Even the Wicked (7 page)

“He’s never the first to walk through a door,” he said. “Makes no difference if it’s a room that got checked ten minutes ago. Before he walks in, somebody checks it again.”

“Good.”

“This fucker’s spooky, Matt. ‘The People’s Will.’ Thinks he’s Babe Fucking Ruth, calling his shots and then hitting the ball out. And he’s batting a thousand, too, the son of a bitch. This time we’re gonna strike him out.”

“Let’s hope so.”

“Yeah, let’s. Personal protection work’s supposed to be boring. If you do it right, nothing ever happens. But it generally doesn’t come with front-page headlines attached to it. ‘WILL TAKES AIM AT LEGAL WHIZ.’ And everywhere you go with the guy, there’s reporters and film crews, jokers sticking a mike in his face, other jokers pointing a video cam at him.”

“Now you know what the Secret Service goes through.”

“I do,” he said, “and they’re welcome to it. I never cared for Washington anyway. The streets go every which way, and the fucking summers there are enough to kill you.”

I found things to do over the next several days. I saw Joe Durkin at Midtown North, and he made a couple of phone calls and confirmed that the open letter to Adrian Whitfield had been written by the same person (or at least laid out in the same fashion and printed in the same typeface) as Will’s earlier correspondence. I’d assumed as much, just on the basis of literary style, but it was something I’d wanted to confirm.

Even so, I spent a little time looking for someone with a personal reason to want Whitfield dead. He’d been divorced twice, and was presently married to but legally separated from his third wife, who continued to live in Connecticut. Each of the marriages had produced children, and I remembered that one son (the eldest, it turned out) had been arrested two years previously for selling a few hundred dollars’ worth of Ecstasy to an undercover police officer. Charges had been dropped, evidently in return for his rolling over and giving up his supplier. That looked promising, but it didn’t seem to lead anywhere.

I liked the idea of someone with a private grudge. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had concealed a personal motive behind the smoke screen of serial murder. Sometimes an opportunist would disguise his own solitary act of homicide to look as though it was part of somebody else’s string—I’d had a case like that once, the killer used an ice pick and so did the imitator. And I’d known of cases where the killer committed several purposeless murders at random to establish a pattern of serial murder, then struck down someone he had reason to kill as part of that same pattern. It was a way to divert suspicion from oneself when one would otherwise be the first and most obvious suspect. But it didn’t work, because routine police work sooner or later led someone to take a look at everybody with an individual motive, and once they started looking they always found something.

If this was a smoke screen, Will was certainly blowing a lot of smoke. Writing letters to newspapers and knocking off a batch of public figures was a long way from strangling a string of housewives so that you could wring your own wife’s neck without being obvious about it.

But maybe he just plain got into it. That happens. The man who did the housewives killed four of them before he left his own wife with her panty hose knotted around her neck. And he went on to do three more before they caught him. I can’t believe he went on that long just to make it look good. My guess is he was enjoying himself.

The good weather held into the weekend. Sunday it was supposed to rain, but it didn’t, and by late that afternoon it was hot and hazy. Monday was worse, with a high of ninety-two and the air like wet wool. Tuesday was more of the same, and that afternoon I got a phone call that diverted my attention from Will for the time being.

The caller was a woman I knew named Ginnie. She said, “God, I’m so upset. You’ve heard about Byron?”

“I know he’s ill.”

“He’s dead.”

I knew Ginnie from AA. She lived at Fifty-third and Ninth and came to meetings at St. Paul’s. Byron was a friend of hers, and I’d met him a few times at meetings, but he lived in the Village and mostly attended meetings down there. He came into the program because he couldn’t stop drinking, but some years before that he’d been a heroin addict, and he’d shared needles, and shortly after he got sober he had the antibody test and turned out to be HIV-positive. You’d think people would react to such news by saying the hell with it and going out and getting drunk, and I suppose some of them do, but a lot don’t.

Byron didn’t. He stayed sober and went to meetings, and he took the drugs his doctor gave him, along with a nutritional regimen designed to strengthen his immune system. This may have done him some good, but it didn’t keep him from coming down with AIDS.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “The last time I saw him would have been in March or April. I ran into him at a meeting in the Village. I think it was Perry Street.”

“That’s where he mostly went.”

“I remember noticing that he didn’t look well.”

“Matt, AIDS would have killed him but it didn’t get the chance. Somebody shot him.”

“Somebody—”

“Pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger. Now why in God’s name would anybody do a thing like that?”

Gently I said, “Ginnie, he’d be the one with the best reason.”

“What?”

“Maybe he did it himself.”

“Oh Christ,” she said, impatient with me. “He was in a public place, Matt. You know that little park across the street from his building?”

“I don’t know where he lived.”

“Horatio Street. Not the Van Gogh but the prewar apartment building next door to it. There’s a little park across the street. Abingdon Square? No, that’s the other one.”

“Jackson Square.”

“I guess so. He was sitting there this morning with a cup of coffee and the morning paper. And a man walked up to him and shot him dead.”

“Did they catch the shooter?”

“He got away.”

“But there were witnesses.”

“There were people in the park. It was early, so it was still comfortable. It’s an oven but there now.”

“I know.”

“Thank God for air-conditioning. Byron should have stayed in his own air-conditioned apartment, but he liked the sun. He said he’d spent his whole life staying out of it, but now he seemed to get energy from it. Solar energy. He said one good thing about being HIV-positive is you didn’t have to worry about skin cancer. You didn’t know him well, did you, Matt?”

“Hardly at all.”

“You know how he got the virus.”

“Sharing needles, as I understand it.”

“That’s right. He wasn’t gay.”

“I gathered as much.”

“Living in the Village and having AIDS, it’d be natural to assume that he was. But he was straight. Very much so.”

“Oh?”

“I was sort of in love with him.”

“I see.”

“What do you do when you fall in love with somebody and he’s HIV-positive?” She didn’t wait for an answer, which was just as well, because I didn’t have one. “Gay men have to face that all the time, don’t they? I guess they practice safe sex, or else they just don’t date across HIV lines. If they’re virus-free they don’t let themselves get involved with anybody who’s not.” She was silent for a moment. “Or they just go ahead and take chances.”

“Is that what you did?”

“Oh no. Me? What makes you say that?”

“Something in your voice.”

“It’s probably envy. Sometimes I wish I were the kind of person who can act on that kind of impulse. I never was, not even in the bad old days. I liked Byron a lot and I had this kind of yearning for him, but his status put each of us off-limits for the other. We had one conversation about it, how if things were different we’d do something about it. But things weren’t different, things were the way they were. So we stayed friends. Just friends, as the saying goes, but what’s the word ‘just’ doing in there? Friendship’s pretty rare, don’t you think?”

“Yes.”

“I learned so much from him. He treasured each day. Do you think they’ll get the man who killed him?”

“It sounds likely,” I said. “He was killed in a public place with witnesses around. And that’s the Sixth Precinct, it’s not a high-crime area, so it won’t get written off as drug-related. The odds are they’ll have somebody in custody by the end of the week.”

“They might think it’s drug-related.”

“Why?”

“He used to be a junkie. It’ll be on his record, won’t it?”

“If he was ever arrested.”

“A couple of times. He never had to go to prison, but he told me he’d been arrested a few times.”

“Then it’d be on his record, yes.”

“And there’s drug dealing that goes on in that park. It’s not swarming with dealers like Washington Square, but Byron told me how he would sit in the window and looked out at the street and watch people cop.”

After a moment I said, “He didn’t go back to using dope, did he, Ginnie?”

“No.”

“Then they won’t think the killing was drug-related, unless they figure it for a case of mistaken identity, and maybe that’s what it was. It doesn’t matter. Either way they’ll handle it by the book and run down whatever leads they’ve got. My guess is they’ll find the shooter and close the case.”

“I hope so. Matt? Why should it matter to me? It’s not going to bring him back.”

“No.”

“And it’s not like I’ve got this thirst for revenge. I don’t hate the man who killed Byron. For all I know he did him a favor. He was at peace, Matt. He treasured each day, but I already said that, didn’t I?”

“Yes.”

“He was still able to get out of the house. He could still go to meetings. He had to use a cane, but he would walk the few blocks to Perry Street, and there was always somebody who would give him a seat. That was the other good thing about AIDS, he said. No worries about skin cancer, and you didn’t have to get to Perry Street an hour early to get a good seat. He could joke about it, all of it. I guess it’s bad when you can’t.”

“I guess so.”

“There was a friend of mine at work. When he couldn’t come to work anymore I used to visit him. Until I couldn’t take it anymore. It destroyed his mind, but not all at once. He would go in and out of dementia. I couldn’t bear to be around him. It’s not as though I was deserting him, he had a lover who was taking care of him, and dozens of friends. I just knew him casually, from the office. Listen to me, will you? Always having to explain myself.” She stopped to draw a breath. “I found myself looking for signs of dementia with Byron. But he was spared that.”

I read the coverage in the newspapers, and I was watching New York One, the local news channel, when Melissa Mikawa did a stand-up in Jackson Square in front of the very bench where Byron Leopold was shot to death. The cameraman provided a shot of his apartment building directly across the street, and Mikawa pointed as the camera panned to indicate the killer’s escape route.

Then she went on to something else, and I hit the Mute button and answered the phone. It was Adrian, with a couple of new jokes and the wistful report that, once Will had you in his sights, everybody else wanted to draw a bead on you. “The Fourth Estate is hot for me,” he said. “If I had the stomach for it, I could be on the tube eighteen hours a day and spend the rest of my time talking to print reporters. Of course everybody wants to marry a virgin.”

“How’s that?”

“They want an exclusive. Remember what the fellow said after they tarred and feathered him and rode him out of town on a rail?”

“Something about honor, wasn’t it?”

“‘But for the honor of it, I’d have preferred to leave town in the usual manner.’ I may not have it word for word, but since it’s an apocryphal story, how could anybody have it word for word? It’s nice to be wanted, but I’m finding it easier and easier to say no. Except for McGraw.”

“What did he want?”

“What they all want. An interview.”

He said something else, but I didn’t catch it. I was off chasing an errant thought, trying to run it down. I said, “No private meetings.”

“Come again?”

“I wouldn’t see anyone,” I said, “without your bodyguards present in the room.”

“Not even a fat old newspaperman, eh?”

“Not even the cardinal.”

“Really? There’s something about the guy that inspires confidence. I guess it’s the red hat, makes him look like one of the Guardian Angels.” He laughed and I laughed with him, and he told me to relax. “The cardinal hasn’t called,” he said, “and Marty didn’t want a meeting, just a phoner. Five minutes of my time, and could I please hand him something his and his alone that he could make a column out of. I don’t think I gave him anything, but he can always spin a column out of thin air. He’s done it often enough in the past.”

We told each other good-bye and I hung up the phone and turned off the TV without finding out what the silent figures were chattering about. I had an idea, and I sat there and let myself play with it. It seemed farfetched, and it struck me as something the police would have long since ruled out, but you never know. If nothing else, it gave me something to do.

As it turned out, a few hours on the telephone put me right back at square one. You couldn’t say it was pointless, in that I was now able to let go of a stray thought that had come my way, but neither could I get much feeling of accomplishment out of it.

Meanwhile Marty McGraw did manage to conjure up a column out of what Adrian had given him, a ruminative piece on the pluses and minuses of celebrity status. Another columnist in the same paper started out musing on the fate of Byron Leopold, but after a paragraph or two he went on to something else, and so did I. I could hardly claim close ties with Byron, I hadn’t even known his last name, and the apprehension of his murderer was the responsibility of the fellows at the Sixth Precinct. They could handle it just fine without any help from me.

Except they didn’t, not right away, and I found myself being drawn in for no good reason. On Thursday, two days after the murder, I realized in my wanderings that I was a five-minute walk from the murder scene. I went over there and sat on a park bench for half an hour. I got into a couple of conversations, then went over and exchanged a few words with the doorman at Byron’s building.