All the Flowers Are Dying

by Block, Lawrence

  “No.”

  “He might belong to the DMA, but probably not. Most of the members are corporate, because membership’s expensive. But he could have a free listing in Who’s Charging What. Or he could be the kind of guy who runs small-space ads offering his services in DM News or Direct or Target Marketing. You could check there, and also in the classifieds in Adweek and Advertising Age.”

  He was full of suggestions, and I wrote everything down. If David Thompson had won an award or made a speech, he’d probably turn up on a Google search, but that might be tricky because his name was such a common one. “You could find me that way,” he said, “along with the Peter Hochstein who’s serving a life sentence for a contract killing in Nebraska, not to mention Peter Hochstein the German scientist.”

  There was a good chance, he said, that David Thompson might fly under the radar. “I have a listing in Who’s Charging What,” he said, “because it’s free, so what could it hurt? But I don’t run classifieds in Ad Age, and I don’t run ads in the direct marketing publications. I don’t think it’s worth the money, and I’m not the only one. Most of us who’ve been doing this for a while seem to feel that way. It’s almost as if we’ve stopped believing in the power of advertising, which is funny, when you think about it. I don’t belong to any trade organizations, either. The business I get is all referrals, and what kind of client is going to pick you because he saw your ad? That’s as unlikely as getting business from a listing in the Yellow Pages.”

  I thanked him, and the first thing I did was something I should have done earlier. I looked for Thompson in the Yellow Pages—not the consumer book but the business-to-business edition. There was no separate listing for direct marketing copywriters, but there was a section of advertising copywriters, and I wasn’t surprised not to find David Thompson there.

  I didn’t find him in the back pages of Advertising Age or Adweek, either, which were the two publications he’d mentioned that you could find on the newsstand. I bit the bullet and sat down at Elaine’s computer, and I Googled my way to some of the sites he’d mentioned.

  Everybody tells me what a timesaver the Internet is, and how they can’t believe they ever got along without it. And I know what they mean, but every time I use it I wind up wondering what people did with their spare time before computers came along to suck it all up. I sat down at the damn thing in the middle of the afternoon, and I couldn’t get away from it until Elaine was putting dinner on the table.

  She said she’d wanted to check her e-mail but hadn’t wanted to disturb me. I told her I’d have welcomed a disturbance, that I’d spent hours without accomplishing much of anything. “I couldn’t find the son of a bitch,” I said, “and I couldn’t find half the websites I was looking for, and I wound up Googling Peter Hochstein, don’t ask me why, and he wasn’t kidding, there really is somebody with the same name doing life in Nebraska for murder for hire. He was sentenced to death originally, and the sentence was changed on appeal, and it was a pretty interesting case, though why I spent the better part of an hour reading about it is something I’d be hard put to explain.”

  “You know what I think? I think we should get a second computer.”

  “That’s funny,” I said, “because what I think is we should get rid of the one we’ve got.”

  New York neighborhoods rarely have sharply delineated boundaries. They’re formed by a shifting consensus of newspapermen, realtors, and local inhabitants, and it’s not always possible to say with assurance where one leaves off and the next one begins. Kips Bay, where David Thompson lived—or where the man who claimed to be David Thompson claimed to be living—is that area in the immediate vicinity of Kips Bay Plaza, a housing complex that fills the three-block area bounded by Thirtieth and Thirty-third streets and First and Second avenues. The neighborhood known as Kips Bay probably runs south from Thirty-fourth Street and east from Third Avenue. Bellevue and the NYU Medical Center take up the space between First Avenue and the FDR Drive. The southern edge of Kips Bay is hardest to pinpoint, but if you occupied an apartment at Twenty-sixth Street and Second Avenue, say, I don’t think you’d tell people you lived in Kips Bay.

  The overall area was pretty small no matter how you figured it, and it didn’t take me much more time to cover it on foot than I’d spent learning next to nothing on the Internet the day before. It’s predominantly residential, with a good sprinkling of the service businesses and neighborhood restaurants that cater to local residents, and that’s where I went, showing David Thompson’s photograph in bodegas and delis, dry cleaners and newsstands. “Have you seen this fellow around?” I asked Korean greengrocers and Italian shoe repairmen. “You know this man?” I asked Dominican doormen and Greek waiters. None of them did, nor did a mail carrier in the middle of his rounds, a clerk at a copy shop, or a beat cop who started out thinking that he ought to be the one asking the questions, but who lost the attitude when he found out I’d been on the job myself, especially when it turned out I’d known his father.

  “He looks like a lot of guys,” the cop said. “What’s his name?” I told him, and he shook his head and said that was a big help, wasn’t it? His own name was Danaher, and I remembered his father as a backslapping gladhander who could have doubled as a ward boss. He was living in Tucson, the son said, and playing golf every day unless it rained. “And it never rains,” he said.

  It rained that night, in New York if not in Tucson. I stayed in and watched a lackluster fight card on ESPN. The next day dawned cool and clear, and the city felt bright with promise. TJ and I met for breakfast and compared notes, and decided we were making the kind of progress Thomas Edison described, when he asserted that he now knew twelve thousand substances that wouldn’t make an effective filament for a lightbulb. We’d established about that many ways not to find David Thompson, and I was starting to wonder if he was there to be found.

  I didn’t have anything for TJ to do, so he went home to sit in front of his computer and I got home myself in time for a phone call from one of the David Thompsons for whom I’d left a message. He was calling to let me know that he wasn’t the David Thompson I was looking for. Then why had he bothered calling? I thanked him and rang off.

  Sometime in the middle of the afternoon it occurred to me that the only hook I had for Louise’s David Thompson was his phone number, so why didn’t I use it? I couldn’t trace it, I couldn’t attach a name or address to it, but the one thing I could do was dial it and see who answered. I did, and at first no one did, and then after five rings his voice mail kicked in and a computer-generated voice invited me to leave a message. I rang off instead.

  I thought I might run into Louise at a meeting that night, and when I didn’t I gave her a call. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I jumped the gun, hiring you when I did. I haven’t heard from the guy since. I hate it when a person dumps you and doesn’t even tell you.”

  “Have you tried calling him?”

  “If he’s dumping me,” she said, “I don’t want to give him the satisfaction, you know? And if he’s not, I don’t want to crowd him. I’m old-fashioned when it comes to girls calling guys.”

  “Okay.”

  “But screw that. If I can sic a detective on him, what’s so extreme about calling him? Hang on, Matt, I’ll get back to you.”

  She called back in no time at all. “No answer. Just his voice mail, and no, I didn’t leave a message. I didn’t even ask. Did you find out anything about him?”

  I said I’d put in some hours on the case, but didn’t have much to show for them. I didn’t tell her how close I was to inventing the lightbulb.

  “Well,” she said, “maybe you shouldn’t keep the meter running, you know? Because if I never hear from him again, the whole thing becomes academic. If I’m gonna forget about a guy, it’s not like I need to know a whole lot about him.”

  I tend to relate to a case like a dog to a bone, and have been known to keep at it after a client has told me to let it go, but in this instance it was e
asy to stop. It might have been harder if I could have thought of something productive to do, but all I could come up with was waiting until he had a date with her and following him home afterward. I couldn’t very well do that if he never called her again.

  Late the following afternoon I was at the Donnell Library on West Fifty-third, reading a book on direct marketing. It wouldn’t help me find David Thompson, but I’d grown interested enough in some aspects of the subject from what I’d encountered online to spend an hour or two skimming the subject. I walked from there to Elaine’s shop on Ninth Avenue, figuring I’d keep her company and walk her home when she closed up, but she wasn’t there.

  Monica was, and had been for most of the afternoon. “I just dropped in,” she explained, “figuring we’d kill an hour with girl talk. I stopped at Starbucks for a couple of mocha lattes, and as soon as she’d finished hers she said I was an angel sent from heaven, and could I mind the store while she ran out to an auction at Tepper Galleries. And I’ve been stuck here ever since, and one latte only goes so far, and I’ve been positively jonesing for a cup of coffee.”

  “Why didn’t you lock up for fifteen minutes and go get one?”

  “Because to do that, dear Matthew, one would have to have had the key, which your good wife didn’t see fit to leave with me. I’m sure there’s a spare tucked away somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. You want to hold the fort while I get us both a couple of coffees?”

  “No, I’ll go. Did you say a mocha latte?”

  “I did, but that was then and this is now. Get me something really disgusting, will you? Something along the lines of a caramel mocha frappuccino, so gooped up with sugar crap that you can’t taste the coffee, but with a couple of extra shots of espresso in there to kick ass. How does that sound?”

  It sounded horrible, but she was the one who was going to drink it. I repeated the order verbatim, and the ring-nosed blond barista took it in stride. I brought it back to the shop, and we found things to talk about until Elaine breezed in, reporting a successful afternoon at the auction.

  Monica’s reward for shop-sitting was a good dinner at Paris Green. The two of them did most of the talking, with one or the other of them periodically apologizing to me for all the girl talk. What no one talked about was Monica’s mystery man.

  We put her in a cab and walked home, and as we walked in the door my cell phone rang.

  It was Louise. “He called,” she said. “Late last night, very apologetic for the hour and the long silence. Busy busy busy, and he’s out of town this weekend, but we’ve got a date Monday night. It was too late to call you last night, and then today I was the one who was busy busy busy, and besides I wanted to think about it.”

  “And?”

  “Well, he’s evidently not dumping me after all, and I really like him, and I think what we’ve got might have a future. And there’s a point where you have to have faith, you have to be able to let go and trust somebody.”

  “So you want to call off the investigation?”

  “What, are you out of your mind? I just said I have to trust him, and how can I trust the son of a bitch when I don’t know for sure who he is? I called to tell you to go ahead.”

  8

  He’s up before the alarm rings. He showers, shaves, dresses. He’s saved a change of clothes for this day—clean underwear, a fresh white shirt. He puts on the dark gray suit he wore on his first visit to the prison, and rejects the silver tie in favor of a textured black one. Somber, he decides. You can’t go wrong with somber.

  He checks himself in the mirror and is pleased with what he sees. Could his mustache use a trim? He smiles at the thought, grooms the mustache with thumb and forefinger.

  His shoes aren’t dirty, but they could use polishing. Is there a bootblack within fifty miles? He rather doubts it. But when he picked up the ice cream at the Circle K (and he’d bought two pints, not one, and ate them both) he’d also picked up a flat tin of Kiwi black shoe polish.

  Some motel amenities include a disposable cloth for polishing your shoes, provided less for the guest’s convenience than to save the hotel’s towels. This Days Inn has been remiss, and it’s their loss. He uses a wash-cloth to apply the polish, a hand towel to buff it to a high sheen.

  Before he leaves, he uses another towel to wipe surfaces he may have touched. It’s not his habit to touch things unnecessarily, and there’s not going to be anyone dusting his room for prints, but this is the sort of thing he does routinely, and why not? He’s got plenty of time, and it’s never a mistake to take precautions. Better safe than sorry.

  He boots up his computer a final time, logs on, checks his e-mail. Vis its the several Usenet newsgroups to which he subscribes, reads a few entries. There’s been a flurry of activity in a thread dealing with the impending execution of Preston Applewhite, and he catches up on the new posts. He finds a few provocative observations, tucked in among the usual predictable cries of outrage from the diehard foes of capital punishment, balanced by the cheers of death penalty fans whose only regret is that the proceedings won’t be televised.

  Pay-per-view, he thinks. Just a matter of time.

  He logs off, finishes packing, leaves the motel by the rear door. No need to check out, as they took an imprint of his credit card. Nor is there any need to return the plastic key card. He’s read that a lot of information is automatically coded into the card, that one could in theory use it to reconstruct a guest’s entrances and exits. He’s not sure this is actually true, and even if it were, he knows the cards are automatically recycled, their coded data erased forever when they’re reprogrammed for another guest and another room. But why leave anything to chance? He’ll bring the key along and discard it in another state.

  It’s twenty minutes past ten when he pulls up at the penitentiary gate- house, where the guard recognizes him and welcomes him with a grim smile. He parks in what has become his usual spot, checks himself in the mirror, smoothes his mustache, and walks to the entrance. The sun is high in a virtually cloudless sky, and there’s no breeze. It’s going to be a hot day.

  But not inside, where climate controls keep the air cool and dry year-round. He passes through the metal detector, shows his ID to men who already know him by sight, and is escorted to the little room where witnesses sit to view the application of society’s ultimate sanction.

  He’s ushered into the room at ten-forty-five, a full hour and a quarter before the proceedings are scheduled to begin, and there are already half a dozen people present, four men and two women. One man a few years his junior, wearing a shirt and tie but no jacket, makes conversational overtures. He’s sure the man is a journalist, and he doesn’t want to talk to him, or indeed to anyone. He dismisses the man with a shake of his head.

  There is, he’s surprised to note, a refreshment table laid out for the spectators, with a coffee urn and a pitcher of iced tea, along with a plate of doughnuts and another of corn and bran muffins. He doesn’t want to eat anything, the whole idea is faintly distasteful, but does help himself to a cup of coffee.

  And takes a chair. There are no bad seats; the viewing gallery is long and narrow, with every chair adjacent to the big plate-glass window. He’s struck immediately by how close they are to what they’re going to watch. But for the intervening glass, they’d be able to smell the breath of the attending physician, and the fear of his unfortunate patient.

  The equipment is in place, the gurney, the apparatus holding three suspended bottles and an array of medical equipment. He glances to his right, at a middle-aged man and woman whose eyes are fixed upon a framed photograph the woman is holding. Their son, of course. One of Applewhite’s three victims.

  He shifts in his seat, manages a glimpse of the photo. The shock of blond hair is an unmistakable field mark; these are the Willises, parents of the first boy slain, the one whose remains were never found.

  The body’s location is the secret Preston Applewhite is evidently determined to take with him to the grave.

  T
he door opens to admit another man, who takes a seat, then sees the refreshment table and helps himself to coffee and a doughnut. “That looks good,” someone says, and goes to the table.

  And the coffee is in fact better than one might expect, weaker than he’d prefer but otherwise acceptable, and freshly made. He finishes it, sets the cup aside, and gazes through the pane of glass.

  And allows the memories to come…

  Richmond, Virginia, no more than fifty miles away, but further removed in time than in distance. Years ago, when the Willis boy—Jeffrey?—is alive, when Preston Applewhite is a free man, a husband and father, a respected member of his community. And a man who still enjoys a game of basketball once or twice a week at the municipal outdoor recreation area a few blocks from his office.

  And he himself, Arne Bodinson (although he has another name then, and it would take some concentration to conjure it up from his memory), happens to be passing through the grounds. He’s never walked there before, he’s barely arrived in Richmond, and he pauses to watch the men play a boys’ game.

  Two men leap for a rebound. The elbow of one collides with the face of the other, and the second man cries out in pain and crumples to the pavement, blood streaming from his nose.

  Why do things happen? Why does one man live while another dies, one prosper while another fails? It seems self-evident that one of two operating principles must apply. Either everything happens for a reason or nothing happens for a reason. Either it was all coded in the molecules from the very instant of the Big Bang or every bit of it, every left or right turn, every lightning strike, every broken shoelace, is the product of nothing but random chance.