“Well, hello,” she says. “How’s your uncle?”
“I was just visiting him.”
“I wish I could, I’ll tell you that. You see somebody for so many years, you miss seeing them. It’s a shame you couldn’t get them to take him at St. Clare’s. My cousin Marie was at St. Clare’s, God rest her soul, and I was able to visit her every single day until she passed.”
And what a rare treat that must have been.
“They’re taking good care of him at the VA,” he reminds her. “The best possible, and it’s all free of charge.”
“I never even knew he was in the service.”
“Oh, yes, and very proud to have served. But he didn’t like to talk about those days.”
“He never said a word on the subject. The Veterans, that’s up in the Bronx, isn’t it?”
“Kingsbridge Road.”
“I don’t even know where that is. I guess it’s a long ride on the subway.”
“You have to change trains,” he says, “and then it’s a long walk when you finally do get there.” He has no idea if this is true, he’s only been to the Bronx once, and that was years ago. “And visiting him can be difficult. Today he didn’t know me.”
“You went all that way and he didn’t know you.”
“Well, you have to take the bitter with the sweet, Mrs. L. And you know what my uncle always used to say. ‘You get what you get.’ ”
He climbs the stairs, lets himself into the apartment, locks the door. The apartment is run-down and shabby. He’d have cheerfully hired someone to clean it, but that could have caused talk, and so he’d done it himself as best he could, scrubbing the floors and walls, spraying air freshener. But one can only do so much, and the place still holds the stench of fifty years of Joe Bohan’s cigarettes, mingled with the persistent aroma of Joe Bohan himself, a man who lived alone and evidently never made too much of a thing of personal hygiene.
Still, in a city where even the shabbiest hotel room is ridiculously expensive, there’s much to be said for a free apartment, especially one so close to so much of his unfinished business.
In a delicatessen on Tenth Avenue, where he’d stopped for a sandwich and a cup of coffee, he’d heard two old men talking about poor Joe Bohan, who wasn’t getting out much anymore. Always kept to himself, one man said, but a nicer guy you wouldn’t want to meet.
He’d found a Joseph Bohan listed in the phone book. He called the number, and a man with a scratchy voice answered. No, the man said, there was no Mary Eileen Bohan at that address. He was an old man, he lived by himself. Close relatives? No, none at all. But there were lots of Bohans, although he didn’t remember hearing of a Mary Eileen.
He gave the old man a day or two to forget the phone call, then packed up and moved out of the room he’d been living in, an overpriced flophouse a few blocks from Penn Station. He mounted the stoop on West Fifty-third with a suitcase in each hand, rang the buzzer marked BOHAN, and climbed to the third floor, where an unshaven old wreck stood in the doorway, wearing a gray nightshirt and at least a week’s worth of body odor.
“Uncle Joe? I’m your nephew Al, come all this way to see you.”
The old man was confused, but let him inside. He was smoking a cigarette, sucking on it as if it were a breathing tube connected to an oxygen tank, and spitting out questions between puffs. Whose son is he, then? Is he Neil’s boy? And what’s in the suitcases? And is he alive, Neil? He’d thought his brother was dead, thought he’d died without ever marrying.
The old man was wheezing, unsteady on his feet. There were two growths on his faced that looked cancerous, and his color was bad, and God above did he ever stink. He took hold of Bohan, one hand cupping the bristly chin, the other grasping the bony shoulder, and had little trouble snapping the old man’s neck. How nice when the expedient act was humane as well!
Over the next several days he let the building’s other tenants get used to him, while he made the place his own, getting rid of the old man’s clothes and possessions even as he got rid of the old man himself. Every day he’d haul a few trash bags down the stairs and out the door. Cleaning up, he told the neighbors. These past few years, my uncle never threw anything out. It’s hard for him, you know.
Some bags he left at the curb for the trash pickup. Others, containing pieces of the old man’s body, couldn’t be discarded quite so casually. He’d put the corpse in the tub, drained it of its fluids, and cut it into portable chunks with a bone saw from a Ninth Avenue kitchen supply store. Portions of Joe Bohan, wrapped up like cuts of meat, he carried a few at a time across the West Side Highway to the Hudson. If they ever surface— and that’s unlikely, as there won’t be any gases to lessen their specific gravity—he can’t imagine that anyone will make anything of them. And, if by some forensic miracle they do, the hermit crab will have long since outgrown his shell, along with the name of Aloysius Bohan.
Once the last physical remnant of Joe Bohan was gone, except for his enduring odor, he let the word out that he’d taken his uncle to the hospital. “I tried nursing him myself,” he told Mrs. Laskowski, “but I can’t give him the care he needs. Last night I got him downstairs and into a cab and we rode clear up to the VA. Cab cost a fortune, but what are you going to do? I’m all he’s got in the world. He wants me to stay here until he comes home from the hospital. I’m supposed to be in San Francisco, I’ve got a job offer out there, but I can’t just leave him here. He’s my uncle.”
And that was that.
Now he sits at the kitchen table, its top scarred by hundreds of Joe Bohan’s neglected cigarettes. He touches his upper lip, then frowns, annoyed with himself. Habits, he thinks, take so little time to form, so much longer to break. He boots up his computer, which has sole claim on Joe Bohan’s phone line. The dial-up connection is slow today, and he’d love to install a DSL line, but that’s out of the question.
Well, perhaps he won’t need to be here too much longer.
18
TJ said, “You already thought of this, and it don’t make sense anyway, but if I don’t say it I ain’t never gonna get it out of my head.”
“Okay.”
“You most likely know what’s coming.”
We were at the Morning Star. He’d called and asked me to meet him there, and I’d walked away from a much better cup of coffee than the one I was drinking now.
“I might,” I said.
“Gonna make me say it all the same. ’Kay. There any chance at all that David Thompson and Monica’s killer are the same person?”
“The chief thing they’ve got in common,” I said, “is that you and I don’t know who they are or how to find them.”
“More’n that.”
“Oh?”
“Both got a mustache.”
“Maybe they’re both Hitler, and he didn’t die in the bunker after all. Look at the timing and you’ll see they’re not the same person. Thompson—that’s probably not his name, but we’ve got to call him something. Thompson was with Louise Monday night from the time she met him at the restaurant until he got away from us a little before midnight.”
“And?”
“And it was around nine-thirty or ten when he showed up in the lobby of Monica’s building, according to Sussman, who got it from the doorman.”
“That was Tuesday. Night before last, right?”
“Jesus, you’re right.”
“Wouldn’t be much of a stretch to get downtown in what, twenty-two hours?”
I shook my head. “He was there Monday night, too,” I said. “With Monica. She told Elaine.”
“He saw her Monday and Tuesday, then. We sure of that?”
“We can’t call Monica and ask her. But yes, we’re sure.”
“But we don’t know what time. We got a time check for Tuesday, him comin’ and goin’, but not for Monday.”
I thought about it, nodded slowly.
“So he leaves Louise at a quarter of twelve, an’ we know the first thing he does is whip out hi
s cell an’ make a call.”
“To Monica, inviting himself over. But if I remember what Elaine said, he already had a date planned for Monday with Monica.”
“ ‘Sorry, honey, but I’m running a little late. Be over soon’s I can.’ ”
“He was a sharp dresser, according to Monica. Did David Thompson look like he fit Monica’s definition of a sharp dresser?”
“Was jeans an’ a polo shirt, wasn’t it?”
“Personally,” I said, “I can’t quite see our guy showing up on Jane Street with flowers and a bottle of Strega.” I pictured him coming out of Louise’s building. “He lit a cigarette,” I remembered. “That was one thing she established online, before she met the guy. That he was a smoker, because if he wasn’t she didn’t want any part of him.”
“So?”
“Monica was an ex-smoker, and she hated to be in the same room with a lit cigarette. She had that heightened sensitivity people seem to develop when they’ve been away from tobacco for a few years. If he was a heavy smoker—”
“We don’t know about the heavy part. Maybe he just made sure to light one up when he was around Louise, to keep her happy.”
“And the minute he walks out of her building, he lights up another for show?”
“See what you mean. Who you callin’?”
“A cop,” I said. Sussman had given us his card, and I was punching the number into my cell phone. When I got him on the line I identified myself and said I had just one question. Was there any indication that anyone might have smoked a cigarette in Monica Driscoll’s apartment?
“Why?”
I couldn’t blame him. That would have been my response if our roles were reversed. Still, I’d have been happier if he hadn’t asked.
“I’ve been looking into something for a friend,” I said. “She’s got no connection to Monica, nothing in common, except that there’s a mystery man in her life. I haven’t had much luck finding out anything about him, in fact he’s been damned elusive, and—”
“And you thought maybe they were one and the same.”
“No,” I said, “I thought and continue to think that they’re not, but if I can make one phone call and rule it out altogether—”
“I get you. I take it you know for a fact whether or not this second guy smokes.”
“I know for a fact that he does.”
“And Ms. Driscoll didn’t?”
“And had strong feelings on the subject.”
He said he’d get back to me and rang off. TJ asked about Elaine. I said she’d been out the door that morning before I’d made it to the kitchen, that it was one of her gym days. I said I figured it was a good sign that she went, because I was pretty sure she hadn’t felt like it.
Something like that, he said, that was the secret to it. You had to do it all the time, not just on the days you felt like it. I told him staying sober was like that.
“Last night,” he said, “she’d be sad an’ cry from time to time, and then it’d pass, you know, and her mind’d be on the card game. You know how to play pinochle?”
“No.”
“Well, she could teach you. She can teach a game real good. It’s an okay game. All you got in the world is two people an’ a deck of cards, you could get by with it. Course it’d have to be a pinochle deck, so you’d need two decks of cards to make it. You take two decks, an’ you don’t use from deuce through eight, just nine on up to ace.”
“I’m really glad you’re telling me all this.”
“Yeah, well, it be just the two of us an’ we ain’t even got a deck of cards, and we’s waiting for the damn phone to ring. But I guess you don’t need to hear all this shit about pinochle.”
“No, it’s all right.”
“Thing is, even when she was fine, playing cards and joking, it was there, you know? This deep-down sadness, kind that runs clear to the bone.”
Sussman said, “You’d think it would be a simple question to answer. This age of science we live in, where you can multiply your date of birth by the change in your pocket and feed the result into a computer, and it tells you what you ate for breakfast. Did anybody smoke a cigarette in the apartment where the murder took place? What’s so tricky about that?”
“I gather it wasn’t that simple.”
“First of all,” he said, “the son of a bitch was a neatnik. I believe I told you he vacuumed, in addition to wiping every surface but the ceiling. So there wouldn’t be any cigarette butts lying around, or any ashes in the ashtrays. Something I didn’t notice at the time, but I can tell you now, is there weren’t any ashtrays in the place, period. So it’s pretty clear she wasn’t a smoker, and didn’t have regular company that smoked.”
“She wasn’t and didn’t.”
“Now he could have been a smoker and not smoked in her apartment, out of respect for her wishes.”
“I suppose,” I said, “but when he had her tied up and started torturing her, I wouldn’t think respect would play much of a role.”
“No, you’re absolutely right. She’s tied up with tape on her mouth, first thing he’d do is light one up. And most likely use her for an ashtray, far as that goes, and that’s one thing I can tell you we didn’t find.”
“Burn marks.”
“He worked her over pretty good. I didn’t want to go into detail in front of your wife, but this guy was a fucking animal. If he’d had a cigarette going, we’d have seen evidence on the corpse.”
“You don’t smoke yourself.”
“No, I never started.”
“When you walked into the crime scene—”
“I’ve been asking myself the same question. Did I smell smoke? I didn’t notice, but would I? I can’t answer that. Plus my partner and I weren’t the first people there. A pair of uniforms responded to the 911 call and were first on the scene. She hadn’t been dead that long, so there wasn’t the intense odor of advanced decomposition that develops over time, but you know the things that happen. The bowels let go, the bladder lets go. You know right away you’re not in a perfume factory.”
“So one of the blues might have lit a cigarette.”
“They’re not supposed to,” he said, “but people do it. To mask the smell and just because you’re standing around and there’s a dead body there and it’s the middle of the night and you’re a smoker and you want a cigarette so you light one up. But I didn’t notice the smell of smoke, and neither did my partner, and I’ve got a call in to ask the two uniforms if they noticed the smell of smoke when they went in, but if they’re smokers all bets are off.”
“If they say no, they’re too used to it to notice. If they say yes, they might be lying to cover up their own smoking.”
“You know how a cop thinks,” he said with approval. “Long and short of it, strongest argument is he’s not a smoker because he didn’t put out his cigarettes on her. And now that we’ve ruled your guy out, suppose you tell me who he is and how to get ahold of him.”
“Now that we’ve ruled him out.”
“Right.”
I told him I had a problem with that. I’d be compromising my client’s interests. She’d wanted a confidential investigation of a new boyfriend, just to make sure he didn’t have an arrest record or a wife in Mamaroneck, and the last thing she’d want me to do was put the guy front and center in a murder investigation.
He said, “I thought you were looking into something for a friend. Now she’s a client. You licensed? You working for an attorney? If not, there’s no privilege here.”
“I never said there was. If I thought for a minute there was a possible connection—”
“You must have, or you wouldn’t have raised the issue. You had enough of a feeling about the guy to call me, and I spent the better part of an hour on it, so where do you get off holding out?”
“You’re right,” I said, “but I haven’t got anything to give you. His name is David Thompson, except that may not be his name. Now you know everything I know.”
“Not
everything. Who’s your client?”
“No,” I said. “Privilege or no, I’m not giving you that. I’ll talk to her, and if it’s okay with her I’ll give you the name. But do you really want to send the investigation in this direction? If you want to start checking out every guy who may have lied to a woman…”
“Let’s leave it that you’ll talk to her.”
That’s where we left it, but as soon as I’d rung off I remembered something that had been sticking in the back of my mind. I called him right back. “The 911 call,” I said. “You said middle of the night?”
“Well, not quite. Four in the morning. Close enough to the middle of the night, although I guess it would have been ten or eleven in the morning in Prague.”
“The call came from Prague?”
“It might as well have. Didn’t show up on Caller ID, and when we checked the LUDS we got an unregistered cell phone.”
“They record the 911 calls, don’t they?”
“Oh, absolutely, and it’s all on tape. Or digital, I guess. Everything’s digital nowadays.”
Even fingers and toes. “Somebody called in at four in the morning. You said ‘he.’ The caller was male?”
“Probably. It’s hard to tell too much from a whisper.”
“He whispered? Unless they refined the technology, that means no voiceprint ID.”
“That’s true, as far as I know.”
“So it was him. He phoned it in himself.”
“That’s the working assumption,” he said. “Whispered to prevent identification. Or he just didn’t want to wake his wife by talking loud, but somehow I don’t think that was it.”
“What did he say?”
“ ‘There’s a woman who’s been murdered,’ plus the address and apartment number. Operator tried to keep him on the line but he slipped the hook and swam away. Calls like that, it’s usually mischief, some drunk wants to send a cop on a wild goose chase, or he’s looking to wake up some schmuck he’s got a beef with. But you got to check it out, so the two uniforms went and got the doorman to ring the apartment, and got a key from him when there was no answer. And walked in on more than they expected to find.”
All the Flowers Are Dying Page 17
