Three years later, they found her. No, that wasn’t quite accurate, either: The police had found her. The point was, she had been found. But she had been dead.
Did the police have any idea who had done it? The detective shook his head. He could have told the mother that it had probably been one of Angela’s tricks, but contrary to popular belief in the precinct house, he actually did have a heart. “We currently have no information, Mrs. Nicholas.” Which wasn’t entirely true, since that man, Sladek, had turned out to have been poisoned, too, and with the same poison, so that was—maybe—a starting point. But it was close enough to true. Anyway, he said it.
“How did it happen? How could this happen?”
“We aren’t certain. Our lab is working on it.”
The father finally stirred to life, raising his head, his eyes burning. “You find the man who did this and I’ll kill him.”
“Haven’t you done enough?” Mrs. Nicholas said.
“Do you have a daughter, sergeant?”
“A son,” the detective said.
“Well, if somebody did to your son what somebody did to my daughter,” Mr. Nicholas said, “what would you do?”
I’d kill the son of a bitch, the detective said. To himself. “I’d let the proper authorities handle it.”
Mr. Nicholas shook his head. “With a daughter it’s different.”
* * *
For the first night in a week, it wasn’t raining. The detective looked at the map he’d made, showing the streets from 32nd to 45th on the West Side. The locations where the bodies had been found were marked with red circles. They were spread around—enough so that it didn’t look like there was a pattern. But five homeless people dead in the course of seven weeks? All poisoned? It wasn’t obvious that this was the work of just one person, but that the deaths were connected the detective had no doubt.
He started at the uptown end, the theater district. As you left the streets dominated by Disney marquees, you found the remnants of the old Times Square: novelty shops, import/export storefronts, peep shows, For Rent signs. Plenty of homeless people to talk to.
The detective took his time, walking slowly, keeping his eyes open—for what, he wasn’t sure. He stopped whenever he saw someone sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against a street lamp, lying under a filthy quilt in a cardboard box. He introduced himself, asked whether the person had seen anything unusual lately.
Mostly they said no.
One man said, “You not going to get anyone to tell you anything. They too scared.”
“You scared?” the detective asked.
“Bet your ass I’m scared.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t want to end up dead.”
“We all end up dead,” the detective said.
“Not me, man. I’m not ready yet.”
“So why don’t you tell me, who is it that people are scared of?”
The man just shook his head emphatically.
“Why? Why won’t you tell me?”
“Maybe it’s you.”
“For god’s sake, I’m a cop. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You’re a cop don’t mean nothing. You know that, I know that, everybody know that.”
The detective moved on. Could it be a cop? He thought about it. A frustrated beat cop, maybe, out to clean up the neighborhood in his off time? An old PD hack, about to hit retirement, sick of seeing bums lining the sidewalk? It was possible. He didn’t want to think about it.
Below Port Authority, the number of homeless people dropped to only one or two per block. The detective walked down Eighth Avenue, came back on Broadway, walked down again on Sixth.
At 42nd and Sixth, at the entrance to Bryant Park, a blind man was leaning on a propped-up piece of cardboard lettered with the words, “God Bless You If You Help Me.” He was smoking a long, filter-tipped cigarette. The smoke formed a gray wreath around his face.
“Evening,” the detective said.
“God bless,” the man said. He groped for his cup and then raised it, shaking the coins inside.
“I’m with the police.” The detective squatted next to the man, pulled out his wallet, and put the man’s hand onto his badge. The man’s eyebrows rose and his mouth crinkled into a smile. He put the cup down.
“How are you doing, officer?”
“Could be worse. You?”
“Good night for me,” the man said, hugging himself against the chill. “Most nights nobody talks to me. Tonight you’re the second.”
“Really? Who was the other?”
He thought for a moment. “Man about your age, I’d say. Little older maybe. Pleasant fellow. Talked to me a while, just a minute ago.” He lifted his cigarette. “Gave me a smoke.”
“Nice of him,” the detective said. “Listen, you notice anything out of the ordinary around here lately?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“We’re conducting an investigation.”
“Well, I haven’t seen a thing,” the man said. He laughed softly to himself.
The detective dropped a handful of change into the man’s cup before walking away.
“My lucky day,” the man said, hugging himself tighter. “God bless you.”
* * *
“His name was Michael Casey. He lived off his monthly federal disability check, plus what he picked up panhandling.”
“Damn it!”
“Calm down.”
“I was talking to him last night,” the detective said. “He was sitting next to me, smoking a goddamn cigarette, telling me what a wonderful night it was.”
“You couldn’t have known,” his partner said.
“Sure I could have. I could have figured it out then instead of now. I could have saved his life.”
“We don’t know that.” The partner stopped the car outside Body Beautiful.
The detective got out and walked to the service entrance. The issue of Cosmopolitan was still lying where he had dropped it, crumpled in a dark corner of the doorway. It had dried and hardened and was now stuck to the ground. The detective used a scraper to get it up. Underneath it there was a cigarette butt.
“Bingo.” The detective picked the butt up with a pair of tweezers and dropped it in an evidence baggie. He returned to the car. “I told you there was a cigarette.”
“There are cigarettes on every sidewalk in the city.”
“That’s true, and maybe this one has nothing to do with our case. But I don’t think so. I think that Harold Sladek smoked it. Why? Because the first time we saw it, it was lying on top of that magazine, and the magazine was lying behind his body. Do you think someone came along, smoking, finished his cigarette, and then tossed it over Sladek’s dead body so that it landed on his magazine? I don’t think so.”
“Okay.”
“So: Sladek smoked it. That still doesn’t mean it has something to do with our case. But since we didn’t find any cigarettes in his bags, or even an empty cigarette pack, we can assume that someone else gave the cigarette to him. And we know that someone gave a cigarette to Michael Casey just before he died. And it was the same brand as this one.” He waved the bag in front of his partner’s face.
“Lots of people smoke Chrome Golds.”
“Sure. And lots of homeless people die on the streets. But how many do one right after doing the other? I’ll bet that if we analyze this butt, we’ll find traces of the same poison they found in Sladek’s body.”
“Let’s say you’re right. What would that tell us? We already know Sladek was poisoned.”
“It tells us how it happened.”
“And … ?”
“And now we can get the bastard who did it.”
“What do you want to do, arrest everyone who buys a pack of Chrome Golds?”
The detective didn’t have an answer to that.
“Then what? All we can do is keep cleaning up after the guy and hope that one of these days he’ll try his stunt on the wrong person and get himself s
hot.”
“No one’s going to shoot a nice old guy who’s offering them a cigarette.”
“You don’t know that,” the partner said. “This is New York.”
* * *
He sat with a blue knit hat pulled down over his forehead, his hands crammed under his armpits, shivering. Even with two shirts on, he was cold. He had a thin blanket, which he had wrapped and rewrapped around himself, trying to make it hold in as much heat as possible. Under the blanket he had a thermos filled with coffee. Every few minutes he took a swallow.
People passed, hurrying from store to store, from home to theater, from street to taxi. He only saw their legs, their hands swinging by their sides, their packages. Sometimes children passed at his eye level and then he saw adult hands snatch the curious faces away from him. He saw car tires and bicycle wheels. As it got later, he saw less and less. By midnight, he saw nothing but a neon sign across the street and patches of sidewalk, dimly lit in the glow of street lamps.
The doorway he sat in, the entrance to a Burger King that was closed for renovation, was relatively roomy: He was able to stretch his legs almost to their full length. Each night for the previous ten he had sat in a different doorway, on a different street. Unlike Harold Sladek, he was not driven by years of habit. But this doorway was more comfortable than the others had been, and that really did make a difference. He started thinking about staying here, at least for the next few nights.
A pair of high-heeled shoes clicked past, speeding up as they passed him. Sometime later, a taxi braked to a halt a few feet away. The driver got out, unzipped his pants, relieved himself against a tree, got back into his car, and drove away. Then nothing, for several hours.
Closer to dawn than midnight, footsteps approached again. They came at a casual pace, and he waited for them to pass, but they didn’t.
“Hello there,” a voice said.
The detective didn’t say anything. But under the blanket, he put the thermos down and picked up his gun.
“Cold night.”
“Sure is,” the detective said.
The feet moved a few steps to one side, then the knees bent, and then a man was sitting next to him. “What’s your name?”
“What’s yours?” the detective asked.
“Arthur,” the man said. “You can call me Art.”
The detective looked at him. He had a friendly face with great unruly eyebrows, a small mouth, good teeth. Good dentures, more likely. He looked like someone’s grandfather. Was this their killer, this harmless-looking man? The detective stared at him and tried to see in him a serial murderer, a cold-blooded exterminator of the homeless. He couldn’t.
Arthur reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Do you smoke?”
In wide gold letters, the pack said Chrome Gold.
The detective felt his fingers tense under the blanket, felt the weight of the gun in his hand. What would he do if I said no? Would he find some other way to do it? Or would he just go off and pick someone else to kill?
“Sure,” the detective said. “I smoke.”
Arthur flipped open the top of the pack. There were twenty cigarettes inside, lined up in their perfect rows. Which should have been a tip-off that something was wrong, the detective realized: The pack was already unwrapped, but none of the cigarettes were missing. Why would someone have opened a pack of cigarettes but not have smoked even one of them?
He reached out from under the blanket with his free hand, gripped the pack of cigarettes firmly, and pulled it out of Arthur’s hand.
“Now hold on,” Arthur said, not losing his smile. “Leave some for me. I was just offering you one.” He reached for the pack.
“Oh, I won’t smoke them all,” the detective said. “Don’t worry about that.” He turned the pack over and shook the cigarettes out. Arthur caught a few; the rest fell on the pavement. He started scooping them up.
“Don’t bother, Art. You’ve got bigger worries.”
Arthur kept snatching up the loose cigarettes until he heard the gun cock. He looked up and the smile finally disappeared.
The detective moved the gun closer to the other man’s face. “I’m not going to shoot you, Arthur,” he said, “unless you make me.”
Arthur’s face was trembling. His hands shook. A few cigarettes slipped back onto the sidewalk. He looked left and right, but the street was deserted.
“Nervous?” the detective said. He picked two cigarettes off the sidewalk, wiped them roughly on the blanket. He leaned forward and put one between Arthur’s lips. It slipped out as Arthur opened his mouth to talk. “I don’t want—”
“Oh, you want,” the detective said. He leaned forward and put another cigarette in Arthur’s mouth. He pressed the gun against Arthur’s forehead, Arthur’s head against the wall. “Don’t spit it out.”
Arthur shifted the cigarette nervously to one corner of his mouth, but he didn’t spit it out.
“Good.” The detective groped through Arthur’s coat pockets until he found the lighter. He opened it. A flame leapt up. He brought it close to the end of the cigarette in Arthur’s mouth.
“Please, don’t—”
“Why not?”
Arthur shook his head.
“Why not?” Arthur looked at him miserably, but said nothing. “You’re going to tell me why not, Arthur, or you’re going to smoke that cigarette.”
“I don’t want to …”
The detective passed the flame over the end of the cigarette. The paper and tobacco were singed. A drop of sweat rolled down Arthur’s upper lip and onto the cigarette.
“Want me to guess why you don’t want to smoke this cigarette?” the detective said. “Okay. How about, because you poisoned it? Could that be it?”
Arthur nodded uneasily.
“Talk to me, Arthur.”
“Yes,” he said in a small voice. “That’s it.”
“And why are you going around offering homeless people poisoned cigarettes, Arthur? Do you dislike homeless people? Do you not want to see them around? Or do you just get off on killing people?”
“No,” Arthur whispered, “that’s not it at all.”
“Why don’t you tell me what it is, then?”
“They’re so miserable,” Arthur said. There were tears in his eyes. “Out here on the street, in the cold, on drugs, selling their bodies … No one should have to live like that.”
“So you kill them?”
“I give them a cigarette. They feel no pain. They never know what happened. They’re out of their misery.”
“In other words, you kill them.”
“They go to sleep and don’t wake up.”
“You kill them, goddamn it,” the detective said, pressing the gun harder into the man’s skull. “Say it.”
“I kill them,” Arthur said. “But they’re better off for it.”
Arthur and the detective sat silently, staring at each other. The detective saw no sign of understanding or of self-awareness. He saw terror, but no remorse.
He thought of the digital recorder in his pocket, quietly capturing a record of their words, and pictured this grandfatherly man standing in front of a jury, earnestly insisting on his innocence. He looked at Arthur’s well-cut suit and polished loafers, at the watch on his wrist, and pictured the caliber of lawyer he would hire to defend himself. He pictured a trial with no witnesses to the crimes, a case where the victims were on the margins of society and the defendant looked like a pillar of the community. He pictured the defense lawyer asking the jury if they could trust a policeman who had held a gun to this nice old man’s head. Of course he admitted the crime, ladies and gentlemen—wouldn’t you? With a gun to your head?
He pictured Harold Sladek, cold and wet, taking a cigarette from this well-dressed benefactor. He pictured Michael Casey passing time with his killer, thanking him for his kindness, whispering God bless.
He pictured all this in the time it took for Arthur to swallow, nervously, twice.
/> The detective passed the flame over the cigarette once more. This time he held it there. “Inhale.”
“You can’t—”
“Inhale!”
Arthur sucked in, as briefly as he could. The tip of the cigarette glowed red. The detective closed the lighter and pocketed it.
“Again.”
“Don’t—”
“Again.”
“Please—”
“This is the way it has to be,” the detective said. “You said the stuff you put in the cigarettes is painless. I hope it is, because I guarantee you, bullets are not.” The detective pulled the gun away from Arthur’s head and aimed it at his gut. “Not the way I’ll use them. Take your pick.”
“You’re a monster,” Arthur said, the cigarette gripped tightly between his lips.
“I can live with that,” the detective said. “Now decide.”
Arthur looked at the gun, looked into the detective’s eyes, and inhaled.
“Again,” the detective said.
* * *
When Arthur was dead, the detective packed all the loose cigarettes into one of his bags and then stripped the corpse down to an undershirt and briefs. A press of a button erased the memory of the digital recorder, but just to be safe, he’d record over it when he got home.
He bundled everything up under one arm, pulled his hat further down on his brow, and walked east on 38th Street. It was still dark. No one saw him.
* * *
The body was found shortly after 9 in the morning.
The papers reported that an unidentified homeless man had died during the night, presumably of exposure. In the Daily News it was mentioned that he’d had a thin blanket over him, apparently donated by a good samaritan.
But, the News reported, it hadn’t been enough to keep him alive.
THE LAST SUPPER
BY CAROL LEA BENJAMIN
Greenwich Village
Harry was late. No problem. Esther knew just what to do while she waited, lifting her hand and finally catching the waiter’s eye. He was new, she thought, just a kid, his face eager, as if it really mattered to him what Esther wanted, as if he really cared. Was it a waiter thing, that faux interest? Or just a guy thing, appearing to be listening, to be interested, when they’re not. Harry used to be like that. Harry used to be a lot of things. But no more. She’d see him tonight, give him what he asked for, then never see him again.
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