30
“You know,” Ira Wentworth said, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about that son of a bitch over the past few years. And each time I’ve tried to think of something else instead, because I didn’t want him taking up space in my head. I wanted that chapter to be closed.”
Ira Wentworth was still at the Twenty-sixth Precinct. That’s where he’d been a few years ago when the man with many names but a single set of initials ambushed a young woman named Lia Parkman in her residence on Claremont Avenue. Her roommates were in the apartment at the time, but he managed to get in and out, and not incidentally drown Lia in the bathtub, without anyone noticing his presence. Lia, a student at Columbia, had been a friend of TJ’s, and a cousin of another young woman named Kristin Hollander, whose parents had already been brutally murdered by two men in an apparent home invasion. AB—Lia knew him as Arden Brill, a doctoral candidate in English; Kristin had known him as Adam Breit, an unconventional psychotherapist—killed his accomplice in the burglary, along with another young man. Earlier, he’d killed the owner of an apartment on Central Park West, then moved in, proclaiming himself the subtenant. Down the line he strangled a girl in a Korean massage parlor, wrung her neck and left her there. And, for a coda, he’d stabbed to death five homesteaders renovating a house in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, disfiguring their corpses with muriatic acid before apparently dying himself in the basement, burned to death in the fire he’d set.
I wanted that chapter to be closed, Wentworth said, and it wasn’t hard to figure out why.
Sussman said, “The body in the basement. You couldn’t get a positive ID?”
“Nothing that was a hundred percent. He was wearing a pendant, this pink stone identified as stolen in the Hollander burglary. He had a knife next to him, which we were able to tie to the five killings upstairs. The body was good and charbroiled, all you could say was it could be him. We could get DNA from it, but we didn’t have anything to match it to. If he wasn’t such a fucking trickster, such a cutie pie, there would have been no question.”
“So you closed the case.”
“I couldn’t justify leaving it open. And if I had any kind of a gut feeling that maybe he staged the whole thing and disappeared, well, where were we going to go with it? Send out a nationwide BOLO, be on the lookout for some slick dude who kills people?” He picked up a copy of Ray’s sketch. “Is this what he looks like? You couldn’t prove it by me. I never got to see him, or a picture of him. I never even came across a detailed description. But I know it’s the same guy.”
“Because of the initials.”
“They nail it down, don’t they? That’s where he gets stupid, using the same initials all the time, making it his trademark. It’s how he signs his work. The only thing bigger than his brain is his ego. You know, when we closed the case, I knew there was a chance he got out alive. But that meant he was out of the jurisdiction, and out of our hair.”
“You said as much at the time,” I remembered.
And that was the bell that had tried to ring in a phone conversation with Mark Sussman. Maybe he’d filled his New York quota, maybe he was on his way to El Paso. If so, he’d be out of our hair. I’d got an echo then, but hadn’t been able to hold on to it.
“Worst-case scenario, he was somebody else’s headache,” Wentworth said, finishing the thought. “One thing never even crossed my mind was he might come back.”
I’d called the two of them, Sussman and Wentworth, and we were all gathered in our living room. There was a carafe of coffee on the table, along with a little cream pitcher and a sugar bowl and a dish containing envelopes of artificial sweetener, both pink ones and blue ones. For boy babies and girl babies, I suppose. There was a plate of cookies, too. No one had touched the cookies, or used cream or sugar, but Wentworth had already had two cups of coffee.
There were other cops I could have invited to the party. There was Ed Iverson, from Brooklyn, who’d investigated the apparent murder and suicide on Coney Island Avenue. AB had staged that one, making it look as though Jason Bierman had killed first Carl Ivanko and then himself, effectively closing the book on the Hollander murders. There was Dan Schering, who’d had the Hollander case until Homicide North claimed it as their own. And I could think of a few others, cops from Homicide and from the Two-Six, along with a fire inspector out in Bushwick, but I’d have been hard-pressed to come up with their names, let alone guess where to reach them.
Wentworth said, “What’s it been, four years? Not hard to guess what he’s been doing to get through the days.”
“Been killing people,” TJ said.
“Four that we know of,” Wentworth said. “No, make that five.”
“Who besides Monica?” Elaine wanted to know.
“Your friend is one. Plus three boys in Virginia, unless there’s anyone here who doesn’t think our guy and Abel Baker and Arne Bodinger are one and the same.”
“Bodinson.”
“I stand corrected. Same guy, right?”
“Has to be,” I said.
Sussman agreed, but wondered how that meant he’d killed the boys in Richmond. Wasn’t the evidence ironclad against Preston Applewhite?
“Evidence,” Wentworth said, “would seem to be a specialty of this guy’s. The Richmond killings were done with a knife, if I remember right. And the knife was recovered, it was part of the evidence. And our guy does seem to have a fondness for knives.”
“He strangled the Korean masseuse,” I reminded him. “And he used a gun to kill Bierman and Ivanko and Byrne Hollander.”
“You don’t think he did the three kids in Richmond?”
“I’m sure he did,” I said, “and I agree he likes knives, but he doesn’t limit himself.”
Elaine said, “Weren’t the boys molested? Sexually, I mean.”
“So?”
“So I thought he was straight, that’s all. ‘Nothing queer about Chumley.’ You remember that joke?”
Wentworth said, “About buggering an elephant, wasn’t it? ‘Male or female elephant?’ ‘Why, female elephant, old man, nothing queer about Chumley.’ ”
“But those boys were killed years ago,” Sussman said. “Virginia’s quicker than most states, they move that appeal process right along, but even so he’d have had to put it all in motion way back when.”
“He’s a patient man, Mark. And he probably found other ways to pass the time. There’s a whole lot of people get killed every year, and plenty of the killings go unsolved. And you don’t have to limit yourself to the unsolved ones, either. I mean, the Richmond murders, the cops down there put that one in the Wins column. Case closed, right? Same as we closed the books on all the people he killed here.”
“I don’t know,” Sussman said. “What do we do now, call Richmond?”
They went back and forth on that one. On the one hand, the Richmond murders were a can of worms; on the other, the can was already open. Either way, the main thing to concentrate on was catching the son of a bitch, and if you brought in Richmond and the Bureau, were you increasing the odds of nailing him or setting yourself up for the Too Many Cooks syndrome?
There was a lull, and Elaine said, “You said five.”
“How’s that?”
“You said five killings,” she said to Wentworth. “Monica is one, and the three boys in Richmond. That makes four. Who’s the fifth?”
“Applegate, except that’s not his name. I said it a minute ago. What the hell is it?”
“Applewhite.”
“There you go. Applewhite got a hot shot from the state of Virginia, but our friend was there to see him get it, and he’s the one who put him on the gurney in the first place. He’s not going to get indicted for that, and there’s plenty of other things to hang him for instead, but wouldn’t you say he was as much the cause of Applewhite’s death as the chemicals they pumped into him? And wouldn’t you call that murder?”
If the Richmond cops and the FBI came in, the whole thing turned in
to a media circus overnight.
“It seems to me we got one big edge right now,” Sussman said. “We know who he is and where he’s coming from, and he doesn’t know we know. We go public with it and that’s out the window.”
“I don’t know,” Wentworth said. “What’s our edge amount to, anyway? First place, he might assume we know. It’s not as though he’s been working all that hard to disguise it. He’s not using the same initials just so he can go on wearing the monogrammed cuff links. Some level, he wants the whole world to know.”
“ ‘Catch me before I kill more.’ ”
“No, I’m not saying he’s itching to get caught. He’s doing everything he can to keep from getting caught, but consciously or unconsciously he damn well wants us to know just who it is we’re not catching.”
“If we go public, what does he do?”
“I know what he did last time,” Wentworth said. “He killed five people and disappeared. Six, counting the crispy critter he left behind in his place. I don’t know that we’d trigger another bloodbath, but I’ll bet he’d decide to get out of Dodge.”
“So what do we do? Besides quietly expanding the task force, putting more bodies on the case. How do we find him?”
“For a starter, we get serious about protecting Matt and Elaine. Next we get out there and look for him. He’s got to be holed up someplace. Matt, how long did you say he’s been turning up at meetings?”
“At least a month.”
“So he’s living somewhere. Any idea where?”
“Be this neighborhood,” TJ said. “Puts him close to this apartment, close to the meetings, close to Elaine’s shop.”
“Say the West Fifties,” Sussman said, “from Eighth Avenue to the river. Midtown North, in other words. Who do we know there?”
I let them toss names back and forth. One of the names they mentioned was Joe Durkin, and I chimed in to tell them he’d retired. They worked out details, figured out how to proceed. There were still quite a number of SRO hotels and rooming houses in the area, and that’s where they thought they should concentrate.
I said, “I don’t think he’ll be in a hotel.”
“No?”
TJ said, “This another one gonna be sleeping in his car?”
They didn’t know what he was talking about, and I didn’t bother to enlighten them. “He’ll find an apartment,” I said.
“Then he’s a genius, if he can find an apartment in this city.”
“It doesn’t have to be an empty one,” I said, and reminded them how his neighbors on Central Park West had all been given to understand that he was subletting the apartment of a paleontologist on sabbatical in France. “It was the perfect low-cost open-end sublet,” I said. “All he had to do was kill the paleontologist and sink the body in the Hudson.”
“And you think he’d do it again?”
“The price is right,” I said, “and it’s not as though killing’s a stretch for him.”
“No,” Sussman said. “He seems to be developing a taste for it, doesn’t he?”
When the two cops left, Elaine and TJ and I sat around with nothing much to say. Nobody felt like eating. I put on the TV, changed channels aimlessly for a few minutes, and turned the set off. I sat there and drifted into a curious sort of reverie in which I was trying to get a count of just how many people AB had killed that we knew about. I kept losing track and having to start over.
A few months earlier, when baseball season was just getting under way, I’d driven myself crazy one afternoon trying to remember the teams in the major leagues when I was a boy, when there were eight teams in each league and no divisions or playoffs, let alone exploding scoreboards and designated hitters. I wasn’t using pencil and paper, I was doing it in my head, and it was harder than you’d think. I got all eight National League teams but only seven in the AL, and I couldn’t seem to come up with the one I was missing. I forgot the whole thing, and then two days later the Yankees had a home stand against Detroit, and that was my answer, and one that raised another question. How the hell could I have forgotten the Detroit Tigers?
It was a very different country then. The westernmost city in the majors was St. Louis, the southernmost Washington, D.C. Chicago had two teams, of course, but so did Boston and Philly and, yes, St. Louis. New York had three.
Elaine asked me what I was thinking about. “Baseball,” I said.
“See if there’s a game on,” she suggested. “Come on, it’s something to do. I’ll make popcorn.”
The Yankees were in Baltimore, playing a franchise that had once been the St. Louis Browns. The Mets were winding up a three-game series at home with the Braves, who’d moved in my lifetime from Boston to Milwaukee to Atlanta. But you still get four balls and three strikes, three outs and nine innings, and if the hitters are stronger these days, well, the pitchers throw harder. We sat there on the couch and ate popcorn, the three of us, and watched the young men on the field play the old game.
31
He sits in the coffee shop. He has a table next to the window, and he can sit here and eat his breakfast and keep an eye on the building diagonally across the street. Scudder lives there, Scudder and the fair Elaine, and there is a young black man who seems to spend a lot of time with them. Ever since he returned to New York he has seen Scudder in the young man’s company, sometimes walking on the street, sometimes having a meal together in this very coffee shop.
Elaine never seems to leave the building. Scudder comes and goes, the black man comes and goes, but he never sees Scudder and the black man together anymore. It is hard to be certain, he doesn’t spend twenty-four hours a day observing the building’s entrance, but it seems to him as though at least one of the two men is always inside the building. Scudder never leaves until the black man has come to take his place at her side.
Which suggests to him that they’re guarding her. Keeping her inside where no one can get at her, and standing by to protect her in the event that he might manage to get inside the building.
And if he were to go away?
The idea intrigues him. He wants to think about it. He pays for his meal, leaves the coffee shop, and walks.
He could just disappear. That’s what he always does, sooner or later. He walks away from the life he’s been living like a snake shedding its skin. He goes somewhere else, becomes someone else.
And does the things he does.
And if he were to do so now? Not, as he’d planned, after he’d finished his business with Mr. and Mrs. S cudder. Suppose he were to leave his business unfinished and simply vanish? He could go south or west, he could go anywhere, with his darker hair and his reshaped hairline and his eyeglasses, and no one would know him.
And the Scudders could remain here, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Keeping their guard up, with the woman afraid to leave the building and the man afraid to leave her alone, both of them chained by their terror, while he, the cause of that terror, is nowhere to be found. Gone, vanished, absent without leave, but they in their ignorance are unable to relax, unable to live their lives.
Like the whole country, he thinks. They’ll have their own personal equivalent of long lines at airport security, they’ll cower for the blow that never comes, while he’s thousands of miles away.
He has the great advantage of patience. He’s lived for years with unfinished business, ever since Scudder drove him out of this city. It’s never eaten at him, never preyed on his mind. It’s always been an item on the agenda, something to take care of sooner or later, when the time is right.
Suppose he returns it to the back burner. And suppose he’s gone for a few more years, and the Scudders return to their ordinary lives, and time passes. Thoughts of him, unbidden and unwelcome, will trouble them from time to time. They’ll know he’s out there, they’ll be aware that he might come back. But every month will make that threat a little less urgent, and they’ll reach a point where they’ve relaxed entirely.
And then he’ll return. Oh, he won’t h
ave this particular knife in his pocket when he does. He’ll have let it go somewhere, for one reason or another. But he’ll have another knife, and perhaps he’ll like the new one even better.
And when the time is right he’ll get to use it.
But he ought to do something before he goes. So that they don’t forget him too soon.
32
It was late morning when Mark Sussman called. Had I caught the item about the rush-hour subway stabbing in Queens? The victim was a male, sixteen years old, who’d earlier been in a shoving match with two other teenage males on the subway platform. The killing was assumed to have grown out of that argument, although no one had seen it occur; the bodies of the other passengers kept the youth’s body upright until the train reached a station and the crowd thinned enough for him to fall down.
“They figured gang-related,” he said, “but I thought about it, and then I thought about that woman killed a couple of days ago here in Manhattan. Miles apart, but it’s the same train, and both times it’s a stabbing and nobody saw it happen. Two different boroughs and two different medical examiners, so who’s going to look at both of them at once, you know?”
He’d talked to the right people, and he was waiting for them to compare notes and get back to him. “What I want to hear,” he said, “is it’s two different knives, two different kinds of wounds, two different everything. But you know what I think it is.”
He said he’d let me know as soon as he heard one way or the other. An hour or so later the phone rang and I thought it was him, but it wasn’t. It was Mick Ballou.
“That picture you showed me,” he said. “Didn’t I tell you he looked familiar? I’ve tried to place him, and late last night it came to me.”
All the Flowers Are Dying Page 26
