"How do you do it?"
"Mostly I ask for strength."
"Strength?"
"To do something," I said, "or to get through something. That kind of strength."
"And do you get it?"
"Yes," I said. "I generally do."
I showered before I left her place, then got to the basement of St. Paul's in time for the last half hour of the meeting. I raised my hand and said that I'd thought of drinking earlier. "I was looking out the window at the liquor store across the street," I said, "and I thought how easy it would be to call them up and tell them to send over a bottle. I've been sober a few years now, and I don't get thoughts like that very often, but I'm still an alcoholic, and I've stayed sober this long by not drinking and by coming here and talking about it. And I'm glad I'm sober, and I'm glad I'm here tonight."
Afterward I joined a few of the others at the Flame. I ate a hamburger and drank a glass of iced coffee. I got home a little before eleven.
"You look a little wilted," Elaine said. "Thank God for air-conditioning, huh? Joe Durkin called, he wants you to call him in the morning. And you had a couple of other messages. I wrote them down. I hope your day was more exciting than mine."
"Things were pretty slow?"
"Well, who wants to go gallery-hopping in this weather? But I think I have a commission for Ray Galindez. A woman in her seventies, a Buchenwald survivor. Her whole family died over there, and of course she doesn't have any pictures. She came over after the war with the clothes on her back and nothing else. She wants Ray to draw them all- her parents, her grandparents, her little sister. She lost everybody, Matt."
"Can she afford it?"
"She could buy my whole store out of petty cash. She married another camp survivor and they opened a candy store. Her sons went into business together, they have a metal-casting business in Passaic. She has six grandchildren, three doctors and two lawyers."
"And one black sheep?"
"The black sheep is at Harvard picking up an MBA before she moves back to Passaic and starts running the factory. That's if she doesn't get sidetracked and decide to become the CEO of General Motors."
"You got the whole story, huh?"
"Complete with pictures. Money's no problem. Her only worry is that she won't be able to remember what they look like. 'I close my eyes and try to see them, and I don't see nothing.' I told her to sit down with the artist and see what happens. She got a little teary at the thought. I tried to comfort her and I started to remember what an emotional experience it was when Ray did the sketch of my father. You should have seen us, honey. Two old broads with our arms around each other, crying about nothing."
"You're really something."
"Me?"
"I think you're wonderful."
"I'm just another former whore," she said, "with a former heart of gold."
9
Joe Durkin said, "Tell me something, because I find myself wondering. Just how did I get to be your rabbi?"
"I suppose you went to yeshiva," I said, "and studied long and hard."
"You know," he said, "that's the kind of rabbi I should have been. Wear one of those little beanies, stroke my beard anytime I'm stuck for an answer. I wonder if it's too late for a career change."
"I think you have to be Jewish."
"I figured there was a catch. It sounded too good to be true." He leaned all the way back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his neck. "Seriously, though," he said, "how was I chosen to be your friend in high places? Your personal tapeworm, deep in the bowels of the NYPD bureaucracy."
"Tapeworm," I said. "Jesus."
He grinned. "You like that? I thought you would. My other choice was your cat's-paw, pulling your chestnuts out of the fire. I think I like the tapeworm better."
We were in the squad room at Midtown North. The desk next to Joe's was empty. Two desks away, a heavyset black detective named Bellamy was interrogating a skinny Hispanic kid with a wispy goatee on his sharp chin. The kid had a cigarette going and Bellamy kept waving at the smoke, trying to keep it from drifting in his face.
"Four homicide investigations," Durkin said. "Earliest one's twelve years ago, most recent's this past February. Four men and a woman killed in different ways in widely separated parts of the city over a twelve-year period. What, I asked myself, could these cases possibly have in common? You want to know what I came up with?"
"What?"
"All of the victims are dead. Still dead, like General Franco. You remember that from Saturday Night Live?"
"Vaguely."
" 'This just in from Madrid- Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.' " He made a show of shuffling the papers on his desk. "Here we go. Carl Uhl, killed by a lover in his West Twenty-second Street apartment. Victim was gay, apartment bore evidence of an S-and-M lifestyle, victim was secured with handcuffs and leather restraints, blah blah blah, multiple stab wounds, genital and pectoral mutilation. You need all this?"
"No," I said. "I know most of it, except for the details, and I can look at the notes later. What I want to know-"
"You want to know if the file's still open, right? The answer's yes. The guys from the One-oh picked up a couple of Uhl's acquaintances but their stories checked out. Every once in a while they collar a perp who's been doing gay men this way, picking up tricks in the leather bars on West Street and giving them more excitement than they wanted, and they trot out all their open files with a similar MO and try them on for size. So far Carl Uhl's still an orphan. Why? What do you know that the One-oh doesn't?"
"Not a thing," I said. "Is that how the killer got to Uhl? He picked him up on West Street?"
"Nobody knows. Maybe he came down the chimney carrying his bag of tricks. As far as finding out who he is, that's not gonna happen. Unless he gets picked up for doing it again, and he won't, because you know what? Odds are he's dead."
"How do you figure that?"
"How do I figure it? I figure that twelve years ago he was engaging in high-risk sexual behavior at a time when AIDS was spreading through the bathhouses and backroom bars, but before anybody knew what it was, let alone gave the first thought to precautions. Guy who did Uhl, he probably killed fifty times as many people by giving them the virus as he ever did with his little knife, and when he was done spreading it around he went and died of it himself."
"Did he leave semen behind?"
"No, he took it home in a doggie bag." He picked up the report and scanned it. "Semen traces on victim's abdomen, it says here. Probably Uhl's. His blood type, anyway. Of course this was before DNA testing. Forensics has come a long way, my friend."
"It certainly has."
"And that's why nobody gets away with murder anymore. Where'd that question come from, did he leave semen behind? What have you got?"
"Nothing," I said. "I just wondered if there was any concrete evidence that they'd had sexual relations."
"Well, it doesn't sound as though they were talking about the weather. With these leather boys, though, what they call sex might not be what you and I would call sex. One case I had, these two boys had a relationship, and how they worked it, the one would come over to the other's apartment and be told to strip naked and clean the toilet. Not with his tongue or anything, just grab a can of Comet and a roll of paper towels and clean the toilet. Meanwhile the other one sat in the living room watching Oprah. who cleaned it some verbal abuse and send him packing. It'd be like you or I having the cleaning lady come, an' when she's done instead of paying her you tell her she's a stupid cunt and to get the hell out."
"I wouldn't dare," I said. "It was bad enough the time I asked her to do the windows."