All the Flowers Are Dying

by Block, Lawrence

  Danny had some vodka and said, “Christ, how I always hated that fucking song.”

  “It’s such a beautiful tune,” Elaine said.

  “And the lyric’s a lovely thing, too,” he told her. “ ‘The summer’s gone, the roses all are fallen.’ But I heard it all the time when I was a little kid, I was fucking taunted with it.”

  “Because of your name.”

  “I was going to get taunted anyway,” he said, “because I was the funniest-looking kid anybody ever saw, this white-haired white-faced little pickaninny who couldn’t play sports and had to wear sunglasses and, on top of everything, was about ten times as bright as anyone else in the school, including the teachers. ‘Yo, Danny Boy! The pipes is callin’!’ ”

  “But you kept the nickname,” Jodie said.

  “It wasn’t a nickname. Daniel Boyd Bell is what I was christened. That was my mother’s maiden name, Boyd, B-O-Y-D, like a Green-pointer trying to say Bird. I answered to Danny Boyd from the time I was old enough to answer to anything, and the D just got lost because people didn’t hear it, they assumed it was Danny Boy, B-O-Y, like the song.”

  He frowned. “You know,” he said, “with all the people I know who got cornholed by their fathers and the crap kicked out of them by their mothers, I guess I got a pretty good deal. When you think about it.”

  We caught one more set, and Danny wouldn’t let me pay. “You had two Coca-Colas and one glass of soda water with a piece of lime in it,” he said. “I think I can cover it.” I said something about the cover charge, and he said nobody at his table ever had to pay a cover charge. “They want to keep my business,” he said. “Don’t ask me why.”

  Something made me pull out the photo of the elusive David Thompson. I showed it to Danny and asked him if it rang any kind of a bell.

  He shook his head. “Should it?”

  “Probably not. He has a private mailbox a couple of blocks from here, so I thought he might have come in.”

  “He’s got a face that would be easy to miss,” he said, “but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it. You want to make copies and I’ll show it around?”

  “I don’t think it’s worth it.”

  He shrugged. “Whatever. Who is he, anyway?”

  “Either his name’s David Thompson,” I said, “or it isn’t.”

  “Ah,” he said. “You know, the same can be said for almost everybody.”

  When we got home Elaine said, “You’re a genius, you know that? You took a sad evening and turned it around. Did you ever think you’d live to hear the same person in the course of a single night describe himself as an albino pickaninny and an alter kocker?”

  “Now that you mention it, no.”

  “And, but for you, we’d have missed that. You know what you’re gonna get, big boy?”

  “What?”

  “Lucky,” she said. “But I think you should get lucky with somebody who’s clean and smells nice, so I’ll go freshen up. And you might want to shave.”

  “And shower.”

  “And shower. So why don’t you meet me in the bedroom in a half an hour or so?”

  That was around twelve-thirty, and it must have been close to one-thirty when she said, “See? What did I tell you. You got lucky.”

  “The luckiest I ever got was the day I met you,” I said.

  “Sweet old bear. Oh, wow.”

  “Wow?”

  “I was just thinking. And you know, there’s not a soul I know in the business, so I couldn’t even go and ask somebody.”

  “Ask somebody what?”

  “Well, I was just wondering what the impact of Viagra’s been on working girls. I mean, it would have to have a major effect, wouldn’t you think?”

  “I think you’re a fruitcake.”

  “What? A fruitcake? How can you say that?”

  “A fruitcake’s not a bad thing. Good night. I love you.”

  So it turned out to be a good night, a wonderful night. What I didn’t know was that there weren’t going to be any more of them.

  15

  I woke up to the smell of coffee, and when I got to the kitchen Elaine had a cup poured for me, and an English muffin in the toaster. The TV was on, tuned to the Today show, and Katie Couric was trying to be reasonably cheerful while her guest talked about his new book on the genocide in the Sudan.

  Elaine said, “That poor schnook. He’s on national television, he’s got a book out on a serious subject, and all anybody’s going to notice is that he’s wearing a rug.”

  “And not a very good one, either.”

  “If it was a good one,” she said, “we wouldn’t spot it so easily. And imagine how hot it must be under those studio lights with that thing clinging to your scalp like a dead muskrat.”

  She had a cup of coffee, but no breakfast. She was on her way to the yoga class she took two or three times a week, and felt it was more effective if she did it on an empty stomach. She was out the door and on her way by a quarter after eight, and that was something to be grateful for, as it turned out.

  Because she wasn’t around when they broke for the local news at 8:25. I was half listening to it, and just enough got through to engage my attention. A woman had been killed in Manhattan, although they didn’t say who or where. That’s not rare, it’s a big city and a hard world, but something made me change the channel to New York One, where they give you a steady diet of local news around the clock, and I waited through a pronouncement by the mayor and an optimistic weather report and a couple of commercials, and then an off-camera reporter was talking about the savage torture-murder of an unmarried Manhattan woman, and I got a sinking feeling.

  Then a shot of the building she lived in filled the screen, and that didn’t mean it had to be her, she wasn’t the building’s only tenant, and probably not the only single woman. It didn’t have to be her. It could have been someone else who’d been found nude in her bedroom, stabbed to death after what the reporter grimly described as “an apparent marathon session of torture and abuse.”

  But I knew it was her.

  The name, I was told, was being withheld pending notification of kin. Did she have any kin? I couldn’t remember, and wasn’t sure if it was something I’d ever known. It seemed to me that her parents were dead, and she’d never had children. Wasn’t there an ex-husband, and was he someone they would need to notify? Were there brothers or sisters?

  I picked up the phone and dialed a number I didn’t have to look up, and a voice I didn’t recognize said, “Squad room,” and it took until then for me to remember that Friday had come and gone and Joe Durkin wasn’t working at Midtown North anymore. I knew a couple of other cops there, though not terribly well. And it wasn’t their case, it hadn’t happened in their precinct. Joe would have helped me out, made a few phone calls, but I couldn’t expect anybody else over there to take the trouble. They just knew me as a friend of Joe’s, a guy who’d been off the job more years than he’d been on it, and they didn’t owe me a thing.

  Who else did I know? The last cop I’d worked with at all closely was Ira Wentworth, a detective in the Two-Six on West 126th Street. We’d stayed in touch for a time after the case was resolved—actually, it pretty much resolved itself—and he liked to come over to our apartment, saying that Elaine made the best coffee in the city.

  But we hadn’t kept up the contact, aside from cards at Christmas, and there was no point calling him now, because it hadn’t happened in his precinct, either.

  I had her number, though. I dialed it. If she picked up, I could think of something to say. But I pretty much knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  It rang until voice mail cut in, and I hung up.

  Sooner or later they’d have a tip line set up, a dedicated number for people to call with information on the case, but there’d been nothing like that on the news. I knew which precinct it happened in, I’d been assigned there myself for several years, although I’d long since lost touch with the people I’d worked with there. It might not be
their case, Homicide might have taken it away from them, but they’d have caught the initial squeal and somebody there ought to know something.

  I looked up the number, got whoever was holding down the desk. I gave my own name and phone number before he could ask and told him I’d caught an item on the news about a woman murdered in his precinct. I’d recognized the building and a friend of mine lived in it, and I hadn’t caught the name and was afraid it might be her.

  He told me to hang on, came back to say they weren’t giving out the name yet.

  I said I could understand that, I was a retired cop myself. Suppose I gave him the name of my friend. Could he tell me whether or not it was her?

  He thought about it and decided that would be okay. I told him her name, and the moment of silence was answer enough.

  “I hate to say it,” he said, “but that’s the name I’ve got here. You want to hang on? I’ll transfer you to someone connected to the case.”

  I held, and I guess he briefed the guy before he put him through to me, because he came on the line knowing who I was and what I wanted. His name was Mark Sussman and he and his partner were first up on the case, so it was theirs until somebody took it away from them.

  Was I by any chance a relative? I said I wasn’t. Then did I have any contact information for the victim’s relatives? I said I didn’t, and wasn’t sure she had any living kin. I didn’t mention the ex-husband, since I wasn’t sure of his name and had no idea where—or even if—he was living.

  “We got an ID from a neighbor,” he said, “and she looks like the photo on the passport in her drawer, so there’s no real doubt of her identity. It might not be a bad idea for you to make a formal identification, if you wouldn’t mind doing that.”

  Was the body still at the apartment?

  “No, we got her out of there once the ME had a look at her and the photographer was done taking pictures. She’s at the morgue, that’s… well, you’d know where that is.”

  I would indeed. I said it might take me a while, that I had to stay put until my wife got home. He said there was no rush.

  “I’ll want to sit down and talk with you anyway,” he said. “Before or after you ID the body. If you knew the woman, maybe you can point us in a useful direction.”

  “If I can.”

  “Because we don’t even have a preliminary report from forensics, but it doesn’t looks like the cocksucker left us a lot of physical evidence. You could eat off the floor, the way it looked. If you had the appetite, which you wouldn’t, not after you saw what he did to her.”

  I didn’t know what the hell to do. Out of habit I poured myself another cup of coffee, but I already felt as though I’d been drinking coffee for days. I poured it out and turned on the TV again, as if I’d learn more from it than I had from Sussman. The announcer got on my nerves and I turned it off before they could get any further than the traffic report.

  I kept picking up the phone and putting it down again. Who the hell was I going to call and what could I say? At one point I had Sussman’s number half-dialed before I second-guessed myself and hung up. What could I tell him? That I had a pretty good idea who’d done it, but that I didn’t know his name or where to look for him?

  I looked over at the phone and a number popped into my head, one I hadn’t called in years. It was Jim Faber’s, and I wished to God I could dial that number and hear my late sponsor’s voice on the other end of the line. What would he tell me? That was easy. He’d tell me not to drink.

  I didn’t want to drink, hadn’t consciously thought of it, but now that I did I was just as glad that Elaine and I don’t keep anything alcoholic in the house. Because why do they distill whiskey, why do they put it in bottles, if not for occasions like this one?

  There were other program friends I could call, other men and women I could count on to tell me not to drink. But I wasn’t going to drink, and I didn’t want to have the rest of any of those conversations.

  I called TJ, brought him up to speed. He said, “Oh, man, that’s terrible news.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I had the news on, I heard what they said, but I never made the connection.”

  “Well, why would you?”

  “Damn, I feel bad.”

  “So do I.”

  “Elaine home?”

  “She had a yoga class. She should be home any minute.”

  “ ’Less she go straight to the store. You want, I’ll come over, sit with you until she gets there.”

  “Isn’t the market open?”

  “They ’bout to ring the bell, but it don’t matter. New York Stock Exchange get along without me.”

  “No, that’s all right,” I said.

  “You change your mind, just call. Won’t take me a minute to close down here and come over.”

  I rang off and tried her number at the store. I didn’t think she’d go there, she rarely opens up before eleven, but it was possible. When the machine picked up I tried to keep my voice neutral, telling her it was me and to pick up if she was there. She didn’t, and I was just as glad.

  A few minutes later I heard her key in the lock.

  I was standing a few feet from the door when she opened it, and she knew something was wrong as soon as she saw my face. I told her to come in, took her gym bag from her, told her to sit down.

  I don’t know why we do that. Sit down, we say, pointing at chairs. Are you sitting down? we want to know, before imparting bad news over the phone. What difference does it make? Are we really afraid our words will knock the recipient off his feet? Do that many people injure themselves, falling down when they hear bad news?

  Brace yourself—that’s what we’re saying. As if a person can. As if one can prepare oneself for such awful intelligence.

  “It was on the news,” I said. “Monica’s dead. She’s been murdered.”

  16

  They weren’t really set up for viewing. The autopsy wasn’t finished, and a woman who looked as though she spent too much time around dead people had us wait, then took us into a large room and led us to a table on which a mound was covered with a plain white sheet. She uncovered the head, and there was no mistake. It was Monica.

  “Ah, no,” Elaine said. “No, no, no.”

  Outside she said, “My best friend. The best friend I ever had. We talked every day, there wasn’t a day we didn’t talk. Who am I gonna talk to now? It’s not fair, I’m too fucking old to get another best friend.”

  A cab came along and I flagged it.

  I hadn’t wanted to take her to the morgue, but then I hadn’t wanted to leave her alone, either. And it wasn’t my decision to make, anyway, it was hers, and she’d been adamant. She wanted to be with me, and she wanted to see her friend. At the morgue, when the woman warned us it wouldn’t be pretty, I told her she didn’t have to do this. She said she did.

  In the cab she said, “It makes it real. That’s why they have open caskets at funerals. So you’ll know, so you’ll accept it. Otherwise there’d be a part of me that wouldn’t really believe she was gone. I’d go on thinking that I could pick up the phone and dial her number and there she’d be.”

  I didn’t say anything, just held her hand. We rode another block and she said, “I’ll believe that anyway. On some level. But a little bit less than if I hadn’t seen her sweet face. Oh, God, Matt.”

  My first thought when we met Mark Sussman was that he was awfully young, and my second thought, a corrective to the first, was that he was within a couple of years of the age I’d been when I quit the job. He was short, with a well-developed upper body suggestive of frequent workouts with weights, and his dark brown eyes were hard to read.

  He was a college graduate, which seems barely worth noting these days. I don’t think there was a single man in my class at the academy who’d been to college, let alone got all the way through it. There was a general feeling in the department that college was no good for a cop, that you learned too many of the wrong things and not enough of the right o
nes, that it unmanned you while suffusing you with an unwarranted feeling of superiority. That was all a lot of crap, of course, but so was most of what we believed about most subjects.

  He’d had a split major at Brooklyn College, history and sociology, and was accepted at a couple of graduate schools when he realized he didn’t want a teaching career. He took a couple of graduate courses in criminology at John Jay and decided that was his field, but he didn’t want to study it, he wanted to get out there and do it. That was ten years ago, and now he had a gold shield and a desk in the detective squad room at the Sixth Precinct, on West Tenth Street in the Village.

  He sat behind that desk, and we took chairs alongside it. “Monica Driscoll,” he said. “Now we also found documents referring to her as Monica Wellbridge.”

  “That was her ex-husband’s name,” Elaine told him. “She never used it.”

  “Took her maiden name back. When was the divorce, fairly recent?”

  “Oh, God, no. Fifteen years ago? At least that, maybe twenty.” And no, Monica hadn’t been in touch with Derek Wellbridge, and she had no idea how to reach him, or if he was alive to be reached.

  “It’s an unusual name,” Sussman said. “A computer search might turn him up, if there’s any reason to look for him. I think you said she was seeing somebody.”

  “Yes, and he was very secretive.”

  “I don’t suppose you met him.”

  “No. She wouldn’t even tell me his name. At first I figured it was because he was married, although we met a few of her married boyfriends over the years.”

  “She did this a lot? Dated married guys?”

  It should have been an easy question to answer, but Elaine didn’t want to make her friend sound easy, or undiscriminating. “If she was dating somebody,” she said after a moment, “he generally turned out to be married.”

  “She kept making the same mistake?”