Hope to Die

"The bag?"

"You ever buy a pint of booze and not have them put it in a paper bag for you? She'd have left the bottle in the bag until she got home, not tossed the bag on her way home. And the fingerprints. He was cute, wiping the bottle, getting her prints on it, but he used the wrong hand and didn't bother with the cap. That's not enough to hang him, but it's plenty to make a person take a second look."

"You think so? Most people wouldn't even notice."

"Well, I noticed."

"But you're pretty good at this," I said. "A little smarter than the average bear."

He colored, surprised by the compliment. "I don't know about that," he said. "If I was that goddam good, I'd be able to tell you who killed her."

"According to Lia," I said, "his name is Arden Brill."

"Hell," he said. "It sounds more like Arden than anything else, doesn't it? Could you play it one more time?"

I had gone into the bedroom to fetch the answering machine, but Elaine woke up while I was unplugging it and insisted I leave the machine where it was and bring Wentworth in. She disappeared into the bathroom, and emerged during the second playing of the message, wearing a robe and fresh makeup. Since then we'd heard the message another half-dozen times, and were getting less certain with each hearing.

" Arden," he said. "Isn't that a place? The Arden Forest?"

"In Shakespeare," Elaine said. "I don't think there's a real forest."

"No? It's just made up?"

No one was entirely sure, and he pointed out that either way, it was an unusual first name. A last name, sure. Elizabeth Arden, for example. Elaine recalled Eve Arden, the actress, who was before Wentworth's time. I pushed the button and we listened to the message again.

"It could be Auden," he said. "Like the poet?"

"Or Alden," I suggested, "or maybe Alton. They're both occasionally used as first names."

Elaine checked the phone book. There were several Brills, but none with the initial A. "Of course that's just Manhattan," she said. "And who knows where he lives, or if his phone's listed."

"It's probably not his name," I said.

"Well, here's the way I see it," Wentworth said. "If it is his name, he's probably not the guy."

Elaine said, "Wait a minute, I must be missing something. If there actually is an English scholar named Arden Brill, that means the girl was lying? That doesn't make any sense."

Wentworth shook his head. "Let's assume she wasn't telling a story," he said, "because why would she? No, she was telling the truth. A guy told her his name was Arden Brill and he was doing a thesis on her aunt. Now if there really is such a person, then not only was she telling the truth, but so was he. His name really is Brill and he really was doing a paper, a thesis, whatever. So he's legit."

"And if there's nobody by that name- "

"Then he's a phony," I said, "and he got close to Lia so that he could copy her key and find a way around the burglar alarm. So if Brill is real, somebody else had a reason to want Lia Parkman dead. And if there's no such person as Brill, then he's the one."

"And a lot of good it does us to know that," Wentworth said, "because we've got no idea who he is."

After he left, promising to get back to us when he knew something, Elaine said there was another possibility. "There could be a man named Arden Brill, and he could even be a doctoral candidate in the English department. But that doesn't mean he's necessarily the man who got in touch with Lia Parkman."

"Don't stop there."

"Well, say I want to win your confidence. I make up this story about my thesis and your aunt, di dah di dah di dah. But suppose you check? So I pick a name of somebody who really exists, some scholar she wouldn't ordinarily run into in a million years, and when she checks, yes, there is an Arden Brill in the English department, as a matter of fact he's hard at work on his doctorate, which is probably on bird symbolism in the poetry of Robinson Jeffers and nothing to do with Susan Hollander, but nobody's going to tell her that. You see what I mean?"

"Yes, sure."

"Does it make sense?"

"Maybe."

"Because here's what doesn't make sense otherwise," she said. "If his name's not Arden Brill, why would he make up such an unusual name?"

TWENTY-SEVEN

I was shaving when the call came. An Officer Tillis from the Twenty-sixth Precinct, and could I come in so they could take my statement in the Lia Parkman case? I said I could, and drank a cup of coffee before I caught the train to 125th Street.

The station house is on 126th Street, a block and a half west of Broadway. I walked there and wound up sitting at a metal desk in a room that was otherwise empty, except for a framed photo of the mayor on the wall over the desk. Above it, someone had taped up a headline cut from an American Express magazine ad: DO YOU KNOW ME?

They gave me a yellow pad and let me use my own pen, and I wrote out a sort of Reader's Digest version of my co

There's an Episcopal church across the street from the Two-six, and if the doors had been open I might have gone in. Instead I went back to the subway entrance, then kept on going to La Salle and west for a block to Claremont. I didn't know which building was Lia's, but I didn't have to ask too many people before the sleepy-eyed attendant at a coin laundry pointed out the apartment house on the corner. I stood across the street and looked it over, a six-story brick cube with mock-Tudor trim. I didn't go in, didn't try to locate any of her roommates. An official investigation was in process, and I had no business getting in everybody's way. I just wanted a closer look, and I decided this was close enough.

I headed back to Broadway. There was a West African restaurant a few doors up La Salle, and I made a note to try it sometime. Meanwhile I thought of the Salonika, just two blocks away. I was hungry, I hadn't had anything but that one cup of coffee, and I could eat there as well as anywhere else, but I decided I didn't want to share my table with a ghost. I didn't blame myself for her death, I blamed the son of a bitch who'd killed her, but I couldn't help wondering whether the hand might have played out differently if I'd been a little firmer with her the previous afternoon.

And if I had, and if she'd told me in person what she later told my answering machine? Wouldn't she still have gone home, and wouldn't he still have paid her a visit? And wouldn't it have all come out the same?

I rode downtown and had my breakfast at the Morning Star.

When I got home there was a message to call Ira Wentworth, and this time I didn't shortcut the process by ringing Lia Parkman's cell phone. I called the precinct, and he answered his own phone. I told him he was putting in a lot of hours.

"I stayed at it pretty late last night," he said, "and I came in early this morning, because I wanted to see if I could goose the ME's office a little. I got the report. Injuries to the throat are consistent with a choke hold. Cause of death is definitely drowning, water in the lungs, et cetera. Blood alcohol is close to zero. Small amount of vodka in the stomach, unabsorbed into the bloodstream because she died so soon after ingesting it. He was being cute with the vodka, and it's three different kinds of a wrong note."

He'd been cute before, with the brass bolt he'd attached to the inside of Bierman's door.

"And you'll like this," he said. "Skin tissue on the face reveals traces of- and there's a chemical name a yard long I'm not even going to try to pronounce, but it's identified as a propellant frequently added to chemical Mace."