I Am Pilgrim (28 page)

didn’t even suspect it until I stepped into the apartment.

The lights were low, ‘Hey Jude’ was playing on the stereo, the room was filled with the smell of

home cooking and a table was set for three: I had been invited for dinner. I guessed the whole evening would be devoted to pressuring me to change my mind about Bradley’s seminar, but there was no way

out, not when people have spent months compiling a dossier on your life and you’re a beggar for their files.

‘You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble,’ I said, doing my best imitation of a smile.

‘The least we could do,’ Marcie replied, ‘considering all the trouble we have caused you.’

Bradley appeared, hand extended, asking me what I’d like to drink. As it happened, I was in one of

my periodic ‘cease and desist’ phases: I had decided New York would be a fresh start, a perfect opportunity to try to get clean, and it wouldn’t be just lip service this time – I’d even got the schedule of the local Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Being an addictive personality, however, I couldn’t do

anything in moderation – not even sobriety – so I had also sworn off all alcohol. This was going to be a long evening.

Bradley returned with my Evian. While Marcie went to check on dinner, Bradley took a shot of his liquor and guided me towards the white room at the end of the universe. Except it wasn’t that any more – the kilim was on the floor, the drapes rehung and the only evidence of the desperate drama

that had played out within its walls was the physiotherapy equipment in the corner.

Dozens of file boxes were standing next to it. Bradley pointed and smiled. ‘This is your life, Mr Murdoch.’

As I bent and glanced through them, I was shocked at the extent of their research – the boxes were

filled with computer print-outs, data-storage disks and copies of everything from Caulfield Academy

yearbooks to the annual reports of UN agencies. I took a folder at random – it was their master list of the aliases I had used – and the names brought a rush of memories.

Bradley watched as I turned the pages. ‘Marcie and I have been talking,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if

we call you Scott?’

‘What’s wrong with Peter Campbell?’ I asked.

‘I just thought … at least between ourselves, it’d be easier to use your real name. That’s how we’ve always thought of you.’

I looked at him. ‘Trouble is, Ben, Scott Murdoch’s not my real name either.’

Bradley stared, trying to compute it. Was I lying, trying one last gambit to throw them off the track they had followed so assiduously, or was this my poor attempt at humour?

I indicated the list of aliases. ‘It’s like all the rest. Just another false identity – a different time, a different place, a different name.’ I shrugged. ‘It’s been my life.’

‘But … you were Scott Murdoch at school … just a kid … That was years before the secret world,’

he said, even more perplexed.

‘I know. Nobody would have chosen what happened – but that’s the way it turned out.’

I watched the investigator ’s mind race – the child’s name that was no real name at all, my absence

from either of the funerals, the fact I didn’t seem to have inherited any of the Murdochs’ wealth. He looked at me and realized: I was adopted, I wasn’t Bill and Grace’s natural child at all.

I smiled at him, one of those smiles that has no humour in at all. ‘I’m glad you didn’t try to go back any further than Scott Murdoch. Everything before Greenwich is mine, Ben – it’s not for anyone else

to see.’

There was no doubt he understood it was a warning. The three rooms on the wrong side of 8-Mile,

the woman’s features which had faded in my memory with every year, the real name she gave me –

they were the very core of me, the only things I owned that were indisputably mine.

‘Who cares about a name?’ Bradley said at last, smiling. ‘Pete’s fine.’

Marcie called out, and the evening headed down a track I would never have expected. For a start,

she was a superb cook, and if excellent food doesn’t put you in a good mood you’ve probably been

supersized
one time too many. In addition, they didn’t mention the seminar and I had to admit that signing me up didn’t appear to be on their minds. I started to relax, and the idea occurred to me that they knew so much about my background that, for them at least, it was like having dinner with an old friend.

Bradley had scores of questions about the book and the cases it dealt with and Marcie took obvious

delight in watching her clever husband try to pin me down on details I was forbidden to talk about.

During one particularly torrid session she laughed and said she had never seen him so pissed off in

her life. I looked at her and couldn’t resist joining in.

When someone makes you laugh, when they’ve invited you into their home and tried their hardest

to make you welcome, when they’ve given you boxes of material that just might save your life, when

they’ve hauled them down into the street and helped you load them into a cab, when you’re standing under a street light in Manhattan and all that’s waiting for you is an apartment so cold you call it Camp NoHo, when you’re lost in your own country and the world’s promises haven’t amounted to very much, when you have the inescapable sense you are waiting for some future which might not be

very pleasant, when they smile and shake your hand and thank you for coming and say they have no

way of contacting you, you’ve got a hard choice to make.

I paused, all my tradecraft and experience telling me to write down a fake phone number and drive

away with their research. What did I need them for now? But I thought of the warmth with which they

had greeted me, Bradley’s joy in the music he had chosen for the evening and, I’m sorry, I couldn’t

do it. I took out my cellphone, pulled its number up on the screen and watched Marcie write it down.

In the weeks that followed they would call, and we would catch a movie or go to a club and listen to the old blues-men that Bradley loved, jam the night away – always just the three of us. Thank God they never tried to set me up on a date or went off piste and mentioned Bradley’s seminar.

During that time Bradley underwent a battery of physical and psychological tests and, much to his

relief, was passed fit to return to work. He still limped a little and, because of that, he was on lighter duties than normal but sometimes, usually late at night, he would get hold of me and ask if I wanted to drop by a crime scene where he thought there was some element which might interest me. On one particular evening he left a message while I was attending one of my regular twelve-step meetings. By this stage, I had switched my patronage to AA – as Tolstoy might have said, drug addicts are all alike, whereas every alcoholic is crazy in his own way. This led to far more interesting meetings, and I had decided that, if you were going to spend your life on the wagon, you might as well be entertained.

The meeting – held in a decaying church hall on the Upper West Side – came to an end, and I left

my fellow outcasts milling about the foyer. I walked east, enjoying the unseasonably warm evening,

and it wasn’t until I saw the Gothic towers of the Dakota that I thought to check my phone for messages. I saw Bradley’s number and figured he must have turned up another one of his rock ’n’ roll ghosts, so I was surprised when I clicked play and heard him, for the first time since we had met, ask for help.

‘I’ve got a murder case that’s very strange,’ he said on the message. Explaining nothing more than

the fact that it concerned a young woman, he then gave me the address of a sleazy hotel where he wanted me to meet him.

It was called the Eastside Inn.

Chapter Twenty-five

THE WOMAN RESPONSIBLE for the killing in room 89 had used my knowledge, my experience, my
brain

to commit the murder, and that made me – at least by my count – an accessory to the crime.

I wasn’t going to let something like that ride, so once the coroner ’s assistants had zipped up the bag containing Eleanor ’s body I walked out of the room – angrier than I had been for a long time – and

headed down the stairs.

I found what I was looking for – the door to the manager ’s office – in a small alcove near the reception desk. Alvarez, or one of the other young cops, had locked it when they left, so I stepped back and smashed the sole of my shoe hard into the wood just below the handle.

The sound of splintering wood brought a uniformed cop. ‘I’m with Bradley,’ I said, with an air of

complete authority. He shrugged, I finished kicking and stepped into the scumbag’s lair – rank with

the smell of body odour and cigarettes.

Amid the squalor, a tall metal filing cabinet had been pivoted aside, revealing a hidden space in the floor. Set into the cavity was a heavy-duty safe. The burglar, being an expert, must have known exactly where to look and had already worked the combination and opened the safe door.

Among the cash and documents were computer print-outs of the hotel’s accounts, a couple of cheap

handguns and scores of tiny colour-coded sachets. I bent down and held a couple of them up to the light: the green ones contained coke; crack rocks were in black; tina – appropriately, I suppose – was in ice-blue. Other colours meant other product – just like in any good warehouse. The scumbag had

missed his calling – he should have been running Wal-Mart.

Staring at the stash, I would be a liar to say I wasn’t tempted, especially by the Percodan in the yellow sachets. I reached out to see how many there were – you know, just out of curiosity. Strangely, I found my hand pausing before it touched them and then slowly moving aside. Who says that twelve-step programmes are a waste of time?

I lifted the computer sheets and other documents out of the safe and sat down at the battered desk.

That was where Bradley found me thirty minutes later.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked, leaning against the door frame, so tired his face looked like an unmade bed.

‘Helping out.’

Surprise made him perk up. ‘I thought you were retired.’

‘I am, but call me old-fashioned – somebody uses a book I wrote to murder a young woman and it

pisses me off.’

He walked in and lowered himself gingerly into a chair. He’d told me that he figured his leg would

probably trouble him for the rest of his life, more so when he was tired.

‘You should go home and get some rest,’ I said. ‘Your team finished yet?’

‘Half an hour; they’re packing up now. Find anything?’ he asked, indicating the documents littering

the desk.

‘Yeah.’ I pushed a folder towards him. ‘That’s the file for Room 89. Your detectives glanced through and they were right – she moved in over a year ago and paid in advance. But the details are a total mess, not even any specific dates. I figure it’s kept deliberately confusing—’

‘In case the tax people run an audit?’ Bradley interrupted.

‘Exactly. So I went to the bottom of the drug safe. Down there I found the computer print-outs of the real accounts. They’re perfect, every cent accounted for.

‘They have to be – they’re kept for the wise guys who own the joint, so you can imagine what they’d do if the scumbag tried to rip ’em off.’

I pointed at one of the items I had marked. ‘You can see it here – the killer moved in on September

eleventh.’

The unmade bed shifted into furrows of surprise. He leaned forward, looking closely at the entry.

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah, a time stamp indicates she checked in around five o’clock – about six hours after the Twin

Towers fell.

‘You were still in surgery, Ben, but I guess – like me – you’ve read the stories about that day. The whole area was a war zone, ash raining down, people running for their lives, everybody thinking even worse was to come.

‘For hours before she checked in there was so much smoke in the air it would have seemed like night, cars stood abandoned in the road, everything was silent except for the sirens.

‘I remember reading that a priest was walking through the streets calling for people to make their

last confession. It was end-of-days stuff and, according to the computer print-outs, even the pimps and whores at the Eastside Inn knew it. The night before, ninety rooms were occupied. The night of the eleventh there were six. The whole joint – the whole
neighbourhood
– had moved out.

‘But our killer makes her way to this place. She must have walked, picking her way through the wreckage. Imagine it, Ben – filthy from falling dust, probably unrecognizable, her shoes almost burnt through from the hot ash and maybe a bandana across her face to try to block the acrid fumes.

‘Finally, she pushes through the front door and takes off the bandana – she doesn’t start with the disguises until the morning, and that means the scumbag’s the only one who knows what she looks like, if he can remember. Not that we’ll find him, anyway.

‘She tells him she wants a room. Like I said, she doesn’t belong here, but already she knows she’s

gonna stay – the print-outs show she paid for two months in advance.’

I pushed the account details aside. ‘Why, Ben?’ I asked. ‘Why did she do all that? There was nowhere else to stay, this was the only hotel in New York? She virtually walked over hot coals because she liked it so much?’

He pulled a Camel out of a pack left lying on the desk. Sometimes he just liked to hold one. I made

a mental note to talk to him about the value of twelve-step programmes.