“That’s true, as far as I know.”
“So it was him. He phoned it in himself.” All the Flowers Are Dying
159
“That’s the working assumption,” he said. “Whispered to prevent identification. Or he just didn’t want to wake his wife by talking loud, but somehow I don’t think that was it.”
“What did he say?”
“ ‘There’s a woman who’s been murdered,’ plus the address and apartment number. Operator tried to keep him on the line but he slipped the hook and swam away. Calls like that, it’s usually mischief, some drunk wants to send a cop on a wild goose chase, or he’s looking to wake up some schmuck he’s got a beef with. But you got to check it out, so the two uniforms went and got the doorman to ring the apartment, and got a key from him when there was no answer. And walked in on more than they expected to find.”
“He wanted the body found,” I said.
“It does look that way, doesn’t it?”
“He wanted it found right away. He knocked himself out to get rid of the evidence, he ran the vacuum cleaner. If you were him, wouldn’t you want her to lie there undiscovered for as long as possible?”
“If I were him I’d do the world a favor and cut my fucking throat.
But I had the same thought myself. The guy’s not all of a piece. He’s inconsistent.”
“Like a Magritte painting,” I remembered.
“Well, kind of. This part wouldn’t show up in a painting, it’s not visual, but it’s the same kind of inconsistency. It clashes.” Elaine had called it dissonance.
“I don’t know, maybe you can’t expect consistency from a crazy man, but this guy’s off the chart. It’s somewhere between Magritte and a turd in a punch bowl, which was an image I thought of yesterday and decided to keep to myself.”
“Thanks for sharing.”
“Yeah, right. I don’t know why he called it in. Unless he was proud of his work and didn’t want it to go unnoticed.”
“And four in the morning, well, he can’t sleep, he’s got nothing else to do . . .”
“It may be a mistake trying to figure him out. Still, how can you keep from trying? I don’t know if it’s enough to call it a pattern, but 160
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you could almost say the bastard’s consistently inconsistent. Like with the murder weapon.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Taking everything else,” he said, “and leaving behind the one thing most killers would take along. Didn’t I tell you? He left the knife sticking in her chest. He stabbed her in the heart and left it there.”
“Jesus. No, you didn’t mention this yesterday.”
“Again, probably out of deference to your wife. You don’t want to be too graphic. It’s something, though, wouldn’t you say?”
“It seems completely out of character. Any chance you’ll be able to trace it?”
“Well, I think that’s why he didn’t mind leaving it. We can trace it all we want and all it’s going to lead is right back to her apartment. I called it a knife just now, but it’s more along the lines of a dagger, and probably a ceremonial one. It’s decorative, and to look at it you wouldn’t think of it as a weapon, not until you saw what he did with it. I guess he must have liked the looks of it. Either he forgot to bring a weapon or he figured he’d pick something out of her knife drawer, and he saw this on the desk or coffee table, wherever she kept it. It’s nice looking, if you owned it you’d leave it out where people could see it. And he certainly did that. He left it sticking straight up in the air with the tip in her heart.”
19
“I guess you’ll want to get upstairs,” I said. “Don’t you have to see how your stocks are doing?”
“Got no stocks.”
“You got wiped out?”
“Wiped myself out,” he said. “Do that once a day. Way the game is played.”
He explained it for me. Ideally, a day trader started and ended the day with nothing in his account but cash. Whatever he bought during the day’s trading, he sold before the closing bell. Whatever stocks he’d shorted, he covered. Win or lose, plus or minus, he faced a fresh slate each morning. I told him it’s a shame the rest of life’s not like that.
“There’s stocks I keep an eye on,” he said. “Charts I study. Make a dollar here, lose a dollar there. Commission be the same on each transaction, whether you a high roller or playing with nickels and dimes.
Ten ninety-nine a trade. You betting basketball games, they never give you that good a line.”
“And you do okay?”
He shrugged. “What’s that thing you like to say? Woman falls off the Empire State Building, passes the thirty-fourth floor, what’s she holler out?”
“ ‘So far, so good.’ ”
“Only the last half-inch you got to worry about.” 162
