room,” and it took until then for me to remember that Friday had come and gone and Joe Durkin wasn’t working at Midtown North anymore. I knew a couple of other cops there, though not terribly well. And it wasn’t their case, it hadn’t happened in their precinct. Joe would have helped me out, made a few phone calls, but I couldn’t expect anybody else over there to take the trouble. They just knew me as a friend of Joe’s, a guy who’d been off the job more years than he’d been on it, and they didn’t owe me a thing.
Who else did I know? The last cop I’d worked with at all closely was Ira Wentworth, a detective in the Two-Six on West 126th Street. We’d stayed in touch for a time after the case was resolved—actually, it pretty much resolved itself—and he liked to come over to our apartment, saying that Elaine made the best coffee in the city.
But we hadn’t kept up the contact, aside from cards at Christmas, and there was no point calling him now, because it hadn’t happened in his precinct, either.
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I had her number, though. I dialed it. If she picked up, I could think of something to say. But I pretty much knew that wasn’t going to happen.
It rang until voice mail cut in, and I hung up.
Sooner or later they’d have a tip line set up, a dedicated number for people to call with information on the case, but there’d been nothing like that on the news. I knew which precinct it happened in, I’d been assigned there myself for several years, although I’d long since lost touch with the people I’d worked with there. It might not be their case, Homicide might have taken it away from them, but they’d have caught the initial squeal and somebody there ought to know something.
I looked up the number, got whoever was holding down the desk. I gave my own name and phone number before he could ask and told him I’d caught an item on the news about a woman murdered in his precinct. I’d recognized the building and a friend of mine lived in it, and I hadn’t caught the name and was afraid it might be her.
He told me to hang on, came back to say they weren’t giving out the name yet.
I said I could understand that, I was a retired cop myself. Suppose I gave him the name of my friend. Could he tell me whether or not it was her?
He thought about it and decided that would be okay. I told him her name, and the moment of silence was answer enough.
“I hate to say it,” he said, “but that’s the name I’ve got here. You want to hang on? I’ll transfer you to someone connected to the case.” I held, and I guess he briefed the guy before he put him through to me, because he came on the line knowing who I was and what I wanted. His name was Mark Sussman and he and his partner were first up on the case, so it was theirs until somebody took it away from them.
Was I by any chance a relative? I said I wasn’t. Then did I have any contact information for the victim’s relatives? I said I didn’t, and wasn’t sure she had any living kin. I didn’t mention the ex-husband, since I wasn’t sure of his name and had no idea where—or even if—he was living.
“We got an ID from a neighbor,” he said, “and she looks like the 126
Lawrence Block
photo on the passport in her drawer, so there’s no real doubt of her identity. It might not be a bad idea for you to make a formal identification, if you wouldn’t mind doing that.”
Was the body still at the apartment?
“No, we got her out of there once the ME had a look at her and the photographer was done taking pictures. She’s at the morgue, that’s . . .
well, you’d know where that is.”
I would indeed. I said it might take me a while, that I had to stay put until my wife got home. He said there was no rush.
“I’ll want to sit down and talk with you anyway,” he said. “Before or after you ID the body. If you knew the woman, maybe you can point us in a useful direction.”
“If I can.”
“Because we don’t even have a preliminary report from forensics, but it doesn’t looks like the cocksucker left us a lot of physical evidence. You could eat off the floor, the way it looked. If you had the appetite, which you wouldn’t, not after you saw what he did to her.” I didn’t know what the hell to do. Out of habit I poured myself another cup of coffee, but I already felt as though I’d been drinking coffee for days. I poured it out and turned on the TV again, as if I’d learn more from it than I had from Sussman. The announcer got on my nerves and I turned it off before they could get any further than the traffic report.
I kept picking up the phone and putting it down again. Who the hell was I going to call and what could I say? At one point I had Sussman’s number half-dialed before I second-guessed myself and hung up.
What could I tell him? That I had a pretty good idea who’d done it, but that I didn’t know his name or where to look for him?
I looked over at the phone and a number popped into my head, one I hadn’t called in years. It was Jim Faber’s, and I wished to God I could dial that number and hear my late sponsor’s voice on the other end of the line. What would he tell me? That was easy. He’d tell me not to drink.
I didn’t want to drink, hadn’t consciously thought of it, but now that All the Flowers Are Dying
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I did I was just as glad that Elaine and I don’t keep anything alcoholic in the house. Because why do they distill whiskey, why do they put it in bottles, if not for occasions like this one?
There were other program friends I could call, other men and women I could count on to tell me not to drink. But I wasn’t going to drink, and I didn’t want to have the rest of any of those conversations.
I called TJ, brought him up to speed. He said, “Oh, man, that’s terrible news.”
