The Genius (27 page)

“That’s crazy.”

“That’s Queens.” She rummaged around on her desk, shuffling forms and e-mail printouts and files and unopened envelopes. Atop the windowsill were three mugs: a DA seal, Fordham, NYU law. A matted teddy bear dressed as a fireman. A photo of her father, and another of her and her sister in bathing suits on the beach. A brass Gordian knot, dangling on a string tacked to a shelf holding legal books. The screen saver on her computer faded in and out hypnotically, rotating images of a green countryside.

“Ireland,” she said, noticing my stare.

“Is that where your family’s from?”

“County Kerry. My dad’s side. My mom’s Italian. I’ve never been to either place, but if I start saving up what’s left of my salary at the end of every month I should be able to afford a trip when I’m seventy-five.”

She found what she was looking for, a set of keys for her file cabinet. She opened up a drawer full of compact discs and transcripts. I glanced inside but she closed it.

“Not ours.”

“Love letters?” I asked.

“Wiretaps.”

From the next drawer down she produced our box of evidence. It looked bigger than when I’d last seen it, and as she started taking out files and laying them on the desk I realized that she had contributed to its growth.

“This is what Richard Soto came up with.” She handed me a list of old cases, fifteen pages of names, dates, locations, brief descriptions, and the names of the arrested party, if any. I glanced through it and was about to ask her a question when I looked up and saw her staring at the photo of her father, a tissue loosely crumpled in her hand.

She said, “I miss him so much.”

I almost said “I do too.” But I didn’t. I laid a hand on the files and said, “Let’s talk about something else.”

OVER THE NEXT SIX WEEKS we met frequently, either in person or on the phone. During her lunch break we would meet at the Chinese place near the DA’s office; Isaac would take his place three tables away and commence to consume mind-boggling amounts of pork fried rice. We gave him our fortune cookies.

We decided to start from scratch, laying out a fresh timeline of the killings, examining it for patterns. We had the footprint cast reexamined, and were told that the person who’d made it was probably taller than six feet. Samantha asked how big Victor was, and I had to confess that, although one person had told me he was short, in truth I didn’t know. Now that I think about it, that was how we spent the bulk of our time, at least at first: outlining what we did
not
know.

“Did he go to school?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did he have family?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you know, exactly?”

“I don’t know.”

“How hard were you looking for him?”

“Not very,” I admitted.

“Well,” she said, “now’s your chance to redeem yourself.”

We picked up where I’d left off: calling churches, but this time with greater success. Through dumb luck or diligence, we found a Father Verlaine, at Good Shepherd in Astoria, who gave us our first sign that Victor had been a real person and not a figment of someone’s imagination. We drove to the rectory and found the priest; he was doing a crossword puzzle, and he greeted us cheerfully.

“Of course I knew Victor,” he said. “He had a better attendance record than I do. But I haven’t seen him in a year or two. Is everything all right?”

“We want to make sure he’s safe. Nobody’s heard from him in a while.”

“I can’t believe he would ever do anything wrong,” said the priest. “His conscience was cleaner than anyone’s, with the possible exception of the Holy Father.”

I asked what he meant.

“Every time I opened the confessional window I’d find him on the other side.”

“What did he confess?”

The priest clucked his tongue. “Those are matters between a man and God. I will tell you that he had far less reason to be there than most people, including the ones who don’t come to confess at all. I told him once or twice not to be so hard on himself, and that if he didn’t, he’d be in violation of the sin of scrupulosity.” He smiled. “All that meant was that I found him in there the next day, confessing to me about that.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have a photograph of him, would you?”

“No.”

Samantha said, “Could you describe him?”

“Oh, let’s see. He was small, about five-foot-four and on the thin side.

He sometimes grew a little moustache. Always he wore the same coat, no matter how hot or cold it was. That coat had seen better days. You’re probably not old enough to remember—how old are you?”

“Twenty-eight,” she said.

“Well, then you’re definitely not old enough, but I’ll tell you that he looked a bit like Howard Hughes.”

“Was he unwell?”

“He didn’t seem especially healthy. He often had a cough. I could always tell he was there, because I’d hear it coming from the back pews.”

I said, “Did he have any obvious psychological problems?”

He hesitated. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you much more than I have. My office forbids it.”

In the car, Samantha said, “That’s a start.”

“He said he was small. Doesn’t that rule him out?”

“Not really. Footprinting isn’t an exact science. A photo would be more helpful, so we could ask around the neighborhood. What about that cough? He might have gotten treated for it.”

“It sounds more like he wasn’t treated at all.”

“But if he was, then there’s a record of him somewhere. Based on what you’ve told me, the picture I’m getting, people like him, they fall through the cracks. They don’t have a regular doctor. They show up at the emergency room.”

“Then let’s call the local emergency rooms.”

“I’ll work on it. You’d be surprised how hard it is in this state to get medical records. Did he have a job?”

“Not as far as I can tell.”

“He had to pay for things. He paid his rent.”

“The building manager told me he paid in cash. His apartment was rent-controlled from back in the sixties. He was paying a hundred dollars a month.”

She whistled in admiration, and for a moment she wasn’t the arm of the law but just another New Yorker envying someone else’s lease. “Still, that’s a hundred dollars he had to come up with every thirty days. Maybe he panhandled.”

“It’s possible,” I said. “But how does that help us? There isn’t a panhandlers’ union we can call.”

“You know what else,” she said, her gaze wandering toward the sky— and away from me. I sometimes got the impression that when we were talking she paid attention to me only long enough to start thinking on her own. In this she differed from her father, who had taken—or seemed to take—a real interest in my opinion. I have to give her credit for her honesty. From the outset, she never pretended she was doing this for anyone other than him. Certainly not for me.

“The paper,” she said. “He had to buy lots of it; you’d think he’d be on good terms with whoever sold it to him. And food. Why don’t you tackle that. I’m going to keep chasing down the witnesses in the old cases and see what I can come up with. Here. I pulled some of the old mug shots from those cases and made copies for you so you can show them around. Don’t worry. We’ll get something.”

“You think so?”

“Not a chance.”

I WENT BACK TO MULLER COURTS, starting at one of the two bodegas. Once the countermen got through staring at Isaac, they confirmed my description of Victor. They knew who he was—“Weird dude”—but, other than a preference for a certain brand of wheat bread and Oscar Mayer ham, could provide no information. I asked about paper, and they handed me a notepad with greenish, lined pages.

“What about white,” I said. “Plain white.”

“We don’t got that.”

Thinking of the food journal, I asked what kind of apples he bought. “He didn’t buy apples.”

“He must’ve bought apples,” I said.

“Did you see him buy apples?”

“I didn’t see him buy no apples.”

“No, he didn’t buy no apples.”

In an effort to be helpful, one of them suggested that he had bought, rather, pears.

I said, “What about cheese?”

“No cheese.”

“He didn’t buy no cheese.”

“No cheese.”

I went to the other bodega. This time I had Isaac wait outside, which he did happily, on condition that he could run across the street and get a meatball hero. I gave him ten bucks and he bounded off like a little kid.

The girl behind the register, a pretty Latina with red plastic glasses, put down her poetry magazine when I approached. She, too, recognized Victor by my description.

“I called him ‘sir,’ ” she told me.

“Why’s that.”

“He looked like the kind of person who you call sir.”

“How often did he come in here?”

“Twice a week when I was here. I don’t work on Friday or Saturday, though.”

I asked what he would usually buy.

She went to the rattling dairy case and handed me a package of inexpensive presliced Swiss cheese. “Same thing every time. Once I think I asked, ‘Sir, maybe you want to try something else?’ ”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t say anything. He never said anything to me.”

“Can you remember if he ever talked about—”

“He never said
anything
.”

She was equally firm in her conviction that he had purchased neither apples nor paper.

“We don’t sell paper,” she said. “There’s a Staples on Queens Boulevard.”

Ten months prior I would have resisted the idea that Victor’s life extended beyond the confines of Muller Courts—that he’d gone anywhere without my imagination giving him permission to do so. Now I found myself obeying him. I spent several chilly November afternoons walking in and out of local markets, canvassing the neighborhood in widening concentric circles: a one-block radius, two blocks, three… until I reached the triangular plaza at Junction Boulevard and a fruit stand run by a middle-aged Sikh.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “My friend.”

He held up a small mesh bag of Granny Smiths.

The vendor, whose name was Jogindar, said that he and Victor would talk for at least a few minutes every day.

“The weather,” he said. “Always the weather.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Oh, a long time. Perhaps a year and a half. Is he okay?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m looking for him. Did he sound okay to you?”

“He had a terrible cough,” said Jogindar. “I told him he must go to the hospital.”

“Did he?”

He shrugged. “I hope so.”

“Was he ever with anyone else?”

“No, never.”

“Let me ask you this: was there anything strange about the way he behaved?”

Jogindar smiled. Wordlessly he gestured all around us, at the steam-breathing pensioners slouched on park benches; at Queens Boulevard, its lumbering parade, its tangle of wind-whipped powerlines. The whole honking throb of the metropolis, ethnic markets and 99-cent stores and CHECKS CASHED and pawnshops and nail salons and dialysis centers and a wigmaker that sold hair by the pound. He gestured to Isaac, standing ten feet off; to an ancient-looking lady making her way through the intersection, heedless of the red light and the horns exploding at her. She kept shuffling, shuffling, until she made it to the other side. Then everyone drove on.

I understood what he was saying. He was saying
It’s all crazy
.

He breathed into his hands. “When he stopped coming I thought it was a sign.”

“Of what.”

“I don’t know. But after so many years he became very comforting to me. I am thinking of finding a different job.”

“How long have you known him?”

“Since I came here. Eighteen years.” He smiled. “That is a kind of friendship.”

For the heck of it, I bought a bag of Victor’s favorite apples. On my way back to Manhattan, I bit into one. It was unusually sour.

THE BRANCH MANAGER of the local Staples had no idea what I was talking about; nor did any of the cashiers, although most of them seemed to have started on the job that very morning. They did offer to sell me paper, though.

When Samantha and I next conferred, she pointed out Victor’s tendency to routinize. “Think about the picture of him that we’re getting so far. He gets his bread from one place. He gets his cheese someplace else, his apples. He does this every day for God knows how long. How long has that Staples been there, five years? That’s not our man. That’s not where he’s going to go for something as important as his paper.”

I called around until I found the oldest place in the neighborhood, a stationer’s a half-mile due west of the Courts, open Tuesday through Thursday, from eleven to three thirty. I had to leave work especially early—earlier than I’d been leaving, which was already beyond self-indulgent—to get out there on time.

My first impression of Zatuchny’s was that it could have been managed by Victor himself, so clogged was it with junk. I walked into a cloud of that same woody smell I’d first encountered in Victor’s apartment, only several orders of magnitude more powerful. It made me wonder how customers could shop without keeling over.

More to the point, I had a hard time believing that the store had customers at all. From the outside the place looked closed, windows plastered over with curling fliers, neon sign extinguished. I stood at the counter and dinged the bell a couple times.

“Shaddap shaddap shaddap. Shaaaddap.”

An old man appeared, his cheeks flecked with tomato sauce. He paused briefly to stare at me, paused longer to stare at Isaac, and then, frowning, he snatched the bell off the counter and tossed it in a drawer. “It ain’t a toy,” he said.

If I hadn’t known any better, I might have taken him for Victor Cracke. Moustachioed, disheveled, he fit with my preconceived notion quite nicely. So did the disorder of the surroundings… and the smell…

A crazy thought occurred to me: he
was
Victor.

I must have been staring a bit too intensely, because he sneered and said, “I didn’t interrupt my afternoon repast so you could ogle my titties. Whaddaya want.”