A Ticket to the Boneyard (23 page)

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. There’s something you have to remember about Motley. It’s true that he’s cunning and clever and resourceful, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s nuts.”

The phone book was still open on the bed. I looked at the list of my namesakes. It occurred to me that perhaps I ought to call the rest of them and warn them. “Change your name,” I could say, “or face the consequences.”

Was that what he was going to do next? Would he actually try working his way through the list? Then he could move on to the other four boroughs, and after that there were always the suburbs.

Of course if he killed enough people with the same last name, sooner or later some brilliant cop would spot a pattern. One of the listings was for the Scudder group of mutual funds; he could travel all over the country, knocking off all their shareholders.

I closed the phone book. I couldn’t call the Scudders, but was there any point in calling Durkin? It wasn’t his case, it was a long ways from his precinct, but he could find out who was in charge and get through to him. Elizabeth Scudder’s murder would generate a lot of heat. The killing had been bloody and fierce, there was a sex angle, and the victim was young, white, upscale and photogenic.

What good was a tip from me? For a change there was no danger the case would get written off as a suicide, or a family squabble. A full lab crew would have long since labored over the scene, and every shred of physical evidence would have been measured and photographed and bagged and bottled. If he’d left prints, they’d have them, and by now they’d know who’d left them there. If he’d left anything, they’d have it.

Semen? Skin under her nails? Some part of his physical being that would do for a DNA match?

It wasn’t like fingerprint evidence, where you could run a computer check and see what you had in your files. To get a DNA match you had to have a suspect in custody. If he’d left sperm or skin behind, they’d need someone to tell them whose it was. Then, after they’d picked him up, forensic techniques could put the rope around his neck.

The rope was figurative, of course. The state doesn’t hang killers. It doesn’t fry them, either, which is what it used to do. It does put them away, occasionally for life. Sometimes a life sentence translates into seven years or less, but in Motley’s case I figured they’d want to hang on to him a little longer. The last time, he went away for one-to-ten and served twelve; if he was true to form the second time around, they’d bury him inside the walls.

Assuming he got there in the first place. DNA matching and similar sophisticated forensics added up to good corroborative evidence, but you couldn’t expect to build a whole case out of it. Juries didn’t know what the hell you were talking about, especially after the defense had brought in their hired experts to argue that the prosecution’s hired experts were full of crap. If the accused was the victim’s boyfriend and if they picked him up in her bedroom with her blood on his hands, then a DNA match on his semen would ice his cupcake nicely. If, on the other hand, the accused had no connection to the victim beyond the fact that she had the same last name as the cop who’d arrested him over a decade ago—well, under those circumstances it might not carry much weight.

I did give Durkin a call, finally. I don’t know what I might have said to him. He wasn’t in.

I didn’t give my name, or leave a message.

I left the hotel around eleven-thirty intending to go to the noon meeting at Fireside. That’s the name of the group that meets at the Y on West Sixty-third.

I didn’t get there.

Walking wasn’t as much of an effort as it had been the day before. I was still stiff, and my body was holding on to a considerable amount of pain, but my muscles weren’t as tight and I didn’t tire as quickly. And it was warmer today, with less of a breeze blowing and not so much dampness in the air. Good football weather, I suppose you’d call it. A little too warm for the raccoon coat, but brisk enough to make you appreciate the flask on your hip, or the flat pint of rye in your overcoat pocket.

I ambled over to Eighth Avenue and turned south instead of north. I walked downtown as far as Toni Cleary’s building and stood looking at her landing site, then up at the window he’d thrown her out of. A voice in my head kept telling me it was my fault she was dead.

It seemed to me the voice was right.

I circled the block and wound up right back where I’d started, which seemed to be my current role in life. I gazed up at Toni’s window again and wondered if she’d had a clue what was happening to her, or why. Maybe he’d told her that she was being punished for being one of my women. If so, he’d very likely referred to me by my last name. That was what he called me.

Had she even known my last name? I hadn’t known hers. She’d been killed because of her association with me, and she might well have died without knowing who her killer was talking about.

Not that it mattered. She’d have been in the twin grip of pain and terror, and an understanding of her killer’s motivations would have been fairly far down on her list of emotional priorities.

And Elizabeth Scudder? Had she died wondering about her long-lost cousin Matthew? I might have gone over and stared at her building if it hadn’t been a mile and a half to the south of me and clear across town. Her building couldn’t have told me anything, but Toni’s wasn’t giving me much, either.

I looked at my watch and saw that I’d missed the meeting. It was still going on but it would be all but over by the time I got there. That was fine, I decided, because I didn’t really want to go anyway.

I bought a hot dog from one street vendor and a knish from another and ate about half of each. I got a cardboard container of coffee from a deli and stood on the corner with it, blowing on it between sips, finishing most of it before I got impatient and spilled the rest in the gutter. I held on to the cup until I got to a trash basket. They’re sometimes hard to find. Suburbanites steal them, and they wind up in backyards in Westchester. They make efficient and durable trash burners, enabling their new owners to contribute what they can to air pollution in their local communities.

But I was public-spirited, your ideal solid citizen. I wouldn’t litter, or pollute the air, or do anything to lower the quality of life for my fellow New Yorkers. I’d just go through life a day at a time while the bodies piled up around me.

Great.

I never set out to look for a liquor store. But here I was, standing in front of one. They had their Thanksgiving window display installed, with cardboard figures of a Pilgrim and a turkey, and a lot of autumn leaves and Indian corn placed appropriately.

And a few decanters, seasonal and otherwise. And a lot of bottles.

I stood there looking at the bottles.

This had happened before. I’d be walking along with nothing much in mind, certainly not thinking about drinking, and I’d come out of some sort of reverie and find myself looking at the bottles in a liquor-store window, admiring their shapes, nodding at various wines and deciding what foods they’d go with. It was what I’d heard people call a drink signal, a message from my unconscious that something was troubling me, that I was not at that particular moment quite as comfortable with my sobriety as I might think.

A drink signal wasn’t necessarily cause for alarm. You didn’t have to rush to a meeting or call your sponsor or read a chapter of the Big Book, although it might not hurt. It was mostly just something to pay attention to, a blinking yellow light on sobriety’s happy highway.

Go home, I told myself.

I opened the door and went in.

No alarms went off, no sirens sounded. The balding clerk who glanced my way looked me over as he might have looked at any prospective customer, his chief concern being that I wasn’t about to show him a gun and demand that he empty the till. Nothing in his eyes suggested any suspicion on his part that I had no business in his store.

I found the bourbon section and looked at the bottles. Jim Beam, J. W. Dant, Old Taylor, Old Forester, Old Fitzgerald, Maker’s Mark, Wild Turkey.

Each name rang a bell. I can walk past saloons all over town and remember what I drank there. I may be less clear on what brought me there or whom I drank with, but I’ll recall what was in my glass, and what bottle it came from.

Antique Age. Old Grand Dad. Old Crow. Early Times.

I liked the names, and especially the last.
Early Times
. It sounded like a toast. “Well, here’s to crime.” “Absent friends.” “Early Times.”

Early Times indeed. They got better the more of a distance you looked back at them from. But what didn’t?

“Help you?”

“Early Times,” I said.

“A fifth?”

“A pint’ll be enough,” I said.

He slipped the bottle into a brown paper bag, twisted the top, handed it over the counter to me. I dropped it into a pocket of my topcoat and dug a bill out of my wallet. He rang the sale, counted out change.

One drink’s too many, they say, and a thousand’s not enough. But a pint would do. For starters, anyway.

There’s a liquor store right across the street from my hotel, and I couldn’t guess how many times I went in and out of it during the drinking years. This store, though, was a few blocks away on Eighth Avenue, and the walk back to the Northwestern seemed endless. I felt as though people were staring at me on the street. Maybe they were. Maybe the expression on my face was the sort to draw stares.

I went straight up to my room and bolted the door once I was inside it. I took the pint of bourbon from my coat pocket and laid it down on the top of my dresser. I hung my coat in the closet, draped my suit jacket over the back of a chair. I went over to the dresser and picked up the bottle and felt its familiar shape through the brown paper wrapping, and weighed it in my hands. I put it back down, still unwrapped, and went over to look out the window. Downstairs, across Fifty-seventh Street, a man in a topcoat like mine was entering the liquor store. Maybe he’d come out with a pint of Early Times and take it back to his room, and look out his window.

I didn’t have to unwrap the damn thing. I could open the window and pitch it out. Maybe I could take aim, and try to drop it on someone who looked as though he just got out of church.

Jesus.

I put the TV on, looked at it without seeing it, turned it off. I walked over to the dresser and took the bottle out of the paper bag. I put it back on the dresser but I stood it upright this time, then crumpled the paper bag and dropped it in the wastebasket. I returned to my chair and sat down again. From where I was sitting I couldn’t see the bottle on top of the dresser.

Back when I was first getting sober I’d made Jan a promise. “Promise me you won’t take that first drink without calling me,” she said, and I’d promised.

Funny the things you think of.

Well, I couldn’t call her now. She was out of town, and I’d ordered her not to tell anyone where she’d gone. Not even me.

Unless she hadn’t left. I’d had a call from her the day before, but what did that prove? The connection, now that I thought about it, had been crystal clear. She might have been in the next room from the sound of it.

Failing that, she could have been on Lispenard Street.

Would she do that? Convinced that the danger was largely in my mind, would she have stayed in her loft and lied to me about it?

No, I decided, she wouldn’t do that. Still, there was no reason I could think of not to call her.

I dialed, got her machine. Was there anyone left in the world who didn’t have one of those damned things? I listened to the same message she’d had on there for years, and when it ended I said, “Jan, it’s Matt. Pick up if you’re there, will you?” I waited a moment while the machine went on taping the silence, and then I said, “It’s important.”

No answer, and I hung up. Well, of course she hadn’t answered. She was miles away. She wouldn’t have played it dishonest. If she’d decided to stay in the city, she’d have told me so.

Anyway, I’d kept my promise. I’d made the call. Not my fault there was nobody home, was it?

Except that it was. My fault, that is. It was my warning that got her in a cab to the airport, and it was my actions years ago, long before I met her, that made the trip necessary. My fault. Jesus, was there one thing in the fucking world that
wasn’t
my fault?

I turned, and the pint of Early Times was on the dresser, with light from the overhead fixture glinting off its shoulder. I went over and picked up the bottle and read its label. It was eighty proof. All of the popular-priced bourbons had been eighty-six proof for years, and then some marketing genius had come up with the idea of cutting the proof to eighty and leaving the price unchanged. Since the federal excise tax is based on alcohol content, and since alcohol costs the manufacturer more than plain water, the distiller increased his profit while slightly boosting the demand at the same time, since dedicated drinkers had to swill down more of the product in order to get the same effect.

Of course the bonded bourbons were still a hundred proof. And some of the brands came in at odd figures. Jack Daniel’s was ninety proof. Wild Turkey was 101.

Funny what sticks in your mind.

Maybe I should have picked up a fifth, or even a quart.

I put the bottle down and walked over to the window again. I felt curiously calm, and at the same time I was all hyped up. I looked out across the street, then turned and looked at the bottle again. I switched on the TV and clicked the dial from channel to channel, not even noticing what I was looking at. I went around the dial two or three times and turned the set off.

The phone rang. I stood there for a moment, looking at it as though I couldn’t figure out what it was, or what to do about it. It rang again. I let it ring a third time before I picked it up and said hello.

“Matt, this is Tom Havlicek.” It took me a moment to place the name, and I got it just as he added, “In Massillon. Beautiful downtown Massillon, isn’t that what they say?”