“I’ll bet they haven’t got the word yet at the DMV.”
“I’d be breaking the law,” he said. “Impersonating a police officer.”
“Gee, I didn’t think of that.”
“Yeah, I bet. Why can’t you do it yourself? You’ve been breaking laws right and left for years.”
“You know the procedure. It’s changed in the past thirty years.”
“Thirty years,” he said. “Jesus, I guess it has. Did they even have license plates thirty years ago?”
“They did, but they kept falling off the horses.”
“Off the horses’ asses, you mean. And speaking of horses’ asses, I thought you were the next thing to retired yourself.”
“Something came up.”
“As the bishop said to the actress. Give me the fucking plate number, I’ll see what I can do.”
204
Lawrence Block
It didn’t take him long. He called back fifteen minutes later and said, “Next time we have dinner, it’s on you. And it won’t be any cheap joint like the one I took you to, either. Write this down: David Joel Thompson, 118 Manhattan Avenue, Apartment 4-C for Charlie. Zip is 10025. Phone number—”
“They have a phone number listed?”
“They could probably tell you his favorite color, if you knew how to ask for it.” He gave me Thompson’s phone number and his date of birth, which made him forty-one. “And a Sagittarius,” he added, “in case Elaine wants to try doing his chart. Five-nine, a hundred sixty pounds, color of hair brown, color of eyes brown. That help?”
“You’re a prince, Joe.”
“A retired prince,” he said. “A prince with a pension.” The name was the one he had given Louise, and the address was a five-minute walk from his mail drop. The phone number had a 212 prefix, so it would be a land line, not his cell phone. I dialed it and it rang five times before a mechanical voice informed me that the number I had reached had been disconnected.
It didn’t matter, David Thompson didn’t matter, but I was interested in spite of myself. If I’d had anything better to do I’d have done it, but I didn’t. I could sit around waiting for Sussman to call, or I could get out of the house and do something.
I asked TJ to stick around, and made sure he had the gun with him.
He’d been carrying it in the small of his back, held there by his belt and covered by the baggy blue chambray workshirt he’d neglected to tuck in. “New York is a tough town, Myrtle,” he said, his accent suitably midwestern. “Even the beggars carry guns.” It was overcast, and by the time I got out of the subway the sky had darkened and I was sorry I hadn’t brought an umbrella. I’d taken the One train and stayed on a stop past Ninety-sixth Street, to 103rd and Broadway. Manhattan Avenue runs north and south a short block west of Central Park, extending from 100th Street up to just below 125th. I walked there and found 118. There was no Thompson nameplate on the row of buzzers, and both the buzzer and the mailbox for Apartment All the Flowers Are Dying
205
4-C for Charlie bore small plastic inserts imprinted with the name kostakis.
I rang the bell and waited and rang it again, and nobody answered. I rang the super’s bell and nobody answered that, either, and I was on my way out the door when the door from the hallway opened and a man with a voice thick with phlegm asked me what I wanted.
I told him, and he frowned and scratched his head. “David Thompson,” he said. “He don’t live here. I got a Greek couple in there now, been with me the better part of a year now. Very nice people. Guy who was in there before them, tell the truth, I don’t remember his name.
It’s funny, ’cause I can picture him.”
I showed him the photo and he didn’t hesitate. “That’s him,” he said.
“Moved, no forwarding. And I remember the name now, because the first week or two he’d get mail here, and I’d have to give it back to the postman. Then that stopped, and I could forget him, which I did.”
“He didn’t pay his rent,” I told TJ and Elaine. “He got a couple of months behind and ignored the notices they sent him. Eviction proceedings can take a while, but the super’s not a man who does everything by the book. He made sure Thompson was out of the house, then changed the locks and got a friend to help him put all of Thompson’s stuff on the street. The stuff disappeared gradually, he said. People would come by and take what they wanted, and eventually the sanitation men carted off the rest.”
“Thompson never showed up?”
“If he did, the super never noticed, but I’m not sure how much he notices. Thompson may have moved out on his own before the locks were changed, and not bothered to tell anybody.”
“And just left everything.”
“Everything that the super wound up tossing. We don’t know what he may have taken with him.”
TJ said, “We got a plan?”
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
26
That was Friday, and according to the Times it was the longest day of the year. I could have told them as much myself, but I wouldn’t have been talking about the relative proportion of daylight and darkness.
The hours crawled, and there seemed to be more of them than usual.
We sat around, the three of us, and we read the papers and watched TV, and for a while TJ and Elaine played canasta, which didn’t work too well because neither of them was too clear on the rules. Eventually he went home and we went to bed, and when we got up it was Saturday and nothing had changed but the weather. The rain that had threatened to fall yesterday was falling now, and it contiunued off and on throughout the day.
“I keep thinking I should call Monica,” Elaine said.
I kept thinking I should call Sussman, and eventually I did. He had some progress to report, though it didn’t seem to me as though it led anywhere. They’d found the liquor store where he’d bought the bottle of Strega, paying cash for it, and the clerk had given a firm positive ID
of the sketch. Assuming you could get it admitted as evidence, it was no more than circumstantial, the sort of thing Ray Gruliow liked to call “a mere feather on the scales of Justice.” Sussman admitted it was light. “It means we can stop sending guys to check out liquor stores,” he said, “and I guess that’s a plus. How are you and your wife holding up?”
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I told him we were all right, but we’d be a lot happier when the case was wrapped up.
“As would I,” he said. “What I’ve been doing is going through all the Unsolveds, trying to find something that matches up just a little bit.
You have to figure he’s done this before, wouldn’t you say?” I hadn’t thought about that, but of course he was right. Monica’s murder was too well staged, too carefully worked out, to be anybody’s maiden effort.
“But there’s not a thing with his prints on it. Not literally his prints, you know what I mean.”
“Sure.”
“I’ve been running the MO through NCIC, and I’ve got a call in to an FBI field agent, one of the few I know who doubles as a human being. Because I had the thought that maybe our guy’s from somewhere else. So he won’t fit any of our Unsolveds, but he might fit just fine in Oshkosh or Kokomo.”
“Maybe he’s like lightning and never strikes twice in the same place.”
“Then he’d be as hard to catch as lightning, because nobody’d be in a position to see a pattern develop. Unless the individual murders are rubber stamp affairs, so similar that the feds’ computer can’t help picking up on it. Otherwise, you know, he just crisscrosses the country, kills one person here and one person there, and there’s never a full-scale manhunt because nobody realizes they’re dealing with a one-man crime wave.”
“Wasn’t there somebody like that a few years ago? Turned out to be a long-haul trucker?”