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“Not anymore.”

“No, now you’re with an old friend, and so am I.” He started to look for the waitress, then saw I already had a drink. He hadn’t done anything with his Stoli but pour it and look at it, and now he raised it and said, “Old friends.” I raised my own glass and sipped my soda water, and he drank half of his vodka.

He asked what had brought me, and I said I had a little time to kill, and he laughed and said we’d kill it together.

“But I was going to get here sooner or later anyway,” I said, and showed him a copy of Ray’s drawing.

“You showed me the other night,” he said. “At Mother’s. Wait a minute. Is this the same guy?”

“No, a different one entirely.”

“That’s what I was thinking, although I can’t say I have the other chap’s features engraved on my heart. This one looks menacing.”

“Part of that may be the sensibilities of the person who told the artist what to draw. This is the man who murdered a woman in the Village the night before last.”

“All over the TV,” he said. “Give me a minute and I’ll tell you her name.”

I supplied it myself, along with the fact that she’d been Elaine’s best friend, and Elaine had sold him the murder weapon. With Danny Boy, you could give him the first sentence and he had the whole page; what he said was, “I hope you put her on a plane.”

“It might come to that. I don’t know.” I detailed the security precautions we were taking, and that I was going to pick up a gun for her. He asked if she’d know what to do with it, and I said there wasn’t too much you had to know to shoot someone at close range.

He said, “All my life, all the players and hard cases I’ve known, I’ve never once fired a gun, Matthew. I’m trying to think if I ever even had one in my hand. You know, I don’t think I did.” All the Flowers Are Dying

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“Well, you’re still a young man, Danny.”

“That’s what the Yellow Peril tells me. Jodie, you met her the other night. ‘Danny, you are so amazing!’ For a man my age, she means.

And as long as they keep making those little blue pills, I can go on amazing her.”

“Science is wonderful.”

“Yeah.”

Something made me ask about his health. It had been more than five years, and he hadn’t had a recurrence. So he was out of the woods, wasn’t he?

“Out of the woods? Matthew, you can’t even see a tree from where I’m sitting.”

“That’s great.”

“I beat colon cancer. That’s a funny expression, don’t you think?

Like I got in the ring with it and kicked the shit out of it. Cancer of the colon, off its feet and down for the count. I didn’t have much to do with it, to tell you the truth. They cut me up and stitched me back together and filled me full of chemicals, and when they quit I was alive and the cancer wasn’t. ‘I beat colon cancer.’ It’s like saying you beat a slot machine, when all you did was pick the right time to drop your quarter in it.”

“The point is you’re okay.”

“That’s the good news,” he said, and waited for me to ask what the bad news was. But I’d heard too much bad news lately to seek it out.

When I didn’t ask he told me.

“Prostate cancer,” he said, “and there’s good news there, too, because I’ve got a low Gleason score. Gleason, all I could think of was The Honeymooners. A low Gleason means it’s slow-growing. I can treat it and risk impotence and incontinence, or I can live with it and, according to the doctor, almost certainly die of something else before the prostate cancer can get me. ‘If you keep on drinking like you do,’ he said, and I swear he was smiling while he said it, ‘your liver’s likely to give out long before your prostate can kill you.’ Guess what I had as soon as I got out of his office.”

“A glass of Stoli.”

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“As a matter of fact it was Absolut, but you’ve got the right idea.

Doctor’s orders, the way I look at it. Let me tell you something, put this in perspective, before you start feeling sorry for me. It’s a complete fucking miracle I’ve lived this long. When I was born the obstetrician told my parents I would probably die within the week. Then I wasn’t supposed to survive childhood. ‘Give him all the love you can now,’ the pediatrician told them, ‘because you’re not going to have him long. The Lord’s likely to want him back.’ That was great for me, because they took me home and spoiled me rotten. And the Lord evidently took a good long look at me and decided he didn’t want me all that much.”

“Well, you can’t really blame him, can you?”

“I don’t blame anybody,” he said, “for anything. I’ve had a good life, and I figure everything past the first week of it’s been a bonus. I listen to music whenever I want, and I drink as much as I want, and I get all the pussy I want, and when little Jodie gets sick of me I’ll find somebody else, because there’s always one there to be found. So don’t feel sorry for me.”

I told him I wouldn’t dream of it.

When I got down to Grogan’s, Mick said I’d just missed him by a few minutes. “We were busy earlier,” he said. “Busy enough for me to join Con behind the wood. I don’t mind it. It’s honest work, pouring an honest drink.”

Most of what he did wouldn’t fit most people’s definition of honest work. A few years back, when the loosely allied Irish mob the press called the Westies was in full force, Mick Ballou led a faction of it, and led it with brutal efficiency. He was a career criminal and he had become my best friend, and Joe Durkin wasn’t the only man who found this puzzling. I didn’t really understand it myself.

“It’s thinned out some,” he said, “though it’s always busier than it used to be. The afternoons are still slow. That’s the nicest time in a bar, I’d say, when your only customers are men who want to sit quietly with a drink. Or late at night, when there’s no one there at all but two old friends talking the night away.”

“We’ve had our share of nights like that.” All the Flowers Are Dying

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“And never a one but I was glad of it. We’ve not had a late night in a while, but that’s not what brings you here this evening, is it?”

“No, it’s not.”

I told him about it. He’d met Monica, although I had to refresh his memory. We’d brought her there once after the three of us saw a Brian Friel play at the Irish Arts Centre, and he’d joined us at our table, and Monica had teased him about having poetry readings, which she assured him would be good for business at Grogan’s. Yeats would be perfect, she’d said, and he’d topped her by nodding judiciously and reciting “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” with a flair and cadence that would not have been out of place on the stage of the Abbey.

“She had a lovely sense of humor,” he recalled. “And she liked my poem.”

“She did.”

“Killing’s terrible enough when it’s done for a reason. Oh, it’s an awful thing. And yet there’s joy in it, you know.”

“I know.”

“But the joy can never be the reason. If I let that happen what would I be? By God, I’m bad enough as I am.”

We went into his office and he opened the big old Mosler safe and sorted through an array of handguns. I picked out a pair of nine-millimeter pistols for TJ and myself and a .38-special revolver for Elaine. It had less stopping power than the nines, but it struck me as simpler for her to operate; there was no safety catch to mess with, it was less likely to jam, and all she had to do was keep squeezing the trigger until she ran out of bullets.

Back at our table, with the guns and two boxes of shells in an old gym bag at my feet, he said I was welcome to the weapons, but that he hoped I’d have no need for them.

“The police’ll pick him up tomorrow,” I said, “and I’ll bring them back as good as new.”

“Would you need a hand, do you think?”

“I’ll let you know if I do, but I don’t think so, Mick. All I’m going to do is keep her where he can’t get at her. And we’re not going to leave her alone. If I’m not there, TJ’ll be.”

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“I’d stand a shift anytime. Just let me know.”

“Thank you.”

He took another look at the drawing. “The dirty man,” he said, and it sounded far worse than a curse. “By God, he looks familiar.”

“I said the same thing, and so did Danny Boy. He sends regards, I’m supposed to tell you.”

“Does he, then. And how is the young fellow?”

“He’s fine, but I don’t know about the ‘young fellow’ part. He’s our age.”

“Is he indeed? I guess he would have to be, wouldn’t he? It’s his size makes me think him younger than he is. Ah, Jaysus, man, we’re all of us getting old.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I complain about all my customers, these lawyers and stockbrokers who want to come in here and drink with the devil, but ’tis their custom that supports me. I’m making my living from this place, can you believe it? This and the few little businesses I own. I have to walk outside and spit in the street once a week so I won’t forget what it’s like to break a law. By God, I’m a toothless old lion, and it’s a nerve I have to resent the keeper who slips food through the bars of my cage.”

“Bread soaked in milk,” I said, “so you can handle it.”

“And yourself, waiting for the police to do what once you’d have tried to do on your own.”

“They have the resources.”

“Of course they do.”

“I don‘t even know who he is. I wouldn’t know where to start looking for him.”

“You’ll keep herself safe and sound. That’s all you need to do.” He touched a forefinger to Ray’s sketch. “I could swear he’s been in here.

Or is there an actor he looks like?”

“There’s probably a dozen.”

“You could look at him and never see him. Your eyes could glide right over him, for there’s nothing there to hold you. But I’ll now remember him if I see him. That poor woman. Did you say he gave her a hard death?”

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“It couldn’t have been an easy one. He tortured her.”

“There’s never a call for that,” he said. “Isn’t there enough suffering in the world without making a point of creating more of it? I’d kill him in an instant, should God give me the chance, but I’d not make him suffer. I’d just kill him and be done with it.”

25

I took the long way home from Grogan’s, up Tenth Avenue to Fifty-eighth Street, east two long blocks to Eighth Avenue, then back to Fifty-seventh Street, where I stayed on the north side and made my way to the corner of Ninth. I guess I was looking for him, looking for someone who might be lurking in my neighborhood and keeping an eye on the entrance to our building. I saw a drunk peeing in a doorway, I saw a man with an aluminum walker making his painfully slow way to the Chaldean deli, I saw a man and woman I recognized having an argument I’d watched them have a dozen times before. I saw any number of my fellow citizens, waiting for buses, descending into subway tunnels, getting in or out of taxis, or going someplace on foot, some of them taking their time, others in a New York hurry. But I didn’t see the one man I was looking for, and in due course it struck me that I might be behaving in a manner likely to call attention to myself, not a good idea when I was carrying three unregistered handguns and enough ammo to start a gang war. I quit while I was ahead and went upstairs.

Elaine was dozing lightly in the big armchair. TJ was doing something with her computer. I gave him one of the nines and a loaded clip, and he checked it out as if he’d done this before. He asked if I wanted him to stay over. He could sleep on the couch, he suggested. I sent him home, roused Elaine enough to put her back to sleep in our bed, and went and stood by the south window myself.

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The Towers were still absent, even as more gaps seemed to be forming in my own personal skyline. I went on looking for a while, and when nothing changed I went to bed.

TJ called while we were having breakfast. Did we need him? Because he thought he might go out for a while. I told him to go, and he reminded me that he’d be carrying his cell phone. If we needed him, all we had to do was call him.

After a second cup of coffee I put the two guns on the kitchen table, the nine and the .38. Elaine picked them up in turn, held them gingerly in her hand, and announced she liked the nine better. It wasn’t as heavy, she said, and she liked the way it fit her hand. I told her I’d picked out the revolver for her, and why I thought it might suit her better. She said that was okay, but seemed disappointed.

Her disappointment abated as she became more familiar with the thing. I taught her to load it and unload it, had her aim it and dry-fire it. I’d learned to shoot one-handed, that was the way they taught you back when I joined the department, but nowadays everybody holds a gun in two hands. I think it started around the time Chris Evert taught the world there was nothing sissy about a two-handed backhand, though I can’t see the connection. I don’t know that a second hand improves your aim, but it does lessen the effect of recoil, and that alone was reason enough to teach her to use both hands.

The thing to remember, I told her, was to keep firing. Recoil would probably elevate the muzzle, so she’d have to take aim again, and pull the trigger again, and keep it up until the gun was empty. If she hit him the first time and dropped him, if he fell down and lay there dead, that was no reason to stop. If he’s face up, shoot him in the chest. If he’s face down, shoot him in the back. And then shoot him in the head.

And then cut his head off, I thought, and put it on a stick, and we’ll carry it all through the town.

TJ called around ten, to make sure we were okay. He might be a while, he said. I told him everything was fine. He called again an hour later to say he was on his way, and was there anything we needed? I told him 202

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to pick up a couple of newspapers, and he brought the Times and the Post when he showed up a little before noon.

“I know it ain’t high priority,” he said, “but I didn’t know what else to do. So I decided to check out David Thompson.”

“How?”

“Well, he be waitin’ on that check you said you’d send him, right? So I went up to Amsterdam Avenue an’ hung out there. Be good if there was a place right across the street where you could have something to eat and watch through the window, but there wasn’t, so I just stood up against a building.”

“That must have gotten old in a hurry,” Elaine said.

“Legs was feeling it,” he admitted. “I got to wishing there was a way for me to sit down, but you sit yourself down in the middle of the sidewalk and people apt to look at you.”

“It’s no way to avoid attention,” I agreed.

“And if you sitting down, you might miss what’s happening on the other side of the street, ’specially a wide street like Amsterdam. So what I did, I crossed the street and I sat down on the sidewalk right next to the place with the mailboxes.”

“To avoid calling attention to yourself.” He grinned. “I’s wearing this,” he said, taking off a peaked cap of pieced denim, “in case the sun was to get in my eyes. And ’cause a hat be a good disguise. You put it on, you take it off, you changing your

’pearance. Older dude taught me that.”

“I didn’t know you were paying attention.”

“Man, I always listen to the voice of experience. How else I gone learn? What I did, I put the cap on the ground in front of me, dropped all my loose change in it, an’ sat with one leg sort of folded back under me. Anybody look at me, they think I be a cripple.”

“And if they saw you trot across the street and set up?”

“Then they think I’s a fake cripple. Man, you think a beggar’s got an easy gig, but it ain’t so. People just pass you by, don’t even want to look at you.”

“Day trading’s probably a better deal,” Elaine said.

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started with. Now and then, somebody stop an’ give you something.

Had one dude put in a dollar an’ take change.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Just took a quarter,” he said. “ ’Pologized to me, said he needed it for a parking meter. Leaves me seventy-five cents ahead, so why he be

’pologizing? People are strange sometimes.” Elaine said, “See? Look what you learned this morning.”

“Already knew that. What I learned is you just wait in the right place, you get what you lookin’ for.”

“He turned up?”

He nodded. “Came for his mail. Walked in lookin’ hopeful an’ came out lookin’ disgusted. Guess he still waitin’ on that check. And he ain’t the guy in that drawing, case there was any question. He’s the dude came out of Louise’s building, the one lost us around the block.”

“Did you have any luck following him?”

“Didn’t even try. He drove up in a big old Chevy Caprice, pulled up by the hydrant, was in and out in a couple of minutes. Hopped back in the car and drove off. I got the plate number. That do us any good?” Joe Durkin said, “Didn’t I tell you? I’m a private citizen, I put in my last day for the City of New York. I’m officially retired.”

“I’ll bet they haven’t got the word yet at the DMV.”

“I’d be breaking the law,” he said. “Impersonating a police officer.”

“Gee, I didn’t think of that.”

“Yeah, I bet. Why can’t you do it yourself? You’ve been breaking laws right and left for years.”

“You know the procedure. It’s changed in the past thirty years.”

“Thirty years,” he said. “Jesus, I guess it has. Did they even have license plates thirty years ago?”

“They did, but they kept falling off the horses.”

“Off the horses’ asses, you mean. And speaking of horses’ asses, I thought you were the next thing to retired yourself.”

“Something came up.”

“As the bishop said to the actress. Give me the fucking plate number, I’ll see what I can do.”

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It didn’t take him long. He called back fifteen minutes later and said, “Next time we have dinner, it’s on you. And it won’t be any cheap joint like the one I took you to, either. Write this down: David Joel Thompson, 118 Manhattan Avenue, Apartment 4-C for Charlie. Zip is 10025. Phone number—”

“They have a phone number listed?”

“They could probably tell you his favorite color, if you knew how to ask for it.” He gave me Thompson’s phone number and his date of birth, which made him forty-one. “And a Sagittarius,” he added, “in case Elaine wants to try doing his chart. Five-nine, a hundred sixty pounds, color of hair brown, color of eyes brown. That help?”

“You’re a prince, Joe.”

“A retired prince,” he said. “A prince with a pension.” The name was the one he had given Louise, and the address was a five-minute walk from his mail drop. The phone number had a 212 prefix, so it would be a land line, not his cell phone. I dialed it and it rang five times before a mechanical voice informed me that the number I had reached had been disconnected.

It didn’t matter, David Thompson didn’t matter, but I was interested in spite of myself. If I’d had anything better to do I’d have done it, but I didn’t. I could sit around waiting for Sussman to call, or I could get out of the house and do something.

I asked TJ to stick around, and made sure he had the gun with him.

He’d been carrying it in the small of his back, held there by his belt and covered by the baggy blue chambray workshirt he’d neglected to tuck in. “New York is a tough town, Myrtle,” he said, his accent suitably midwestern. “Even the beggars carry guns.” It was overcast, and by the time I got out of the subway the sky had darkened and I was sorry I hadn’t brought an umbrella. I’d taken the One train and stayed on a stop past Ninety-sixth Street, to 103rd and Broadway. Manhattan Avenue runs north and south a short block west of Central Park, extending from 100th Street up to just below 125th. I walked there and found 118. There was no Thompson nameplate on the row of buzzers, and both the buzzer and the mailbox for Apartment All the Flowers Are Dying

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4-C for Charlie bore small plastic inserts imprinted with the name kostakis.

I rang the bell and waited and rang it again, and nobody answered. I rang the super’s bell and nobody answered that, either, and I was on my way out the door when the door from the hallway opened and a man with a voice thick with phlegm asked me what I wanted.

I told him, and he frowned and scratched his head. “David Thompson,” he said. “He don’t live here. I got a Greek couple in there now, been with me the better part of a year now. Very nice people. Guy who was in there before them, tell the truth, I don’t remember his name.

It’s funny, ’cause I can picture him.”

I showed him the photo and he didn’t hesitate. “That’s him,” he said.

“Moved, no forwarding. And I remember the name now, because the first week or two he’d get mail here, and I’d have to give it back to the postman. Then that stopped, and I could forget him, which I did.”

“He didn’t pay his rent,” I told TJ and Elaine. “He got a couple of months behind and ignored the notices they sent him. Eviction proceedings can take a while, but the super’s not a man who does everything by the book. He made sure Thompson was out of the house, then changed the locks and got a friend to help him put all of Thompson’s stuff on the street. The stuff disappeared gradually, he said. People would come by and take what they wanted, and eventually the sanitation men carted off the rest.”

“Thompson never showed up?”

“If he did, the super never noticed, but I’m not sure how much he notices. Thompson may have moved out on his own before the locks were changed, and not bothered to tell anybody.”

“And just left everything.”

“Everything that the super wound up tossing. We don’t know what he may have taken with him.”

TJ said, “We got a plan?”

“No,” I said. “Not really.”

26

That was Friday, and according to the Times it was the longest day of the year. I could have told them as much myself, but I wouldn’t have been talking about the relative proportion of daylight and darkness.

The hours crawled, and there seemed to be more of them than usual.

We sat around, the three of us, and we read the papers and watched TV, and for a while TJ and Elaine played canasta, which didn’t work too well because neither of them was too clear on the rules. Eventually he went home and we went to bed, and when we got up it was Saturday and nothing had changed but the weather. The rain that had threatened to fall yesterday was falling now, and it contiunued off and on throughout the day.

“I keep thinking I should call Monica,” Elaine said.

I kept thinking I should call Sussman, and eventually I did. He had some progress to report, though it didn’t seem to me as though it led anywhere. They’d found the liquor store where he’d bought the bottle of Strega, paying cash for it, and the clerk had given a firm positive ID

of the sketch. Assuming you could get it admitted as evidence, it was no more than circumstantial, the sort of thing Ray Gruliow liked to call “a mere feather on the scales of Justice.” Sussman admitted it was light. “It means we can stop sending guys to check out liquor stores,” he said, “and I guess that’s a plus. How are you and your wife holding up?”

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I told him we were all right, but we’d be a lot happier when the case was wrapped up.

“As would I,” he said. “What I’ve been doing is going through all the Unsolveds, trying to find something that matches up just a little bit.

You have to figure he’s done this before, wouldn’t you say?” I hadn’t thought about that, but of course he was right. Monica’s murder was too well staged, too carefully worked out, to be anybody’s maiden effort.

“But there’s not a thing with his prints on it. Not literally his prints, you know what I mean.”

“Sure.”

“I’ve been running the MO through NCIC, and I’ve got a call in to an FBI field agent, one of the few I know who doubles as a human being. Because I had the thought that maybe our guy’s from somewhere else. So he won’t fit any of our Unsolveds, but he might fit just fine in Oshkosh or Kokomo.”

“Maybe he’s like lightning and never strikes twice in the same place.”

“Then he’d be as hard to catch as lightning, because nobody’d be in a position to see a pattern develop. Unless the individual murders are rubber stamp affairs, so similar that the feds’ computer can’t help picking up on it. Otherwise, you know, he just crisscrosses the country, kills one person here and one person there, and there’s never a full-scale manhunt because nobody realizes they’re dealing with a one-man crime wave.”

“Wasn’t there somebody like that a few years ago? Turned out to be a long-haul trucker?”

“Rings a bell. I can’t see our guy behind the wheel of a Peterbilt, somehow.”

“No.”

“Maybe he’s filled his New York quota,” he said, “and he’s off to bring his own special brand of joy to El Paso. That would put him out of our reach, but he’d also be out of our hair, and your wife could open up her store and sell me that sketch. I really liked it, you know.”

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“I would just plain love to take you up on that,” he said. “But if he’s gone and we never hear from him again? Right now I have to say that’d be fine with me.”

I hung up feeling as though I’d missed something, that he’d said something I should have picked up on. There’s a way to use the answering machine as a recorder, although I’ve never had occasion to do so and would have to consult the manual for instructions. I’d never considered it, but it occurred to me now that it would be handy to have it on tape so I could play it back and puzzle it out.

And there was something else he’d said the other day, something that had gone right by me and I’d only thought of later on, when it was too late to ask him what he’d meant. But what the hell was it?

My memory’s always been good, except for all those things I’ve chosen to forget. Just as Elaine had secretly believed age would never make visible inroads upon her looks, so I’d managed to tell myself I was somehow immune to the erosion of memory that comes with the years. I suppose it’s pride that makes us think things will be different for us, that the universe will grant us a special dispensation. And she did, God knows, look young for her years, and was still as beautiful a woman as I’d ever known. And my memory was still pretty sharp.

But every once in a while something would come along to remind me that it wasn’t as sharp as it used to be.

I said as much to Elaine, and she said, “That reminds me. The one thing Monica always dreaded was Alzheimer’s. There’s some of it in her family, and she was terrified she’d get it if she lived long enough.” She winced at that. “She made me promise I wouldn’t let her live like that. She had a living will, but that’s no help with Alzheimer’s, not until the late stages, because there’s no plug to pull. You’re perfectly healthy, you just don’t have a mind anymore.

“So what I had to promise was that I’d find some way to put her out of her misery. Get her to take sleeping pills, I suppose. We didn’t get into the details. And God knows what I would have done if it came to that, but at any rate I promised her.

“And she said, ‘Yeah, right, and a fat lot of good that’s gonna do me.

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Because there I’ll be, gaga, with my eyes looking in different directions and drool running down the corner of my mouth, and you’ll stand there saying, “Gosh, let me think now. There’s something I was supposed to do for Monica and I can’t for the life of me remember what the hell it was.” ’ ”

Sunday morning TJ showed up early with a bag of lox and bagels and cream cheese. I ate quickly and left the two of them at the breakfast table and rode down to the Village for the eleven o’clock at Perry Street. A lot of old-timers tend to go to that meeting, and I always run into a few old friends there.

It was raining when I left the house, dry by the time I got to the meeting, raining again at 12:30 when it ended. I picked up the Sunday Times on the way home and the three of us sat around reading sections of it. It was the perfect picture of domestic tranquility, except that Elaine would lapse periodically into troughs of deep sadness. And, of course, there was someone out there trying to kill her.

I had the Sports section and was reading a story about golf, a pastime in which I have not the slightest interest, when she said, “I think you should read this.”

“Me?”

“Uh-huh. Or maybe you already did. About that man who killed the three boys in Richmond, and earlier this month he was executed.”

“I saw it.”

“Today?”

“Yesterday, or it might have been Friday.” The days sort of run together when you’re not doing anything. “I noticed it because I had two conversations about the case just a couple of days before they put him down. Somebody tipped them off as to the location of the missing body, isn’t that it?”

“There’s a little more in today’s paper.”

“And people are jumping up and down and saying they executed an innocent man,” I said. “That sort of thing’s been tried before, you know. Say I’m on Death Row, awaiting execution for a murder that I damn well did commit. What I do, I slip some details of the crime to 210

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you, and you have a great crisis of conscience and confess to it, supplying details that have been withheld by the police and could only be known by the actual killer. Well, right, and the actual killer told them to you. It’s an old game, and when it’s worked right it clouds the issue, and sometimes you’ll even see a temporary stay of execution come out of it. But it can’t hold up, and it doesn’t.”

“This seems a little different.”

“Because the information didn’t come to light until the guy got the needle. And didn’t the tip come to them by untraceable e-mail? You have to wonder why the tipster bothered. He’d held off too long to save his buddy, not that it would have worked anyway.”

“Maybe he sent the message in time,” TJ suggested, “but it got hung up in cyberspace somewhere. There’s days when some of the service providers are as slow as the post office.”

“You know,” Elaine said, “there’s a lot more information in today’s paper. Would it kill you to read the fucking article?”

“Probably not,” I said. “Where is it?”

“Never mind. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap.”

“Can I see the article?”

“It’s probably not gonna be that interesting.”

“Elaine—”

TJ, his eyes rolling, got to his feet, walked over to her, took the paper out of her hand, and came over to present it to me. “It’s nice having a family,” he said, “even if it is what you call dysfunctional.” I read the article.

One or two paragraphs in, I said, “I see what you mean.”

“It’s weird, isn’t it?”

“And complicated,” I said. “Let me finish.” A Times-Dispatch reporter had thought to contact the authorities at Greensville, where the execution of Preston Applewhite had taken place. The warden there recalled several visits by a Yale professor of psychology named Arne Bodinson. Bodinson’s initials were the same as those of the rather transparent pseudonym of the e-mail tipster, which might or might not be purely coincidental.

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story I read yesterday or the day before—except for Bodinson’s first name, which had originally been erroneously reported as Arnold. Since then, the reporter had established conclusively that no one at Yale had ever heard of Bodinson, Arne or Arnold, that he was not a member of the Yale faculty, nor had he, as his résumé claimed, earned a doctorate from that institution. This prompted the reporter to check with the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where Bodinson had allegedly done his undergraduate work, and where they too had no record of his ever having attended, let alone having been awarded a degree.

“This is fascinating,” I said. “Did you see where this Bodinson actually attended the execution? As an invited guest of Applewhite?”

“Isn’t that something? The best thing we ever get invited to is the Mostly Mozart patrons’ dinner.”

“Least they gave you a T-shirt,” TJ put in. “Bet you Bodinson didn’t get one.”

“ ‘My Friend Just Got a Lethal Injection,’ ” Elaine said, “ ‘and All I Got Was This Fucking Shirt.’ ”

I said, “It’s hard to figure this out. There doesn’t seem to be any trace of Bodinson. He was in the area for several days, he kept visiting Applewhite in his cell, but none of the local motels remember him.

There’s a picture.”

“Where? I didn’t see it.”

“Not in the paper. Everyone who passes through security at Greensville walks in front of a security camera. They don’t have a photo in hand, but they will, once they run through all the stored tapes. Of course, if Bodinson was savvy enough to fake credentials that got him into Applewhite’s cell, he probably didn’t give the security camera a very good look at him. They’ll have shots with his hand in front of his face, or his head turned away. They’ll probably be in tomorrow’s paper, because this story’s going to get a lot of national play.”

“I can see why.”

“According to the warden, Bodinson told Applewhite he believed his claim of innocence. Of course we don’t know that’s what he told Applewhite, because nobody heard him but Applewhite, and he’s not 212

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talking. But that’s what he said he was going to tell him. But in the meantime he told the warden that he’d be lying to Applewhite for the sake of the study he was doing, that it was obvious to him the man was guilty as charged. How can you figure the son of a bitch?”

“I suppose more will be revealed.”

“I wonder. If he knew Applewhite from before, why not just visit him in the normal fashion? You’re allowed to have friends visit. If he was a stranger, what was the point?”

Elaine suggested the man might be a kindred spirit, part of an un-derground network of predatory pedophiles.

“Offering aid and comfort to a fallen comrade,” I said, “and keeping it anonymous. He promised the warden he’d try to find out where the missing boy was buried. And evidently did find out, but instead of telling the warden what he’d learned he waited and tipped off the Richmond paper. I don’t get it.”

“Maybe Applewhite told him, but swore him to secrecy until after his death. Maybe he wanted to be able to die proclaiming his innocence.”

“It’s all so damn convoluted,” I said. “Applewhite’s just a pervert and a murderer, but Arne Bodinson a/k/a Abel Baker is something else again. You’ve got to wonder where he’ll turn up next.”

27

It is, he has to admit, a disturbingly good likeness. It’s in the papers and on television, a full-face drawing of himself, the eyes gazing intently out at one, as in a photograph for which the subject has stared directly into the camera lens. But this is no photo, and must have been produced by a police artist, working in concert with a witness.

But what witness? Surely not the doorman in the building on Jane Street. The man had barely opened his eyes, let alone had the wit to use them. And the other doorman, the one who’d been on duty when he left, had scarcely spared him a glance. It was his job to vet persons on their way in, not those headed out.

Then who?

Oh, of course. The woman in the shop. Elaine Scudder, dealer in art and antiques. The wife of the detective. The friend of the late Monica.

Yes, he will definitely skin her. Start with her hands and feet, then work his way to the good parts.

But first there is the problem of the drawing. He can’t move about effectively, can’t do what he has to do, if any passerby is apt to glance at him and sound the alarm. How can he give his full attention to the hunt if he’s at the same time cast in the role of quarry?

He has a copy of the sketch before him, torn from this morning’s Daily News. How the eyes blaze! He’s only beginning to realize what a sense of 214

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strength and purpose emanates from them. Surely this ocular intensity is a continuing development, an ongoing part of his evolution. Aren’t the eyes said to be the windows of the soul? The soul is a myth, surely, but substitute spirit or essence for it and you got the idea. His eyes reflect the person he is, and as he has grown in power, the look in his eyes has evolved accordingly.

He studies his reflection in the bathroom mirror, where the late Joseph Bohan must have viewed himself on those infrequent occasions when he remembered to shave. Yes, his eyes really do burn like the eyes in the drawing.

This pleases him.

He’s also pleased to note the prominence of the mustache in the drawing. It is a dominant feature, it draws the eye, and a casual viewer will remember the mustache and forget the face’s other features.

And he doesn’t have the mustache anymore.

That’s a help, but he’s not sure it’s enough. With eight million people out there in the city, it’s not unlikely that one of them will look beyond the portcullis of the mustache and see the face plain.

His task, then, is to alter his appearance so that he looks less like the drawing. And hasn’t he a long history of reinventing himself? Isn’t his life an unending process of reinvention?

It would be easy, he thinks, simply to shave his head. He did this once years ago, with no purpose beyond experimentation, and was pleased if not greatly surprised to discover that he has a nicely shaped head, with none of those bumps or craters best left covered.

Shaving one’s head brings about an instantaneous radical transforma-tion, but nevertheless he knows it’s a bad idea. A man with a shaved head has a commanding presence. The bald pate draws the eye. And the viewer can hardly help but wonder what the shaven head would look like without the razor’s intervention.

No, the object is to avoid drawing glances. One wants to look different from one’s picture, but still to blend in with one’s fellows. One seeks not to stand out from the crowd but to fade into it, to be perfectly ordinary, invisible in one’s mundanity.

He’s been to the drugstore, and now he lines up his purchases on the bathroom shelf. He strips to the waist and gets to work.

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First, the hairline. He’s been blessed with a full head of hair, and it’s every bit as full in the drawing as in reality. Eyes that would be drawn to a shaved head won’t look twice at a receding hairline. He uses the little scissors first, clearing a path for the razor, which he then wields with the precision of a plastic surgeon, carefully delineating a new hairline. It begins an inch and a half higher on his forehead, and the recession is more pronounced on the temples. The result, when he’s finished, is a textbook case of male-pattern baldness, lacking only a nascent bald spot at the crown. A bald spot, alas, is not something one can convincingly create on one’s own.

Keep it simple, he tells himself.

Nice phrase, that. Keep it simple, easy does it, first things first. He’s been associating with a great gathering of simpletons lately, people he won’t be seeing anymore, but he does like some of their catchphrases, and when he dropped one or two of his own into their midst they generally seemed to like them as well.

You get what you get, he said on one occasion, and watched their little puppet heads bob up and down in agreement.

He keeps it simple, and is done with his hairline. Next the eyebrows, and for this operation he will need the little scissors and the pair of tweezers.

His own eyebrows are by no means bushy, but are nevertheless somewhat prominent. Trimming and plucking reduces their prominence, and it’s remarkable how the change alters the whole appearance of his eyes.

Looking out from beneath thinner, wispier brows, his gaze is somehow gentler, less unsettling.

Next, hair dye. His own medium-brown hair has the advantage of near invisibility; it might draw a glance in Asia or Scandinavia, but in America it is utterly ordinary. That’s a good argument for leaving it alone, but after due reflection he follows the instructions on the package and renders it a shade or two darker. He knows not to dye it black—

black hair, even when it’s natural, somehow always looks dyed—and the color he’s selected is very nearly as pedestrian as his own, yet undeniably different.

He leaves his eyebrows undyed, so that they’ll appear even less distinct.

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and consequently lighter than the rest. The contrast is slight, but noticeable all the same, like evidence of the former presence of a ring or wrist-watch. He’s allowed for this, however, and he applies a small amount of sunless tanning lotion to the pale areas, and to the rest of his face as well.

He’s naturally light-complected, and avoids the sun, so a little color in his face will make him just a little more ordinary.

And, finally, a pair of glasses.

Not sunglasses. While they do a wonderful job of hiding the eyes and masking the face, they have the disadvantage of looking like a disguise.

Ordinary eyeglasses, on the other hand, are almost as good at concealing the eyes and changing the shape of the face without looking as though that’s what they’re doing.

His distance vision is perfect, better than 20-20, and, while he’s reached an age when presbyopia could be expected to show itself, his close vision is equally good. He doesn’t even need glasses for reading.

He wanted real glasses, not a stage prop or a drugstore special. And yesterday he went to a LensCrafters shop and let the resident optometrist examine his eyes. He feigned difficulty with one of the chart’s lower lines, then let the man find a lens that “improved” his vision. It does no such thing, but it is mild enough so that it doesn’t greatly interfere with it. He won’t see any better with his new glasses, but he won’t see all that much worse, and he doesn’t think they will give him a headache.

And he’ll only wear them when he’s out in public.

With the glasses on, he stands at the bathroom mirror and shifts his gaze back and forth, from his reflection to the sketch to the reflection again.

Why, his own mother wouldn’t recognize him.

But that’s something he doesn’t want to think about, not now, not ever, and he quickly wills the thought away. No one will recognize him, that’s the point. Not the readers of the Daily News, not the viewers of Live at Five. The cops, fumbling about in the manner of their tribe, won’t give him a second glance. Matthew Scudder won’t recognize him until the Messer bowie is planted in his guts, opening him up, carving him from asshole to appetite. And as for Elaine . . .

Yes, he’ll definitely skin her.

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.

.

.

A problem, of course, lies in the fact that the other residents in his building, Joe Bohan’s neighbors, have seen him as he appeared earlier—

without the mustache, he has never worn that here, but with his full head of lighter hair, his paler skin, his fuller eyebrows, his unspectacled eyes.

Few of them, to be sure, have had more than a glimpse of him, passing him on the stairs, perhaps. But he’s had several chats with Mrs. Laskowski and passed the time of day with one or two others.

So it will be best to avoid them, best to minimize his own comings and goings. It might even be prudent to quit the premises and take up residence elsewhere. Not another transient hotel, though. That’s just the sort of place the police check first.

Perhaps he’ll be able to stay where he is. Time is on his side; after the first fruitless days, the cops, having lost the scent, will lose their zeal as well. The press will tire of showing his picture, and the public, bom-barded with new images and new horrors, will begin to forget what he looks like.

Time takes time. And you get what you get.

But he waits until dark to leave the building, waits until Mrs.

Laskowski will surely have given up the glory of the front stoop for the comfort of her television set. Then, the Jenkins folding knife in his pocket, he descends into the night.

At another Kinko’s, this one over on the East Side, he logs on and visits one of his newsgroups. He scans the new posts, gives a few of them a thorough reading, then starts a new thread of his own.

He types:

The experts, self-styled and otherwise, the criminologists and psychologists and journalists, see those of us who kill for pleasure as driven men, essentially helpless in the grip of our own overpowering compulsions. No doubt it is more comforting to believe a man has to kill than that he simply loves to kill.

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We kill, they tell us, according to the calendar, our behavior often dictated by phases of the moon. Much was made of the fact that our late brother Preston Applewhite dispatched his young friends at one-month intervals. Of course if one wished to establish a pattern, to draw public attention to the idea that a serial killer was operating, mightn’t one deliberately wait a month between incidents? But no one seems to have considered this possibility.

There are, to be sure, those of us who are at the effect of our compulsions. But there are also those of us who are not. We can wait, if need be, no matter how the moon draws tides in our blood. And, when it is expedient, we can act in an instant in the absence of any inner prompting. We are much more dangerous and far less predictable than you find it comforting to believe.

He reads it over, ponders a signature, decides none is required. And hits send.

Back at the apartment, he thinks about what he has posted. The one thing he must do, he knows, is give himself time. Time for the Scudders to let their guard down. Time for the police to lose interest. Time for the public to forget.

But earlier, walking across town, he looked up and caught a glimpse of the moon. And it told him of what his very own blood has already informed him. That in a day, two at the most, it will be full.

He is not an automaton. He does not simply react to stimuli. He does not exist at the whim of fate. He makes his own fate, carves out his own destiny.

Yet how can he argue that the full moon is without influence?

It draws up the very seas, for heaven’s sake. No one denies its role as the source of the tides. How then deny its pull upon the blood in one’s veins?

Was the moon full that night in Durango? Along with the glow of the bedside lamp, did moonlight fall upon the throat and lead the bowie to it?

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He rather thinks so.

Tomorrow, he knows, the pull will be at its strongest. Will it be irresistible? No, certainly not. His will is stronger than the tides, stronger than the moon.

But it might influence him to hurry things, to take needless chances.

The longer he delays resolving matters with the Scudders, the more certain he can be of success. So must he stifle the moon-driven urges? Must he put them aside, perhaps until the next full moon, perhaps even longer?

Often, counseling patients, he’s stressed the importance of getting away from binary thinking. Beware the trap of the two alternatives, he advised them. So often, if you but look for it, you discover a third choice.

For him, the third choice, the only real choice, is obvious. All he has to do is take the pressure off.

Late Monday afternoon, at the peak of rush hour, he’s crammed into a subway car on the southbound E train. As the train pulls out of the Fiftieth Street station, he draws the knife from his pocket, opens it with a practiced flick of the wrist. The bodies of his fellow passengers screen his actions from view, and no one can see him slip the knife between two ribs of the woman he’s pressed against.

He’s aware of the sudden intake of breath that stops when the blade finds her heart. For an instant she seems to be dancing on the end of his knife. Then the dance is over. He feels the life go out of her and breathes it in along with her scent.

The train pulls into Times Square. The doors open. He’s one of many heading out the doors, and he’s on the platform before the woman he’s just killed has room enough to fall down. By the time they clear enough space to attempt to help her, he’s up the stairs. He’s out on the street long before anyone has the slightest suspicion she’s dead.

There.

It’s so easy. Because the moon is full, or simply because he likes to do what gives him pleasure, he’s felt the need to kill. But he hasn’t allowed that need to hurry his plan or expose him to unnecessary risk. He’s found a simple risk-free way to act on it, and has done so with great success.

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Now he can wait. Now he can bide his time, cocooned in Joe Bohan’s cozy apartment, keeping up with his newsgroups, surfing the Internet, watching the Applewhite story (which is fast becoming the Bodinson story) unfold in fascinating fashion in Richmond.

The moon won’t be full for another four weeks. And, should he feel the urge before then, how hard will it be to find and dispatch someone else?

This city has human beings in great abundance. It won’t miss a few here and there.

You can go to the ocean with a teaspoon or a bucket, he used to tell his clients. The ocean does not care.

A useful image, getting across the notion of the infinite abundance of the Universe. He’s always liked it.

Indeed. With a teaspoon or a bucket. Or a knife.

28

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

“Until all of this is over, I take that to mean.”

“And I hope it’s soon.”

“She’s staying close to home?”

“She’s staying home,” I said. “Period.”

“Because I had a thought.”

“Oh?”

“It can’t be much fun for her, sitting home every day. And I don’t know what kind of business she does there, little shop like that, but you can’t do any at all when you’re not open.”

“I think I see where this is going.”

“Well, I figured you would. We can protect her, you know. I’d have two men in that back office, I’d park a panel truck in front with another two men in it, I’d have the place wired for sound. He couldn’t get anywhere near her.”

“No,” I said.

“Take a minute and think about it, why don’t you? We’ve got a chance to take a proactive stance here. Isn’t that better than just sitting around waiting for something to happen?”

“Send a cop to college,” I said, “and he comes out using words like proactive.”

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“What’s the matter with proactive? We’ve got a chance to quit sitting around with our thumbs up our asses. You like that better?”

“What I don’t like,” I said, “is staking my wife out like a sacrificial goat.”

There was more, and both our voices got a little louder toward the end. When I hung up, Elaine asked me just what the role of sacrificial goat consisted of. I told her to forget it.

“They want me to open the store?”

“It’s a bad idea. Sussman likes it because it gives him a chance to do something.”

“That must be where proactive came in.”

“He can station men here and there and have them all stay in touch with walkie-talkies. He gets to be the general, he gets to direct the movie. But you’re the one who’d be taking the risk, and to no purpose, because this guy’s not stupid.”

“So you’re saying it wouldn’t work?”

“Not in a million years. You think he’ll just waltz into the shop? They can have two guys in a Con Ed truck, looking like they’re working in a manhole, and they can have another guy dressed like a bum and collecting coins in a paper cup—”

“Like TJ, with his denim cap.”

“—and two cops in the back room, and one in the basement and another on the roof, for all I know. The guy’ll spot ’em in a hot second, and he’ll stay away.”

“Say he does. Nobody gets hurt, and at least I’m out there doing something instead of just sitting here like a piece of Wedgwood that’s too delicate to put on the table. What’s the downside?”

“They put you out there,” I said. “They bait the hook and he doesn’t bite.”

“They bait the hook with a goat? Never mind. So he doesn’t bite.

Does that mean it wasn’t worth trying?”

“It does if it means they lose their edge,” I said. “They keep preparing for something that keeps not happening, and they start taking it for granted that nothing’s going to happen. And they get sloppy, and All the Flowers Are Dying

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they let their guard down. And he sits back and waits and watches, and when he finally makes his move nobody notices until it’s too late.”

“You really think that would happen?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

“And you wouldn’t just be standing there behind the counter for six or seven hours a day. You’d have to get there and back. They’d give you a police escort, and don’t you think he’d spot it? And figure out a way around it?”

“I see what you mean,” she said. “You can only take precautions so long and then you start loosening up. But won’t the same thing happen to us here? I’m already getting a fierce case of cabin fever. We’ve got a nice roomy apartment, so I’ve got more than four walls to stare at, but I’m getting pretty tired of them just the same. I’ve been good, I do my yoga in the living room, but I don’t know how long I can take it.”

“We’ll take it a day at a time.”

“Like staying sober, huh?”

“Like getting through anything. Even guys in prison figure that much out. You take it a day at a time and you wait it out.”

“I know you’re right,” she said. She was silent for a moment, and then she said, “Suppose it was you.”

“Suppose what was me?”

“Suppose it was you on this asshole’s shit list. And as far as that goes, how do we know it isn’t? Maybe I’m not the only one he wants to kill, did you ever think of that?”

“If he makes a move on me, I hope he doesn’t bring me a bottle of Strega.”

“I’m serious.”

“I guess the flowers would be okay, though. But no Strega.” A little later she said, “You take risks. You’ve even let yourself be the bait in the trap. What about the time that Colombian came at you with a machete?”

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“That was more than twenty years ago. I was young and reckless then.”

“You still take risks. When you and Mick went out to his farm after those men—”

“There was nothing else to do, honey.”

“I know.”

“There was no way to bring the cops in, and we were in no position to hang back and wait it out. It was a different situation.” She nodded. She said, “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the time I was stabbed. It must have hurt, don’t you think? But it’s funny, the only pain I remember is post-op, waiting to heal. I almost died, didn’t I?”

“It was touch and go.”

“They had to take out my spleen.”

“They did,” I said, “though anyone who knows you would find that hard to believe.”

“Thanks a lot. He was trying to kill you, too. Me first, but then you.

I think this is the same idea.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I just have a feeling. He may not be too fussy about the order, either. I’m staying inside, I’ve been cooped up here for days, but you get to go out.”

“What’s your point?”

“Well, you have to be careful. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to you.”

“If I lost you,” I said, “I really wouldn’t want to go on.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I’m not saying I’d kill myself. I just wouldn’t want to live anymore.

You reach a certain age and it can get pretty grim, you spend all your time going to other people’s funerals and waiting around for your own.

Your body and your mind both start giving up ground, and the best you can hope for is that they both quit on you at the same time. I can handle all that if I’ve got you keeping me company, but without you, well, I don’t know that there’d be much point. So I realize it’s a pain in the All the Flowers Are Dying

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ass staying inside twenty-four hours a day, but do it anyway, okay? Humor me.”

“Okay,” she said.

A little after noon I got a phone call. It was the woman in the shop on Amsterdam Avenue. Number 1217 had come in again, wanting to pick up his mail, and there was no mail. So she’d thought of something. Tell me your name, she said, and I’ll look and see if any mail for you got in the wrong box.

“So he told me, and his name is David Thompson.” I thanked her, and was careful not to let on that we’d learned as much a couple of days ago. It was useful confirmation, anyway, and told us that David Thompson was not only the name on his driver’s license but also the one under which he was receiving his mail.

All of this made him look increasingly legitimate. On the other hand, he’d been booted out of his apartment for not paying the rent, and if he was living in Kips Bay, what did he need with a mail drop on the Upper West Side?

I had a hunch, and then my phone rang again less than an hour later, and I wasn’t really surprised when it was him.

“This is David Thompson,” he said. “I never did get that check.”

“I know,” I said, “and I’m sorry as hell. You wouldn’t believe what’s been going on here.”

“Oh?”

“Listen,” I said, “I’ve got your check right here in front of me, and what I want to do is hand it to you personally. And while I’m at it I’ve got some more work for you, a bigger project that I’d prefer to discuss with you face-to-face. And I promise you won’t have to wait so long to get paid this time.”

There was a pause, and he said I’d better give him the address again.

The poor bastard didn’t have a clue who he was talking to and didn’t want to let on.

“No, don’t come here,” I said. “This place is a zoo. There’s a coffee shop at Fifty-seventh and Ninth, the northwest corner, the Morning 226

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Star. Say half an hour? And you won’t have trouble picking me out. I’ll be the only guy there in a suit and a tie.” He said he’d see me there. I went to the bedroom to pick out a suit and a tie.

He showed up wearing a suit and tie himself. I guess he’d figured he had to dress for the meeting. He saw me, knew he didn’t recognize me, and scanned the room for another suit.

I said, “David?”

He turned at the sound of my voice and made a good show of recognizing me after all. “I don’t know how I missed you,” he said, and came over to shake hands. His hand was dry, his grip firm. He said something about the weather or the traffic, and I responded appropriately and motioned for him to sit. I already had coffee in front of me, and the waiter was right on the spot for a change. Thompson said he’d have tea, that coffee always made him want a cigarette.

He looked neat and clean. His suit was pressed and his shirt un-wrinkled, and he’d shaved that morning. His hair was a little shaggy, but not unfashionably so, and his mustache was neatly trimmed.

“I’m going to start by apologizing,” I said. “I got you here under false pretenses. There’s a reason I don’t look familiar. We’ve never met. I didn’t give you any work, and I don’t have a check for you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, how could you? My name’s Matthew Scudder, I’m a former police officer. A woman I know met you online. She had a bad experience once, and it led her to adopt a policy of running a check on people she was interested in, to make sure they aren’t misrepresenting themselves.”

“Louise,” he said.

“You don’t check out,” I said. “Your name’s so common it makes you hard to investigate, but what does come up has some pieces missing. I think I know what’s going on here.”

“This is making me very uncomfortable.”

“You’re free to leave. I can’t hold you here. But why don’t you listen to what I have to say, and then you can tell me if I’m right or wrong. Or just tell me to go to hell, whatever you want.”

29

“He had a rough time,” I said. “He had a job and a girlfriend, and he lost them both at about the same time, and he took it hard. Slept fifteen or more hours a day, watched television the rest of the time. De-pression’s a self-limiting state, and sooner or later you generally find your way out of it, unless you go and kill yourself first. He managed to avoid doing that, but by the time he surfaced he was broke and three months behind on the rent, and he knew it was only a question of time before they locked him out of his apartment. He took his laptop and some of his clothes and put them in his car, and he was just in time, because two days later he went back and saw everything he owned out at the curb. He just turned around and walked away.” I could have told her this over the phone, I suppose, but it seemed to me she deserved more than that. So I’d called her at work and met her at five-thirty, in a coffee shop around the corner from her office.

“He wasn’t destitute,” I said, “but his credit cards were maxed out and he was very low on cash. He called all his contacts in the business, looking for freelance work, and a couple of people gave him some work. But that meant waiting to get paid, sometimes for months.

That’s evidently the nature of the business.”

“It’s the nature of every business,” she said.

“He looked for a place to live,” I said, “and he couldn’t find anything he’d want to live in for less than two thousand dollars a month. Even 228

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way out in Brooklyn or Queens everything he looked at was well over a thousand, and that meant coming up with a month’s rent and one or two months’ security deposit just to get in the door.”

“And he’d need furniture on top of that.”

“The rent alone was the killer. Even if he found a way to swing it, the monthly nut was going to be tough, because his prospects weren’t that great and he didn’t have a cash cushion to get him through the slow stretches. So he decided to hell with paying rent. He’s been living in his car.”

“You’re kidding. I didn’t even know he had a car.”

“It’s so old and beat up he can park it on the street, which is a good thing because he can’t afford to garage it. And it’s a Chevy Caprice, a big old four-door sedan with a roomy back seat.”

“And that’s where he sleeps?”

“He says it’s not that uncomfortable. He slept in it while he looked for an apartment, and he had grown used to it by the time he realized he wasn’t going to be able to find anything he could afford. So he went on living in it, and the only problem is making sure he’s always got a legal parking place. If he ever gets towed, he’ll have to come up with a few hundred dollars to get his car back from the pound, and he can’t afford to let that happen.”

“But he doesn’t look like somebody who’s living in his car. He shaves, he combs his hair, he wears clean clothes, he smells nice . . .”

“He belongs to a gym. It’s a good one, the membership costs him over a hundred dollars a month, but that’s a lot less than an apartment.

He shows up every morning, pumps some iron or puts in his time on the treadmill, then showers and shaves and puts on the change of clothes he’s brought with him. He keeps all his clothes in the trunk of his car and goes to a coin laundry when he has to.”

“And what about work? Is he really writing advertising copy?”

“Just like he said. He’s got his laptop, which he hides under the front seat of the car in case somebody breaks in. When he wants to go online he goes to a café with wireless access. I’m not too clear on what that is.”

“I know how it works. I’ve got a card for it in my laptop but I’ve never All the Flowers Are Dying

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used it. My God, do I know how to pick ’em or what? I find the man of my dreams and he’s living in the back of his car.”

“He’s not married,” I said, “and he’s not leading a double life.”

“How could he? It sounds as though he’s barely leading a single life.”

“He’s making ends meet. It’s hard for him to get ahead of the game, but he’s staying even, and that’s no mean trick in this economy. He’s a plucky guy. I have to say I liked him.”

“I liked him myself. Or at least I liked the person he was pretending to be.”

“The pretense bothered him,” I told her. “Our conversation was an uncomfortable one—”

“I can imagine.”

“—but he seemed relieved to have it all out in the open. He wanted to tell you but he didn’t know how.”

“ ‘Honey, it so happens I’m a bum.’ ”

“Well, he doesn’t intend to spend the rest of his life living in his car.

He’s hoping to find full-time work, or build his freelance business into something that’ll put him back on his feet again. Anyway, he wasn’t sure how much you liked him, or whether the two of you had something that might last. If not, why bother embarrassing himself by coming clean?”

“When we went out for dinner,” she said, “I offered to split the check. He wouldn’t hear of it.”

“As I said, he’s not impoverished. Just low on funds.”

“And homeless. You know, he could have stayed over. He could have slept in a real bed for a change.”

“I guess it was a point of honor for him not to.”

“Jesus,” she said, and drummed the tabletop with her fingers. “He’s gonna call me and I don’t know what the hell I’m gonna say to him.”

“I don’t think he’ll be calling.”

“He’s dumping me? Where did that come from?”

“He’ll wait for you to call,” I said. “And if you don’t, well, he’ll take that to mean you don’t want to see him again.”

“Oh,” she said, and thought about it. “That makes it easier for me, 230

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doesn’t it? Saves us both the nuisance of a difficult conversation.” She thought some more. “Except maybe that’s tacky. I know how much fun it is to wait around wondering if the phone’s gonna ring. Maybe it’s simpler to make the call and get it over with.” I told her that was up to her. She wanted to know how much she owed me, and I told her the retainer covered her tab in full. In fact, I said, reaching for the check, there was enough left over to cover the coffee.

“I’m glad you found out,” she said, “even if I’m not crazy about what you found out. I knew there was something. He was too good to be true, with that adorable mustache. Plus he smokes.”

“The mustache,” I said.

“What? Don’t tell me it’s gone.”

“No,” I said. “You just reminded me of something, that’s all.” I didn’t wait until I got home. I found a doorway where the street noise wasn’t too bad and called Sussman on my cell phone.

He said, “You thought it over and changed your mind.”

“No, not a chance,” I said. “This is something else entirely, something you said the other day that I keep meaning to ask you about.”

“So now’s your chance. What did I say?”

“It had to do with his mustache. The subject came up, and you said something like the mustache is a good thing, because you could braid a rope out of it and hang him with it.”

“I said that?”

“Something like it, anyway.”

“I guess we can blame it on Brooklyn College,” he said. “Colorful figures of speech, when I’m not using words like proactive. So?”

“What did you mean?”

“Oh, you weren’t there when that came out? I guess maybe you weren’t. All his vacuuming only worked up to a point. We found three little hairs, and they didn’t belong to the woman. One on the sheet next to her and two in the bush, you should pardon the expression.”

“Hairs from a mustache.”

“So the lab techs tell me. Facial hair, anyway, and enough for a All the Flowers Are Dying

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DNA profile. That’s not gonna find him for us, but once we do it’s golden. If there’s one thing the DAs like it’s some good hard physical evidence to put on the table.”

I walked a block and called him again. I guess he had Caller ID and I guess my phone wasn’t blocking it, because his opening words were,

“Now what?”

“About the mustache,” I said.

“So?”

“One thing it tells me is he’s clean-shaven.”

“Now, you mean? How do you figure that? He doesn’t know he left a couple of hairs behind when he was having a snack. And even if he does, the DNA’s not specific to the mustache. It’s in every cell in his body.”

“He didn’t shave,” I said. “He didn’t have to. He just used a little solvent and peeled it off.”

For a moment I thought the connection was broken. Then he said,

“You’re saying it’s a fake mustache.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“And it was no accident he left those hairs there. He placed them there on purpose so that we’d find them.”

“Right.”

“Jesus, that’s convoluted.”

“We know he’s a planner.”

“And a tricky bastard altogether. But this doesn’t make any sense, Matthew. Giving us somebody else’s DNA doesn’t lead us down any primrose path. It’s not like he’s trying to frame somebody else for this.

I mean, he knows we’ve got an eyewitness, a friend of the victim who sold him the murder weapon. We pull him in, we’re not gonna cut him loose because the DNA’s not a match.”

“It gives his lawyer something to play with in court,” I said.

“ ‘Isn’t it true that you found male facial hair at the crime scene?

And isn’t it true that you tried and failed to match that DNA with that of the defendant’s?’ ”

“ ‘And isn’t it within the realm of possibility that another man visited 232

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the victim’s apartment after my client had gone home, and how can you rule out the possibility that this other man was responsible for her death?’ ”

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Sussman said. “But what kind of psycho pervert murderer is so fucking painstaking? Listen, are you gonna be around for the next couple of hours?”

“Whether I am or not, I’ll have my cell with me.”

“Good. I want to talk to the lab guys, and then I want to talk to you some more.”

I was just walking in the door when the phone rang. “They didn’t have to do anything,” he said. “All I had to do was ask. The three hairs they recovered are male human facial hair, like I said. Facial hair is like body hair, it grows to a certain length and then it falls out, at which time the follicle sets about sprouting another hair.”

“And?”

“And these hairs didn’t fall out. They were severed, probably by a scissors. Now what happens sometimes is you take a scissors and trim your mustache, and you don’t comb it when you’re done, and some of the trimmings stay in the mustache and get dislodged later. Which is why they weren’t suspicious when they examined the hairs and saw they’d been cut.”

“Makes sense.”

“And the thing is it could have happened just that way. I can’t prove it didn’t. But I know it didn’t, because if our Mr. Neat trimmed his fucking mustache he’d have damn well combed it afterward.”

“Right.”

“He combed her crotch. Either that or he shaved his own bush, the way some of them do, to keep from leaving telltale evidence. Man, I bet every TV in every prison is tuned to C.S.I. when it comes on, I bet the motherfuckers sit there and take notes. Anyway, we didn’t come up with any loose pubic hairs there, not his and not hers, but what we did find were those hairs from his mustache. So it was a fake.”

“Had to be.”

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“And he wore it all along. When he met her, when he went to your wife’s shop. Incidentally, forget what I said before about her going back to work. This prick’s too fucking clever.”

“My thought exactly.”

“I don’t know if we should change the sketch for TV and the papers.

It might just tip him off that we know what he’s doing. Besides, he could have a full beard by now.”

“If he found someone to sell it to him.”

“That’s a line of inquiry I was just thinking about. Theatrical supply houses, because somebody had to sell him that mustache. Matt, I’ve got to thank you for this one. I never even thought of a false mustache.

I’m not used to thinking that way. Maybe criminals were a shiftier lot back in the day, huh?”

“That must be it,” I said. “The guy’s a throwback.” TJ was on the computer and Elaine was reading a magazine, but they both took a break to hear about David Thompson. Elaine was bothered by the idea that Louise was going to break up with him. “So he hasn’t got a place to live. So what?”

“I think it bothers her that he didn’t tell her.”

“It’s like herpes,” she said. “You don’t tell anybody until they need to know. Besides, he did tell her his place was too small for company. He just didn’t tell her quite how small it was.”

“He said it was in Kips Bay.”

“Well, maybe he likes to park there, maybe there are lots of good spaces. I think she should buy a house in Montclair and let him park in her driveway.”

“You’re just a sucker for happy endings.”

“Well, you’re right about that.”

TJ remembered how, on the night we tried to tail him, Thompson had stopped to make a quick phone call as soon as he was out of Louise’s building.

“We figured he was calling a woman,” I said, “and we were right. He called Louise, to tell her what a good time he’d had. Then he took the 234

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route he did, over to West End and up to Eighty-eighth, because that’s where his car was parked. And when he got in it, well, that was how he gave us the slip, without even knowing we were there.”

“An’ he just got in it an’ didn’t start the engine or nothin’.”

“Why go anywhere? He had a space that was good until seven the next morning.”

Elaine said, “That’s men for you. After they make love, all they want to do is get in their car and go to sleep.”

“Least he got a car,” TJ said. “They could go for rides.”

“He could take her to drive-in movies,” she said. “If they still had them. Or he could park somewhere and lure her into the back seat.”

“An’ he fall right asleep.”

“Out of force of habit,” she agreed. “Oh, I love it.” They turned more serious when I told them about the mustache hairs Monica’s killer had left behind, and the inferences Sussman and I had drawn. I asked Elaine if the mustache had looked phony to her, and she said it hadn’t, that she’d have said something if it had.

“But you don’t expect a mustache to be a fake,” she said. “A certain kind of hairline, you take a second glance to see if you can spot any of the standard telltale signs of a rug. Even then, like we were saying the other day, if it’s a good one you can’t tell. A false mustache should be easier to get away with, because no one would be looking for it.” Something struck me, and I asked where the drawing was.

“Right there on the table, a whole stack of them.”

“I mean the original.”

“Oh,” she said. “Just a minute, I think I know where I put it.”

“Bring an eraser, will you?”

“An eraser? Why do you—oh, I get it. Okay.” She came back with Ray’s pencil sketch and a cube of Artgum and said, “Let me do it, okay? Now you want the mustache off but nothing else touched, am I right?”

“Right.”

“So I’ll do it, because my hands are better than yours at detail work.”

“And lettering.”

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“And lettering, and it’s all because I’m a girl. That’s the same reason I can’t throw a baseball.”

“Or understand the infield fly rule.”

“Except I could throw a baseball fine if I were a lesbian. I don’t know about the infield fly rule, though.” She leaned forward, blew away the shreds of Art Gum detritus. “There! What do you think?”

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

“What’s the matter? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine. You look sick. What’s the matter?”

“I think I know him,” I said. “I think it’s Abie.”

“His name’s Abie. I’ve known him for, well, I don’t know. One, two months? He’s new in New York, but he’s been sober something like ten years. He comes to meetings at St. Paul’s and Fireside, and just the other night he turned up at a gay men’s meeting in Chelsea. I thought it was strange, running into him there. And there was something odd about his manner. I guess I thought he was gay but didn’t want me to know it. He wanted to talk, tried to get me to talk, but I just wanted to be alone that night.”

“He was stalking you.”

I couldn’t sit still. I was on my feet, walking around the room as I talked.

I said, “It just doesn’t make sense. He’s been in the program ten years, for God’s sake.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he said so, and why would anybody lie about something like that? It’s like a mustache, you don’t look at it closely.” I frowned.

“I’m the one he latched on to, aren’t I? I thought it was Monica and then you, or maybe the other way around, but it must have been me.

He tagged me to AA and started coming to meetings. I don’t know how he got to Monica.”

“She’s over here a lot. Was over here a lot.”

“Then he found a way to meet her, which probably wouldn’t have 236

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been too hard. And impressed upon her the need for secrecy, so she couldn’t tell us about him. Didn’t she buy Scotch for him?”

“Yes.”

“And he brought her a bottle of that Italian crap.”

“Strega.”

“Right, Strega. He came around and talked about his ten years of sobriety, he qualified at meetings, and then he went to her place and drank a little Scotch. And why shouldn’t he, if he wasn’t an alcoholic in the first place?”

I picked up the phone, looked up a number, made a call. It rang almost enough times for me to hang up before Bill picked up. I said, “It’s Matt, Bill. How’s it going? Say, you sponsor Abie, don’t you? Have you seen him at meetings lately? Well, why I’m asking, and I don’t want you to breach a confidence, but I’ve got a reason to suspect him of something serious. Pretty damned serious, actually. I think he may be running a game, that he might not be sober at all. That’s not the serious part, which I don’t want to say just yet. Uh-huh. That’s interesting.

What’s his last name, do you happen to know? Well, do you know where he’s been living? I see. Yes, sure, Bill. I will, and thanks.” I hung up and said, “He hasn’t seen him in several days, doesn’t know his last name, no idea where he lives. He smelled whiskey on him one time, and he didn’t say anything, and Abie must have sensed something, because he preempted the subject by saying how he’d had a drink spilled on him at a restaurant and it was driving him crazy, walking around smelling the booze on himself. But thinking back, Bill has the feeling that might have been crap, and the booze was on his breath, not his clothes.”

“You want a cup of tea, baby? Or something to eat? You’re all—”

“I’m all keyed up, and I damn well ought to be. Bill was his sponsor and Abie never told him his last name.”

“Abie’s an odd name to pick. Short for Abraham, I suppose.”

“You would think, but he corrected you if you called him that. Or if you shortened it to Abe, come to think of it. And people are so polite in AA, so fucking accepting. He could have called himself Dolores and everybody would have gone along with it.” All the Flowers Are Dying

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“What’s wrong with Dolores?”

TJ asked if he used a last initial, like Matt S. or Bill W.

I said, “No, just Abie.” And then I stopped in my tracks, and I guess my eyes widened and my jaw dropped, because TJ gaped at me and Elaine took my arm and asked me what was the matter.

“So fucking clever,” I said. “So goddam cute. Abie, see? Just plain Abie. Those are his initials. A period B period. AB.”

“I don’t see—”

“A fucking B. As in Abel Baker, or Arne Bodinson.”

“You can’t think—”

“Or Arden Brill,” I said. “Or Adam Breit. Or what did he write on the wall? Aubrey Beardsley. Always AB. Oh, sweet Jesus, it’s him.”

30

“You know,” Ira Wentworth said, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about that son of a bitch over the past few years. And each time I’ve tried to think of something else instead, because I didn’t want him taking up space in my head. I wanted that chapter to be closed.” Ira Wentworth was still at the Twenty-sixth Precinct. That’s where he’d been a few years ago when the man with many names but a single set of initials ambushed a young woman named Lia Parkman in her residence on Claremont Avenue. Her roommates were in the apartment at the time, but he managed to get in and out, and not incidentally drown Lia in the bathtub, without anyone noticing his presence.

Lia, a student at Columbia, had been a friend of TJ’s, and a cousin of another young woman named Kristin Hollander, whose parents had already been brutally murdered by two men in an apparent home inva-sion. AB—Lia knew him as Arden Brill, a doctoral candidate in English; Kristin had known him as Adam Breit, an unconventional psychotherapist—killed his accomplice in the burglary, along with another young man. Earlier, he’d killed the owner of an apartment on Central Park West, then moved in, proclaiming himself the subtenant.

Down the line he strangled a girl in a Korean massage parlor, wrung her neck and left her there. And, for a coda, he’d stabbed to death five homesteaders renovating a house in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, All the Flowers Are Dying

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disfiguring their corpses with muriatic acid before apparently dying himself in the basement, burned to death in the fire he’d set.

I wanted that chapter to be closed, Wentworth said, and it wasn’t hard to figure out why.

Sussman said, “The body in the basement. You couldn’t get a positive ID?”

“Nothing that was a hundred percent. He was wearing a pendant, this pink stone identified as stolen in the Hollander burglary. He had a knife next to him, which we were able to tie to the five killings upstairs. The body was good and charbroiled, all you could say was it could be him. We could get DNA from it, but we didn’t have anything to match it to. If he wasn’t such a fucking trickster, such a cutie pie, there would have been no question.”

“So you closed the case.”

“I couldn’t justify leaving it open. And if I had any kind of a gut feeling that maybe he staged the whole thing and disappeared, well, where were we going to go with it? Send out a nationwide BOLO, be on the lookout for some slick dude who kills people?” He picked up a copy of Ray’s sketch. “Is this what he looks like? You couldn’t prove it by me. I never got to see him, or a picture of him. I never even came across a detailed description. But I know it’s the same guy.”

“Because of the initials.”

“They nail it down, don’t they? That’s where he gets stupid, using the same initials all the time, making it his trademark. It’s how he signs his work. The only thing bigger than his brain is his ego. You know, when we closed the case, I knew there was a chance he got out alive. But that meant he was out of the jurisdiction, and out of our hair.”

“You said as much at the time,” I remembered.

And that was the bell that had tried to ring in a phone conversation with Mark Sussman. Maybe he’d filled his New York quota, maybe he was on his way to El Paso. If so, he’d be out of our hair. I’d got an echo then, but hadn’t been able to hold on to it.

“Worst-case scenario, he was somebody else’s headache,” Went-240

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worth said, finishing the thought. “One thing never even crossed my mind was he might come back.”

I’d called the two of them, Sussman and Wentworth, and we were all gathered in our living room. There was a carafe of coffee on the table, along with a little cream pitcher and a sugar bowl and a dish containing envelopes of artificial sweetener, both pink ones and blue ones. For boy babies and girl babies, I suppose. There was a plate of cookies, too. No one had touched the cookies, or used cream or sugar, but Wentworth had already had two cups of coffee.

There were other cops I could have invited to the party. There was Ed Iverson, from Brooklyn, who’d investigated the apparent murder and suicide on Coney Island Avenue. AB had staged that one, making it look as though Jason Bierman had killed first Carl Ivanko and then himself, effectively closing the book on the Hollander murders. There was Dan Schering, who’d had the Hollander case until Homicide North claimed it as their own. And I could think of a few others, cops from Homicide and from the Two-Six, along with a fire inspector out in Bushwick, but I’d have been hard-pressed to come up with their names, let alone guess where to reach them.

Wentworth said, “What’s it been, four years? Not hard to guess what he’s been doing to get through the days.”

“Been killing people,” TJ said.

“Four that we know of,” Wentworth said. “No, make that five.”

“Who besides Monica?” Elaine wanted to know.

“Your friend is one. Plus three boys in Virginia, unless there’s anyone here who doesn’t think our guy and Abel Baker and Arne Bodinger are one and the same.”

“Bodinson.”

“I stand corrected. Same guy, right?”

“Has to be,” I said.

Sussman agreed, but wondered how that meant he’d killed the boys in Richmond. Wasn’t the evidence ironclad against Preston Applewhite?

“Evidence,” Wentworth said, “would seem to be a specialty of this guy’s. The Richmond killings were done with a knife, if I remember All the Flowers Are Dying

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right. And the knife was recovered, it was part of the evidence. And our guy does seem to have a fondness for knives.”

“He strangled the Korean masseuse,” I reminded him. “And he used a gun to kill Bierman and Ivanko and Byrne Hollander.”

“You don’t think he did the three kids in Richmond?”

“I’m sure he did,” I said, “and I agree he likes knives, but he doesn’t limit himself.”

Elaine said, “Weren’t the boys molested? Sexually, I mean.”

“So?”

“So I thought he was straight, that’s all. ‘Nothing queer about Chumley.’ You remember that joke?”

Wentworth said, “About buggering an elephant, wasn’t it? ‘Male or female elephant?’ ‘Why, female elephant, old man, nothing queer about Chumley.’ ”

“But those boys were killed years ago,” Sussman said. “Virginia’s quicker than most states, they move that appeal process right along, but even so he’d have had to put it all in motion way back when.”

“He’s a patient man, Mark. And he probably found other ways to pass the time. There’s a whole lot of people get killed every year, and plenty of the killings go unsolved. And you don’t have to limit yourself to the unsolved ones, either. I mean, the Richmond murders, the cops down there put that one in the Wins column. Case closed, right? Same as we closed the books on all the people he killed here.”

“I don’t know,” Sussman said. “What do we do now, call Richmond?” They went back and forth on that one. On the one hand, the Richmond murders were a can of worms; on the other, the can was already open. Either way, the main thing to concentrate on was catching the son of a bitch, and if you brought in Richmond and the Bureau, were you increasing the odds of nailing him or setting yourself up for the Too Many Cooks syndrome?

There was a lull, and Elaine said, “You said five.”

“How’s that?”

“You said five killings,” she said to Wentworth. “Monica is one, and the three boys in Richmond. That makes four. Who’s the fifth?” 242

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“Applegate, except that’s not his name. I said it a minute ago. What the hell is it?”

“Applewhite.”

“There you go. Applewhite got a hot shot from the state of Virginia, but our friend was there to see him get it, and he’s the one who put him on the gurney in the first place. He’s not going to get indicted for that, and there’s plenty of other things to hang him for instead, but wouldn’t you say he was as much the cause of Applewhite’s death as the chemicals they pumped into him? And wouldn’t you call that murder?” If the Richmond cops and the FBI came in, the whole thing turned into a media circus overnight.

“It seems to me we got one big edge right now,” Sussman said. “We know who he is and where he’s coming from, and he doesn’t know we know. We go public with it and that’s out the window.”

“I don’t know,” Wentworth said. “What’s our edge amount to, anyway? First place, he might assume we know. It’s not as though he’s been working all that hard to disguise it. He’s not using the same initials just so he can go on wearing the monogrammed cuff links. Some level, he wants the whole world to know.”

“ ‘Catch me before I kill more.’ ”

“No, I’m not saying he’s itching to get caught. He’s doing everything he can to keep from getting caught, but consciously or unconsciously he damn well wants us to know just who it is we’re not catching.”

“If we go public, what does he do?”

“I know what he did last time,” Wentworth said. “He killed five people and disappeared. Six, counting the crispy critter he left behind in his place. I don’t know that we’d trigger another bloodbath, but I’ll bet he’d decide to get out of Dodge.”

“So what do we do? Besides quietly expanding the task force, putting more bodies on the case. How do we find him?”

“For a starter, we get serious about protecting Matt and Elaine.

Next we get out there and look for him. He’s got to be holed up someplace. Matt, how long did you say he’s been turning up at meetings?”

“At least a month.”

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“So he’s living somewhere. Any idea where?”

“Be this neighborhood,” TJ said. “Puts him close to this apartment, close to the meetings, close to Elaine’s shop.”

“Say the West Fifties,” Sussman said, “from Eighth Avenue to the river. Midtown North, in other words. Who do we know there?” I let them toss names back and forth. One of the names they mentioned was Joe Durkin, and I chimed in to tell them he’d retired. They worked out details, figured out how to proceed. There were still quite a number of SRO hotels and rooming houses in the area, and that’s where they thought they should concentrate.

I said, “I don’t think he’ll be in a hotel.”

“No?”

TJ said, “This another one gonna be sleeping in his car?” They didn’t know what he was talking about, and I didn’t bother to enlighten them. “He’ll find an apartment,” I said.

“Then he’s a genius, if he can find an apartment in this city.”

“It doesn’t have to be an empty one,” I said, and reminded them how his neighbors on Central Park West had all been given to understand that he was subletting the apartment of a paleontologist on sabbatical in France. “It was the perfect low-cost open-end sublet,” I said. “All he had to do was kill the paleontologist and sink the body in the Hudson.”

“And you think he’d do it again?”

“The price is right,” I said, “and it’s not as though killing’s a stretch for him.”

“No,” Sussman said. “He seems to be developing a taste for it, doesn’t he?”

When the two cops left, Elaine and TJ and I sat around with nothing much to say. Nobody felt like eating. I put on the TV, changed channels aimlessly for a few minutes, and turned the set off. I sat there and drifted into a curious sort of reverie in which I was trying to get a count of just how many people AB had killed that we knew about. I kept losing track and having to start over.

A few months earlier, when baseball season was just getting under way, I’d driven myself crazy one afternoon trying to remember the 244

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teams in the major leagues when I was a boy, when there were eight teams in each league and no divisions or playoffs, let alone exploding scoreboards and designated hitters. I wasn’t using pencil and paper, I was doing it in my head, and it was harder than you’d think. I got all eight National League teams but only seven in the AL, and I couldn’t seem to come up with the one I was missing. I forgot the whole thing, and then two days later the Yankees had a home stand against Detroit, and that was my answer, and one that raised another question. How the hell could I have forgotten the Detroit Tigers?

It was a very different country then. The westernmost city in the majors was St. Louis, the southernmost Washington, D.C. Chicago had two teams, of course, but so did Boston and Philly and, yes, St.

Louis. New York had three.

Elaine asked me what I was thinking about. “Baseball,” I said.

“See if there’s a game on,” she suggested. “Come on, it’s something to do. I’ll make popcorn.”

The Yankees were in Baltimore, playing a franchise that had once been the St. Louis Browns. The Mets were winding up a three-game series at home with the Braves, who’d moved in my lifetime from Boston to Milwaukee to Atlanta. But you still get four balls and three strikes, three outs and nine innings, and if the hitters are stronger these days, well, the pitchers throw harder. We sat there on the couch and ate popcorn, the three of us, and watched the young men on the field play the old game.

31

He sits in the coffee shop. He has a table next to the window, and he can sit here and eat his breakfast and keep an eye on the building diagonally across the street. Scudder lives there, Scudder and the fair Elaine, and there is a young black man who seems to spend a lot of time with them.

Ever since he returned to New York he has seen Scudder in the young man’s company, sometimes walking on the street, sometimes having a meal together in this very coffee shop.

Elaine never seems to leave the building. Scudder comes and goes, the black man comes and goes, but he never sees Scudder and the black man together anymore. It is hard to be certain, he doesn’t spend twenty-four hours a day observing the building’s entrance, but it seems to him as though at least one of the two men is always inside the building. Scudder never leaves until the black man has come to take his place at her side.

Which suggests to him that they’re guarding her. Keeping her inside where no one can get at her, and standing by to protect her in the event that he might manage to get inside the building.

And if he were to go away?

The idea intrigues him. He wants to think about it. He pays for his meal, leaves the coffee shop, and walks.

.

.

.

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He could just disappear. That’s what he always does, sooner or later. He walks away from the life he’s been living like a snake shedding its skin. He goes somewhere else, becomes someone else.

And does the things he does.

And if he were to do so now? Not, as he’d planned, after he’d finished his business with Mr. and Mrs. Scudder. Suppose he were to leave his business unfinished and simply vanish? He could go south or west, he could go anywhere, with his darker hair and his reshaped hairline and his eyeglasses, and no one would know him.

And the Scudders could remain here, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Keeping their guard up, with the woman afraid to leave the building and the man afraid to leave her alone, both of them chained by their terror, while he, the cause of that terror, is nowhere to be found. Gone, vanished, absent without leave, but they in their ignorance are unable to relax, unable to live their lives.

Like the whole country, he thinks. They’ll have their own personal equivalent of long lines at airport security, they’ll cower for the blow that never comes, while he’s thousands of miles away.

He has the great advantage of patience. He’s lived for years with unfinished business, ever since Scudder drove him out of this city. It’s never eaten at him, never preyed on his mind. It’s always been an item on the agenda, something to take care of sooner or later, when the time is right.

Suppose he returns it to the back burner. And suppose he’s gone for a few more years, and the Scudders return to their ordinary lives, and time passes. Thoughts of him, unbidden and unwelcome, will trouble them from time to time. They’ll know he’s out there, they’ll be aware that he might come back. But every month will make that threat a little less urgent, and they’ll reach a point where they’ve relaxed entirely.

And then he’ll return. Oh, he won’t have this particular knife in his pocket when he does. He’ll have let it go somewhere, for one reason or another. But he’ll have another knife, and perhaps he’ll like the new one even better.

And when the time is right he’ll get to use it.

But he ought to do something before he goes. So that they don’t forget him too soon.

32

It was late morning when Mark Sussman called. Had I caught the item about the rush-hour subway stabbing in Queens? The victim was a male, sixteen years old, who’d earlier been in a shoving match with two other teenage males on the subway platform. The killing was assumed to have grown out of that argument, although no one had seen it occur; the bodies of the other passengers kept the youth’s body upright until the train reached a station and the crowd thinned enough for him to fall down.

“They figured gang-related,” he said, “but I thought about it, and then I thought about that woman killed a couple of days ago here in Manhattan. Miles apart, but it’s the same train, and both times it’s a stabbing and nobody saw it happen. Two different boroughs and two different medical examiners, so who’s going to look at both of them at once, you know?”

He’d talked to the right people, and he was waiting for them to compare notes and get back to him. “What I want to hear,” he said, “is it’s two different knives, two different kinds of wounds, two different everything. But you know what I think it is.” He said he’d let me know as soon as he heard one way or the other.

An hour or so later the phone rang and I thought it was him, but it wasn’t. It was Mick Ballou.

“That picture you showed me,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you he looked familiar? I’ve tried to place him, and late last night it came to me.” 248

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“You saw him at Grogan’s?”

“I did not. ’Twas years ago I saw him, and then only for a moment.

Do you recall when you had me go to a house on West Seventy-fourth Street? There was a girl there you thought might be in harm’s way.”

“Kristin Hollander.”

“And a very nice young woman she was. He came to the door, your man in the drawing. Of course I’d no idea who he might be. I opened the door and told him to piss off, and he pissed off. I barely looked at him, but I’ve a fine old memory, haven’t I? It was the same man.”

“Oh, God,” I said. “I never even thought of her. I don’t know what the hell’s the matter with me. Listen, I’ll have to get off the line so I can arrange police protection for her. Assuming she’s all right, assuming he hasn’t already paid her a visit. Christ, if he’s got to her, if he’s killed her—”

“No one’s touched a hair on her head.”

“How do you know?”

“How do I know? Why, amn’t I sitting across the table from her even now?”

“He drove over there late last night,” I told Elaine, “but felt it was too late to show up on her doorstep, so he parked across the street and kept his eyes open. Then this morning, as soon as it seemed to him to be a decent hour, he rang her doorbell. He found it remarkable that she remembered him.”

“Has anyone ever forgotten Mick?”

“I asked him that. He said there’ve been some that wished they could.”

“I’ll bet.”

“The house has a burglar alarm and a good set of locks, and she’s got Mick in there with her. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to worry about her before, but now I don’t have to. He killed her parents, you know.”

“I know.”

“She’s still living there. All by herself, in that big house.”

“And now she’s got Mick for company.”

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“They’re playing cribbage,” I said. “They played cribbage four years ago, when he went and guarded her.”

I picked up the phone and called Ira Wentworth and told him most of it, although I don’t think I mentioned that they were playing cribbage. “I don’t know how we forgot about her,” I said, “but she’ll be all right now. He’s not going to get in there, and God help him if he does.

Still, it might not be a bad idea to stake the place out.”

“Because he might show up,” he said. “I talked to my captain, and we’re reopening the Lia Parkman file. I can probably spring a couple of plainclothes to sit in a car and watch the block.” I put the phone down, and the next time it rang it was Sussman. The lab evidence was preliminary, and you couldn’t take it to the bank, but every indication was that the teenage male in Queens and the woman in Manhattan had been killed in the same manner—a single thrust from the rear, between two ribs and into the heart. The weapons used in the two homicides were at the very least similar, and probably iden-tical.

“And for now,” he said, “that’s as far as it’s gonna go. I don’t even want to write it up, let alone go and tell somebody. Because God help us all if the media get hold of this. You want to try imagining the subway at rush hour with every passenger trying to watch his back?”

“They’d want metal detectors,” I said.

“At every turnstile. Take the coins out of your pockets, put ’em in the tray, and swipe your Metrocard. Yeah, right. We got to catch this prick in a hurry, that’s all. Because you can only keep a lid on it for so long. If he does it one more time, takes out one more rush-hour straphanger, some media genius is gonna figure it out all by himself.

And there goes the front page in every paper and the lead slot on every TV newscast, and we’ve got panic in the streets. And under them.” That evening I was sitting in a chair with a book, and Elaine came over looking concerned and asked me if I was all right. Evidently I’d set the book down and had been staring off into space for five or ten minutes.

I hadn’t been aware of it.

I said, “I hate not doing anything. I hate waiting for something to 250

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happen and hoping I can react to it properly when it does. I hate feeling helpless and useless and out of the loop.”

“And old?”

“And old,” I said. “I know there’s nothing I can do other than what I’m doing already. I know all that, and I’ll keep on doing it. But I don’t like the way it feels.”

It felt a little better in the morning. Sussman called, and I could hear the change in his voice. “We found him,” he said, and before I could react he corrected himself. “Found where he’s living, I should say. Way the hell west on Fifty-third Street. A woman recognized the sketch, said he was the nice young man come to take care of his Uncle Joe, who had to go to the Veterans Hospital up in the Bronx. Except the people at the VA never heard of Joe Bohan, and my guess is nobody’s ever gonna see poor old Joe again.”

“I don’t suppose our guy was on the premises.”

“No,” he said, “but his laptop was. The laptop’s password-protected, but we’ve got a guy we can go to who can crack it quicker than a high school kid can break into a locked car. We don’t have to get into it to know it’s our guy’s laptop, though, because Joe wasn’t an online kind of guy. In fact you wouldn’t know Joe ever lived there, because all of his things are gone. All that’s left would seem to belong to the owner of the laptop, and one of the articles in question is a big old knife. Even as we speak, they’re trying to match it up to the subway stabbings. And I’ve got a dozen men on the block, keeping an eye out, waiting for him to come back for his laptop. Or his knife.”

33

Sometimes it seems to him that there truly are guardian angels, and that he has one. At more rational moments the notion of a guardian angel strikes him as essentially metaphorical, a convenient way to personify that portion of one’s mind-spirit-self capable of perceiving the imperceptible.

Years ago, during his last stay in New York, he was away from his apartment on Central Park West when Scudder led a band of cops there.

He was in a taxi, on his way home, ready to walk right into a lobby swarming with police officers just waiting for him to appear, and something warned him, something made him get out of the cab and approach the rest of the way on foot, cautiously, alert for any sign of danger.

Looking back, he has never been able to pinpoint anything that should have made him wary. He can recall no police sirens wailing in the distance, no discernible change in the appearance of the neighborhood as the cab neared its destination. But whatever you choose to call it, a guardian angel, a higher self, an elevated level of ESP, it is undeniable that something warned him and that he’d had the presence of mind to act on the warning.

Something made him turn away from that Central Park West apartment, retrieve his car from the garage where he kept it, and drive straight to Brooklyn. It hadn’t taken him long to get there, nor had it taken him long to take care of his business and leave the Meserole Street house in flames, and get out of the city altogether.

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All because he was able to listen to that inner prompting and not let logic overrule what it told him.

And now he experiences it again, that same sort of warning. He feels a tightness in the back of his neck, a tingling in the palms of his hands.

He’s walking south on Ninth Avenue when he first notices it, he’s just passed Elaine’s shop, and his first thought is that he’s under observation, that someone is watching him.

He stops to look at the menu in a restaurant window, turns this way and that, getting a look around without making it too obvious that’s what he’s doing. He doesn’t see anyone, and that’s not what it is, this sensation he’s experiencing. He’s not being watched.

There’s something waiting for him, that’s what it is. And he remembers the sensation from four years ago, remembers stopping the cab abruptly, telling the driver he’ll walk the rest of the way.

Remembers what was waiting for him a few blocks further along on Central Park West.

He walks to Fifty-third Street, turns right, walks west. And he’s like a child playing a game, with others telling him You’re getting warmer or You’re getting colder as he turns this way and that. He’s getting warmer, and he feels warmer, feels the increasing sense of a hostile presence in front of him.

Eventually he gets close enough to see them, on the block where he’s been living. There are no blue uniforms, but all it takes is a glance and he is able to spot them for what they are. There’s a car with its hood up, and the two men peering into its engine compartment might as well be dressed in blue. And there’s a woman with a baby carriage, paying more attention to the street scene than to the infant—a doll, he’s certain—

within the carriage. Two men share the stoop next door to Joe Bohan’s building, drinking from cans held in paper bags. Cops, all of them.

So much for his laptop. No point going back for it now, even if he could somehow thread his way through the maze of police. They’ll have long since carried it off, along with everything else he owns.

What’s on the laptop? The password will secure it for a while, but if you build a better mousetrap someone will surely build a better mouse, and that applies to his own mousetraps as well as those of others. They’ll All the Flowers Are Dying

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get past his password, in an hour or a day or a week, and what will they learn?

Is the matter of Preston Applewhite documented there? He rather thinks it must be.

No harm. Applewhite, poor fellow, has long since gone to glory, and if this serves to rehabilitate his reputation, well, he’d set that in motion with his tip to the Richmond newspaper. And it’s a zero-sum universe, isn’t it?

Because any gain to Applewhite’s reputation will come at the expense of the reputations of the whole criminal justice system of the state of Virginia.

Let them have the laptop. He can always get another. Meanwhile, there’s always Kinko’s.

And what else has he lost? Some clothing, some personal articles. A razor, a toothbrush, a comb.

And, of course, that beautiful knife. The Reinhold Messer bowie, with its blade of Damascus steel, so skillfully made, so perfectly balanced.

He slips a hand into his pocket, where the Thaddy Jenkins folder waits, smooth and cool to his touch. He can’t help taking it out, opening it with a flick of his hand that has by now become purely reflexive. He tests the blade with his thumb, feels its keenness.

And then, a little reluctantly, he works the catch, closes the knife, returns it to his pocket.

The house?

He’s thought of it before, that house on West Seventy-fourth Street. It seems to him that there would be some sort of poetic justice in taking it up as his next temporary residence, a larger and more comfortable shell for the hermit crab than poor old Joe Bohan’s tenement flat. It was, after all, supposed to be his house, back in the time when he still thought a house was something he wanted.

Why he’d even had fantasies—they seem quite laughable now—of marrying Kristin Hollander, and helping her deal with the grief of having lost her parents. She is a pretty thing, Kristin, and she’d have been amusing company for a while. He might have convinced her, for example, of the therapeutic necessity of making love in the front room, the very place where he’d killed her mother and father.

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And then, of course, when the amusement faded, the poor grief-stricken thing would take her own life—easy enough to arrange—and the house would be his, free and clear.

If not for Matthew Scudder . . .

He shakes his head, dismisses that whole train of thought. The past, he reminds himself, is called that for a reason—it has passed, it is over and done with. Someone has called it another country, and if so it’s not one to live in, or even the place for an extended visit. It is the here and now that concerns him.

Should the here and now include the Hollander house?

She still lives there. He knows that much, and not merely because he’s seen the listing in the phone book. He’s seen her, too, leaving her house and walking to the corner to hail a taxi, and looking just as he remembers her. How old would she be? Twenty-five, twenty-six? Midtwenties, certainly, and still quite lovely.

There was a time when he had a key to her house, and knew the code for the burglar alarm. Both the lock and the code have long since been changed. Still, there ought to be some way to get into the house.

And if he were simply to ring the bell?

She’d come to the door. Late at night she might be on her guard, but in the middle of the afternoon, why, she’d open the door to see who it might be.

And if she recognizes him?

Kristin, he’ll say, it’s so good to see you! And by the time she reacts, by the time that it strikes her that she has no reason to be glad to see him, why, he’ll be inside, won’t he? And it will no longer matter what she thinks or feels or tries to do.

When he’s through with her, the house will be his for as long as he wants it. The hermit crab will have a spendid new shell.

The very moment he turns the corner onto her block, he senses an alien presence. His first impulse is to turn again and slip away, but the feeling that grips him is a little different this time, and he decides on a closer look. He’ll be careful, he’ll take pains to see without being seen, but he won’t turn tail and withdraw, not quite yet.

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At a Korean market around the corner on Columbus Avenue, he buys three loaves of white bread and two rolls of paper towels. The shopping bag they give him is full to overflowing, but weighs next to nothing. He’s out the door when it occurs to him to add a bouquet of flowers, all wrapped up in green paper. With one arm clutching the bag of groceries to his chest and his free hand brandishing the bouquet, he manages to look ordinary and harmless while screening his features from any eyes turned in his direction.

He walks down her street, moving at the deliberate pace his burdens would seem to dictate. He’s able to glance into each parked vehicle, to check out stoops and doorways. And he sees no one the least bit suspicious, no one who might possibly be a watchful cop.

Why the warning from his guardian angel?

It was, he decided, an echo of the earlier warning. The mind would do that, summoning up the memory of a feeling when presented with a similar situation. And, while the alarm has turned out to be a false one, hasn’t it been useful all the same? Because now he can ring her bell with a bag and a bouquet to block any view of him she might gain through a peephole. That had been a flaw in his original plan, the possibility that there might be a peephole in her front door that would allow her to recognize him before she had the door open. But now she’ll have to open it to know who her visitor is, and what woman could leave the door closed on a man holding a bouquet of flowers?

Perfect.

He has passed her house and walked to the other end of the block, and now he turns to approach it again. He’s two doors away, just steps from the walkway leading to her front door, when something makes him stop right where he is. He takes a moment to visualize it all in his mind, ringing the bell, positioning the groceries and the flowers just so, waiting until the door opens, then pushing hard against the door, forcing his way in, dropping everything, and hitting her once, as hard as he can, in the chest or stomach, to keep her from reacting or crying out until he’s had a chance to draw the door shut behind him.

And he stands there, seeing all of this as clearly as if it is actually happening, when a car drives up and pulls smoothly into a parking space at a fire hydrant directly across the street from her house.

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Two men, and he knows at once that they’re cops.

The driver cuts the engine. His passenger gets out of the car, walks into the middle of the street, and raises a hand to shield his eyes for a look at the house number. Satisfied, he turns and gets back in the car, rolling down the window to give him a better view of Kristin Hollander’s house.

And to think he’d been ready to write off a clear warning as vestigial, a mere echo! Whatever its source, he’d been alerted not to the physical presence of police (who hadn’t been there yet at the time) but to the reality of danger.

He walks at his deliberate pace, his face shielded by the bouquet, his innocence guaranteed by the bulk of his burden, until he reaches the corner and disappears from their view. He walks another block, drops both his bundles in a trash can, and picks up his pace.

If they are watching the Hollander house, they know who he is.

Or suspect it, at the very least. That he did not die in the fire in Brooklyn, that the body in the basement was somebody else’s, that he who killed and ran away has lived to kill another day.

The thought excites him. It is, he knows, a paradox that he who so relishes his anonymity at the same time hungers for recognition. It seems clear that he is a genius, although not in an area much esteemed by the Nobel committee. Still, he has a human desire to be acknowledged for what he is—and a core of good sense that keeps him well aware of the danger of such acknowledgment.

He asks himself once again if it is not perhaps time to disappear. He has the clothes he is wearing, the money in his wallet, along with an ATM card that will give him access to a few thousand dollars in a bank account on the other side of the country. He no longer recalls the name he used to open the account, or the name and location of the bank, but what does it matter? He has the card and knows the PIN, and that’s all he needs to know.

And what else does he have? The keenness of his mind, the strength of his will, and the promptings of his intuition.

And, of course, the knife in his pocket.

Enough to take him wherever he wants to go. Shall he leave, then?

34

The phone call came a few minutes after five. I let the machine pick up, and after we’d listened to my own recorded message, there was a long enough silence for me to think the caller might have hung up.

Then he said, “Well, hello, Matt S. This is Abie.” Elaine was in the room with me, and the color left her face as she recognized the voice. She would, of course; she’d heard it when he’d come to her shop to buy the bronze paper knife.

I picked up the phone. I said, “Hello,” and wondered why I was saying anything.

“I’ve been trying to reach my sponsor,” he said. “I was hoping for the benefit of his strength, hope, and experience. But he’s not answering his phone, so I thought I’d call you instead.”

“Really.”

“Maybe you could tell me not to drink, and to go to a meeting. That might be helpful in keeping me on the straight and narrow.”

“What do you want?”

“Why, I just wanted to talk. And you’ll probably want to keep me on the line so you can trace the call.”

We hadn’t set up for that. It’s not that hard to do nowadays, but in this case there hadn’t seemed to be much point to it. We knew he’d called Bill several times, and a check of the LUDS on Bill’s phone had established that all the calls from Abie had been made on an untrace-258

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able cell phone. If he called me he’d use the same phone, so why bother setting up a trace?

“I’ll save you the trouble,” he said. “I’m on a pay phone at Penn Station, and in approximately seven minutes I’ll be on a train. I’ve decided it’s time to disappear.”

“I wish you’d stick around.”

“Oh? Be careful what you pray for, my friend.”

“Because I might get it?”

“So they say. Or did you want to tell me that I can be helped, and that you’ll see to it that they help me if only I turn myself in?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t want to tell you that.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t want you to be helped. I want you to be killed.”

“Now that’s refreshing,” he said. “All the more reason for me to leave the stage, wouldn’t you say? I’m enjoying this conversation, but it’s time to catch my train. One thing, though. Will you give my sponsor a call? It’s Bill, the older fellow they call William the Silent. He’s even more silent than usual lately, and I’d feel better if you’d check on him.” He broke the connection. I put the phone down and looked at Elaine.

She said, “I feel like throwing out the answering machine and getting a new one. Or at least spraying this one with Lysol.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Maybe I should spray the whole apartment. It needs disinfecting, after that voice has had a chance to bounce off the walls.”

“The whole city needs disinfecting.”

“The whole planet. Who are you calling?”

“Bill,” I said. The phone rang and rang. I broke the connection and redialed and the same thing happened.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said.

They found Bill in his apartment, dead of multiple stab wounds to the chest. There were defensive wounds on his hands and forearms, suggesting he’d tried to fight off his killer.

Sussman checked the phone records, and it turned out the call we’d All the Flowers Are Dying

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received had in fact come from a pay phone in Penn Station. I didn’t know what to make of that.

“One of the things we found on Fifty-third Street,” he said, “was a cell phone charger. I had to guess, I’d say his battery ran down. If he wanted to give you a call, he had to spend a quarter.”

“He called from Penn Station,” I said, “and he said he was calling from Penn Station.”

“So?”

“So he wanted to make sure I knew it. Not only does he tell me, but he knows the LUDS will back him up.”

“He wants us to think he’s leaving town.”

“Maybe. Or he really is leaving town, and he wants us to think he’s not.”

“By telling us he is.”

“Right.”

Elaine said, “ ‘How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I’ve Been A Liar All My Life?’ ”

“They don’t write songs like that anymore,” Sussman said. “So let’s sum this up, okay? What we now know for sure is that either he’s leaving town or he’s not. Is that about it?” I wound up going to the meeting at St. Paul’s. I didn’t want to go anywhere, but someone had to tell them about Bill, and I decided it really ought to be me. I got there a little late, after the qualification but in time for the general discussion, and I got to be the bearer of bad tidings.

Beyond the fact that we’d lost a long-time member, I had to let everybody know that they might be in danger, and that it was impossible to guess with any degree of certainty just how real that danger might be. Abie—I called him that in the meeting, because that’s how they knew him—was at once a coldly logical being and a homicidal maniac. Just as I couldn’t say if he’d left town or pretended to leave town, neither could I tell if he’d killed his sponsor as an opening skir-mish in a one-man war on New York AA or simply to send me a personal message. I felt like the goddam government, raising the Alert 260

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level from Yellow to Orange. Stop being Careful, I was saying, and start being More Careful. And rest assured that we’ll let you know when it’s time to be Extra Careful.

I didn’t stop in at the Flame afterward. I hadn’t left Elaine alone, TJ

was with her, but all the same I was anxious to get home.

Walking the couple of blocks, I kept having the feeling someone was watching me. I looked around, but nothing caught my eye.

35

The bastard’s wary.

You can see it in his walk, see it in the way he keeps looking this way and that way. Maybe he can sense that he’s being watched, followed.

Maybe it’s just an indication of the level of his anxiety.

And he’s armed, too. You can’t see the gun, but you know just where it is—tucked into his waistband on the right hip. His sport shirt, worn outside his trousers, hangs down far enough to cover it, but when you watch him it’s no trick to pinpoint its location because of the way his right hand hovers nearby, ready to reach for the gun should the occasion arise.

And would he be fast enough? The man’s in his middle sixties, and isn’t likely to have the reflexes of a teenager. He’s on edge, he’s undoubt-edly visualizing quick draws in his mind, but suppose you rush him, suppose you run hard at him from the rear with the knife open in your hand.

How long will it take him to register the sound of approaching footsteps?

How quickly will he turn, how swiftly can the left hand draw the shirttail aside while the right hand yanks the gun free?

There are other people on the street, but you can forget about them. By the time they figure out what’s happening in front of their eyes, it will be over and done with, and you’ll be around the corner while he’s bleeding into the pavement.

You could do it. Care to give it a try?

No, not just yet.

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.

.

.

Perhaps he should have bought a ticket. A reserved seat on the Metroliner to Washington, say. In a name they’ll recognize, Arden Brill or Alan Breit or Arne Bodinson.

But would they even check ticket sales? And would they attach much significance to such a purchase if they even managed to spot it?

Probably a waste of time. A waste of money, too.

He has money to waste, if it comes to that. His wallet holds a fresh supply of cash, courtesy of the late William the Silent, who hadn’t been so silent after all. Old Bill had given up his ATM card and the PIN number when it was clear nothing else would save his life. That didn’t save it either, of course, and he couldn’t have thought it would, but it’s hard to think clearly when someone has you pinned to the floor and keeps on sticking a knife into you.

With the PIN revealed, he’d used the knife one last time. Then he’d withdrawn it, and shortly thereafter he’d made another withdrawal, this for $500 from Bill’s account. That, plus the cash Bill kept in his sock drawer, has improved his financial position considerably.

Money won’t be a problem.

But he needs a place to stay. He’ll want to sleep, and he could use a shower.

And he needs a way to get at the Scudders.

A smile comes to his lips, the cautious half-smile he practiced in the rear-view mirror in Virginia. Two birds, he thinks. And he knows where to find a stone.

The man’s name is Tom Selwyn. He’s a few inches over six feet in height, and must weigh well over 250 pounds. He carries the weight well, and is the sort of fat man who’s inevitably described as being light on his feet.

No doubt he’s a good dancer, although one’s not likely to find out. While the jukebox holds a decent selection of jazz and standards, there’s no dance floor in the dimly lit Fifty-eighth Street bar.

“Alden,” Tom Selwyn says. “Alden. As in Miles Standish’s very good friend?”

Now there’s a thought. “As a matter of fact,” he says, “my mother, who All the Flowers Are Dying

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would never forgive me if I didn’t at once point out her membership in the DAR—”

“I can well imagine.”

“Well, she managed to find a genealogist who was able to establish a direct line of descent from John Alden and Priscilla Mullins”—now how did he manage to summon up that name?— “to herself, and hence to me. Whom she would have liked to name John Alden Beals, but my father was already named John and felt one John in the family was plenty.”

“I’ll omit any wordplay relating to Johns and lavatories.”

“That’s because you’re a gentleman, and I in turn will avoid any allu-sions to peeping Toms and doubting Thomases.”

“Fair enough.”

“She dropped the John and named me Alden.”

“Alden Beals.”

He bows his head, just the slightest bit theatrically. “Myself,” he says.

“I’ve noticed you before, you know.”

“Really?”

“You’ve been here at Griselda’s before. Two or three times I’ve seen you march in, order a single-malt Scotch, perhaps the same brand you’ve been drinking tonight—”

“Perhaps not. I’m not terribly loyal. Always looking for something better, you know.”

“Oh, indeed I do.”

“But willing to keep sampling as I search, one might say.”

“I suspect one might. You’ve come in, ordered one drink, took your time drinking it, and then left without a word to anyone.”

“I never thought anyone noticed me.”

“Oh, please. An attractive man like yourself? Surely you felt the eyes, mine among them. But you never seemed to be looking for company.” He is silent for a moment. Then he says, “I have someone at home.”

“I see.”

“But that’s not always where I want to be.”

“And just where would you like to be now, Alden?”

“At the moment,” he says, “I’d like to be precisely where I am. Right 264

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here in this congenial atmosphere, engaged in conversation with a very personable and attractive gentleman.”

“You’re very kind.”

“It’s no more than the truth. The only problem—”

“Oh, I hope there’s not a problem.”

“Only that it’s getting close to closing time.” Selwyn looks at his watch, a Tourneau with a thin case and an oversize dial. “It is,” he agrees. “And where would you like to go when they close this pop stand?” And, when he hesitates, “What was it your great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother said? ‘Why don’t you speak for yourself, Alden?’ ”

He has lowered his eyes. Now he raises them to gaze directly and openly into Tom Selwyn’s. “I’d like to go back to your place,” he says.

The lobby attendant is seated at a desk on the left. He has anticipated this, and contrives to be on Selwyn’s right as they enter the building, letting the big man screen him from the attendant’s view. The two exchange greetings. (“Evening, Mr. Selwyn.” “A lovely evening, Jorge. I see Sammy hit one tonight.”)

In the elevator Selwyn pushes Nine and sighs as the door closes.

“Sammy Sosa,” he explains. “He and Jorge hail from the same village in the Dominican Republic. Although it may not be large enough to be called a village. What’s smaller than a village?”

“A hamlet?”

“Perhaps. Or it may be more of a coriolanus. Do you follow baseball?”

“No.”

“Neither do I, but I contrive to find out what Sammy Sosa has done, so Jorge and I will have something to talk about. He’s with the Cubs. Sosa, that is. Not Jorge. The Cubs play in Chicago, in the stadium that didn’t have lights, but now it does. And here we are.” The apartment consists of one large high-ceilinged room, perhaps thirty feet square, with a small kitchen alcove. Except for the king-size platform bed, piled high with pillows, the furnishings are antique.

There’s a large abstract oil on one wall, with a simple black gallery frame, and groups of prints and drawings on the other walls. It is, he decides, a All the Flowers Are Dying

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very pleasing room, and a great improvement on Joe Bohan’s apartment; it’s a shame he won’t be able to stay here very long.

“I have Scotch,” Selwyn says.

“Maybe later.”

“Ah. Someone doesn’t wish to wait.”

“Someone doesn’t even wish to talk,” he says, and begins taking off his clothes. His host raises an eyebrow, then unbuttons his own shirt, takes it off, steps out of his trousers. His clothes had concealed some of his bulk; naked, it’s evident just how heavy he is.

“I was always shy about disrobing,” Tom Selwyn says. “You can imagine how I hated gym class. In recent years I’ve learned that there are people who don’t mind a Rubenesque figure. And it would appear you’re one of those, wouldn’t it? My word, no wonder you don’t want to waste time on drink or small talk. You’re fully prepared, aren’t you? Not to say splendidly endowed. And speaking of preparation, the drawer there holds a supply of rubber goods. You’ll find the large ones on the left. But here, let me help you get dressed. If I may?”

Selwyn offers a bit of artful oral homage before fitting him with the condom, then kneels at the side of the bed, his forearms planted on the mattress, his enormous buttocks on display. There’s nothing attractive about the sight, nothing about Selwyn to make him a desirable sex object, and yet he finds himself consumed with the need to have this man.

First, though, he gets the knife from his pants pocket, concealing it in his hand. Then he does what is expected of him, bringing Selwyn to climax while holding back his own orgasm.

Selwyn’s breathing returns to normal, and he starts to get up, but a hand on his shoulder keeps him where he is.

“My goodness,” he says, “you’re still hard. You haven’t finished, have you? Do so, by all means. I want you to come.”

“I can’t.”

“Is it physiological? A drug or something? Because if there’s anything I can do—”

“I won’t let myself finish,” he says. “I’m saving it for a woman on the fourteenth floor.”

There is a pause, a rather delicious pause, and Selwyn opens his 266

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mouth at last to say something, but he never gets the chance. The hand moves, the knife moves, and blood gouts from his slashed throat. His body bucks and heaves, twisting violently this way and that, and blood spurts everywhere.

Fortunately, the bathroom is magnificently appointed, the shower a great luxury. And afterward there’s a sofa, untouched by blood spatters, and if it’s not as comfortable as the king-size bed might be, well, surely it’s more than satisfactory.

His sleep comes easily. It’s deep, and of course untroubled.

The alarm wakes him at six. He’s had four hours sleep, and he’d like one or two more. Morning, though, is the best time.

Suppose he stays here another twenty-four hours? It seems unlikely that anyone will come looking for Selwyn. On the other hand, the man’s continuing presence will make the place increasingly unpleasant. The air-conditioning is doing what it can, but still the air is heavy with the sweet reek of decomposing flesh and blood. In another twenty-four hours—

No, it doesn’t bear thinking about. And he’d have to stay, because once he leaves he won’t be able to get back in. He would need Selwyn at his side in order to gain access to the Parc Vendôme, but Selwyn’s not the buoyant companion he was a few hours ago.

Time to go.

He doesn’t even make an attempt to clean up, to erase traces of his presence. By now they’re sure to have a full set of his fingerprints from Joe Bohan’s apartment on West Fifty-third Street. He’d followed his usual policy of not touching surfaces unnecessarily, but his prints were all over his laptop and the table on which it had rested, and what difference does it really make? They have his prints, and now they’ll get his DNA from the towel he used after his shower, and all that means is that they’ll be able to identify him if they ever get their hands on him.

And they would anyway. There are too many people who’ve seen him and would be able to pick him out of a lineup. If they catch him, if they pick him up for drunk driving in Wisconsin or Wyoming, a routine fingerprint check is all it will take to end his career, if not his life.

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But he never gets drunk, and never drinks before driving.

So it won’t be that. It may be something else, sooner or later, but it’s all far in the future—or near in the future, but in any event not in the present. And the present, after all, is what time it is now, and now’s the only time it ever is. And when all is said and done, really, what do you get?

You get what you get.

There are staircases at either end of the building, but it seems simpler to take the elevator. It’s empty when it arrives on Nine, and the only thing that concerns him is the possibility that someone who might recognize him—Scudder, Elaine, the black youth, some police officer—will be waiting for the elevator when the door opens on Fourteen. But it’s early, it’s not seven yet, and that reduces the likelihood substantially.

And he doesn’t have much time to worry about it, because the elevator is at its destination before he can give the whole business much thought. When he rode up with Selwyn, he noted the placement of the elevator’s security camera, monitored (if the fellow bothers) by the lobby attendant. He positions himself now to minimize his exposure to the camera, and makes sure his body conceals the knife, which he holds open at his side.

But of course there’s no one waiting for the elevator, and indeed the entire hallway is empty. He walks to the door of Apartment 14-G, where a glance at the nameplate confirms that this is indeed the Scudder apartment.

If he had a key—

But, alas, he doesn’t. And any approach he can think of is likely to prompt the apartment’s male occupant to come to the door with a drawn gun, or to leave the door locked and simply call 911.

Stick to the plan, then.

He walks the length of the hallway to the rear stairwell. A few yards from the door leading to it is another door, which opens on a small room holding the chute for the trash compactor and a pair of recycling bins. A service elevator allows the hall porter to clear the bins.

There might be a security camera in the stairwell, though it seems unlikely that they’d have one for every floor. There’s no camera here, in the 268

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compactor room, but tenants are apt to wander in with their trash, and how could he account for his presence?

He has a sudden vision of a stream of tenants, old ladies carrying shopping bags full of trash, and himself with no choice but to stab them each in turn, dismembering them and stuffing them piecemeal down the compactor chute, desperate to get one out of the way before the next one shows up.

He chooses the stairwell instead. There’s no camera anywhere to be seen, and if he can’t see it how can it see him?

He props the door open an inch or two. That’s enough to provide a clear view of the entrance of 14-G without giving his own presence away.

Now all he requires is patience. And that quality is one he’s always had in abundance.

36

I slept poorly, and kept slipping in and out of a drinking dream. I woke up remembering none of the details, but concerned at first that it was somehow more than a dream, that I’d actually had a drink.

Elaine was still sleeping. I got out of bed quietly to keep from wak-ing her. Our bedside tables each sported a handgun—the nine on my side, the .38 on hers. In the shower, I tried unsuccessfully to come up with some suitable version of The family that prays together stays together. When I got back to the bedroom the bed was empty, and so was her night table.

I got dressed and went to the kitchen. She wasn’t there, but she’d made coffee, and the .38 now rested on the counter next to the coffee urn. I walked around looking for her, then returned to the kitchen when I heard the shower running. I poured myself a cup of coffee and toasted a muffin, and I was pouring a second cup by the time she joined me. She was wearing a belted silk robe, one I’d given her for Christmas a couple of years back. It had been one of my more successful presents. She hadn’t put on makeup yet, and her scrubbed face looked like a girl’s.

She asked if I wanted some eggs, and I thought about it and decided I didn’t. She turned on the TV and got the local news, and there was nothing on it that demanded my attention. There was really only one topic of interest to either of us.

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I said, “He may have left town.”

“No. He’s out there.”

“If he is, he hasn’t got much time. They’ve got his prints.”

“That’ll help a lot. ‘Attention—be on the lookout for a man with the following fingerprints . . . ’ ”

“The point is the city’s closing down around him. If he didn’t catch a train yesterday, he’ll have trouble boarding one today. They’ll be looking for him at Penn Station. And Grand Central, and the bus terminal and the airports.”

“He could have a car,” she said. “Or he could kill somebody and take theirs.”

“Possible.”

“He’s still in town. I can tell.”

I’d be quicker to dismiss claims of intuitive knowledge if I hadn’t learned over the years to trust them when I have them myself. And I’d have been especially hard put to argue with her this time because I agreed with her. I wasn’t as certain as she was, but I didn’t think he’d left.

And hadn’t I felt him watching me on the way home from the meeting last night?

Maybe, and maybe not. Maybe anxiety was sufficient explanation for the way I’d felt. God knows there was enough of it on hand to do the job.

I said, “I think you’re probably right. Right or wrong, though, we have to act as if he’s here.”

“Meaning stay inside.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“I’m not going to argue with you. I’ve got the worst case of cabin fever I’ve ever had in my life, but I’m also scared to death. At this point it would be hard to get me to leave the apartment.”

“Good.”

“I hope it’s not a permanent case of agoraphobia. I heard about a man once, he used to edit a science-fiction magazine, and he wouldn’t leave his apartment building.”

“Afraid of aliens?”

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“God knows what he was afraid of. God knows if it even happened, some john told me the story, he used to sell stories to the guy and I think played poker with him. None of that matters. The point is it started with him never leaving the Village, always finding an excuse not to go north of Fourteenth Street or south of Canal. Then he wouldn’t leave the block, and then he wouldn’t leave the building.”

“And then it got worse?”

“Quite a bit worse. He wouldn’t set foot out of the apartment itself, and then he wouldn’t leave the bedroom, and finally he wouldn’t get out of bed. Except to go to the bathroom. I assume he would get out of bed to go to the bathroom.”

“Let’s hope so.”

“He was editing a magazine where people walked around on the moons of Jupiter, but he couldn’t get out of his own bed. And finally the men in the white coats came and took him away, and I don’t think he ever did make it back.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen to you.”

“Probably not. But I bet there are lots of people like that, never going out the door. You don’t have to in New York, you can get everything delivered.”

“Speaking of which,” I said, “you know how they keep trying to sell us home delivery of the Times?”

“ ‘Available at no extra cost now for a limited time only.’ ”

“I never saw the point,” I said, “but if we’re going to stay cooped up like this, maybe I ought to call them.”

“Where are you going? Oh, to get the paper? You want to bring me . . .”

I waited, but the sentence didn’t come to an end. “Bring you what?”

“Nothing,” she said. “There’s got to be something I want, but I can’t think what it is.”

I gave her a kiss. She held on to me for a little longer than usual, then let go.

37

He is completely tuned in, perfectly focused, and he hears the turning of the lock. There are several doors closer than 14-G, but he knows that’s the one he’s just heard, and without having to think about it he flicks his wrist and opens the knife. It makes a noise equal in volume to the lock, but he knows no one will hear it, because no one is listening for it.

The door opens. Scudder? Elaine?

It is Scudder, grim-faced, and he draws the door shut, then takes a moment to look this way and that, assuring himself that the hallway is empty. If he notices the slight gap between the stairwell door and its jamb, he pays it no mind.

He turns, walks to the elevator, reaches out a finger and jabs the button. He’s wearing a short-sleeved sport shirt and a pair of dark trousers.

His shoes are canvas slip-ons.

Is he carrying a gun? His shirt’s tucked in, which suggests he’s left the gun at home.

Should he take him now? The man’s unarmed, with only his bare hands to defend against the knife. And he’s not expecting anything, either.

He’d hear the approach, though, hear his nemesis rushing the length of the hallway at him. He’d turn, he’d prepare himself, and he’d cry out to summon help. The hue and cry would certainly alert Elaine.

Still . . .

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The elevator arrives and spares him the decision. Scudder steps inside.

The door closes and whisks him away.

Now.

He listens for a moment at the closed door. Then he draws back his fist and pounds on it.

Her voice: “What is it?”

He notes the pronoun—What, not Who. Good.

He hammers on the door again, puts his other hand in front of his mouth to muffle his voice. Lowering it to a pitch close to Scudder’s, in-fusing it with urgency, he says, “Let me in. He’s in the building, he got past the doorman. Let me in!”

Nothing but the truth, he thinks.

She’s saying something, he can’t make it out, but it doesn’t matter, because the lock is turning. The instant it begins to open he hurls himself against it and it flies back, catching her shoulder and sending her reeling.

He flings the door shut, turns to her. She’s staggering backward like a drunk in high heels. The wall stops her and she’s trying to get her balance, and her face is something right out of a horror movie, a study in terror, and he holds the knife so she can see it.

Oh, this is going to be lovely . . .

She reaches into a pocket of the robe, comes up with a gun. Holds it in both hands, points it his way.

“Now put that down,” he says, his voice ringing with authority. “You little fool, put that down this minute.” She’s shaking, trembling violently. He takes a confident step toward her, speaking gently to her, telling her to put the gun down, that her only chance is calm cooperation. It’s going to work, he knows it’s going to work, and—

She pulls the trigger.

He feels the punch of the bullet before his ears register the sound of the gunshot. It hits him high on the left shoulder, and he knows at once that it’s broken the bone. There must be pain, and doubtless there will be eventually, but the pain hasn’t come yet.

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He rushes her. The gun’s pointing at the ceiling, the recoil must have elevated it, but she’s lowering it, bringing it to bear on him. She fires too soon, though, and the bullet passes harmlessly over his head, and before she can steady herself for a third shot he’s reached her. His left hand won’t work, the arm hangs at his side. He grabs her wrist in his right hand, shakes it until the gun drops to the floor, then lifts his hand and backhands her hard across the face.

He hits her again, in the pit of the stomach, and when she doubles up he gives her a shove and sends her sprawling. She’s scrabbling for the gun, but he gets to it first and grabs it, then straightens up and points it at her.

She’s on her hands and knees on the floor, staring up at him. Her robe has fallen open and he can see her breasts. Her eyes look right into the muzzle of the gun. And it’s odd, because there’s no fear in them now. He wonders what happened to the terror.

Wherever it’s gone, it’ll be back soon enough.

“In a little while,” he says softly, “you’ll wish I’d pulled the trigger.” It would be easier to get the cylinder to swing out if he had both hands to work with. But he manages it, and tilts the gun so that the remaining rounds spill out onto the carpet. He kicks at them, sends them scurrying like bugs across the room.

“Now that that’s out of the way,” he says, “we can enjoy ourselves. Get up, Elaine. Come on, on your feet!”

She stays where she is until he draws back a foot and kicks her hard in the ribs. Then she gets up, and it’s delicious just looking at her face, reading her thoughts in the expressions that pass over it. She’s trying to think of something to do, something that will save her, and there’s nothing, and the hopelessness of her situation is beginning to dawn on her.

And this is just the beginning! Oh, he’s going to enjoy this. He’s going to make it last as long as he can.

“Take off the robe, Elaine.”

She stands there, obdurate. He reaches out with the knife and she backs up until the wall stops her.

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blood, either, except for a minimal amount at the very edge of the wound, and he wonders if the bullet could have cauterized the wound even as it inflicted it.

Is it possible that the wound is healing itself? He’s heard of such things but always dismissed them as comic book fantasies. Still, something is shielding him from the pain, even as something is keeping him from losing blood.

He wore amethyst for months. Perhaps it worked, perhaps he’s absorbed its essence. Perhaps he is in fact immortal . . .

He reaches out with the knife, and there’s nowhere for her to go, nothing for her to do. She unbelts the robe, lets it fall from her shoulders.

Oh, lovely. Just lovely.

She’s on her back on the living room floor. He’s naked, his clothes where he dropped them, and he’s on top of her, and it’s good he didn’t let himself reach climax earlier with that fat queen, because all that energy is at his disposal now, and he’s rock-hard and enormous, and he’s inside her, buried in her clear to the hilt, and her breasts are cushioning him, and he’s holding the knife to her throat. And he could lie like this forever, thrusting lazily into her, gripped so perfectly by the envelope of her flesh, forever on the edge of his passion and yet entirely in control of it, able to go on this way for all eternity.

And, as he moves inside her, he talks to her. He tells her what he’s going to do to her, how he’ll cut her and drink her blood, how he’ll scoop out her eyes like melon balls, how he’ll slice her nipples off, how he’ll skin her alive. His voice is conversational, almost gentle. But is she paying attention? Is she taking this all in?

With the tip of the knife blade, he draws an inch-long line on her shoulder. The left shoulder. She shot him in the left shoulder, inflicting a painless but paralyzing wound, and he’s merely piercing the skin, drawing a white line that turns red as blood oozes from it.

He puts his mouth to the cut and tastes her blood.

And the door bursts open.

38

Could I have heard something?

I don’t think it’s possible. There were two gunshots, and one or both of them might have rung out while I was in the elevator on the way down to the lobby. But it seems unlikely that I could have heard them, or paid much attention to them if I did.

I was just going out for the paper. Elevator to the lobby, a few steps to the newsstand on the corner, a few steps back. I hadn’t even bothered to take my gun along. I’d thought of it, but it was on the bedside table and I was standing at the door, and it would have been silly, wouldn’t it?

Maybe we were linked, she and I, and something within me could sense an attack on her. I don’t know how these things work, or if they work. But when the elevator reached the lobby I had the feeling that something was wrong.

I have to get back there, I thought.

First get the paper, I told myself, so you won’t look like an idiot when you burst into the apartment and she’s got her feet up and the TV on.

No. Screw the paper.

I got back on the elevator. There were other people on it, and it crawled, stopping at three or four floors en route to mine. The closer I got the greater my sense of urgency grew, and by the time I got off at Fourteen I knew with absolute certainty that he was in there. I didn’t All the Flowers Are Dying

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know if she was alive, I was afraid he’d had enough time to kill her, but I knew he was there and I had no time to waste.

I had my key in my hand when the elevator door opened, and I rushed the length of the hall and got the key in the lock and threw the door open.

There was a chair overturned and clothes here and there on the floor, and she was on the floor and he was on top of her, and even as I registered this he was disengaging from her, getting to his feet, and she was lying there, motionless.

There was a trail of blood from her shoulder down toward her breast, and I couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead, and I couldn’t take time to look because he was there, facing me, and he had a knife in his hand and there was blood on the tip of it, her blood.

“Matt,” he said. “Now this is providential, wouldn’t you say? As soon as you and I have concluded our business”—he moved the knife from side to side, like a hypnotist swinging an amulet in front of a subject’s eyes—“then Elaine and I can take our time. It would be nice if you could watch me kill her, but you can’t have everything, can you? You get what you get, Matthew. Don’t ever forget that.” Then she was alive. That was all that really registered from his little speech. She was alive. I was in time. If I could kill him then she could survive.

He stood leaning slightly forward with his weight balanced on the balls of his feet, moving the knife from side to side. He was naked, and he would have looked ridiculous, except for the fact that he clearly knew how to use the knife and just as clearly looked forward to using it.

There was something wrong with his left arm. It hung at his side.

There was a wound, too, a hole in his shoulder, and at first I thought it was an old wound, scarred over, and then I realized she’d shot him, although he didn’t seem to be bleeding.

That ought to be to my advantage, though I couldn’t see how. A knife’s not a gun, nobody needs two hands to use it properly.

He was saying something else but I wasn’t paying attention. I’m not sure I could have heard him if I’d tried. I stood there looking at him and he took a step toward me and I couldn’t think of the right way to 278

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do this and I didn’t care. I ran at him and threw myself at him, and I felt the knife dig into my middle, and I knocked him sprawling and landed on top of him, and he twisted the knife and the pain was thin and high and insistent, like a scream.

I got a hand on his throat and bore down, and he tucked his chin down, and I drew back my hand and hammered at his face with both hands. He couldn’t fight back, he had one hand that didn’t work and another that was pinned between our two bodies, and in order to retrieve it he’d have to let go of the knife, and he wouldn’t do that, not while he could twist the knife in my guts and send pain coursing through me like a jackhammer tearing up pavement.

I wanted to pull away from him, I wanted to cry out, I wanted to let go and let the curtain come down, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t, because I had to finish this, I had to end it forever, and the only way to do that was to kill him, and the only way to kill him was by hitting him and hitting him and hitting him until he was dead.

My hands were bloody and his mouth and nose were bloody and I hit him again and his front teeth were broken off at the gum line and I hammered him with my fists and his head thumped against the floor and I took hold of his head with my thumbs digging into his eyes and I gouged with my thumbs and I raised his head and pounded it against the floor and his blood spread on the carpet and my own blood was seeping out of me. The blood was welling up behind my eyes, filling my field of vision, and I had the sense that as soon as I could see nothing but the red tidal wave of blood it would sweep me up and I would drown in it.

And then I lost track of things, because all I seemed able to pay attention to was the rising curtain of blood, and all I could do was try to hold on to the few degrees of vision at the very top edge of it. And then there was a noise like a clap of thunder, and at first I thought Oh it’s a gunshot and then I thought Oh it’s a crack in the universe and then I thought No it’s the end, the end of everything and then the wave of blood swept me up and everything was red and red and red and the red darkened and then everything was black.

39

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

There are voices but I can’t make out what they’re saying. Some of them are familiar and some of them are not, but I can’t identify any of them. By the time I’ve heard a word I’ve forgotten the words before it, and I forget it as well when I hear the next one.

Floating . . .

I’m in a room, a huge room, an enormous room. It may extend forever, this room. There may be no walls. Just people, strewn across the length and breadth of it.

And I’m somehow above them, looking down at them, but I can only bring into focus the person I am looking at, and I don’t seem able to direct my gaze where I want. It just goes here and there, centering on this person for a moment, then moving elsewhere. It’s as though I’m watching a movie, with someone else operating the camera.

And there’s no time. The camera moves neither slowly nor rapidly.

Everything somehow exists outside of time. There’s all the time in the world, but there’s no time at all.

A portion of the room is familiar. It’s Jimmy Armstrong’s saloon, the old one on Ninth Avenue. And there’s Billie Keegan behind the bar, drawing a beer for Manny Karesh. And Jimmy’s at a table, not heavy and bloated as he became in his later years, but the thin elfin Jimmy I first 280

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met, sitting at a table with a plate of steamed fish and bean sprouts. I want to say something to him but he drifts off to the edge of vision, and I see a fellow in a sharp suit spin a silver dollar on the tabletop, then snatch it up just as it begins to wobble. And it’s Spinner Jablon, who knew he would be murdered and hired me ahead of time to catch his killer.

Spinner looks up, and I look with him, and the waitress is there with a tray of drinks, and it’s Paula Wittlauer, who went out a high window. I barely knew her and she was gone, and her sister didn’t believe it was suicide and hired me, and it turned out she was right. Paula turns toward me with a glass in her hand, and then she changes, and now she’s a call girl named Portia Carr, and the man at her side is a crooked cop named Jerry Broadfield. He has a cocky grin on his face, and I watch it fade into sadness and regret.

And the images come and go faster now. I am barely able to register one face before it’s gone and another is in its place. Skip Devoe and Bobby Ruslander, and Bobby betrayed Skip and Skip sold him out to the Morrissey brothers, who left him with a black hood over his head and his hands wired behind his back and a bullet in the back of his head. And now they’re friends again, they have their arms around each other as if they’re posing for a picture. And they’re gone, and there’s Tommy Tillary and Carolyn Cheatham, and Tommy’s wife, Margaret, whom I never met but recognize at once. Tommy killed Margaret, and got away with it, and Carolyn killed herself, and I framed him for it, and he went to prison and was murdered there.

So many people, all of them dead . . .

Miguelito Cruz and Angel Herrera. Martin Vanderpoel and his son Richie, and Wendy Hanniford. Henry Prager. John Lundgren. Glenn Holtzmann and Lisa Holtzmann and Jan Keane.

Estrellita Rivera. Six years old, and it was my own wayward bullet that killed her so many years ago. Her eyes meet mine, and she smiles knowingly, and she’s gone.

Jim Faber, wearing the old army jacket he wore when I first met him, at the very first AA meeting I ever attended. Jim looks as though he’s going to tell me something, and I strain to hear it, and then he’s gone.

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Roger Prysock, wearing a zoot suit. Adrian Whitfield and Richie Vollmer and Regis Kilbourne. James Leo Motley. Peter Khoury and Francine Khoury. Ray Callander. Andy Buckley. Vince Mahaffey. Gerry Billings. Moon Gafter and Paddy Dowling. And more men, passing through my field of vision faster than I can summon up their names.

And then some women. Kim Dakkinen, with an emerald ring on her finger. Sunny Hendryx. Connie Cooperman. Toni Cleary. Elizabeth Scudder, who’d died because we shared a surname. I’d never met her, but somehow I recognize her, and then she’s gone.

And then Elaine. What are you doing here, I want to ask, with all these dead people?

Was I too late? Did he kill you, too?

She’s floating above the others, and it’s only her face, her perfect face, and she’s so young. She looks like a girl now, she looks like the girl I first met at Danny Boy’s table.

I look at her, and all I want to do is look at her, I want to look at her forever, I want to drown in her eyes.

And below us now there’s a great sea of people, there’s every person I ever knew who’s gone. My first wife, Anita. My mother, my father. Aunts and uncles. Grandparents, stretching back to the beginning of time.

Hundreds, thousands of people, and they fade out slowly, until there’s nothing there but space, empty space.

Then everything shifts abruptly, like a fast cut in a film. I’m watching from on high, and below me men and women in surgical gowns and masks are hovering around a table. There’s a figure on the table but I can’t see who it is.

But I can see the others. There’s Vince Edwards and Sam Jaffe from Ben Casey, and Richard Chamberlain and Raymond Massey from Dr.

Kildare, and Robert Young as Marcus Welby. Mandy Patinkin and Adam Arkin from Chicago Hope, and that guy from St. Elsewhere, and George Clooney and Anthony Edwards from ER. And I look at the women, and each one starts out as somebody else but they all somehow turn into Elaine. And I know that’s me on the table. I can’t see myself but I know that it’s me.

Someone says: Oh, fuck!

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It’s so hard to watch. It’s so hard to pay attention.

Someone says: We’re losing him.

So much easier to let go . . .

Someone says: No. No!

And the lights dim all the way down, and everything ends.

40

There may have been other times when I recovered consciousness, or at least hovered at its edge for a moment or two. But the first I retained any awareness of, after the curious vision of a roomful of television actors in surgical scrubs, was brief and indistinct. I was all at once present, after having been somewhere else for an indeterminate period of time. I was lying on my back, and I willed myself to move, and couldn’t.

Someone was holding my hand. I opened an eye and confirmed what I already knew: It was Elaine.

I thought, she’s alive. I squeezed her hand, or at least thought about it, and she turned her eyes toward mine.

“You’re going to be all right,” she said.

It seemed to me that I already knew that. I wanted to say something, but then my eyes closed and I went away again.

I came back and went away again a few more times, but before it seemed possible a couple of nurses got me out of bed and made me walk around in the hospital corridor. I was getting enough Demerol to keep the pain manageable, but even so, walking was still no pleasure.

They insist you do it, though, because that way you recover faster, so they can send you home and give your bed to somebody else.

By now I knew I was at Roosevelt Hospital, and that he’d done quite 284

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a number on me with his knife. They’d had to remove a couple of sections of small intestine and stitch the rest back together in what they hoped would be a serviceable fashion. I’d lost a lot of blood, and kept losing some of the blood they transfused into me, and it was touch and go in there for a while. The moment I seemed to recall—We’re losing him!—had several real-life counterparts. There were several moments when they’d thought I was slipping away, and maybe I did, but each time something called me back.

“I yelled at you,” she said. “I said, ‘Don’t you dare leave me!’ ”

“Evidently I couldn’t.”

“Not with the all-star medical team you had. Marcus Welby, though?

I didn’t think he spent much time in the operating room. I thought he pretty much confined himself to dispensing good homespun wisdom.”

“I never realized I watched that many medical shows,” I said. “I guess they did a good job of imprinting on my consciousness.”

“Or unconsciousness,” she said.

They’d be feeding me through an IV line for a while, and it would be an indeterminate period of time before some parts of me worked as well as they used to.

One doctor advised Elaine that I might never be able to handle spicy foods again. “And I told him he obviously doesn’t know who he’s dealing with,” she said. “My man takes on killers with his bare hands, I told him. No Scotch bonnet pepper is going to lay him low.”

“The only reason I went after him with my bare hands,” I said, “is that’s all I had.”

“He had a knife and you ran right at him.”

“I’d risk anything to keep him from hurting you. And if you were already dead, well, then I didn’t really care what happened to me.” What had happened to him, meanwhile, was that he was dead.

While I was smashing his head against the floor, Elaine had managed to get the pistol from my bedside table. That noise I’d heard, the last thing I was aware of before the blood-dimmed tide swept over me, was indeed a gunshot, the first of several. She’d had to figure out how to disengage the safety, and then she’d had to get up close enough to get All the Flowers Are Dying

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off a shot at him without hitting me. She wound up sticking the gun in his ear and pulling the trigger, and I registered the sound of it even as I was letting go and slipping away.

“You told me if I ever used the gun I was supposed to keep on firing until it was empty,” she said, “and that’s what I did. The recoil didn’t seem any worse than with the thirty-eight. Or maybe I was better at anticipating it, I don’t know. When it started going click instead of bang I picked up the phone and called 911, but the cops were already on their way, and so was the ambulance.” I told her she’d saved my life, and she repeated that the cop and ambulance had already been on their way by the time she made the call.

“Not by calling,” I said. “By killing the bastard.”

“I don’t know if I killed him.”

“He’s dead,” I said, “and you shot him seven or eight times in the head. I think it’s safe to infer a cause-and-effect relationship there.”

“Except that he may have been dead already. They think you may have beaten him to death.”

“Oh. Well, I don’t think I could have managed it if he’d had two hands at his disposal. You took a lot of fight out of him by putting a bullet in his shoulder.”

“I could have saved us both a lot of aggravation by putting it in his heart instead.”

“He’s dead,” I said. “It doesn’t really matter who did it. We saved each other’s lives.”

“That’s nothing new,” she said. “We do that every day.” They never did pin a name to the son of a bitch. His prints weren’t on file anywhere, except as an unidentified suspect in a murder somewhere out west. Name or no name, Wentworth and Sussman assured me that his death would clear a lot of cases all over the country, including some that had already been attributed to other people, like Preston Applewhite.

“God knows how many people he killed,” Sussman said. “We pulled a lot out of his computer, but he’s only had that particular laptop for a 286

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year or two. Taking out someone like him, it’s not so much a win for the criminal justice system as it’s a vitally important public health measure. You kill him and it’s like you found a cure for cancer.” Elaine had some bruises where he’d hit her and some more from falling and hurting herself, and there was a narrow scar about an inch long on her shoulder, where he’d cut her. She was putting Vitamin E on it, though, and she’d picked up something at the drugstore that would make scars disappear.

I said it wasn’t all that much of a scar, and she said it didn’t matter.

“I don’t want his mark on me,” she said.

And he’d raped her.

“Aside from yours,” she said, “it’s been over a dozen years since I had anybody’s dick in me. I could probably find a more graceful way of putting it—”

“But why bother?”

“My thought exactly. I was so disgusted, baby. Not while it was going on, not while he had the knife at my throat. I was too busy with fear to have any time left for disgust. But later, thinking about him, I kept wanting to vomit. I kept taking baths and douching, trying to get clean, and then I just declared myself clean and said the hell with it.

Because there wasn’t anything there to wash away, you know?” I had a lot of visitors. TJ, of course, and Danny Boy, and Mick, who came alone a couple of times and showed up once with Kristin Hollander. (“I wonder,” Elaine said, after the two of them left, and I told her not to be silly. She gave me a look.) A number of cops came, in addition to Sussman and Wentworth, and ex-cops like Joe Durkin and Ray Galindez. There were people I knew from AA and men from the Club of Thirty-one, and Ray Gruliow, who fit both categories. And friends and acquaintances from the building, and from all around the neighborhood.

Louise turned up, to see how I was and to let me know that she was continuing to spend time with David Thompson. “Because I realized I was being an idiot,” she said. “Here’s this really nice guy who’s fun to All the Flowers Are Dying

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be with, in and out of bed, and he likes me. And he smokes. And I’m gonna get on my high horse because he’s had a run of bad luck and has to sleep in his car? My God, a few years ago I was getting pig-drunk and puking on my shoes and going home with strangers, and where do I get off looking down on a decent guy like David?” It was a lot better between them, she said, now that everything was out in the open, and he didn’t have to keep his guard up, and she could stop worrying that he was hiding something. He wasn’t moving in, they both agreed that wouldn’t be appropriate yet, but at least he could stay over on nights when they went to bed together.

“Assuming he’s got a good parking place,” Elaine said.

“And enough cigarettes,” Louise said.

And I said, “Look, maybe I shouldn’t mention this, but it’s a big thing with you so you probably ought to know. He’s planning on saving money, one way or the other, so that he can afford an apartment. And one thing he intends to do, partly to save money and also for long-term health reasons, involves smoking.”

She looked at me. “He’s gonna quit?”

“That’s what he says.”

“Oh,” she said, and thought about it. “Oh, what the hell,” she said.

“Nobody’s perfect.”

I’m home now, and if I spend most of my time in bed with a book or in a chair in front of the television set, I manage to stay active enough to keep my blood circulating and my doctors happy. More often than not, I’ll join TJ for breakfast at the Morning Star and hear about his adventures in the market. And twice a week I walk the few blocks up Ninth Avenue to St. Paul’s and go to a meeting in the basement. I used a walking stick at first, a splendid one of blackthorn with a great knob to hold on to and a brass ferrule at its tip. Mick had brought it back from Ireland for me, years before I had any use for it. I still use it sometimes, but only when I remember.

My insides seem to be working reasonably well, although every once in a while something reminds me that I’d had a knife stuck in there not too long ago. But the other night Elaine made a pot of chili, 288

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spiced the way I like it, so that it was as much a religious experience as a meal. And I did just fine.

Three mornings a week, I have a ninety-minute physical therapy session with a resolutely cheerful blonde named Margit, who shows up at the appointed hour with a sack of hand weights and pulleys and other implements of torture. I’m always pleased when she shows up, and even happier when she leaves. I’m making steady progress, she says, which is great to hear. And I’m really doing remarkably well for a man my age, she adds, which isn’t.

And in a few weeks Elaine and I will be taking a cab to JFK and a plane to Lauderdale, where we’ll get on a ship for a cruise through the West Indies and up the Amazon. Elaine says we won’t have to do anything, we’ll pack and unpack once and just sit back and relax. And eat six times a day, she says, and sit on the deck in the sunshine, and watch pink dolphins in the river and listen to the howler monkeys on its banks.

“We’ll be fine,” she says, and I think she’s probably right.

In the meantime, one or the other of us is often to be found standing at the south window, staring off into the distance. I’m not sure what Elaine sees, or even what I myself am trying to glimpse out there.

We’re gazing out at the past, perhaps, or into the future. Or, I sometimes think, at the uncertain present.

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

The author is pleased to acknowledge the considerable contribution of the Ragdale Foundation, in Lake Forest, Illinois, where most of this book was written.

About the Author

LAWRENCE BLOCK, a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, is a four-time winner of the Edgar Allan Poe and Shamus awards, as well as a recipient of prizes in France, Germany, and Japan. He also received the British Crime Writers Association’s prestigious Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in crime writing. The author of more than fifty books and numerous short stories, he is a devout New Yorker and enthusiastic world traveler.

To receive notice of author events and new books by Lawrence Block, sign up at www.authortracker.com.

ALSO BY LAWRENCE BLOCK

t h e m a t t h e w s c u d d e r n o v e l s The Sins of the Fathers • Time to Murder and Create • In the Midst of Death • A Stab in the Dark • Eight Million Ways to Die •

When the Sacred Ginmill Closes • Out on the Cutting Edge •

A Ticket to the Boneyard • A Dance at the Slaughterhouse •

A Walk Among the Tombstones • The Devil Knows You’re Dead •

A Long Line of Dead Men • Even the Wicked •

Everybody Dies • Hope to Die

t h e b e r n i e r h o d e n b a r r m y s t e r i e s Burglars Can’t Be Choosers • The Burglar in the Closet •

The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling • The Burglar Who Studied Spinoza • The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian • The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams • The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart •

The Burglar in the Library • The Burglar in the Rye •

The Burglar on the Prowl

t h e a d v e n t u r e s o f e va n t a n n e r The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep • The Canceled Czech • Tanner’s Twelve Swingers • Two for Tanner • Tanner’s Tiger • Here Comes a Hero • Me Tanner, You Jane • Tanner on Ice t h e a f fa i r s o f c h i p h a r r i s o n No Score • Chip Harrison Scores Again • Make Out with Murder •

The Topless Tulip Caper

k e l l e r ’ s g r e a t e s t h i t s Hit Man • Hit List

o t h e r n o v e l s

After the First Death • Ariel • Cinderella Sims • Coward’s Kiss •

Deadly Honeymoon • The Girl with the Long Green Heart •

Grifter’s Game • Not Comin’ Home to You • Random Walk •

Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man • Small Town • The Specialists •

Such Men Are Dangerous • The Triumph of Evil •

You Could Call It Murder

c o l l e c t e d s h o r t s t o r i e s Sometimes They Bite • Like a Lamb to Slaughter • Some Days You Get the Bear • Ehrengraf for the Defense • One Night Stands •

The Lost Cases of Ed London • Enough Rope b o o k s f o r w r i t e r s

Writing the Novel from Plot to Print • Telling Lies for Fun & Profit •

Write for Your Life • Spider, Spin Me a Web a n t h o l o g i e s e d i t e d

Death Cruise • Master’s Choice • Opening Shots • Master’s Choice 2 •

Speaking of Lust • Opening Shots 2 • Speaking of Greed •

Blood on Their Hands • Gangsters Swindlers Killers & Thieves

Credits

Jacket photograph by Douglas Whyte

Designed by Deborah Glasserman

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ALL THE FLOWERS ARE DYING. Copyright © 2005 by Lawrence Block. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.

PerfectBound™ and the PerfectBound™ logo are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader February 2005 ISBN 0-06-083189-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Block, Lawrence.

All the flowers are dying / Lawrence Block.—1st ed.

p. cm.

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Document Outline

Cover Image

Title Page

Dedication Page

Epigraph Page

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Lawrence Block

Credits

Copyright Notice

About the Perfectbound