The Knowland Retribution (16 page)

St. John

Walter was happiest on
St. John, with the heat and the quiet, the privacy, and the pace. He was at his best on his deck, looking out at the rock. Whenever he came back, Clara said, “Walter? You have a good trip?” If he had, he'd tell her so. If not, he said, “Good to be back.” That was enough for her. She lived in his house and she felt that she knew the man. She was old enough to be his mama.

He was glad to be home, but he couldn't get Isobel out of his mind. Three days in her apartment had yielded Walter a dozen names. He'd taken them from the pictures obscuring her kitchen walls. Each picture was tagged with a name, one or more street and e-mail addresses, and cell and landline numbers. He had their stories in his head. He worked without notes. He kept no records.

Isobel lived on West End Avenue, in an elegant building with a full-time, uniformed staff. Her sixth-floor apartment overlooked 84th Street. It opened into a short foyer with the kitchen on the left, the living room straight ahead, and a hallway ending at two bedrooms side by side, each with a full bathroom. The wall between the kitchen and living room had a chunk taken out and an archway constructed. Two large, potted trees guarded the archway. The kitchen floor was dark red tile. The rest of the floors were parquet. Her furniture was costly but thrown-together, comfortable everywhere. Live plants in all rooms. Piles of books, periodicals. Two very large living room paintings filled with big, colorful, abstract shapes faced each other across the room, the 84th street windows between them. Her bedroom was the place for family photos and personal displays: intricate seashell designs arranged in frames, a child's Tower of London.

The other bedroom was crammed with books. They were stuffed into bookshelves, piled on tables, stacked on the floor. The beds were made and the kitchen was spotless. Even the recessed light fixtures were dust free. “Isobel had help,” he thought. He liked the place, except for the artwork.

“Lovely joint,” he said. “You mentioned that your people are not poor.”

“Obviously not,” said Isobel, opening the refrigerator, not looking up. While the coffee brewed they sat at the kitchen table. She filled him in on her “perfectly ordinary” past.

Maurice Gitlin, her father, traded—in the great tradition of Englishmen who roamed the globe seeking to buy cheap and sell dear. He'd involved himself in deals pertaining to just about everything legal, and rumors persisted that from time to time he may have lost sight of the line. “Prosperity is the mother of invective,” he counseled Isobel whenever she asked if the stories about him were true.

Isobel spent much of her youth in Fiji, but called London and Paris home as well. She was into her teens before she realized that only
some
people had homes in the South Pacific, England, and France. After Oxford University, where she learned to trade on her village-girl accent and treat her stammer as less than a problem, Isobel felt an itch to try America. She'd visited many times. At twenty she enrolled in the Western Classics program at St. John's in Annapolis. There she spent five years reading Plato, Virgil, Kant, Dante, and Nietzsche. She also wrote a regular column: “Sex and the Serious Student.” It was extremely popular, exciting much mail. She was thought “witty yet substantive,” “frank and irreverent,” “self-contained,” and “strangely, refreshingly modest.” She responded to letters from graduate students with references to the classics, judiciously laced with reader suggestions on how to find G-spots and execute blowjobs, and she was not averse, on occasion, to finding out for herself.

Isobel asked to be titled Associate Editor of the publication, which had, over time, been called many things, most recently
Freethinker
. Then she went to New York and applied for a job at the
New York Times.
Her editorial background and roots got her in, she told Walter, then added, “And my father, of course, has always been a help.”

They spent the rest of that day immersed in Isobel's files. Of all the survivors, the ones on the kitchen walls seemed most promising to Walter. Isobel gave him details of their lives and losses. She knew a lot. She'd even tracked down most of them in their present circumstances. A few were hard to find, but she had a list with addresses for nearly all. Walter had a professional's appreciation for Isobel's work. Murder was a state, sometimes even a local, crime. Every cop involved in one jealously guarded territory. Homicide was the top of the pyramid for cops. After chasing car thieves, burglars, bad-check bouncers, and wife beaters, every policeman in America yearned to catch a homicide. Small-town cops looked on such a happening as if they had won the lottery. They dreamed of solving a killing. They saw themselves in the papers and on the evening news, famous just like the football coaches and NASCAR drivers. Big city detectives saw big news murders as career builders. They sought them out like Infantry officers; eager for a star, they seek out combat. However, just because a killing is notorious, just because it makes the
New York Times
front page, doesn't mean it gets the attention of the best homicide detectives in the business. Jurisdiction was the whole ballgame. In Dallas, nearly half a century after the fact, they still smarted at losing the JFK murder to the feds.

Walter's work took him to so many jurisdictions, he had a real sense of the differences in police competence. He did not like to make judgments. It's just that he knew the importance of experience. He knew a murder like that of the little girl in Colorado, the beauty queen barely out of her toddler years, would have been solved in a New York minute—
in New York
. As it was, with an investigation lost in the boondocks of the west, he was just as sure no one would ever be arrested, tried, or convicted for that crime. If you're going to kill someone, Walter knew, the best place to do it was somewhere they don't have any murders, because that means they don't have anybody who knows how to solve them. Boston and Houston were not, of course, the same as rural Tennessee. But if Boston cops needed information available only in Houston, which they undoubtedly did, or vise versa, Walter knew they could forget about it. If your suspect list contained hundreds of names, living in hundreds of places, he knew you would need the cooperation of hundreds of police departments. Not a chance in hell, he wagered. Left to their own devices, the police might never identify this killer, and the FBI would only gum up the works. No one in the know was any longer unaware that the FBI hadn't caught anyone important in decades.

Isobel, or someone like her, was the only way. She had answered many of the most important questions, all by herself, long before any law enforcement agency could or would. It impressed Walter that she even knew the questions, no less was able to get so many of the answers. What Walter also knew was that she didn't know how to take the answers she had, the data, and spin them into a single, definitive, correct identification. He was confident he could.

Her descriptions were concise and detailed. And they were interesting. She spoke of these people as if she knew them; treated their stories like her own; tried, with great success Walter thought, to get behind their eyes. From time to time he asked questions. She nearly always answered “I don't know.” They quit at eleven and ordered Chinese food.

“What was the point,” asked Isobel, chewing Mu Shu pork, “of asking me questions you knew I could not answer?”

Walter looked at her carefully. She'd gone through the process for hours, never suggesting the slightest awareness of what he was up to. But she'd sniffed some purpose in him all the while.

“It's been my experience,” Walter said, “that when people are telling you everything, you can ask them a question, any question, and if they don't have the answer, they will say so. They'll say ‘I don't know.' But if they are holding back, they will not do that. They won't say ‘I don't know.' They'll always give you something, true or not, just to be sure that you don't suspect them of covering up or trying to mislead you.”

“F-fuck you. You were testing me all day and night.”

Walter winced. “That's not the way to look at it. I have no reason to think you're holding back. I didn't. That's not why.”

“Then, w-w-why?” That was the first time all day he'd heard her stutter. He felt a sharp pang of regret. It startled him because he hadn't felt anything quite like it for a long, long time. At that point Walter became aware of a growing attachment, the nature of which was anything but clear.

“Everyone forgets important details,” he said. “You think you've said it all and then someone asks a question and another detail comes back. Talk to a doctor. Patients leave out all kinds of things when they talk about their symptoms. A cardiologist I know says patients with pacemakers often forget to tell him they have one. He doesn't know till he listens to the chest. If you want to know every relevant thing, you have to ask. You must be persistent. It's the question that brings it all back. That's all.”

“You
are
an old shit,” she said. And the hint of hurt in her voice, and the certainty in Walter's mind that she knew he was still not being completely honest, put a painful edge on that feeling of regret. He leaned forward and put his hand, very delicately, on hers.

“Listen, I test people as a matter of reflex. It's what I've been doing for thirty years. I knew I didn't have to do it with you, and I tried to stop several times.”

She stared at him with a blank expression.

Walter smiled sadly. “I really did.”

“I can live with that,” she said, doing her best to conceal her delight in the sorrowful look on his face and the soft, tightened sound of his voice.

During the next day and a half, while Isobel was at work, Walter taxied from the Mayflower and worked in her flat. He sat in her kitchen reading the hundreds of pages of printouts she'd left him. Then he read them again. He focused on where the “A-group” survivors lived, how their lives had been changed, who'd moved, who'd quit jobs or been fired, gotten in trouble, divorced, found a new sweetheart or spouse. Who sued and what was known about how much they got? One by one he wanted to know: Where were they at this moment?

He knew how loss creates fresh separations: between survivors and friends, neighbors, relatives, each other. When a hamburger's killed one of your children, how do you ever send the others to McDonalds? How do you explain why they can't go? What do they tell their friends? Survivors are reminders. How many parents protect their kids by keeping them apart from the ones who lost parents or brothers or sisters? Men sometimes moved, like divorced men sometimes do, away from their old neighborhoods, away from the couples they knew when they were a couple too. Many people changed jobs, suddenly strangers with people at work. Amid the routines of devastation, Walter searched patiently for the abnormal. He made calls, discovered employers and co-workers, neighbors and friends, turned up new girlfriends, old flames, estranged family members. Most were easy to talk to. It was no surprise to Walter. This was what he'd been doing for years. He knew how to approach people, how to help them tell him what it was he needed to learn.

When Isobel returned in the evening she told him about the magical note: “I killed Floyd Ochs.”

“
Who
killed Floyd Ochs?” she asked Walter. She told him some called it a fraud or a very bad joke. She suspected that some considered her to be the note's author. She told him it was a blessing because it confirmed what she thought she knew. Walter said he was glad it made her feel better, but it didn't change very much for him, except for what it told him about the killer. They had a drink and walked up to Broadway and found a place to talk about survivors.

When Walter was ready to leave New York, he kissed Isobel on the forehead and told her, “I have what I need for now. I do my thinking better at home. Come visit me. You'll like it.” He promised to call in a day or two.

Clara gave him a message from Tom Maloney. He'd called while Walter was in New York. Walter called back on Tom's twenty-four-hour number. He said he was making progress but had nothing to report. Then he said, “I don't work this way, Tom. I tried to make it clear before. If I need to talk to you, I'll call. Otherwise, back off and let me do what I'm doing.” Maloney said he would. Walter knew he wouldn't, not for a while anyway. Years ago, Walter had rejected the notion of being supervised. Making it stick wasn't always easy. The people he worked for supervised whom they pleased. He quit one job and sent back most of the money. But that was the only time it came to that. Otherwise, he delivered a real conclusion, happy or not.