long time ago.”

“And no relatives that you know of.”

“She had a brother who died. There could be, I don’t know, an aunt or a cousin somewhere, but nobody I knew about. Nobody she kept in touch with.”

He said, “As far as her not being into bondage, S & M, whatever you want to call it, that would actually fit right in with our take on it.” To me he said, “I don’t know if you ever ran into this, but you must have if you worked this precinct. Anybody who’s at all serious about kink, they’ve got a closet full of gear, leather and rubber and masks and chains, you’d almost think the equipment’s more important to them than what they do with it. She didn’t have a thing, no handcuffs, no All the Flowers Are Dying

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whips, none of that garbage. Not that—” He stopped short, started to laugh. “You watch Seinfeld? I was starting to say ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with that.’ You remember that episode?”

“Sure.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make light. What it looks like, he brought along what he figured he’d need, and he took it away with him when he was done. Did she say he was neat? You’d have to say he was the neat-est heterosexual male on the planet. There was a bottle of liquor, an Italian after-dinner drink. I’ve got it written down here somewhere. It doesn’t matter, it’s just a bottle of fancy booze. We think he brought it with him, along with the flowers, and they each had a drink out of it, and he wiped the bottle and glasses before he left. He wiped everything, he didn’t leave a print in the whole damned apartment, as far as we’ve been able to tell. We’ll probably lift a partial somewhere or other before we’re done, we usually do, but I have to say I wouldn’t bet on it.”

“Because he was neat.”

“He even ran the vacuum cleaner. The downstairs neighbor heard it sometime around midnight. He wasn’t about to complain about it, it wasn’t that noisy, it was just unexpected at that hour. It was evidently out of character for her to vacuum in the middle of the night.”

“Or ever,” Elaine said. “She had a maid come in once a week, and vacuuming was something the maid did.”

“The maid probably didn’t take the vacuum cleaner bag with her when she left, either, like this guy did. She thought he was some kind of government agent? Well, if he wasn’t he could have been. He was really professional about not leaving anything behind that could be traced back to him. You know that TV show with the forensics? And then there’s another version set in Miami, but it’s not as good. The original one’s an excellent show, but I have to say I wish they’d take it off the air.”

“Because it gives people ideas?”

“No, the nut jobs out there, you don’t have to give them ideas. They come up with plenty all on their own. What it does, it makes them harder to catch. It tells them what kind of mistakes not to make.”

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“No, I don’t. I don’t know what I think about the guy. That was the spookiest crime scene I’ve ever seen. I don’t want to go into detail, and I’m sorry Mrs. Scudder has to hear this at all, but he tortured that woman a long time before he killed her. And then to leave the place immaculate, everything in apple-pie order, and her naked and dead in the middle of it, it was like that painter, that Frenchman . . .”

“Magritte,” she said.

“Yeah, that’s the one. Like, what’s wrong with this picture? I mean, if this is the man she’s been seeing, and it would almost have to be, given that he gave his name and she told the doorman to send him up. If he’s been dating her, and sleeping with her—they were sleeping together?”

“She said he was a good lover.”

“Right, you told me that. There are guys who go nuts, get hold of some poor woman and do a number on her. But they don’t date her first. Usually they pick a stranger, some hooker off the street or some poor woman who just winds up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Once in a while there’s one who thinks he’s having a relationship with the woman, but it’s only in the privacy of his own mind. Erotomania, that’s what they call it. It’s delusional, your perp thinks it’s dating but anybody else would call it stalking.”

He was right, it didn’t add up.

“It would help,” he said, “if either of you could remember anything else she might have let slip about the guy. Anything at all, like did he have a regional accent, was he educated or uneducated, even small things like was he a baseball fan, did he smell of cologne. You think something’s too trivial to mention, and then it matches up with something else and you’ve got a clue.”

“He drinks Scotch,” Elaine said.

“Now there’s something right there. She just happened to mention it?”

“She offered him a drink, and he asked for Scotch and she didn’t have any. So he had something else, but the next day she went out and bought a bottle of what I guess was really good Scotch. And she evidently made a good choice, because the next time he was over he said All the Flowers Are Dying

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it was really good, but he only had one small drink, and she was saying she wondered which would last longer, the relationship or the bottle.”

“The bottle,” Sussman said. “It’s still there, Glen Something-or-other.” He made a note. “Maybe he picked it up to pour a drink on a prior visit and forgot to wipe his prints off it last night. But I wouldn’t count on it. Still, that’s exactly the kind of thing to come up with. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if she let something slip having to do with his name. Give it a chance and it might come to you.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Strega,” he said suddenly. “Speaking of things coming to you.

That’s the name of the bottle he brought along. That’s one way we might catch him. It’s not exactly Georgi Vodka. If you’re a clerk in a liquor store, how often does somebody pop in for a bottle of Strega?”

“So you’ll canvass stores in the neighborhood.”

“We’ll start in the neighborhood and keep going. She didn’t give you any indication at all of where he lived? You can’t put him in any particular part of the city? Well, somebody sold him the Strega, and maybe the guy who did will actually be in the store when somebody drops in to ask, and maybe he’ll not only remember but he’ll decide it’s okay to cooperate with the police, that he won’t be infringing on his customer’s inalienable right of privacy and making himself vulnerable to a lawsuit.

Maybe Mr. Strega paid with a credit card, though that seems like too much to hope for. Maybe the store’s got security cameras installed, and maybe they actually work, and maybe we’ll actually get there before that night’s tapes are automatically recycled, though that’s a stretch. You don’t need to keep the tapes any length of time, because all you have to be able to do is ID the dirtbag who holds you up, not somebody who bought a bottle of high-priced booze from you a couple of nights ago.”

Monica’s apartment building was distinctive, which may have been why I’d recognized it right away when it showed up on New York One.

It’s on Jane Street in the northwest corner of the Village, a seventeen-story Art Deco building with a facade of yellow-brown brick, and elab-136

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orately sculpted lintels and cornices. We walked uptown on Hudson Street without saying much, and when Monica’s building, taller than its neighbors, hove into view, Elaine’s hand tightened its grip on mine.

By the time we were across the street from it she was crying.

She said, “If she ever did a bad thing I never knew it. She was never mean-spirited, she never hurt anybody. Never. She fucked some married men, big fucking deal, and she quit working once her parents died and left her enough money to live on. And sometimes she’d keep candy in her purse and eat it secretly, because she was ashamed and didn’t want you to know. And she probably gave more thought to her wardrobe than Mother Teresa ever did, which probably made her a more superficial person than Mother Teresa, and a lot more fun to hang out with. And those are the worst things I can think of to say about her, and they’re not so terrible, are they? They’re not bad enough to get you killed. Are they?”

“No.”

“I can’t look at her building. It makes me cry.”

“I’ll get us a cab.”

“No, let’s walk for a while. Can we walk for a while?” We walked north on Hudson, which becomes Ninth Avenue north of Fourteenth Street. We passed a trendy restaurant called Markt, and she said, “René Magritte wasn’t French, he was Belgian.”

“But you still knew he was the painter Sussman was talking about.”

“Because I got the same image in my mind, that surreal dissonance.

It’s daytime but the sky’s dark. Or that one with a picture of a pipe with a curved stem, and writing that says ‘This is not a pipe.’ Paradox.

The reason I just thought of it now—”

“Is that Markt is a Belgian restaurant.”

“Yeah, and so’s the little place across the street on Fourteenth, La Petite Something-or-other. Monica liked it, they’ve got all these different ways to cook mussels, and she was always crazy about mussels. You know what they look like?”

“Mussels? Sort of like clams.”

“Up close,” she said, “after you take them out of the shell. They look like pussies.”

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“Oh.”

“I told her it was her latent lesbianism shining through. We were going to have lunch there but we never got around to it. And now we never will.”

“You haven’t had anything to eat today,” I said.

“I don’t want to go there.”

“Not there,” I agreed. “But should we stop someplace?”

“I couldn’t eat.”

“Okay.”

“It wouldn’t stay down. But if you’re hungry . . .”

“I’m not.”

“Well, if you decide you want something, we can stop. But I’ve got no appetite.”

We walked a few blocks in silence, and then she said, “People die all the time.”

“Yes.”

“It’s what happens. The longer you live the more people you lose.

That’s how the world works.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I may be a little nuts for the next few days.”

“That’s okay.”

“Or longer. I wasn’t ready for this.”

“No.”

“How could I be? I figured I’d always have her. I figured we’d be cranky old ladies together. She’s the only friend I have who knows I used to turn tricks. I just got the tenses wrong, didn’t I? She was the only friend I had who knew I used to turn tricks. She’s in the past tense now, isn’t she? She’s part of the past, she’s gone forever from the present and the future. I think I have to sit down.” There was a Latino coffee shop handy. They had Cuban sandwiches and I don’t know what else, because neither of us looked at the menu. I ordered two coffees, and she told the waiter to make hers a cup of tea.

“She was never the slightest bit judgmental. She was interested but not fascinated, and she didn’t see anything wrong with it, or wrong 138

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with me for having spent those years that way. Who else even knows, who else that’s still in my life? You and Danny Boy, who knew me then.

And TJ. I can’t think of anybody else.”

“No.”

“Listen to me, will you? I’m making this all about me. My God, he tortured her. She must have been so frightened. I can’t imagine it, and I can’t stop imagining it. I don’t think I can handle this, baby.”

“You’re handling it right now.”

“This is handling it? I don’t know. Maybe it is.” I drank half my coffee, and she had a couple of sips of tea, and we went outside and walked uptown for a few more blocks. Then she said she was ready to take a cab, and I managed to flag one.

On the ride home she said one word. “Why,” she said, and there was no question mark in her voice. She didn’t sound as though she expected an answer, and God knows I didn’t have one.

She sat down at her computer and spent an hour working on a paid obituary notice for the Times, then printed it out and brought it to me to see if I thought it was all right. Before I could read it she took it back and started tearing it up. She said, “What am I, crazy? I don’t need to run an ad to tell the people she’s gone. The papers and TV’ll take care of that. By this time tomorrow everybody she ever knew is going to know what happened to her, along with the rest of the world.” She went over to the window and looked through it. We’re on the fourteenth floor, and we used to be able to see the World Trade Center towers from our south window. Now, of course, they’re not there to be seen, but for months afterward I’d find her at that window, looking out at their absence.

Around six the doorman called up to announce TJ. She burst into tears when she saw him and he gave her a hug. “You must be hungry,” she told him, and turned to me. “You, too. Have you had anything to eat since breakfast?”

I hadn’t.

“We have to eat,” she announced. “Is pasta all right? And a salad?” We said it was fine.

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“It’s all I ever make. God, I’m boring. How can you stand me? I cook the same meal all the fucking time, the only thing that varies is the shape of the pasta. Maybe I should start cooking meat. Just because I decided to be a vegetarian doesn’t mean the two of you can’t have meat.”

I said, “Why don’t you just make us all some pasta.”

“Thank you,” she said. “That’s what I’ll do.” I hadn’t intended to go to a meeting, but when the time came Elaine suggested it. I said I’d just as soon stay home. She said, “Go. TJ and I are going to play cards. Do you know how to play gin rummy?”

“Sure.”

“How about cribbage?”

“Yeah, a little bit.”

“That’s no good, then. Casino? You know how to play casino?”

“I used to play with my gran.”

“Did she let you win?”

“Are you kidding? She’d cheat if she had to.”

“I bet she didn’t have to. There must be a card game you don’t know.

How about pinochle?”

“Takes three players, don’t it?”

“I’m talking two-handed pinochle,” she said. “It’s a completely different game. You don’t know how to play it?”

“I never even heard of it.”

“Perfect,” she said. “That means I can teach you. Matt, go to a meeting.”

They’ve got a men’s meeting on Wednesdays at St. Columba’s, a small church on West Twenty-fifth Street. It’s specifically for men over forty, and it’s almost exclusively gay men who attend, although that’s not a requirement. The demographics of the neighborhood support its makeup. It’s in Chelsea, where most of the male population is gay, if not over forty.

I could have gone to my regular meeting at St. Paul’s, five minutes from my front door, but for some reason I didn’t want familiar faces, 140

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and people asking how it was going. It wasn’t going well, and I didn’t want to talk about it.

There’s a bus that goes down Ninth Avenue, but I just missed it and took a cab, which made this a banner day for cabs, if for little else.

They were reading the preamble as I got there, and had already taken the collection. I decided they could probably make the rent without my dollar, and I helped myself to a cup of coffee and found a seat. The speaker, dressed and groomed like an ad in GQ, told a story of solitary drinking at the Four Seasons bar, where he’d try to catch the eye of another unaccompanied gentleman, then repair to a wonderfully louche establishment across the street and hope his prospect would follow. If not, he’d just stay there and get drunk. “We were all so deep in the closet back then,” he said, “we had marks from the coat hangers. You’d have thought Joan Crawford was our mother.” After he’d finished, they went around the room instead of asking for a show of hands. By the time it was my turn, I’d already said everything I had to say, albeit in the privacy of my own mind. “My name’s Matt,” I said, “and I’m an alcoholic. I really enjoyed your qualification. I think I’ll just listen tonight.”

A little later a voice I knew said, “I’m really glad I got here tonight.

It’s not a regular meeting of mine, but I see a few familiar faces here.

And I got a lot out of your story. My name’s Abie and I’m an alcoholic.” He went on to talk about having to put in long hours lately, and missing meetings, and how he had to remember that his sobriety has to come first. “If I lose that, then I lose everything that goes with it,” he said.

It wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard a few thousand times over the years, but it didn’t hurt me any to hear it again.

He caught up with me on the way out. “My first time here,” he said.

“I didn’t even know it was a special-interest meeting.”

“Men over forty.”

“I knew that part from the listing in the book. What I didn’t know is everybody was gay.”

“Not everybody was.”

“Except for thee and me,” he said, and grinned. “I don’t mind gay All the Flowers Are Dying

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people, in fact I enjoy the energy in a room full of gay men. But I wasn’t expecting it.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I thought.

“Matt? I was surprised when you didn’t share tonight.”

“Well, I’m not in the same class with William the Silent,” I said, “but I don’t feel compelled to say something just because it’s my turn.”

“Except you looked as though you had something you wanted to get out.”

“Oh?”

“Like you had something gnawing at you.” He touched my shoulder.

“You want to go get some coffee?”

“I had two cups here tonight. I think that’s enough coffee for me.”

“Something to eat, then.”

“I don’t think so, Abie.”

“My first sponsor used to say we were people who couldn’t afford the luxury of keeping things to ourselves.”

“It’s probably a good thing he wasn’t in the CIA, then.”

“I suppose, but the point—”

“I think I get the point.”

He stepped back, frowning, and pinched his upper lip, a physical tic I’d seen him make before. “Look, I didn’t mean any harm,” he said. “I guess you’d rather be alone tonight.”

I didn’t tell him otherwise.

I took another cab, and got one with loud Arab music on the radio. I told the driver to turn it down. He looked at me, and I guess he saw something on my face that kept him from arguing. He turned it down and off, and we rode home in a welcome if stony silence.

The pinochle game was still in progress when I walked in the door. I asked who was winning, and Elaine made a face and pointed across the table. “He swears he never played the game before,” she said, “and it hurts me to think such a sweet young man could lie like a rug.”

“Never did,” he said.

“Then how come you could sit there and beat my brains out?”

“You just a good teacher, is all.”

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“That must be it.” She gathered the cards. “Go home. You’re an angel for keeping me company, even if you didn’t have the decency to let me win. Wait a minute. Are you hungry? Do you want a cookie?” He shook his head.

“You sure? I baked them myself, using the name ‘Mrs. Fields.’ ” He shook his head again, and she gave him a hug and let him go.

She put the cards away and went to the window again, the one that no longer had a view of the towers. She sighed and turned from it to me and said, “I’ve been thinking. She had other friends besides me. No one else was as close, but there were other women she’d meet for lunch, or talk to on the phone.”

“There’d have to be.”

“She might have let something slip about this guy. I mean, she told me he drinks Scotch and has a mustache. She might have said something else to somebody else.”

“And if you gather the somethings together, a picture might emerge.”

“Well, don’t you think it’s possible?”

“I know it’s possible,” I said, “and so will Sussman. They’ll go through her address or her Rolodex, whatever she had, and they’ll check out every listing. He might be in there, as far as that goes. Just because she wouldn’t say his name doesn’t mean he didn’t give her one. If he also gave her a number, it’ll be in her book.”

“You think they’ll get him that way?”

I didn’t, but I said it was possible.

“All right, here’s another thing I was thinking. She might have gone back to her shrink. She stopped therapy years ago, but she’s been back a few times for a couple of sessions here and a couple of sessions there. And I remember having the feeling recently that she might have gone back. I don’t know what triggered it, but it was a feeling I got.”

“And she might have said something about the guy to the therapist?”

“Well, you know, if she can’t feel free to say anything to anybody else . . .”

“That’s a point.”

“But would the shrink say anything? Isn’t everything you tell your shrink privileged?”

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I said it was, but that there was a gray area here. When the patient was dead and the investigation was trying to uncover the killer, that would override doctor-patient privilege for some physicians, and not for others.

“Her shrink’s name is Brigitte Dufy. She’s French, she’s got the same last name as the painter Raoul Dufy, and she may even be a relative. I know Monica asked her but I don’t remember what the answer was. As if it matters. She grew up around here, her father was a sous-chef at the Brittany du Soir. You remember that place?”

“Yes, of course.”

“It was terrific, I wonder what happened to it. One day it was just gone. Anyway, Brigitte grew up here with a neighborhood accent that was solid Hell’s Kitchen Irish. Monica liked to call her Bridget Duffy.

They’ll probably find her name in Monica’s address book, but maybe not. You know how when you copy an address book you don’t bother transferring the names of people who’ve dropped out of your life? Because why bother, since you’re not going to call them again? Well, if she’d stopped therapy . . .”

I said I’d mention it to Sussman in the morning.

“I can’t stand that she’s gone,” she said. “But I’ll get used to it. That’s what life is, getting used to people dying. But I can’t stand the thought of somebody doing this to her and getting away with it. And I don’t want to get used to it.”

“They’ll get him.”

“You promise?”

How could I promise something like that? Then again, how could I deny her?

“I promise.”

“Is there anything you can do?”

“Besides get in everybody’s way? I don’t know. I’ll see if I can come up with anything.”

“I don’t expect you to get out there and find him,” she said. “Except, see, the thing is I do. You’re my hero, you know. You always have been.”

“I think you’d be better off with Spider-man.”

“No,” she said. “No, I’m happy with the choice I made.”

17

In a Kinko’s on Columbus Avenue, he sits at a computer terminal, where a small hourly fee provides him with utterly anonymous Internet access.

He goes to the Yahoo website and, at no cost and in a matter of minutes, he opens an account with a user name that is just a meaningless jumble of letters and numbers. It would be difficult to remember, but he won’t need to remember it because he’ll never use it again. It’s a one-time-only account, almost certainly untraceable, but if they trace it they won’t get any farther than this computer, open to the public and used by dozens of people every day.

He remembers wondering how anyone was ever caught and convicted a century ago, in the absence of forensics. But didn’t science aid the criminal with one hand while it aided the criminologist with the other? He’d come across a line somewhere that had always struck him as the perfect explanation of Darwinian evolution: If you build a better mousetrap, Nature will build a better mouse.

He meditates upon this principle for a spell, then brings himself reluctantly back to the present moment. He clicks on write mail and begins typing:

I am writing to you because it troubles me to think of the unfortunate parents of Jeffrey Willis, for whose murder Preston Applewhite recently paid the ultimate penalty. Hard as All the Flowers Are Dying

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it is to lose a son, it must be harder still when his body is never recovered. One hates the thought of one’s own flesh and blood lying forever in an unmarked grave, although, on reflection, I can’t see that I’d much prefer lying in a marked grave. It is, I should think, one and the same to the person lying there.

Still, it seems only right for me to tell you that the spirit of Preston Applewhite (may all curse his memory!) came to me last night in a spirit of profound contrition. “You must tell the good people at the Richmond Times-Dispatch,” it said, in an appropriately spectral tone, “that I deeply regret what I’ve done, and seek to make amends by telling you just where to look for all that remains of the Willis boy.” And here is where it said to look. . . .

He writes out detailed instructions, creating a perfect verbal treasure map that will lead whoever follows it to the very spot in the old family graveyard where he had such a pleasant time with young Jeffrey, who’d not had a terribly pleasant time of it himself. It brings it all back for him, and he’s tempted to add a precise description of Jeffrey’s last moments, but that would be inconsistent with the letter’s content and tone.

Though it would surely be fun. He’s reminded of Albert Fish, the de-ranged cannibal who murdered young children and ate them. After killing and devouring one Grace Budd, he wrote a note to her parents describing the murder and attesting to their daughter’s succulence on the dinner table. But, he swore to them, “I never fucked her. She died a virgin.” A Budd never forced to bloom, he thinks. How reassuring that must have been for the elder Budds!

You will think at first that this is a hoax, for how could any intelligent person think otherwise? But you can hardly fail to send out a couple of men with a couple of shovels, if there’s the slightest possibility that Jeffrey’s bones (for the 146

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rest of him surely has long since rotted away) are where the spirit has said they are.

When you find them, as surely you shall, you and your readers and the appropriate authorities will have much to ponder. Are you to believe in spirits and their revelations?

Or has someone made a grievous error?

I trust you’ll forgive my not signing this. I have lately learned the importance of anonymity. It is, to be sure, the spiritual foundation of all our traditions.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch has a website, of course, where he’d found the city editor’s e-mail address. He enters that in the appropriate space and sits for several minutes, the cursor poised over the send button. To send it or not, that is the question, and there is no obvious answer. The whole matter of Preston Applewhite has been resolved in a most satisfactory manner, which argues mightily for leaving well enough alone.

On the other hand, it seems to him that it would be more interesting to send the message, to stir the pot, to see what happens. For something will most certainly happen, whereas if he leaves well enough alone, why, nothing will happen, nothing beyond what has happened already.

And interest is everything, isn’t it?

But he’s not too sure of that last paragraph. It will strike a chord with some of the people who read it, and send them rushing madly off in several wrong directions, but it’s really just a private joke, and would deprive him of an opportunity to sign his work. He highlights the last paragraph, hits delete, thinks for a moment, and replaces it with this: I’ll leave you to your work, dear friends, even as I return to my own. I’ll be abandoning my present e-mail address forth-with, so I regret that you’ll be unable to contact me. Should I have occasion to communicate further, I’ll do so from an-All the Flowers Are Dying

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other e-mail address, which, alas, will be as untraceable as this one. But you’ll know me by my signature; I have the honor to be, sir, your most obedient servant, Abel Baker

He smiles his rueful smile, and hits the send button.

He rather likes New York.

He has lived here before, for several years, and he would have stayed longer if circumstances hadn’t compelled him to leave. At the time those circumstances looked like a turn of bad luck, but attitude is everything, as he often says, and he was wise enough to will himself to regard what looked like adversity as opportunity. Hasn’t his exile from New York given him a chance to see something of the country? Hasn’t it furnished him with any number of grand adventures, culminating so recently in the remarkable affair of Preston Applewhite?

When he left, the Twin Towers stood proudly at the foot of Manhattan. He wonders sometimes what it would have been like to be present in the city when it suffered such an unfathomable blow.

That day’s loss of life has no great personal impact upon him. What he does wonder at, though, and what does inspire him, is the awesome power of the man who pulled the strings, the puppet master who convinced his followers to fly planes into buildings. It bespoke an enviable talent for manipulation.

He’s done some manipulation himself. When he lived here he was no mean hand at it, although no subject of his ever did anything all that dra-matic. Still, his people were bright, and success demanded his employing a sort of psychological jujitsu; he won by using their own mental strength against them.

He has been walking as he’s had these thoughts, and he notes with some delight that his steps and his thoughts have brought him to the same place, a house on West Seventy-fourth Street. He was on the outside of this house on many occasions, and inside it once. There were three other 148

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people with him on that occasion, and he killed two of them right here, in this very house, one with a gun and one with a knife, and killed the third an hour later in a house several miles to the south.

He’d thought at the time that the house would be his reward, that the killings would make it his. He thought that was what he wanted, a fine brownstone house a block from Central Park.

He’d thought that was why he killed.

How much freer he is now that he knows the truth about himself!

He’d wondered, on his return to the city, if this house would even still be standing. Years ago, downtown on West Eleventh Street, one brownstone in a row of brownstones had simply disappeared. The place had been a bomb factory for student radicals, owned by the parents of one of them, and how better to fulfill their unconscious motivations than by blowing up a parental home? Wasn’t that, all things considered, the un-derlying purpose of their politics?

By the time he first came to New York, the house had already been replaced. The new structure, sized to match its neighbors, looks to have been given a twist by its architect, with a section jutting out at an oblique angle from the rest of the facade. The ostensible purpose, he knows, was to wed the contemporary to the traditional, but he senses a deeper explanation, a desire to let the plosive force that gutted the first building express itself in its successor.

But there had been no bomb factory here on West Seventy-fourth Street, and so there is no reason for this fine house to have disappeared, merely because it has ceased to hold a place in his day-to-day consciousness. It still stands, and the same young woman still occupies it, all but the lowest floor, where the same old woman, older now, maintains the same undistinguished antique shop.

He thinks of another shop, of the letter opener he bought there. Of the woman who sold it to him, calling it a paper knife. The term itself, he thinks, could be ambiguous, meaning either a knife to cut paper or a knife made of paper. Or a knife in name only, like a paper tiger.

Gone now, whatever you called it. Oh, it still exists, even as the house still exists, but it’s no longer part of his life.

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Is this house part of his life? Does it, like so much else here in this ex-traordinary city, come under the heading of Unfinished Business?

He’ll have to think about that.

On his way home he stands for a few moments directly across the street from another much larger building, this one on the southeast corner of Fifty-seventh and Ninth. There’s a doorman on duty twenty-four hours a day, and there are security cameras in the elevators and the lobby. Still, how difficult a hindrance are they likely to prove? Created and installed and maintained by men, surely they can be subverted by a man.

But it’s not yet time.

He walks home. He sometimes thinks of himself as a hermit crab, taking up homes and discarding them when he outgrows them. The shelter that suits him now, his home for the present, consists of three rooms on the top floor of a tenement on Fifty-third Street west of Tenth Avenue.

The building shows some of the effects of gentrification. Its brick facade has been repointed, its halls and stairways renovated, its vestibule entirely redone. Many of the apartments have been done over, too, as their occupants have moved or died off, replaced by new tenants paying full market value rents. Only a few of the old rent-controlled tenants are left, and one of them, Mrs. Laskowski, probably doesn’t have much time left. She’s fifty pounds overweight and diabetic, and suffers as well from something that makes her joints ache in bad weather. But she’s out there on the front stoop, smoking a malodorous little Italian cigar, when he mounts the steps.

“Well, hello,” she says. “How’s your uncle?”

“I was just visiting him.”

“I wish I could, I’ll tell you that. You see somebody for so many years, you miss seeing them. It’s a shame you couldn’t get them to take him at St.

Clare’s. My cousin Marie was at St. Clare’s, God rest her soul, and I was able to visit her every single day until she passed.” And what a rare treat that must have been.

“They’re taking good care of him at the VA,” he reminds her. “The best possible, and it’s all free of charge.”

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“I never even knew he was in the service.”

“Oh, yes, and very proud to have served. But he didn’t like to talk about those days.”

“He never said a word on the subject. The Veterans, that’s up in the Bronx, isn’t it?”

“Kingsbridge Road.”

“I don’t even know where that is. I guess it’s a long ride on the subway.”

“You have to change trains,” he says, “and then it’s a long walk when you finally do get there.” He has no idea if this is true, he’s only been to the Bronx once, and that was years ago. “And visiting him can be difficult. Today he didn’t know me.”

“You went all that way and he didn’t know you.”

“Well, you have to take the bitter with the sweet, Mrs. L. And you know what my uncle always used to say. ‘You get what you get.’ ” He climbs the stairs, lets himself into the apartment, locks the door.

The apartment is run-down and shabby. He’d have cheerfully hired someone to clean it, but that could have caused talk, and so he’d done it himself as best he could, scrubbing the floors and walls, spraying air freshener. But one can only do so much, and the place still holds the stench of fifty years of Joe Bohan’s cigarettes, mingled with the persistent aroma of Joe Bohan himself, a man who lived alone and evidently never made too much of a thing of personal hygiene.

Still, in a city where even the shabbiest hotel room is ridiculously expensive, there’s much to be said for a free apartment, especially one so close to so much of his unfinished business.

In a delicatessen on Tenth Avenue, where he’d stopped for a sandwich and a cup of coffee, he’d heard two old men talking about poor Joe Bohan, who wasn’t getting out much anymore. Always kept to himself, one man said, but a nicer guy you wouldn’t want to meet.

He’d found a Joseph Bohan listed in the phone book. He called the number, and a man with a scratchy voice answered. No, the man said, there was no Mary Eileen Bohan at that address. He was an old man, he lived by himself. Close relatives? No, none at all. But there were lots of Bohans, although he didn’t remember hearing of a Mary Eileen.

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up and moved out of the room he’d been living in, an overpriced flophouse a few blocks from Penn Station. He mounted the stoop on West Fifty-third with a suitcase in each hand, rang the buzzer marked bohan, and climbed to the third floor, where an unshaven old wreck stood in the doorway, wearing a gray nightshirt and at least a week’s worth of body odor.

“Uncle Joe? I’m your nephew Al, come all this way to see you.” The old man was confused, but let him inside. He was smoking a cigarette, sucking on it as if it were a breathing tube connected to an oxygen tank, and spitting out questions between puffs. Whose son is he, then? Is he Neil’s boy? And what’s in the suitcases? And is he alive, Neil? He’d thought his brother was dead, thought he’d died without ever marrying.

The old man was wheezing, unsteady on his feet. There were two growths on his faced that looked cancerous, and his color was bad, and God above did he ever stink. He took hold of Bohan, one hand cupping the bristly chin, the other grasping the bony shoulder, and had little trouble snapping the old man’s neck. How nice when the expedient act was humane as well!

Over the next several days he let the building’s other tenants get used to him, while he made the place his own, getting rid of the old man’s clothes and possessions even as he got rid of the old man himself. Every day he’d haul a few trash bags down the stairs and out the door. Cleaning up, he told the neighbors. These past few years, my uncle never threw anything out. It’s hard for him, you know.

Some bags he left at the curb for the trash pickup. Others, containing pieces of the old man’s body, couldn’t be discarded quite so casually. He’d put the corpse in the tub, drained it of its fluids, and cut it into portable chunks with a bone saw from a Ninth Avenue kitchen supply store. Por-tions of Joe Bohan, wrapped up like cuts of meat, he carried a few at a time across the West Side Highway to the Hudson. If they ever surface—

and that’s unlikely, as there won’t be any gases to lessen their specific gravity—he can’t imagine that anyone will make anything of them. And, if by some forensic miracle they do, the hermit crab will have long since outgrown his shell, along with the name of Aloysius Bohan.

Once the last physical remnant of Joe Bohan was gone, except for his enduring odor, he let the word out that he’d taken his uncle to the hospi-152

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tal. “I tried nursing him myself,” he told Mrs. Laskowski, “but I can’t give him the care he needs. Last night I got him downstairs and into a cab and we rode clear up to the VA. Cab cost a fortune, but what are you going to do? I’m all he’s got in the world. He wants me to stay here until he comes home from the hospital. I’m supposed to be in San Francisco, I’ve got a job offer out there, but I can’t just leave him here. He’s my uncle.” And that was that.

Now he sits at the kitchen table, its top scarred by hundreds of Joe Bohan’s neglected cigarettes. He touches his upper lip, then frowns, an-noyed with himself. Habits, he thinks, take so little time to form, so much longer to break. He boots up his computer, which has sole claim on Joe Bohan’s phone line. The dial-up connection is slow today, and he’d love to install a DSL line, but that’s out of the question.

Well, perhaps he won’t need to be here too much longer.

18

TJ said, “You already thought of this, and it don’t make sense anyway, but if I don’t say it I ain’t never gonna get it out of my head.”

“Okay.”

“You most likely know what’s coming.”

We were at the Morning Star. He’d called and asked me to meet him there, and I’d walked away from a much better cup of coffee than the one I was drinking now.

“I might,” I said.

“Gonna make me say it all the same. ’Kay. There any chance at all that David Thompson and Monica’s killer are the same person?”

“The chief thing they’ve got in common,” I said, “is that you and I don’t know who they are or how to find them.”

“More’n that.”

“Oh?”

“Both got a mustache.”

“Maybe they’re both Hitler, and he didn’t die in the bunker after all. Look at the timing and you’ll see they’re not the same person.

Thompson—that’s probably not his name, but we’ve got to call him something. Thompson was with Louise Monday night from the time she met him at the restaurant until he got away from us a little before midnight.”

“And?”

“And it was around nine-thirty or ten when he showed up in the 154

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lobby of Monica’s building, according to Sussman, who got it from the doorman.”

“That was Tuesday. Night before last, right?”

“Jesus, you’re right.”

“Wouldn’t be much of a stretch to get downtown in what, twenty-two hours?”

I shook my head. “He was there Monday night, too,” I said. “With Monica. She told Elaine.”

“He saw her Monday and Tuesday, then. We sure of that?”

“We can’t call Monica and ask her. But yes, we’re sure.”

“But we don’t know what time. We got a time check for Tuesday, him comin’ and goin’, but not for Monday.” I thought about it, nodded slowly.

“So he leaves Louise at a quarter of twelve, an’ we know the first thing he does is whip out his cell an’ make a call.”

“To Monica, inviting himself over. But if I remember what Elaine said, he already had a date planned for Monday with Monica.”

“ ‘Sorry, honey, but I’m running a little late. Be over soon’s I can.’ ”

“He was a sharp dresser, according to Monica. Did David Thompson look like he fit Monica’s definition of a sharp dresser?”

“Was jeans an’ a polo shirt, wasn’t it?”

“Personally,” I said, “I can’t quite see our guy showing up on Jane Street with flowers and a bottle of Strega.” I pictured him coming out of Louise’s building. “He lit a cigarette,” I remembered. “That was one thing she established online, before she met the guy. That he was a smoker, because if he wasn’t she didn’t want any part of him.”

“So?”

“Monica was an ex-smoker, and she hated to be in the same room with a lit cigarette. She had that heightened sensitivity people seem to develop when they’ve been away from tobacco for a few years. If he was a heavy smoker—”

“We don’t know about the heavy part. Maybe he just made sure to light one up when he was around Louise, to keep her happy.”

“And the minute he walks out of her building, he lights up another for show?”

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“See what you mean. Who you callin’?”

“A cop,” I said. Sussman had given us his card, and I was punching the number into my cell phone. When I got him on the line I identified myself and said I had just one question. Was there any indication that anyone might have smoked a cigarette in Monica Driscoll’s apartment?

“Why?”

I couldn’t blame him. That would have been my response if our roles were reversed. Still, I’d have been happier if he hadn’t asked.

“I’ve been looking into something for a friend,” I said. “She’s got no connection to Monica, nothing in common, except that there’s a mystery man in her life. I haven’t had much luck finding out anything about him, in fact he’s been damned elusive, and—”

“And you thought maybe they were one and the same.”

“No,” I said, “I thought and continue to think that they’re not, but if I can make one phone call and rule it out altogether—”

“I get you. I take it you know for a fact whether or not this second guy smokes.”

“I know for a fact that he does.”

“And Ms. Driscoll didn’t?”

“And had strong feelings on the subject.” He said he’d get back to me and rang off. TJ asked about Elaine. I said she’d been out the door that morning before I’d made it to the kitchen, that it was one of her gym days. I said I figured it was a good sign that she went, because I was pretty sure she hadn’t felt like it.

Something like that, he said, that was the secret to it. You had to do it all the time, not just on the days you felt like it. I told him staying sober was like that.

“Last night,” he said, “she’d be sad an’ cry from time to time, and then it’d pass, you know, and her mind’d be on the card game. You know how to play pinochle?”

“No.”

“Well, she could teach you. She can teach a game real good. It’s an okay game. All you got in the world is two people an’ a deck of cards, you could get by with it. Course it’d have to be a pinochle deck, so 156

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you’d need two decks of cards to make it. You take two decks, an’ you don’t use from deuce through eight, just nine on up to ace.”

“I’m really glad you’re telling me all this.”

“Yeah, well, it be just the two of us an’ we ain’t even got a deck of cards, and we’s waiting for the damn phone to ring. But I guess you don’t need to hear all this shit about pinochle.”

“No, it’s all right.”

“Thing is, even when she was fine, playing cards and joking, it was there, you know? This deep-down sadness, kind that runs clear to the bone.”

Sussman said, “You’d think it would be a simple question to answer.

This age of science we live in, where you can multiply your date of birth by the change in your pocket and feed the result into a computer, and it tells you what you ate for breakfast. Did anybody smoke a cigarette in the apartment where the murder took place? What’s so tricky about that?”

“I gather it wasn’t that simple.”

“First of all,” he said, “the son of a bitch was a neatnik. I believe I told you he vacuumed, in addition to wiping every surface but the ceiling. So there wouldn’t be any cigarette butts lying around, or any ashes in the ashtrays. Something I didn’t notice at the time, but I can tell you now, is there weren’t any ashtrays in the place, period. So it’s pretty clear she wasn’t a smoker, and didn’t have regular company that smoked.”

“She wasn’t and didn’t.”

“Now he could have been a smoker and not smoked in her apartment, out of respect for her wishes.”

“I suppose,” I said, “but when he had her tied up and started tortur-ing her, I wouldn’t think respect would play much of a role.”

“No, you’re absolutely right. She’s tied up with tape on her mouth, first thing he’d do is light one up. And most likely use her for an ashtray, far as that goes, and that’s one thing I can tell you we didn’t find.”

“Burn marks.”

“He worked her over pretty good. I didn’t want to go into detail in All the Flowers Are Dying

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front of your wife, but this guy was a fucking animal. If he’d had a cigarette going, we’d have seen evidence on the corpse.”

“You don’t smoke yourself.”

“No, I never started.”

“When you walked into the crime scene—”

“I’ve been asking myself the same question. Did I smell smoke? I didn’t notice, but would I? I can’t answer that. Plus my partner and I weren’t the first people there. A pair of uniforms responded to the 911

call and were first on the scene. She hadn’t been dead that long, so there wasn’t the intense odor of advanced decomposition that develops over time, but you know the things that happen. The bowels let go, the bladder lets go. You know right away you’re not in a perfume factory.”

“So one of the blues might have lit a cigarette.”

“They’re not supposed to,” he said, “but people do it. To mask the smell and just because you’re standing around and there’s a dead body there and it’s the middle of the night and you’re a smoker and you want a cigarette so you light one up. But I didn’t notice the smell of smoke, and neither did my partner, and I’ve got a call in to ask the two uniforms if they noticed the smell of smoke when they went in, but if they’re smokers all bets are off.”

“If they say no, they’re too used to it to notice. If they say yes, they might be lying to cover up their own smoking.”

“You know how a cop thinks,” he said with approval. “Long and short of it, strongest argument is he’s not a smoker because he didn’t put out his cigarettes on her. And now that we’ve ruled your guy out, suppose you tell me who he is and how to get ahold of him.”

“Now that we’ve ruled him out.”

“Right.”

I told him I had a problem with that. I’d be compromising my client’s interests. She’d wanted a confidential investigation of a new boyfriend, just to make sure he didn’t have an arrest record or a wife in Mamaroneck, and the last thing she’d want me to do was put the guy front and center in a murder investigation.

He said, “I thought you were looking into something for a friend.

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Now she’s a client. You licensed? You working for an attorney? If not, there’s no privilege here.”

“I never said there was. If I thought for a minute there was a possible connection—”

“You must have, or you wouldn’t have raised the issue. You had enough of a feeling about the guy to call me, and I spent the better part of an hour on it, so where do you get off holding out?”

“You’re right,” I said, “but I haven’t got anything to give you. His name is David Thompson, except that may not be his name. Now you know everything I know.”

“Not everything. Who’s your client?”

“No,” I said. “Privilege or no, I’m not giving you that. I’ll talk to her, and if it’s okay with her I’ll give you the name. But do you really want to send the investigation in this direction? If you want to start checking out every guy who may have lied to a woman . . .”

“Let’s leave it that you’ll talk to her.” That’s where we left it, but as soon as I’d rung off I remembered something that had been sticking in the back of my mind. I called him right back. “The 911 call,” I said. “You said middle of the night?”

“Well, not quite. Four in the morning. Close enough to the middle of the night, although I guess it would have been ten or eleven in the morning in Prague.”

“The call came from Prague?”

“It might as well have. Didn’t show up on Caller ID, and when we checked the LUDS we got an unregistered cell phone.”

“They record the 911 calls, don’t they?”

“Oh, absolutely, and it’s all on tape. Or digital, I guess. Everything’s digital nowadays.”

Even fingers and toes. “Somebody called in at four in the morning.

You said ‘he.’ The caller was male?”

“Probably. It’s hard to tell too much from a whisper.”

“He whispered? Unless they refined the technology, that means no voiceprint ID.”

“That’s true, as far as I know.”

“So it was him. He phoned it in himself.” All the Flowers Are Dying

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“That’s the working assumption,” he said. “Whispered to prevent identification. Or he just didn’t want to wake his wife by talking loud, but somehow I don’t think that was it.”

“What did he say?”

“ ‘There’s a woman who’s been murdered,’ plus the address and apartment number. Operator tried to keep him on the line but he slipped the hook and swam away. Calls like that, it’s usually mischief, some drunk wants to send a cop on a wild goose chase, or he’s looking to wake up some schmuck he’s got a beef with. But you got to check it out, so the two uniforms went and got the doorman to ring the apartment, and got a key from him when there was no answer. And walked in on more than they expected to find.”

“He wanted the body found,” I said.

“It does look that way, doesn’t it?”

“He wanted it found right away. He knocked himself out to get rid of the evidence, he ran the vacuum cleaner. If you were him, wouldn’t you want her to lie there undiscovered for as long as possible?”

“If I were him I’d do the world a favor and cut my fucking throat.

But I had the same thought myself. The guy’s not all of a piece. He’s inconsistent.”

“Like a Magritte painting,” I remembered.

“Well, kind of. This part wouldn’t show up in a painting, it’s not visual, but it’s the same kind of inconsistency. It clashes.” Elaine had called it dissonance.

“I don’t know, maybe you can’t expect consistency from a crazy man, but this guy’s off the chart. It’s somewhere between Magritte and a turd in a punch bowl, which was an image I thought of yesterday and decided to keep to myself.”

“Thanks for sharing.”

“Yeah, right. I don’t know why he called it in. Unless he was proud of his work and didn’t want it to go unnoticed.”

“And four in the morning, well, he can’t sleep, he’s got nothing else to do . . .”

“It may be a mistake trying to figure him out. Still, how can you keep from trying? I don’t know if it’s enough to call it a pattern, but 160

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you could almost say the bastard’s consistently inconsistent. Like with the murder weapon.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“Taking everything else,” he said, “and leaving behind the one thing most killers would take along. Didn’t I tell you? He left the knife sticking in her chest. He stabbed her in the heart and left it there.”

“Jesus. No, you didn’t mention this yesterday.”

“Again, probably out of deference to your wife. You don’t want to be too graphic. It’s something, though, wouldn’t you say?”

“It seems completely out of character. Any chance you’ll be able to trace it?”

“Well, I think that’s why he didn’t mind leaving it. We can trace it all we want and all it’s going to lead is right back to her apartment. I called it a knife just now, but it’s more along the lines of a dagger, and probably a ceremonial one. It’s decorative, and to look at it you wouldn’t think of it as a weapon, not until you saw what he did with it. I guess he must have liked the looks of it. Either he forgot to bring a weapon or he figured he’d pick something out of her knife drawer, and he saw this on the desk or coffee table, wherever she kept it. It’s nice looking, if you owned it you’d leave it out where people could see it. And he certainly did that. He left it sticking straight up in the air with the tip in her heart.”

19

“I guess you’ll want to get upstairs,” I said. “Don’t you have to see how your stocks are doing?”

“Got no stocks.”

“You got wiped out?”

“Wiped myself out,” he said. “Do that once a day. Way the game is played.”

He explained it for me. Ideally, a day trader started and ended the day with nothing in his account but cash. Whatever he bought during the day’s trading, he sold before the closing bell. Whatever stocks he’d shorted, he covered. Win or lose, plus or minus, he faced a fresh slate each morning. I told him it’s a shame the rest of life’s not like that.

“There’s stocks I keep an eye on,” he said. “Charts I study. Make a dollar here, lose a dollar there. Commission be the same on each transaction, whether you a high roller or playing with nickels and dimes.

Ten ninety-nine a trade. You betting basketball games, they never give you that good a line.”

“And you do okay?”

He shrugged. “What’s that thing you like to say? Woman falls off the Empire State Building, passes the thirty-fourth floor, what’s she holler out?”

“ ‘So far, so good.’ ”

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“That’s it,” I agreed.

“So far so good. I got more’n I started with, and time to time I been drawing some cash for expenses.”

“It must be nerve-racking.”

“Not too. Worst that happens, day’s a minus ’stead of a plus. You guess wrong on Lucent Technology, guy who guessed right don’t show up with a nine and start bustin’ caps at you. Lose a few dollars, is all.”

“You’re saying it beats selling product.”

“No comparison, Harrison.” He grinned, enjoying the rhyme. “Plus you’re not out on the street corner on rainy days. Big difference right there.” He called the waiter over, said he guessed he’d have another bagel. To me he said, “This David Thompson. Cops likely to find him?”

“I don’t think they’re going to make much of an effort. Sussman didn’t spell it out, but in his position I’d run a computer check of yellow sheets. I’d sort all the David Thompsons, screen for age and color, toss the ones that are currently locked up, and save the rest for some night when there’s nothing on TV.”

“You gonna give him Louise?”

“My guess is he’ll forget to ask. And what am I holding out? We know damn well they’re two different guys.”

“Ever since Monica got killed,” he said, “it don’t seem all that important finding out about David Thompson. Like is he married or not.”

“I know. What do we care?”

“But ain’t nothing changed far as Louise is concerned.”

“No,” I said, “and if he’s running a game, she ought to know about it.

And if he’s kosher she ought to know that, too, so she can relax and enjoy herself. I don’t want to give up on Thompson, but I can’t think of much we can do besides wait. Next time Louise sees him, we can take another shot at shadowing him. Or the mailbox lady could call me and give me a name.”

“I was thinking ’bout that last part. Seems like we ought to be able to hurry the process some.”

“How?”

“Say we sent him a letter, with the suite number on it and all. Soon as it gets there, she’s gonna call you.” All the Flowers Are Dying

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“If she remembers.”

“If she don’t, maybe you give her a call to remind her. Even run up there and remind her in person.”

“And?”

“And she looks at the letter, and—” He broke off, closed his eyes, put his head in his hands. “And nothing,” he said. “ ’Cause only way she gets the name is off the envelope, an’ we’d need to know it ourselves to put it down there. Good thing I ain’t in front of my computer, way my mind’s working today.”

The day trader grabbed the check, insisting he’d saved money by lin-gering in the Morning Star. I told him what he’d proposed wasn’t so bad. It showed he was thinking, if not very clearly. “And it would work fine,” I added, “if all we wanted to do was send him a letter bomb.”

“Solve our problems that way,” he said. “Until Louise goes and pulls another nicotine addict off of Craig’s List.” I went across the street. Elaine wasn’t there, but I found her gym clothes in the hamper and deduced that she’d come home to shower and change. It was the sharpest detection work I’d done in a while and I was proud of myself. I called her at the shop and the machine answered. I didn’t leave a message, and while I was trying to decide whether to try her again in ten minutes or walk over there myself, the door opened and she came in.

“I opened up,” she said, “and I looked around, and I said the hell with it. I locked up again and came home.”

“And here you are.”

“And here I am.” She caught me looking at her and said, “I look like hell, don’t I? Tell the truth.”

“In all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never looked like hell. Not once.”

“Until now.”

“And not now, either.”

“You want to try telling me I’ve never looked better? I didn’t think so.”

“You look fine.”

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forefingers high on her cheeks. She pressed upward, then let go.

“Fucking gravity,” she said. “Who the hell asked for it? God damn it, I was going to be the one woman who never aged. Guess what? I’m the same as everybody else.” She turned to face me. “My God, will you listen to me? The only thing worse than the little lines around my mouth are the words coming out of it. Me me me, all the fucking time. Who cares if I show my age, and why the hell shouldn’t I, anyway? Just because I don’t act it.”

“It’s a rough day,” I said.

“I guess. I didn’t get much sleep last night. I could lie down now but I’d just be setting myself up for another night of staring out the window.

Guess what? The Towers aren’t coming back, and neither is Monica.”

“No.”

“It’s not a dream. Waking up won’t fix it.”

“No.”

“It’s gonna take time. It’s what, twenty-four hours since we heard? If I was all better I’d be disgusted with myself. Time takes time, isn’t that what they say?”

“That’s what they say.”

“I wish I could take a pill and wake up six months from now. Except I’d still feel the same way, because I wouldn’t have spent those six months dealing with it. Anyway, nobody’s invented a six-month pill yet.”

“Not that I’ve heard of.”

“They’ve got a permanent pill. You take it and you don’t wake up at all. I’m not ready for that yet.”

“Good.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “it’s not all that hard to understand why you used to drink.”

“It did shut things down.”

“I can see the appeal, I have to admit it. But the hell with all that, and the hell with me me me, as far as that goes. Did you talk to Sussman?”

“They haven’t made any progress,” I said, “or if they have he didn’t bother to report it to me.” I told her about TJ’s wild hunch, and how I’d tried it out on Sussman even though neither of us thought it stood much of a chance of being true.

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“If he smoked,” she said, “she’d have told me about it. She never would have hooked up with him in the first place, she didn’t even like to be around people with the smell of smoke on their clothes, but if he just plain charmed her so much she was willing to overlook the smoking, the one thing she’d have done is mention it. ‘I can’t tell you anything about him, but he smokes, can you believe it, and I still like him.’

Whatever. She’d have found a way to say something about it.”

“Eventually,” she said, “they’re going to rebuild. First everybody in the city gets to voice an opinion, and the relatives of the victims get to vote twice, and finally they’ll build something. And I wonder what it’s going to be like, standing here and looking out at it.” She was at the window, of course.

“I wish something would happen,” she said, and my cell phone rang.

It was the woman I’d given my card to, the mailbox lady. She was calling to tell me that the morning’s mail had held a letter for the holder of box 1217. “An’ I write down the name,” she said. “I think is the same name you say. David Thompson.”

“That’s the name,” I agreed. “Who sent the letter?”

“Who send it? How I know who send it?”

“In the upper-left corner of the envelope,” I said, “there’s usually a return address.”

“Maybe. I don’t remember.”

Jesus, it was like pulling teeth. “Could you get the envelope now and take a look?”

“Is gone.”

“It’s gone?”

“He come an’ pick it up. Same man as the picture you show me.”

“He came and picked it up.”

“Is his letter. He ask for it, I give it to him. You never say not to do this.”

Nor had I asked her to note the return address. It wasn’t her fault, it was mine, but knowing this somehow failed to make me feel better about the whole thing.

I asked her if she remembered anything about the envelope. It was, 166

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she said, a long envelope, not the smaller kind that bills come in. And the address was typed or printed, not handwritten.

“An’ he was disappointed,” she volunteered.

“Disappointed?”

“He open it an’ look inside an’ he make a face.” Because there was no check in there, I thought. That’s why he’d turned up, to look for the check he thought I was going to send him, and he got some other letter instead, probably some relentless credit card issuer telling him he’d been preapproved, and he was understand-ably disheartened.

I thanked her, and she said next time she would write down whatever it said on the envelope. In fact she would make a photocopy. I hadn’t noticed a copying machine, but now that she mentioned it I recalled another hand-lettered sign in the window, offering copies at fifteen cents apiece. That would be good, I told her, and I thanked her again and hung up.

“He’ll be back tomorrow or the next day,” I told Elaine, “because he wants the check he thinks I’m going to send him. He’s sounding increasingly legit. Whatever today’s letter was, the name on it was the same one he gave Louise. And he wouldn’t have to know who the myth-ical check was from in order to go pick it up. The business he’s in, there’s probably a long list of companies that take their time paying him. He figures he’ll find out which one it is when he’s got the check in hand. It’s a shame she didn’t note the return address, but she’s not a mind reader.”

“It sounds like that’s the only service they don’t offer there.”

“Just about. He’ll be back tomorrow, but that’s no help. Not unless someone else sends him a letter.”

I made a trip to the dry cleaner’s for her, and picked up sandwiches at the deli on my way back. Neither of us wanted them, but we ate anyway.

Then we were talking again about the view from the window, and how it would seem when towers in one form or another began to rise into our field of vision. I don’t remember how, but that led to Magritte or dissonance or paradox, whatever, and I told her about the startling All the Flowers Are Dying

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dissonance Sussman had forgotten to mention a day ago, the presence of the murder weapon at the crime scene.

She said, “A dagger.”

“Well, some kind of decorative knife. I don’t know that Sussman’s an authority on edged weapons.”

“And he thinks he found it lying around? I’ve been in that apartment a few hundred times and I never saw a dagger there.”

“It may not have been a dagger. It may have been, I don’t know . . .”

“A letter opener.”

“Something like that, sure.”

“I never saw one of those, either.”

“Well, would you notice it if you did? As far as—” She didn’t let me finish. “Call him,” she said.

“Call him?”

“Sussman, Mark Sussman. Call him.”

It took a while, but I finally got through to him. She held out her hand for the phone and I gave it to her.

She said, “This is Elaine Scudder. I’m fine, thank you, but that’s not the point. I’d like you to describe the murder weapon for me. Was it bronze? Well, was it bronze colored? And was it sharp at the tip but not along the edges of the blade? Do you have it in front of you? Well, could you get it? Yes, of course it’s important. If it wasn’t important I wouldn’t ask you to do it, would I? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap. Yes, I’ll wait.” I started to say something but she held up a hand and stopped me.

“All right,” she said, “let me describe it to you, okay? And we’ll see if it’s what I think it is. It’s a bronze letter opener or paper knife, ten to twelve inches long. On one side there’s a scene in low relief of two hunting dogs holding a stag at bay. On the other side, you’ll find the name of the sculptor in incused block capitals. The name is DeVreese, that’s spelled D-E-V-R-E-E-S-E. You may need a magnifying glass to make it out.”

She held the phone, listened. Then she said, “Mark? Don’t go anywhere. I saw him, I saw the man who killed her. I sold him the murder weapon. Oh my God. Don’t go anywhere, we’ll be right down.”

20

The letter opener was sealed in a clear plastic evidence bag. Sussman held it out to her, and I could sense her reluctance to touch it, even wrapped in plastic. She took it gingerly in both hands and looked at it, and a tear flowed out of the corner of her eye and down her cheek. I don’t think she noticed it.

“Yes, this is it,” she said. “You see that little nick there? This is the one I had in the shop. It would almost have to be. I don’t know how many of these they made, but this is the only one I’ve ever seen, and I never came across it in any catalogs.” She handed it back. “He came into my shop. He stood there and he talked to me, he paid what I asked and walked off with it in his pocket. And then he killed my friend with it.”

“And this was Tuesday?”

“The day before yesterday. It didn’t take him long to use it, did it?

He bought it from me that afternoon and killed her that night. I think I’m going to be sick.”

Sussman told her there was a bathroom down the hall, while another detective hurried to provide a wastebasket. Somebody else turned up with a glass of water. She decided she wasn’t going to be sick after all, took a sip of the water, and steadied herself with a couple of deep breaths.

Sussman asked if he’d used a credit card.

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She said, “No, dammit. I had to go and offer him a discount if he paid cash. I said I’d knock off the sales tax. I pay the tax anyway, it’s hardly worth breaking the law to save a few dollars, but I save the credit card commission, and it’s a way to give a small discount. If I hadn’t opened my big mouth—”

“He’d have paid cash anyway,” I said. “Or used a fake card. You didn’t screw anything up.”

“Why did I have to sell him the damn thing? Why didn’t I tell him it wasn’t for sale?” No one had an answer for that, but she answered it herself. “I’m being irrational, aren’t I? I just want to rewrite the past, or at least see how it could have been rewritten. Never mind. He came into my shop and picked it out and I sold it to him.”

“How much did you charge him?”

“Two hundred dollars. There’s no book price because it’s not in the book, but he didn’t overpay.”

“Remember the denomination of the bills?”

“Twenties, I think. I think he counted out ten twenties.” Someone speculated that the bills might hold a print. She remembered that she’d given some of the twenties in change later that same day to a customer who’d bought a small china dog for twelve dollars and paid for it with a hundred-dollar bill. And she’d taken a couple of twenties out of the register and spent them shopping. But there might be one of the killer’s twenties in the register, and it might have prints on it, some of which might be his, and—

It sounded like a long shot to me. But someone would have to check it out, because we were down to long shots.

She said, “He gave me the creeps.”

“Now, when you think about it?” Sussman asked. “Or at the time?”

“At the time. There was something about him. At the time I thought he was hitting on me, which I get a certain amount of, any woman does. Sometimes it’s flirting and sometimes it’s more exploratory.”

“Which was this?”

“It was somewhere in the middle, or at least that’s what it felt like, but it was distinctly creepy. It wasn’t anything he did, just the way he looked at me.” A light came into her eyes, and she shuddered. “He 170

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wanted to kill me,” she said. “There was a moment there when he was considering something, I could see it in his eyes, and I thought it was, you know, making a pass. But he had the paper knife in his hand, and he was thinking about stabbing me with it.” Sussman told her she couldn’t know that.

“Fine,” she said. “So don’t write it down. But that’s what he was doing. You think he just happened to buy the murder weapon from somebody who just happened to be the victim’s best friend?”

“No, I didn’t say that.”

“He was stalking you,” I said.

“Yes, that’s exactly what he was doing.”

“Had you seen him before?”

“I don’t think so. It’s possible. He was, well, pretty ordinary looking.”

“But you can picture him in your mind?”

“I think so. You want me to sit down with a police artist?”

“If you don’t mind,” Sussman said, and she looked at him like he was crazy. Mind? Why should she mind?

The artist was of the new breed. He never picked up a pencil, just sat at a computer terminal loaded with a dedicated software program that had made sketches obsolete. He worked with her the same way a more traditional police artist would have worked, asking her were the eyebrows bushier, was there more definition in the jawline, and morphing the on-screen image accordingly. She sat next to him while he worked, answering his questions, occasionally reaching out to touch an area on the screen that seemed to her not to be right. A couple of us stood around watching and kept our mouths shut while the process continued.

When she decided that was as close as they were going to get, he saved the image and printed out half a dozen copies, and we each took one and stared long and hard at it. I certainly couldn’t recognize the son of a bitch. He looked like everybody and nobody.

One of the cops said, “There must be a million guys out there look like this.”

“Not a million,” Sussman said, “but I know what you mean.”

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weak ones, either. There was something about his eyes, but I think that was a matter of the look in them, and how are you going to get that out of a computer?”

“But the sketch resembles him?”

She frowned. “It doesn’t not resemble him,” she said.

“Meaning what exactly?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t use my eyes right, maybe I didn’t want to look at him. Maybe all I saw was the mustache, and I locked in on that and didn’t pay enough attention to the rest of his face.” A cop said, “It suits him, the mustache. I mean, you can see why he’d grow one. Makes his face look a little less generic.”

“I say thank God for the mustache,” Sussman said, “because we’re gonna braid a rope out of it and hang him with it. You did really well, Mrs. Scudder.”

“Elaine,” she said.

“Elaine, then. You did good work. The sketch may look, I don’t know, sketchy, to you, but you know how to use your eyes, and my guess is it’s closer than you think. You should see some of the sketches people come up with. We had this guy, committed a string of rapes in and around the Morris Park section of the Bronx. They put three sketches of him on the news, all in a row, and I swear you thought you were looking at three different guys. They didn’t even look like brothers.”

“They damn well looked like brothers,” one of the cops said.

“I’m gonna file on you,” Sussman told him. “Have you cited for racial insensitivity. I suppose you think you can get away with saying shit like that just because you’re black. They didn’t look like members of the same family, is that better?”

“I say arrest all three of them,” someone else said. “How can you go wrong?”

21

The Canarsie line runs east from Eighth Avenue and Fourteenth Street to the Rockaway Parkway stop at the corner of Rockaway and Glenwood, in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. Officially it’s the L

train. Not too long ago it was the LL, or Double-L. Then someone in a position of authority (though not, I shouldn’t think, a whole lot of authority) decided to do away with all the double letters. The GG train became the G and the LL became the L. Meanwhile the AA became the K, because there already was an A, and eventually disappeared entirely. I don’t know who makes these decisions, or what he could possibly do for a living if he ever lost that job.

I don’t often have occasion to take the L, and when I do I invariably think of my father, who died riding it. He stood on the platform between two cars, probably to sneak a smoke, and he fell, and the wheels passed over him. He was probably drunk when it happened, so you could blame the drink for it, or the tobacco, if you wanted to stretch a point. When I was a boy, of course, I blamed the train.

The L train runs along Fourteenth Street and under the East River into Brooklyn. Eventually it comes up above ground and runs as an elevated line, as do most trains when they reach the outer boroughs, but we didn’t stay on it that long. We got off at the first stop in Brooklyn, which is Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. We walked north on Bedford past several numbered streets until we came to an attractive All the Flowers Are Dying

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three-story house in a row of attractive three-story houses. Once they’d all been covered up with asphalt or aluminum siding, but in recent years they’d all been restored, and Elaine thought they were adorable and the whole neighborhood charming.

“I could live here,” she said.

She hadn’t been out here before. I had, though not recently, and I was able to pick out Ray and Bitsy’s house without having to look up the number in my book. Ray must have seen us coming; the door opened before I could knock on it, and as we followed him into the living room his wife, Bitsy, emerged from the kitchen with a plate of cookies and a carafe of coffee. It was Puerto Rican coffee, dark and rich, and I’d had a yen for a cup ever since I saw the Café Bustelo sign in the shop window on Amsterdam Avenue.

Ray told us we were both looking terrific, and Elaine asked about their kids, and Elaine and I each took a cookie, although she could only manage a bite of hers. Ray said, “Well, we could sit and talk for hours, but I guess we should get down to it, huh?” and Elaine nodded and stood up and went to the room on the third floor where he had his studio.

I sat down and reached for another cookie, and Bitsy said, “There’s more in the kitchen. First time I tried this recipe. I have to say I think they came out pretty good, and they couldn’t be simpler to make. That coffee okay?”

“It’s a lot more than okay.”

“Matt? Is she all right?”

“Her best friend was killed yesterday.”

“Aw, gee, that’s terrible. But, you know, I’m kind of relieved to hear it, in a way, because I was afraid, you know, that she might be ill.”

“When she feels something it shows in her face.”

“Well, besides that. Her energy’s way off. Like her aura’s a mess.”

“You can see people’s auras?”

“Not exactly see,” she said. “It’s more I get a feeling. My mother was the same way. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain. Maybe it’s a load of crap. But losing a best friend, and you say she was murdered? That would do it, all right. That’s a terrible thing.” 174

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.

.

.

We had turned right when we left the stationhouse, but before we’d gone ten steps she stopped in her tracks and said, “Ray.” We know a few Rays, including Ray Gruliow, whose house is right there in the Sixth Precinct, but I didn’t need a last name to know which one she meant.

Ray Galindez was a kid from El Barrio who became a cop and then discovered his true calling when they found out he could draw and made a police artist out of him. The IdentiKit software didn’t take his job away, because they’d have been happy to train him to use it, but it took the joy out of it for him.

Elaine thought his ability amounted to far more than a knack or a job skill, that he was in fact a talented artist who possessed the ability to bond with his subjects and channel their visions into black-and-white reality. Working together, the two of them had produced a por-trait of her long-dead father, and she went on to get him assignments drawing other people’s dead relatives, including those of a Holocaust survivor who’d lost her whole family in the camps. It had been a remarkably cathartic experience for Elaine, who’d called the process the equivalent of a year or two of therapy. I don’t know what it was like for the others who tried it, but nobody ever asked for a refund.

Because Elaine took him seriously, Ray began to take his art seriously himself. She showed his work at her shop, sold a few pieces, and managed to get a neighborhood paper, the Chelsea-Clinton News, to run a review. That got him some more work, and with Bitsy’s encouragement he quit the NYPD and set up shop as an artist. They already had a house they were renovating in Williamsburg, which by then was becoming the ideal place for an artist to live, and he managed to pick up some commercial work that helped pay the mortgage each month.

Bitsy, a trained bookkeeper, built a practice in the neighborhood, crunching numbers for people who were better at mixing colors, and that kept the lights and phone on and the freezer stocked, and let her work at home and be a full-time mother in the bargain, with plenty of time for baking cookies.

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decent eye and a brief course of instruction to function competently as a police artist. But Ray did something no amount of training or programming could achieve, somehow making his drawing hand function as an extension of his subject’s mind. Elaine wasn’t satisfied with what had come out of the squad room computer, and if there was a way to improve on it, we’d find it in Williamsburg.

I was thinking about another cookie and telling myself I didn’t really want it when Ray and Elaine came downstairs. “Show Ray what their artist came up with,” she said, and I got out our copy of their sketch and unfolded it. Ray arranged the two sketches side by side on the coffee table, and Elaine said, “You see? All the difference in the world.” That was a stretch. Considered together, the two pictures looked like two different views of the same man. I hadn’t seen the fellow, so I couldn’t say which was a better likeness. Elaine had, and as far as she was concerned there was no comparison.

“Ray’s drawing looks less generic,” I allowed. “It’s hard to point to anything and say it’s different, but something’s different.”

“The affect is different,” Elaine said. “The other one feel’s like something you could put together with an advanced version of that kid’s toy.”

“Mr. Potato Head,” Bitsy said.

“I used to love Mr. Potato Head,” Elaine said. “I couldn’t understand why my mother wanted the potato back so she could fix it for dinner. I started crying. My father took me on his lap and told me there would always be another potato.”

“There always will,” I said.

“Somehow I used to find that reassuring. This sketch looks just like him, Ray. You know how I can tell? Because I can’t stand to look at it.

I get sick to my stomach.”

My reaction was less extreme, but I did get a funny feeling looking at Ray’s drawing. He’d managed to convey not just what Elaine had seen in the face but how she felt about it now that she knew what the man had done. It was in the eyes, I guess, but whatever it was there was something chilling about it.

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I said, “He looks familiar.”

“Maybe because of the time you spent staring at the other sketch.”

“Maybe.”

She turned to me. “Are you serious? Do you know him?”

“The best I can do is say he looks familiar. Maybe I saw him on the street, or in the subway. Him or somebody with a similar look to him.

You see so many people in this town, so many glancing images.”

“But you’re pretty good at paying attention to what you see.” Cop training, I suppose. I told Ray we’d want to make copies of the drawing, and was there a place in the neighborhood? He gave me a look and went upstairs, drawing in hand, and returned with a folder holding a dozen copies, plus the original pencil sketch in a manila envelope.

As we prepared to go, he took me aside. “I’ve never seen her like this,” he said. “She’s scared to death of this guy.” We’d have taken the subway home, the L and the A, but Ray called a car service. A good thing about living in Brooklyn is that you can do that, while the downside is that you have to, as you’re not often able to flag a cruising taxi. Our driver was cheerful and talkative, but when we didn’t respond he took the hint and lapsed into a wounded silence.

When he pulled up in front of the Parc Vendôme I got out first and looked around before I helped Elaine out of the cab.

The doorman on duty was one of the regular crew, his service there dating back almost to the year we moved in. I established that no one had come around looking for us since he came on duty, and told him not to send anybody up to our apartment.

“Unless it’s TJ,” Elaine said.

I amended my instructions. But no one else, I said, no matter what credentials the person might show. He could have a badge, I said. He could wear a blue uniform. That didn’t mean he was a cop.

We went upstairs, and I said, “I just realized what I’m doing. I’m like a general, preparing for the previous war.”

“Motley,” she said.

She meant not the garb jesters wear but a man named James Leo Motley, who got past her doorman wearing the uniform and carrying All the Flowers Are Dying

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the badge and baton of an auxiliary policeman he’d murdered. He was a cop, so why would the doorman think to turn him away? He’d stabbed Elaine, and she’d come close to dying.

That was—Christ, it was fifteen years ago, and Motley, who’d menaced us both, had served too to bring us together after about that many years apart. I suppose that meant we owed him something, but I was glad we’d never be able to pay it, grateful beyond measure that the son of a bitch was dead.

Now we had a new one on our hands, resourceful enough to come in uniform, resourceful enough to think of something else.

When we got off the elevator I checked the hallway, then left her standing in it while I checked the apartment. I told her she could come in, and once she did I locked the door.

She said, “I guess I won’t go to the shop again until this is over.”

“No kidding.”

“I’ve got someone coming tomorrow afternoon. A Russian woman, or maybe she’s Ukrainian. As if it makes a difference. She’s got some icons she’d like to sell, and I wouldn’t mind buying them if they’re au-thentic. Or even if they’re not, if the price is right and they look good.

I could tell her to come here instead.”

“You could tell her to come next month.”

“Is it going to take that long?”

“To find this guy? There’s no telling. They could pick him up tonight or he could stay out there for weeks.”

“God. You really don’t think it’s safe to have her come here? She’s a little old lady in a babushka.”

“The staff here’s pretty good,” I said, “but they’re not Marines guarding an embassy. If the rule’s ironclad, they might get the idea that it’s important. Every time you make an exception, they take the whole business a little less seriously.”

She opened her mouth to debate the point, then changed her mind and told me I was right. “If he’s really stalking me,” she said.

“What else would you call it?”

“He really did want to kill me. I don’t read minds, but you pick things up. That’s what I was picking up. He had this weapon in his 178

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hand, and there I was, and the thought went through his mind. But maybe it was just an opportunity, you know? He had a weapon and I was there, and he’s a nut who likes to kill women, and . . .”

“And?”

“And why was he there? Why my shop? It had to be because I was Monica’s friend, and he had to know that. From something she said, or from following her around.”

“Or from following you around, and that’s how he found his way to Monica.”

“You think?”

“I think either’s equally possible.”

“I guess. Matt, he wouldn’t come into my shop looking to buy a murder weapon. It’s this little chichi art and antiques shop, not Macho Toys for Butch Boys. The letter opener was probably the only thing in the shop you could use to kill somebody, unless you smothered them with a hooked rug or beat them to death with one of the marble book-ends. He came in because he wanted an up-close look at me.”

“That sounds right.”

“The hell with the icons. I’m Jewish, you couldn’t even bury them with me. I hate for her to make the trip for nothing, though.”

“Where is she, out in Brighton Beach?”

“No, I think she’s in the neighborhood somewhere, but even so she shouldn’t have to schlep icons there and back. I’ve got her number at the store.”

“I’ll go over there later and get it.”

“Will you? And I’ll call her and tell her what? That the shop is closed until further notice. You know what you could do while you’re at it—”

“I’ll put a sign in the window.”

“I’ll print it out. I print neater than you.”

“You’re a girl.”

“That must be it. Who are you calling?”

“Sussman,” I said. “I want to give him something he doesn’t know he needs, and save myself a trip while I’m at it.”

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I was waiting at the shop when Sussman got there, a lab technician in tow. I let them in, and the techie gave us each a pair of gloves, then went around collecting fingerprints from all the likely surfaces, concentrating on the glass countertops. I opened the cash box and took out the three twenty-dollar bills it contained and gave them to Sussman. He bagged them and made a point of writing out a receipt for me. I didn’t care about the sixty bucks, which was just as well for all the good the receipt would do. If the past was anything to go by, those bills were destined to spend eternity in an NYPD evidence locker.

“Now where’s this sketch I’ve heard so much about?” Sussman asked, and I showed it to him. He said it didn’t look a whole lot different to him, and I said he’d see the difference when he looked at the two sketches side by side.

He said, “This one’s more artistic, I can see that much. It looks like it was drawn by a human being and not by a machine. That wouldn’t necessarily make it a better likeness.”

“Elaine says it is.”

“Well, she should know. She’s the only one who’s seen the original.

Who’d you say did it?”

I told him a little bit about Ray, and pointed to a framed drawing he’d done. It showed the profile of a middle-aged man sitting in a chair with a book. He was an uncle of Bitsy’s who was finishing out his days in a nursing home in Santurce. This was how she remembered him, but she’d told Ray to sell the drawing if anyone wanted to buy it. “We don’t need my whole damn family all over the walls,” she’d said. “You know how many cousins I got?”

“Guy’s very good,” Sussman said. “What would something like that go for, you happen to know?”

“I’d have to ask Elaine.”

“When this is over,” he said, “I might be interested. The more you look at it, the more you see. I could definitely find wall space for something like that. Plus the fact that he’s a former cop adds something to it for me. I don’t know why it should but it does. She have other work of his?”

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“In back, but—”

“No, don’t drag ’em out now, just for future reference. I really like that one.” He turned to the sketch Ray had done a couple of hours ago.

“This one too,” he said, “but not to hang on the wall. This one I’d like to hang by the balls. I’ll take this along, call in the other sketch, get this one out there. Even without seeing the original I can tell this one’s a better likeness. You know how? Because you get a sense of the guy.”

22

After they left I checked Elaine’s appointment book. I started to copy down the name and number of a Mrs. Federenko, then simplified things by calling the woman myself. I told her I was calling for Mrs.

Scudder, who wouldn’t be able to look at the icons tomorrow because the shop was closed until further notice.

That’s what it said, too, on the sheet of paper she’d given me, which I taped to the inside of the window. I left a new message on the shop’s answering machine: “Thank you for calling Elaine Scudder Art and Antiques. The shop is closed until further notice.” I pulled the gates shut and headed uptown. When I got to Fifty-seventh Street I called TJ and said I wanted to talk to him. He offered to come down, and I said to stay where he was, that I’d be right up. I crossed the street and went into the lobby of the old hotel. Vinnie was still working there, he’d had that job for thirty years that I knew about, and he just gave me a nod and didn’t even bother calling to let TJ

know I was coming. For all I know, he may have been under the impression that I still lived there. God knows I’d put in enough time in that little room.

“You didn’t have to come up,” TJ told me. A game of computer soli-taire filled the screen, and he saw what I was looking at and turned it off. “Wall Street’s been closed since four o’clock,” he said, “and I dumped everything before three. Had a wild ride.” 182

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“Oh?”

“When did I get up here this morning? Whenever it was, there’s this stock I been watching, an’ it made a move, you know, it broke through this particular price point, so I bought some. An’ it went up.”

“Isn’t that what it was supposed to do?”

“Yeah, well, they don’t always be doin’ what they supposed to do. So it’s movin’ up an’ movin’ up, an’ I pop in this trailing stop-loss order, so if it goes down I’ll be out of it, but each time it goes up a notch the stop-loss order goes up a notch with it, an’ you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, do you?”

“I get a general idea.”

“Well, it kept runnin’ up like that for, I don’t know, two hours? An’

then it came back down a bit, an’ when it hit my stop-loss order I didn’t have to do nothin’, I was out of it automatically. They already had my order an’ they sold me out. An’ then of course the stock turns around an’ heads back up, an’ I’m like, wha’d I do that for? An’ then I’m like, should I buy more?”

“You’re talking like a Valley Girl.”

“I am?” He frowned. “Don’t want to do that. What I did, I told myself to be cool, and it was a good thing, because it turned around and went all the way back down, an’ it finished the day two whole points below where I bought it at in the first place.”

“So you did all right.”

“I did real good. They want to print up a list of contented stock-holders, they can put my name on it.”

“What’s the company?”

“I dunno. Trading symbol’s NFI. I never did find out the name of it.”

“Do you know what they do?”

“No.”

“Doesn’t any of that matter?”

“Not if you ain’t gonna own it for more’n two hours. But we can have a look.” He picked up a newspaper, ran his eyes down the stock table. “Name’s Novastar. Pays a nice dividend, must be a REIT or a MLP. Course you got to own it a little longer’n I did to collect the dividend. Who’s that there? That ain’t Louise’s boyfriend, is it?” All the Flowers Are Dying

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“You don’t think it’s a good likeness?”

“Don’t look like the man I saw.”

“This is someone else,” I said. “This is the man who killed Monica.” After I’d brought him up to speed, the two of us went across the street.

It seemed to me that at least one of us should be with Elaine whenever possible. I couldn’t be sure she was his primary target, and for all I knew he’d killed Monica and got on the next plane to Las Vegas, but until they ran him down and caught him I wasn’t taking any chances.

The way it looked to me, the man was the worst possible combination, an off-the-page homicidal maniac with an incisive, methodical mind.

You couldn’t wait for him to do something stupid, nor could you expect him to behave logically. He was crazy like a rabid fox, and all you could do was hope he ran out in front of a car.

Around seven I went around the corner and picked up dinner from the Chinese restaurant. We usually call down and have them deliver, but deliveries weren’t part of the new regimen. No one was getting upstairs but the three of us, and if that meant a little extra coming and going, I figured I could live with that.

I ordered more food than we were likely to eat, and I guess that too was part of the siege mentality we were operating under. “I guess I won’t be going out of the house much,” Elaine said, wielding her chop-sticks, and I told her she wouldn’t be going out of the house at all. She let herself get used to the idea, then picked up another piece of the co-conut beef.

I asked TJ if he owned a gun. He didn’t, and neither did I. A few years ago Mick Ballou and I had been at war with a gang that had taken up residence at his farm upstate in Sullivan County, and we’d gone out there armed and did a decade’s worth of shooting in a matter of minutes. I hadn’t had a gun in my hand since that night.

“If you had a gun,” I said, “would you know how to use it?”

“Learning curve can’t be too steep,” he said. “Some of the stupidest dudes I ever met did just fine at it.”

“What about you?” I asked Elaine. “Would you use a gun?”

“Would I use one?”

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“If he got up here,” I said, “and you were alone, or he got past whoever was here with you. Could you pick up a gun and shoot him?”

“It’s like a no-brainer camera, right? Point and shoot? I’d point it and shoot it.”

“If he was just standing here, say. No weapon in his hands and an explanation on his lips, telling you how it wasn’t his doing, some other man stole the letter opener from him, and—”

“In other words, he’s not coming at me. He’s acting like a gentleman. Could I shoot him anyway? I swear I don’t know where you got the idea that I’m some kind of shrinking violet. We’re talking about the prick that killed my friend. Would I shoot him? He could be lying on this couch taking a nap and if I had a gun I’d blow his fucking brains out. You’re gonna go get some guns?”

“I’m going to try.”

“Get three,” she said. “One for each of us. No more Mr. Nice Guy.”

23

Knives are beautiful.

Take this one, for instance. It is ten and three-quarters inches long, a bowie type, similar to that beautiful Randall-made knife he’d had to leave in Richmond. This knife, though, had been made not by the legendary Randall, but by a young Idahoan named Reinhold Messer. He’d bought the knife from Messer himself, a long-haired full-bearded bear of a man who’d sat behind his table at a knife show in Provo, Utah, and showed off his creations with hands as gently expressive as an orchestra conductor’s.

All of Messer’s knives were beautiful, but he’d liked this one the best.

It is heavy, you could hammer nails with the butt end, but its balance is so perfect it feels weightless in the hand. More, it feels like part of the hand itself.

Its grips, the half-round slabs on either side of the handle, are made of Micarta, a resin-based material favored by knife makers because they deem it superior to natural materials like wood and stone, ivory and oosik.

(They use these materials, too, and he has seen grips of rosewood and rare tropical hardwoods, of malachite and lapis lazuli, of elephant and walrus and mastodon ivory, and of oosik, which is the name, Inuit in origin, for the bone in the penis of the walrus. Who even knew such a thing existed?

Investigate any area thoroughly, he is delighted to observe, and you will acquire all manner of arcane knowledge.) A knife like this, he believes, is artisanship of the highest order, with 186

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form always following function, and beauty growing out of the synthesis of the two. The blade itself continues past the hilt to the very butt of the knife, a single piece of steel, with the part above the hilt known as the tang. (Who would guess there was a word for it, and a lovely word at that.) This particular blade is made of Damascus steel, which means not that it was imported from Syria—it was made right here in the good old U. S. of A.—but that it was produced by a venerable process that probably originated in Damascus, of bending a piece of steel back upon itself, hammering it flat, bending and hammering, over and over, until the resulting blade is almost infinitely layered, with the layers showing in the finished knife like the wood grain on a hardwood tabletop. Each Damascus blade is unique and each is beautiful, but the purpose of the process is not beauty but strength; every time the piece of steel is hammered and hardened and folded and hammered again, it grows stronger and more durable. The beauty grows out of the functionality, and who wouldn’t want to own that sort of beauty? Who wouldn’t want to wield it like a baton in his hand, to wave it like a wand, like the épée of a fencing master?

Who wouldn’t be proud to wear it on his belt and stride down the street with it?

Who wouldn’t yearn to draw it smoothly from its sheath and across a throat?

He’s used it twice, and one time he did in fact cut a throat with it. It was surprising, too, because it was as if it happened without his willing it, as if the knife acted on its own.

He remembers the occasion well, although it’s sometimes difficult to place events in a time frame. This was in southern Colorado, in a town called Durango, and he never lived there, never even spent an entire night there. He was passing through, and he stopped for dinner, and the waitress, who brought him first a welcome glass of Scotch on the rocks and then an equally welcome blood-rare steak, flirted with him in a manner that seemed aimed at more than a good tip. He flirted back, and told her she looked a little like a movie star, if only he could remember the name. It was, he assured her, right on the tip of his tongue. Stick out your tongue, she said, and maybe I’ll be able to see it.

He asked her what time she got off work. Ten-thirty, she said, and told All the Flowers Are Dying

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him to wait for her at the far end of the parking lot, because she didn’t want anyone knowing her business.

He was in cowboy mode, dressed in boots and jeans and a western shirt with snaps instead of buttons, and it seemed natural to wear the knife on his belt. He waited for her in his car and followed her back to her trailer, where he fucked her to their mutual satisfaction and fell asleep at her side. He woke up after an hour and found her sleeping, her bottle-blonde hair spread out on the pillow, her jaw slack. She was snor-ing, and her breath smelled. He’d never told her the name of the actress she reminded him of—of course there was no such actress—and he thought now that she wasn’t very pretty, although she’d been a good enough sexual partner. He could stick around for a while, if only to find out what she would and wouldn’t do. He had no place to go, and this town was probably as good a one as the next to spend a few days or a week or a month.

He reached for his pants, and his hand brushed the sheathed knife, and it was as if the knife decided. Because the next thing he knew the knife was in his hand, its unsheathed blade resplendent in the light of the bedside lamp. If she’d turned off the light before she passed out, if he hadn’t seen the light glinting off the beautiful knife blade, if she weren’t lying on her back, giving him such a good look at her pale throat . . .

Did she even feel the knife? He drew it across her throat in one fluid motion and the flesh offered no resistance at all. It was like cutting warm butter. Her eyes fell open, but never saw anything. The light was already gone from them.

He dressed and left, and by the time the sun cleared the horizon he was a hundred miles from Durango. He’d cleaned up after himself in a limited fashion. He’d left his seed in her, so there was nothing to be done about that, and no point in worrying about hairs and trace evidence when he’d already provided them with a good DNA sample. Much luck to them, a small-town police force with the nearest competent lab where, in Denver? They were welcome to his DNA, they could store it in a test tube on a shelf in some back room, and what harm could it do him? None unless they arrested him, and that wasn’t going to happen.

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he’d been to Durango, much less that he’d picked up the waitress. Anyone who’d watched her would have seen her get in her own car and drive off.

No one could have noticed him pull out and drive off in her wake.

He’d paid cash for his meal. He hadn’t even bought gas in Durango.

No trace of him in the town, except for a few cc’s of semen in a dead girl’s vagina.

Besides, he had an alibi. It wasn’t he who did it. It was the knife.

.

.

.

Online, he visits his newsgroups. There is, he’s pleased to note, a flurry of activity on the subject of Preston Applewhite. Several of the newsgroup’s more devoted participants have been following the coverage in the Richmond paper. Human remains have been unearthed from the private cemetery of an abandoned farmhouse, and preliminary evidence suggests strongly that the Willis boy has indeed been found.

There’s no end of speculation. Did Applewhite, unwilling to admit his crimes, arrange for someone to speak for him from beyond the grave? Did he have a confederate—one theorist calls him an unindicted coconspirator—

who’d participated in his crimes? Was Applewhite in fact part of a long-rumored satanic cult?

The newspaper has reproduced a portion of the e-mail he’d sent them, along with his signature, and one newsgroup member has been quick to pick up on Abel Baker. “You younger types won’t know this,” he writes,

“but these are the first two letters of the old phonetic alphabet. Able Baker Charlie Dog Easy Fox . . . Can anyone remember the rest?” Someone of course can and does, and someone else chimes in with the modern replacement, beginning with Alpha and Bravo. And another party wonders when exactly Alpha Bravo etc. replaced Able Baker, and someone supplies a date which someone else challenges, and the thread rapidly degenerates into a discussion of the relative merits of the two alphabets, and the implication of the change in terms of the evolving role of the military.

He exits the newsgroup, Googles his way to the Times-Dispatch’s website. He reads everything he can find on the story, including an editorial calling for a review of the whole notion of capital punishment, and an op-ed piece taking an opposite tack and arguing that the process should All the Flowers Are Dying

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be streamlined, so that less “time for mischief” separate the imposition of sentence and its execution. Neither piece, it seems to him, is a master-piece of rational thinking.

He reads on, and yes, some enterprising reporter has determined that Applewhite had a visitor before he died, that he spent more than a few hours during the several days before his death with one Arnold Bodinson.

They’ve gone and anglicized the first name, he notes, probably having heard Arnie for Arne and opted for a more formal version, but surely they’ll correct that in the days to come. Dr. Bodinson is identified as a prominent psychologist affiliated with Yale University, and the coincidence of his initials matching those of Abel Baker has not escaped attention. No doubt the earnest chaps in the newsgroup will have something to say on the subject as well.

Efforts to reach Dr. Bodinson have thus far been unsuccessful, the reporter states. And are doomed to remain so, he thinks, but tomorrow’s paper should hold the revelation that Yale University has never heard of Arne Bodinson, or Arnold either.

Now won’t that be interesting?

He thinks of Reinhold Messer and wonders if that, like Arne Bodinson, is a nom de guerre. It seems almost too good to be true, as Messer is the German word for knife. Messer certainly conformed to the militia–Aryan Brotherhood archetype, and if his name at birth had been, say, Cuthbert Lavender, a name change would seem inevitable.

He has looked for Messer on the Internet, but the man doesn’t have a website, and hadn’t even provided a business card. You can look for me at shows, he’d said, which suggested a life lived off the books. Not so with the man who made the other knife he owns, an owlish boy-man named Thad Jenkins, called Thaddy by his colleagues. Jenkins specialized in folding knives, finding their manufacture more of an engineering challenge. ’Sides, he’d drawled, wasn’t anybody couldn’t find a use for a pock-etknife.

From Thaddy’s array of folders, he’d selected a beauty, almost six inches long when closed, and about the same length as Messer’s bowie when open. While it was neither a gravity knife nor a switchblade, its 190

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mechanism and balance were such that a simple flick of the wrist, quickly learned, would open it, whereupon the extended blade would lock securely in place.

He turns it over in his hands. The grips are a tropical hardwood of exceptional density, with a color like pecan and a very close grain. It’s as smooth as glass, and quite beautiful, and over time the oils from his hand will burnish the wood and only make it more beautiful.

Of course he may not own it long enough to see that happen. Things come in and out of his life. I came like water and like wind I go, he wrote once, on a basement wall, quoting Omar Khayyám but attributing the line to Aubrey Beardsley. And didn’t most things come like water, and go like wind? For some time he’d worn a disc of mottled pink rhodochrosite, for clarity, but he’d had to leave that behind in that very basement. But by then he’d internalized the mineral’s properties and didn’t need it anymore.

Then he’d taken to wearing an amethyst crystal, for immortality, and it too was long gone, and he couldn’t even recall what had become of it. But he’d internalized the special properties of the amethyst as well.

Would he live forever? Well, really, who was to say? But look at all the people he’s already outlived . . .

He flicks the knife and the blade leaps from its casing and locks into place. The blade is slender, half the width of the bowie’s, and the knife overall weighs no more than a third of its bulkier fellow. Do knives have gender? In a sense they’re all masculine, all sharpened phalli. But if one were to regard some as male and others as female, it’s easy to see Messer’s creation as bluntly masculine, Jenkins’s folder as graceful in its femininity.

The man, Scudder, the more difficult quarry, would fall to the sturdier weapon. It is Scudder who deprived him of the house on Seventy-fourth Street. He has long ceased to care about the house, he knows he never really wanted it in the first place, but that’s beside the point. It is Scudder, too, who made him leave New York. He’d had a thriving practice, he’d had a house full of people who loved and revered and, yes, needed him, and he’d had to stab them all dead and burn the house down around them. And yes, it was thrilling, sacrificing those men and women, but that too was beside the point, for it was Scudder who’d left him no choice but murder and flight, and Scudder who would pay for it.

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Scudder was an ox, a brute. A bull, really, and he’d fight him as one would fight a bull, tricking him with a flourish of the cape, then dispatching him with a single thrust of the Damascus steel blade.

The folder will do for the woman.

And a far more serviceable tool it will be than the elegant bit of bronze he’d left behind on Jane Street. It had been poetic, surely, to buy from one woman what he’d used to kill the other, and it had done what he’d required of it, opening a hole to let out life as efficiently as it had ever opened an envelope. But this folding knife of Jenkins will do more, and do it with grace.

And she knows, he’s sure she knows. Not how or when, but only that he’s coming for her. Her shop, a sign in her window proclaims, is closed until further notice. Her answering machine carries the same message.

Closed until further notice.

Closed for All Time, it might better say. Closed until Grand Opening under New Management.

Her knowledge will make her wary. Thus she’ll be a more elusive quarry than her friend Monica (who was really almost too easy) but she won’t elude him forever. He’ll find a way. And he has worlds of time.

He holds the knife, so light, so graceful, so feminine in its supple elegance. He works the catch that allows the blade to close, then flicks it open. Supple indeed, elegant indeed, but sturdy. According to the man who made it, it is more than equal to the task of skinning out big game.

There’s a thought. Perhaps he’ll flay her. Skin her alive, with her eye-lids taped open and a mirror positioned so that she can watch, and her mouth taped shut to stifle her screams.

The image delights him, so much so that he can’t sit still. Before he leaves Joe Bohan’s apartment, he folds the knife shut and drops it in a pocket. It is, after all, a dangerous city. One would be well advised not to walk its streets unarmed.

24

I went first to Grogan’s, the uncompromising old Irish bar at Fiftieth and Tenth. There was nothing in its appearance to suggest that it had been the scene of a massacre a few years ago, a bomb hurled against the back bar, the room’s interior sprayed with a burst from an updated version of the tommy gun. But most of the crowd would know this, and some of them could tell you the death toll. Grogan’s had drawn a good crowd ever since it opened, as the new upscale residents of Hell’s Kitchen began to discover the place and treasure it for its old-time au-thenticity, even as their patronage eroded the very quality that pulled them in.

Gangster chic, always in good supply in this town, at least since Jimmy Walker was mayor, got a boost from The Sopranos, and young lawyers and account execs liked to be able to tell their coworkers that they’d spent the previous night drinking whiskey alongside Mick Ballou.

Tonight’s crowd wouldn’t be able to make that claim, however, because the proprietor of Grogan’s wasn’t on the premises. I learned as much from the tight-lipped bartender, the latest lad to come straight from County Antrim to Grogan’s, looking to Mick for sanctuary and a job. I suspect I wasn’t the first to inquire, and I got the same answer as everybody else—he wasn’t in, and as to whether he’d be in later, why, who was to say?

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when I said this, not because it would mean anything to anyone else, but to impress the guy behind the stick. It wouldn’t get an answer out of him, but if Mick was in the back room, the fellow would find an un-obtrusive way to ring him on the house phone. When that didn’t happen I knocked back the rest of my Coke and left.

I could have spent an hour in a meeting, and it might even have done me good, but I didn’t feel like it. If I was going to kill time I’d sooner kill it in a bar. That’s not recommended, and I can understand why, but I didn’t give a damn.

I called the apartment and the machine picked up, which was as we’d arranged; Elaine would screen her calls, picking up only when she recognized the caller. I said a few words and she took the call, and I said I’d be a while. She said that would be fine.

I rang off and took a cab to Poogan’s.

They keep the place dimly lit, which is part of its appeal for Danny Boy, who has occasionally observed that what the world needs most is a volume control and a dimmer switch, that the damn place is always too loud and too bright. I let my eyes accustom themselves to the dark, and I didn’t see Danny Boy but I did see his table. Poogan’s, like Mother Blue’s, sells him his vodka by the bottle, and lets him keep it close at hand in an ice bucket. I think there’s a state law against that, but so far nobody’s turned up to enforce it.

I stood at the bar with a glass of soda water and ice—I didn’t want any more Coke yet—and one record finished its play on the jukebox and another replaced it, and I looked over to see Danny Boy returning from the men’s room. It struck me that he looked old, but I decided it must be my eyes, because lately I was starting to see age in every face I looked at, and I didn’t need a mirror to know I’d be able to spot it in mine.

He sat down heavily, took a glass, held it at a tilt the way you do when you pour a beer, and filled it halfway with iced Stolichnaya. He held it up and looked at it, and I remembered doing that with bourbon, and remembered too how the bourbon tasted when I quit just looking at it and did with it what one was meant to do.

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like spying. I carried my drink to his table, and he looked up as I pulled over a chair for myself. He said, “Well, this is a treat, Matthew. I don’t see you for months and then I have the pleasure of your company twice in a single week. You’re alone tonight?”