Hope to Die

TWO

Their daughter Kristin found the bodies. She'd spent the evening with friends inChelsea and was going to stay over at a girlfriend's apartment in London Terrace, but that would have meant wearing the same clothes to work in the morning or else running home first to change. A man she'd just met offered her a ride home, and she took it. It was a few minutes after one when he pulled up and double-parked in front of the house on West Seventy-fourth.

He was going to walk her to her door, but she stopped him. Still, he waited while she crossed the sidewalk and mounted the steps, waited while she used her key, waited until she was inside. Did he sense something? Probably not. I suspect it was habit, the way he was brought up: when you see a woman home, you wait until she's safely inside before you take your leave.

So he was still there, just about to pull away, when she reappeared in the doorway, her face a mask of horror. He killed the ignition and got out to see what was the matter.

The story broke much too late for the morning papers, but it was the lead item on the local news, so Elaine and I learned about it at breakfast. The gal on New York One reported that the victims had attended a concert atLincolnCenter that evening, so we knew we'd been there listening to the same music with them; what we didn't know then was that they'd been at the patrons' reception and dinner as well. It was unsettling to think we'd been in the same concert hall with them, along with several thousand other people; it would be more unsettling later to realize that we'd all been part of a considerably more intimate gathering.

The double murder was more than front-page news. It was, in journalistic terms, a wonderful story. The victims, a prominent attorney and a published writer, were decent, cultured people, murdered brutally in their own home. She'd been raped, always a bonus for the tabloid reader, and subjected to a second violation with the fireplace poker. In a less outspoken time than ours, that last detail would have been veiled. The police generally hold back something like that, to make it easier to screen false confessions, but this time the press got hold of it. The Times left it unreported, perhaps out of decency, and the TV news hinted at a further violation without getting specific, but the News and the Post showed no such restraint.

A police canvass of the area turned up a neighbor who had spotted two men leaving a house, probably the Hollander house, sometime after midnight and before one. She noticed their departure because each had a laundry bag slung over his shoulder. She didn't regard the sight as suspicious, never thinking they might be burglars, assuming instead that they were roommates, headed for the twenty-four-hour laundromat around the corner onAmsterdam. She remembered thinking that it was a shame young people had to work such long hours these days, and the only time they had to do their laundry was in the middle of the night.

The description she furnished was vague, and a session with a police artist led nowhere, as she had never gotten a clear look at their faces. They were, as she recalled, neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin. She thought, although she couldn't swear to it, mind you, that one of them might have had a beard.

Forensics thought she might be right. They'd recovered a couple of hairs that had almost certainly come from a man's beard, and you didn't need a DNA check to know they weren't Byrne Hollander's, as he was clean-shaven.

According to the woman, it was possible that one of them limped. She remembered there was something awkward about his walk, attributing it at the time to the weight of the sack of laundry he was carrying. And maybe that's all it was, but maybe he'd been limping. She couldn't say for sure.

When you luck into a story that sells papers, you keep it on the front page whether or not there are any new developments. The Post showed the most imagination, actually running a sketch of the suspect with the headline HAVE YOU SEEN HIM LIMPING? It showed a man with a Mephistophelian beard and generally demonic facial features, a sack slung over his shoulder, furtively slouching. TowardAmsterdam Avenue, I suppose, if notBethlehem. The implication, of course, was that this was a police sketch, but it was no such thing. Some staff artist at the paper had cobbled it up to order and there it was on the front page, with the Post's readers urged to come up with a name to go with the imaginary face.

And, of course, dozens of them did, flooding the police tip line, the number of which the paper had been considerate enough to furnish. When someone phones in a tip in a high-profile case, you can't dismiss it out of hand, even when it's the result of some journalist's fantasy. There's always the possibility that the tip's legit, that the caller's using the sketch as an excuse to point the police toward someone of whom he has reason to be suspicious. Every call gets checked out, not because those checking expect results, but because they know how they'll look if the tip they overlook turns out to be on the money. The first thing you learn in the NYPD, on the job if not in classes at the academy, is to cover your ass. And the job keeps on teaching it to you, over and over.

One caller said the cops ought to take a look at a guy named Carl Ivanko. It wasn't that the sketch looked like him, exactly, because Carl's face was sort of lopsided, as well as longer and narrower than the face in the sketch. And the caller didn't know if Carl had a beard. Facial hair was sort of an on-and-off thing with him, and it had been a while since the caller ran into Carl, and if he never saw him again, well, that would be fine.

So it was more the description than the sketch, really, that had brought Carl to mind, although there was something about the sketch that had triggered his action, even though it didn't bear much resemblance to Carl. The thing was, Carl had something wrong with his hip, and it gave him an awkward walk some of the time. It wasn't a limp, not exactly, but what it came down to was he walked funny.

But then a lot of guys have a bum hip or a trick knee, and maybe had a beard once. What made the connection, see, was the poker, and that wasn't based on anything that happened, not as far as the caller knew. It was what he'd said, Carl, and he'd said it more than once. Of a woman who'd failed to reciprocate his interest, and of another woman who'd caught his eye on the street. What I'd like to do, Carl said, I'd like to take a hot poker and shove it up her cunt.

Or words to that effect.

No one was hugely surprised to learn that Carl Ivanko had a sheet. His juvenile record was sealed, but since then he'd been arrested twice for burglary. He pleaded out on both occasions, drawing a suspended sentence the first time and doing three years upstate for the second charge. He'd also been picked up once for attempted rape, but the charges were dropped when the victim couldn't pick him out of the lineup.

The last known address for him was his mother's place onEast Sixth Street, four flights up, with an Indian restaurant on the ground floor. That was the block between First and Second, where almost every building had an Indian restaurant on the ground floor. Mrs. Ivanko didn't live there anymore, and no one in the building knew who Carl was, let alone what had become of him.

There are lots of ways to find someone when you want to badly enough, but Carl turned up on his own before they could try most of them.Brooklyn police officers responding to a complaint of a bad odor emanating from a locked ground-floor apartment in the 1600 block ofConey Island Avenue broke in to find two male Caucasians, ages twenty-five to thirty-five, who had apparently been dead for several days. Documents on the bodies, later confirmed by fingerprints, identified the two men as Jason Paul Bierman and Carl Jon Ivanko. Bierman's wallet held a driver's license with theConey Island Avenue address. Ivanko didn't seem to have a driver's license, but a generic Student ID card in his wallet supplied some information. It was the kind you can buy in souvenir shops, and gave Ivanko's college affiliation as "MeanStreetsUniversity" and his address as "the Gutters of New York." There was a space for someone to notify in case of accident or serious illness. "The

City Morgue" was Ivanko's suggestion.

Both men had died of gunshot wounds. Ivanko, sprawled full-length on the uncarpeted floor, had been shot twice in the chest and once in the temple, in a manner more or less identical to Byrne Hollander, and, ballistics later established, with the same.22-caliber automatic. The cops didn't have to look hard for the gun; it was still in Jason Bierman's hand. He was sitting on the floor in the corner of the room, his back against the wall, his gun hand in his lap. He had apparently put the barrel in his mouth, tilted it upward, and fired a single shot through the roof of his mouth and into the brain. Professional killers are supposed to favor.22s for head shots because the bullet typically caroms around inside the skull, with fatal results a strong possibility. It had worked for Bierman, but it might have worked whatever gun he used. Cops, drunk or depressed or both, have used their service revolvers in this manner for years; the. 38-caliber slugs may not bounce much, but they do the job.

Both of the pillowcases from the Hollander bedroom turned up in the Bierman apartment, one empty and wadded up on the floor, the other half full of stolen goods on the unmade double bed. The wooden chest of sterling silver, service for twelve, rested on top of Bierman's chest of drawers. Kristin Hollander was able to identify it, along with several pieces of her mother's jewelry and other articles taken from her home.

Forensic analysis established that the facial hairs found at the crime scene were from Carl Ivanko's beard, and the semen recovered from Susan Hollander's anus was his as well. Posthumous x-rays of Ivanko revealed deterioration of the hip socket that would account for the limp the witness had reported and the caller confirmed.

I didn't know all of this at the time, although it was all reported at considerable length on television and in the papers. By then I had something else on my mind.

Besides sending in a contribution, Elaine typically orders tickets to around a dozen concerts during the month-long Mostly Mozart festival. I keep her company more often than not, and when business or inclination keeps me away, she can always find a friend to use my ticket. Last year she took T J to one performance, a countertenor singing with a small orchestra of period instruments. I'd have enjoyed it myself, but I had a case I had to work. It was T J's first classical concert, as far as we knew, and she said he seemed to like the whole thing, music and all, but not to expect him to run out and buy a whole batch of CDs.

We went to the opening concert on Monday night, and our next tickets were for Thursday night, a sold-out affair with Alicia de Larrocha at the piano. By then we'd learned that the Hollanders had not only attended Monday's concert but had been at the patrons' dinner as well. The killers had not yet been found, and Avery Fisher Hall was buzzing with the story. As far as I could tell, it was all anyone was talking about.

I made a point of heading for the patrons' lounge during intermission, more for the conversation than the free coffee and Toblerone bars they give you. One couple we see there often enough to nod to asked if they hadn't seen us at the dinner, and if we'd seen or known the Hollanders. We said we hadn't known them, and we might or might not have seen them there, that it was impossible to say.

"That's just it," the woman said. "We sat with three other couples we didn't know. We could as easily have been seated with Byrne and Susan Hollander."

"We could have been Byrne and Susan Hollander," her husband said. He meant they could have suffered the Hollanders' fate. How convenient it had been, after all, for the killers to know that the Hollanders were out for the evening, and when they could be expected to return home. Was it impossible that they'd had a list of people expected to attend the patrons' dinner? And couldn't they have just as easily selected any of the names on that list?

It was a stretch, but I knew what he meant and how he'd gotten there. Any disaster- a crime or an earthquake, anything at all- has a lesser or greater impact upon us in proportion to the likelihood that it could have happened to us. The Hollanders were people like us, we might but for the luck of the draw have been seated next to them at dinner, and was it impossible that it was precisely what we shared with them that had gotten them killed? It was not impossible, so it could have been us instead of them- and we shivered with the odd blend of terror and relief that is so often the consequence of a narrow escape.

The patrons' lounge was full of people who were glad to be alive- and the least bit afraid to go home, because who could be certain the killers were finished?

That was Thursday. Saturday morning the cops kicked the door in on Coney Island Avenue, and a few hours later the media had the story and the city- especially that part of it that lived on the Upper West Side and went to concerts- breathed a sigh of relief. The killers were no longer at large, which was wonderful, and in fact they were dead, which was even better. The story would still be interesting enough to sell newspapers for several more days, maybe even a week, but it was already beginning to fade into the past. It wasn't scary anymore. Burglar alarm sales, which had spiked during the week, would drop back to normal. Women could leave the can of pepper spray home, after having gotten in the habit of tucking it in their purse on the way to a concert. Men who'd told their lawyers to find out just how hard it was to get a carry permit could now decide it was more trouble than it was worth.

I was no less interested in the story now, listened to the news reports, and read whatever appeared in print. On Monday I had lunch with Joe Durkin. It was social, I wasn't working on anything, but our relationship had been strained a year or so ago when I had some work that cost me my PI license. I could live fine without a license, I'd done so for twenty years, but I couldn't get along without some of the friendships I'd built up with people in and out of the police department. So I made it a point to get together with Joe now and then, and not just when I needed a favor.

He's a detective at Midtown North, so it wasn't his case, or even his precinct's, but it was part of our lunchtime conversation as it was part of so many others, with or without a professional interest in the subject. "The crime rate's down," he said, "but I swear the guys who are out there are trying to make up for it by being twice as nasty. When did burglary become a contact sport, for Christ's sake? A burglar was always a guy who wanted to avoid human contact."

"A gentleman jewel thief," I suggested.

"Not too many of those, were there? But your professional burglar acted like a pro, took what he could use and left the rest, got in and got out in a hurry, and your run-of-the-mill break-in was the work of some smash-and-grab junkie who kicked the door in, grabbed a portable radio, something he could get ten bucks for, and ran like the thief he was. These fucks stole all they could, tore the place apart, and then sat down to wait for the folks to come home. You know what it was? It was a cross between a burglary and a home invasion. A home invasion, you don't go in unless you know the vics are in the house, because you want the confrontation."

"Drug dealers."

"A prime target," he agreed. " 'Tell us where the money is or we cut your kid's head off.' Which they'll probably do anyway, the cocksuckers. These two went in, tossed the place, and waited for it to turn into a home invasion. Why? More money?"

"Could be. Maybe they didn't find as much as they expected."

"I guess it's a line of work where you live in hope. Maybe they saw a picture of the lady and decided they wanted to make her acquaintance."

"Or they already knew what she looked like."

"Either way. I'll tell you, Matt, gentleman jewel thief or junkie with a monkey, rape never used to be part of the game plan. Now it happens all the time. She's there, she's cute, what the hell, might as well. Hey, if there's something you like in the fridge, wouldn't you grab a bite?"

"It's not supposed to be sexual," I said.

"That's what they keep telling us. It's hostility toward women, or some such crap."

"Well, I'd say a guy has to be the least bit hostile to do what this one did with the poker."

"The son of a bitch. Yeah, of course, no question. I mean, it's never a loving act, is it? Raping a woman. But how the hell can they claim it's not about sex? If sex has nothing to do with it, where did the son of a bitch get his hard-on from? What, did somebody sprinkle Viagra on his cornflakes?"

"And somehow they only feel this hostility toward the ones they find attractive."

"Yeah," he said, "isn't that a coincidence? He does her, he gets off, you'd think he'd be feeling grateful if he's feeling anything at all. So he shows his gratitude by doing her with the poker, and then he cuts her fucking throat. I swear, one like this makes me wish we had the death penalty."

"We do have the death penalty."

He gave me a look. "Makes me wish we had the death penalty the wayTexas has the death penalty. You know what I mean."

"Anyway, there's no need for it in this case. They're already dead."

"Yeah, and thank God for that. No lawyer's gonna get 'em off and no parole board's gonna decide they've learned the error of their ways. The one prick, Bierman? The shooter? At least for once in his life he did the right thing."

"I wonder why," I said.

"Who knows? Who knows why they do anything? And, when you come right down to it, who gives a shit? They're off the board. They're not gonna do it again."

That night I walked upNinth Avenue a couple of blocks and went to an AA meeting in the basement ofSt. Paul the Apostle. Early on, when I left my wife and sons and the New York Police Department and moved back to the city, I got in the habit of stopping at St. Paul's, sitting for a few minutes in the stillness, lighting the odd candle for people I wanted to remember, or couldn't seem to forget, and stuffing the poor box with my curious largesse. I was always paid in cash in those days, and so my tithing was in cash, and anonymous. I can't say what my contributions amounted to because I never kept track of what I earned, and what difference does it make now? I do know the Paulist Fathers never invited me to a patrons' dinner.

Now my AA home group has its meetings there, one flight down from the sanctuary where I once lit my candles and gave away my money. I like the coincidence of that, but I've been going long enough for the irony to have worn thin. I've been sober eighteen years, a day at a time, and that sometimes astonishes me. That's more years than I was a cop, and almost as many years as I drank.

Early on I went to meetings every day, and sometimes two or three. Now it's more like two or three a week, and there have been weeks when I haven't gone at all. It's not uncommon for attendance to lessen with time. On the contrary, it's the usual pattern, although there are some stalwarts twenty or thirty years sober who still get there seven days a week. Sometimes I envy them, and other times I figure it's what they do instead of having lives of their own. The program, after all, is supposed to be a bridge back to life. For some of us, as my sponsor occasionally pointed out, it's just a tunnel to another meeting.

It's been a couple of years since my sponsor died, and it seems to me I went to more meetings before then. He was killed, shot dead in a Chinese restaurant by a hired gun who mistook him for me. The man who shot him is dead now, just about everybody involved wound up dead, and I'm still alive and, more remarkably, still sober.

They're pretty clear on what you should do if your sponsor dies or drinks or runs off with your wife. First you get your ass to a meeting, and then you find yourself another sponsor. That's the conventional wisdom, and I have no quarrel with it, but it's generally honored in the breach by those of us who've been sober more than ten years or so. For my part, I couldn't see anyone taking Jim Faber's place in my life. Early on he'd been a tower of strength and a source of essential counsel, but over time he became more of a friend and less of an adviser. Our standing date for Chinese food every Sunday night was a time for us to talk about anything and everything. I'm sure it helped me stay sober, and be comfortable in my sobriety, and I suppose that was the point. But there'd been a lot more than that to the relationship, and I've never felt inclined to hunt for a replacement.

I've sponsored people myself over the years, on and off. A year ago I had two sponsees, one sober a few years, one fresh out of rehab. Neither one looked to me like the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but sponsorship's a practical relationship, designed to help both parties stay sober, and I'm sure I went to more meetings and stayed more active in the program because of the role I played. But one of my sponsees- the new one- drank and disappeared, and the other one moved toCalifornia, and no one had turned up to take their place.

I could search actively for somebody else to sponsor, I suppose, but I haven't felt the need. When the pupil is ready, the mystics say, the teacher will appear. And I would guess it ought to work as well the other way around.

There are people who quit going to meetings and stay sober. All you have to do, when all is said and done, is not drink. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I stopped going, but I haven't let myself entertain the thought. My time's not that valuable. I figure I can afford a couple of hours a week.

We had concert tickets that night, but there was a soprano on the bill, and I'm generally happier when they stick to instrumental music. So Elaine was atLincolnCenter with her friend Monica, and I was at a meeting. I got myself a cup of coffee and said hello to the people I knew. I used to know almost everybody, when I was more active and went to more meetings. I took a seat at the back and thought about this, and looked around the room and realized that I'd been sober longer than anybody else there.

That happens now and then. Eighteen years isn't forever, and there are plenty of men and women with twenty and thirty and even forty years without a drink, and the meetings in retirement communities are probably swarming with them. In a church basement onNinth Avenue, however, eighteen years is a pretty long time.

The speaker told a story with a lot of cocaine in it, but he drank a lot, too, enough to qualify him as an alcoholic. My mind wandered, but I got the gist of it. He'd been drunk and now he was sober, and sober was better.

Well, amen to that.

When the meeting was over I helped stack the chairs, and thought about joining people for coffee at the Flame. I went straight home instead. Elaine wasn't home yet, and I checked the answering machine and found a message from Michael, my elder son.

He said, "Dad, are you there? Pick up if you're around, will you? I guess you're out. I'll try you again later."

No request to call him back, and not a clue what it was about. I played the message back a couple more times, trying to divine something from the words and the tone. He sounded strained, I decided, but a lot of people do when they have to talk to a machine. Still, he probably left messages all the time. He had a good position with a firm inSilicon Valley, he made sales calls all the time, spent half his life on the phone.

Of course it's probably different when you're calling your father.

It was a few minutes past ten, and three hours earlier inCalifornia. I looked up his number and dialed it. It rang four times and I got his machine, rang off without leaving a message.

I went and played back his message again. Sat there frowning at the answering machine.

I went into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee, and I was drinking a cup when Elaine came home with Monica in tow. I poured a cup for Monica and put the teakettle on for Elaine, who only drinks coffee in the morning. I fixed her a cup of chamomile tea and the three of us sat around and talked about the concert, and about the Hollanders. I would have mentioned the phone message, such as it was, but it could wait until Monica went home.

When the phone rang Elaine was closer to it, so she picked it up. "Oh, hi!" she said, sounding delighted, but that didn't give me a clue to the caller's identity. She always responds that way, even when it's a telemarketer trying to get her to switch her long-distance service to Sprint. "How'sCalifornia? Oh, you're here? That's wonderful! But listen, your dad's right here," she said. "I'll let you talk to him."

I stood up and took a step toward the phone, but her face clouded and she held up a hand to warn me off. She said, "Oh? Oh, no. Oh, Michael, that's awful. I'm so sorry. How did it happen? God, I'm so sorry. Here, I'll put your father on."

She lowered the receiver and held her hand over the mouthpiece. "He wants to talk to you," she said, "but I think he wanted to tell me first, so I could tell you."

Tell me what? That his marriage was in trouble, that his child was sick- but why was he inNew York? What bad news would have sent him rushing east?

"It's Anita," she said. That's Mike and Andy's mother, my ex-wife. "She had a heart attack. She's dead."