All the Flowers Are Dying (28 page)

Elaine said, “See? Look what you learned this morning.”

“Already knew that. What I learned is you just wait in the right place, you get what you lookin’ for.”

“He turned up?”

He nodded. “Came for his mail. Walked in lookin’ hopeful an’ came out lookin’ disgusted. Guess he still waitin’ on that check. And he ain’t the guy in that drawing, case there was any question. He’s the dude came out of Louise’s building, the one lost us around the block.”

“Did you have any luck following him?”

“Didn’t even try. He drove up in a big old Chevy Caprice, pulled up by the hydrant, was in and out in a couple of minutes. Hopped back in the car and drove off. I got the plate number. That do us any good?”

Joe Durkin said, “Didn’t I tell you? I’m a private citizen, I put in my last day for the City of New York. I’m officially retired.”

“I’ll bet they haven’t got the word yet at the DMV.”

“I’d be breaking the law,” he said. “Impersonating a police officer.”

“Gee, I didn’t think of that.”

“Yeah, I bet. Why can’t you do it yourself? You’ve been breaking laws right and left for years.”

“You know the procedure. It’s changed in the past thirty years.”

“Thirty years,” he said. “Jesus, I guess it has. Did they even have license plates thirty years ago?”

“They did, but they kept falling off the horses.”

“Off the horses’ asses, you mean. And speaking of horses’ asses, I thought you were the next thing to retired yourself.”

“Something came up.”

“As the bishop said to the actress. Give me the fucking plate number, I’ll see what I can do.”

It didn’t take him long. He called back fifteen minutes later and said, “Next time we have dinner, it’s on you. And it won’t be any cheap joint like the one I took you to, either. Write this down: David Joel Thompson, 118 Manhattan Avenue, Apartment 4-C for Charlie. Zip is10025. Phone number—”

“They have a phone number listed?”

“They could probably tell you his favorite color, if you knew how to ask for it.” He gave me Thompson’s phone number and his date of birth, which made him forty-one. “And a Sagittarius,” he added, “in case Elaine wants to try doing his chart. Five-nine, a hundred sixty pounds, color of hair brown, color of eyes brown. That help?”

“You’re a prince, Joe.”

“A retired prince,” he said. “A prince with a pension.”

The name was the one he had given Louise, and the address was a five-minute walk from his mail drop. The phone number had a 212 prefix, so it would be a land line, not his cell phone. I dialed it and it rang five times before a mechanical voice informed me that the number I had reached had been disconnected.

It didn’t matter, David Thompson didn’t matter, but I was interested in spite of myself. If I’d had anything better to do I’d have done it, but I didn’t. I could sit around waiting for Sussman to call, or I could get out of the house and do something.

I asked TJ to stick around, and made sure he had the gun with him. He’d been carrying it in the small of his back, held there by his belt and covered by the baggy blue chambray workshirt he’d neglected to tuck in. “New York is a tough town, Myrtle,” he said, his accent suitably midwestern. “Even the beggars carry guns.”

It was overcast, and by the time I got out of the subway the sky had darkened and I was sorry I hadn’t brought an umbrella. I’d taken the One train and stayed on a stop past Ninety-sixth Street, to 103rd and Broadway. Manhattan Avenue runs north and south a short block west of Central Park, extending from 100th Street up to just below 125th. I walked there and found 118. There was no Thompson nameplate on the row of buzzers, and both the buzzer and the mailbox for Apartment 4-C for Charlie bore small plastic inserts imprinted with the name KOSTAKIS.

I rang the bell and waited and rang it again, and nobody answered. I rang the super’s bell and nobody answered that, either, and I was on my way out the door when the door from the hallway opened and a man with a voice thick with phlegm asked me what I wanted.

I told him, and he frowned and scratched his head. “David Thompson,” he said. “He don’t live here. I got a Greek couple in there now, been with me the better part of a year now. Very nice people. Guy who was in there before them, tell the truth, I don’t remember his name. It’s funny, ’cause I can picture him.”

I showed him the photo and he didn’t hesitate. “That’s him,” he said. “Moved, no forwarding. And I remember the name now, because the first week or two he’d get mail here, and I’d have to give it back to the postman. Then that stopped, and I could forget him, which I did.”

“He didn’t pay his rent,” I told TJ and Elaine. “He got a couple of months behind and ignored the notices they sent him. Eviction proceedings can take a while, but the super’s not a man who does everything by the book. He made sure Thompson was out of the house, then changed the locks and got a friend to help him put all of Thompson’s stuff on the street. The stuff disappeared gradually, he said. People would come by and take what they wanted, and eventually the sanitation men carted off the rest.”

“Thompson never showed up?”

“If he did, the super never noticed, but I’m not sure how much he notices. Thompson may have moved out on his own before the locks were changed, and not bothered to tell anybody.”

“And just left everything.”

“Everything that the super wound up tossing. We don’t know what he may have taken with him.”

TJ said, “We got a plan?”

“No,” I said. “Not really.”

That was Friday, and according to the
Times
it was the longest day of the year. I could have told them as much myself, but I wouldn’t have been talking about the relative proportion of daylight and darkness. The hours crawled, and there seemed to be more of them than usual.

We sat around, the three of us, and we read the papers and watched TV, and for a while TJ and Elaine played canasta, which didn’t work too well because neither of them was too clear on the rules. Eventually he went home and we went to bed, and when we got up it was Saturday and nothing had changed but the weather. The rain that had threatened to fall yesterday was falling now, and it contiunued off and on throughout the day.

“I keep thinking I should call Monica,” Elaine said.

I kept thinking I should call Sussman, and eventually I did. He had some progress to report, though it didn’t seem to me as though it led anywhere. They’d found the liquor store where he’d bought the bottle of Strega, paying cash for it, and the clerk had given a firm positive ID of the sketch. Assuming you could get it admitted as evidence, it was no more than circumstantial, the sort of thing Ray Gruliow liked to call “a mere feather on the scales of Justice.”

Sussman admitted it was light. “It means we can stop sending guys to check out liquor stores,” he said, “and I guess that’s a plus. How are you and your wife holding up?”

I told him we were all right, but we’d be a lot happier when the case was wrapped up.

“As would I,” he said. “What I’ve been doing is going through all the Unsolveds, trying to find something that matches up just a little bit. You have to figure he’s done this before, wouldn’t you say?”

I hadn’t thought about that, but of course he was right. Monica’s murder was too well staged, too carefully worked out, to be anybody’s maiden effort.

“But there’s not a thing with his prints on it. Not literally his prints, you know what I mean.”

“Sure.”

“I’ve been running the MO through NCIC, and I’ve got a call in to an FBI field agent, one of the few I know who doubles as a human being. Because I had the thought that maybe our guy’s from somewhere else. So he won’t fit any of our Unsolveds, but he might fit just fine in Oshkosh or Kokomo.”

“Maybe he’s like lightning and never strikes twice in the same place.”

“Then he’d be as hard to catch as lightning, because nobody’d be in a position to see a pattern develop. Unless the individual murders are rubber stamp affairs, so similar that the feds’ computer can’t help picking up on it. Otherwise, you know, he just crisscrosses the country, kills one person here and one person there, and there’s never a full-scale manhunt because nobody realizes they’re dealing with a one-man crime wave.”

“Wasn’t there somebody like that a few years ago? Turned out to be a long-haul trucker?”

“Rings a bell. I can’t see our guy behind the wheel of a Peterbilt, somehow.”

“No.”

“Maybe he’s filled his New York quota,” he said, “and he’s off to bring his own special brand of joy to El Paso. That would put him out of our reach, but he’d also be out of our hair, and your wife could open up her store and sell me that sketch. I really liked it, you know.”

“Get this son of a bitch and she’ll give it to you.”

“I would just plain love to take you up on that,” he said. “But if he’s gone and we never hear from him again? Right now I have to say that’d be fine with me.”

I hung up feeling as though I’d missed something, that he’d said something I should have picked up on. There’s a way to use the answering machine as a recorder, although I’ve never had occasion to do so and would have to consult the manual for instructions. I’d never considered it, but it occurred to me now that it would be handy to have it on tape so I could play it back and puzzle it out.

And there was something else he’d said the other day, something that had gone right by me and I’d only thought of later on, when it was too late to ask him what he’d meant. But what the hell was it?

My memory’s always been good, except for all those things I’ve chosen to forget. Just as Elaine had secretly believed age would never make visible inroads upon her looks, so I’d managed to tell myself I was somehow immune to the erosion of memory that comes with the years. I suppose it’s pride that makes us think things will be different for us, that the universe will grant us a special dispensation. And she did, God knows, look young for her years, and was still as beautiful a woman as I’d ever known. And my memory was still pretty sharp.

But every once in a while something would come along to remind me that it wasn’t as sharp as it used to be.

I said as much to Elaine, and she said, “That reminds me. The one thing Monica always dreaded was Alzheimer’s. There’s some of it in her family, and she was terrified she’d get it if she lived long enough.” She winced at that. “She made me promise I wouldn’t let her live like that. She had a living will, but that’s no help with Alzheimer’s, not until the late stages, because there’s no plug to pull. You’re perfectly healthy, you just don’t have a mind anymore.

“So what I had to promise was that I’d find some way to put her out of her misery. Get her to take sleeping pills, I suppose. We didn’t get into the details. And God knows what I would have done if it came to that, but at any rate I promised her.

“And she said, ‘Yeah, right, and a fat lot of good that’s gonna do me. Because there I’ll be, gaga, with my eyes looking in different directions and drool running down the corner of my mouth, and you’ll stand there saying, “Gosh, let me think now. There’s something I was supposed to do for Monica and I can’t for the life of me remember what the hell it was.” ’ ”

Sunday morning TJ showed up early with a bag of lox and bagels and cream cheese. I ate quickly and left the two of them at the breakfast table and rode down to the Village for the eleven o’clock at Perry Street. A lot of old-timers tend to go to that meeting, and I always run into a few old friends there.

It was raining when I left the house, dry by the time I got to the meeting, raining again at 12:30 when it ended. I picked up the Sunday
Times
on the way home and the three of us sat around reading sections of it. It was the perfect picture of domestic tranquility, except that Elaine would lapse periodically into troughs of deep sadness. And, of course, there was someone out there trying to kill her.

I had the Sports section and was reading a story about golf, a pastime in which I have not the slightest interest, when she said, “I think you should read this.”

“Me?”

“Uh-huh. Or maybe you already did. About that man who killed the three boys in Richmond, and earlier this month he was executed.”

“I saw it.”

“Today?”

“Yesterday, or it might have been Friday.” The days sort of run together when you’re not doing anything. “I noticed it because I had two conversations about the case just a couple of days before they put him down. Somebody tipped them off as to the location of the missing body, isn’t that it?”

“There’s a little more in today’s paper.”

“And people are jumping up and down and saying they executed an innocent man,” I said. “That sort of thing’s been tried before, you know. Say I’m on Death Row, awaiting execution for a murder that I damn well did commit. What I do, I slip some details of the crime to you, and you have a great crisis of conscience and confess to it, supplying details that have been withheld by the police and could only be known by the actual killer. Well, right, and the actual killer told them to you. It’s an old game, and when it’s worked right it clouds the issue, and sometimes you’ll even see a temporary stay of execution come out of it. But it can’t hold up, and it doesn’t.”

“This seems a little different.”

“Because the information didn’t come to light until the guy got the needle. And didn’t the tip come to them by untraceable e-mail? You have to wonder why the tipster bothered. He’d held off too long to save his buddy, not that it would have worked anyway.”

“Maybe he sent the message in time,” TJ suggested, “but it got hung up in cyberspace somewhere. There’s days when some of the service providers are as slow as the post office.”

“You know,” Elaine said, “there’s a lot more information in today’s paper. Would it kill you to read the fucking article?”

“Probably not,” I said. “Where is it?”

“Never mind. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap.”

“Can I see the article?”

“It’s probably not gonna be that interesting.”