All the Flowers Are Dying (14 page)

“Who’s in the building around the corner?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “You’re the detective.”

“Thanks.”

TJ said, “Could be another woman.”

“In the corner building?”

“Everybody got to be someplace.”

“So he’s two-timing Louise with somebody who lives around the corner from her?”

“Three-timing, if he got that wife in Scarsdale.”

“Maybe she’s a working girl,” Elaine offered.

“Louise? I honestly don’t think—”

“Not Louise. The late date, the woman around the corner. Maybe she’s in the game.”

“But he was just with Louise.”

“So?”

“From what she said—”

“He screwed her brains out?”

“Not the words she used,” I said, “but that was the general impression I got, yeah.”

“Maybe the earth moved for her but not for him. Or maybe he was going for the hat trick. That’s what, hockey?”

I nodded. “When one player scores three goals in a game.”

“I knew it was three goals, I just couldn’t remember if it was hockey or soccer.”

“It’s migrated into other sports, but it’s a hockey term.”

“I wonder where it comes from. Anyway, if he knows a working girl right around the corner from Louise, why not drop over and see her?”

I summoned up the image of him in front of Louise’s brownstone, phone in hand. “He didn’t have to look up her number,” I said. “But he’d have it on his speed dial, wouldn’t he?”

“Probably. That’s what people have nowadays, instead of a little black book.”

“If he was still in the mood,” I said, “why didn’t he just stay upstairs a little longer?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” she said. “Do you suppose it could be that Y chromosome he’s been carrying around all his life?”

“In other words, he’s a guy.”

“When I was working,” she said, “I’d have johns who would get themselves off before they came over, so they could last longer. I had one who was the opposite, he wanted me to keep him right on the edge for like an hour or more and not let him get off at all, so he could go home and give his wife a bounce she wouldn’t forget. That one baffled me, I’ve got to say. I felt like a picador at a bullfight.”

I glanced at TJ to see what he made of her remembrance of things past. If it had any impact on him, it didn’t show on his face. He knew about her career history, he and Monica were about the only people we saw regularly who did, but she rarely talked about it in his presence as she was dong now.

TJ had never known his own mother. She’d died when he was less than a year old, and his grandmother had raised him until her own death. Things she’d told him had led TJ to speculate that his mother had been a working girl, and that he himself might have been a trick baby, an unplanned bonus from an unwitting client. No way to tell, he’d said, and he seemed comfortable enough with not knowing.

But the conversation had lost its way, having essentially abandoned David Thompson for a dissertation on the Men Are Strange theme. I said, “I’m not convinced he went into that building.”

“It might have been another one?”

“Or no building at all. Maybe he knew he was being followed.”

“He wouldn’t,” TJ said, “ ’less he was suspicious to start with. You think he picked up something from Louise?”

“Not if he used a condom,” Elaine said.

“If he’s married,” I said, “he might have suspected his wife was having him followed. That could have made him wary enough to sense us.”

“Way he stood there lighting that cigarette,” TJ said. “Like he wanted a minute to figure out what to do as much as he wanted that nicotine hit.”

“So he turned right instead of left,” I said, “and turned right again at West End, turned against traffic. Then he ducked into a building, or found a doorway or an alleyway to hide in.”

“Why would he do that? To shake the two of you, obviously, but why? Wouldn’t it be suspicious behavior, and wouldn’t you think the last thing he’d want to do if he thinks his wife is having him followed is act suspicious?”

“ ’Less it’s more important that she don’t know where he’s going next.”

I said, “Maybe there was a cab there. Around the corner on Eighty-eighth.”

“He had a cab waiting for him?”

“No, but there could have been one standing there, discharging a fare. And he could have grabbed it and been on his way by the time I turned the corner.”

“Wouldn’t you have seen a cab driving away?”

“If I was looking for it. If it was already halfway down the block, and I was looking around for a man on foot, well, I might not have noticed it. Or he could have had a car parked there.”

“And started it up and pulled out without being seen? Only if you was limpin’ round the corner.”

“He could have parked there,” I said, “and got in and pulled the door shut, but not started up. Because he didn’t want to be spotted.”

“Or because he had something to do first,” Elaine offered, “like make a phone call or look up an address.”

“Or smoke another cigarette,” I said, “or anything at all. There’s too much we don’t know and too many avenues for speculation.”

“Plus all the side streets,” TJ said.

We batted it back and forth a little more, and Elaine said he sounded to her like a man with something to hide, and her guess would be that he was a sex addict. That was a new term, she added, for what used to be just a guy who liked to party, or what earlier generations had called a good-time Charlie, or a gentleman with an eye for the ladies.

That got us talking about how the world didn’t cut you much slack anymore, how yesterday’s pastimes were today’s pathologies. TJ finished his Coke and went home.

“Leo wouldn’t take any money,” I told Elaine, “and neither will I. Tonight’s not going to come out of Louise’s retainer.”

“The $500? Didn’t that get used up a while ago?”

“I’ve barely put a dent in it.”

“You’re a real hard-nosed businessman, aren’t you?”

“The money doesn’t really matter.”

“I know that, baby.”

“I just want to see if I can figure it out,” I said. “It shouldn’t be that hard.”

He holds the bronze letter opener in his hands, turns it over, runs a finger over the design in low relief on the handle. A pack of hounds are holding a stag at bay. It is, he notes, quite artfully executed.

The woman, every bit as artfully executed as the letter opener, stands patiently on the other side of the counter. He asks her what she can tell him about the piece.

“Well, it’s a paper knife, of course. Art Nouveau, probably French but possibly Belgian.”

“Belgian?”

“It’s signed,” she says. “On the reverse.” He turns it over and she hands him a magnifying glass with a staghorn handle. “It’s hard to see with the naked eye, or at least with my naked eye. See?”

“DeVreese.”

“Godfrey DeVreese,” she says, “or Godefroid, if you prefer. I’m not sure which he’d have preferred. He was Belgian. I had a bronze medallion of his for years, a gorgeous thing, a good three and a half inches in diameter. Leopold the Second on one side, with a beard that was a hell of a lot nobler than the man sporting it. You know about Leopold the Second?”

He grins easily. “I would suppose,” he says, “that he came between Leopold the First and Leopold the Third.”

“
Actually his successor was his son, Albert. Leopold Three came a little later on. Number Two was the gentle fellow who ran the Belgian Congo as his personal fief. He treated the local residents as slaves, and he’d have had more respect for the inhabitants of an ant farm. Remember all those photos of natives with their hands chopped off
?”

What can she be she talking about? “It rings a bell,” he says.

“But he looked good,” she says, “especially in bronze. There was a horse on the other side, and he looked even better than Leo. It was a draft horse, one of those big boys you don’t see anymore outside of a Budweiser commercial. Except this one was a Percheron and the Budweiser horses are Clydesdales. The medal was an award from some sort of agricultural fair. Probably the turn-of-the-century equivalent of a tractor-pulling contest.”

“You still have the medallion?”

“I thought I was going to own it forever, but some horse collector spotted it a few months ago and away it went. I’ll probably never see another one like it.”

He turns the letter opener in his hands. It’s quite beautiful, and he likes the heft of it.

“You said turn-of-the-century?”

“I suppose DeVreese would have said fin de siècle. Or the equivalent in Flemish, whatever that might be. I can’t date it precisely, I’m afraid, but it would have to be late nineteenth or early twentieth century.”

“So it’s about a hundred years old.”

“Give or take.”

He tests the point with his thumb. It’s quite sharp. The blade’s edges are not. It will serve to open a letter, but you couldn’t slice with it.

You could stab, however.

“May I ask the price?”

“It’s two hundred dollars.”

“That seems high.”

“I know,” she says disarmingly.

“Do you suppose I could get a discount?”

She considers this. “If you pay cash,” she says, “I could absorb the sales tax.”

“So that would be two hundred dollars even as opposed to what, two-sixteen?”

“A few dollars more than that, actually. If you want I could look it up for you, so you’ll know to the penny how much you’re saving.”

“But what I’d be paying,” he says, “is two hundred dollars.”

“And in return you’d be getting a piece of history.”

“It’s always nice to get a piece”—just the slightest pause here—“of history.” Has she even noticed the pause? This would seem to be a woman who doesn’t miss much, and his sense is that she took it in and decided to overlook it, all without any of this registering on her face.

He frowns, has another look at the bas-relief, notes the steadfast determination of both the hounds and their quarry. It would be the work of a moment, he thinks, to wrap his hand around the handle, to strike without warning. He visualizes the act, the underhand thrust, the sharpened bronze tip entering just below the lowest rib and reaching up for the heart. Visualizes himself turning and moving to the door before she slips to the floor behind the counter, even before the life fades from her eyes.

But he’s touched things. His prints are all over the top surface of the showcase, and nothing holds a print better than glass.

“I think I’d like to have it.”

“I don’t blame you.”

Besides, it would be too quick. It would be over before she knew it, and that can be very satisfying sometimes, the quick kill, but in this instance he’d want her to see it coming, want to watch her lose that confidence, that irritating self-possession.

His loins stir at the thought of what he’ll do to her, when the time comes.

But none of this shows in his face as he sighs with resignation and counts bills from his wallet. She takes the money, wraps the letter opener in tissue paper, tucks it into a paper bag. He tells her he won’t need a receipt, then slips his purchase into the inside breast pocket of his jacket.

“Thanks,” she says. “Just so you know, I don’t think you paid too much. They’d ask something like five hundred in a shop on Madison Avenue.”

He smiles, murmurs something, heads for the door. But oh, Christ, how he wants to kill her! He doesn’t want to wait. He wants to kill her right now.

I didn’t much want to give my client a report of the night’s proceedings, and not just because it might leave her wondering if she’d hired an incompetent. More to the point, any suggestion that her Mr. Thompson had given me the slip would imply that he was not what he appeared, that he had something to hide. That’s how it felt to me, but it would be premature to pass that perception to Louise.

“Nothing conclusive,” I told her. “I should be able to tell you more in a day or so.”

I found Thompson’s number in my notebook, called him on my cell phone. I hoped he wouldn’t answer and felt relieved when I got his Voice Mail. “Hey, man,” I said. “We sent you a check, payment in full, and I’ve got it right here in front of me. It came back, we’ve got the wrong address for you. Oh, shit, I’ve got to take that. Listen, ring me back, if I don’t answer just leave your address on my voice mail. And while you’re at it—oh, hell, never mind. Later.”

I’d tried to sound rushed, like some middle-management guy with everything happening at once, and I couldn’t tell if I’d pulled it off. I’d know more when he did or didn’t call me back.

I had my cell phone in my pocket when I left the house, but I paused on the sidewalk to turn it off. I was on my way to a meeting, and you have to turn off cell phones and pagers there; at most groups they make an announcement to that effect. But I wanted mine off, meeting or no meeting, because the last thing I wanted was to answer a call and have David Thompson on the other end of the line. The first thing he’d do was ask who I was and what company the check was from, and I’d be stuck for an answer. If he got my voice mail there’d be nobody to ask, and he’d figure somebody owed him money and he might as well collect it, and he’d leave his address.

This was assuming that at least a portion of his story was true, that he was in some sort of business in the course of which companies sent him checks. It might or might not be direct marketing, and his name might or might not be David Thompson, which was why I’d been as vague as I had in my message to him.

It ought to work. And if it failed, it would simply have succeeded in another direction. If he was that suspicious, then he really did have something to hide.

I walked up to the Y on West Sixty-third and caught the noon meeting of the Fireside group. The speaker told an abbreviated drinking story and spent most of her time talking about her current dilemma, which was whether or not to face that acting wasn’t working for her, that two lines in a Rolaids commercial and a few dozen days as an extra, along with nonpaying roles in showcase productions that nobody came to, wasn’t all that much to show for five years of devotion to the profession.