around. He's got two men with him at all times, plus the driver who never leaves the vehicle.'
He went on to run it all down for me. I couldn't think of a way to improve it.
'He's never the first to walk through a door,' he said. 'Makes no difference if it's a room that got checked ten minutes ago. Before he walks in, somebody checks it again.'
'Good.'
'This fucker's spooky, Matt. 'The People's Will.' Thinks he's Babe Fucking Ruth, calling his shots and then hitting the ball out. And he's batting a thousand, too, the son of a bitch. This time we're gonna strike him out.'
'Let's hope so.'
'Yeah, let's. Personal protection work's supposed to be boring. If you do it right, nothing ever happens.
But it generally doesn't come with front-page headlines attached to it. 'WILL TAKES AIM AT LEGAL
WHIZ.' And everywhere you go with the guy, there's reporters and film crews, jokers sticking a mike in his face, other jokers pointing a video cam at him.'
'Now you know what the Secret Service goes through.'
'I do,' he said, 'and they're welcome to it. I never cared for Washington anyway. The streets go every which way, and the fucking summers there are enough to kill you.'
* * *
I found things to do over the next several days. I saw Joe Durkin at Midtown North, and he made a couple of phone calls and confirmed that the open letter to Adrian Whitfield had been written by the same person (or at least laid out in the same fashion and printed in the same typeface) as Will's earlier correspondence. I'd assumed as much, just on the basis of literary style, but it was something I'd wanted to confirm.
Even so, I spent a little time looking for someone with a personal reason to want Whitfield dead. He'd been divorced twice, and was presently married to but legally separated from his third wife, who continued to live in Connecticut. Each of the marriages had produced children, and I remembered that one son (the eldest, it turned out) had been arrested two years previously for selling a few hundred dollars'
worth of Ecstasy to an undercover police officer. Charges had been dropped, evidently in return for his rolling over and giving up his supplier. That looked promising, but it didn't seem to lead anywhere.
I liked the idea of someone with a private grudge. It wouldn't be the first time someone had concealed a personal motive behind the smoke screen of serial murder. Sometimes an opportunist would disguise his own solitary act of homicide to look as though it was part of somebody else's string—I'd had a case like that once, the killer used an ice pick and so did the imitator. And I'd known of cases where the killer committed several purposeless murders at random to establish a pattern of serial murder, then struck down someone he had reason to kill as part of that same pattern. It was a way to divert suspicion from oneself when one would otherwise be the first and most obvious suspect. But it didn't work, because routine police work sooner or later led someone to take a look at everybody with an individual motive, and once they started looking they always found something.
If this was a smoke screen, Will was certainly blowing a lot of smoke. Writing letters to newspapers and knocking off a batch of public figures was a long way from strangling a string of housewives so that you could wring your own wife's neck without being obvious about it.
But maybe he just plain got into it. That happens. The man who did the housewives killed four of them before he left his own wife with her panty hose knotted around her neck. And he went on to do three more before they caught him. I can't believe he went on that long just to make it look good. My guess is he was enjoying himself.
* * *
The good weather held into the weekend. Sunday it was supposed to rain, but it didn't, and by late that afternoon it was hot and hazy.
Monday was worse, with a high of ninety-two and the air like wet wool.
Tuesday was more of the same, and that afternoon I got a phone call that diverted my attention from Will for the time being.
The caller was a woman I knew named Ginnie. She said, 'God, I'm so upset. You've heard about Byron?'
'I know he's ill.'
'He's dead.'
I knew Ginnie from AA. She lived at Fifty-third and Ninth and came to meetings at St. Paul's. Byron was a friend of hers, and I'd met him a few times at meetings, but he lived in the Village and mostly attended meetings down there. He came into the program because he couldn't stop drinking, but some years before that he'd been a heroin addict, and he'd shared needles, and shortly after he got sober he had the antibody test and turned out to be HIV- positive. You'd think people would react to such news by saying the hell with it and going out and getting drunk, and I suppose some of them do, but a lot don't.
Byron didn't. He stayed sober and went to meetings, and he took the drugs his doctor gave him, along with a nutritional regimen designed to strengthen his immune system. This may have done him some good, but it didn't keep him from coming down with AIDS.
'I'm sorry to hear that,' I said. 'The last time I saw him would have been in March or April. I ran into him at a meeting in the Village. I think it was Perry Street.'
'That's where he mostly went.'
'I remember noticing that he didn't look well.'
'Matt, AIDS would have killed him but it didn't get the chance.
Somebody shot him.'
'Somebody—'
