'And you know for a fact he won't change his mind?'
'He can't.'
'Why's that?'
'Because he's dead,' I said. 'The last person he killed was himself.
I'm not blowing smoke and I'm not holding out, either. Will was Adrian Whitfield. He killed three people and then he killed himself.'
He looked at me. 'In other words, case closed. Is that what you're saying?'
'It'll take some police work to wrap it up and tie off the loose ends, but—'
'But Will's history and the people of this great city can sleep safe in their beds. Is that it?'
'Evidently not,' I said, 'if your tone of voice is anything to go by.
What have you got?'
'What have I got? I haven't got a thing. I could tell you what they've got downtown, except you can figure it out for yourself when I tell you who they got it from. Our old friend Martin J. McGraw.' I looked at him and he nodded. 'Yeah, right,' he said. 'Another letter from Will.'
17
The letter had obviously been written after its author had read Marty McGraw's most recent column, the one that ended in an oblique invitation to Will to deal harshly with the principal owner of the New York Yankees. 'An Open Letter to Marty McGraw' was how he headed it, and he started with a reference to the last line of McGraw's column.
'You ask where I am now that you need me,' he said. 'The question answers itself if you will but remember what I am. The Will of the People is always present, even as it is always needed. The particular flesh and blood embodiment of that Will who writes these lines, and who has been called to action several times in recent months, is nothing more than a physical manifestation of that Will.'
He went on in that abstract vein for another paragraph or two, then turned specific. His letter's title notwithstanding, Marty McGraw was not his target. Neither was the Yankees' arrogant owner. Instead he named three New Yorkers whom he charged with acting in flagrant opposition to the public good.
First was Peter Tully, head of the Transit Workers Union, who was already threatening to greet the new year with a bus and subway strike.
Second on the list was Marvin Rome, a judge who'd never met a defendant he didn't like. The final name was that of Regis Kilbourne, for many years the theater critic of the New York Times.
Hours later, I finally got to see a copy of the letter. 'You keep shaking your head like that,' Joe Durkin said, 'you'll wind up suing yourself for whiplash.'
'Will never wrote this letter.'
'So you said. At great length, as I recall.'
We'd spent the day in a conference room at One Police Plaza, where I got to tell my story over and over to different teams of detectives. Some of them acted respectful while others were cynical and patronizing, but whatever attitude they struck it felt as though they were acting the part. They all seemed impossibly young to me, and I suppose they were. Their average age must have been around thirty-five, which gave me a good twenty years on them.
I don't know why they had to ask me the same questions quite as many times as they did. A certain amount of that was probably to see if I contradicted myself or offered any additional information, but eventually I guess they just settled into a routine. It was easier to go over my story a few more times than to think of something else to do.
Meanwhile, other people were off doing other things. They sent a crew to toss Adrian's apartment and another to disrupt things at his office. His photograph went out by wire to Omaha and Philadelphia, as well as to Midwest Express's hub city, Milwaukee. They weren't keeping me posted, but I guess some corroborating evidence began to turn up, because there was an attitudinal shift sometime around the middle of the afternoon. That was when it began to become clear that they knew the story I'd spun for them was more than smoke.
Joe was around for the whole thing. He wasn't always in the conference room, and at one point I thought he'd gone home, or back to his precinct. He came back, though, and he brought a sandwich and a container of coffee for me. He disappeared again after a while, but he was planted in a chair in the outer office when they finally told me to go home.
We walked a couple of blocks, passing up a few favorite cop watering holes, and wound up in the bar of a Vietnamese restaurant on Baxter Street. The place was the next thing to empty, with one man reading a newspaper at a table and another nursing a beer at the far end of the bar. The woman behind the bar looked exotic, and thoroughly bored. She fixed a martini for Joe and a Coke for me and left us alone.
Joe drank a third of his martini and held the glass aloft. 'I ordered this,' he said, 'not because I ever liked the taste of these things, but because after a day like today I wanted something that would hit me right between the eyes.'
'I know what you mean,' I said. 'That's why I ordered a Coke.'
'Is that a fact. Don't tell me you never get the urge for something stronger.'
'I get lots of urges,' I said. 'So?'
'So nothing.' He nodded in the direction of the bartender. 'Talk about urges,' he said.
'Oh?'
'What do you figure, black father and Vietnamese mother?'
'Something like that.'
