All the Flowers Are Dying (31 page)

“I’m going to start by apologizing,” I said. “I got you here under false pretenses. There’s a reason I don’t look familiar. We’ve never met. I didn’t give you any work, and I don’t have a check for you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, how could you? My name’s Matthew Scudder, I’m a former police officer. A woman I know met you online. She had a bad experience once, and it led her to adopt a policy of running a check on people she was interested in, to make sure they aren’t misrepresenting themselves.”

“Louise,” he said.

“You don’t check out,” I said. “Your name’s so common it makes you hard to investigate, but what does come up has some pieces missing. I think I know what’s going on here.”

“This is making me very uncomfortable.”

“You’re free to leave. I can’t hold you here. But why don’t you listen to what I have to say, and then you can tell me if I’m right or wrong. Or just tell me to go to hell, whatever you want.”

“He had a rough time,” I said. “He had a job and a girlfriend, and he lost them both at about the same time, and he took it hard. Slept fifteen or more hours a day, watched television the rest of the time. Depression’s a self-limiting state, and sooner or later you generally find your way out of it, unless you go and kill yourself first. He managed to avoid doing that, but by the time he surfaced he was broke and three months behind on the rent, and he knew it was only a question of time before they locked him out of his apartment. He took his laptop and some of his clothes and put them in his car, and he was just in time, because two days later he went back and saw everything he owned out at the curb. He just turned around and walked away.”

I could have told her this over the phone, I suppose, but it seemed to me she deserved more than that. So I’d called her at work and met her at five-thirty, in a coffee shop around the corner from her office.

“He wasn’t destitute,” I said, “but his credit cards were maxed out and he was very low on cash. He called all his contacts in the business, looking for freelance work, and a couple of people gave him some work. But that meant waiting to get paid, sometimes for months. That’s evidently the nature of the business.”

“It’s the nature of every business,” she said.

“He looked for a place to live,” I said, “and he couldn’t find anything he’d want to live in for less than two thousand dollars a month. Even way out in Brooklyn or Queens everything he looked at was well over a thousand, and that meant coming up with a month’s rent and one or two months’ security deposit just to get in the door.”

“And he’d need furniture on top of that.”

“The rent alone was the killer. Even if he found a way to swing it, the monthly nut was going to be tough, because his prospects weren’t that great and he didn’t have a cash cushion to get him through the slow stretches. So he decided to hell with paying rent. He’s been living in his car.”

“You’re kidding. I didn’t even know he had a car.”

“It’s so old and beat up he can park it on the street, which is a good thing because he can’t afford to garage it. And it’s a Chevy Caprice, a big old four-door sedan with a roomy back seat.”

“And that’s where he sleeps?”

“He says it’s not that uncomfortable. He slept in it while he looked for an apartment, and he had grown used to it by the time he realized he wasn’t going to be able to find anything he could afford. So he went on living in it, and the only problem is making sure he’s always got a legal parking place. If he ever gets towed, he’ll have to come up with a few hundred dollars to get his car back from the pound, and he can’t afford to let that happen.”

“But he doesn’t look like somebody who’s living in his car. He shaves, he combs his hair, he wears clean clothes, he smells nice…”

“He belongs to a gym. It’s a good one, the membership costs him over a hundred dollars a month, but that’s a lot less than an apartment. He shows up every morning, pumps some iron or puts in his time on the treadmill, then showers and shaves and puts on the change of clothes he’s brought with him. He keeps all his clothes in the trunk of his car and goes to a coin laundry when he has to.”

“And what about work? Is he really writing advertising copy?”

“Just like he said. He’s got his laptop, which he hides under the front seat of the car in case somebody breaks in. When he wants to go online he goes to a café with wireless access. I’m not too clear on what that is.”

“I know how it works. I’ve got a card for it in my laptop but I’ve never used it. My God, do I know how to pick ’em or what? I find the man of my dreams and he’s living in the back of his car.”

“He’s not married,” I said, “and he’s not leading a double life.”

“How could he? It sounds as though he’s barely leading a single life.”

“He’s making ends meet. It’s hard for him to get ahead of the game, but he’s staying even, and that’s no mean trick in this economy. He’s a plucky guy. I have to say I liked him.”

“I liked him myself. Or at least I liked the person he was pretending to be.”

“The pretense bothered him,” I told her. “Our conversation was an uncomfortable one—”

“I can imagine.”

“—but he seemed relieved to have it all out in the open. He wanted to tell you but he didn’t know how.”

“ ‘Honey, it so happens I’m a bum.’ ”

“Well, he doesn’t intend to spend the rest of his life living in his car. He’s hoping to find full-time work, or build his freelance business into something that’ll put him back on his feet again. Anyway, he wasn’t sure how much you liked him, or whether the two of you had something that might last. If not, why bother embarrassing himself by coming clean?”

“When we went out for dinner,” she said, “I offered to split the check. He wouldn’t hear of it.”

“As I said, he’s not impoverished. Just low on funds.”

“And homeless. You know, he could have stayed over. He could have slept in a real bed for a change.”

“I guess it was a point of honor for him not to.”

“Jesus,” she said, and drummed the tabletop with her fingers. “He’s gonna call me and I don’t know what the hell I’m gonna say to him.”

“I don’t think he’ll be calling.”

“He’s dumping me? Where did that come from?”

“He’ll wait for you to call,” I said. “And if you don’t, well, he’ll take that to mean you don’t want to see him again.”

“Oh,” she said, and thought about it. “That makes it easier for me, doesn’t it? Saves us both the nuisance of a difficult conversation.” She thought some more. “Except maybe that’s tacky. I know how much fun it is to wait around wondering if the phone’s gonna ring. Maybe it’s simpler to make the call and get it over with.”

I told her that was up to her. She wanted to know how much she owed me, and I told her the retainer covered her tab in full. In fact, I said, reaching for the check, there was enough left over to cover the coffee.

“I’m glad you found out,” she said, “even if I’m not crazy about
what
you found out. I knew there was something. He was too good to be true, with that adorable mustache. Plus he smokes.”

“The mustache,” I said.

“What? Don’t tell me it’s gone.”

“No,” I said. “You just reminded me of something, that’s all.”

I didn’t wait until I got home. I found a doorway where the street noise wasn’t too bad and called Sussman on my cell phone.

He said, “You thought it over and changed your mind.”

“No, not a chance,” I said. “This is something else entirely, something you said the other day that I keep meaning to ask you about.”

“So now’s your chance. What did I say?”

“It had to do with his mustache. The subject came up, and you said something like the mustache is a good thing, because you could braid a rope out of it and hang him with it.”

“I said that?”

“Something like it, anyway.”

“I guess we can blame it on Brooklyn College,” he said. “Colorful figures of speech, when I’m not using words like
proactive
. So?”

“What did you mean?”

“Oh, you weren’t there when that came out? I guess maybe you weren’t. All his vacuuming only worked up to a point. We found three little hairs, and they didn’t belong to the woman. One on the sheet next to her and two in the bush, you should pardon the expression.”

“Hairs from a mustache.”

“So the lab techs tell me. Facial hair, anyway, and enough for a DNA profile. That’s not gonna find him for us, but once we do it’s golden. If there’s one thing the DAs like it’s some good hard physical evidence to put on the table.”

I walked a block and called him again. I guess he had Caller ID and I guess my phone wasn’t blocking it, because his opening words were, “Now what?”

“About the mustache,” I said.

“So?”

“One thing it tells me is he’s clean-shaven.”

“Now, you mean? How do you figure that? He doesn’t know he left a couple of hairs behind when he was having a snack. And even if he does, the DNA’s not specific to the mustache. It’s in every cell in his body.”

“He didn’t shave,” I said. “He didn’t have to. He just used a little solvent and peeled it off.”

For a moment I thought the connection was broken. Then he said, “You’re saying it’s a fake mustache.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“And it was no accident he left those hairs there. He placed them there on purpose so that we’d find them.”

“Right.”

“Jesus, that’s convoluted.”

“We know he’s a planner.”

“And a tricky bastard altogether. But this doesn’t make any sense, Matthew. Giving us somebody else’s DNA doesn’t lead us down any primrose path. It’s not like he’s trying to frame somebody else for this. I mean, he knows we’ve got an eyewitness, a friend of the victim who sold him the murder weapon. We pull him in, we’re not gonna cut him loose because the DNA’s not a match.”

“It gives his lawyer something to play with in court,” I said.

“ ‘Isn’t it true that you found male facial hair at the crime scene? And isn’t it true that you tried and failed to match that DNA with that of the defendant’s?’ ”

“ ‘And isn’t it within the realm of possibility that another man visited the victim’s apartment
after
my client had gone home, and how can you rule out the possibility that this other man was responsible for her death?’ ”

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Sussman said. “But what kind of psycho pervert murderer is so fucking painstaking? Listen, are you gonna be around for the next couple of hours?”

“Whether I am or not, I’ll have my cell with me.”

“Good. I want to talk to the lab guys, and then I want to talk to you some more.”

I was just walking in the door when the phone rang. “They didn’t have to do anything,” he said. “All I had to do was ask. The three hairs they recovered are male human facial hair, like I said. Facial hair is like body hair, it grows to a certain length and then it falls out, at which time the follicle sets about sprouting another hair.”

“And?”

“And these hairs didn’t fall out. They were severed, probably by a scissors. Now what happens sometimes is you take a scissors and trim your mustache, and you don’t comb it when you’re done, and some of the trimmings stay in the mustache and get dislodged later. Which is why they weren’t suspicious when they examined the hairs and saw they’d been cut.”

“Makes sense.”

“And the thing is it could have happened just that way. I can’t prove it didn’t. But I
know
it didn’t, because if our Mr. Neat trimmed his fucking mustache he’d have damn well combed it afterward.”

“Right.”

“He combed her crotch. Either that or he shaved his own bush, the way some of them do, to keep from leaving telltale evidence. Man, I bet every TV in every prison is tuned to
C.S.I
. when it comes on, I bet the motherfuckers sit there and take notes. Anyway, we didn’t come up with any loose pubic hairs there, not his and not hers, but what we did find were those hairs from his mustache. So it was a fake.”

“Had to be.”

“And he wore it all along. When he met her, when he went to your wife’s shop. Incidentally, forget what I said before about her going back to work. This prick’s too fucking clever.”

“My thought exactly.”

“I don’t know if we should change the sketch for TV and the papers. It might just tip him off that we know what he’s doing. Besides, he could have a full beard by now.”

“If he found someone to sell it to him.”

“That’s a line of inquiry I was just thinking about. Theatrical supply houses, because somebody had to sell him that mustache. Matt, I’ve got to thank you for this one. I never even thought of a false mustache. I’m not used to thinking that way. Maybe criminals were a shiftier lot back in the day, huh?”

“That must be it,” I said. “The guy’s a throwback.”

TJ was on the computer and Elaine was reading a magazine, but they both took a break to hear about David Thompson. Elaine was bothered by the idea that Louise was going to break up with him. “So he hasn’t got a place to live. So what?”

“I think it bothers her that he didn’t tell her.”

“It’s like herpes,” she said. “You don’t tell anybody until they need to know. Besides, he did tell her his place was too small for company. He just didn’t tell her quite how small it was.”

“He said it was in Kips Bay.”

“Well, maybe he likes to park there, maybe there are lots of good spaces. I think she should buy a house in Montclair and let him park in her driveway.”

“You’re just a sucker for happy endings.”

“Well, you’re right about that.”

TJ remembered how, on the night we tried to tail him, Thompson had stopped to make a quick phone call as soon as he was out of Louise’s building.

“We figured he was calling a woman,” I said, “and we were right. He called Louise, to tell her what a good time he’d had. Then he took the route he did, over to West End and up to Eighty-eighth, because that’s where his car was parked. And when he got in it, well, that was how he gave us the slip, without even knowing we were there.”