Hope to Die

TWENTY-FIVE

If I'd gone straight home I might have been there when she called, but maybe not. It's hard to say.

And it's moot, because I didn't go straight home. I stopped across the street, watching CNN while T J booted up the computer and searched for Jason Bierman. There were already several Web sites devoted wholly or in part to the massacre on West Seventy-fourth, and he read out several bits of arcana to me, including the report of one incisive fellow who'd paced off the precise distance from the Hollanders' home to the spot in front of the Dakota where John Lennon was shot.

I said, "How many more steps to the grassy knoll? That's what I want to know."

"Here's somethin' else," he said. "His mama says he didn't do it."

So had Oswald's, I told him, and how was that for coincidence? On the TV, Lynne Russell smiled bravely through a report of bad news from the Balkans and worse news from the Middle East. I turned her off when they went to a commercial and called Elaine at her shop. We arranged to meet for an early dinner at Armstrong's. I asked T J if he wanted to join us, but he said he had things to do.

I left him hunched over his Mac and went across the street. I collected the mail and took it upstairs, sorted it, and didn't find anything exciting. I checked the messages, and there was one from Lia Parkman, a disjointed, rambling riff in which she apologized for not having told me earlier that she could recall a conversation involving her Aunt Susan. It had been with a graduate student who was doing a doctoral dissertation on her writing. His name was Arden Brill. She went on to say I could call her, that I had her number, and then the machine cut her off in the middle of a sentence.

But I didn't have her number, T J had her number, and when I called him his line was busy. I tried his cell phone and he picked up, checked the number, and read it off to me. I dialed it and it rang four times, and then a recorded voice told me I'd reached Sprint voice mail, and invited me to leave a message for- and another recorded voice, hers, said, "Lia Parkman."

I decided I'd try her later, and rang off without leaving a message.

I took a shower and decided I didn't need to shave again, and after I got dressed I tried Lia's number again, with the same results. I watched the news some more, tried Lia a third time on my way out the door, and walked a long block west to Tenth Avenue, where Jimmy Armstrong keeps a saloon. I went in and got a Perrier at the bar, turning when I heard my name called. The man on his feet beckoning to me was Manny Karesh, a friend from the old days, when Jimmy's joint was on Ninth Avenue, just around the corner from my hotel.

Manny was at a table with a couple of nurses fresh off their shifts at Roosevelt. They were drinking Margaritas and he was nursing a beer- a Dos Equis, he said, to fit the Mexican theme of the girls' drinks. Perhaps, he suggested, I might want to switch to some Mexican brand of bottled water.

One of the nurses said they had a woman on the ward who'd gone to Mexico on vacation, and drank the water. Manny asked how she was doing. "We're all sort of waiting for her to die," the girl said.

Elaine showed up and we got our own table. "I'd apologize for being late," she said, "but maybe I ought to apologize for showing up at all. You looked as though you were doing just fine."

"Yeah, right," I said. "They take one look at me and they think 'Geriatric Ward.' "

"That might not be so bad," she said. "Maybe you could get them to give you an enema. Anyway, if they've got one eye on the calendar, what are they doing with Manny? He's twenty years older than you."

"He's got the heart of a boy."

"In the body of a dirty old man," she said, and reached for the menu.

She had the avocado salad and I had a bowl of chili, and while we waited for the food I told her I'd sent the check to Michael. "All I did was write a check," I said, "and that seems like too much and not enough, both at once."

I explained how I'd made the check payable to Michael, and he'd write a single check for the full amount payable to the employer. She asked if he'd know half of it was from me. I said, "His boss? He won't care who it's from. Oh, that's not what you mean, is it?"

"Michael said he could only send five thousand, so will he say where he got the rest?"

"We didn't discuss it," I said. "He can do what he wants."

When we got home there were three messages. The one from Lia was still on there, joined by a message from Danny Boy, who suggested I might want to drop over to Mother Blue's anytime after nine.

The third message said, "Will the party who receives this message please call Ira Wentworth." There was a number to call, and nothing else.

I found Elaine and asked her if she knew anybody named Ira Wentworth. She didn't, and when she asked why I played the message for her. She said, "Guess what? We just won a free trip to inspect a time-share resort on beautiful Grand Cayman Island. Except he doesn't sound like a telemarketer. You know what he sounds like? A cop."

I played it again, and I knew what she meant. I dialed the number, and it rang a long time. I was on the point of hanging up when a woman picked it up and said, "Squad room, this is McLaren."

I asked for Ira Wentworth and she said he was out. Did I want to leave a message? I said I was Matthew Scudder, returning his call. Did I want to leave a number? "He must have it," I said. "He dialed it."

Did I know what this was in reference to? "Well, I figure he'll know," I said. "He called me."

"You were right," I told Elaine. "He's a cop, according to somebody named McLaren. Who's also a cop, or she wouldn't be answering the phone, though I can't say she sounds like one."

"I wonder what he wants."

"No idea. She didn't even say which precinct, she just said 'squad room,' and I didn't think to ask."

"You could call back."

"I could also say the hell with it," I said. "I'm going to see what Danny's got. While I'm at it I can ask him what he knows about Wentworth and McLaren."

"Wentworth amp; McLaren. It sounds like a team of architects. Or maybe a design studio."

"They're cops," I said, "first and foremost, and design's strictly a sideline. Look, if he calls, see if you can find out what it's about, will you?"

When I got to Mother Blue's, the house rhythm section was working its way tastefully through "Walking," the Miles Davis tune. I joined Danny Boy, and when the number ended the drummer and bass player left the stage and went to the bar, and the pianist played a Thelonious Monk composition. Danny and I both recognized the tune, but neither of us could come up with the title. When the number ended the pianist joined his fellow musicians at the bar, the jukebox kicked in, and Danny poured himself an inch of vodka and said that everybody had the same thing to say about Ivanko and Bierman.

"Which is that it's a good thing they're dead," he said. "The consensus seems to be that they're the sort of people who give crime a bad name. Especially Ivanko, who they all figured would do something like this sooner or later. Of course that's hindsight talking, but in this case it spoke with rare conviction."

"And Bierman?"

"Now that's what's interesting," he said, "and the reason I called. Nobody had much of anything to say about Bierman. If they were just as glad he was dead, that's because they knew him as Ivanko's partner in this particular outrage of the week. The one exception is Jason Bierman's mother."

"According to T J," I said, "she's all over the Internet."

"All over New York, too. She flew into town to clear her boy's name."

"Bierman's not from New York?"

"I don't know where he's from," he said, "or her either, originally, but she lives in Wisconsin these days. The city's one I never heard of before, and it's got ten or twelve letters and half of them are O's. Not that it matters, because she's not there anymore. She's here."

"In New York."

"At the old Hotel Peralda, known to the cognoscenti as the Paraldehyde Arms."

"Just west of Broadway in the Nineties," I said.

" Ninety-seventh Street," he said, "and what a pesthole it always was. Babies crying and bullets flying, and the only quiet rooms were the ones where the tenants were dead. Some hotel chain bought the place, if you can believe it, and they've converted it to a budget hotel for respectable travelers. I just hope they tented it first and fumigated the daylights out of it."

"And that's where she's staying?"

"If she hasn't gotten herself killed yet, or reinvented herself as a transvestite hooker, or hopped a freight back to Ocomocoloco. She swears her son was a good boy, and he couldn't possibly have done what they say he did. According to her, Jason was a fall guy for a player to be named later."

"Either I'm as crazy as she is," I said, "or the woman's right."

He poured himself some more vodka. "You were made for each other," he said. "She's been talking some to the press, from what I hear, but the only ones who want to bother with her are from the supermarket tabloids, and what they really want her to do is tell how young Jase used to pull the wings off flies and use stray cats for scientific experiments. When she insisted on making him sound like a choirboy, they lost interest. And of course the cops don't want to hear from her. They make some rookie take her statement, and then they just shine her on."

"Can't blame them."

"No. So what she's doing, even though she doesn't have a pot to piss in, and God knows the Colonial Inn expects you to bring your own- "

"That's the new name of the Paraldehyde?"

"Yes, and it's wonderfully descriptive, as long as your idea of a colony is Devil's Island. What the woman's doing, and why I couldn't wait to call you, is she's looking for a private detective to represent her interests and clear her poor boy's reputation. Made for each other, the two of you. Made for each other!"

If that had been one of Danny's nights at Poogan's, I might never have met Helen Leich Bierman Watling, the twice-widowed mother of Jason Bierman. I'd have thought of calling her at her hotel, and I might have looked at my watch and decided it was too late for a phone call. If I'd failed to find a working pay phone, intending to call when I got home, I'd have been that much more likely to decide it was too late and let it go until morning.

By then I'd have heard from Ira Wentworth (of Wentworth amp; McLaren) and a call to a dotty old lady from Wisconsin would no longer have ranked high on my list of priorities. In any event, I'd have had to call her by nine that morning, because that was when she was leaving to catch an eleven-A.M. flight to Milwaukee, the airport of choice for those living in Oconomowoc.

But Mother Blue's is on Amsterdam in the Nineties, just a few minutes from the Colonial Inn, late the Paraldehyde Arms. I didn't even call, I just walked there, and a clerk who looked too well-scrubbed for the rest of the lobby confirmed that Mrs. Watling was a guest of the hotel. I picked up a house phone and he put through a call to her room.

I said, "Mrs. Watling, my name's Matthew Scudder, I'm a private detective. I'd like to talk with you about your son."

"Oh, my," she said. "You people really come out of the woodwork, don't you?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"I guess you smell money," she said. "I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I'm afraid I can't possibly afford the fees you charge."

And she rang off.

"I think we got cut off," I told the clerk. "Could you put me through again?"

When she picked up I said, "Mrs. Watling, you couldn't hire me if you wanted to. I already have a client, and I happen to believe your son is in fact innocent, that he was set up and killed by a man as yet unidentified. I'm downstairs in the lobby, I walked over here to talk to you, but if you hang up on me again I'll go home, and you can go to hell."

I said all that in one breath, wanting to get the words in before she broke the connection, and maybe that's why my finish was a little more forceful than I'd intended. For a moment I thought she had in fact hung up, because I didn't hear anything from her, and then she said, "Oh, dear. I finally act in an assertive manner, after being so namby-pamby ever since I got to this city, and I guess I picked the wrong man to hang up on. Are you still there?"

"I'm here."

"Do you want to come up here?"

NO VISITORS ALLOWED IN ROOMS, a sign announced. "I don't think I can," I said. "There seems to be a rule against it."

"Do you suppose they think I'm a prostitute? Well, it doesn't matter, there's no room for two people in here anyway. There's not really room for one. This is the worst excuse for a hotel I've ever seen in my whole life, let alone stayed in, and they're charging me ninety-five dollars a night, and tax is extra. And people tell me it's a bargain!"

Welcome to New York, I thought.

"I'll have to get dressed," she said, "but it won't take me a minute, and then I'll be right down."

It was more than a minute, but no more than five, before she emerged from the elevator, wearing a beige pantsuit and a bright yellow blouse. "I'm dressed all wrong for New York," she said. "You don't have to tell me."

"I wasn't going to."

"Well, I am, and I know it, but I'm not going to run out and buy a lot of black clothes just so I can fit in. And I don't think I would fit in even if I did."

I wasn't inclined to argue the point. She looked like a suburban Midwestern matron, her light brown hair carefully styled, her lipstick neatly applied, her wrinkles the kind they call laugh lines. She wasn't the stereotypical mother I'd envisioned, but she seemed to fit the role she'd fashioned for herself, or found forced upon her- the mother determined to salvage a dead son's good name.

Except it wasn't all that good a name to start with, she told me, after we had settled into a corner booth at the Ninety-sixth Street equivalent of the Morning Star, or the Salonika. "Nothing ever really worked out for Jason," she said. "His father was about the handsomest boy in our high school class, and the most fun. But fun was all he cared about, and fun meant drinking, and drinking meant… well, he took off when Jason was four years old. I never heard from him, and I was told I could divorce him in absentia, or have him declared legally dead after seven years. But I didn't know that I wanted to do that, either of those things, and then I didn't have to, because he turned a car over somewhere in California and there was a card in his wallet of who to notify in the event he died, which he did."

Jason didn't do well in school, she said, and then when she remarried he didn't get along with his stepfather, who was, she had to admit it, a hard man to get along with. And Jason sort of drifted, and he wasn't too good at staying out of trouble, but he was never what you'd call bad. There was nothing hurtful about him, nothing mean-spirited. They said he'd been arrested for sneaking under a subway turnstile, and she could imagine him doing that, or even shoplifting from a supermarket or department store, but what they'd said he'd done…

I told her how I was investigating from the other direction, trying to find someone with a motive specific to the Hollanders. If I could find some common element, someone in her son's life who was in any way linked to Byrne and Susan Hollander, then I might be able to connect the dots.

She thought it over while she spread butter on her toasted bran muffin ("one thing that's definitely better in New York, I'll grant you that") and took a little bite. She sipped some iced tea, ate more of the muffin, drank more of the tea, and looked up at me and shook her head.

"I just don't know who he did or didn't know," she said. "He would call me just about once a week, he was good about that. He called collect, of course. I told him to, he didn't have the money to pay for his calls. In fact I helped him out a little, I sent a money order every few weeks. I didn't send checks because it was almost impossible for him to find a place that would cash a personal check on an out-of-state bank, and of course he didn't have a bank account of his own to deposit it into. He didn't have anything."

Except, she said, he was beginning to find himself, to get his feet planted. Not to take charge of his life, that made him sound a little more capable than he had yet become, but at least to play an active role in his own life instead of watching passively as it unfolded before him.

"He was working," she said. "Three hours a day, Monday through Friday, delivering lunches for a delicatessen. They paid him in cash at the end of his shift each day, and it wasn't very much, but he got tips, too. And he worked nights, too, making deliveries for a package store."

I didn't know the term, and she said, "Don't you call it that? A store that sells packaged goods. Beverages, alcoholic beverages. What do you call it?"

"A liquor store."

"Well, that's New York for you," she said. "I guess we're more discreet in the Midwest, or maybe just more namby-pamby. We call them package stores. Now you didn't know that, and I didn't know there was anything else to call them, so I guess we both learned something, didn't we?"

Jason's life didn't sound like much, she knew. A couple of part-time subsistence jobs hardly amounted to a budding career. But when you knew him and where he'd come from, well, you could see that he was on the right track.

"The last time he got in trouble," she said, "they had him see a counselor, and I have to give New York credit for this, because Jason said the man helped him see things a little more clearly. How he was just getting in his own way time and time again, and how it didn't have to be that way. And from that point on, his life began to improve."

Some specifics might have helped. The name of the social worker, for instance, who might have known the names of some of the other people in Jason Bierman's new life. It would have been nice to know the names and locations of his occasional employers; she knew only that the deli was in Manhattan, which didn't narrow it down much. The package store ("or liquor store, I'll have to remember to call it that") might have been anywhere.

She finished her bran muffin and iced tea, and I decided I'd had as much of my coffee as I wanted. I picked up the check, and she took a wallet from her purse and asked how much her share came to. I said it was on me. She insisted she'd be happy to pay, and I told her to forget it. "You're a visitor," I said. "Next time I'm in Wisconsin, I'll let you pick up the tab."

"Well, that's very nice of you," she said. "And after I just about accused you of trying to drum up some high-priced business!" But she'd had audiences with several private detectives, she said, and one told her to go home, that she was wasting her time, and the others wanted substantial advances before they would undertake to do a thing.

"Two men asked for two thousand dollars, and one wanted twenty-five hundred," she said. "And there was another man who asked for two or three thousand, I can't remember which, and I said that was much too high, and he said, well, how about a thousand? And I hemmed and hawed, and he said if I gave him five hundred he could get started. And it came to me that he wanted whatever I could give him, and he probably wouldn't do a thing once he had the money in his hand."

I told her she was probably right. She apologized again, unnecessarily, and asked if I thought she should stay in New York. She was supposed to fly home in the morning but she supposed she could stick around for a few more days.

I told her there was no need. I gave her one of my cards and made sure I had her address and phone number written down correctly. And I walked her back to her hotel, even though she told me not to bother. I waited until she had collected her key from the desk and boarded the elevator, then went outside and looked for a taxi.

When I walked in the door, Elaine told me Ira Wentworth had called twice. He wouldn't say what it was about, just that I should call him as soon as I got in.

I tried his number and a nasal-voiced male said, "Squad room, this is Acker." I gave my name and said I was returning Detective Wentworth's call.

"He's not in," Acker said, "but I know he wants to talk to you. Will you be staying put for the next ten minutes?"

"I'm not going anywhere. He's got the number, but let me give it to you again."

He repeated it back to me and rang off, and I realized I'd missed my chance to ask the number of the precinct. I picked up the phone and had my finger on the redial button but didn't push it.

I had a feeling I knew which precinct it was.

I put the phone down while I checked my notebook, picked it up again, and tried a number I'd tried before, with no success. It rang once, twice, and then somebody answered but didn't speak.

I said, "Ira Wentworth?"

The voice I'd heard once before, on my machine, said, "Who the hell is this?"