A Drop of the Hard Stuff

“For all we know,” I said, “this mysterious partner is long dead, or locked up tight in a cell upstate. But it might be good to know who he is.”

“Would he have a motive? After all these years?”

“There’s no statute of limitations on homicide.”

“So he wouldn’t want Jack talking about it.”

“No.”

“And we know he’s capable of murder. Whichever of them shot the man, it was the partner who shot the woman.”

“While she was begging for her life,” I said. “Because she’d seen him, and could identify him. What else did Jack have to say about this paragon of virtue?”

But if he’d said anything else, Greg couldn’t remember it. I went home. There was a note in my box, and my first thought was that Jan had called to tell me our date was on after all. But the caller had been someone named Mark, who’d provided a phone number, along with an initial in lieu of a surname. An AA acquaintance, it would appear, and I wondered if it was Stuttering Mark or Motorcycle Mark.

I went upstairs, looked at the message again, then crumpled the slip and tossed it in the wastebasket. Whoever he was, it was too late to call and find out more. And by now he’d found someone else to hear his problems and tell him not to drink, and by morning he’d have forgotten why he called me in the first place.

XXV

I PICKED UP the Times in the morning and read it while I had my breakfast. In Woodside, a family of Colombian immigrants had been murdered in what police believed to be a home invasion. Three adults dead, and four children, with the bodies mutilated. Authorities seemed uncertain as to whether the motive was robbery or revenge, and I decided it sounded like a little of both. Somebody in the drug world had cheated someone else, or constituted unacceptable competition. So why not kill him? And why not walk off with his cash and inventory while you were at it? And, of course, kill his family, because that was the way you did business.

The first thing I thought of was Bill Lonergan. The Times story didn’t provide a street address, so I didn’t know how close he lived to the scene of the crime, but Woodside isn’t that large. I wondered how closely he followed the local crime scene, and decided he’d have trouble overlooking this one. Seven people murdered in their home, four of them children. It’d be on the TV news, at least until the police ran out of leads and some other horror displaced it from the public consciousness.

After that, of course, I thought of Jack Ellery and his partner.

I called Greg Stillman, who began the conversation by telling me he’d been trying to remember more about the partner. “But it seems to me he was trying to avoid saying anything that would make him identifiable,” he said. “I don’t know if they worked together more than that one time.”

“Do you know when it happened?”

“The killing? It was before he went to prison. And after he’d started committing crimes, but I guess that’s pretty obvious. There were a lot of years in there, but there was nothing chronological about his Fourth Step. If I had to guess, I’d say ten or twelve years ago.”

“And all you know is it was uptown?”

“And on the West Side. When I picture it I see an address on Riverside Drive, but I don’t know why.”

“Did he say something about looking out at the Hudson after the other guy shot the woman?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Was it a house? An apartment building?”

“No idea. Matt?”

“Because I can’t help being interested.”

“Nice. You answered the question before I could ask it.”

“Well, it’s one I’ve been asking myself. But there’s nowhere to go with this, is there? A man and a woman shot to death in their home somewhere north and west of Times Square.”

“I seem to have the impression it was quite a ways uptown.”

“Fine. Somewhere north and west of Central Park.”

“Not much easier that way, is it?”

“I don’t suppose he mentioned their names. The victims.”

“No.”

“Or anything to set them apart.”

“Those kinds of details might have been in his Fourth Step, Matt.”

“But he kept them to himself.”

“Or if he told me, it sailed right by. I told you I was trying not to dwell on what I was hearing.”

“Yes.”

“A fine time to play Second Monkey.”

“How’s that?”

“You know, Hear No Evil. If I’d been paying closer attention—”

“You don’t want to go there, Greg.”

“No.”