“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make light. What it looks like, he brought along what he figured he’d need, and he took it away with him when he was done. Did she say he was neat? You’d have to say he was the neat-est heterosexual male on the planet. There was a bottle of liquor, an Italian after-dinner drink. I’ve got it written down here somewhere. It doesn’t matter, it’s just a bottle of fancy booze. We think he brought it with him, along with the flowers, and they each had a drink out of it, and he wiped the bottle and glasses before he left. He wiped everything, he didn’t leave a print in the whole damned apartment, as far as we’ve been able to tell. We’ll probably lift a partial somewhere or other before we’re done, we usually do, but I have to say I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“Because he was neat.”
“He even ran the vacuum cleaner. The downstairs neighbor heard it sometime around midnight. He wasn’t about to complain about it, it wasn’t that noisy, it was just unexpected at that hour. It was evidently out of character for her to vacuum in the middle of the night.”
“Or ever,” Elaine said. “She had a maid come in once a week, and vacuuming was something the maid did.”
“The maid probably didn’t take the vacuum cleaner bag with her when she left, either, like this guy did. She thought he was some kind of government agent? Well, if he wasn’t he could have been. He was really professional about not leaving anything behind that could be traced back to him. You know that TV show with the forensics? And then there’s another version set in Miami, but it’s not as good. The original one’s an excellent show, but I have to say I wish they’d take it off the air.”
“Because it gives people ideas?”
“No, the nut jobs out there, you don’t have to give them ideas. They come up with plenty all on their own. What it does, it makes them harder to catch. It tells them what kind of mistakes not to make.”
“You think this man was just showing what he learned on television?” 134
Lawrence Block
“No, I don’t. I don’t know what I think about the guy. That was the spookiest crime scene I’ve ever seen. I don’t want to go into detail, and I’m sorry Mrs. Scudder has to hear this at all, but he tortured that woman a long time before he killed her. And then to leave the place immaculate, everything in apple-pie order, and her naked and dead in the middle of it, it was like that painter, that Frenchman . . .”
“Magritte,” she said.
“Yeah, that’s the one. Like, what’s wrong with this picture? I mean, if this is the man she’s been seeing, and it would almost have to be, given that he gave his name and she told the doorman to send him up. If he’s been dating her, and sleeping with her—they were sleeping together?”
“She said he was a good lover.”
“Right, you told me that. There are guys who go nuts, get hold of some poor woman and do a number on her. But they don’t date her first. Usually they pick a stranger, some hooker off the street or some poor woman who just winds up in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Once in a while there’s one who thinks he’s having a relationship with the woman, but it’s only in the privacy of his own mind. Erotomania, that’s what they call it. It’s delusional, your perp thinks it’s dating but anybody else would call it stalking.”
He was right, it didn’t add up.
“It would help,” he said, “if either of you could remember anything else she might have let slip about the guy. Anything at all, like did he have a regional accent, was he educated or uneducated, even small things like was he a baseball fan, did he smell of cologne. You think something’s too trivial to mention, and then it matches up with something else and you’ve got a clue.”
“He drinks Scotch,” Elaine said.
“Now there’s something right there. She just happened to mention it?”
“She offered him a drink, and he asked for Scotch and she didn’t have any. So he had something else, but the next day she went out and bought a bottle of what I guess was really good Scotch. And she evidently made a good choice, because the next time he was over he said All the Flowers Are Dying
135
it was really good, but he only had one small drink, and she was saying she wondered which would last longer, the relationship or the bottle.”
“The bottle,” Sussman said. “It’s still there, Glen Something-or-other.” He made a note. “Maybe he picked it up to pour a drink on a prior visit and forgot to wipe his prints off it last night. But I wouldn’t count on it. Still, that’s exactly the kind of thing to come up with. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if she let something slip having to do with his name. Give it a chance and it might come to you.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“Strega,” he said suddenly. “Speaking of things coming to you.
That’s the name of the bottle he brought along. That’s one way we might catch him. It’s not exactly Georgi Vodka. If you’re a clerk in a liquor store, how often does somebody pop in for a bottle of Strega?”
“So you’ll canvass stores in the neighborhood.”
“We’ll start in the neighborhood and keep going. She didn’t give you any indication at all of where he lived? You can’t put him in any particular part of the city? Well, somebody sold him the Strega, and maybe the guy who did will actually be in the store when somebody drops in to ask, and maybe he’ll not only remember but he’ll decide it’s okay to cooperate with the police, that he won’t be infringing on his customer’s inalienable right of privacy and making himself vulnerable to a lawsuit.
Maybe Mr. Strega paid with a credit card, though that seems like too much to hope for. Maybe the store’s got security cameras installed, and maybe they actually work, and maybe we’ll actually get there before that night’s tapes are automatically recycled, though that’s a stretch. You don’t need to keep the tapes any length of time, because all you have to be able to do is ID the dirtbag who holds you up, not somebody who bought a bottle of high-priced booze from you a couple of nights ago.”
