All the Flowers Are Dying (23 page)

“It’s a rough day,” I said.

“I guess. I didn’t get much sleep last night. I could lie down now but I’d just be setting myself up for another night of staring out the window. Guess what? The Towers aren’t coming back, and neither is Monica.”

“No.”

“It’s not a dream. Waking up won’t fix it.”

“No.”

“It’s gonna take time. It’s what, twenty-four hours since we heard? If I was all better I’d be disgusted with myself. Time takes time, isn’t that what they say?”

“That’s what they say.”

“I wish I could take a pill and wake up six months from now. Except I’d still feel the same way, because I wouldn’t have spent those six months dealing with it. Anyway, nobody’s invented a six-month pill yet.”

“Not that I’ve heard of.”

“They’ve got a permanent pill. You take it and you don’t wake up at all. I’m not ready for that yet.”

“Good.”

“Sometimes,” she said, “it’s not all that hard to understand why you used to drink.”

“It did shut things down.”

“I can see the appeal, I have to admit it. But the hell with all that, and the hell with me me me, as far as that goes. Did you talk to Sussman?”

“They haven’t made any progress,” I said, “or if they have he didn’t bother to report it to me.” I told her about TJ’s wild hunch, and how I’d tried it out on Sussman even though neither of us thought it stood much of a chance of being true.

“If he smoked,” she said, “she’d have told me about it. She never would have hooked up with him in the first place, she didn’t even like to be around people with the smell of smoke on their clothes, but if he just plain charmed her so much she was willing to overlook the smoking, the one thing she’d have done is mention it. ‘I can’t tell you anything about him, but he smokes, can you believe it, and I still like him.’ Whatever. She’d have found a way to say something about it.”

“Eventually,” she said, “they’re going to rebuild. First everybody in the city gets to voice an opinion, and the relatives of the victims get to vote twice, and finally they’ll build something. And I wonder what it’s going to be like, standing here and looking out at it.”

She was at the window, of course.

“I wish something would happen,” she said, and my cell phone rang.

It was the woman I’d given my card to, the mailbox lady. She was calling to tell me that the morning’s mail had held a letter for the holder of box 1217. “An’ I write down the name,” she said. “I think is the same name you say. David Thompson.”

“That’s the name,” I agreed. “Who sent the letter?”

“Who send it? How I know who send it?”

“In the upper-left corner of the envelope,” I said, “there’s usually a return address.”

“Maybe. I don’t remember.”

Jesus, it was like pulling teeth. “Could you get the envelope now and take a look?”

“Is gone.”

“It’s gone?”

“He come an’ pick it up. Same man as the picture you show me.”

“He came and picked it up.”

“Is his letter. He ask for it, I give it to him. You never say not to do this.”

Nor had I asked her to note the return address. It wasn’t her fault, it was mine, but knowing this somehow failed to make me feel better about the whole thing.

I asked her if she remembered anything about the envelope. It was, she said, a long envelope, not the smaller kind that bills come in. And the address was typed or printed, not handwritten.

“An’ he was disappointed,” she volunteered.

“Disappointed?”

“He open it an’ look inside an’ he make a face.”

Because there was no check in there, I thought. That’s why he’d turned up, to look for the check he thought I was going to send him, and he got some other letter instead, probably some relentless credit card issuer telling him he’d been preapproved, and he was understandably disheartened.

I thanked her, and she said next time she would write down whatever it said on the envelope. In fact she would make a photocopy. I hadn’t noticed a copying machine, but now that she mentioned it I recalled another hand-lettered sign in the window, offering copies at fifteen cents apiece. That would be good, I told her, and I thanked her again and hung up.

“He’ll be back tomorrow or the next day,” I told Elaine, “because he wants the check he thinks I’m going to send him. He’s sounding increasingly legit. Whatever today’s letter was, the name on it was the same one he gave Louise. And he wouldn’t have to know who the mythical check was from in order to go pick it up. The business he’s in, there’s probably a long list of companies that take their time paying him. He figures he’ll find out which one it is when he’s got the check in hand. It’s a shame she didn’t note the return address, but she’s not a mind reader.”

“It sounds like that’s the only service they don’t offer there.”

“Just about. He’ll be back tomorrow, but that’s no help. Not unless someone else sends him a letter.”

I made a trip to the dry cleaner’s for her, and picked up sandwiches at the deli on my way back. Neither of us wanted them, but we ate anyway.

Then we were talking again about the view from the window, and how it would seem when towers in one form or another began to rise into our field of vision. I don’t remember how, but that led to Magritte or dissonance or paradox, whatever, and I told her about the startling dissonance Sussman had forgotten to mention a day ago, the presence of the murder weapon at the crime scene.

She said, “A dagger.”

“Well, some kind of decorative knife. I don’t know that Sussman’s an authority on edged weapons.”

“And he thinks he found it lying around? I’ve been in that apartment a few hundred times and I never saw a dagger there.”

“It may not have been a dagger. It may have been, I don’t know…”

“A letter opener.”

“Something like that, sure.”

“I never saw one of those, either.”

“Well, would you notice it if you did? As far as—”

She didn’t let me finish. “Call him,” she said.

“Call him?”

“Sussman, Mark Sussman. Call him.”

It took a while, but I finally got through to him. She held out her hand for the phone and I gave it to her.

She said, “This is Elaine Scudder. I’m fine, thank you, but that’s not the point. I’d like you to describe the murder weapon for me. Was it bronze? Well, was it bronze colored? And was it sharp at the tip but not along the edges of the blade? Do you have it in front of you? Well, could you get it? Yes, of course it’s important. If it wasn’t important I wouldn’t ask you to do it, would I? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap. Yes, I’ll wait.”

I started to say something but she held up a hand and stopped me. “All right,” she said, “let me describe it to you, okay? And we’ll see if it’s what I think it is. It’s a bronze letter opener or paper knife, ten to twelve inches long. On one side there’s a scene in low relief of two hunting dogs holding a stag at bay. On the other side, you’ll find the name of the sculptor in incused block capitals. The name is DeVreese, that’s spelled
D-E-V-R-E-E-S-E
. You may need a magnifying glass to make it out.”

She held the phone, listened. Then she said, “Mark? Don’t go anywhere. I saw him, I saw the man who killed her. I sold him the murder weapon. Oh my God. Don’t go anywhere, we’ll be right down.”

The letter opener was sealed in a clear plastic evidence bag. Sussman held it out to her, and I could sense her reluctance to touch it, even wrapped in plastic. She took it gingerly in both hands and looked at it, and a tear flowed out of the corner of her eye and down her cheek. I don’t think she noticed it.

“Yes, this is it,” she said. “You see that little nick there? This is the one I had in the shop. It would almost have to be. I don’t know how many of these they made, but this is the only one I’ve ever seen, and I never came across it in any catalogs.” She handed it back. “He came into my shop. He stood there and he talked to me, he paid what I asked and walked off with it in his pocket. And then he killed my friend with it.”

“And this was Tuesday?”

“The day before yesterday. It didn’t take him long to use it, did it? He bought it from me that afternoon and killed her that night. I think I’m going to be sick.”

Sussman told her there was a bathroom down the hall, while another detective hurried to provide a wastebasket. Somebody else turned up with a glass of water. She decided she wasn’t going to be sick after all, took a sip of the water, and steadied herself with a couple of deep breaths.

Sussman asked if he’d used a credit card.

She said, “No, dammit. I had to go and offer him a discount if he paid cash. I said I’d knock off the sales tax. I pay the tax anyway, it’s hardly worth breaking the law to save a few dollars, but I save the credit card commission, and it’s a way to give a small discount. If I hadn’t opened my big mouth—”

“He’d have paid cash anyway,” I said. “Or used a fake card. You didn’t screw anything up.”

“Why did I have to sell him the damn thing? Why didn’t I tell him it wasn’t for sale?” No one had an answer for that, but she answered it herself. “I’m being irrational, aren’t I? I just want to rewrite the past, or at least see how it could rewritten. Never mind. He came into my shop and picked it out and I sold it to him.”

“How much did you charge him?”

“Two hundred dollars. There’s no book price because it’s not in the book, but he didn’t overpay.”

“Remember the denomination of the bills?”

“Twenties, I think. I think he counted out ten twenties.”

Someone speculated that the bills might hold a print. She remembered that she’d given some of the twenties in change later that same day to a customer who’d bought a small china dog for twelve dollars and paid for it with a hundred-dollar bill. And she’d taken a couple of twenties out of the register and spent them shopping. But there might be one of the killer’s twenties in the register, and it might have prints on it, some of which might be his, and—

It sounded like a long shot to me. But someone would have to check it out, because we were down to long shots.

She said, “He gave me the creeps.”

“Now, when you think about it?” Sussman asked. “Or at the time?”

“At the time. There was something about him. At the time I thought he was hitting on me, which I get a certain amount of, any woman does. Sometimes it’s flirting and sometimes it’s more exploratory.”

“Which was this?”

“It was somewhere in the middle, or at least that’s what it felt like, but it was distinctly creepy. It wasn’t anything he did, just the way he looked at me.” A light came into her eyes, and she shuddered. “He wanted to kill me,” she said. “There was a moment there when he was considering something, I could see it in his eyes, and I thought it was, you know, making a pass. But he had the paper knife in his hand, and he was thinking about stabbing me with it.”

Sussman told her she couldn’t know that.

“Fine,” she said. “So don’t write it down. But that’s what he was doing. You think he just happened to buy the murder weapon from somebody who just happened to be the victim’s best friend?”

“No, I didn’t say that.”

“He was stalking you,” I said.

“Yes, that’s exactly what he was doing.”

“Had you seen him before?”

“I don’t think so. It’s possible. He was, well, pretty ordinary looking.”

“But you can picture him in your mind?”

“I think so. You want me to sit down with a police artist?”

“If you don’t mind,” Sussman said, and she looked at him like he was crazy. Mind? Why should she mind?

The artist was of the new breed. He never picked up a pencil, just sat at a computer terminal loaded with a dedicated software program that had made sketches obsolete. He worked with her the same way a more traditional police artist would have worked, asking her were the eyebrows bushier, was there more definition in the jawline, and morphing the onscreen image accordingly. She sat next to him while he worked, answering his questions, occasionally reaching out to touch an area on the screen that seemed to her not to be right. A couple of us stood around watching and kept our mouths shut while the process continued.

When she decided that was as close as they were going to get, he saved the image and printed out half a dozen copies, and we each took one and stared long and hard at it. I certainly couldn’t recognize the son of a bitch. He looked like everybody and nobody.

One of the cops said, “There must be a million guys out there look like this.”

“Not a million,” Sussman said, “but I know what you mean.”

“He didn’t have any strong features,” Elaine said. “Or especially weak ones, either. There was something about his eyes, but I think that was a matter of the look in them, and how are you going to get that out of a computer?”

“But the sketch resembles him?”

She frowned. “It doesn’t not resemble him,” she said.

“Meaning what exactly?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t use my eyes right, maybe I didn’t want to look at him. Maybe all I saw was the mustache, and I locked in on that and didn’t pay enough attention to the rest of his face.”

A cop said, “It suits him, the mustache. I mean, you can see why he’d grow one. Makes his face look a little less generic.”

“I say thank God for the mustache,” Sussman said, “because we’re gonna braid a rope out of it and hang him with it. You did really well, Mrs. Scudder.”

“Elaine,” she said.

“Elaine, then. You did good work. The sketch may look, I don’t know, sketchy, to you, but you know how to use your eyes, and my guess is it’s closer than you think. You should see some of the sketches people come up with. We had this guy, committed a string of rapes in and around the Morris Park section of the Bronx. They put three sketches of him on the news, all in a row, and I swear you thought you were looking at three different guys. They didn’t even look like brothers.”

“They damn well looked like brothers,” one of the cops said.

“I’m gonna file on you,” Sussman told him. “Have you cited for racial insensitivity. I suppose you think you can get away with saying shit like that just because you’re black. They didn’t look like members of the same family, is that better?”