All the Flowers Are Dying (21 page)

By the time he first came to New York, the house had already been replaced. The new structure, sized to match its neighbors, looks to have been given a twist by its architect, with a section jutting out at an oblique angle from the rest of the facade. The ostensible purpose, he knows, was to wed the contemporary to the traditional, but he senses a deeper explanation, a desire to let the plosive force that gutted the first building express itself in its successor.

But there had been no bomb factory here on West Seventy-fourth Street, and so there is no reason for this fine house to have disappeared, merely because it has ceased to hold a place in his day-to-day consciousness. It still stands, and the same young woman still occupies it, all but the lowest floor, where the same old woman, older now, maintains the same undistinguished antique shop.

He thinks of another shop, of the letter opener he bought there. Of the woman who sold it to him, calling it a paper knife. The term itself, he thinks, could be ambiguous, meaning either a knife to cut paper or a knife made of paper. Or a knife in name only, like a paper tiger.

Gone now, whatever you called it. Oh, it still exists, even as the house still exists, but it’s no longer part of his life.

Is this house part of his life? Does it, like so much else here in this extraordinary city, come under the heading of Unfinished Business?

He’ll have to think about that.

On his way home he stands for a few moments directly across the street from another much larger building, this one on the southeast corner of Fifty-seventh and Ninth. There’s a doorman on duty twenty-four hours a day, and there are security cameras in the elevators and the lobby. Still, how difficult a hindrance are they likely to prove? Created and installed and maintained by men, surely they can be subverted by a man.

But it’s not yet time.

He walks home. He sometimes thinks of himself as a hermit crab, taking up homes and discarding them when he outgrows them. The shelter that suits him now, his home for the present, consists of three rooms on the top floor of a tenement on Fifty-third Street west of Tenth Avenue. The building shows some of the effects of gentrification. Its brick facade has been repointed, its halls and stairways renovated, its vestibule entirely redone. Many of the apartments have been done over, too, as their occupants have moved or died off, replaced by new tenants paying full market value rents. Only a few of the old rent-controlled tenants are left, and one of them, Mrs. Laskowski, probably doesn’t have much time left. She’s fifty pounds overweight and diabetic, and suffers as well from something that makes her joints ache in bad weather. But she’s out there on the front stoop, smoking a malodorous little Italian cigar, when he mounts the steps.

“Well, hello,” she says. “How’s your uncle?”

“I was just visiting him.”

“I wish I could, I’ll tell you that. You see somebody for so many years, you miss seeing them. It’s a shame you couldn’t get them to take him at St. Clare’s. My cousin Marie was at St. Clare’s, God rest her soul, and I was able to visit her every single day until she passed.”

And what a rare treat that must have been.

“They’re taking good care of him at the VA,” he reminds her. “The best possible, and it’s all free of charge.”

“I never even knew he was in the service.”

“Oh, yes, and very proud to have served. But he didn’t like to talk about those days.”

“He never said a word on the subject. The Veterans, that’s up in the Bronx, isn’t it?”

“Kingsbridge Road.”

“I don’t even know where that is. I guess it’s a long ride on the subway.”

“You have to change trains,” he says, “and then it’s a long walk when you finally do get there.” He has no idea if this is true, he’s only been to the Bronx once, and that was years ago. “And visiting him can be difficult. Today he didn’t know me.”

“You went all that way and he didn’t know you.”

“Well, you have to take the bitter with the sweet, Mrs. L. And you know what my uncle always used to say. ‘You get what you get.’ ”

He climbs the stairs, lets himself into the apartment, locks the door. The apartment is run-down and shabby. He’d have cheerfully hired someone to clean it, but that could have caused talk, and so he’d done it himself as best he could, scrubbing the floors and walls, spraying air freshener. But one can only do so much, and the place still holds the stench of fifty years of Joe Bohan’s cigarettes, mingled with the persistent aroma of Joe Bohan himself, a man who lived alone and evidently never made too much of a thing of personal hygiene.

Still, in a city where even the shabbiest hotel room is ridiculously expensive, there’s much to be said for a free apartment, especially one so close to so much of his unfinished business.

In a delicatessen on Tenth Avenue, where he’d stopped for a sandwich and a cup of coffee, he’d heard two old men talking about poor Joe Bohan, who wasn’t getting out much anymore. Always kept to himself, one man said, but a nicer guy you wouldn’t want to meet.

He’d found a Joseph Bohan listed in the phone book. He called the number, and a man with a scratchy voice answered. No, the man said, there was no Mary Eileen Bohan at that address. He was an old man, he lived by himself. Close relatives? No, none at all. But there were lots of Bohans, although he didn’t remember hearing of a Mary Eileen.

He gave the old man a day or two to forget the phone call, then packed up and moved out of the room he’d been living in, an overpriced flophouse a few blocks from Penn Station. He mounted the stoop on West Fifty-third with a suitcase in each hand, rang the buzzer marked BOHAN
, a
nd climbed to the third floor, where an unshaven old wreck stood in the doorway, wearing a gray nightshirt and at least a week’s worth of body odor
.

“Uncle Joe? I’m your nephew Al, come all this way to see you.”

The old man was confused, but let him inside. He was smoking a cigarette, sucking on it as if it were a breathing tube connected to an oxygen tank, and spitting out questions between puffs. Whose son is he, then? Is he Neil’s boy? And what’s in the suitcases? And is he alive, Neil? He’d thought his brother was dead, thought he’d died without ever marrying.

The old man was wheezing, unsteady on his feet. There were two growths on his faced that looked cancerous, and his color was bad, and God above did he ever stink. He took hold of Bohan, one hand cupping the bristly chin, the other grasping the bony shoulder, and had little trouble snapping the old man’s neck. How nice when the expedient act was humane as well!

Over the next several days he let the building’s other tenants get used to him, while he made the place his own, getting rid of the old man’s clothes and possessions even as he got rid of the old man himself. Every day he’d haul a few trash bags down the stairs and out the door. Cleaning up, he told the neighbors. These past few years, my uncle never threw anything out. It’s hard for him, you know.

Some bags he left at the curb for the trash pickup. Others, containing pieces of the old man’s body, couldn’t be discarded quite so casually. He’d put the corpse in the tub, drained it of its fluids, and cut it into portable chunks with a bone saw from a Ninth Avenue kitchen supply store. Portions of Joe Bohan, wrapped up like cuts of meat, he carried a few at a time across the West Side Highway to the Hudson. If they ever surface— and that’s unlikely, as there won’t be any gases to lessen their specific gravity—he can’t imagine that anyone will make anything of them. And, if by some forensic miracle they do, the hermit crab will have long since outgrown his shell, along with the name of Aloysius Bohan.

Once the last physical remnant of Joe Bohan was gone, except for his enduring odor, he let the word out that he’d taken his uncle to the hospital. “I tried nursing him myself,” he told Mrs. Laskowski, “but I can’t give him the care he needs. Last night I got him downstairs and into a cab and we rode clear up to the VA. Cab cost a fortune, but what are you going to do? I’m all he’s got in the world. He wants me to stay here until he comes home from the hospital. I’m supposed to be in San Francisco, I’ve got a job offer out there, but I can’t just leave him here. He’s my uncle
.”

And that was that.

Now he sits at the kitchen table, its top scarred by hundreds of Joe Bohan’s neglected cigarettes. He touches his upper lip, then frowns, annoyed with himself. Habits, he thinks, take so little time to form, so much longer to break. He boots up his computer, which has sole claim on Joe Bohan’s phone line. The dial-up connection is slow today, and he’d love to install a DSL line, but that’s out of the question.

Well, perhaps he won’t need to be here too much longer.

TJ said, “You already thought of this, and it don’t make sense anyway, but if I don’t say it I ain’t never gonna get it out of my head.”

“Okay.”

“You most likely know what’s coming.”

We were at the Morning Star. He’d called and asked me to meet him there, and I’d walked away from a much better cup of coffee than the one I was drinking now.

“I might,” I said.

“Gonna make me say it all the same. ’Kay. There any chance at all that David Thompson and Monica’s killer are the same person?”

“The chief thing they’ve got in common,” I said, “is that you and I don’t know who they are or how to find them.”

“More’n that.”

“Oh?”

“Both got a mustache.”

“Maybe they’re both Hitler, and he didn’t die in the bunker after all. Look at the timing and you’ll see they’re not the same person. Thompson—that’s probably not his name, but we’ve got to call him something. Thompson was with Louise Monday night from the time she met him at the restaurant until he got away from us a little before midnight.”

“And?”

“And it was around nine-thirty or ten when he showed up in the lobby of Monica’s building, according to Sussman, who got it from the doorman.”

“That was Tuesday. Night before last, right?”

“Jesus, you’re right.”

“Wouldn’t be much of a stretch to get downtown in what, twenty-two hours?”

I shook my head. “He was there Monday night, too,” I said. “With Monica. She told Elaine.”

“He saw her Monday and Tuesday, then. We sure of that?”

“We can’t call Monica and ask her. But yes, we’re sure.”

“But we don’t know what time. We got a time check for Tuesday, him comin’ and goin’, but not for Monday.”

I thought about it, nodded slowly.

“So he leaves Louise at a quarter of twelve, an’ we know the first thing he does is whip out his cell an’ make a call.”

“To Monica, inviting himself over. But if I remember what Elaine said, he already had a date planned for Monday with Monica.”

“ ‘Sorry, honey, but I’m running a little late. Be over soon’s I can.’ ”

“He was a sharp dresser, according to Monica. Did David Thompson look like he fit Monica’s definition of a sharp dresser?”

“Was jeans an’ a polo shirt, wasn’t it?”

“Personally,” I said, “I can’t quite see our guy showing up on Jane Street with flowers and a bottle of Strega.” I pictured him coming out of Louise’s building. “He lit a cigarette,” I remembered. “That was one thing she established online, before she met the guy. That he was a smoker, because if he wasn’t she didn’t want any part of him.”

“So?”

“Monica was an ex-smoker, and she hated to be in the same room with a lit cigarette. She had that heightened sensitivity people seem to develop when they’ve been away from tobacco for a few years. If he was a heavy smoker—”

“We don’t know about the heavy part. Maybe he just made sure to light one up when he was around Louise, to keep her happy.”

“And the minute he walks out of her building, he lights up another for show?”

“See what you mean. Who you callin’?”

“A cop,” I said. Sussman had given us his card, and I was punching the number into my cell phone. When I got him on the line I identified myself and said I had just one question. Was there any indication that anyone might have smoked a cigarette in Monica Driscoll’s apartment?

“Why?”

I couldn’t blame him. That would have been my response if our roles were reversed. Still, I’d have been happier if he hadn’t asked.

“I’ve been looking into something for a friend,” I said. “She’s got no connection to Monica, nothing in common, except that there’s a mystery man in her life. I haven’t had much luck finding out anything about him, in fact he’s been damned elusive, and—”

“And you thought maybe they were one and the same.”

“No,” I said, “I thought and continue to think that they’re not, but if I can make one phone call and rule it out altogether—”

“I get you. I take it you know for a fact whether or not this second guy smokes.”

“I know for a fact that he does.”

“And Ms. Driscoll didn’t?”

“And had strong feelings on the subject.”

He said he’d get back to me and rang off. TJ asked about Elaine. I said she’d been out the door that morning before I’d made it to the kitchen, that it was one of her gym days. I said I figured it was a good sign that she went, because I was pretty sure she hadn’t felt like it.

Something like that, he said, that was the secret to it. You had to do it all the time, not just on the days you felt like it. I told him staying sober was like that.

“Last night,” he said, “she’d be sad an’ cry from time to time, and then it’d pass, you know, and her mind’d be on the card game. You know how to play pinochle?”

“No.”

“Well, she could teach you. She can teach a game real good. It’s an okay game. All you got in the world is two people an’ a deck of cards, you could get by with it. Course it’d have to be a pinochle deck, so you’d need two decks of cards to make it. You take two decks, an’ you don’t use from deuce through eight, just nine on up to ace.”