After he’d finished, they went around the room instead of asking for a show of hands. By the time it was my turn, I’d already said everything I had to say, albeit in the privacy of my own mind. “My name’s Matt,” I said, “and I’m an alcoholic. I really enjoyed your qualification. I think I’ll just listen tonight.”
A little later a voice I knew said, “I’m really glad I got here tonight. It’s not a regular meeting of mine, but I see a few familiar faces here. And I got a lot out of your story. My name’s Abie and I’m an alcoholic.”
He went on to talk about having to put in long hours lately, and missing meetings, and how he had to remember that his sobriety has to come first. “If I lose that, then I lose everything that goes with it,” he said.
It wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard a few thousand times over the years, but it didn’t hurt me any to hear it again.
He caught up with me on the way out. “My first time here,” he said. “I didn’t even know it was a special-interest meeting.”
“Men over forty.”
“I knew that part from the listing in the book. What I didn’t know is everybody was gay.”
“Not everybody was.”
“Except for thee and me,” he said, and grinned. “I don’t mind gay people, in fact I enjoy the energy in a room full of gay men. But I wasn’t expecting it.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I thought.
“Matt? I was surprised when you didn’t share tonight.”
“Well, I’m not in the same class with William the Silent,” I said, “but I don’t feel compelled to say something just because it’s my turn.”
“Except you looked as though you had something you wanted to get out.”
“Oh?”
“Like you had something gnawing at you.” He touched my shoulder. “You want to go get some coffee?”
“I had two cups here tonight. I think that’s enough coffee for me.”
“Something to eat, then.”
“I don’t think so, Abie.”
“My first sponsor used to say we were people who couldn’t afford the luxury of keeping things to ourselves.”
“It’s probably a good thing he wasn’t in the CIA, then.”
“I suppose, but the point—”
“I think I get the point.”
He stepped back, frowning, and pinched his upper lip, a physical tic I’d seen him make before. “Look, I didn’t mean any harm,” he said. “I guess you’d rather be alone tonight.”
I didn’t tell him otherwise.
I took another cab, and got one with loud Arab music on the radio. I told the driver to turn it down. He looked at me, and I guess he saw something on my face that kept him from arguing. He turned it down and off, and we rode home in a welcome if stony silence.
The pinochle game was still in progress when I walked in the door. I asked who was winning, and Elaine made a face and pointed across the table. “He swears he never played the game before,” she said, “and it hurts me to think such a sweet young man could lie like a rug.”
“Never did,” he said.
“Then how come you could sit there and beat my brains out?”
“You just a good teacher, is all.”
“That must be it.” She gathered the cards. “Go home. You’re an angel for keeping me company, even if you didn’t have the decency to let me win. Wait a minute. Are you hungry? Do you want a cookie?”
He shook his head.
“You sure? I baked them myself, using the name ‘Mrs. Fields.’ ”
He shook his head again, and she gave him a hug and let him go. She put the cards away and went to the window again, the one that no longer had a view of the towers. She sighed and turned from it to me and said, “I’ve been thinking. She had other friends besides me. No one else was as close, but there were other women she’d meet for lunch, or talk to on the phone.”
“There’d have to be.”
“She might have let something slip about this guy. I mean, she told me he drinks Scotch and has a mustache. She might have said something else to somebody else.”
“And if you gather the somethings together, a picture might emerge.”
“Well, don’t you think it’s possible?”
“I know it’s possible,” I said, “and so will Sussman. They’ll go through her address or her Rolodex, whatever she had, and they’ll check out every listing. He might be in there, as far as that goes. Just because she wouldn’t say his name doesn’t mean he didn’t give her one. If he also gave her a number, it’ll be in her book.”
“You think they’ll get him that way?”
I didn’t, but I said it was possible.
“All right, here’s another thing I was thinking. She might have gone back to her shrink. She stopped therapy years ago, but she’s been back a few times for a couple of sessions here and a couple of sessions there. And I remember having the feeling recently that she might have gone back. I don’t know what triggered it, but it was a feeling I got.”
“And she might have said something about the guy to the therapist?”
“Well, you know, if she can’t feel free to say anything to anybody else…”
“That’s a point.”
“But would the shrink say anything? Isn’t everything you tell your shrink privileged?”
I said it was, but that there was a gray area here. When the patient was dead and the investigation was trying to uncover the killer, that would override doctor-patient privilege for some physicians, and not for others.
“Her shrink’s name is Brigitte Dufy. She’s French, she’s got the same last name as the painter Raoul Dufy, and she may even be a relative. I know Monica asked her but I don’t remember what the answer was. As if it matters. She grew up around here, her father was a souschef at the Brittany du Soir. You remember that place?”
“Yes, of course.”
“It was terrific, I wonder what happened to it. One day it was just gone. Anyway, Brigitte grew up here with a neighborhood accent that was solid Hell’s Kitchen Irish. Monica liked to call her Bridget Duffy. They’ll probably find her name in Monica’s address book, but maybe not. You know how when you copy an address book you don’t bother transferring the names of people who’ve dropped out of your life? Because why bother, since you’re not going to call them again? Well, if she’d stopped therapy…”
I said I’d mention it to Sussman in the morning.
“I can’t stand that she’s gone,” she said. “But I’ll get used to it. That’s what life is, getting used to people dying. But I can’t stand the thought of somebody doing this to her and getting away with it. And I don’t want to get used to it.”
“They’ll get him.”
“You promise?”
How could I promise something like that? Then again, how could I deny her?
“I promise.”
“Is there anything you can do?”
“Besides get in everybody’s way? I don’t know. I’ll see if I can come up with anything.”
“I don’t expect you to get out there and find him,” she said. “Except, see, the thing is I do. You’re my hero, you know. You always have been.”
“I think you’d be better off with Spider-man.”
“No,” she said. “No, I’m happy with the choice I made.”
17
In a Kinko’s on Columbus Avenue, he sits at a computer terminal, where a small hourly fee provides him with utterly anonymous Internet access. He goes to the Yahoo website and, at no cost and in a matter of minutes, he opens an account with a user name that is just a meaningless jumble of letters and numbers. It would be difficult to remember, but he won’t need to remember it because he’ll never use it again. It’s a one-time-only account, almost certainly untraceable, but if they trace it they won’t get any farther than this computer, open to the public and used by dozens of people every day.
He remembers wondering how anyone was ever caught and convicted a century ago, in the
absence of forensics. But didn’t science aid the criminal with one hand while it aided the criminologist with the other? He’d come across a line somewhere that had always struck him as the perfect explanation of Darwinian evolution: If you build a better mousetrap, Nature will build a better mouse.
He meditates upon this principle for a spell, then brings himself reluctantly back to the present moment. He clicks on WRITE MAIL and begins typing:
I am writing to you because it troubles me to think of the unfortunate parents of Jeffrey Willis, for whose murder Preston Applewhite recently paid the ultimate penalty. Hard as it is to lose a son, it must be harder still when his body is never recovered. One hates the thought of one’s own flesh and blood lying forever in an unmarked grave, although, on reflection, I can’t see that I’d much prefer lying in a marked grave. It is, I should think, one and the same to the person lying there.
Still, it seems only right for me to tell you that the spirit of Preston Applewhite (may all curse his memory!) came to me last night in a spirit of profound contrition. “You must tell the good people at the Richmond Times-Dispatch,” it said, in an appropriately spectral tone, “that I deeply regret what I’ve done, and seek to make amends by telling you just where to look for all that remains of the Willis boy.”
And here is where it said to look….
He writes out detailed instructions, creating a perfect verbal treasure map that will lead whoever follows it to the very spot in the old family graveyard where he had such a pleasant time with young Jeffrey, who’d not had a terribly pleasant time of it himself. It brings it all back for him, and he’s tempted to add a precise description of Jeffrey’s last moments, but that would be inconsistent with the letter’s content and tone.
Though it would surely be fun. He’s reminded of Albert Fish, the deranged cannibal who murdered young children and ate them. After killing and devouring one Grace Budd, he wrote a note to her parents describing the murder and attesting to their daughter’s succulence on the dinner table. But, he swore to them, “I never fucked her. She died a virgin.”
A Budd never forced to bloom, he thinks. How reassuring that must have been for the elder Budds!
You will think at first that this is a hoax, for how could any intelligent person think otherwise? But you can hardly fail to send out a couple of men with a couple of shovels, if there’s the slightest possibility that Jeffrey’s bones (for the rest of him surely has long since rotted away) are where the spirit has said they are.
When you find them, as surely you shall, you and your readers and the appropriate authorities will have much to ponder. Are you to believe in spirits and their revelations? Or has someone made a grievous error?
I trust you’ll forgive my not signing this. I have lately learned the importance of anonymity. It is, to be sure, the spiritual foundation of all our traditions.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch has a website, of course, where he’d found the city editor’s e-mail address. He enters that in the appropriate space and sits for several minutes, the cursor poised over the SEND button. To send it or not, that is the question, and there is no obvious answer. The whole matter of Preston Applewhite has been resolved in a most satisfactory manner, which argues mightily for leaving well enough alone.
On the other hand, it seems to him that it would be more interesting to send the message, to stir the pot, to see what happens. For something will most certainly happen, whereas if he leaves well enough alone, why, nothing will happen, nothing beyond what has happened already.
And interest is everything, isn’t it?
But he’s not too sure of that last paragraph. It will strike a chord with some of the people who read it, and send them rushing madly off in several wrong directions, but it’s really just a private joke, and would deprive him of an opportunity to sign his work. He highlights the last paragraph, hits DELETE, thinks for a moment, and replaces it with this:
I’ll leave you to your work, dear friends, even as I return to my own. I’ll be abandoning my present e-mail address forthwith, so I regret that you’ll be unable to contact me. Should I have occasion to communicate further, I’ll do so from another e-mail address, which, alas, will be as untraceable as this one. But you’ll know me by my signature; I have the honor to be, sir, your most obedient servant,
Abel Baker
He smiles his rueful smile, and hits the SEND button.
He rather likes New York.
He has lived here before, for several years, and he would have stayed longer if circumstances hadn’t compelled him to leave. At the time those circumstances looked like a turn of bad luck, but attitude is everything, as he often says, and he was wise enough to will himself to regard what looked like adversity as opportunity. Hasn’t his exile from New York given him a chance to see something of the country? Hasn’t it furnished him with any number of grand adventures, culminating so recently in the remarkable affair of Preston Applewhite?
When he left, the Twin Towers stood proudly at the foot of Manhattan. He wonders sometimes what it would have been like to be present in the city when it suffered such an unfathomable blow.
That day’s loss of life has no great personal impact upon him. What he does wonder at, though, and what does inspire him, is the awesome power of the man who pulled the strings, the puppet master who convinced his followers to fly planes into buildings. It bespoke an enviable talent for manipulation.
He’s done some manipulation himself. When he lived here he was no mean hand at it, although no subject of his ever did anything all that dramatic. Still, his people were bright, and success demanded his employing a sort of psychological jujitsu; he won by using their own mental strength against them.
He has been walking as he’s had these thoughts, and he notes with some delight that his steps and his thoughts have brought him to the same place, a house on West Seventy-fourth Street. He was on the outside of this house on many occasions, and inside it once. There were three other people with him on that occasion, and he killed two of them right here, in this very house, one with a gun and one with a knife, and killed the third an hour later in a house several miles to the south.
He’d thought at the time that the house would be his reward, that the killings would make it his. He thought that was what he wanted, a fine brownstone house a block from Central Park.
He’d thought that was why he killed.
How much freer he is now that he knows the truth about himself!
He’d wondered, on his return to the city, if this house would even still be standing. Years ago, downtown on West Eleventh Street, one brown-stone in a row of brownstones had simply disappeared. The place had been a bomb factory for student radicals, owned by the parents of one of them, and how better to fulfill their unconscious motivations than by blowing up a parental home? Wasn’t that, all things considered, the underlying purpose of their politics?
By the time he first came to New York, the house had already been replaced. The new structure, sized to match its neighbors, looks to have been given a twist by its architect, with a section jutting out at an oblique angle from the rest of the facade. The ostensible purpose, he knows, was to wed the contemporary to the traditional, but he senses a deeper explanation, a desire to let the plosive force that gutted the first building express itself in its successor.
But there had been no bomb factory here on West Seventy-fourth Street, and so there is no reason for this fine house to have disappeared, merely because it has ceased to hold a place in his day-to-day consciousness. It still stands, and the same young woman still occupies it, all but the lowest floor, where the same old woman, older now, maintains the same undistinguished antique shop.
He thinks of another shop, of the letter opener he bought there. Of the woman who sold it to him, calling it a paper knife. The term itself, he thinks, could be ambiguous, meaning either a knife to cut paper or a knife made of paper. Or a knife in name only, like a paper tiger.
Gone now, whatever you called it. Oh, it sti
ll exists, even as the house still exists, but it’s no longer part of his life.
Is this house part of his life? Does it, like so much else here in this extraordinary city, come under the heading of Unfinished Business?
He’ll have to think about that.
On his way home he stands for a few moments directly across the street from another much larger building, this one on the southeast corner of Fifty-seventh and Ninth. There’s a doorman on duty twenty-four hours a day, and there are security cameras in the elevators and the lobby. Still, how difficult a hindrance are they likely to prove? Created and installed and maintained by men, surely they can be subverted by a man.
But it’s not yet time.
He walks home. He sometimes thinks of himself as a hermit crab, taking up homes and discarding them when he outgrows them. The shelter that suits him now, his home for the present, consists of three rooms on the top floor of a tenement on Fifty-third Street west of Tenth Avenue. The building shows some of the effects of gentrification. Its brick facade has been repointed, its halls and stairways renovated, its vestibule entirely redone. Many of the apartments have been done over, too, as their occupants have moved or died off, replaced by new tenants paying full market value rents. Only a few of the old rent-controlled tenants are left, and one of them, Mrs. Laskowski, probably doesn’t have much time left. She’s fifty pounds overweight and diabetic, and suffers as well from something that makes her joints ache in bad weather. But she’s out there on the front stoop, smoking a malodorous little Italian cigar, when he mounts the steps.