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used it. My God, do I know how to pick ’em or what? I find the man of my dreams and he’s living in the back of his car.”
“He’s not married,” I said, “and he’s not leading a double life.”
“How could he? It sounds as though he’s barely leading a single life.”
“He’s making ends meet. It’s hard for him to get ahead of the game, but he’s staying even, and that’s no mean trick in this economy. He’s a plucky guy. I have to say I liked him.”
“I liked him myself. Or at least I liked the person he was pretending to be.”
“The pretense bothered him,” I told her. “Our conversation was an uncomfortable one—”
“I can imagine.”
“—but he seemed relieved to have it all out in the open. He wanted to tell you but he didn’t know how.”
“ ‘Honey, it so happens I’m a bum.’ ”
“Well, he doesn’t intend to spend the rest of his life living in his car.
He’s hoping to find full-time work, or build his freelance business into something that’ll put him back on his feet again. Anyway, he wasn’t sure how much you liked him, or whether the two of you had something that might last. If not, why bother embarrassing himself by coming clean?”
“When we went out for dinner,” she said, “I offered to split the check. He wouldn’t hear of it.”
“As I said, he’s not impoverished. Just low on funds.”
“And homeless. You know, he could have stayed over. He could have slept in a real bed for a change.”
“I guess it was a point of honor for him not to.”
“Jesus,” she said, and drummed the tabletop with her fingers. “He’s gonna call me and I don’t know what the hell I’m gonna say to him.”
“I don’t think he’ll be calling.”
“He’s dumping me? Where did that come from?”
“He’ll wait for you to call,” I said. “And if you don’t, well, he’ll take that to mean you don’t want to see him again.”
“Oh,” she said, and thought about it. “That makes it easier for me, 230
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doesn’t it? Saves us both the nuisance of a difficult conversation.” She thought some more. “Except maybe that’s tacky. I know how much fun it is to wait around wondering if the phone’s gonna ring. Maybe it’s simpler to make the call and get it over with.” I told her that was up to her. She wanted to know how much she owed me, and I told her the retainer covered her tab in full. In fact, I said, reaching for the check, there was enough left over to cover the coffee.
“I’m glad you found out,” she said, “even if I’m not crazy about what you found out. I knew there was something. He was too good to be true, with that adorable mustache. Plus he smokes.”
“The mustache,” I said.
“What? Don’t tell me it’s gone.”
“No,” I said. “You just reminded me of something, that’s all.” I didn’t wait until I got home. I found a doorway where the street noise wasn’t too bad and called Sussman on my cell phone.
He said, “You thought it over and changed your mind.”
“No, not a chance,” I said. “This is something else entirely, something you said the other day that I keep meaning to ask you about.”
“So now’s your chance. What did I say?”
“It had to do with his mustache. The subject came up, and you said something like the mustache is a good thing, because you could braid a rope out of it and hang him with it.”
“I said that?”
“Something like it, anyway.”
“I guess we can blame it on Brooklyn College,” he said. “Colorful figures of speech, when I’m not using words like proactive. So?”
“What did you mean?”
“Oh, you weren’t there when that came out? I guess maybe you weren’t. All his vacuuming only worked up to a point. We found three little hairs, and they didn’t belong to the woman. One on the sheet next to her and two in the bush, you should pardon the expression.”
“Hairs from a mustache.”
“So the lab techs tell me. Facial hair, anyway, and enough for a All the Flowers Are Dying
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DNA profile. That’s not gonna find him for us, but once we do it’s golden. If there’s one thing the DAs like it’s some good hard physical evidence to put on the table.”
I walked a block and called him again. I guess he had Caller ID and I guess my phone wasn’t blocking it, because his opening words were,
“Now what?”
“About the mustache,” I said.
“So?”
“One thing it tells me is he’s clean-shaven.”
“Now, you mean? How do you figure that? He doesn’t know he left a couple of hairs behind when he was having a snack. And even if he does, the DNA’s not specific to the mustache. It’s in every cell in his body.”
“He didn’t shave,” I said. “He didn’t have to. He just used a little solvent and peeled it off.”
For a moment I thought the connection was broken. Then he said,
“You’re saying it’s a fake mustache.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“And it was no accident he left those hairs there. He placed them there on purpose so that we’d find them.”
“Right.”
“Jesus, that’s convoluted.”
“We know he’s a planner.”
“And a tricky bastard altogether. But this doesn’t make any sense, Matthew. Giving us somebody else’s DNA doesn’t lead us down any primrose path. It’s not like he’s trying to frame somebody else for this.
I mean, he knows we’ve got an eyewitness, a friend of the victim who sold him the murder weapon. We pull him in, we’re not gonna cut him loose because the DNA’s not a match.”
“It gives his lawyer something to play with in court,” I said.
“ ‘Isn’t it true that you found male facial hair at the crime scene?
And isn’t it true that you tried and failed to match that DNA with that of the defendant’s?’ ”
“ ‘And isn’t it within the realm of possibility that another man visited 232
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the victim’s apartment after my client had gone home, and how can you rule out the possibility that this other man was responsible for her death?’ ”
“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Sussman said. “But what kind of psycho pervert murderer is so fucking painstaking? Listen, are you gonna be around for the next couple of hours?”
“Whether I am or not, I’ll have my cell with me.”
“Good. I want to talk to the lab guys, and then I want to talk to you some more.”
I was just walking in the door when the phone rang. “They didn’t have to do anything,” he said. “All I had to do was ask. The three hairs they recovered are male human facial hair, like I said. Facial hair is like body hair, it grows to a certain length and then it falls out, at which time the follicle sets about sprouting another hair.”
“And?”
“And these hairs didn’t fall out. They were severed, probably by a scissors. Now what happens sometimes is you take a scissors and trim your mustache, and you don’t comb it when you’re done, and some of the trimmings stay in the mustache and get dislodged later. Which is why they weren’t suspicious when they examined the hairs and saw they’d been cut.”
“Makes sense.”
“And the thing is it could have happened just that way. I can’t prove it didn’t. But I know it didn’t, because if our Mr. Neat trimmed his fucking mustache he’d have damn well combed it afterward.”
“Right.”
“He combed her crotch. Either that or he shaved his own bush, the way some of them do, to keep from leaving telltale evidence. Man, I bet every TV in every prison is tuned to C.S.I. when it comes on, I bet the motherfuckers sit there and take notes. Anyway, we didn’t come up with any loose pubic hairs there, not his and not hers, but what we did find were those hairs from his mustache. So it was a fake.”
“Had to be.”
All the Flowers Are Dying