Hope to Die

Peter Meredith's therapist may not have been able to save his client's relationship with Kristin, or to trim him down to a size 42, but it sounded as though he could claim a certain degree of success.

Marsha Kittredge and Lucian Bemis had the second floor. She was a blond Wasp princess from Beaufort, South Carolina, and he was a tall gaunt black man from South Philadelphia. She was a painter, he a sculptor, and T J had decided that, once upon a time, her great-grandfather had owned his great-grandfather.

The ground floor's occupants were Ruth A

"Made me suspicious," he said. "Man gives you money, you got to figure it's so you'll look the other way. Started to wonder what I wasn't meant to see. Then I remembered who I supposed to be."

"A city employee."

"You right, Dwight. Man in my position, they got to pay you even if they ain't done nothin' wrong." He sighed. "Good business to be in," he said, "if only the uniforms wasn't so lame."

When I finally picked up the phone and called him, Michael was in the car, on his way to a client. "I'll make the check out to you," I said, "and put it in the mail this afternoon. For five thousand dollars. You write your own check to him, or better yet- "

"I was thinking of making the check payable to his employer."

"That's exactly what I was about to suggest. Not because we don't trust him, but because the canceled check will be proof of payment."

"That's a good point," he said. "I can even say as much to Andy if he takes offense. But to be perfectly frank about it, as far as I'm concerned it's because I don't trust him."

I got out the checkbook and wrote out a check for five thousand dollars payable to Michael Scudder. I looked up his address, addressed an envelope, and folded a sheet of notepaper to wrap the check so that it wouldn't be visible through the envelope. I don't know why, I can't imagine that a lot of postal employees hold envelopes to the light, looking for personal checks they can steal.

And it seemed to me I ought to write something on the sheet of paper. I sat there trying to think of something to say. Everything that came to mind struck me as redundant or foolish or both. I decided to face the fact that I didn't have anything to say to my boy, to either of my boys, and I wrapped the check in the piece of paper and tucked it in the envelope, sealed it and stamped it and held it out and looked at it.

T J was sitting on the couch, turning the pages of an art magazine. He hadn't said a word in a while.

"I'm sending five thousand dollars to my son in California," I said.

He didn't look up from the magazine. "He probably be glad to get it," he said.

"It's not for him. It's for his brother in Tucson. Andy, his name is. He embezzled money from the company he works for and if he doesn't pay it back he'll go to jail."

He didn't say anything

I picked up the envelope, held it in my hand. It didn't weigh much. One stamp would carry it all the way across the country. I said, "I could get the money from the bank, squirt lighter fluid on it and set it on fire. It'd make about as much sense."

"Blood," he said.

"Blood?"

"Thicker'n water."

"So they tell me. Sometimes I wonder." I got to my feet. "I'm going to drop this in the mail," I said. "You want to wait here?"

He shook his head, closed the magazine, stood up.

I mailed it in the box on the corner, thinking what an act of faith I'd just performed, expecting the post office to transport it three thousand miles and actually deliver it to its intended recipient. Yet it seemed far more likely that the letter would get there than that the check inside would do any good.

We got two Cokes and two slices of Sicilian pizza at the corner of Fifty-eighth and ate our lunch standing up. My Coke tasted cloyingly sweet, and I asked the counterman if he had a wedge of lemon. He gave me one of those little plastic packets of lemon juice, and I decided that would only make things worse. I looked into the glass and said, "Thicker than water."

"So they say."

"You have any family, T J?"

"Not since my gran died."

I knew she'd raised him. He'd said as much once, and that her death was the last time he'd cried.

We finished our slices and looked at each other, and I motioned to the counterman for two more. We worked on them, and T J finished his Coke. I told him he was welcome to the rest of mine, but he didn't want it. We'd both been silent for a while, and not just because we were busy eating.

And then he said, "I could have a daddy. No way to know."

I didn't say anything.

"My mama came home an' had me," he said, "an' then she sickened and died. I don't remember her at all. I wasn't a year old when she passed. Gran told me about her, showed me pictures of her, said how she loved me, which maybe she did an' maybe she didn't. Far as my daddy, my gran said all she knew about him was he was dead. He was killed, she said, but as to whether or not that's true, I couldn't tell you. Gran coulda made that up, or maybe it was what my mama told her, but Mama made it up."

On the sidewalk, a man walked by having a spirited telephone conversation. He didn't have a cell phone, however. The mouthpiece he was half-shouting into was that of the receiver of a pay phone, a foot-long strand of cable still attached to it. I'd seen him before, wearing the same mismatched pants and suit jacket, the pants several inches too short for him, the jacket's sleeves too long. He walked around like that all the time, carrying his private phone, telling whoever was at the other end of it all about the KGB and the CIA and the hidden truth about the Oklahoma City bombing.

Nobody was paying the slightest bit of attention to him.

"I'd say he was a black man," T J said. "Bein' as I'm what you could call medium dark. Other hand, my gran was a good measure darker, and my mama, best I recall from the pictures, she was dark like my gran. So my daddy coulda been more on the light-ski

"No."

"Could be my mama herself didn't know," he said. "Gran didn't say she was wild, but she was real young, an' I'd guess she was wild. Could be she was a workin' girl, could be I was a trick baby. No way to tell."

Later we were sitting in the park going over what he'd learned in Williamsburg- which, all in all, wasn't much. None of the people he'd seen were physically right for the part of the third man. Kieran Eklund was still possible, but only because he hadn't been ruled out yet.

But you could just about rule him out on the grounds that people who work day and night restoring a neglected house, digging out old mortar, scrubbing bare brick with muriatic acid, scraping walls and sanding floors, are just plain not the type to create elaborate charades leading to multiple homicide. Putting that kind of effort into a house in the shadow of Bushwick Terminal and equidistant from two low-income housing projects might cast doubts on their judgment, but it still made them all extremely unlikely killers.

"And he's not just nuts," I said. "He's calculating. I wish there was money in this."

His eyebrows went up. "Last I heard, we had a client."

"I don't mean money for us. Money for him. Nobody puts something like this together for revenge, or out of bloodlust. The whole thing's too cold. There's got to be a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow."