Even the Wicked

4

Elaine was still up when I got home, watching a wildlife documentary on the Discovery channel. I joined her for the last ten minutes of it. During the credit crawl she made a face and switched off the set.

“I should have done that when you came in,” she said.

“Why? I didn’t mind watching.”

“What I have to learn,” she said, “is always to skip the last five minutes of those things, because it’s always the same. You spend fifty-five minutes watching some really nice animal, and then they ruin the whole thing by telling you it’s endangered and won’t last out the century. They’re so determined to leave you depressed you’d think they had Prozac for a sponsor. How was Adrian Whitfield?”

I gave her a summary of the evening. “Well, he’s not depressed,” she said. “Bemused, it sounds like. ‘Why me?’”

“Natural question.”

“Yeah, I’d say. How much did you say the retainer was? Two thousand dollars? I’m surprised you took it.”

“Cop training, I guess.”

“When somebody hands you money, you take it.”

“Something like that. He wanted to pay me for my time, and when I turned him down he decided he wanted to hire me. We can use the money.”

“And you can use the work.”

“I can, and maybe I’ll be able to figure out something to do. I just hope it won’t involve buying a computer.”

“Huh?”

“TJ. He was on my case earlier. When did he leave?”

“Half an hour after you did. I offered him the couch, but he didn’t want to stay over.”

“He never does.”

“‘What you think, I’s got no place to sleep?’ I wonder where he does sleep.”

“It’s a mystery.”

“He must live somewhere.”

“Not everybody does.”

“I don’t think he’s homeless, do you? He changes his clothes regularly and he’s clean about his person. I’m sure he doesn’t bed down in the park.”

“There are a lot of ways to be homeless,” I said, “and they don’t all involve sleeping on the subway and eating out of Dumpsters. I know a woman who drank her way out of a rent-controlled apartment. She moved her things to a storage locker in Chelsea. She pays something like eighty dollars a month for a cubicle eight feet square. That’s where she keeps her stuff, and that’s where she sleeps.”

“They let you sleep there?”

“No, but how are they going to stop you? She goes there during the day and catches four or five hours at a time that way.”

“That must be awful.”

“It’s safer than a shelter, and a lot more private. Probably cleaner and quieter, too. She changes her clothes there, and there’s a coin laundry in the neighborhood when she needs to do a load of wash.”

“How does she wash herself? Don’t tell me she’s got a shower in there.”

“She cleans up as well as she can in public rest rooms, and she’s got friends who’ll occasionally let her shower at their place. It’s hit or miss. A shower isn’t necessarily a daily occurrence in her life.”

“Poor thing.”

“If she stays sober,” I said, “she’ll have a decent place to live sooner or later.”

“With a shower of her own.”

“Probably. But you get a lot of different lifestyles in this town. There’s a fellow I know who got divorced six or seven years ago, and he still hasn’t got his own place.”

“Where does he sleep?”

“On a couch in his office. That’d be a cinch if he was self-employed, but he’s not. He’s some kind of mid-level executive at a firm with offices in the Flatiron Building. I guess he’s important enough to have a couch in his office.”

“And when somebody catches him sleeping on it—”

“He yawns and tells them how he stretched out for a minute and must have dozed off. Or he was working late and missed the last train to Connecticut. Who knows? He belongs to a fancy gym two blocks from there, and that’s where he has his shower every morning, right after his Nautilus circuit.”

“Why doesn’t he just get an apartment?”

“He says he can’t afford it,” I said, “but I think he’s just being neurotic about it. And I think he probably likes the idea that he’s getting over on everybody. He probably sees himself as an urban revolutionary, sleeping in the belly of the beast.”

“On a leather sofa from Henredon.”

“I don’t know if it’s leather or who made it, but that’s the idea. In the rest of the country people with no place to live sleep in their cars. New Yorkers don’t have cars, and a parking space here costs as much as an apartment in Sioux City. But we’re resourceful. We find a way.”

In the morning I deposited Adrian Whitfield’s check and tried to think of something I could do to earn it. I spent a couple of hours reviewing press coverage of the case, then spoke to Wally Donn and checked the security arrangements they’d made. Whitfield had called first thing in the morning, but not before Wally’d seen a paper, so he’d known right away what the call was about.

“Let me get your thinking on this,” he said, “since you know the guy and steered him over here, which incidentally I appreciate. We’re basically looking at him in three places, the courtroom and his home and his office. In court it’s a crowded public place, plus you have to go through a metal detector to get in.”

“Which doesn’t mean somebody couldn’t wheel in a howitzer.”

“I know, and this is a guy who walks through walls, right? Has he used a gun yet? He mostly goes for the throat. He strung up Vollmer and garroted Patsy S. and what was it the right-to-lifer got, a coat hanger around the neck?”

“First he’d been stabbed.”

“And what’s-his-name got his head chopped off, the black guy. Except that doesn’t count on account of his own man did it. Skippy, whatever his name was.”

“Scipio.”

“Anyway, no guns. The point is he’s not afraid to work close, and he always manages to get the vic in private. Which means Whitfield’s gonna have men around him all the time, but he’s especially not walking in anywhere by himself. Like the john in the Criminal Courts Building, for example. That’s where he got Patsy, isn’t it? In a toilet?”

“That’s right.”

“His MO’s all over the place,” he said, “which is a pain in the neck. You’re right about the abortion guy, he got stabbed first, and Vollmer pretty much got his head beat in, if I remember correctly. So the point is he’s not married to a single way of doing it, which means you can’t rule out a rifle shot from across the street.”

“That’s hard to guard against.”

“It’s close to impossible,” he agreed, “but there’s still precautions you can take. I got him wearing a Kevlar vest, which won’t stop everything but it’s still a lot more protection than he was getting from his Fruit of the Looms. For transportation he’s getting an armor-plated limo with impact-resistant glass all around. He’s got two men with him at all times, plus the driver who never leaves the vehicle.”

He went on to run it all down for me. I couldn’t think of a way to improve it.

“He’s never the first to walk through a door,” he said. “Makes no difference if it’s a room that got checked ten minutes ago. Before he walks in, somebody checks it again.”

“Good.”

“This fucker’s spooky, Matt. ‘The People’s Will.’ Thinks he’s Babe Fucking Ruth, calling his shots and then hitting the ball out. And he’s batting a thousand, too, the son of a bitch. This time we’re gonna strike him out.”

“Let’s hope so.”

“Yeah, let’s. Personal protection work’s supposed to be boring. If you do it right, nothing ever happens. But it generally doesn’t come with front-page headlines attached to it. ‘WILL TAKES AIM AT LEGAL WHIZ.’ And everywhere you go with the guy, there’s reporters and film crews, jokers sticking a mike in his face, other jokers pointing a video cam at him.”

“Now you know what the Secret Service goes through.”

“I do,” he said, “and they’re welcome to it. I never cared for Washington anyway. The streets go every which way, and the fucking summers there are enough to kill you.”

I found things to do over the next several days. I saw Joe Durkin at Midtown North, and he made a couple of phone calls and confirmed that the open letter to Adrian Whitfield had been written by the same person (or at least laid out in the same fashion and printed in the same typeface) as Will’s earlier correspondence. I’d assumed as much, just on the basis of literary style, but it was something I’d wanted to confirm.

Even so, I spent a little time looking for someone with a personal reason to want Whitfield dead. He’d been divorced twice, and was presently married to but legally separated from his third wife, who continued to live in Connecticut. Each of the marriages had produced children, and I remembered that one son (the eldest, it turned out) had been arrested two years previously for selling a few hundred dollars’ worth of Ecstasy to an undercover police officer. Charges had been dropped, evidently in return for his rolling over and giving up his supplier. That looked promising, but it didn’t seem to lead anywhere.

I liked the idea of someone with a private grudge. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had concealed a personal motive behind the smoke screen of serial murder. Sometimes an opportunist would disguise his own solitary act of homicide to look as though it was part of somebody else’s string — I’d had a case like that once, the killer used an ice pick and so did the imitator. And I’d known of cases where the killer committed several purposeless murders at random to establish a pattern of serial murder, then struck down someone he had reason to kill as part of that same pattern. It was a way to divert suspicion from oneself when one would otherwise be the first and most obvious suspect. But it didn’t work, because routine police work sooner or later led someone to take a look at everybody with an individual motive, and once they started looking they always found something.

If this was a smoke screen, Will was certainly blowing a lot of smoke. Writing letters to newspapers and knocking off a batch of public figures was a long way from strangling a string of housewives so that you could wring your own wife’s neck without being obvious about it.

But maybe he just plain got into it. That happens. The man who did the housewives killed four of them before he left his own wife with her panty hose knotted around her neck. And he went on to do three more before they caught him. I can’t believe he went on that long just to make it look good. My guess is he was enjoying himself.

The good weather held into the weekend. Sunday it was supposed to rain, but it didn’t, and by late that afternoon it was hot and hazy. Monday was worse, with a high of ninety-two and the air like wet wool. Tuesday was more of the same, and that afternoon I got a phone call that diverted my attention from Will for the time being.

The caller was a woman I knew named Ginnie. She said, “God, I’m so upset. You’ve heard about Byron?”

“I know he’s ill.”

“He’s dead.”

I knew Ginnie from AA. She lived at Fifty-third and Ninth and came to meetings at St. Paul’s. Byron was a friend of hers, and I’d met him a few times at meetings, but he lived in the Village and mostly attended meetings down there. He came into the program because he couldn’t stop drinking, but some years before that he’d been a heroin addict, and he’d shared needles, and shortly after he got sober he had the antibody test and turned out to be HIV-positive. You’d think people would react to such news by saying the hell with it and going out and getting drunk, and I suppose some of them do, but a lot don’t.

Byron didn’t. He stayed sober and went to meetings, and he took the drugs his doctor gave him, along with a nutritional regimen designed to strengthen his immune system. This may have done him some good, but it didn’t keep him from coming down with AIDS.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “The last time I saw him would have been in March or April. I ran into him at a meeting in the Village. I think it was Perry Street.”

“That’s where he mostly went.”

“I remember noticing that he didn’t look well.”

“Matt, AIDS would have killed him but it didn’t get the chance. Somebody shot him.”

“Somebody—”

“Pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger. Now why in God’s name would anybody do a thing like that?”

Gently I said, “Ginnie, he’d be the one with the best reason.”

“What?”

“Maybe he did it himself.”

“Oh Christ,” she said, impatient with me. “He was in a public place, Matt. You know that little park across the street from his building?”

“I don’t know where he lived.”

“Horatio Street. Not the Van Gogh but the prewar apartment building next door to it. There’s a little park across the street. Abingdon Square? No, that’s the other one.”

“Jackson Square.”

“I guess so. He was sitting there this morning with a cup of coffee and the morning paper. And a man walked up to him and shot him dead.”

“Did they catch the shooter?”

“He got away.”

“But there were witnesses.”

“There were people in the park. It was early, so it was still comfortable. It’s an oven but there now.”

“I know.”

“Thank God for air-conditioning. Byron should have stayed in his own air-conditioned apartment, but he liked the sun. He said he’d spent his whole life staying out of it, but now he seemed to get energy from it. Solar energy. He said one good thing about being HIV-positive is you didn’t have to worry about skin cancer. You didn’t know him well, did you, Matt?”

“Hardly at all.”

“You know how he got the virus.”

“Sharing needles, as I understand it.”

“That’s right. He wasn’t gay.”

“I gathered as much.”

“Living in the Village and having AIDS, it’d be natural to assume that he was. But he was straight. Very much so.”

“Oh?”

“I was sort of in love with him.”

“I see.”

“What do you do when you fall in love with somebody and he’s HIV-positive?” She didn’t wait for an answer, which was just as well, because I didn’t have one. “Gay men have to face that all the time, don’t they? I guess they practice safe sex, or else they just don’t date across HIV lines. If they’re virus-free they don’t let themselves get involved with anybody who’s not.” She was silent for a moment. “Or they just go ahead and take chances.”

“Is that what you did?”

“Oh no. Me? What makes you say that?”

“Something in your voice.”

“It’s probably envy. Sometimes I wish I were the kind of person who can act on that kind of impulse. I never was, not even in the bad old days. I liked Byron a lot and I had this kind of yearning for him, but his status put each of us off-limits for the other. We had one conversation about it, how if things were different we’d do something about it. But things weren’t different, things were the way they were. So we stayed friends. Just friends, as the saying goes, but what’s the word ‘just’ doing in there? Friendship’s pretty rare, don’t you think?”

“Yes.”

“I learned so much from him. He treasured each day. Do you think they’ll get the man who killed him?”

“It sounds likely,” I said. “He was killed in a public place with witnesses around. And that’s the Sixth Precinct, it’s not a high-crime area, so it won’t get written off as drug-related. The odds are they’ll have somebody in custody by the end of the week.”

“They might think it’s drug-related.”

“Why?”

“He used to be a junkie. It’ll be on his record, won’t it?”

“If he was ever arrested.”

“A couple of times. He never had to go to prison, but he told me he’d been arrested a few times.”

“Then it’d be on his record, yes.”

“And there’s drug dealing that goes on in that park. It’s not swarming with dealers like Washington Square, but Byron told me how he would sit in the window and looked out at the street and watch people cop.”

After a moment I said, “He didn’t go back to using dope, did he, Ginnie?”

“No.”

“Then they won’t think the killing was drug-related, unless they figure it for a case of mistaken identity, and maybe that’s what it was. It doesn’t matter. Either way they’ll handle it by the book and run down whatever leads they’ve got. My guess is they’ll find the shooter and close the case.”

“I hope so. Matt? Why should it matter to me? It’s not going to bring him back.”

“No.”

“And it’s not like I’ve got this thirst for revenge. I don’t hate the man who killed Byron. For all I know he did him a favor. He was at peace, Matt. He treasured each day, but I already said that, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“He was still able to get out of the house. He could still go to meetings. He had to use a cane, but he would walk the few blocks to Perry Street, and there was always somebody who would give him a seat. That was the other good thing about AIDS, he said. No worries about skin cancer, and you didn’t have to get to Perry Street an hour early to get a good seat. He could joke about it, all of it. I guess it’s bad when you can’t.”

“I guess so.”

“There was a friend of mine at work. When he couldn’t come to work anymore I used to visit him. Until I couldn’t take it anymore. It destroyed his mind, but not all at once. He would go in and out of dementia. I couldn’t bear to be around him. It’s not as though I was deserting him, he had a lover who was taking care of him, and dozens of friends. I just knew him casually, from the office. Listen to me, will you? Always having to explain myself.” She stopped to draw a breath. “I found myself looking for signs of dementia with Byron. But he was spared that.”

I read the coverage in the newspapers, and I was watching New York One, the local news channel, when Melissa Mikawa did a stand-up in Jackson Square in front of the very bench where Byron Leopold was shot to death. The cameraman provided a shot of his apartment building directly across the street, and Mikawa pointed as the camera panned to indicate the killer’s escape route.

Then she went on to something else, and I hit the Mute button and answered the phone. It was Adrian, with a couple of new jokes and the wistful report that, once Will had you in his sights, everybody else wanted to draw a bead on you. “The Fourth Estate is hot for me,” he said. “If I had the stomach for it, I could be on the tube eighteen hours a day and spend the rest of my time talking to print reporters. Of course everybody wants to marry a virgin.”

“How’s that?”

“They want an exclusive. Remember what the fellow said after they tarred and feathered him and rode him out of town on a rail?”

“Something about honor, wasn’t it?”

“‘But for the honor of it, I’d have preferred to leave town in the usual manner.’ I may not have it word for word, but since it’s an apocryphal story, how could anybody have it word for word? It’s nice to be wanted, but I’m finding it easier and easier to say no. Except for McGraw.”

“What did he want?”

“What they all want. An interview.”

He said something else, but I didn’t catch it. I was off chasing an errant thought, trying to run it down. I said, “No private meetings.”

“Come again?”

“I wouldn’t see anyone,” I said, “without your bodyguards present in the room.”

“Not even a fat old newspaperman, eh?”

“Not even the cardinal.”

“Really? There’s something about the guy that inspires confidence. I guess it’s the red hat, makes him look like one of the Guardian Angels.” He laughed and I laughed with him, and he told me to relax. “The cardinal hasn’t called,” he said, “and Marty didn’t want a meeting, just a phoner. Five minutes of my time, and could I please hand him something his and his alone that he could make a column out of. I don’t think I gave him anything, but he can always spin a column out of thin air. He’s done it often enough in the past.”

We told each other good-bye and I hung up the phone and turned off the TV without finding out what the silent figures were chattering about. I had an idea, and I sat there and let myself play with it. It seemed farfetched, and it struck me as something the police would have long since ruled out, but you never know. If nothing else, it gave me something to do.

As it turned out, a few hours on the telephone put me right back at square one. You couldn’t say it was pointless, in that I was now able to let go of a stray thought that had come my way, but neither could I get much feeling of accomplishment out of it.

Meanwhile Marty McGraw did manage to conjure up a column out of what Adrian had given him, a ruminative piece on the pluses and minuses of celebrity status. Another columnist in the same paper started out musing on the fate of Byron Leopold, but after a paragraph or two he went on to something else, and so did I. I could hardly claim close ties with Byron, I hadn’t even known his last name, and the apprehension of his murderer was the responsibility of the fellows at the Sixth Precinct. They could handle it just fine without any help from me.

Except they didn’t, not right away, and I found myself being drawn in for no good reason. On Thursday, two days after the murder, I realized in my wanderings that I was a five-minute walk from the murder scene. I went over there and sat on a park bench for half an hour. I got into a couple of conversations, then went over and exchanged a few words with the doorman at Byron’s building.

Saturday afternoon there was a memorial service for him at St. Luke’s on Hudson Street. People who had known him during the years he was sober shared reminiscences. I listened as if for clues.

Afterward I had a cup of coffee with Ginnie. “It’s funny,” she said. “I keep having the feeling that I ought to hire you.”

“To find the guy who shot Byron? The cops can do a better job of that than I can.”

“I know. The feeling persists all the same. You know what I think it is? I’d be doing something for him, Matt. And there’s nothing else I can do for him.”

Later that day I had a call from Adrian Whitfield. “You know what?” he said. “I’ve figured out how the son of a bitch is going to get me. He’s fixing it so I die of boredom.”

“You hear about people dying of boredom,” I said, “but you don’t see it listed as ‘cause of death’ on a whole lot of autopsy reports.”

“It’s a cover-up, like the Catholics do with suicide. People who die of boredom can’t be buried in hallowed ground. Did you ever know a fellow named Benedetto Nappi?”

“I think I saw a couple of his paintings at the Frick.”

“Not unless there’s a side to the man that I don’t know about. Benny the Suitcase is what they called him, although I couldn’t tell you why. The story goes that he had a job starting Tony Furillo’s car. He’d warm up the engine, and then if there was no explosion that meant it was safe for Tony to go for a ride.”

“Like a food taster.”

“Exactly like a food taster. You turned the key in the ignition and when nothing happened you went back home and watched cartoons. Benny did this for a couple of months and then quit. Not because he couldn’t take the pressure. I don’t think he noticed any pressure. ‘Nothing ever happens,’ he complained. Of course if anything ever did happen you’d have had to pick him up with a sponge, but all he knew was the boredom was too much for him.”

“And you know how he feels.”

“I do, and in point of fact I’ve got less right to complain than Benny ever had. I could gripe about having to wear body armor during a heat wave, but the truth of the matter is that I go from an air-conditioned apartment to an air-conditioned limo to an air-conditioned office. It’s hotter than hell on the street, but I don’t get to spend enough time out there to matter.”

“You’re not missing a thing.”

“I’ll take your word for it. I don’t know that Kevlar flatters my figure much, and it’s not the last word in comfort, but it’s not like a hair shirt. So here I am living my life and waiting for the bomb to go off, and when it doesn’t I start feeling cheated. What about you? Are you getting anywhere at all?”

“As a matter of fact,” I said, “I’ve been thinking about sending you your money back.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I can’t think of a good way to earn it. I’ve put in some hours, but I don’t think I’ve learned anything I didn’t already know, and I’m certainly in no position to improve on the official investigation.”

“And?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“There’s something else, isn’t there?”

“Well, there is,” I said, and I told him about Byron Leopold.

He said, “He’s what, a friend of a friend?”

“Essentially, yes. I knew him, but just to say hello to.”

“But not so closely that you can’t sleep as long as his killer walks the streets.”

“I’m surprised there hasn’t been an arrest by now,” I said. “I thought I’d give it a couple of days, but I’ve already got a client.”

“You’ve never worked more than one case at a time?”

“Occasionally, but—”

“But you think I’ll feel cheated. I’m walking around under sentence of death and you ought to be earning the money I paid you, not moonlighting while the sun shines. The friend wants to hire you?”

“She mentioned it. I wouldn’t take her money.”

“You’d be working pro bono.”

“You lawyers and your Latin phrases.”

“A man sits on a bench in a pocket park with a cup of coffee and the New York Times. Another man walks up, shoots him, runs off. And that’s it, right?”

“So far.”

“Victim had AIDS. What is it, homophobia?”

“Byron was straight. He used to shoot dope, he got AIDS sharing needles.”

“So maybe the killer was an ill-informed homophobe. Or it’s the other way round, some kind of mercy killing. Is that how you’re thinking?”

“Those are some of the possibilities.”

“Here’s another. You figure there’s any possible connection between this incident and our friend Will?”

“Jesus,” I said. “That never crossed my mind.”

“And now that it has?”

“Crossed it and kept right on going,” I said. “If there’s a connection, I can’t say it leaps out at me. He didn’t announce it first or claim credit for it afterward. And the victim was the furthest thing from a public figure. Where’s the connection?”

“It’s so random,” he said. “So pointless.”

“So?”

“Whereas Will’s hits are all very specific. He addresses his target directly and tells him why he’s got it coming.”

“Right.”

“His official hits, that is.”

“You think he’s doing some unannounced killing?”

“Who knows?”

“What would be the point?”

“What’s the point of any of it?” he said. “What’s the point of killing me, for God’s sake? Maybe he likes killing and he can’t get enough of it. Maybe he’s planning to shoot me and he wants to practice on an easy target, somebody who’s not expecting it and isn’t surrounded by bodyguards. Maybe the little pas de deux in Jackson Square was a dress rehearsal.”

It was an interesting idea. It seemed farfetched, but it was sufficiently provocative so that I found myself suggesting other possibilities. We kicked it around for a few minutes, and then Whitfield said, “I don’t think there’s any connection and neither do you. But I don’t see why you can’t spend a couple of days looking for one. Don’t send me my money back. You’ll find a way to earn it.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so. What I’m paying you is small change compared to what Reliable’s getting from me for guarding my body. Forty-eight man-hours a day, plus the limo and the driver, plus whatever extras get tacked on to the bill. It doesn’t take long to add up.”

“If it keeps you alive—”

“Then it’s worth it. And if it doesn’t, then paying the tab becomes somebody else’s headache. What a deal, huh? How can I lose?”

“I think you’re going to be all right.”

“Tell you something,” he said. “I think so, too.”