All the Flowers Are Dying
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Scudder was an ox, a brute. A bull, really, and he’d fight him as one would fight a bull, tricking him with a flourish of the cape, then dispatching him with a single thrust of the Damascus steel blade.
The folder will do for the woman.
And a far more serviceable tool it will be than the elegant bit of bronze he’d left behind on Jane Street. It had been poetic, surely, to buy from one woman what he’d used to kill the other, and it had done what he’d required of it, opening a hole to let out life as efficiently as it had ever opened an envelope. But this folding knife of Jenkins will do more, and do it with grace.
And she knows, he’s sure she knows. Not how or when, but only that he’s coming for her. Her shop, a sign in her window proclaims, is closed until further notice. Her answering machine carries the same message.
Closed until further notice.
Closed for All Time, it might better say. Closed until Grand Opening under New Management.
Her knowledge will make her wary. Thus she’ll be a more elusive quarry than her friend Monica (who was really almost too easy) but she won’t elude him forever. He’ll find a way. And he has worlds of time.
He holds the knife, so light, so graceful, so feminine in its supple elegance. He works the catch that allows the blade to close, then flicks it open. Supple indeed, elegant indeed, but sturdy. According to the man who made it, it is more than equal to the task of skinning out big game.
There’s a thought. Perhaps he’ll flay her. Skin her alive, with her eye-lids taped open and a mirror positioned so that she can watch, and her mouth taped shut to stifle her screams.
The image delights him, so much so that he can’t sit still. Before he leaves Joe Bohan’s apartment, he folds the knife shut and drops it in a pocket. It is, after all, a dangerous city. One would be well advised not to walk its streets unarmed.
24
I went first to Grogan’s, the uncompromising old Irish bar at Fiftieth and Tenth. There was nothing in its appearance to suggest that it had been the scene of a massacre a few years ago, a bomb hurled against the back bar, the room’s interior sprayed with a burst from an updated version of the tommy gun. But most of the crowd would know this, and some of them could tell you the death toll. Grogan’s had drawn a good crowd ever since it opened, as the new upscale residents of Hell’s Kitchen began to discover the place and treasure it for its old-time au-thenticity, even as their patronage eroded the very quality that pulled them in.
Gangster chic, always in good supply in this town, at least since Jimmy Walker was mayor, got a boost from The Sopranos, and young lawyers and account execs liked to be able to tell their coworkers that they’d spent the previous night drinking whiskey alongside Mick Ballou.
Tonight’s crowd wouldn’t be able to make that claim, however, because the proprietor of Grogan’s wasn’t on the premises. I learned as much from the tight-lipped bartender, the latest lad to come straight from County Antrim to Grogan’s, looking to Mick for sanctuary and a job. I suspect I wasn’t the first to inquire, and I got the same answer as everybody else—he wasn’t in, and as to whether he’d be in later, why, who was to say?
“It’s Matt Scudder who’s looking for him,” I said. I lowered my voice All the Flowers Are Dying
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when I said this, not because it would mean anything to anyone else, but to impress the guy behind the stick. It wouldn’t get an answer out of him, but if Mick was in the back room, the fellow would find an un-obtrusive way to ring him on the house phone. When that didn’t happen I knocked back the rest of my Coke and left.
I could have spent an hour in a meeting, and it might even have done me good, but I didn’t feel like it. If I was going to kill time I’d sooner kill it in a bar. That’s not recommended, and I can understand why, but I didn’t give a damn.
I called the apartment and the machine picked up, which was as we’d arranged; Elaine would screen her calls, picking up only when she recognized the caller. I said a few words and she took the call, and I said I’d be a while. She said that would be fine.
I rang off and took a cab to Poogan’s.
They keep the place dimly lit, which is part of its appeal for Danny Boy, who has occasionally observed that what the world needs most is a volume control and a dimmer switch, that the damn place is always too loud and too bright. I let my eyes accustom themselves to the dark, and I didn’t see Danny Boy but I did see his table. Poogan’s, like Mother Blue’s, sells him his vodka by the bottle, and lets him keep it close at hand in an ice bucket. I think there’s a state law against that, but so far nobody’s turned up to enforce it.
I stood at the bar with a glass of soda water and ice—I didn’t want any more Coke yet—and one record finished its play on the jukebox and another replaced it, and I looked over to see Danny Boy returning from the men’s room. It struck me that he looked old, but I decided it must be my eyes, because lately I was starting to see age in every face I looked at, and I didn’t need a mirror to know I’d be able to spot it in mine.
He sat down heavily, took a glass, held it at a tilt the way you do when you pour a beer, and filled it halfway with iced Stolichnaya. He held it up and looked at it, and I remembered doing that with bourbon, and remembered too how the bourbon tasted when I quit just looking at it and did with it what one was meant to do.
My thoughts bothered me, and so did my actions, which felt oddly 194
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like spying. I carried my drink to his table, and he looked up as I pulled over a chair for myself. He said, “Well, this is a treat, Matthew. I don’t see you for months and then I have the pleasure of your company twice in a single week. You’re alone tonight?”
“Not anymore.”
“No, now you’re with an old friend, and so am I.” He started to look for the waitress, then saw I already had a drink. He hadn’t done anything with his Stoli but pour it and look at it, and now he raised it and said, “Old friends.” I raised my own glass and sipped my soda water, and he drank half of his vodka.
He asked what had brought me, and I said I had a little time to kill, and he laughed and said we’d kill it together.
“But I was going to get here sooner or later anyway,” I said, and showed him a copy of Ray’s drawing.
“You showed me the other night,” he said. “At Mother’s. Wait a minute. Is this the same guy?”
“No, a different one entirely.”
“That’s what I was thinking, although I can’t say I have the other chap’s features engraved on my heart. This one looks menacing.”
“Part of that may be the sensibilities of the person who told the artist what to draw. This is the man who murdered a woman in the Village the night before last.”
“All over the TV,” he said. “Give me a minute and I’ll tell you her name.”
I supplied it myself, along with the fact that she’d been Elaine’s best friend, and Elaine had sold him the murder weapon. With Danny Boy, you could give him the first sentence and he had the whole page; what he said was, “I hope you put her on a plane.”
“It might come to that. I don’t know.” I detailed the security precautions we were taking, and that I was going to pick up a gun for her. He asked if she’d know what to do with it, and I said there wasn’t too much you had to know to shoot someone at close range.