“Don’t ask me why.” Something made me pull out the photo of the elusive David Thompson. I showed it to Danny and asked him if it rang any kind of a bell.
He shook his head. “Should it?”
“Probably not. He has a private mailbox a couple of blocks from here, so I thought he might have come in.”
“He’s got a face that would be easy to miss,” he said, “but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it. You want to make copies and I’ll show it around?”
“I don’t think it’s worth it.”
He shrugged. “Whatever. Who is he, anyway?”
“Either his name’s David Thompson,” I said, “or it isn’t.”
“Ah,” he said. “You know, the same can be said for almost everybody.” When we got home Elaine said, “You’re a genius, you know that? You took a sad evening and turned it around. Did you ever think you’d live to hear the same person in the course of a single night describe himself as an albino pickaninny and an alter kocker?”
“Now that you mention it, no.”
“And, but for you, we’d have missed that. You know what you’re gonna get, big boy?”
“What?”
“Lucky,” she said. “But I think you should get lucky with somebody who’s clean and smells nice, so I’ll go freshen up. And you might want to shave.”
“And shower.”
“And shower. So why don’t you meet me in the bedroom in a half an hour or so?”
That was around twelve-thirty, and it must have been close to one-thirty when she said, “See? What did I tell you. You got lucky.”
“The luckiest I ever got was the day I met you,” I said.
“Sweet old bear. Oh, wow.”
“Wow?”
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“I was just thinking. And you know, there’s not a soul I know in the business, so I couldn’t even go and ask somebody.”
“Ask somebody what?”
“Well, I was just wondering what the impact of Viagra’s been on working girls. I mean, it would have to have a major effect, wouldn’t you think?”
“I think you’re a fruitcake.”
“What? A fruitcake? How can you say that?”
“A fruitcake’s not a bad thing. Good night. I love you.” So it turned out to be a good night, a wonderful night. What I didn’t know was that there weren’t going to be any more of them.
15
I woke up to the smell of coffee, and when I got to the kitchen Elaine had a cup poured for me, and an English muffin in the toaster. The TV
was on, tuned to the Today show, and Katie Couric was trying to be reasonably cheerful while her guest talked about his new book on the genocide in the Sudan.
Elaine said, “That poor schnook. He’s on national television, he’s got a book out on a serious subject, and all anybody’s going to notice is that he’s wearing a rug.”
“And not a very good one, either.”
“If it was a good one,” she said, “we wouldn’t spot it so easily. And imagine how hot it must be under those studio lights with that thing clinging to your scalp like a dead muskrat.” She had a cup of coffee, but no breakfast. She was on her way to the yoga class she took two or three times a week, and felt it was more effective if she did it on an empty stomach. She was out the door and on her way by a quarter after eight, and that was something to be grateful for, as it turned out.
Because she wasn’t around when they broke for the local news at 8:25. I was half listening to it, and just enough got through to engage my attention. A woman had been killed in Manhattan, although they didn’t say who or where. That’s not rare, it’s a big city and a hard world, but something made me change the channel to New York One, where 124
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they give you a steady diet of local news around the clock, and I waited through a pronouncement by the mayor and an optimistic weather report and a couple of commercials, and then an off-camera reporter was talking about the savage torture-murder of an unmarried Manhattan woman, and I got a sinking feeling.
Then a shot of the building she lived in filled the screen, and that didn’t mean it had to be her, she wasn’t the building’s only tenant, and probably not the only single woman. It didn’t have to be her. It could have been someone else who’d been found nude in her bedroom, stabbed to death after what the reporter grimly described as “an apparent marathon session of torture and abuse.” But I knew it was her.
The name, I was told, was being withheld pending notification of kin. Did she have any kin? I couldn’t remember, and wasn’t sure if it was something I’d ever known. It seemed to me that her parents were dead, and she’d never had children. Wasn’t there an ex-husband, and was he someone they would need to notify? Were there brothers or sisters?
I picked up the phone and dialed a number I didn’t have to look up, and a voice I didn’t recognize said, “Squad
