reasonable enough, and certainly came to a good deal less than what I would have spent flying there myself. I told him as much and thanked him for his efforts.
'Any time,' he said. 'Mind if I ask what you think you're looking at here? Is your boy Havemeyer setting these people up and knocking them off?'
'That's the way it feels,' I said. 'But it all depends on what I learn from the insurance companies.'
'That's a point. If Phillips and Settle are still alive and taking nourishment, that'd weaken the theory some, wouldn't it?'
* * *
But they were both dead.
I got excited at first. I had a line on a serial murderer, I knew his name and where he lived, and nobody else in the world even suspected he existed. I got a rush right in the old ego. When I broke this one I'd have the media dogging me again, and this story would be national, not just local. Maybe, I thought, instead of slipping out the service entrance I ought to meet the onslaught head-on. Maybe I should welcome the attention and make the most of it.
Amazing what a mind can do if you give it half a chance. In less time than it takes to tell about it I had myself guesting on Letterman and doing a cameo on 'Law and Order.' I could see myself sitting across the table from Charlie Rose, explaining the workings of the criminal mind. I just about had myself racing around the country on a book tour before it struck me that the deaths of Harlan Phillips and John W.
Settle weren't quite enough to get William Havemeyer indicted for murder.
Because they were supposed to die. They'd had AIDS, both of them, and it had been sufficiently advanced as to meet the medical criteria established by the viatical transaction brokers. Just because they were dead didn't mean Havemeyer killed them. Mother Nature could have beaten him to the punch.
So I made some more phone calls, and what I learned saved me from having to make the tough choice between 'Inside Edition' and
'Hard Copy.' Harlan Phillips had died in a hospice in the Mission District,
two years and eight months after having been diagnosed with AIDS, and just short of a year after assigning his Mass Mutual policy to William Havemeyer. John Wilbur Settle, treating himself to a trip abroad, no doubt with the windfall that blew his way when Havemeyer bought his policy, was one of eighty-four people drowned when a Norwegian passenger ferry caught fire, burned, capsized, and sank in the Baltic Sea.
I remembered the incident, though I hadn't paid a great deal of attention to it at the time. I went to the library and determined that the fire had broken out as a result of a failure of the ship's electrical system, that the ship had been carrying a load of passengers slightly in excess of its legal capacity, and that many of them were described as holiday revelers, which is often a nonjudgmental way of saying everybody was drunk. Rescue efforts were delayed as a result of a communications snafu, but were nevertheless reasonably successful, with over nine hundred passengers and crew members surviving. Of an even dozen Americans aboard, three were casualties, and the paper of record dutifully supplied their names.
They were Mr. and Mrs. D. Carpenter, of Lafayette, Louisiana, and Mr. J. Settle, of Eugene, Oregon.
Somehow I couldn't see Bad Billy Havemeyer flying off to Oslo, then sneaking aboard the SS Magnar Syversen and crossing a couple of wires in the engine room. Nor could I picture him at Phillips's bedside in San Francisco, ripping out IVs, say, or pressing a pillow over a ravaged face.
* * *
I left the library and just walked for a while, not really paying much attention to where I was going. It was cold out and the wind had a nasty edge to it, but the air was fresh and clean the way it gets when there's a north wind blowing.
When I got home there was a message on the machine. Marty McGraw had called and left a number. I called him back and he said he just wanted to keep in touch. What was I working on these days?
Just going around in circles, I said, and winding up back at square one.
'Be a good name for a restaurant,' he said.
'How's that?'
'Square One. A restaurant, a saloon, place on the order of the old Toots Shor's. Kind of joint where you can have a few pops and get a decent steak without worrying what kind of wine goes with it. Call it Square One because you know you're always going to wind up back at it. You getting anywhere with Will?'
'You must mean Will Number Two.'
'I mean the son of a bitch who wrote me a letter threatening three prominent New Yorkers, and nobody seems to give a shit. I don't suppose you've been looking into it by any chance.'
'I don't figure it's any business of mine.'
'Hey, when did that ever stop you in the past?' I didn't say anything right away, and he said, 'That sounded wrong, the way it came out. Don't take it the wrong way, will you, Matt?'
'Don't worry about it.'
'You read that crap in the competition this morning?'
'The competition?'
'The New York Fucking Post. That's close to the original name of that rag, as a matter of fact. The New York Evening Post, that's what used to grace that masthead.'
'Like the Saturday Evening Post?'
'That was a magazine, for Christ's sake.'
