All the Flowers Are Dying

by Block, Lawrence

  “You saw him at Grogan’s?”

  “I did not. ’Twas years ago I saw him, and then only for a moment. Do you recall when you had me go to a house on West Seventy-fourth Street? There was a girl there you thought might be in harm’s way.”

  “Kristin Hollander.”

  “And a very nice young woman she was. He came to the door, your man in the drawing. Of course I’d no idea who he might be. I opened the door and told him to piss off, and he pissed off. I barely looked at him, but I’ve a fine old memory, haven’t I? It was the same man.”

  “Oh, God,” I said. “I never even thought of her. I don’t know what the hell’s the matter with me. Listen, I’ll have to get off the line so I can arrange police protection for her. Assuming she’s all right, assuming he hasn’t already paid her a visit. Christ, if he’s got to her, if he’s killed her—”

  “No one’s touched a hair on her head.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do I know? Why, amn’t I sitting across the table from her even now?”

  “He drove over there late last night,” I told Elaine, “but felt it was too late to show up on her doorstep, so he parked across the street and kept his eyes open. Then this morning, as soon as it seemed to him to be a decent hour, he rang her doorbell. He found it remarkable that she remembered him.”

  “Has anyone ever forgotten Mick?”

  “I asked him that. He said there’ve been some that wished they could.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “The house has a burglar alarm and a good set of locks, and she’s got Mick in there with her. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to worry about her before, but now I don’t have to. He killed her parents, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “She’s still living there. All by herself, in that big house.”

  “And now she’s got Mick for company.”

  “They’re playing cribbage,” I said. “They played cribbage four years ago, when he went and guarded her.”

  I picked up the phone and called Ira Wentworth and told him most of it, although I don’t think I mentioned that they were playing cribbage. “I don’t know how we forgot about her,” I said, “but she’ll be all right now. He’s not going to get in there, and God help him if he does. Still, it might not be a bad idea to stake the place out.”

  “Because he might show up,” he said. “I talked to my captain, and we’re reopening the Lia Parkman file. I can probably spring a couple of plainclothes to sit in a car and watch the block.”

  I put the phone down, and the next time it rang it was Sussman. The lab evidence was preliminary, and you couldn’t take it to the bank, but every indication was that the teenage male in Queens and the woman in Manhattan had been killed in the same manner—a single thrust from the rear, between two ribs and into the heart. The weapons used in the two homicides were at the very least similar, and probably identical.

  “And for now,” he said, “that’s as far as it’s gonna go. I don’t even want to write it up, let alone go and tell somebody. Because God help us all if the media get hold of this. You want to try imagining the subway at rush hour with every passenger trying to watch his back?”

  “They’d want metal detectors,” I said.

  “At every turnstile. Take the coins out of your pockets, put ’em in the tray, and swipe your Metrocard. Yeah, right. We got to catch this prick in a hurry, that’s all. Because you can only keep a lid on it for so long. If he does it one more time, takes out one more rush-hour straphanger, some media genius is gonna figure it out all by himself. And there goes the front page in every paper and the lead slot on every TV newscast, and we’ve got panic in the streets. And under them.”

  That evening I was sitting in a chair with a book, and Elaine came over looking concerned and asked me if I was all right. Evidently I’d set the book down and had been staring off into space for five or ten minutes. I hadn’t been aware of it.

  I said, “I hate not doing anything. I hate waiting for something to happen and hoping I can react to it properly when it does. I hate feeling helpless and useless and out of the loop.”

  “And old?”

  “And old,” I said. “I know there’s nothing I can do other than what I’m doing already. I know all that, and I’ll keep on doing it. But I don’t like the way it feels.”

  It felt a little better in the morning. Sussman called, and I could hear the change in his voice. “We found him,” he said, and before I could react he corrected himself. “Found where he’s living, I should say. Way the hell west on Fifty-third Street. A woman recognized the sketch, said he was the nice young man come to take care of his Uncle Joe, who had to go to the Veterans Hospital up in the Bronx. Except the people at the VA never heard of Joe Bohan, and my guess is nobody’s ever gonna see poor old Joe again.”

  “I don’t suppose our guy was on the premises.”

  “No,” he said, “but his laptop was. The laptop’s password-protected, but we’ve got a guy we can go to who can crack it quicker than a high school kid can break into a locked car. We don’t have to get into it to know it’s our guy’s laptop, though, because Joe wasn’t an online kind of guy. In fact you wouldn’t know Joe ever lived there, because all of his things are gone. All that’s left would seem to belong to the owner of the laptop, and one of the articles in question is a big old knife. Even as we speak, they’re trying to match it up to the subway stabbings. And I’ve got a dozen men on the block, keeping an eye out, waiting for him to come back for his laptop. Or his knife.”

  33

  Sometimes it seems to him that there truly are guardian angels, and that he has one. At more rational moments the notion of a guardian angel strikes him as essentially metaphorical, a convenient way to personify that portion of one’s mind-spirit-self capable of perceiving the imperceptible.

  Years ago, during his last stay in New York, he was away from his apartment on Central Park West when Scudder led a band of cops there. He was in a taxi, on his way home, ready to walk right into a lobby swarming with police officers just waiting for him to appear, and something warned him, something made him get out of the cab and approach the rest of the way on foot, cautiously, alert for any sign of danger.

  Looking back, he has never been able to pinpoint anything that should have made him wary. He can recall no police sirens wailing in the distance, no discernible change in the appearance of the neighborhood as the cab neared its destination. But whatever you choose to call it, a guardian angel, a higher self, an elevated level of ESP, it is undeniable that something warned him and that he’d had the presence of mind to act on the warning.

  Something made him turn away from that Central Park West apartment, retrieve his car from the garage where he kept it, and drive straight to Brooklyn. It hadn’t taken him long to get there, nor had it taken him long to take care of his business and leave the Meserole Street house in flames, and get out of the city altogether.

  All because he was able to listen to that inner prompting and not let logic overrule what it told him.

  And now he experiences it again, that same sort of warning. He feels a tightness in the back of his neck, a tingling in the palms of his hands. He’s walking south on Ninth Avenue when he first notices it, he’s just passed Elaine’s shop, and his first thought is that he’s under observation, that someone is watching him.

  He stops to look at the menu in a restaurant window, turns this way and that, getting a look around without making it too obvious that’s what he’s doing. He doesn’t see anyone, and that’s not what it is, this sensation he’s experiencing. He’s not being watched.

  There’s something waiting for him, that’s what it is. And he remembers the sensation from four years ago, remembers stopping the cab abruptly, telling the driver he’ll walk the rest of the way.

  Remembers what was waiting for him a few blocks further along on Central Park West.

  He walks to Fifty-third Street, turns right, walks west. And he’s like
a child playing a game, with others telling him You’re getting warmer or You’re getting colder as he turns this way and that. He’s getting warmer, and he feels warmer, feels the increasing sense of a hostile presence in front of him.

  Eventually he gets close enough to see them, on the block where he’s been living. There are no blue uniforms, but all it takes is a glance and he is able to spot them for what they are. There’s a car with its hood up, and the two men peering into its engine compartment might as well be dressed in blue. And there’s a woman with a baby carriage, paying more attention to the street scene than to the infant—a doll, he’s certain— within the carriage. Two men share the stoop next door to Joe Bohan’s building, drinking from cans held in paper bags. Cops, all of them.

  So much for his laptop. No point going back for it now, even if he could somehow thread his way through the maze of police. They’ll have long since carried it off, along with everything else he owns.

  What’s on the laptop? The password will secure it for a while, but if you build a better mousetrap someone will surely build a better mouse, and that applies to his own mousetraps as well as those of others. They’ll get past his password, in an hour or a day or a week, and what will they learn?

  Is the matter of Preston Applewhite documented there? He rather thinks it must be.

  No harm. Applewhite, poor fellow, has long since gone to glory, and if this serves to rehabilitate his reputation, well, he’d set that in motion with his tip to the Richmond newspaper. And it’s a zero-sum universe, isn’t it? Because any gain to Applewhite’s reputation will come at the expense of the reputations of the whole criminal justice system of the state of Virginia.

  Let them have the laptop. He can always get another. Meanwhile, there’s always Kinko’s.

  And what else has he lost? Some clothing, some personal articles. A razor, a toothbrush, a comb.

  And, of course, that beautiful knife. The Reinhold Messer bowie, with its blade of Damascus steel, so skillfully made, so perfectly balanced.

  He slips a hand into his pocket, where the Thaddy Jenkins folder waits, smooth and cool to his touch. He can’t help taking it out, opening it with a flick of his hand that has by now become purely reflexive. He tests the blade with his thumb, feels its keenness.

  And then, a little reluctantly, he works the catch, closes the knife, returns it to his pocket.

  The house?

  He’s thought of it before, that house on West Seventy-fourth Street. It seems to him that there would be some sort of poetic justice in taking it up as his next temporary residence, a larger and more comfortable shell for the hermit crab than poor old Joe Bohan’s tenement flat. It was, after all, supposed to be his house, back in the time when he still thought a house was something he wanted.

  Why he’d even had fantasies—they seem quite laughable now—of marrying Kristin Hollander, and helping her deal with the grief of having lost her parents. She is a pretty thing, Kristin, and she’d have been amusing company for a while. He might have convinced her, for example, of the therapeutic necessity of making love in the front room, the very place where he’d killed her mother and father.

  And then, of course, when the amusement faded, the poor grief-stricken thing would take her own life—easy enough to arrange—and the house would be his, free and clear.

  If not for Matthew Scudder…

  He shakes his head, dismisses that whole train of thought. The past, he reminds himself, is called that for a reason—it has passed, it is over and done with. Someone has called it another country, and if so it’s not one to live in, or even the place for an extended visit. It is the here and now that concerns him.

  Should the here and now include the Hollander house?

  She still lives there. He knows that much, and not merely because he’s seen the listing in the phone book. He’s seen her, too, leaving her house and walking to the corner to hail a taxi, and looking just as he remembers her. How old would she be? Twenty-five, twenty-six? Midtwenties, certainly, and still quite lovely.

  There was a time when he had a key to her house, and knew the code for the burglar alarm. Both the lock and the code have long since been changed. Still, there ought to be some way to get into the house.

  And if he were simply to ring the bell?

  She’d come to the door. Late at night she might be on her guard, but in the middle of the afternoon, why, she’d open the door to see who it might be.

  And if she recognizes him?

  Kristin, he’ll say, it’s so good to see you! And by the time she reacts, by the time that it strikes her that she has no reason to be glad to see him, why, he’ll be inside, won’t he? And it will no longer matter what she thinks or feels or tries to do.

  When he’s through with her, the house will be his for as long as he wants it. The hermit crab will have a spendid new shell.

  The very moment he turns the corner onto her block, he senses an alien presence. His first impulse is to turn again and slip away, but the feeling that grips him is a little different this time, and he decides on a closer look. He’ll be careful, he’ll take pains to see without being seen, but he won’t turn tail and withdraw, not quite yet.

  At a Korean market around the corner on Columbus Avenue, he buys three loaves of white bread and two rolls of paper towels. The shopping bag they give him is full to overflowing, but weighs next to nothing. He’s out the door when it occurs to him to add a bouquet of flowers, all wrapped up in green paper. With one arm clutching the bag of groceries to his chest and his free hand brandishing the bouquet, he manages to look ordinary and harmless while screening his features from any eyes turned in his direction.

  He walks down her street, moving at the deliberate pace his burdens would seem to dictate. He’s able to glance into each parked vehicle, to check out stoops and doorways. And he sees no one the least bit suspicious, no one who might possibly be a watchful cop.

  Why the warning from his guardian angel?

  It was, he decided, an echo of the earlier warning. The mind would do that, summoning up the memory of a feeling when presented with a similar situation. And, while the alarm has turned out to be a false one, hasn’t it been useful all the same? Because now he can ring her bell with a bag and a bouquet to block any view of him she might gain through a peephole. That had been a flaw in his original plan, the possibility that there might be a peephole in her front door that would allow her to recognize him before she had the door open. But now she’ll have to open it to know who her visitor is, and what woman could leave the door closed on a man holding a bouquet of flowers?

  Perfect.

  He has passed her house and walked to the other end of the block, and now he turns to approach it again. He’s two doors away, just steps from the walkway leading to her front door, when something makes him stop right where he is. He takes a moment to visualize it all in his mind, ringing the bell, positioning the groceries and the flowers just so, waiting until the door opens, then pushing hard against the door, forcing his way in, dropping everything, and hitting her once, as hard as he can, in the chest or stomach, to keep her from reacting or crying out until he’s had a chance to draw the door shut behind him.

  And he stands there, seeing all of this as clearly as if it is actually happening, when a car drives up and pulls smoothly into a parking space at a fire hydrant directly across the street from her house.

  Two men, and he knows at once that they’re cops.

  The driver cuts the engine. His passenger gets out of the car, walks into the middle of the street, and raises a hand to shield his eyes for a look at the house number. Satisfied, he turns and gets back in the car, rolling down the window to give him a better view of Kristin Hollander’s house.

  And to think he’d been ready to write off a clear warning as vestigial, a mere echo! Whatever its source, he’d been alerted not to the physical presence of police (who hadn’t been there yet at the time) but to the reality of danger.

  He walks at his deliberate
pace, his face shielded by the bouquet, his innocence guaranteed by the bulk of his burden, until he reaches the corner and disappears from their view. He walks another block, drops both his bundles in a trash can, and picks up his pace.

  If they are watching the Hollander house, they know who he is.

  Or suspect it, at the very least. That he did not die in the fire in Brooklyn, that the body in the basement was somebody else’s, that he who killed and ran away has lived to kill another day.

  The thought excites him. It is, he knows, a paradox that he who so relishes his anonymity at the same time hungers for recognition. It seems clear that he is a genius, although not in an area much esteemed by the Nobel committee. Still, he has a human desire to be acknowledged for what he is—and a core of good sense that keeps him well aware of the danger of such acknowledgment.

  He asks himself once again if it is not perhaps time to disappear. He has the clothes he is wearing, the money in his wallet, along with an ATM card that will give him access to a few thousand dollars in a bank account on the other side of the country. He no longer recalls the name he used to open the account, or the name and location of the bank, but what does it matter? He has the card and knows the PIN, and that’s all he needs to know.

  And what else does he have? The keenness of his mind, the strength of his will, and the promptings of his intuition.

  And, of course, the knife in his pocket.

  Enough to take him wherever he wants to go. Shall he leave, then?

  34

  The phone call came a few minutes after five. I let the machine pick up, and after we’d listened to my own recorded message, there was a long enough silence for me to think the caller might have hung up.

  Then he said, “Well, hello, Matt S. This is Abie.”