Hope to Die

"How?"

"That's the thing, how do you compromise? Like when one person wants to have a child and the other one doesn't. You can't have half a kid."

"No."

"We went for couple counseling, and it was an interesting process, but we kept butting up against the same brick wall. He wanted to go in on the house more than he wanted to be with me, and I wasn't ready for that. I said buying a house was something married people did, and he said then let's get married, and I said you don't want to get married, you just want to buy a house, and anyway I don't want to get married, and if I got married I still wouldn't want to buy the house. And by the time we got through pointing this out to each other, well, we didn't really want to be together anymore. When I moved out it was a relief to both of us."

"Still, it had to be emotionally wrenching."

"I suppose so."

"Did he call you? Try to get you to come back to him?"

"No, nothing like that. I honestly think he was more relieved than I was to be out of it. And he was busy, first getting the money together and then moving in and doing all the work. If he missed me at all, that would take his mind off it."

"I see."

"And if it didn't, well, the other people in the house were all his friends. I'm sure they'd have been happy to fix him up with somebody who'd fit in."

"The way you didn't fit in?"

"You sound like the shrink, the counselor. And I guess I didn't fit in, because they all wanted something and I didn't want it. Anyway, what would I want with a house in Williamsburg? I have a house in Manhattan, all to myself."

Her voice broke on the final phrase, and she turned from me, rising and going to the sink for a glass of water. From the back I saw her shoulders rise and fall, but her sobbing was a silent affair. She drank a whole glass of water, and when she came back her brow was untroubled and her eyes were dry.

She hadn't heard from Peter, or of him, but he'd called after her parents were killed, called to express his sympathy and, like everyone else, asked if there was anything he could do.

"But what could he do? What could anybody do? People always say that, and there's never anything anybody can do."

"Your parents had met him," I said.

"Yes, of course, on quite a few occasions."

"He'd been to this house."

"Many times. Oh, no. I know what you're thinking, and it's impossible."

"You're sure of that?"

"You would be, too," she said, "if you knew him, or even knew anything about him. Peter is just about the gentlest person going. He's a vegetarian, he won't even wear leather shoes."

"Hitler was a vegetarian," I pointed out. Elaine, a vegetarian herself with a closet full of leather shoes, would not have been proud of me.

Kristin didn't seem to notice. "Peter would open windows to let flies out. We had cockroaches on Tenth Street, and he kept trying to find a nonlethal way to get rid of them. He wouldn't let me use glue traps because of the way they suffered, stuck there wiggling their little feelers. It bothered him. Does that sound like the man in your scenario?"

"Not really, no."

"And didn't the third man change clothes with the first person he killed? Didn't he wear his shirt and jeans and get blood on them?"

"I can't swear to it," I said, "but it certainly looks that way."

"The man he killed," she said. "The one who committed suicide. What did he look like?"

"I never saw him. From his picture in the paper- "

"Not his face, I saw the picture myself. I didn't want to look at it, but how could I avoid it? I saw both their pictures. What kind of build did he have, that's what I'm asking."

"Ordinary, medium height, medium build."

"Peter is five-nine," she said, "and weighs two hundred and sixty pounds. Do you think he could have buttoned that shirt, or even gotten it around his shoulders? Or squeezed into those jeans?"

"No."

"I haven't seen him in almost a year, so I suppose he could have lost some weight, but…"

"But not that much."

"I don't see how. His weight was something he was working on, but he'd been working on it all his life. Anyway, his shrink thought it was more important to get him to accept himself as he was than to sweat off a few pounds." She smiled gently. "And that was one time I agreed with him. Peter was a very sweet man, a very sexy man. He carried the weight well. But not well enough for him to fit into that man's clothes."

So Peter Meredith wasn't our mystery man, and there weren't any other candidates that I could see. Kristin wanted to know what was next.

"I don't know," I said. "I don't see how much more I can do. I think what I probably should do is apologize for taking up this much of your time and then quit trying to make something out of nothing."

"That's not what it sounded like, something out of nothing."

"No," I said, "it sounds good, what I put together, but what is it besides smoke and mirrors? I certainly haven't got anything I could take to the cops. I still have a few friends on the force, and they'd take the trouble to hear me out, but I can't think of anybody who'd be inclined to reopen the case on the strength of what I've got."

"So you'll just give up?"

"Probably not," I admitted. "I've got a stubborn streak, and time on my hands. The best thing would be if somebody hired me to round up lost relatives for a family reunion. That would give me a good reason to stop poking around in a case that's not going anywhere."

"Is that what you want?" she said. "Because I'll hire you."

She was taken aback when I said she couldn't. Early on she'd sort of assumed that was what I was building toward, and it hadn't taken her long to decide to go along with it. And now that she'd come right out and made the offer, I was turning her down.

"I don't understand," she said. "It's what you do, isn't it? And you've already been doing it, without a client, and not getting paid for it. Now I'm prepared to be your client, and you don't want to take the case."

"You'd be wasting your money, Kristin."

"So? You've been wasting your time. If you can waste your time, why can't I waste my money?"

"I surrendered my private investigator's license," I said.

"Why would you do that? Did you decide to retire?"

She might as well know; maybe it would help dissuade her. "They were threatening to take it away from me," I said. "I was helping a friend, and I had to cut some corners. That got a few official noses out of joint, especially since the friend I helped is a career criminal."

"Really? A career criminal?"

"Oh, very much so," I said. "A certifiable bad guy."

"But he's your friend."

"Yes."

A light came into her eyes. She said, "There's no conflict of interest here, is there? I mean, your friend's not the third man, is he?"

"He stands about six-four and outweighs your friend Peter," I said, "so I don't think Bierman's shirt would fit him."

"That's reassuring. But I still want to know who killed my parents. If I can't hire you, who should I hire?"