A Ticket to the Boneyard (32 page)

I made sure I had the angle right. Cops eat their guns all the time, it’s their favorite single method of committing suicide, and sometimes they miss, sometimes the bullet goes on through without doing mortal damage. I wanted to do this properly, and I was only going to get one chance. I wanted the bullet to go right up through the roof of the mouth and into the brain.

When I had the gun the way I wanted it, I just stayed in position for a moment. There was something I seemed to want to say, but whom was I going to say it to?

I thought, Say it to him. And I remembered what the ICU nurse had told me. According to her, patients in coma understood what was said to them.

I said, “I’m not sure this is a good idea. But suppose you got out again. Suppose your lawyer pulled off some kind of half-assed insanity defense. Or suppose you went away for life and escaped. How can I take that kind of chance?”

I paused for a moment, then shook my head. “I’m not even sure that’s it. I just don’t want you to be alive anymore.

“And I want to be the one who sees to it, and that’s how all this shit started in the first place, isn’t it? I had to play God and frame you for attempted murder. What would have happened if I’d just let things take their course back then? Would it have made a difference?”

I waited, as if he might answer. Then I said, “And here I am playing God again. I know better and I’m doing it anyway.”

That was all I said. I stayed there at his side, down on one knee, the gun in his mouth, his finger on the trigger, my finger on his. I don’t know how long I waited, or what I was waiting for.

Eventually his breathing changed slightly and he started to stir. My finger moved, and so did his, and that was that.

I set the stage before I left. I got Echevarria’s cuffs loose from Motley’s ankles and returned them to the case on his belt. I righted the table that had gotten upended earlier and straightened out other articles disturbed during our struggle. I went around the apartment, handkerchief in hand, and removed my prints from every surface where I might have left them.

While I was doing this, I picked up a lipstick tube from the dresser in the bedroom and used it to leave a last message on the living-room wall. In block caps three inches tall I printed, it has to end. i make my peace with god. sorry i kill so many. You couldn’t prove it was his writing, but I couldn’t see how you could prove that it wasn’t. Just to keep it neat I capped the lipstick tube, got his prints on it, and tucked it into his shirt pocket.

I fastened the chain lock on the apartment’s front door and left the same way I’d come in, via the window. This time I drew it all the way shut after me. I went down the fire escape, lowered the ladder, descended it. Someone had moved the garbage can to its original position, so I had to drop the last few feet, but that was easy enough.

Someone had also removed my topcoat. I thought at first someone had walked off with it, but something made me lift the lid of one of the garbage cans and there it was, reposing under a layer of eggshells and orange peels. The person who’d put it there had evidently assumed it had been discarded, and decided further that it wasn’t worth rescuing. It had been a perfectly respectable coat, or at least I’d thought so, but now I figured it was time to buy myself a new one.

I thought the same conscientious tenant who’d tossed my topcoat might have removed my toothpick from the lock, but it was still in place and all I had to do was draw the door open. I retrieved the toothpick and let the door lock behind me, went on out through the front of the building, and walked over to First Avenue where I caught a cab headed uptown. I got out at the hospital’s main entrance and went directly to the ICU. The nurse said Elaine’s condition was unchanged but wouldn’t let me go in to see her. I sat down in the waiting room and tried to look at a magazine.

I would have liked to pray but I couldn’t think how to go about it. AA meetings generally close with either the Lord’s Prayer or the serenity prayer, but neither seemed especially appropriate at the moment, and giving thanks for everything just as it was felt like a joke, and not a very tasteful one. In the course of things I did say some prayers, even including that one, but I don’t really think anyone was listening.

Every now and then I would go to the desk, only to be told that nothing had changed and that she couldn’t have anyone in the room with her just yet. Then I’d go back to the waiting room and wait some more. I dozed off in my chair a couple of times but never got deeper than a sort of waking dream state.

Around five in the afternoon I got hungry, which wasn’t too surprising given that I hadn’t had anything since Mick and I ate breakfast. I got some change and bought coffee and sandwiches from machines in the lobby. I couldn’t manage more than half a sandwich, but the coffee was good. It wasn’t good coffee, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it was good to get it inside me.

Two hours after that a nurse came in with a grave expression on her pale face. “Maybe you’d better see her now,” she said.

On the way I asked her what she meant by that. She said it looked as though they were losing her.

I went in and stood at her bedside. She didn’t look any better or any worse than she had before. I picked up her hand and held it and waited for her to die.

“He’s dead,” I told her. There were nurses around but I don’t think any of them could hear me. They were too busy to listen. Anyway, I didn’t care what they heard. “I killed him,” I told her. “You don’t ever have to worry about him again.”

I suppose you can believe people in comas hear what’s said to them. You can believe God hears prayers, too, if that’s what you want. Whatever makes you happy.

“Don’t go, anywhere,” I told her. “Don’t die, baby. Please don’t die.”

I must have been with her for half an hour before one of the nurses told me to return to the waiting room. A few hours after that another nurse came in and talked some about Elaine’s medical condition. I don’t remember what she said and didn’t understand much of it at the time, but the gist of it was that she had passed a crisis, but that an infinite number of crises lay ahead of her. She could develop pneumonia, she could throw an embolism, she could go into liver or kidney failure—there were so many ways she could die that it seemed impossible for her to dodge them all.

“You might as well go home,” she said. “There’s nothing you can do, and we have your number, we’ll call you if anything happens.”

I went home and slept. In the morning I called and was told that her condition was about the same. I showered and shaved and got dressed and went over there. I was there all morning and part of the afternoon, and then I rode a crosstown bus through the park and went to Toni’s memorial service at Roosevelt.

It was all right. It was like a meeting, really, except that everybody who spoke said something about Toni. I talked briefly about our trek out to Richmond Hill and back, and mentioned some of the funny things Toni had said in her talk.

It bothered me that everybody thought she’d killed herself, but I didn’t know what to do about that. I would have liked to tell her relatives in particular what the real circumstances had been. Her family was Catholic, and it might have mattered to them. But I couldn’t think how to handle it.

Afterward I went out for coffee with Jim Faber, and then I went back to the hospital.

I was there a lot during the next week. A couple of times I was on the verge of making an anonymous call to 911 to tip them off about the dead body at 288 East Twenty-fifth Street. As soon as Motley’s corpse was discovered, I could phone Anita and tell her she could stop worrying. I couldn’t reach Jan, but sooner or later she would reach me, and I wanted to be able to say it was all right to come home. If I said as much to either of them ahead of schedule, I might someday be called upon to explain myself.

What kept me from calling 911 was the knowledge that all such calls were taped, and that I could be identified as the caller through voiceprint comparison. I didn’t think anyone would ever check, but why leave the possibility open? At first I’d thought Ms. Lepcourt would come home to her apartment and discover the body, but when that didn’t happen over the weekend I had to consider the possibility that she’d never be coming home.

That just meant I had a couple more days to wait. On Tuesday afternoon a neighbor finally realized that the odor she was smelling was not a dead rat in the wall, and that it wasn’t going to go away of its own accord. She called the police, they broke the door down, and that was that.

On Thursday, almost a week after Motley left her bleeding on her rug, a resident internist told me he thought Elaine was going to make it.

“I never thought she would,” he said. “There were so many things that kept threatening to go wrong. The stress she underwent throughout was enormous. I was afraid her heart might fail, but it turns out she has a real good heart.”

I could have told him that.

A little later, around the time she came home from the hospital, I had dinner with Joe Durkin at the Slate. He said it was on him and I didn’t argue. He downed a couple of martinis to start, and he told me how neatly Motley’s suicide had closed out a batch of files. They were hanging Andrew Echevarria and Elizabeth Scudder on him, and there was an unofficial understanding that he’d caused the deaths of Antoinette Cleary and Michael Fitzroy, the young man Toni’d landed on. They also figured him as the probable killer of one Suzanne Lepcourt, who’d floated to the surface of the East River earlier that week. It was hard to tell what had caused her death—as a matter of fact, without dental records it would have been next to impossible to tell who she was, let alone what had killed her. But there wasn’t much doubt that she’d died as the result of foul play, or that the foul player was Motley.

“Decent of him to kill himself,” Durkin said. “Since nobody seemed capable of doing it for him. He saved us a lot of aggravation.”

“You had a good case against him.”

“Oh, we would have put him away,” he said. “I’ve got no doubts of that. Still, this makes it simpler all around. Did I tell you there was a note?”

“On the wall, you said. In lipstick.”

“Right. I’m surprised he didn’t use the mirror. I bet the landlord wishes he had. It’s a lot easier scraping it off a mirror than covering it with paint. There’s a mirror on the wall next to the door, too. You must have noticed it.”

“I was never in the apartment, Joe.”

“Oh, of course. I forgot.” He gave me a knowing look. “Anyway,” he said, “offing himself was the first decent thing the bastard ever did. You wouldn’t figure a guy like him to do it, would you?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Sometimes a man will have that one moment of clarity, when all the illusions fall away and he sees clearly for the first time.”

“That moment of clarity, huh?”

“It happens.”

“Well,” he said, picking up his drink, “I don’t know about you, but whenever I feel a moment of clarity coming on, I just reach out for one of these and let the clouds roll in.”

“That’s probably wise,” I said.

Of course he was hoping I’d tell him what happened on Twenty-fifth Street. He had his suspicions and he wanted me to confirm them. If that’s what he wants, he’s going to have a long wait.

I’ve told two people. I told Elaine. In a sense I’d already told her in Intensive Care, but if a part of your mind really does hear what’s said at such times, it doesn’t tell the rest of your mind later on. I let her think Motley had killed himself until she was home from the hospital. Then, the same day I brought her her Christmas present, I told her what really happened.

“Good,” she said. “Thank God. And thank you. And thank you for telling me.”

“I don’t see how I could not tell you. I don’t know if I’m glad I did it, though.”

“Why not?”

I told her how my framing him had set it all in motion in the first place, and how I’d done the same thing all over, playing God again.

“Honey,” she said, “that’s crap. He would have come back at us anyway. This way it took him twelve years instead of a couple of months. And killing the son of a bitch pretty much guarantees he won’t cause any more trouble. Not in this world, anyway, and that’s the only world I’m going to worry about right now.”

Around the middle of January Mick and I had a long night together, but after we closed the bar we didn’t go to the butchers’ mass. It had snowed a few days earlier, and he wanted to show me how pretty his place upstate looked with snow covering the hills. We drove up there and I stayed over and rode back with him the following afternoon. It was peaceful up there, and as beautiful as he’d said it was.

On the way up I told him how Motley’s life had ended. It didn’t come as a surprise to him. After all, he knew I had the address, and he knew too that I’d had to handle my business with Motley on my own.

I called Tom Havlicek after Motley’s body was discovered, but I didn’t give him anything beyond the official version. At that point, of course, they reopened the case in Massillon—now that it didn’t make any difference. It did clear Sturdevant’s name, however, which I suppose was of value to his friends and relatives. At the same time it sullied Connie’s, because the local paper came up with the fact that she’d been a hooker years back and shared this tidbit with their readers.

Tom said I ought to come out and he’d take me hunting, and I said that really sounded nice, but I think we both knew how unlikely I was to take him up on it. He called the other day when the Bengals got beaten in the Super Bowl and said he might be getting down to New York one of these days. I told him to make damn sure he gets in touch with me when he does, and he said I could count on it, that he’d make a point of it. And perhaps he will.

I haven’t told Jim Faber yet.

We have dinner at least once a week, and I’ve come close to telling him a couple of times. I suppose I’ll get around to it one of these days. I’m not sure what’s stopped me so far. Maybe I’m afraid of his disapproval, or that he’ll do what he so often does and put me face-to-face with my own conscience, a sleeping dog I let lie as much as I possibly can.