Even the Wicked (32 page)

I was still digesting that when his voice dropped and he said, “Of course the money wasn’t going to come from out of thin air. It was the insurance company’s, and I was in no sense entitled to it. But I began to see it that way. If he died accidentally it was mine, all of it. If he died of his disease, I’d be cheated out of half of it.”

“Cheated out of it.”

“That’s how I began to see it, yes.” He lifted the teapot, filled both our cups. “I started imagining accidents,” he said.

“Imagining them?”

“Things that might happen. In this part of the country people are killed in auto accidents with awful frequency. I don’t suppose that happens as often in New York.”

“It happens,” I said, “but probably not as often.”

“When you think of New York,” he said, “you think of people getting murdered. Although the actual murder rate’s not particularly high there compared with the rest of the country, is it?”

“Not that high, no.”

“It’s much higher in New Orleans,” he said, and went on to name a couple of other cities. “But in the public mind,” he said, “New York’s streets are the most dangerous in the nation. In the world, even.”

“We have the reputation,” I agreed.

“So I imagined that happening to him. A knife or a gun, something swift and surgical. And do you know what I thought?”

“What?”

“I thought what a blessing it would be. To both of us.”

“Both you and Byron Leopold?”

“Yes.”

“How did you figure that?”

“A quick death.”

“Almost a mercy killing,” I said.

“You’re being ironic, but is it less merciful than the disease? Nibbling away at your life, leaving you with less and less, finally taking away the will to live before it finally takes your life? Do you know what it’s like to watch that happen to someone you love?”

“No.”

“Then you should be grateful.”

“I am.”

He took off his glasses again, wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “She died by inches,” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

“My wife. It took her years to die. It put her on crutches and it put her in a wheekhair. It would take a bite of her life, and we would adjust to that and become accustomed to that. And then it would take another bite. And it never got better. And it always got worse.”

“It must have been very hard for you.”

“I suppose it was,” he said, as if that aspect hadn’t occurred to him before. “It was awful for her. I used to pray that she would die. I felt conflicted about that. How can you pray for the death of someone you love? You can pray for relief, but can you pray for death? ‘God, ease her pain,’ I would say. ‘God, give her the strength to bear her burden.’ And then I would find myself praying, ‘God, let it be over.’” He sighed, straightened up. “Not that it made the slightest bit of difference. The disease had its own schedule, its own pace. Prayer wouldn’t slow it down or speed it up. It tortured her for as long as it wanted to, and then it killed her. And then it was over.”

The tape recorder had a sense of theater. It picked that moment to get to the end of side one. You want to open it up and turn the cassette over and start it recording again with as little fuss as possible, to keep from breaking the mood. So of course my fingers sabotaged the process, fumbling with the catch, fumbling with the cassette.

Maybe it was just as well. Maybe the mood needed breaking.

When he resumed talking, he returned to the subject of Byron Leopold. “At first I just thought that someone might kill him,” he said. “Some burglar breaking into his house, some mugger on the street. Anything, a stray bullet from a war between drug dealers, anything I’d read about in the newspaper or see on television. I’d recast it in my mind and imagine it happening to him. There was a program, I think it was based on a real case, this male nurse was smothering patients. They weren’t all terminal, either, so I don’t suppose it was strictly a case of mercy killing. I thought that might happen, and I realized if it did the death would probably be misdiagnosed and recorded as natural.”

“And you’d be cheated.”

“Yes, and never know it. For all I knew some thoughtful nurse had smothered Harlan Phillips on his deathbed. There was a double-indemnity clause in that policy, too. So for all I knew—”

“Yes.”

“If Byron Leopold was going to be murdered, it couldn’t look as though he’d died in his sleep, or succumbed to his disease. It wouldn’t have to be disguised as an accident. I checked, and homicide fits the definition of accident for insurance purposes. By now, you see, I was contemplating doing it myself. I don’t know when that happened, that the idea entered my mind, but once it was there it was always there. I couldn’t think of anything else.”

He had never thought of taking an active part in ending his wife’s agony. Even when he prayed for her death, it never occurred to him to do anything to bring it about. When he had reached the point that he was actively considering ways to kill Byron Leopold, it struck him that a knife or a bullet would have spared his wife a great deal of suffering.

“But I could never have done it,” he said.

“But you thought you could do it with Leopold.”

“I didn’t know. The only way I could imagine doing it was with a gun. I couldn’t possibly strike him or stab him, but maybe I could point a gun and pull a trigger. Or maybe not. I wasn’t at all certain.”

“Where did you get the gun?”

“I’d had it for years. It belonged to an uncle of mine, and when he passed away my aunt didn’t want it in the house. I put it in a trunk in the attic, along with a box of shells that came with it, and never thought of it again. And then I did think of it, and it was where I’d put it. I didn’t even know if it would work. I thought it might blow up in my hand if I tried to fire it.”

“But you used it anyway?”

“I drove out into the country and test-fired it. I just shot a couple of bullets into a tree trunk. It seemed to work all right. So I went home, and I thought about it, and I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep and I knew I had to do something. So I went to New York.”

“How did you get the gun through airport security?”

“How did I…But I didn’t go to the airport. I didn’t fly, I never fly.”

“You told me that,” I said. “I’d forgotten.”

“I took the train,” he said. “There’s no security check, no metal detectors to pass through. I guess they’re not afraid of hijackers.”

“Not since Jesse James.”

“I went to New York,” he said, “and I found the building where he lived, and it turned out there was a bed-and-breakfast just a block and a half away. I didn’t know how long I’d be there but I didn’t think it could possibly take me more than a week. Assuming I would be able to do it.”

As it turned out, he could have done it the morning after his first night in the bed-and-breakfast. He’d gone to the little park so that he could watch the entrance to Leopold’s building, and the minute he saw the man emerge on crutches and carrying a newspaper, he somehow knew it was the man he sought. AIDS showed in the man’s face, and it was evident that the disease was in its later stages.

But he hadn’t brought the gun with him. It was in his room, wrapped in a dish towel and locked in his suitcase.

He brought it the following morning, and Byron Leopold was already on his bench in the park when he got there. It had occurred to him that there might be more than one AIDS victim living at that address, given that the neighborhood seemed to have a high concentration of homosexuals. While a quick death would undoubtedly constitute a blessed deliverance for this man, whoever he might be, it seemed prudent to make sure of his identity. This was, to be sure, murder for gain, however he chose to rationalize it, and it would profit him not at all to kill the wrong person.

“So I went up to him,” he said, “and I called him by name, and he nodded, and I said his name again, and he said yes, that he was Byron Leopold, or whatever he said, I don’t remember exactly. And I still wasn’t sure I would do it, you see, because I hadn’t committed myself. I could just walk away having made the identification, and then I could do it some other time. Or I could go back home and forget about it.

“‘Mr. Leopold?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Byron Leopold?’ ‘Yes, what is it?’ Something like that. And then I had the gun out and I was shooting him.”

He was vague on the details after that point. He started running, expecting pursuit, expecting capture. But no one came after him and no one caught him. By early evening he was back on the train, bound for Cleveland.

“I thought they would come for me,” he said.

“But no one did.”

“No. There were people in the park. Witnesses. I thought they’d furnish a description and one of those composite drawings would be in all the newspapers. I thought someone would make a connection between the insurance policy and myself. But there was nothing in the papers, nothing at all as far as I could see. And I kept waiting for someone to come to the door, but no one did.”

“It sounds as though you would have welcomed it.”

He nodded slowly. “I’ve thought about it all the time,” he said, “and I still can’t explain it, not to myself and certainly not to anybody else. I had the illusion that I could go to New York and kill this man, and then I could come back here, and the only change in my life would be that I would have more money.”

“But that’s not the way it was.”

“The instant I pulled the trigger,” he said, “the illusion vanished like a portrait in smoke blown away by a gust of wind. You couldn’t even see where it had been. And it was done, the man was dead, there was no reversing it.”

“There never is.”

“No, there never is, not one bit of the past. It’s all etched in stone. You can’t erase a word, not a syllable.” He sighed heavily. “I thought…well, never mind what I thought.”

“Tell me.”

“I thought it didn’t matter,” he said. “I thought he was going to die anyway. And he was!”

“Yes.”

“And so are we all, every last one of us. We’re all mortal. Does that mean it’s no crime to kill us?”

No crime for God, I thought. He does it all the time.

“I told myself I was doing him a favor,” he went on bitterly. “That I was giving him an easy out. What made me think that was what he wanted? If he’d been ready to die he could have taken pills, he could have put a plastic bag over his head. There are enough ways. For God’s sake, he lived on a high floor, he could have gone out the window. If that’s what he wanted.” He frowned. “You can tell he wasn’t eager to die. There was only one reason for him to sell that policy. It was to get money to live on. He wanted his life to be as comfortable as possible for as long as it lasted. So I provided the money,” he said, “and then I took away the life.”

He’d removed his glasses in the course of that speech, and now he put them on again and peered through them at me. “Well?” he said. “Now what happens?”

Always the beautiful question.

“You have some choices,” I said. “There’s a Cleveland police officer, a friend of a friend, who’s familiar with the situation. We can go to the stationhouse where you’ll be placed under arrest and officially informed of your rights.”

“The Miranda warning,” he said.

“Yes, that’s what they call it. Then of course you can have your attorney present, and he’ll explain your options. He’d probably advise you to waive extradition, in which case you’ll be escorted back to New York for arraignment.”

“I see.”

“Or you can accompany me voluntarily,” I said.

“To New York.”

“That’s right. The advantage in that, as far as you’re concerned, is chiefly that it cuts out a certain amount of delays and red tape. And there’s another personal consideration.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, I won’t use handcuffs,” I said. “If you’re officially in custody you’ll have to be cuffed throughout, and that can be both embarrassing and uncomfortable on the plane. I don’t have any official standing so I’m not bound by rules of that sort. All we’ll have to do is get two seats together.”

“On a plane,” he said.

“Oh, that’s right. You don’t fly.”

“I suppose it strikes you as terribly silly. Especially now.”

“If it’s a phobic condition the rules of logic don’t apply. Mr. Havemeyer, I don’t want to talk you into anything, but I’ll tell you this. If you’re officially taken into custody and escorted to New York, they’ll make you get on a plane.”

“But if I were to go with you—”

“How long does it take on the train?”

“Under twelve hours.”

“No kidding.”

“The Lake Shore Limited,” he said. “It leaves Cleveland at three in the morning and arrives at ten minutes of two in the afternoon.”

“And that’s how you went to New York?”

“It’s not that bad,” he said. “The seats recline. You can sleep. And there’s a dining car.”

You can fly it in a little over an hour, but even if I left him in a holding cell in Cleveland, I wouldn’t be able to catch a flight back until sometime the next morning.

“If you want,” I said, “I’ll take the train with you.”

He nodded. “I suppose that would be best,” he said.

It was a long night.

I left Havemeyer alone long enough to duck across the street to the car and bring Jason Griffin up to speed. He had plans for the evening but insisted it was no problem to cancel them, and that he’d be glad to take me and my prisoner to the train station. I told him he might as well join us inside the house, and he agreed that it would be more convenient than sitting in the car with the wide-mouthed jar his uncle had recommended.

While he locked the car, I hurried back to the house myself, anxious about having left Havemeyer alone. I was afraid I might find him dead by his own hand, or on the phone with his lawyer. It was hard to say which of the two prospects was more troubling, but both fears proved groundless. I found him in the kitchen, rinsing out our teacups.

I told him I’d invited my driver in to join us, and moments later there was a knock on the door and I opened it for Jason. I didn’t know what the three of us were going to talk about, but that settled itself when Havemeyer determined that Jason was a student at Western Reserve. That led to a conversation about the college’s football team, which turned easily enough into a spirited discussion of Cleveland’s pro team, the Browns, and their perfidious owner’s decision to pack the franchise off to Baltimore.