The apartment was a large studio with a small bathroom and a pullman kitchen. The furniture was sparse, and unexceptional, as if someone had chosen it out of a catalog. There was a television set, books in a bookcase, a framed Hopper poster from a show a year ago at the Whitney. There was a hardcover book, a post-Cold War spy thriller, on the round coffee table, with a scrap of paper tucked in to mark his place. He’d got about a third of the way through it.
I picked up a little brass elephant from its own small wooden stand on top of the television set. I weighed it in my hand. The super was across the room, watching me. “You want it,” he said, “put it in your pocket.”
I put the little fellow back on his stand. “I think he’s already got a home,” I said.
“Not for long. All this stuff gotta go out of here. Who’s it belong to now, can you tell me that?”
I couldn’t. I told him I was sure somebody would be in touch with him.
“Co-op board’s gonna want to put this on the market. He was a tenant, Mr. Leopold. He didn’t buy when he had the chance, so the apartment ain’t his no more. Clothes and furniture’d go to his family, if he had one. Somebody’s gotta come around, say, ‘All this here is mine now.’ Nobody shows up, where it all goes is the Salvation Army.”
“I’m sure they’ll make good use of it.”
“Anything real good, the drivers got dealers they call, tip ’em off. Then the dealer snaps it up and slips ’em a few bucks on the side. I saw you lookin’ at that book. You want, pick it up, take it home with you.”
“No, that’s all right.”
I went to the window, looked out at the park across the way. I poked through the closet.
“Cops been through here a couple of times,” he said. “One of ’em took things. Thought I didn’t notice. I notice plenty.”
“I’ll bet you do.”
“Pills from the medicine chest, a watch from the table next to the bed. Wasn’t a cop, he’d make a good thief. One of the other cops, he didn’t want to touch anything. Walks around like this.” He stood with his arms folded and pressed snug against his chest. “Thinks he’s gonna catch it if he touches anything. Catch it from breathing the air. Stupid bastard. That ain’t how you catch it.”
On the last morning of his life, Byron Leopold breakfasted on half a cantaloupe and a slice of toast. (They’d found the melon rind in the garbage, the melon’s other half wrapped in plastic in the refrigerator, the dishes he’d used stacked in the sink.) He made a pot of drip coffee and filled a lidded plastic cup, then collected his home-delivered copy of the Times from the mat in front of his door. With the paper tucked under his arm, the coffee cup in one hand and his rubber-tipped cane in the other, he rode the elevator downstairs and walked through the lobby.
This was his usual routine. On cold or rainy mornings he stayed in his apartment and sat at the window while he drank his coffee and read his newspaper, but when the weather was good he went out and sat in the sun.
He was sitting down, reading the paper, with his cup of coffee on the bench beside him. Then a man had approached him. The man was white, and the eyewitness consensus seemed to be that he was neither old nor young, neither tall nor short, neither stout nor lean. He was evidently wearing light-colored slacks, although one witness recalled him in jeans. His shirt was either a T or a short-sleeved sport shirt, depending on whose word you took. My sense was that nobody paid any real attention to him until they heard the gunshot. At that point the few who weren’t diving for cover tried to see what was going on, but by then the shooter was showing them his heels, and not much else.
He said something to Byron. A couple of people heard him, and one said he called Byron by name. If that was true it meant the killing was other than wholly random, but the cop I talked to at the Sixth hadn’t placed much faith in that particular witness. He was a neighborhood street person, I was given to understand, his consciousness generally under the sway of one chemical or another, and apt to see and hear things imperceptible to you or me.
Two shots, almost simultaneous. No one actually saw the gun. One witness remembered him as carrying a paper bag, and maybe he was, and if so he could have had the gun concealed in it. Both slugs entered the victim’s chest, and were evidently fired from a distance of five to ten feet. The gun was a .38 revolver, more than powerful enough for the task at hand, though hardly a high-tech armorpiercing weapon. If Byron had been wearing the Kevlar vest that Adrian Whitfield was griping about, he’d have lived to tell the tale.
But he wasn’t, and the bullets entered side by side, one finding his heart and the other an inch or so to the right of it. The pain and shock must have been something beyond description, but they couldn’t have lasted long. Death was pretty close to instantaneous.
Two shots, and the shooter was off and running before the light died in Byron’s eyes. He was lucky. He could have tripped and gone sprawling, he could have run around a corner and right into a cop. Or, failing that, he could have rushed past somebody who managed to get a good look at his face.
Didn’t happen. He got away clean.
That afternoon I beeped TJ, and he met me at a coffee shop a couple of blocks from there. “We been here before,” he said. “Fixed the place up since then. Looks nice.”
“How’s the cheeseburger?”
He considered the question. “Fulfillin’,” he said.
“Fulfilling?”
“Be fillin’ me full,” he said, pushing his plate away. “What kind of work you got for me?”
“Nothing we could use a computer for,” I said, and told him what I knew about Byron Leopold and the manner of his death.
“Legwork time,” he said. “Knockin’ on do’s and talkin’ to ho’s.”
“That’s the idea.”
“We on the clock?”
“You are,” I said.
“Means you payin’ me, but who be payin’ you?”
“Peter’s paying me,” I said, “while I try to find out what happened to Paul.”
“Think you lost me ’round the turn, Vern.”
“I have a client,” I said. “Adrian Whitfield.”
“Lawyer dude. Got his self on Will’s list.”
“That s right.”
“How’s he hooked up with Byron?”
“He’s not,” I said, and explained Whitfield’s theory.
“Thinks Will’s runnin’ warm-up sessions,” he said. “Make sense to you?”
“Not really.”
“Me neither,” he said. “What for’s he need to practice? He doin’ fine.”
Suppose Byron Leopold’s murder was a street crime. Maybe he’d been killed out of anger at something he’d said or done. Maybe he’d witnessed a crime, maybe he’d seen something from his window or heard something from his park bench. Maybe he’d been mistaken for somebody who’d burned the shooter on a drug sale, or made a pass at the shooter’s lover.
If it was anything of that sort, there was a chance the word would get around on the street, and I sent TJ off to look for it. He could get more that way than I could.
Meanwhile, I could look for the motive in Byron’s life.
I picked up the phone and called Ginnie. “Tell me about him,” I said.
“What do you want to know?”
“There are things that don’t add up. He was a rent-stabilized tenant with a decent apartment in a good building that went co-op a little over twelve years ago. It was a noneviction plan, which meant the tenants could either buy in at the insider’s price or stay on as rental tenants. That’s what he did, he went on paying rent.”