Hope to Die

"How did you happen to show him the gun?"

"I don't know. The subject came up. Is there anything else? Because we have guests, and I'd like to get back to them."

THIRTY-SEVEN

Harold Fischer's phone was listed, his Central Park West address the same as Nadler's. I tried the number and it rang four times before the machine picked up. An uninflected male voice repeated the last four digits of the telephone number and invited me to leave a message at the tone.

"If you were leaving the country for a year," I asked T J, "and if you were subletting your apartment, wouldn't you turn off the phone?"

"I don't, could be I come home to a nasty phone bill."

"Maybe Fischer told them to cut it off," I said, "and Breit told them to turn it back on again."

"Said he was Fischer, you mean."

"Maybe. I wonder if Fischer even knew he was subletting his apartment. Maybe he closed it up and Breit moved in."

"Best for Breit if he leave before Fischer come back from France."

"Best for Fischer, too." I tried the number again, got the machine again. "He's not home," I said.

"Then what we waitin' for?"

The doorman took a lot of convincing. I showed him a letter from Harold Fischer, advising anyone concerned that one Matthew Scudder was hereby authorized to enter his premises at 242 Central Park West. The letterhead bore two addresses, the permanent New York address on the left, and a temporary address on the Rue de la Paix in Paris on the right. T J had cobbled it up, letterhead and all, on his computer, and I'd signed Harold P. Fischer in a hand any paleontologist would be proud of.

In the past, when a fellow needed phony letterhead, he had to go to a printshop for it. Now anyone can make his own at home in five minutes. Desktop forgery, T J calls it.

After the doorman had a good look at the letter, I had three more things to show him. I led off with my Detectives' Endowment Association courtesy card, and followed with a photocopy of my New York State private investigator's license. It had long since expired, but I kept my thumb over the date. In case these items were insufficiently impressive, I finished up with a pair of fifty-dollar bills. "For your trouble," I murmured. "Mr. Fischer wanted to show his appreciation."

"I could get in trouble," the man said.

"In the first place, you're authorized," I told him, "and in the second place nobody's going to know."

"Suppose he comes in while you're up there?"

"He's in Paris," I said, "and I'm acting on his behalf in the first place, and- "

"Not Mr. Fischer. The new man, Dr. Breit."

"Just send him up," I said. "I'd love to meet him."

In the end he sorted through a drawer and came up with a set of keys to the Fischer apartment. "Anybody asks," he said, "you went and grabbed these out of the desk on your own. You didn't get them from me."

"We never met," I agreed.

We took the elevator to the fourteenth floor, found Fischer's apartment. There was a bell to ring and I rang it, and knocked on the door as well. No response. I tried the key in the lock, opened the door, and walked in, with T J right behind me. I called out, "Harold? Harold Fischer?" and walked through the large high-ceilinged room with its windows overlooking the park. There was a couch and a couple of chairs, and a desk with a computer on it. T J went straight to it, while I checked out the rest of the apartment. In the bedroom, the bed was made, the drapes drawn. In the bathroom, one towel was still damp.

T J called to me, and I went back to the living room and found him hunched over the computer, his eyes on the screen. "Something here you better look at," he said.

Ira Wentworth read the two-page printout a couple of times through, pausing now and then to shake his head. He looked up when he was done and said, "Tell me again where you got this."

"Off the Internet."

"You know what this is, don't you? This is a murder happened just hours ago. Did it even make the news yet?"

"First we heard of it," T J said, "was readin' this-here on the Web. Went to this site I been watchin', has a lot of shit about the Hollander murders. People speculatin', offerin' their own theories 'bout the case."

"Buffs," Wentworth said, the way a man might look around a kitchen and say cockroaches. He looked at the papers he was holding, shook his head again, and said, "This is the man who killed that girl. Amsterdam and Eighty-eighth, earlier today, did it just the way he says he did it. Different precinct, but everybody's talking about it, because you don't get just one of these. Maniac's out there, he's go

"This one's done it before."

"Yeah, that's clear, isn't it? But there's nothing here about the Hollanders, nothing about Parkman. Nothing saying who he is, either, far as that goes."

"He implies he's a mental-health professional."

"He's a mental-health case, is what he fucking is. You say his name's Breit?"

"Adam Breit."

"And how do you tie him in? You told me, but tell me again."

I said, "He met Kristin Hollander when he did couple counseling for her and a former boyfriend. He still sees the boyfriend and his little circle professionally. He was a counselor, court-appointed or self-appointed, I don't know which, for Jason Bierman."

"Mope who had the place in Coney Island."

Midwood, I thought, but the hell with it. "He's subletting an apartment in the same building with Nadler," I said, "and Nadler had him over for drinks and showed him the gun."

"Which was later stolen, and used at the Hollanders' and out in Brooklyn."

"Right."

"Makes him look awfully good for it," he said. "You know what we got? We got everything but evidence."

T J said, "He posted this. Every chance in the world he used his home computer, an' if he didn't erase it…"

"Even if he did," Wentworth said, "there's geniuses who can recover stuff after you erased it. But we can't seize his computer without a warrant. We can't even walk in his door without a warrant."

"It's not his apartment."

"He's subletting it, isn't he?"

"There's some question about the legality of that. There's a chance he moved in without informing the apartment's owner."

"And the owner?"

"Is in France and can't be reached," I said. I pointed to the paper he was holding. "Isn't that enough to obtain a warrant?"

"This? How can you tell where it came from?"

T J pointed to the upper left corner of the first page, where a Web address appeared in a different typeface from the rest. "Person ru

"Take forever, wouldn't it?"

"Take a while."

"And you'd have to get cooperation, and those people out on the Web aren't always in a hurry to cooperate."

"That's a fact."

"But that's what we did," Wentworth said, "and we reached the guy, and got the confirmation from him over the phone. Of course, there's some judges who'd want to see proof of that before they issue a warrant." He gri

By the time we got there, armed with a warrant authorizing a search of Apartment 14-G at 242 Central Park West, City of New York, County of New York, State of New York, our party had grown to include Dan Schering from the Twentieth Precinct, two detectives named Ha

" 'Stead of a letter from Harold Fischer," T J murmured, "I shoulda printed up a warrant. Save you a hundred bucks that way."