All the Flowers Are Dying Page 11

  “Son of a bitch,” he said with feeling.

  “Shoot across to Riverside and come back on Eighty-eighth,” I said, opening the door and getting out again. “I’ll try to stay with him.”

  By the time I got going he had a half-block lead on me, which shouldn’t have been a problem, but I lost sight of him when he turned right at Eighty-eighth Street. I increased my pace and got to the corner where he’d turned and he was gone.

  Leo, who ran us back to Ninth and Fifty-seventh, wouldn’t take any money. “I thought we was gonna have an adventure,” he said. “ ‘Follow that cab!’ I thought I’d show off my driving skills and tail the bastard through parts of Brooklyn even Pete Hamill’d get lost in. All I did was drive around the fucking block.”

  “It’s not your fault I lost him.”

  “No, it’s his fault, for turning out to be such an elusive bastard. Put your money back in your pocket, Matt. Call me again sometime, and we’ll have fun, and you can pay me double. But this one’s on the house.”

  He’d dropped us in front of the Morning Star, but neither of us felt like going there. We crossed the street to the Parc Vendôme and went upstairs. Elaine was on the couch with a novel Monica had recommended as a perfect guilty pleasure. “She called it the prose equivalent of a three-handkerchief movie,” she said, “and I have to say she was right. What’s the matter?”

  “The guy walked around the block and lost us,” I said.

  “The nerve of the son of a bitch. You want something?”

  “I wouldn’t mind starting the night over,” I said, “but that would be tricky. I don’t want more coffee. I don’t think I want anything. TJ?”

  “Maybe a Coke,” he said, and went off to fetch it himself.

  I joined him in the kitchen and the two of us tried to make sense out of what had happened to us up in the West Eighties. “It’s like he made us,” he said, “but he didn’t exactly act like it.”

  “What I can’t figure out,” I said, “is how he disappeared like that.”

  “Magician walks down the street and turns into a drugstore.”

  “It was something like that, wasn’t it? He wasn’t that far ahead of me when he turned the corner. Maybe a hundred feet? Not much more than that, and I would have cut the distance some, because I walked faster once the corner building blocked my view of him. And then I got there and he was gone.”

  “Even if he turns the corner and starts bookin’, you’d get a look at him soon as you come round the corner yourself.”

  “You would think so.”

  “ ’Less he ducked into that building.”

  “The apartment house on the corner? I thought of that. The street door’s not locked, anybody can get into the vestibule. Then you’d need a key, or for someone to buzz you in. I looked in and didn’t see him, but I didn’t do that right away, not until I’d spent some time trying to spot him on the street. You know, it seemed strange that he would walk to West End instead of Broadway, but if he lived there—”

  “Then he just a man going home.”

  “A man who lives around the corner from a woman and tells her he lives a couple of miles away in the East Thirties.”

  “Maybe he don’t want her coming over every other day to borrow a cup of sugar.”

  “More likely a pack of cigarettes. I can see that, actually. You go fishing for a girlfriend online, hoping she doesn’t live in the outer reaches of Brooklyn or Queens, some bus-and-subway combination away from you, and then you find out she’s right around the corner, and you realize there’s such a thing as too close.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Wouldn’t she recognize him? From seeing him in the neighborhood?”

  “You’d think so. New Yorkers may not know our next-door neighbors, but we’re generally able to recognize them by sight. He made a phone call, let’s not forget that part.”

  “Right before he lit up a cigarette.”

  Elaine had come in to fix herself a cup of tea. “He was phoning his wife,” she said, “to find out if he should pick up a quart of milk on the way home.”

  “Or a cup of sugar,” I said. “Or a carton of Marlboros. If he was married, would he get himself a girlfriend around the corner?”

  “Not unless he had a well-developed death wish,” she said. “Who was he talking to on the phone, a man or a woman?”

  “We couldn’t even hear him,” I said.

  “Couldn’t you tell by his body language? Whether it was a man or a woman on the other end of the call?”

  “No.”

  “TJ?”

  “I had to guess, I’d say a woman.”

  “You would?” I said. “Why?”

  “Dunno.”

  “He was just with a woman,” I said, “and from what Louise said he gave a good account of himself. If he wasn’t calling his wife to say he’d had to stay late at the office—”

  “And he wouldn’t,” TJ said, “not if he lived five minutes away. He’d just show up.”

  “You’re right. So it wasn’t a wife he called.”

  “ ’Less it was somebody else’s wife.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “He could have called his wife,” Elaine said. “In Scarsdale, to say he’d be late, or that he wasn’t going to make it home at all. And then he went to the building around the corner.”

  “Who’s in the building around the corner?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You’re the detective.”

  “Thanks.”

  TJ said, “Could be another woman.”

  “In the corner building?”

  “Everybody got to be someplace.”

  “So he’s two-timing Louise with somebody who lives around the corner from her?”

  “Three-timing, if he got that wife in Scarsdale.”

  “Maybe she’s a working girl,” Elaine offered.

  “Louise? I honestly don’t think—”

  “Not Louise. The late date, the woman around the corner. Maybe she’s in the game.”

  “But he was just with Louise.”

  “So?”

  “From what she said—”

  “He screwed her brains out?”

  “Not the words she used,” I said, “but that was the general impression I got, yeah.”

  “Maybe the earth moved for her but not for him. Or maybe he was going for the hat trick. That’s what, hockey?”

  I nodded. “When one player scores three goals in a game.”

  “I knew it was three goals, I just couldn’t remember if it was hockey or soccer.”

  “It’s migrated into other sports, but it’s a hockey term.”

  “I wonder where it comes from. Anyway, if he knows a working girl right around the corner from Louise, why not drop over and see her?”

  I summoned up the image of him in front of Louise’s brownstone, phone in hand. “He didn’t have to look up her number,” I said. “But he’d have it on his speed dial, wouldn’t he?”

  “Probably. That’s what people have nowadays, instead of a little black book.”

  “If he was still in the mood,” I said, “why didn’t he just stay upstairs a little longer?”

  “Gee, I don’t know,” she said. “Do you suppose it could be that Y chromosome he’s been carrying around all his life?”

  “In other words, he’s a guy.”

  “When I was working,” she said, “I’d have johns who would get themselves off before they came over, so they could last longer. I had one who was the opposite, he wanted me to keep him right on the edge for like an hour or more and not let him get off at all, so he could go home and give his wife a bounce she wouldn’t forget. That one baffled me, I’ve got to say. I felt like a picador at a bullfight.”

  I glanced at TJ to see what he made of her remembrance of things past. If it had any impact on him, it didn’t show on his face. He knew about her career history, he and Monica were about the only people we saw regularly who did, but she rarely talked about it in his pre
sence as she was dong now.

  TJ had never known his own mother. She’d died when he was less than a year old, and his grandmother had raised him until her own death. Things she’d told him had led TJ to speculate that his mother had been a working girl, and that he himself might have been a trick baby, an unplanned bonus from an unwitting client. No way to tell, he’d said, and he seemed comfortable enough with not knowing.

  But the conversation had lost its way, having essentially abandoned David Thompson for a dissertation on the Men Are Strange theme. I said, “I’m not convinced he went into that building.”

  “It might have been another one?”

  “Or no building at all. Maybe he knew he was being followed.”

  “He wouldn’t,” TJ said, “ ’less he was suspicious to start with. You think he picked up something from Louise?”

  “Not if he used a condom,” Elaine said.

  “If he’s married,” I said, “he might have suspected his wife was having him followed. That could have made him wary enough to sense us.”

  “Way he stood there lighting that cigarette,” TJ said. “Like he wanted a minute to figure out what to do as much as he wanted that nicotine hit.”

  “So he turned right instead of left,” I said, “and turned right again at West End, turned against traffic. Then he ducked into a building, or found a doorway or an alleyway to hide in.”

  “Why would he do that? To shake the two of you, obviously, but why? Wouldn’t it be suspicious behavior, and wouldn’t you think the last thing he’d want to do if he thinks his wife is having him followed is act suspicious?”

  “ ’Less it’s more important that she don’t know where he’s going next.”

  I said, “Maybe there was a cab there. Around the corner on Eighty-eighth.”

  “He had a cab waiting for him?”

  “No, but there could have been one standing there, discharging a fare. And he could have grabbed it and been on his way by the time I turned the corner.”

  “Wouldn’t you have seen a cab driving away?”

  “If I was looking for it. If it was already halfway down the block, and I was looking around for a man on foot, well, I might not have noticed it. Or he could have had a car parked there.”

  “And started it up and pulled out without being seen? Only if you was limpin’ round the corner.”

  “He could have parked there,” I said, “and got in and pulled the door shut, but not started up. Because he didn’t want to be spotted.”

  “Or because he had something to do first,” Elaine offered, “like make a phone call or look up an address.”

  “Or smoke another cigarette,” I said, “or anything at all. There’s too much we don’t know and too many avenues for speculation.”

  “Plus all the side streets,” TJ said.

  We batted it back and forth a little more, and Elaine said he sounded to her like a man with something to hide, and her guess would be that he was a sex addict. That was a new term, she added, for what used to be just a guy who liked to party, or what earlier generations had called a good-time Charlie, or a gentleman with an eye for the ladies.

  That got us talking about how the world didn’t cut you much slack anymore, how yesterday’s pastimes were today’s pathologies. TJ finished his Coke and went home.

  “Leo wouldn’t take any money,” I told Elaine, “and neither will I. Tonight’s not going to come out of Louise’s retainer.”

  “The $500? Didn’t that get used up a while ago?”

  “I’ve barely put a dent in it.”

  “You’re a real hard-nosed businessman, aren’t you?”

  “The money doesn’t really matter.”

  “I know that, baby.”

  “I just want to see if I can figure it out,” I said. “It shouldn’t be that hard.”

  11

  He holds the bronze letter opener in his hands, turns it over, runs a finger over the design in low relief on the handle. A pack of hounds are holding a stag at bay. It is, he notes, quite artfully executed.

  The woman, every bit as artfully executed as the letter opener, stands patiently on the other side of the counter. He asks her what she can tell him about the piece.

  “Well, it’s a paper knife, of course. Art Nouveau, probably French but possibly Belgian.”

  “Belgian?”

  “It’s signed,” she says. “On the reverse.” He turns it over and she hands him a magnifying glass with a staghorn handle. “It’s hard to see with the naked eye, or at least with my naked eye. See?”

  “DeVreese.”

  “Godfrey DeVreese,” she says, “or Godefroid, if you prefer. I’m not sure which he’d have preferred. He was Belgian. I had a bronze medallion of his for years, a gorgeous thing, a good three and a half inches in diameter. Leopold the Second on one side, with a beard that was a hell of a lot nobler than the man sporting it. You know about Leopold the Second?”

  He grins easily. “I would suppose,” he says, “that he came between Leopold the First and Leopold the Third.”

  “Actually his successor was his son, Albert. Leopold Three came a little later on. Number Two was the gentle fellow who ran the Belgian Congo as his personal fief. He treated the local residents as slaves, and he’d have had more respect for the inhabitants of an ant farm. Remember all those photos of natives with their hands chopped off?”

  What can she be she talking about? “It rings a bell,” he says.

  “But he looked good,” she says, “especially in bronze. There was a horse on the other side, and he looked even better than Leo. It was a draft horse, one of those big boys you don’t see anymore outside of a Budweiser commercial. Except this one was a Percheron and the Budweiser horses are Clydesdales. The medal was an award from some sort of agricultural fair. Probably the turn-of-the-century equivalent of a tractor-pulling contest.”

  “You still have the medallion?”

  “I thought I was going to own it forever, but some horse collector spotted it a few months ago and away it went. I’ll probably never see another one like it.”

  He turns the letter opener in his hands. It’s quite beautiful, and he likes the heft of it.

  “You said turn-of-the-century?”

  “I suppose DeVreese would have said fin de siècle. Or the equivalent in Flemish, whatever that might be. I can’t date it precisely, I’m afraid, but it would have to be late nineteenth or early twentieth century.”

  “So it’s about a hundred years old.”

  “Give or take.”

  He tests the point with his thumb. It’s quite sharp. The blade’s edges are not. It will serve to open a letter, but you couldn’t slice with it.

  You could stab, however.

  “May I ask the price?”

  “It’s two hundred dollars.”

  “That seems high.”

  “I know,” she says disarmingly.

  “Do you suppose I could get a discount?”

  She considers this. “If you pay cash,” she says, “I could absorb the sales tax.”

  “So that would be two hundred dollars even as opposed to what, two-sixteen?”

  “A few dollars more than that, actually. If you want I could look it up for you, so you’ll know to the penny how much you’re saving.”

  “But what I’d be paying,” he says, “is two hundred dollars.”

  “And in return you’d be getting a piece of history.”

  “It’s always nice to get a piece”—just the slightest pause here—“of history.” Has she even noticed the pause? This would seem to be a woman who doesn’t miss much, and his sense is that she took it in and decided to overlook it, all without any of this registering on her face.

  He frowns, has another look at the bas-relief, notes the steadfast determination of both the hounds and their quarry. It would be the work of a moment, he thinks, to wrap his hand around the handle, to strike without warning. He visualizes the act, the underhand thrust, the sharpened bronze tip entering just bel
ow the lowest rib and reaching up for the heart. Visualizes himself turning and moving to the door before she slips to the floor behind the counter, even before the life fades from her eyes.

  But he’s touched things. His prints are all over the top surface of the showcase, and nothing holds a print better than glass.

  “I think I’d like to have it.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  Besides, it would be too quick. It would be over before she knew it, and that can be very satisfying sometimes, the quick kill, but in this instance he’d want her to see it coming, want to watch her lose that confidence, that irritating self-possession.

  His loins stir at the thought of what he’ll do to her, when the time comes.

  But none of this shows in his face as he sighs with resignation and counts bills from his wallet. She takes the money, wraps the letter opener in tissue paper, tucks it into a paper bag. He tells her he won’t need a receipt, then slips his purchase into the inside breast pocket of his jacket.

  “Thanks,” she says. “Just so you know, I don’t think you paid too much. They’d ask something like five hundred in a shop on Madison Avenue.”

  He smiles, murmurs something, heads for the door. But oh, Christ, how he wants to kill her! He doesn’t want to wait. He wants to kill her right now.

  12

  I didn’t much want to give my client a report of the night’s proceedings, and not just because it might leave her wondering if she’d hired an incompetent. More to the point, any suggestion that her Mr. Thompson had given me the slip would imply that he was not what he appeared, that he had something to hide. That’s how it felt to me, but it would be premature to pass that perception to Louise.

  “Nothing conclusive,” I told her. “I should be able to tell you more in a day or so.”

  I found Thompson’s number in my notebook, called him on my cell phone. I hoped he wouldn’t answer and felt relieved when I got his Voice Mail. “Hey, man,” I said. “We sent you a check, payment in full, and I’ve got it right here in front of me. It came back, we’ve got the wrong address for you. Oh, shit, I’ve got to take that. Listen, ring me back, if I don’t answer just leave your address on my voice mail. And while you’re at it—oh, hell, never mind. Later.”