All the Flowers Are Dying

by Block, Lawrence

  “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 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.”

  “That’s it,” I agreed.

  “So far so good. I got more’n I started with, and time to time I been drawing some cash for expenses.”

  “It must be nerve-racking.”

  “Not too. Worst that happens, day’s a minus ’stead of a plus. You guess wrong on Lucent Technology, guy who guessed right don’t show up with a nine and start bustin’ caps at you. Lose a few dollars, is all.”

  “You’re saying it beats selling product.”

  “No comparison, Harrison.” He grinned, enjoying the rhyme. “Plus you’re not out on the street corner on rainy days. Big difference right there.” He called the waiter over, said he guessed he’d have another bagel. To me he said, “This David Thompson. Cops likely to find him?”

  “I don’t think they’re going to make much of an effort. Sussman didn’t spell it out, but in his position I’d run a computer check of yellow sheets. I’d sort all the David Thompsons, screen for age and color, toss the ones that are currently locked up, and save the rest for some night when there’s nothing on TV.”

  “You gonna give him Louise?”

  “My guess is he’ll forget to ask. And what am I holding out? We know damn well they’re two different guys.”

  “Ever since Monica got killed,” he said, “it don’t seem all that important finding out about David Thompson. Like is he married or not.”

  “I know. What do we care?”

  “But ain’t nothing changed far as Louise is concerned.”

  “No,” I said, “and if he’s running a game, she ought to know about it. And if he’s kosher she ought to know that, too, so she can relax and enjoy herself. I don’t want to give up on Thompson, but I can’t think of much we can do besides wait. Next time Louise sees him, we can take another shot at shadowing him. Or the mailbox lady could call me and give me a name.”

  “I was thinking ’bout that last part. Seems like we ought to be able to hurry the process some.”

  “How?”

  “Say we sent him a letter, with the suite number on it and all. Soon as it gets there, she’s gonna call you.”

  “If she remembers.”

  “If she don’t, maybe you give her a call to remind her. Even run up there and remind her in person.”

  “And?”

  “And she looks at the letter, and—” He broke off, closed his eyes, put his head in his hands. “And nothing,” he said. “ ’Cause only way she gets the name is off the envelope, an’ we’d need to know it ourselves to put it down there. Good thing I ain’t in front of my computer, way my mind’s working today.”

  The day trader grabbed the check, insisting he’d saved money by lingering in the Morning Star. I told him what he’d proposed wasn’t so bad. It showed he was thinking, if not very clearly. “And it would work fine,” I added, “if all we wanted to do was send him a letter bomb.”

  “Solve our problems that way,” he said. “Until Louise goes and pulls another nicotine addict off of Craig’s List.”

  I went across the street. Elaine wasn’t there, but I found her gym clothes in the hamper and deduced that she’d come home to shower and change. It was the sharpest detection work I’d done in a while and I was proud of myself. I called her at the shop and the machine answered. I didn’t leave a message, and while I was trying to decide whether to try her again in ten minutes or walk over there myself, the door opened and she came in.

  “I opened up,” she said, “and I looked around, and I said the hell with it. I locked up again and came home.”

  “And here you are.”

  “And here I am.” She caught me looking at her and said, “I look like hell, don’t I? Tell the truth.”

  “In all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never looked like hell. Not once.”

  “Until now.”

  “And not now, either.”

  “You want to try telling me I’ve never looked better? I didn’t think so.”

  “You look fine.”

  I followed her as she walked to the mirror in the foyer and put her forefingers high on her cheeks. She presse
d upward, then let go. “Fucking gravity,” she said. “Who the hell asked for it? God damn it, I was going to be the one woman who never aged. Guess what? I’m the same as everybody else.” She turned to face me. “My God, will you listen to me? The only thing worse than the little lines around my mouth are the words coming out of it. Me me me, all the fucking time. Who cares if I show my age, and why the hell shouldn’t I, anyway? Just because I don’t act it.”

  “It’s a rough day,” I said.

  “I guess. I didn’t get much sleep last night. I could lie down now but I’d just be setting myself up for another night of staring out the window. Guess what? The Towers aren’t coming back, and neither is Monica.”

  “No.”

  “It’s not a dream. Waking up won’t fix it.”

  “No.”

  “It’s gonna take time. It’s what, twenty-four hours since we heard? If I was all better I’d be disgusted with myself. Time takes time, isn’t that what they say?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “I wish I could take a pill and wake up six months from now. Except I’d still feel the same way, because I wouldn’t have spent those six months dealing with it. Anyway, nobody’s invented a six-month pill yet.”

  “Not that I’ve heard of.”

  “They’ve got a permanent pill. You take it and you don’t wake up at all. I’m not ready for that yet.”

  “Good.”

  “Sometimes,” she said, “it’s not all that hard to understand why you used to drink.”

  “It did shut things down.”

  “I can see the appeal, I have to admit it. But the hell with all that, and the hell with me me me, as far as that goes. Did you talk to Sussman?”

  “They haven’t made any progress,” I said, “or if they have he didn’t bother to report it to me.” I told her about TJ’s wild hunch, and how I’d tried it out on Sussman even though neither of us thought it stood much of a chance of being true.

  “If he smoked,” she said, “she’d have told me about it. She never would have hooked up with him in the first place, she didn’t even like to be around people with the smell of smoke on their clothes, but if he just plain charmed her so much she was willing to overlook the smoking, the one thing she’d have done is mention it. ‘I can’t tell you anything about him, but he smokes, can you believe it, and I still like him.’ Whatever. She’d have found a way to say something about it.”

  “Eventually,” she said, “they’re going to rebuild. First everybody in the city gets to voice an opinion, and the relatives of the victims get to vote twice, and finally they’ll build something. And I wonder what it’s going to be like, standing here and looking out at it.”

  She was at the window, of course.

  “I wish something would happen,” she said, and my cell phone rang.

  It was the woman I’d given my card to, the mailbox lady. She was calling to tell me that the morning’s mail had held a letter for the holder of box 1217. “An’ I write down the name,” she said. “I think is the same name you say. David Thompson.”

  “That’s the name,” I agreed. “Who sent the letter?”

  “Who send it? How I know who send it?”

  “In the upper-left corner of the envelope,” I said, “there’s usually a return address.”

  “Maybe. I don’t remember.”

  Jesus, it was like pulling teeth. “Could you get the envelope now and take a look?”

  “Is gone.”

  “It’s gone?”

  “He come an’ pick it up. Same man as the picture you show me.”

  “He came and picked it up.”

  “Is his letter. He ask for it, I give it to him. You never say not to do this.”

  Nor had I asked her to note the return address. It wasn’t her fault, it was mine, but knowing this somehow failed to make me feel better about the whole thing.

  I asked her if she remembered anything about the envelope. It was, she said, a long envelope, not the smaller kind that bills come in. And the address was typed or printed, not handwritten.

  “An’ he was disappointed,” she volunteered.

  “Disappointed?”

  “He open it an’ look inside an’ he make a face.”

  Because there was no check in there, I thought. That’s why he’d turned up, to look for the check he thought I was going to send him, and he got some other letter instead, probably some relentless credit card issuer telling him he’d been preapproved, and he was understandably disheartened.

  I thanked her, and she said next time she would write down whatever it said on the envelope. In fact she would make a photocopy. I hadn’t noticed a copying machine, but now that she mentioned it I recalled another hand-lettered sign in the window, offering copies at fifteen cents apiece. That would be good, I told her, and I thanked her again and hung up.

  “He’ll be back tomorrow or the next day,” I told Elaine, “because he wants the check he thinks I’m going to send him. He’s sounding increasingly legit. Whatever today’s letter was, the name on it was the same one he gave Louise. And he wouldn’t have to know who the mythical check was from in order to go pick it up. The business he’s in, there’s probably a long list of companies that take their time paying him. He figures he’ll find out which one it is when he’s got the check in hand. It’s a shame she didn’t note the return address, but she’s not a mind reader.”

  “It sounds like that’s the only service they don’t offer there.”

  “Just about. He’ll be back tomorrow, but that’s no help. Not unless someone else sends him a letter.”

  I made a trip to the dry cleaner’s for her, and picked up sandwiches at the deli on my way back. Neither of us wanted them, but we ate anyway.

  Then we were talking again about the view from the window, and how it would seem when towers in one form or another began to rise into our field of vision. I don’t remember how, but that led to Magritte or dissonance or paradox, whatever, and I told her about the startling dissonance Sussman had forgotten to mention a day ago, the presence of the murder weapon at the crime scene.

  She said, “A dagger.”

  “Well, some kind of decorative knife. I don’t know that Sussman’s an authority on edged weapons.”

  “And he thinks he found it lying around? I’ve been in that apartment a few hundred times and I never saw a dagger there.”

  “It may not have been a dagger. It may have been, I don’t know…”

  “A letter opener.”

  “Something like that, sure.”

  “I never saw one of those, either.”

  “Well, would you notice it if you did? As far as—”

  She didn’t let me finish. “Call him,” she said.

  “Call him?”

  “Sussman, Mark Sussman. Call him.”

  It took a while, but I finally got through to him. She held out her hand for the phone and I gave it to her.

  She said, “This is Elaine Scudder. I’m fine, thank you, but that’s not the point. I’d like you to describe the murder weapon for me. Was it bronze? Well, was it bronze colored? And was it sharp at the tip but not along the edges of the blade? Do you have it in front of you? Well, could you get it? Yes, of course it’s important. If it wasn’t important I wouldn’t ask you to do it, would I? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap. Yes, I’ll wait.”

  I started to say something but she held up a hand and stopped me. “All right,” she said, “let me describe it to you, okay? And we’ll see if it’s what I think it is. It’s a bronze letter opener or paper knife, ten to twelve inches long. On one side there’s a scene in low relief of two hunting dogs holding a stag at bay. On the other side, you’ll find the name of the sculptor in incused block capitals. The name is DeVreese, that’s spelled D-E-V-R-E-E-S-E. You may need a magnifying glass to make it out.”

  She held the phone, listened. Then she said, “Mark? Don’t go anywhere. I saw him, I saw the man who killed her. I sold him the murder weapon. Oh my Go
d. Don’t go anywhere, we’ll be right down.”

  20

  The letter opener was sealed in a clear plastic evidence bag. Sussman held it out to her, and I could sense her reluctance to touch it, even wrapped in plastic. She took it gingerly in both hands and looked at it, and a tear flowed out of the corner of her eye and down her cheek. I don’t think she noticed it.

  “Yes, this is it,” she said. “You see that little nick there? This is the one I had in the shop. It would almost have to be. I don’t know how many of these they made, but this is the only one I’ve ever seen, and I never came across it in any catalogs.” She handed it back. “He came into my shop. He stood there and he talked to me, he paid what I asked and walked off with it in his pocket. And then he killed my friend with it.”

  “And this was Tuesday?”

  “The day before yesterday. It didn’t take him long to use it, did it? He bought it from me that afternoon and killed her that night. I think I’m going to be sick.”

  Sussman told her there was a bathroom down the hall, while another detective hurried to provide a wastebasket. Somebody else turned up with a glass of water. She decided she wasn’t going to be sick after all, took a sip of the water, and steadied herself with a couple of deep breaths.

  Sussman asked if he’d used a credit card.

  She said, “No, dammit. I had to go and offer him a discount if he paid cash. I said I’d knock off the sales tax. I pay the tax anyway, it’s hardly worth breaking the law to save a few dollars, but I save the credit card commission, and it’s a way to give a small discount. If I hadn’t opened my big mouth—”

  “He’d have paid cash anyway,” I said. “Or used a fake card. You didn’t screw anything up.”

  “Why did I have to sell him the damn thing? Why didn’t I tell him it wasn’t for sale?” No one had an answer for that, but she answered it herself. “I’m being irrational, aren’t I? I just want to rewrite the past, or at least see how it could rewritten. Never mind. He came into my shop and picked it out and I sold it to him.”