“Right, Strega. He came around and talked about his ten years of sobriety, he qualified at meetings, and then he went to her place and drank a little Scotch. And why shouldn’t he, if he wasn’t an alcoholic in the first place?”
I picked up the phone, looked up a number, made a call. It rang almost enough times for me to hang up before Bill picked up. I said, “It’s Matt, Bill. How’s it going? Say, you sponsor Abie, don’t you? Have you seen him at meetings lately? Well, why I’m asking, and I don’t want you to breach a confidence, but I’ve got a reason to suspect him of something serious. Pretty damned serious, actually. I think he may be running a game, that he might not be sober at all. That’s not the serious part, which I don’t want to say just yet. Uh-huh. That’s interesting.
What’s his last name, do you happen to know? Well, do you know where he’s been living? I see. Yes, sure, Bill. I will, and thanks.” I hung up and said, “He hasn’t seen him in several days, doesn’t know his last name, no idea where he lives. He smelled whiskey on him one time, and he didn’t say anything, and Abie must have sensed something, because he preempted the subject by saying how he’d had a drink spilled on him at a restaurant and it was driving him crazy, walking around smelling the booze on himself. But thinking back, Bill has the feeling that might have been crap, and the booze was on his breath, not his clothes.”
“You want a cup of tea, baby? Or something to eat? You’re all—”
“I’m all keyed up, and I damn well ought to be. Bill was his sponsor and Abie never told him his last name.”
“Abie’s an odd name to pick. Short for Abraham, I suppose.”
“You would think, but he corrected you if you called him that. Or if you shortened it to Abe, come to think of it. And people are so polite in AA, so fucking accepting. He could have called himself Dolores and everybody would have gone along with it.” All the Flowers Are Dying
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“What’s wrong with Dolores?”
TJ asked if he used a last initial, like Matt S. or Bill W.
I said, “No, just Abie.” And then I stopped in my tracks, and I guess my eyes widened and my jaw dropped, because TJ gaped at me and Elaine took my arm and asked me what was the matter.
“So fucking clever,” I said. “So goddam cute. Abie, see? Just plain Abie. Those are his initials. A period B period. AB.”
“I don’t see—”
“A fucking B. As in Abel Baker, or Arne Bodinson.”
“You can’t think—”
“Or Arden Brill,” I said. “Or Adam Breit. Or what did he write on the wall? Aubrey Beardsley. Always AB. Oh, sweet Jesus, it’s him.”
30
“You know,” Ira Wentworth said, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about that son of a bitch over the past few years. And each time I’ve tried to think of something else instead, because I didn’t want him taking up space in my head. I wanted that chapter to be closed.” Ira Wentworth was still at the Twenty-sixth Precinct. That’s where he’d been a few years ago when the man with many names but a single set of initials ambushed a young woman named Lia Parkman in her residence on Claremont Avenue. Her roommates were in the apartment at the time, but he managed to get in and out, and not incidentally drown Lia in the bathtub, without anyone noticing his presence.
Lia, a student at Columbia, had been a friend of TJ’s, and a cousin of another young woman named Kristin Hollander, whose parents had already been brutally murdered by two men in an apparent home inva-sion. AB—Lia knew him as Arden Brill, a doctoral candidate in English; Kristin had known him as Adam Breit, an unconventional psychotherapist—killed his accomplice in the burglary, along with another young man. Earlier, he’d killed the owner of an apartment on Central Park West, then moved in, proclaiming himself the subtenant.
Down the line he strangled a girl in a Korean massage parlor, wrung her neck and left her there. And, for a coda, he’d stabbed to death five homesteaders renovating a house in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, All the Flowers Are Dying
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disfiguring their corpses with muriatic acid before apparently dying himself in the basement, burned to death in the fire he’d set.
I wanted that chapter to be closed, Wentworth said, and it wasn’t hard to figure out why.
Sussman said, “The body in the basement. You couldn’t get a positive ID?”
“Nothing that was a hundred percent. He was wearing a pendant, this pink stone identified as stolen in the Hollander burglary. He had a knife next to him, which we were able to tie to the five killings upstairs. The body was good and charbroiled, all you could say was it could be him. We could get DNA from it, but we didn’t have anything to match it to. If he wasn’t such a fucking trickster, such a cutie pie, there would have been no question.”
“So you closed the case.”
“I couldn’t justify leaving it open. And if I had any kind of a gut feeling that maybe he staged the whole thing and disappeared, well, where were we going to go with it? Send out a nationwide BOLO, be on the lookout for some slick dude who kills people?” He picked up a copy of Ray’s sketch. “Is this what he looks like? You couldn’t prove it by me. I never got to see him, or a picture of him. I never even came across a detailed description. But I know it’s the same guy.”
“Because of the initials.”
“They nail it down, don’t they? That’s where he gets stupid, using the same initials all the time, making it his trademark. It’s how he signs his work. The only thing bigger than his brain is his ego. You know, when we closed the case, I knew there was a chance he got out alive. But that meant he was out of the jurisdiction, and out of our hair.”
“You said as much at the time,” I remembered.
And that was the bell that had tried to ring in a phone conversation with Mark Sussman. Maybe he’d filled his
