“But how did—”
“That detective, the drunk I couldn’t say enough bad things about. Maury let him go, but the guy did some extra work on his own. He thought of a question to ask the bartender at the Kettle, something nobody asked him before, because why should they when they had a picture to show him? It’s complicated, but Maury says his final bill’s going to include a big bonus for the guy, and I said we should include a case of his favorite poison while we’re at it, because I owe him a big one.”
“You’re off the hook.”
“Completely.” He kissed the rabbit, put it back in front of its dish of cornmeal. “When I turned down that last plea offer,” he said, “I had the thought that I was setting myself up for disaster. That I was pushing it that extra inch, and now they’d find new evidence, and it would be the kind of evidence that would kill me in court. Because that’s the way you’d do it in fiction. The guy has damn near everything, a Get Out of Jail Free card, and that’s not enough, and the next thing he knows he’s screwed, and it’s his own fault. I told myself come on, you’re not writing this, it’s not fiction, but I was still a little worried.”
“And now you can stop worrying.”
“I really can, can’t I? I’m glad I finished the book before I heard. So that there was still that underlying little bit of tension.”
“Quite a day for you,” she said. “You finished the book and the state dropped charges. The only thing I can think of to follow that is a blow job.”
Afterward she said, “I was in the middle of a story, but somehow I get the feeling I should save the rest of it for another day.”
“It would give new meaning to the word anticlimactic.”
“But there’s something else I could tell you. It’s a story one of them told, and it hasn’t got anything to do with sex. Or maybe it does. It’s hard to tell.”
“Oh?”
“What it really is,” she said, “is a mystery. Maybe I should ask your detective friend about it.”
“Now you’ve got me interested.”
So she told him the story Jay McGann had told, about his Aunt Kate’s friend Helen and the missing Mr. Shevlin.
“He’s living on the boat,” he said. “Except why would he? Scratch that, it doesn’t make sense. I know. He took off, went out of town for the summer, and one of his friends is taking his boat out for him.”
“They’re not like dogs,” she said. “You don’t have to walk them twice a day. And he was funny about his boat. He wouldn’t even let Helen onto it.”
“A busybody like Helen? I can’t say I blame him. You’re right, it’s a mystery.”
“I wonder if I should tell somebody.”
“You could tell this guy Galvin, but not unless you wanted to hire him to investigate. Which would make you more of a busybody than Helen.”
“It would, wouldn’t it? Maybe I should just let it go.”
“You could tell a cop,” he said, “if you knew one. I know a couple, but I’d just as soon not see them again. Besides, this is up on the Upper West Side, right? If he lives near the Boat Basin.”
“West Eighty-sixth Street is where he lives.”
“Or lived.”
“You don’t think...”
“I’m just being dramatic. He’s miles away from the Sixth Precinct, where Slaughter and Reade are stationed, and no closer to the pair who wanted to tie me to the whorehouse murders.”
“I know a cop,” she said. “Well, a former cop.”
“Is he a private eye? Because then you’ve got the same problem you’ve got with Galvin.”
She shook her head. “He’s sort of retired for the time being. He used to be the police commissioner.”
“And he’s a friend of yours? Perfect. He’s probably not in a position to do anything, but he can tell you where to go, or just pass the information on for you. You have his number handy? You want to call him?”
“I’ll be seeing him the day after tomorrow.”
“Today’s Wednesday, so that means... Friday? He’s the guy you see Friday nights?”
“Shit,” she said.
“A former police commissioner. The only one I can think of is Ben Ward, and he just died the end of June.” His eyes widened. “Buckram? Francis X. Buckram—”
“Francis J.”
“I stand corrected. Francis J. Buckram is Franny? He’s the guy who likes for you to wax his private parts and fuck him in the ass?”
“You’re not supposed to know that.”
“You mean he doesn’t feature it in his press releases? Damn, that’s hard to believe. Look, don’t worry. I won’t say a thing. I’ll giggle a little, but that’s all I’ll do, swear to God. Yeah, tell him. Seriously, I mean it. He’ll know what to do.”
thirty-two
He could feel him out there.
William Boyce Harbinger, alias the Carpenter. Born December 18, 1939. Height five feet ten inches, weight 155 pounds. Color of hair, gray. Color of eyes, blue. Complexion, fair.
Out there, somewhere in the city.
Waiting.
It was getting to Buckram. He couldn’t think about anything else. The way he was these days, he damn well needed those Friday nights, and he no longer cared what she did to him. She could draw blood, she could tap a vein and drink from it. Anything, just so she got him out of his self for a couple of hours.
Phone calls piled up. He hadn’t returned any in weeks, and now he’d changed the outgoing message on his machine: Hi, I’m away, and not able to retrieve messages or return calls. Try me again sometime in the fall. That struck him as abrupt, and he’d thought of adding something along the lines of Have a nice day or Enjoy the summer, but decided it would be hypocritical. He didn’t care what kind of a day any of them had, didn’t see why anyone should enjoy the summer.
Or any other season.
The Carpenter was enjoying the summer. Cooling his heels, biding his time. Getting ready for something that would make his Chelsea firebombing spree look like a Boy Scout campfire.
What was he waiting for?
It would be on a Wednesday. Last year the date had fallen on a Tuesday, he remembered that much, everybody in the city remembered that much. There was a line in a Gershwin song about Tuesday maybe being a good news day. Well, that Tuesday had been a bad news day, the ultimate bad news day.
This year, September 11 would fall on a Wednesday.
There was no way to know that was what the Carpenter was waiting for, and yet he knew it with an unyielding certainty, knew it without knowing how he knew it. That was the day that changed his life, wasn’t it? Well, his and everybody else’s, but the Carpenter took it personally, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Lost his whole family, lost every piece of furniture in the room of life. And turned overnight from a harmless old coot with a penchant for New York City history into a maniac who seemed set on finishing what the fucking terrorists had started.
God damn them anyway, the sons of bitches.
If he could just do something about them...
But he couldn’t, of course, and neither could anyone else. They were safely dead, gone to spend eternity with seventy virgins, and maybe that was punishment enough. He tried to imagine a Catholic equivalent, where St. Peter handed good little boys the keys to a Carmelite nunnery. Here you are, sonny boy. Enjoy yourself. Just be careful they don’t smack you with a ruler.