Hope to Die

Wentworth said, "Arden Brill, Adam Breit, and Aubrey Beardsley. I guess he wanted to hang on to his monogrammed luggage." He pointed the flashlight at all that was left of our mystery man. He said, "Well? Does he look familiar?"

He didn't even look human. Then something caught my eye, and I reached for the flashlight. I stooped down and aimed it where I'd seen a glint of something, reached and picked it up.

A gold chain, its links melted and fused. And, hanging from it, an O-shaped disc of mottled pink stone.

FORTY

On Saturday Mostly Mozart had its final concert of the season. I went with Elaine, and we took ourselves out to a late di

That's an even dozen, but the count reached thirteen the middle of the following week, when Ira Wentworth told me he'd played a hunch, and had the ME's office run some checks on unidentified corpses they'd accumulated during the past eight or ten months. A floater, recovered from the Hudson in the spring after having spent a couple of months in the water, was now identifiable on the basis of dental records as all that was left of Harold Fischer. The distinguished paleontologist hadn't gone to France after all, and it was now clear how Adam Breit, unable to pay his rent at Broadway and Waverly, had suddenly been able to afford a handsome apartment in an elegant building on Central Park West.

I brought Wentworth into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee, and again he commented on how good it was. I asked what dental records or anything else might have had to say about the body in the basement, and he said, "It's got to be him, don't you think?"

"It'd be nice to confirm it. What about DNA? Can't they get it from a burned body?"

"They can get it from dinosaur bones," he said. "Remember Jurassic Park? They got plenty of DNA from him."

"And?"

"And there's nothing to match it to, that's the whole problem."

"What about the Kleenex in the massage parlor?"

"Somebody went through the bucket of tissues," he said. "You know, whenever I start whining that I've got the worst job in America, just remind me of that poor schmuck, will you? But they went through it and they didn't find anything that matched. Which might mean he's a fucking criminal genius who really did fish his own scum-soaked tissue out of the bucket, or it might mean that little scientific report we found on his computer was founded upon a lie."

"He never went to the massage parlor?"

"He never got off. He didn't come, and therefore there was no reason for her to use a Kleenex and no DNA to throw away. And that's why he killed her, but he didn't want to face the fact he was sexually inadequate, so he told himself that's not how it happened, here's how it happened, and wrote it all up."

" 'I may be a killer, but I ain't no limp-dick wuss.' "

"Something like that, yeah."

"Maybe," I said. "Of course there's another possibility we haven't mentioned."

"I don't even want to think about it."

"He faked his own death once already," I said, "and left a stooge behind in his place."

"Jason Bierman."

"Uh-huh. Fire inspector said there were two possibilities, either he accidentally touched off the explosion and fire before he could get out of the building, or he wanted to go down with the ship. I thought of a third one right away."

"So did I. You know what bothered me the most?"

"The bloody footprints."

"Got it in one. The fucking bloody footprints. Leading right straight to the cellar stairs, just so we'd know to look. You know the word that comes to mind? Cute."

"Which is something else he's done before."

"Every time he had the chance."

"What about dental records, Ira? Fire or no fire, he'd still have teeth in his jaw."

"Absolutely, but what are you go

"And the daughter of the Czar of all the Russias," I said.

"Posing as a shrink," he said, "should be child's play in comparison, especially since you could make the case that half of them are unqualified to begin with."

I got the pot, refilled our cups. I said, "No fingerprints, I don't suppose."

"Are you kidding? There's barely fingers. And we did find some prints in the Central Park West apartment, but not a ton of them, and it's impossible to know which ones are his."

"Why's that?"

"Because no one set predominates. I think he wiped up a lot, and I wouldn't be surprised if he tended to be careful about fingerprints. Of the prints we did find, well, it stands to reason that the people from Meserole Street left some of them. They were there all the time for individual and group sessions with their fearless leader. And we can't get their prints for comparison, because the muriatic acid that didn't go on their faces went on their hands, and anyway they got burned up in the fire."

"What a fucking mess," I said.

"You got that right."

I drank some coffee. "How'd he get there?"

"Where? Brooklyn?"

"He didn't walk."

"Subway, I suppose. Unless you can find a cabby who'll go to Brooklyn. Nobody logged the trip, incidentally, which doesn't mean nobody made it."

"Did he have a car?"

"Not that anybody knows about. Nothing registered in his name at DMV."

"I think he had a car."

"Under another name? Could be."

"I think he used one when he and Ivanko took down the Hollanders. I thought that all along."

"Possible. Doesn't mean he drove it to Meserole Street."

"No."

"He wasn't carrying two pillowcases full of stolen goods this time, Matt. He could ride the subway and not get a second glance."

"That's true."

"Or he could have got a ride out with one of the Meserole Street people. He could have called them, told one of them to come pick him up. They stood around with their thumbs up their asses while he made the rounds and stabbed them. You don't think they'd run into the city and pick him up if he snapped his fingers?"

"I'm sure they would have."

"If he had a car," he said, "he probably went out there some other way that day. And left his car in a garage, or parked at a curb somewhere. And sooner or later it'll get towed, and wind up sold at an unclaimed property auction, and we'll never know, because it's registered under some other name."

"Uh-huh."

We were both silent for a while, and then Wentworth said, "But if he did take his car, it should have been parked out front."

"You'd think so."

"And it wasn't. Of course he could have left the keys in it, and then it could be anywhere by now."