Hope to Die

FORTY

On Saturday Mostly Mozart had its final concert of the season. I went with Elaine, and we took ourselves out to a late dinner afterward. The festival had lasted just four weeks, and had served as muted accompaniment for more bloodshed than you get in your average opera. The death toll was pretty high- Byrne and Susan Hollander, Jason Bierman, Carl Ivanko, Lia Parkman, Deena Sur from the massage parlor, Peter Meredith and his four housemates, and, finally, Adam Breit or Arden Brill or Aubrey Beardsley, as you prefer.

That's an even dozen, but the count reached thirteen the middle of the following week, when Ira Wentworth told me he'd played a hunch, and had the ME's office run some checks on unidentified corpses they'd accumulated during the past eight or ten months. A floater, recovered from the Hudson in the spring after having spent a couple of months in the water, was now identifiable on the basis of dental records as all that was left of Harold Fischer. The distinguished paleontologist hadn't gone to France after all, and it was now clear how Adam Breit, unable to pay his rent at Broadway and Waverly, had suddenly been able to afford a handsome apartment in an elegant building on Central Park West.

I brought Wentworth into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee, and again he commented on how good it was. I asked what dental records or anything else might have had to say about the body in the basement, and he said, "It's got to be him, don't you think?"

"It'd be nice to confirm it. What about DNA? Can't they get it from a burned body?"

"They can get it from dinosaur bones," he said. "Remember Jurassic Park? They got plenty of DNA from him."

"And?"

"And there's nothing to match it to, that's the whole problem."

"What about the Kleenex in the massage parlor?"

"Somebody went through the bucket of tissues," he said. "You know, whenever I start whining that I've got the worst job in America, just remind me of that poor schmuck, will you? But they went through it and they didn't find anything that matched. Which might mean he's a fucking criminal genius who really did fish his own scum-soaked tissue out of the bucket, or it might mean that little scientific report we found on his computer was founded upon a lie."

"He never went to the massage parlor?"

"He never got off. He didn't come, and therefore there was no reason for her to use a Kleenex and no DNA to throw away. And that's why he killed her, but he didn't want to face the fact he was sexually inadequate, so he told himself that's not how it happened, here's how it happened, and wrote it all up."

" 'I may be a killer, but I ain't no limp-dick wuss.' "

"Something like that, yeah."

"Maybe," I said. "Of course there's another possibility we haven't mentioned."

"I don't even want to think about it."

"He faked his own death once already," I said, "and left a stooge behind in his place."

"Jason Bierman."

"Uh-huh. Fire inspector said there were two possibilities, either he accidentally touched off the explosion and fire before he could get out of the building, or he wanted to go down with the ship. I thought of a third one right away."

"So did I. You know what bothered me the most?"

"The bloody footprints."

"Got it in one. The fucking bloody footprints. Leading right straight to the cellar stairs, just so we'd know to look. You know the word that comes to mind? Cute."

"Which is something else he's done before."

"Every time he had the chance."

"What about dental records, Ira? Fire or no fire, he'd still have teeth in his jaw."

"Absolutely, but what are you gonna match 'em to? The floater in the Hudson had teeth, too, but we had to know to look at Harold Fischer's dental records before they told us anything. The problem with Adam Breit is we don't know who the hell he was before he became Adam Breit. He never lived in New York under that name, not that there's a record, except for a year and a half at Broadway and Waverly and eight months on Central Park West. He never went to medical school anywhere in America under that name, never joined any professional societies. Did he just fake the whole thing as far as his credentials as a therapist are concerned? It might not be the hardest thing in the world. You're never called upon to remove an appendix, or read an x-ray. You just nod your head every once in a while and say things like 'Well, how did that make you feel?' There've been impostors who posed successfully as doctors, as lawyers, and as the son of Sidney Poitier."

"And the daughter of the Czar of all the Russias," I said.

"Posing as a shrink," he said, "should be child's play in comparison, especially since you could make the case that half of them are unqualified to begin with."

I got the pot, refilled our cups. I said, "No fingerprints, I don't suppose."

"Are you kidding? There's barely fingers. And we did find some prints in the Central Park West apartment, but not a ton of them, and it's impossible to know which ones are his."

"Why's that?"

"Because no one set predominates. I think he wiped up a lot, and I wouldn't be surprised if he tended to be careful about fingerprints. Of the prints we did find, well, it stands to reason that the people from Meserole Street left some of them. They were there all the time for individual and group sessions with their fearless leader. And we can't get their prints for comparison, because the muriatic acid that didn't go on their faces went on their hands, and anyway they got burned up in the fire."

"What a fucking mess," I said.

"You got that right."

I drank some coffee. "How'd he get there?"

"Where? Brooklyn?"

"He didn't walk."

"Subway, I suppose. Unless you can find a cabby who'll go to Brooklyn. Nobody logged the trip, incidentally, which doesn't mean nobody made it."

"Did he have a car?"

"Not that anybody knows about. Nothing registered in his name at DMV."

"I think he had a car."

"Under another name? Could be."

"I think he used one when he and Ivanko took down the Hollanders. I thought that all along."

"Possible. Doesn't mean he drove it to Meserole Street."

"No."

"He wasn't carrying two pillowcases full of stolen goods this time, Matt. He could ride the subway and not get a second glance."

"That's true."

"Or he could have got a ride out with one of the Meserole Street people. He could have called them, told one of them to come pick him up. They stood around with their thumbs up their asses while he made the rounds and stabbed them. You don't think they'd run into the city and pick him up if he snapped his fingers?"

"I'm sure they would have."

"If he had a car," he said, "he probably went out there some other way that day. And left his car in a garage, or parked at a curb somewhere. And sooner or later it'll get towed, and wind up sold at an unclaimed property auction, and we'll never know, because it's registered under some other name."

"Uh-huh."

We were both silent for a while, and then Wentworth said, "But if he did take his car, it should have been parked out front."

"You'd think so."

"And it wasn't. Of course he could have left the keys in it, and then it could be anywhere by now."

"True."

"Or not left the keys in it, with the same result. That neighborhood, the kids learn to hot-wire a car before they learn how to drive it."

"Uh-huh."

"Where would he get a stooge at a moment's notice, will you tell me that? Just go out and pick one off the street?"

"Easier said than done."

"Exactly. And did anybody turn up missing?"

"I don't know."

"Well, neither do I," he said. "No reports, but how many people go missing and never get reported? Matt, I think it's him."

"So do I."

"Wallet was in his pocket, you know. It was a mess, what with fire and water damage, but there was some ID in it. A library card, one of those universal Student ID cards they make for you on Times Square. The kind of crap you have when you're using a false name."

"No driver's license?"

"No license, no registration. Which further supports the premise that he didn't have a car."

"Or that his license and registration were in another name, and he kept them separate. And made sure not to plant them on the corpse, because he might need them later."

"When he drove off into the sunset. He left money in the wallet, does that help convince you? I mean, who throws money away?"

"How much money?"

"A hundred and seventy dollars," he said, "which, to refresh your memory, is exactly the amount he boasted about walking out of the massage parlor with. His hundred-dollar bill plus three twenties and a ten."

"The exact amount."

"That's right."

"He walked around all day, and wound up having exactly that amount left in his wallet."

We looked at each other, and his eyes widened. "You know the word that comes to mind," he said.

"I think so, yes."

"Cute."

"That's the word."

"Oh, Jesus," he said. "Look, I'm not going to make myself any nuttier with this than I already am. That's him at the foot of the stairs unless I've got a real reason to think otherwise."

"I'm with you."

"He's dead," Wentworth said. "And if by some godforsaken chance he's not dead, at least he's out of here. And if he's out of here he's somebody else's problem and not ours. What did it say on that basement wall?"

" 'I came like water, and like wind I go.' "

"Well," he said, "all I can say is it's an ill wind."

It was about a week later that Elaine answered the phone and chatted enthusiastically for a few minutes, then covered the mouthpiece and said, "For you. It's Andy."

And indeed it was. He was just calling, he said, to let me know he'd moved again. He'd left Tucson, he said, and had knocked around a little, seeing something of the country, and now he was in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, just up the river from Spokane.

"In a few months," he said, "I'll probably wish I was in Tucson, because everybody tells me they get a whole lot of winter here. But I have to say it's pretty nice so far." He had a job tending bar, he said, and a decent room a five-minute walk from where he worked.

"If I get loaded," he said, "I can make it home real easy. Don't even have to cross any big streets."

"Always a plus," I said.

"Speaking of loaded," he said, "I was out of line, what I said at Hershey's after the funeral. Plus I guess I was, I don't know, emotionally overwrought?"

"Don't worry about it."

"I guess what I'm trying to say is I apologize."

I told him he was forgiven and it was forgotten, and I wrote down his address and phone number, and we told each other we'd stay in touch. To Elaine I said, "Well, that was nice, but as conversations go it was like an iceberg."

"Cold? It didn't feel that way to me."

"Invisible," I said. "Mostly underwater. He knows where the money came from."

"Michael told him?"

"Not in so many words. I'd say Michael told him without telling him, the way Andy just told me he knows, and thanks."

"He's in Idaho, he said."

"Tending bar across the river from Spokane, Washington. And living close enough to the job that he can make it home on foot no matter how drunk he is."

"Are you worried about him?"

"I've got no business worrying about him."

"That's not what I asked."

"It isn't, is it? I don't know if worried is the right word. I can't make myself believe that things are going to be different. People change, but only when they have to. Tucson 's just one more thing that he got away with. The consequences would have been serious, but he didn't suffer them. He dodged the bullet, and a miss is as good as a mile."

"And next time?"

"There'll be a next time," I said, "and maybe a time or two after that, and all I can hope is he's alive and out of prison at the end of it. I have to care because he's my son, but I'm not really involved. I'm not his Higher Power. I'm not even his sponsor."

"Just his father."

"And barely that," I said.

Afterward I found myself thinking about a conversation I'd had with Helen Watling, Jason Bierman's mother. She was deeply gratified that her son's name had been cleared, that he was now known to have been not a multiple murderer but the first in a chain of innocent victims. Yet hers was a bittersweet victory. Her son was still dead, and he'd died a useless, senseless death. And the man she'd credited with helping him turn his life around had in fact betrayed him, and taken his life.

"But you know," she said, "I hate to say this, but I wonder if maybe he isn't better off this way. Because I don't think things were ever going to work out for Jason. But maybe I shouldn't say that, because we can't know that, can we?"

"No," I said. "We can't know that."

I'd had a couple of conversations with Kristin Hollander along the way, and then she called one afternoon to tell me I'd never sent her a final bill. I reminded her I didn't send bills, and that I didn't figure she owed me anything.

"That doesn't seem right," she said. "With all the time you and T J put in? And you must have had expenses, too."

"Nothing to speak of," I told her. "I didn't accomplish a hell of a lot."

"Oh? I'm still alive."

"Your cousin's not," I said, "and neither are those people in Williamsburg. You already gave me a thousand dollars, and that's plenty."

She tried to argue the point, but gave up after a while, and I figured that was the end of it. Then two days later the doorman called up to announce a delivery from Bergdorf's that had to be signed for. He sent the fellow upstairs, and while I was signing for it I told him the doorman was empowered to receive and sign for deliveries to us.

"This one, it had to be the addressee," he said.

I pointed it out to Elaine when she got home, and she started to unwrap it, then stopped to announce that it was for me.

I said, "From Bergdorf's?" They had a men's store, she said, and this was gift-wrapped, and the card had my name on it. I took it from her, mystified.

It was an alligator wallet, a beauty. There was no card, and I took it out of the box and looked for a note, and the thing was crammed with money, crisp new hundred-dollar bills. There were fifty of them, and a card that said "A Gift for You" and was initialed K. H.

I got her on the phone and she said, "You did me a favor and I gave you a gift. Isn't that how it works?"

When someone gives you money, you thank them and put it in your pocket. A cop named Vince Mahaffey had taught me that many years ago, and I'd learned my lesson well.

I gave half the money to T J, figuring he'd done half the work, and maybe more. His eyes got very wide for a moment, and then he took the money and thanked me, and folded the bills and put them in his pocket. He'd learned, too.

Elaine and I had had dinner one night with Ira Wentworth and his wife, and one afternoon he came over, explaining he'd found himself in the neighborhood and couldn't think of a better place to get a cup of coffee. We sat in the kitchen and talked mostly about baseball, and the chances of a Subway Series. "The rest of the country'll hate that," he said, "but you know what? The rest of the country can go screw itself."

And a little later he said, "You know, if you ever wanted to get your PI ticket back, there's a few of us'd be more than happy to write letters on your behalf."

"Thanks," I said. "I appreciate it. But I think I'm happy leaving things the way they are."

"Well, the offer's open," he said. "In case you happen to change your mind."

I had that conversation in mind after the gift arrived from Kristin Hollander, and it wasn't long before I found myself climbing the steps and entering the sanctuary at St. Paul 's. The big room was empty, and I took a seat in a rear pew and just sat there for a while. Then I went to a side altar and lit a whole batch of candles, and then I sat down again and thought how things had changed, and how they hadn't.

On my way out I stuffed $250 in the poor box. Don't ask me why.