Hope to Die

"Wentworth amp; McLaren. It sounds like a team of architects. Or maybe a design studio."

"They're cops," I said, "first and foremost, and design's strictly a sideline. Look, if he calls, see if you can find out what it's about, will you?"

When I got to Mother Blue's, the house rhythm section was working its way tastefully through "Walking," the Miles Davis tune. I joined Da

"Which is that it's a good thing they're dead," he said. "The consensus seems to be that they're the sort of people who give crime a bad name. Especially Ivanko, who they all figured would do something like this sooner or later. Of course that's hindsight talking, but in this case it spoke with rare conviction."

"And Bierman?"

"Now that's what's interesting," he said, "and the reason I called. Nobody had much of anything to say about Bierman. If they were just as glad he was dead, that's because they knew him as Ivanko's partner in this particular outrage of the week. The one exception is Jason Bierman's mother."

"According to T J," I said, "she's all over the Internet."

"All over New York, too. She flew into town to clear her boy's name."

"Bierman's not from New York?"

"I don't know where he's from," he said, "or her either, originally, but she lives in Wisconsin these days. The city's one I never heard of before, and it's got ten or twelve letters and half of them are O's. Not that it matters, because she's not there anymore. She's here."

"In New York."

"At the old Hotel Peralda, known to the cognoscenti as the Paraldehyde Arms."

"Just west of Broadway in the Nineties," I said.

" Ninety-seventh Street," he said, "and what a pesthole it always was. Babies crying and bullets flying, and the only quiet rooms were the ones where the tenants were dead. Some hotel chain bought the place, if you can believe it, and they've converted it to a budget hotel for respectable travelers. I just hope they tented it first and fumigated the daylights out of it."

"And that's where she's staying?"

"If she hasn't gotten herself killed yet, or reinvented herself as a transvestite hooker, or hopped a freight back to Ocomocoloco. She swears her son was a good boy, and he couldn't possibly have done what they say he did. According to her, Jason was a fall guy for a player to be named later."

"Either I'm as crazy as she is," I said, "or the woman's right."

He poured himself some more vodka. "You were made for each other," he said. "She's been talking some to the press, from what I hear, but the only ones who want to bother with her are from the supermarket tabloids, and what they really want her to do is tell how young Jase used to pull the wings off flies and use stray cats for scientific experiments. When she insisted on making him sound like a choirboy, they lost interest. And of course the cops don't want to hear from her. They make some rookie take her statement, and then they just shine her on."

"Can't blame them."

"No. So what she's doing, even though she doesn't have a pot to piss in, and God knows the Colonial I

"That's the new name of the Paraldehyde?"

"Yes, and it's wonderfully descriptive, as long as your idea of a colony is Devil's Island. What the woman's doing, and why I couldn't wait to call you, is she's looking for a private detective to represent her interests and clear her poor boy's reputation. Made for each other, the two of you. Made for each other!"

If that had been one of Da

By then I'd have heard from Ira Wentworth (of Wentworth amp; McLaren) and a call to a dotty old lady from Wisconsin would no longer have ranked high on my list of priorities. In any event, I'd have had to call her by nine that morning, because that was when she was leaving to catch an eleven-A.M. flight to Milwaukee, the airport of choice for those living in Oconomowoc.

But Mother Blue's is on Amsterdam in the Nineties, just a few minutes from the Colonial I

I said, "Mrs. Watling, my name's Matthew Scudder, I'm a private detective. I'd like to talk with you about your son."

"Oh, my," she said. "You people really come out of the woodwork, don't you?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"I guess you smell money," she said. "I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I'm afraid I can't possibly afford the fees you charge."

And she rang off.

"I think we got cut off," I told the clerk. "Could you put me through again?"

When she picked up I said, "Mrs. Watling, you couldn't hire me if you wanted to. I already have a client, and I happen to believe your son is in fact i

I said all that in one breath, wanting to get the words in before she broke the co

"I'm here."

"Do you want to come up here?"

NO VISITORS ALLOWED IN ROOMS, a sign a

"Do you suppose they think I'm a prostitute? Well, it doesn't matter, there's no room for two people in here anyway. There's not really room for one. This is the worst excuse for a hotel I've ever seen in my whole life, let alone stayed in, and they're charging me ninety-five dollars a night, and tax is extra. And people tell me it's a bargain!"

Welcome to New York, I thought.

"I'll have to get dressed," she said, "but it won't take me a minute, and then I'll be right down."

It was more than a minute, but no more than five, before she emerged from the elevator, wearing a beige pantsuit and a bright yellow blouse. "I'm dressed all wrong for New York," she said. "You don't have to tell me."

"I wasn't going to."

"Well, I am, and I know it, but I'm not going to run out and buy a lot of black clothes just so I can fit in. And I don't think I would fit in even if I did."

I wasn't inclined to argue the point. She looked like a suburban Midwestern matron, her light brown hair carefully styled, her lipstick neatly applied, her wrinkles the kind they call laugh lines. She wasn't the stereotypical mother I'd envisioned, but she seemed to fit the role she'd fashioned for herself, or found forced upon her- the mother determined to salvage a dead son's good name.

Except it wasn't all that good a name to start with, she told me, after we had settled into a corner booth at the Ninety-sixth Street equivalent of the Morning Star, or the Salonika. "Nothing ever really worked out for Jason," she said. "His father was about the handsomest boy in our high school class, and the most fun. But fun was all he cared about, and fun meant drinking, and drinking meant… well, he took off when Jason was four years old. I never heard from him, and I was told I could divorce him in absentia, or have him declared legally dead after seven years. But I didn't know that I wanted to do that, either of those things, and then I didn't have to, because he turned a car over somewhere in California and there was a card in his wallet of who to notify in the event he died, which he did."