week’s worth of body odor.
“Uncle Joe? I’m your nephew Al, come all this way to see you.” The old man was confused, but let him inside. He was smoking a cigarette, sucking on it as if it were a breathing tube connected to an oxygen tank, and spitting out questions between puffs. Whose son is he, then? Is he Neil’s boy? And what’s in the suitcases? And is he alive, Neil? He’d thought his brother was dead, thought he’d died without ever marrying.
The old man was wheezing, unsteady on his feet. There were two growths on his faced that looked cancerous, and his color was bad, and God above did he ever stink. He took hold of Bohan, one hand cupping the bristly chin, the other grasping the bony shoulder, and had little trouble snapping the old man’s neck. How nice when the expedient act was humane as well!
Over the next several days he let the building’s other tenants get used to him, while he made the place his own, getting rid of the old man’s clothes and possessions even as he got rid of the old man himself. Every day he’d haul a few trash bags down the stairs and out the door. Cleaning up, he told the neighbors. These past few years, my uncle never threw anything out. It’s hard for him, you know.
Some bags he left at the curb for the trash pickup. Others, containing pieces of the old man’s body, couldn’t be discarded quite so casually. He’d put the corpse in the tub, drained it of its fluids, and cut it into portable chunks with a bone saw from a Ninth Avenue kitchen supply store. Por-tions of Joe Bohan, wrapped up like cuts of meat, he carried a few at a time across the West Side Highway to the Hudson. If they ever surface—
and that’s unlikely, as there won’t be any gases to lessen their specific gravity—he can’t imagine that anyone will make anything of them. And, if by some forensic miracle they do, the hermit crab will have long since outgrown his shell, along with the name of Aloysius Bohan.
Once the last physical remnant of Joe Bohan was gone, except for his enduring odor, he let the word out that he’d taken his uncle to the hospi-152
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tal. “I tried nursing him myself,” he told Mrs. Laskowski, “but I can’t give him the care he needs. Last night I got him downstairs and into a cab and we rode clear up to the VA. Cab cost a fortune, but what are you going to do? I’m all he’s got in the world. He wants me to stay here until he comes home from the hospital. I’m supposed to be in San Francisco, I’ve got a job offer out there, but I can’t just leave him here. He’s my uncle.” And that was that.
Now he sits at the kitchen table, its top scarred by hundreds of Joe Bohan’s neglected cigarettes. He touches his upper lip, then frowns, an-noyed with himself. Habits, he thinks, take so little time to form, so much longer to break. He boots up his computer, which has sole claim on Joe Bohan’s phone line. The dial-up connection is slow today, and he’d love to install a DSL line, but that’s out of the question.
Well, perhaps he won’t need to be here too much longer.
18
TJ said, “You already thought of this, and it don’t make sense anyway, but if I don’t say it I ain’t never gonna get it out of my head.”
“Okay.”
“You most likely know what’s coming.”
We were at the Morning Star. He’d called and asked me to meet him there, and I’d walked away from a much better cup of coffee than the one I was drinking now.
“I might,” I said.
“Gonna make me say it all the same. ’Kay. There any chance at all that David Thompson and Monica’s killer are the same person?”
“The chief thing they’ve got in common,” I said, “is that you and I don’t know who they are or how to find them.”
“More’n that.”
“Oh?”
“Both got a mustache.”
“Maybe they’re both Hitler, and he didn’t die in the bunker after all. Look at the timing and you’ll see they’re not the same person.
Thompson—that’s probably not his name, but we’ve got to call him something. Thompson was with Louise Monday night from the time she met him at the restaurant until he got away from us a little before midnight.”
“And?”
“And it was around nine-thirty or ten when he showed up in the 154
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lobby of Monica’s building, according to Sussman, who got it from the doorman.”
“That was Tuesday. Night before last, right?”
“Jesus, you’re right.”
“Wouldn’t be much of a stretch to get downtown in what, twenty-two hours?”
I shook my head. “He was there Monday night, too,” I said. “With Monica. She told Elaine.”
“He saw her Monday and Tuesday, then. We sure of that?”
“We can’t call Monica and ask her. But yes, we’re sure.”
“But we don’t know what time. We got a time check for Tuesday, him comin’ and goin’, but not for Monday.” I thought about it, nodded slowly.
“So he leaves Louise at a quarter of twelve, an’ we know the first thing he does is whip out his cell an’ make a
