Even the Wicked

12

Elaine was gone by the time I woke up. There was a note on the kitchen table explaining that she’d left early for an auction at Tepper Galleries on East Twenty-fifth Street, and reminding me to beep TJ. I had a shower first, and toasted an English muffin. There was coffee in the thermos, and I drank one cup and poured another before I picked up the phone and dialed his beeper number. When the tone sounded I punched in my own number and hung up.

Fifteen minutes later the phone rang and I picked it up. “Who wants TJ?” he said, and went on without waiting for a response, “’Cept I know who it is, Diz, on account of I reckanize the number. You believe it took me this long to find a phone? Either they out of order or somebody be on them, talkin’ like they gettin’ paid by the word. You think I should get a cell phone?”

“I wouldn’t want one.”

“You don’t want a beeper,” he said, “or a computer, neither. What you want’s the nineteenth century back again.”

“Maybe the eighteenth,” I said, “before the Industrial Revolution took the joy out of life.”

“Someday you can tell me how nice it was with horses and buggies. Why I don’t want a cell phone, they cost too much. Cost when you call somebody, cost when somebody call you. Top of that, you got no privacy. Dude’s chillin’ with a Walkman, he’s liable to pick up everything you sayin’. What makes it work like that?”

“How would I know?”

“Don’t even need a Walkman. People be pickin’ up your conversation on the fillings in their teeth. Next thing you know they think it’s the CIA, tellin’ ’em they supposed to go to the post office and shoot everybody.”

“You wouldn’t want that on your conscience.”

“Damn, you right about that.” He laughed. “I stick to my beeper. Hey, listen. I found that dude.”

“What dude is that?”

“Dude you had me lookin’ for. Dude who was on the scene when the one dude shot the other dude.”

“There’s too many dudes in that sentence,” I said. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Talkin’ ’bout Myron.”

“Myron.”

“Dude got shot in that little park? Dude had AIDS? Ring a little bell, Mel?”

“Byron,” I said.

“Byron Leopold. Wha’d I do, call him Myron? I been doin’ that in my head all along. Thing is, see, I never heard of nobody named Byron... You still there?”

“I’m here.”

“You didn’t say nothin’, so I beginnin’ to wonder.”

“I guess I was speechless,” I said. “I didn’t know you were still looking for the witness.”

“Ain’t been nobody told me to stop.”

“No, but—”

“An’ the man got me started in this detectin’ business, everybody say he like a dog with a bone. Once he get his teeth in somethin’, he ain’t about to turn it loose.”

“Is that what they say?”

“So I gettin’ to be the same my own self, like a dog with a bone. ‘Sides, it be somethin’ to do.”

“And you found the dude.”

“Took some doin’,” he admitted. “He wasn’t exactly lookin’ to be found. But he saw the whole thing, ‘cept it was more hearin’ than seein’. He wasn’t lookin’ at first, and when he did look he was seein’ it from behind. So he saw the back of the dude who did the shooting, and he didn’t see the gun, just heard, you know, pop pop.”

“That’s what he heard? Pop pop?”

“What he heard was gunshots. What else you gone hear when somebody shoots a gun?”

“Everybody who was there heard the gunshots,” I said, “and even if they hadn’t the bullets in Leopold’s body are fairly strong evidence that a couple of shots were fired. So if all this fellow did was hear the shots—”

“Ain’t all he heard.”

“Oh.”

“That was all the man heard, you think I’d be botherin’ you with it?”

“Sorry. What else did he hear?”

“Heard the dude say, ‘Mr. Leopold?’ Then he didn’t hear nothin’, so either Byron just nodded or his voice didn’t carry. Then he heard the dude say, ‘Byron Leopold?’ An’ maybe he looked up an’ maybe he didn’t, but the next he heard the dude was bustin’ caps.”

“Pop pop.”

“Like that.”

“When can I see this witness?”

“He might be pretty slow to talk to you. He already missed a few chances to talk to the police.”

“I don’t suppose the gentleman’s a vice president at IBM.”

“He in the park sellin’ product,” he said, “an’ soon as the dude commences to shoot, he ready to call it a day hisself. I can maybe put you ’cross a table from him, but that don’t mean he’s gone talk to you. ’Sides, what you gonna axe him that I didn’t axe him already?”

“‘Mr. Leopold? Byron Leopold?’”

“Don’t sound to me like he’s makin’ it up.”

“No,” I said, “it doesn’t.”

An hour later I was watching him eat french fries at a Fourteenth Street coffee shop. His cheeseburger was but a memory. He was wearing baggy jeans and a denim jacket with a quilted lining. His railroader’s cap was on the seat beside him.

I told him I had pretty much forgotten Byron Leopold.

“Why’s that?” he wondered. “You come to the conclusion he died of natural causes?”

“When I thought about it at all,” I said, “which wasn’t often, I suppose I figured he’d been taken for someone else and killed in error. Or that he’d unwittingly made an enemy in the neighborhood by sitting on the wrong bench or mouthing off at the wrong person. And he had AIDS, and he was far enough along so that the disease was visible. Maybe somebody had an AIDS phobia and decided the best cure lay in killing off the victims.”

“Like the dudes who set bums on fire.”

“As a quick cure for the problem of homelessness. That’s the idea. I didn’t think that was it, though, because that kind of killer doesn’t act once and then go off and enter a monastery.”

“He repeats.”

“Usually.” The waitress came by and filled my coffee cup without asking. The coffee wasn’t very good, but there was plenty of it. I said, “‘Mr. Leopold? Byron Leopold?’”

“Like that.”

“Making sure he’s got the right person.”

“Person he’s supposed to shoot. Like he knows the name but he never met him before. We brainstormin’, right? Battin’ ideas back and forth?”

“Something like that,” I agreed. “He sounds hired, doesn’t he?”

“The killer? You mean like a pro?”

“Not like a pro,” I said. “The whole thing’s too raggedy-ass for a pro. Here’s a man who’s alone a lot, leads a very regular life, hasn’t set up any security system to make himself hard to kill. It’s easy to get close to him in private, so why would a professional hitman kill him in front of witnesses?”

“Only reason I said a pro, Joe, is you said hired.”

“An amateur,” I said, “hired by another amateur. It pretty much takes a pro to hire a pro. You need to be connected, you can’t look up contract killers in the yellow pages. Ordinary citizens hire killers all the time, but there’s nothing terribly professional about the people who work for them.”

“An’ it don’t always work out the way it s’posed to,” he said. “Like the other day in Washington Heights.”

I knew the one he was talking about. It had been all over the papers the past few days. A Dominican teenager, bridling at her father’s strict discipline, had engaged a pair of local hard cases to kill the man, enticing them with the prospect of the $20,000 he kept in a strongbox in the closet, considering it ever so much safer than the bank.

So they showed up at the house one night and she let them in. She gave them the money, and then they were supposed to wait for Daddy to come home. But they got tired of waiting, and it occurred to them that he might be armed, and there was an easier way to close the account. So they took the girl who started the whole thing and shot her twice in the head, and they did the same for her sleeping mother and brother while they were at it, and then they went home. The father came home from work to find his family dead and his money gone. I bet his car wouldn’t start, either.

“In Washington Heights,” I said, “everybody had a reason. The girl was mad at her father, and the killers wanted the money.”

“So who had a reason to kill Byron?”

“That’s what I was wondering.”

“Didn’t have any money, did he?”

“Actually,” I remembered, “he had more money than he should have. He cashed in his insurance and he died with something like forty thousand dollars in the bank.”

“Ain’t that a motive?”

“He left it all to some AIDS charities. Some of those organizations are a little aggressive in their fund-raising, but I’ve never heard of them going out and killing for the money.”

“Besides, all they gotta do is wait, right? ‘Cause the man already dyin’.” He frowned. “You know what’d be nice? Piece of pie.” I beckoned the waitress over and he asked her what kind of pie she had, giving her response some careful attention. “Pecan,” he decided, “with some of that whatchacall a la mode on it. Say chocolate?” She looked at him, confused, and the street went right out of his speech. “I’ll have a piece of pecan pie,” he said, “with a scoop of chocolate ice cream.” She nodded and went away, and he rolled his eyes. “Now she be thinkin’ I a doctor. She be after me to take out her appendix.”

“Tell her your doctorate’s in botany.”

“That’s just as bad, Tad. She’ll have me talkin’ to her plants. If killin’ Byron didn’t put no money in nobody’s pocket, who’d hire somebody to do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“He had AIDS, right? But he wasn’t gay.”

“He got it from a needle.”

“He keep it all to hisself? Or did he pass it on?” I must have looked puzzled. “The virus, Cyrus. Who’d he go and infect?”

“He could have spread it around,” I said. “Years ago, before he even knew he had it.”

“So he gives it to some woman, and then her husband or her boyfriend or her brother wants to know how she got it. ‘Couldn’t be nobody but that no-account junkie Byron Leopold,’ she says.”

“Whereupon the husband or brother or whatever he is goes out and hires somebody to kill Byron.”

“Or does it his own self. Either way Byron’d be a stranger to him an’ he might axe him his name to make sure he didn’t kill the wrong person. ‘Mr. Leopold? Byron Leopold?’”

“Pop pop.”

“All she wrote,” he agreed.

“What about This is for Sheila, you dirty rat?’ The way he did it, Byron wouldn’t even know why he was dying.”

“If Sheila’s brother was doin’ it hisself, you’d ‘spect him to say somethin’. If he only hired the shooter—”

“The shooter might not bother with the oratory. Even if the brother did it himself, he could have a speech planned and be too nervous to deliver it.” I drank some coffee. “I don’t buy any of it,” I said. “Who takes that kind of revenge on a man with one foot in the grave? Byron Leopold was a bag of bones, his idea of a big day was sitting in the sun with his newspaper. No matter what he did to you, one long look at him and the resentment’d go right out of you.”

“What’s that leave? Suicide?”

“I thought of that.”

“Huh?”

“Say he didn’t want to live anymore but he couldn’t bring himself to take action. So he hires somebody to do it for him.”

“He’s afraid to stick his head in the oven, but he’s cool with the idea of waitin’ for somebody to sneak up and shoot him.”

“I said I thought of it. I never put it high up on the list.”

“’Sides, how’s he hire somebody who never met him face to face? You hire me to shoot you, I ain’t gonna have to ask you your name.”

“Forget it,” I said. “It never made any sense in the first place and it makes less sense now. Byron Leopold was murdered by someone who had a reason to kill him, and he himself was the only person in the world with a reason to want him dead. There ought to be a financial motive. That’s what it feels like, but there’s no money in it for anybody.”

“There’s whatever he had. Forty kay? But you said some charity gets that.”

“And it’s not enough anyway.”

“Not enough?”

“Not enough to kill for.”

“Dudes up on Washington Heights, they killed three people and only got half that much.”

“They were lowlife dipshits,” I said. “They probably killed for the hell of it. They already had the money. Why kill the girl? To keep her quiet? She couldn’t tell anybody, and her mother and brother were asleep in their beds, for Christ’s sake. They killed three people for no reason.”

“Guess you ain’t likely to be a character witness for them. Anyway, wasn’t no lowlife shot Byron. Said, ‘Mr. Leopold.’ Polite, you know? Showed some respect.”

“It’s little things that make all the difference.”

His pie had arrived while we were talking, and now it was mostly gone. He held a bite balanced on his fork and said, “Funny about the forty kay. First it was too much and now it ain’t enough.”

“He cashed in an insurance policy,” I said, “and that would have brought him only a fraction of what he had in the bank. So in that sense the forty thousand was too much, but...”

“Somethin’ wrong?”

“No.”

“Way you just broke off an’ started starin’.”

“Too much money,” I said. “Glenn Holtzmann had too much money. It was in his closet when he died. And I dreamed about him, and that’s what the dream was trying to tell me. Too much money.” I looked across at TJ, who still had the last bite of pie on his fork. “I thought the dream was about Will. But it wasn’t. It was about Byron Leopold.”