Hope to Die

"True."

"Or not left the keys in it, with the same result. That neighborhood, the kids learn to hot-wire a car before they learn how to drive it."

"Uh-huh."

"Where would he get a stooge at a moment's notice, will you tell me that? Just go out and pick one off the street?"

"Easier said than done."

"Exactly. And did anybody turn up missing?"

"I don't know."

"Well, neither do I," he said. "No reports, but how many people go missing and never get reported? Matt, I think it's him."

"So do I."

"Wallet was in his pocket, you know. It was a mess, what with fire and water damage, but there was some ID in it. A library card, one of those universal Student ID cards they make for you on Times Square. The kind of crap you have when you're using a false name."

"No driver's license?"

"No license, no registration. Which further supports the premise that he didn't have a car."

"Or that his license and registration were in another name, and he kept them separate. And made sure not to plant them on the corpse, because he might need them later."

"When he drove off into the sunset. He left money in the wallet, does that help convince you? I mean, who throws money away?"

"How much money?"

"A hundred and seventy dollars," he said, "which, to refresh your memory, is exactly the amount he boasted about walking out of the massage parlor with. His hundred-dollar bill plus three twenties and a ten."

"The exact amount."

"That's right."

"He walked around all day, and wound up having exactly that amount left in his wallet."

We looked at each other, and his eyes widened. "You know the word that comes to mind," he said.

"I think so, yes."

"Cute."

"That's the word."

"Oh, Jesus," he said. "Look, I'm not going to make myself any nuttier with this than I already am. That's him at the foot of the stairs unless I've got a real reason to think otherwise."

"I'm with you."

"He's dead," Wentworth said. "And if by some godforsaken chance he's not dead, at least he's out of here. And if he's out of here he's somebody else's problem and not ours. What did it say on that basement wall?"

" 'I came like water, and like wind I go.' "

"Well," he said, "all I can say is it's an ill wind."

It was about a week later that Elaine answered the phone and chatted enthusiastically for a few minutes, then covered the mouthpiece and said, "For you. It's Andy."

And indeed it was. He was just calling, he said, to let me know he'd moved again. He'd left Tucson, he said, and had knocked around a little, seeing something of the country, and now he was in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, just up the river from Spokane.

"In a few months," he said, "I'll probably wish I was in Tucson, because everybody tells me they get a whole lot of winter here. But I have to say it's pretty nice so far." He had a job tending bar, he said, and a decent room a five-minute walk from where he worked.

"If I get loaded," he said, "I can make it home real easy. Don't even have to cross any big streets."

"Always a plus," I said.

"Speaking of loaded," he said, "I was out of line, what I said at Hershey's after the funeral. Plus I guess I was, I don't know, emotionally overwrought?"

"Don't worry about it."

"I guess what I'm trying to say is I apologize."

I told him he was forgiven and it was forgotten, and I wrote down his address and phone number, and we told each other we'd stay in touch. To Elaine I said, "Well, that was nice, but as conversations go it was like an iceberg."

"Cold? It didn't feel that way to me."

"Invisible," I said. "Mostly underwater. He knows where the money came from."

"Michael told him?"

"Not in so many words. I'd say Michael told him without telling him, the way Andy just told me he knows, and thanks."

"He's in Idaho, he said."

"Tending bar across the river from Spokane, Washington. And living close enough to the job that he can make it home on foot no matter how drunk he is."

"Are you worried about him?"

"I've got no business worrying about him."

"That's not what I asked."

"It isn't, is it? I don't know if worried is the right word. I can't make myself believe that things are going to be different. People change, but only when they have to. Tucson 's just one more thing that he got away with. The consequences would have been serious, but he didn't suffer them. He dodged the bullet, and a miss is as good as a mile."

"And next time?"

"There'll be a next time," I said, "and maybe a time or two after that, and all I can hope is he's alive and out of prison at the end of it. I have to care because he's my son, but I'm not really involved. I'm not his Higher Power. I'm not even his sponsor."

"Just his father."

"And barely that," I said.

Afterward I found myself thinking about a conversation I'd had with Helen Watling, Jason Bierman's mother. She was deeply gratified that her son's name had been cleared, that he was now known to have been not a multiple murderer but the first in a chain of i

"But you know," she said, "I hate to say this, but I wonder if maybe he isn't better off this way. Because I don't think things were ever going to work out for Jason. But maybe I shouldn't say that, because we can't know that, can we?"

"No," I said. "We can't know that."

I'd had a couple of conversations with Kristin Hollander along the way, and then she called one afternoon to tell me I'd never sent her a final bill. I reminded her I didn't send bills, and that I didn't figure she owed me anything.

"That doesn't seem right," she said. "With all the time you and T J put in? And you must have had expenses, too."

"Nothing to speak of," I told her. "I didn't accomplish a hell of a lot."

"Oh? I'm still alive."

"Your cousin's not," I said, "and neither are those people in Williamsburg. You already gave me a thousand dollars, and that's plenty."

She tried to argue the point, but gave up after a while, and I figured that was the end of it. Then two days later the doorman called up to a

"This one, it had to be the addressee," he said.

I pointed it out to Elaine when she got home, and she started to unwrap it, then stopped to a

I said, "From Bergdorf's?" They had a men's store, she said, and this was gift-wrapped, and the card had my name on it. I took it from her, mystified.

It was an alligator wallet, a beauty. There was no card, and I took it out of the box and looked for a note, and the thing was crammed with money, crisp new hundred-dollar bills. There were fifty of them, and a card that said "A Gift for You" and was initialed K. H.

I got her on the phone and she said, "You did me a favor and I gave you a gift. Isn't that how it works?"

When someone gives you money, you thank them and put it in your pocket. A cop named Vince Mahaffey had taught me that many years ago, and I'd learned my lesson well.

I gave half the money to T J, figuring he'd done half the work, and maybe more. His eyes got very wide for a moment, and then he took the money and thanked me, and folded the bills and put them in his pocket. He'd learned, too.

Elaine and I had had di