All the Flowers Are Dying (18 page)

He told me to hang on, came back to say they weren’t giving out the name yet.

I said I could understand that, I was a retired cop myself. Suppose I gave him the name of my friend. Could he tell me whether or not it was her?

He thought about it and decided that would be okay. I told him her name, and the moment of silence was answer enough.

“I hate to say it,” he said, “but that’s the name I’ve got here. You want to hang on? I’ll transfer you to someone connected to the case.”

I held, and I guess he briefed the guy before he put him through to me, because he came on the line knowing who I was and what I wanted. His name was Mark Sussman and he and his partner were first up on the case, so it was theirs until somebody took it away from them.

Was I by any chance a relative? I said I wasn’t. Then did I have any contact information for the victim’s relatives? I said I didn’t, and wasn’t sure she had any living kin. I didn’t mention the ex-husband, since I wasn’t sure of his name and had no idea where—or even if—he was living.

“We got an ID from a neighbor,” he said, “and she looks like the photo on the passport in her drawer, so there’s no real doubt of her identity. It might not be a bad idea for you to make a formal identification, if you wouldn’t mind doing that.”

Was the body still at the apartment?

“No, we got her out of there once the ME had a look at her and the photographer was done taking pictures. She’s at the morgue, that’s… well, you’d know where that is.”

I would indeed. I said it might take me a while, that I had to stay put until my wife got home. He said there was no rush.

“I’ll want to sit down and talk with you anyway,” he said. “Before or after you ID the body. If you knew the woman, maybe you can point us in a useful direction.”

“If I can.”

“Because we don’t even have a preliminary report from forensics, but it doesn’t looks like the cocksucker left us a lot of physical evidence. You could eat off the floor, the way it looked. If you had the appetite, which you wouldn’t, not after you saw what he did to her.”

I didn’t know what the hell to do. Out of habit I poured myself another cup of coffee, but I already felt as though I’d been drinking coffee for days. I poured it out and turned on the TV again, as if I’d learn more from it than I had from Sussman. The announcer got on my nerves and I turned it off before they could get any further than the traffic report.

I kept picking up the phone and putting it down again. Who the hell was I going to call and what could I say? At one point I had Sussman’s number half-dialed before I second-guessed myself and hung up. What could I tell him? That I had a pretty good idea who’d done it, but that I didn’t know his name or where to look for him?

I looked over at the phone and a number popped into my head, one I hadn’t called in years. It was Jim Faber’s, and I wished to God I could dial that number and hear my late sponsor’s voice on the other end of the line. What would he tell me? That was easy. He’d tell me not to drink.

I didn’t want to drink, hadn’t consciously thought of it, but now that I did I was just as glad that Elaine and I don’t keep anything alcoholic in the house. Because why do they distill whiskey, why do they put it in bottles, if not for occasions like this one?

There were other program friends I could call, other men and women I could count on to tell me not to drink. But I wasn’t going to drink, and I didn’t want to have the rest of any of those conversations.

I called TJ, brought him up to speed. He said, “Oh, man, that’s terrible news.”

“Yes, it is.”

“I had the news on, I heard what they said, but I never made the connection.”

“Well, why would you?”

“Damn, I feel bad.”

“So do I.”

“Elaine home?”

“She had a yoga class. She should be home any minute.”

“ ’Less she go straight to the store. You want, I’ll come over, sit with you until she gets there.”

“Isn’t the market open?”

“They ’bout to ring the bell, but it don’t matter. New York Stock Exchange get along without me.”

“No, that’s all right,” I said.

“You change your mind, just call. Won’t take me a minute to close down here and come over.”

I rang off and tried her number at the store. I didn’t think she’d go there, she rarely opens up before eleven, but it was possible. When the machine picked up I tried to keep my voice neutral, telling her it was me and to pick up if she was there. She didn’t, and I was just as glad.

A few minutes later I heard her key in the lock.

I was standing a few feet from the door when she opened it, and she knew something was wrong as soon as she saw my face. I told her to come in, took her gym bag from her, told her to sit down.

I don’t know why we do that.
Sit down
, we say, pointing at chairs.
Are you sitting down
? we want to know, before imparting bad news over the phone. What difference does it make? Are we really afraid our words will knock the recipient off his feet? Do that many people injure themselves, falling down when they hear bad news?

Brace yourself
—that’s what we’re saying. As if a person can. As if one can prepare oneself for such awful intelligence.

“It was on the news,” I said. “Monica’s dead. She’s been murdered.”

They weren’t really set up for viewing. The autopsy wasn’t finished, and a woman who looked as though she spent too much time around dead people had us wait, then took us into a large room and led us to a table on which a mound was covered with a plain white sheet. She uncovered the head, and there was no mistake. It was Monica.

“Ah, no,” Elaine said. “No, no, no.”

Outside she said, “My best friend. The best friend I ever had. We talked every day, there wasn’t a day we didn’t talk. Who am I gonna talk to now? It’s not fair, I’m too fucking old to get another best friend.”

A cab came along and I flagged it.

I hadn’t wanted to take her to the morgue, but then I hadn’t wanted to leave her alone, either. And it wasn’t my decision to make, anyway, it was hers, and she’d been adamant. She wanted to be with me, and she wanted to see her friend. At the morgue, when the woman warned us it wouldn’t be pretty, I told her she didn’t have to do this. She said she did.

In the cab she said, “It makes it real. That’s why they have open caskets at funerals. So you’ll know, so you’ll accept it. Otherwise there’d be a part of me that wouldn’t really believe she was gone. I’d go on thinking that I could pick up the phone and dial her number and there she’d be.”

I didn’t say anything, just held her hand. We rode another block and she said, “I’ll believe that anyway. On some level. But a little bit less than if I hadn’t seen her sweet face. Oh, God, Matt.”

My first thought when we met Mark Sussman was that he was awfully young, and my second thought, a corrective to the first, was that he was within a couple of years of the age I’d been when I quit the job. He was short, with a well-developed upper body suggestive of frequent workouts with weights, and his dark brown eyes were hard to read.

He was a college graduate, which seems barely worth noting these days. I don’t think there was a single man in my class at the academy who’d been to college, let alone got all the way through it. There was a general feeling in the department that college was no good for a cop, that you learned too many of the wrong things and not enough of the right ones, that it unmanned you while suffusing you with an unwarranted feeling of superiority. That was all a lot of crap, of course, but so was most of what we believed about most subjects.

He’d had a split major at Brooklyn College, history and sociology, and was accepted at a couple of graduate schools when he realized he didn’t want a teaching career. He took a couple of graduate courses in criminology at John Jay and decided that was his field, but he didn’t want to study it, he wanted to get out there and do it. That was ten years ago, and now he had a gold shield and a desk in the detective squad room at the Sixth Precinct, on West Tenth Street in the Village.

He sat behind that desk, and we took chairs alongside it. “Monica Driscoll,” he said. “Now we also found documents referring to her as Monica Wellbridge.”

“That was her ex-husband’s name,” Elaine told him. “She never used it.”

“Took her maiden name back. When was the divorce, fairly recent?”

“Oh, God, no. Fifteen years ago? At least that, maybe twenty.” And no, Monica hadn’t been in touch with Derek Wellbridge, and she had no idea how to reach him, or if he was alive to be reached.

“It’s an unusual name,” Sussman said. “A computer search might turn him up, if there’s any reason to look for him. I think you said she was seeing somebody.”

“Yes, and he was very secretive.”

“I don’t suppose you met him.”

“No. She wouldn’t even tell me his name. At first I figured it was because he was married, although we met a few of her married boyfriends over the years.”

“She did this a lot? Dated married guys?”

It should have been an easy question to answer, but Elaine didn’t want to make her friend sound easy, or undiscriminating. “If she was dating somebody,” she said after a moment, “he generally turned out to be married.”

“She kept making the same mistake?”

“No, she liked it that way. She didn’t want to get married again, she didn’t want to be all wrapped up in another person.”

“This mystery man, how long had she been seeing him?”

“Not long. Two weeks? Three? Less than a month, anyway.”

“What do you know about him?”

“Oh, gosh, let me think. He was very secretive, he would have to leave town and not be able to tell her where he was going. She had the idea that he was working for the government. Or
a
government. You know, like some kind of an agent.”

“She give you any kind of a description?”

“He dressed nicely, he was well groomed. But then I never saw her with anybody who wasn’t. Oh, I know. He had a mustache.”

“Yeah, that fits.” He put down his pen, looked up at us. “The doorman sent somebody up to her apartment last night around nine-thirty or ten. Guy gave the doorman his name and she said send him up.”

“If he gave the doorman his name—”

“Yeah, well, I think we’re lucky this particular genius remembers the mustache. And the flowers.”

“Flowers?”

“Which checks out, because we found fresh flowers in a vase on the mantel. He must have had his hands full, too, because he had to set something down on the floor so he could stroke his mustache while he was waiting for the elevator.”

“He put something down so he could stroke his mustache?”

“It was more like he was grooming it. You know, like this.” He put his thumb and forefinger together in the center of his bare upper lip, then spread them apart. “Making sure he looked all right before he went upstairs. Anyway, that’s how come”—he checked his notes— “how come Hector Ruiz noticed the mustache.” He looked at Elaine. “That’s all she mentioned about his appearance? He dressed nicely and wore a mustache?”

“That’s all I can remember. She said he was a good lover. Very forceful, very imaginative.”

“More than she knew.” She looked questioningly at him, and he said, “You’re going to get this anyway from the media, as much as we’d like to keep a lid on it. There’s evidence of ligatures on her wrists and ankles, and tape residue in the area of her mouth. Was she into that whole scene, would you happen to know?”

“She was a sophisticated woman of a certain age,” she told him. “Living alone in Greenwich Village. I mean, you do the math.”

“Okay, but—”

She stopped him. “I don’t think she was kinky,” she said. “I don’t think she was
into
anything in particular. I think, you know, if she liked a guy and he wanted to do something, she wouldn’t run out of there screaming for her mother.”

“That’s just a figure of speech, right? Because what I’ve got is both parents are deceased.”

“Yes, a long time ago.”

“And no relatives that you know of.”

“She had a brother who died. There could be, I don’t know, an aunt or a cousin somewhere, but nobody I knew about. Nobody she kept in touch with.”

He said, “As far as her not being into bondage, S & M, whatever you want to call it, that would actually fit right in with our take on it.” To me he said, “I don’t know if you ever ran into this, but you must have if you worked this precinct. Anybody who’s at all serious about kink, they’ve got a closet full of gear, leather and rubber and masks and chains, you’d almost think the equipment’s more important to them than what they do with it. She didn’t have a thing, no handcuffs, no whips, none of that garbage. Not that—” He stopped short, started to laugh. “You watch
Seinfeld
? I was starting to say ‘Not that there’s anything wrong with that.’ You remember that episode?”

“Sure.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make light. What it looks like, he brought along what he figured he’d need, and he took it away with him when he was done. Did she say he was neat? You’d have to say he was the neatest heterosexual male on the planet. There was a bottle of liquor, an Italian after-dinner drink. I’ve got it written down here somewhere. It doesn’t matter, it’s just a bottle of fancy booze. We think he brought it with him, along with the flowers, and they each had a drink out of it, and he wiped the bottle and glasses before he left. He wiped everything, he didn’t leave a print in the whole damned apartment, as far as we’ve been able to tell. We’ll probably lift a partial somewhere or other before we’re done, we usually do, but I have to say I wouldn’t bet on it.”

“Because he was neat.”

“He even ran the vacuum cleaner. The downstairs neighbor heard it sometime around midnight. He wasn’t about to complain about it, it wasn’t that noisy, it was just unexpected at that hour. It was evidently out of character for her to vacuum in the middle of the night.”

“Or ever,” Elaine said. “She had a maid come in once a week, and vacuuming was something the maid did.”