Hope to Die

FIVE

Late Saturday morning I was drinking a second cup of coffee and looking at the TV listings, pla

The phone rang, and it was T J. "Time you get off the phone and out the door," he said. "I be at the Morning Star, waiting to have breakfast with you."

"I already had breakfast," I said.

"That case, come sit across the table an' keep me company. It be good for your heart."

"How's that?"

"Elaine always says it does her heart good to watch me eat. Don't figure it can hurt you none."

"You're probably right," I said, and poured the rest of my coffee in the sink. Ten minutes later I was across the street at the Morning Star with a fresh cup of coffee that wasn't half as good as the one I'd discarded. Although I'd talked to him a couple of times on the phone, it had been a week since I'd seen T J, and I hadn't realized how much I missed him.

"Sorry 'bout your wife," he said. "Ex-wife, I mean."

"Elaine told you?"

He nodded. "Said you went out to the funeral. I ain't been to many."

"The longer you live," I said, "the more you get to go to."

"Something to look forward to," he said. He had a plate of eggs and sausages and home fries in front of him, and he ate as he talked. I don't know that it did my heart good to watch him, but I can't say it did it any harm.

He put down his fork, took a long drink of orange juice, and wiped his mouth with his napkin. "Girl I'd like you to meet," he said. "Real nice, real pretty, real smart."

"She sounds terrific," I said, "but what would Elaine say?"

He rolled his eyes. "Might be a little young for you," he said. "Goes to Columbia."

"That's where you know her from."

"Uh-huh. Been going to this history class she's taking, but that's not her major. She be majoring in English."

"That case, she probably be speaking well."

"Wants to be a writer," he said. "Like her aunt."

"Who was her aunt, Virginia Woolf?"

He shook his head. "One more guess," he said, "and don't be wasting it on Jane Austen."

Something clicked. I looked at him and he looked back and I said, "Susan Hollander."

"Figured one more guess was all you'd need."

"Susan Hollander was her aunt? What's the girl's name?"

"Lia Parkman. Her mama and Susan Hollander was sisters. That makes Susan her aunt, and Kristin her cousin."

"And you'd like me to meet her."

"Be good if you did."

"Why?"

"She thinks somebody murdered her aunt and uncle."

"Well, I wouldn't be surprised if she's right," I said, "seeing that everybody else on the planet shares her opinion. A pair of punks named Bierman and Ivanov murdered the Hollanders, and- "

"Ivanko, Carl Ivanko."

"What did I say?"

"Said Ivanov."

"Close enough," I said, "since it's a name we can all forget, and the sooner the better. He's dead, along with his partner, so it's too late for him to hire Joh

"Lia."

"How's that?"

"Name's Lia," he said. "Spelled like Lisa, but without the S."

"That would do it."

"Well, it coulda been L-E-A-H, but there's some pronounce that Lay-a."

I still couldn't find the waiter, and decided the coffee wasn't good enough to have more even if I could. "The evidence is pretty strong," I said. "No matter how bright your friend is, I'd say the cops got it right this time. Bierman and Ivanov killed her aunt and uncle."

"Sounds like."

"Ivanko, I mean. I said it wrong again, but I meant Ivanko."

"I know."

"You heard me say it wrong again, but this time you decided not to correct me."

"You never know," he said. "Detecting don't work out, I might want to go in the diplomatic service."

"So you're practicing. Probably not a bad idea. A little diplomacy never hurts. If she's as smart as you say, she knows they did it, Bierman and his friend."

"She knows."

"Though maybe it's a stretch calling him Bierman's friend, since Bierman wound up punching his ticket. She thinks somebody else was involved."

"Uh-huh."

"Fingered the burglary for Bierman and his friend, set it up to come out the way it did, with both the Hollanders dead. And then took out the two of them and set it up to look like thieves falling out, like murder and suicide."

"She didn't take it that far." He polished off his orange juice, wiped his mouth. He turned his head, and the waiter hurried over with the check, as if he'd been hovering offstage waiting for just that cue. T J left it where the waiter set it down and said, "Lia didn't get into the how. Just the who and the why."

"And what would they be?"

"Be best if she told you herself."

"It's a police case," I said, "and it's closed. I don't see how it's anything for us to mess with."

"Probably isn't."

"But what can it hurt to talk to the girl? Is that what you were going to say?"

"Figured it went without saying."

"It'll be a waste of time. How much do you like this girl?"

"It ain't a romance, if that's what you mean."

"There's no case to take, but if there were, could she afford to hire us? Has she got any money?"

"Don't guess she's swimming in it. Girl's maxed out on student loans."

"This sounds better and better," I said. "A girl with no money wants to hire us to beat a dead horse. She goes to Columbia, that means she's on the Upper West Side. Or does she live with her parents?"

"Be a tough commute. Her mom's in Arizona and her daddy's in Florida."

"And she didn't go home for the summer."

"Stayed for summer session. She's just taking this one course, 'The French Revolution and Napoleon.' "

"And that's where you know her from."

"It's pretty interesting stuff. Those dudes had something, but it got away from 'em. Lia's taking the one course and waiting tables at this fake Irish pub. You know it ain't a real Irish pub 'cause they got food." He took a breath. "She's off today. She's living in student housing, got three roommates. I thought we'd meet her in a coffee shop up on Broadway and a Hundred Twenty-second."

"Today?"

He nodded. "One o'clock's what I told her. We leave now, we be right on time."

"And if I said no?"

"Then I show up alone," he said, "and say how you was tied up lookin' for Judge Crater and the Lindbergh baby."

"But you figured I'd come."

"Thought you might."

"I was going to watch TV," I said. "There's golf and there's a Mets game."

"Tough call, which to watch."

"Either one's better than wasting time in a coffee shop on Upper Broadway." The check was still on the table, and I sighed and reached for it. "I'll get this," I said.

"Figured you would," he said. "Seein' we on a case, you can expense it."

TJ's a street kid I ran into on Forty-second Street some years back, before they went and turned the Deuce into Disney World North. He appointed himself my assistant, and I liked his company enough to put up with him. Then I found out how useful he could be. He's a natural mimic, moving effortlessly from hip-hop jive to the Queen's English, turned out one day in baggy shorts and a Raiders cap and the next in a Brooks Brothers suit.

For a while we didn't know where he lived, and I suspect his beeper number was as close as he came to a permanent address. Then one Christmas I gave him the hotel room I'd occupied ever since I moved out of the house in Syosset. I was married to Elaine by then, and living at the Parc Vendome, but I'd held on to my old room across the street at the Northwestern as a combination office and bolt-hole, and because it was rent-controlled, and nobody in New York gives up a rent-controlled space except at gunpoint. I figured it could go on being my office, but he could live there and run it for me. The other half of his Christmas present was a computer, and he ran that for me, too, pulling information off the Internet as if out of the ether. By now Elaine had a computer of her own, and she and T J e-mailed each other across the street, like two kids with a pair of tin cans and a piece of string. She told me she could teach me how to use the thing in about fifteen minutes. One of these days, I said.