Every Dead Thing

I felt a figure brush my arm and turned to see Cole standing beside me.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked.

“I’m one of the good guys,” responded the figure. “Well, I’m FBI, so whatever that makes me in your eyes.” He flicked his ID at us. “Special Agent Woolrich.”

He rose, sighed, and pulled the gloves from his hands, then thrust both gloves and hands deep into the pockets of his coat.

“What brings you out on a night like this, Agent Wool-rich?” I asked. “Lose the keys to the Federal Building?”

“Oh, the witty NYPD,” said Woolrich, with a half smile. “Lucky there’s an ambulance standing by in case my sides split.” He turned his head to one side as he took in the body again. “You know who she is?” he asked.

“We know her name, but that’s it,” said a detective I didn’t recognize. I didn’t even know her name at that point. I knew only that she had been pretty once and now she was pretty no longer. She had been beaten around the face and head with a piece of hollow-centered coaxial cable, which had been dumped beside her body. The cream carpet around her head was stained a deep, dark red and blood had splashed on the walls and the expensive, and probably uncomfortable, white leather furniture.

“She’s Tommy Logan’s woman,” said Woolrich.

“The garbage collection guy,” I said.

“The very same.”

Tommy Logan’s company had clinched a number of valuable garbage collection contracts in the city over the previous two years. Tommy had also expanded into the window cleaning business. Tommy’s boys cleaned the windows in your building or you didn’t have any windows left to clean, and possibly no building either. Anyone with those kinds of contacts had to be co

“Racketeering interested in Tommy?” It was Cole.

“Lots of people interested in Tommy. Lot more than usual, if his girlfriend is lying dead on the carpet.”

“You think maybe someone’s sending him a message?” I asked.

Woolrich shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe someone should have sent him a message telling him to hire a decorator whose eyesight didn’t give out the year Elvis died.”

He was right. Je

No one ever found out who killed her. Tommy Logan seemed genuinely shocked when he was told that his girlfriend was dead, so shocked he even stopped worrying that his wife might find out about her. Maybe Tommy decided to be more generous to his business partners as a result of Je

But Woolrich I saw more of. Our paths crossed on occasion; we went for a drink once or twice before I returned home and he went back to his empty apartment in Tribeca. He produced tickets to a Knicks game; he came to the house for di

I have a memory of him at Je

When Susan and Je

“How you doing?” I asked eventually.

He puffed his cheeks and breathed out, his head moving slightly from side to side like a nodding-dog figure on the backseat of a car. Gray was seeping through his hair from silver pools over his ears. There were lines like the cracks in fine china spreading from his eyes and the corners of his mouth.

“Not so good,” he said. “I got three hours’ sleep, if you can call waking up every twenty minutes to flashes of red ‘sleep.’ I keep thinking of Florence and the gun and the way it looked as it slid into her mouth.”

“Were you still seeing her?”

“Not so much. On and off. We got together a coupla times and I was out at the house a few days back to see if everything was okay. Jesus, what a mess.”

He pulled the newspaper toward him and sca

“We got a fingerprint, a partial print,” he said, as if the sight of his own lines and whorls had only just reminded him of it.

Outside, the tourists and the noise seemed to recede into the distance and there was only Woolrich and his soft eyes. He drained the last of his coffee then dabbed at his mouth with the napkin.

“That’s why I was delayed. Confirmed it just an hour ago. We’ve compared it against Florence ’s prints, but it’s not her. There are traces of the old woman’s blood in it.”

“Where did you find it?”

“Underside of the bed. He may have tried to steady himself as he cut, or maybe he slipped. Doesn’t look like there was an attempt to erase it. We’re comparing it against local files and our master fingerprint identification records. If he’s in the system, we’ll find him.” As well as criminals, the files covered federal employees, aliens, military perso

If it turned out to be the Traveling Man’s print, then it would be the first real break since the deaths of Susan and Je

“Florence’d been shopping in Baton Rouge earlier in the day, then returned home to change for some birthday party, one of her second cousins. She called you from some juke joint in Breaux Bridge, then went back to the house. She stayed there until maybe eight-thirty, then went to a cousin’s birthday party at Breaux Bridge at about nine. According to witness statements taken by the local cops, she was distracted and didn’t stay for long-seems that her momma insisted that she go, that Tee Jean could take care of her. She stayed one hour, maybe ninety minutes, then came back. Bre