Hope to Die (17 page)

"Same as in the old days."

"Pretty much. It was okay for a while there, having a license, being respectable, keeping books and making out bills. But I think I like it better this way."

"Well, it suits you. But that's a pretty small advance, isn't it?"

"I don't know, it strikes me as a pretty handsome gift. Hundred-dollar bills, ten of them."

"Not very much money, though. A thousand dollars."

"There was a time when you could buy a decent car with it, and there'll probably come a time when that's the price of a decent cup of coffee. But right now you're right, it's not very much."

"The work you've already done," she said. "How much would that be worth?"

"Not a red cent," I said. "I didn't have a client."

"If you had."

"I don't know. I put in some hours here and there."

"More than a thousand dollars' worth."

"Maybe."

"It's not as though we need the money," she said.

"No."

"Though we can always find a use for it."

"We always do."

"Matt? You're not going to fall in love with this one, are you?"

"I'm already in love." She didn't say anything, not out loud, anyway, and I said, "No, I'm not going to fall in love with her. She's decent and bright and pretty, and she's forty years younger than I am, and she couldn't be less interested. And, to tell you the truth, neither could I."

"That's interesting," she said. "But let me ask you another question, and you can take all the time you need answering it." She tilted her head, licked her lip, lowered her voice. "Is there anything you could be interested in? Anything you can think of?"

I thought of something.

Later she rolled over and propped herself up on an elbow.

"Thirty-nine," she said.

"On a scale of one to what?"

"Silly man. That wasn't a rating, it was a correction. You're thirty-nine years older than she is, not forty."

"Well, I have tell you," I said. "I feel younger already."

He is five feet eleven inches tall, and his weight has remained between 165 and 170 pounds for the last fifteen of his thirty-seven years. That makes him the same height and weight as the late Jason Paul Bierman, but that is less of a coincidence than it might at first appear. It might have been coincidental if circumstances had thrown him and Bierman together first, if their roles in the human drama had preceded his awareness of their superficial resemblance. But no, it was the other way around. He had picked Bierman out of the great sea of humanity, noting his height and weight, his build. Why, he'd thought, they could wear each other's clothes.

(Bierman, appearing in court, charged with trying to sneak under a subway turnstile. Charges dismissed, Bierman leaving the courtroom, looking vague, uncertain. He catches him as he hits the street, takes him by the arm. Bierman cringes, no doubt assuming he's being arrested again. "Mr. Bierman? Jason? Relax, my friend. I think perhaps I can help you." Bierman trying the couch, choosing the chair. Closing his eyes, sharing his hopes and fears. Learning the gospel. "Jason, what do you get?" "You get what you get, Doc.")

And so he'd selected Bierman. Good luck for him. Bad luck for Bierman.

Or was it bad luck? Bierman had been one of life's losers, a man who asked little of life and got less. You never got more than you asked for, he liked to tell people, and there was nothing wrong with asking for all you wanted. You may go to the ocean with a teaspoon or a bucket, he liked to say; the ocean does not care.

Bierman took a teaspoon, and held it out to the ocean- upside-down.

So his life had never amounted to anything, and in death, in addition to serving as a part of a Grand Design (which, to be fair, would have meant precious little to Bierman, even if he'd been aware of it, which he manifestly was not), in addition to that, why, Bierman had achieved in death what he had never achieved in life.

The sad bastard was famous.

He is at his computer now, scanning a newsgroup he has taken to visiting lately, alt.crime.serialkillers. There's been a spirited exchange of posts recently between someone who has an unwholesome amount of information to share about the Green River killer and someone else, similarly well informed, who claims to be the Green River killer. The likelihood that there's any truth in the claim strikes him as somewhere on the low side of infinitesimal, but that doesn't make the posts any less interesting to scan.

And yes, there are some new additions to the string of posts about Bierman. Technically, of course, Bierman is a far cry from a serial killer. Three corpses, all of them slain in a single night and in connection with a single crime, do not a serial killer make. You'd have to knock off unrelated individuals over a span of time, though just how many it takes is a matter of some dispute, and indeed is perennially disputed on alt.crime.serialkillers.

If Bierman's anything, he's a mass murderer, like the disgruntled postal employees who bring an automatic weapon to work and lose it big time. Three, though, is on the thin side. You might need a little more in the way of mass in order to make it as a genuine mass murderer.

(As a matter of fact, Bierman is no killer at all, and probably lived out his brief span without so much as giving anyone a bloody nose, but none of these people know that. They all assume Bierman killed the three victims credited to him, and some of them, mirabile dictu, are willing to add other victims to his string.)

He reads the post, nodding, smiling, shaking his head. The minds of the various members of the newsgroup, revealed in their posts, never fail to fascinate him. Some write with evident admiration of the notorious murderers of our time, comparing the tallies and techniques of Bundy, of Kemper, of Henry Lee Lucas. Others take a strong moral stand, draping it over a fierce desire to punish; they're death penalty enthusiasts, and rejoice whenever it's applied to one of the subjects of newsgroup gossip. And, of course, there are those in both camps who are deliberately striking a pose, playing a part, feigning contempt or admiration for reasons one can only guess.

He never posts. He's tempted sometimes, when he's inspired with just the words to tweak these clowns. But what, really, is the point? He doesn't post, he lurks. To post is human, to lurk divine.

Bierman, he thinks, I've made you immortal. Living, you were a walking dead man. Dead, you live!

His wristwatch, set to beep not on the hour but a precise ten minutes before it, tells him it's 12:50. He reads the last of the Bierman posts, clicks Mark All Read, and signs off. His screensaver comes on, showing a city skyline at night, forever changing as lights go on and off, on and off.

He sits back, stretches. His shirt is unbuttoned at the throat, his tie loose. He reaches under his collar and produces a mottled pink disc an inch and a quarter in diameter, perhaps an eighth of an inch thick, holed in the center. It's stone, rhodochrosite, and cool to the touch, and it hangs around his neck on a thin gold chain. He rubs the smooth stone between his thumb and forefinger, savoring the feel of it.

He tucks it inside his shirt, buttons the top button of his shirt, tightens his tie. He checks the knot in the mirror and it's fine, perfect.

And he can feel the pink stone disc, smooth and cool against his chest...

Time to go to work.

"So we got us a client," T J said. "Damn! We on the clock, Doc."

"Well, it's barely ticking," I said. "I think the main reason I took her money was to keep her from giving it to somebody else."

"You clever, though, way you work things out. Girl wants to hire us, thinks her cousin did this bad thing. You put her mind at rest, pat her on the head and send her on her way. Then you turn around and get the rich cousin to hire us. We gonna work for one of the cousins, might as well be the one with the money."

"That's right, I almost forgot. Our client started out as the designated suspect."

"You happen to tell her that?"

"It slipped my mind."

We were at the Morning Star. I'd slept later than usual, and Elaine had left for the gym by the time I'd shaved and showered. There was coffee left, and I poured a cup and called T J. "If you haven't had breakfast," I said, "why don't you meet me downstairs in ten minutes." He'd been up since six, he said, when a couple down the hall had a louder-than-usual drunken argument, and he'd gone out and eaten, then went home and booted up his computer and got on-line. But he'd gladly keep me company.

I was working on an omelet, and he was keeping me company with a side of home fries and a toasted bagel and a large orange juice. He dabbed his lips with a napkin and said, "Slipped your mind. Probably a good thing. There any case left, now that we on it?"

"It's hard to know where to go with it. I wish there was someone with a motive. It's a lot of trouble to go through for no reason."

"Stole some stuff," he said.

"More like borrowing it. Moved it from Manhattan to Brooklyn, where the cops recovered it."

"All of it?"

"There's a thought," I said. "He might have held on to something, our mystery man."

"Might be why he did the job in the first place. Say he wants one thing, but he doesn't want anybody to know he took it."

"Like what?"

"How I know, Beau? Something real valuable, some diamond, some priceless painting."

"It would be on the insurance schedule," I said, "and it would be evident it was missing."

"Something else, then. Some legal papers, some photos or letters, kind of thing people kill to get back."

"Why not just take whatever it was," I said, "and go home? Why kill the Hollanders?"

"To keep everybody from finding out you took whatever it was."

I thought about it. "I don't know," I said. "It sounds too complicated. Whoever did this, he put it together carefully and didn't mind killing four people to carry it off. I can't think what the Hollanders could have had in the house that would have warranted that kind of effort."

"Guess you right," he said. "Just came to me is all."

"I wish something would come to me," I said. "Looking at the victims doesn't seem to lead anywhere. They led a blameless life, everybody adored and respected them, and they loved each other. I wonder."

"Wonder what?"

"Maybe I've been looking at the wrong victims."

"Only victims we got," he said.

"I can think of two more."

It didn't take him long. "In the house in Brooklyn," he said. "Bierman and Ivanko. You sayin' he went through all that to waste those two dudes?"

"No, they weren't the point, just the means to the end."

"Use 'em and lose 'em. But he had to find 'em first- that what you gettin' at?"

"There has to be a connection. Not so much with Bierman, whose role was essentially passive."

" 'Bout as passive as it gets," he said. "All Bierman did was get hisself killed."

"Bierman may not have known him at all."

"Dude comes to the door, tells Bierman he's the exterminator, come to spray for roaches. Bierman lets him in and it's a done deal, Bierman's chillin' in the corner and the dude's out the door, wearin' Bierman's shirt an' pants."

"But Ivanko was in on the play," I said. "Even if the last act came as a surprise to him."

"Dude comes to Ivanko, tells him he's got a deal lined up."

" 'Big profit, low risk, here's the key, here's the alarm code...' "

"Can't have that conversation with a dude 'less you know he be down for it. How's he know that about Ivanko?"

"He did three years in Green Haven for burglary. Maybe that's where they met."

"You think the dude's an ex-con?"

I thought about it. "Somehow I don't," I said. "You pick up a few things in prison, but one you tend to lose there is the sense that the law can't touch you, because it already has. The guy who orchestrated all this still thinks he's bulletproof."

"Might have got his hands dirty, though."

"I don't think this was the first time he broke the law. Whether or not he's done time, he could know people who have. Ivanko's got no living relatives, as far as I can tell, and his mother's old apartment's his last known address. He must have been living somewhere when he broke into the Hollanders', but the police found him in Brooklyn before they could find out where he was staying."

"An' then they stopped lookin'."

"That might be a place to start," I said. "If we're looking at Ivanko, you know who we ought to talk to?"

"If you thinkin' same as me, it's too early to call him. He be sleepin'."

"Danny Boy," I said. "It's his neighborhood, too. Poogan's is two blocks from the Hollander house. I'll go see him tonight."

"And between now and then?"

"The gun," I said. "Somebody stole it from a Central Park West psychiatrist's office."

"Maybe the gun was ready to be stolen."

I gave him a look. "The way it appeared on the surface," I said, "Bierman was the shooter, so it seemed logical to assume he brought the gun. Which meant either he stole it himself or someone else stole it and sold it to him."

"But all Bierman really got," he said, "was the bullet."

"Right, so somebody else supplied the gun, and it wouldn't have been Ivanko or it would have been in his hand during the burglary and not his partner's."

"Ivanko coulda had two guns. Didn't need both, so he kept one and gave the other to the mystery man."

"Ivanko didn't have a gun on him when they found him," I said, "but the killer could always have taken it off his body on his way out. Simplest explanation, though, is that there was only one gun, and the man who used it is the man who brought it along."

"The dude himself. Where'd he get it? From the shrink's office?"