“Especially if the customer’s a prosperous-looking middle-aged white man in a Brooks Brothers suit.”
“The right front gets you through,” he agreed.
“And the ID may have been legitimate,” I said. “Maybe he had a client named Johnson, maybe he hung on to a driver’s license for some poor bastard who wouldn’t need it while he was locked up in Green Haven.”
He scratched his head. “We got a name of a dude flew to Omaha one day and back a couple days later. We got anything more than that?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“I’m glad you brought him in,” Joe Durkin said. “This is the very mope we’ve been looking high and low for. I’ll ask him a few questions soon as I remember where I put my rubber hose.”
“Bet I know where it’s at,” TJ said. “You want, I help you look for it.”
Durkin grinned and gave him a poke in the arm. “What are you doing with my friend here?” he demanded. “Why aren’t you out on the street selling crack and mugging people?”
“My day off.”
“And here I thought you guys were dedicated. Seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, soothing the emotional pain of the public. Turns out you coast just like everybody else.”
“Hell yes,” TJ said. “I didn’t want to do nothin’ but work all the time, I be joinin’ the po-leese.”
“Say that again for me, will you? Po-leese.”
“Po-leese.”
“Jesus, I love it when you talk dirty. Matt, I don’t know what gives me the idea, but somehow I think you’re here for a reason.”
We were in the squad room at Midtown North, on West Fifty-fourth Street. I took a chair and explained what I wanted while TJ went over to the board and thumbed through a sheaf of Wanted flyers.
“When you find one with your picture on it,” Joe advised him, “bring it over and I’ll get you to autograph it for me. Matt, let me see if I’ve got this straight. You want me to call the Omaha police and ask them to check hotel records for some zip named Johnson.”
“I’d appreciate it,” I said.
“You’d appreciate it. In a tangible way, do you suppose?”
“Tangible. Yes, I suppose I—”
“I like that word,” he said. “Tangible. It means you can touch it. You reach out and it’s there. Which gives rise to a question. Why don’t you reach out and touch someone?”
“Pardon me?”
“You know the hotel, right? The Hilton?”
“That’s the place to start. I’m not positive that’s where he stayed, but—”
“But you’d start there. Why didn’t you? Use their eight hundred number and the call’s free. Can’t beat that for a bargain.”
“I called,” I said. “I didn’t get anywhere.”
“You identify yourself as a police officer?”
“That’s illegal.” He gave me a look. “I may have given that impression,” I admitted. “It didn’t do me any good.”
“Since when did you become incapable of calling a hotel and conning a little information out of a desk clerk?” He looked at the slip of paper in front of him. “Omaha,” he said. “What the hell ever happened in Omaha?” He looked at me. “Jesus Christ,” he said.
“Not Him personally,” TJ put in, “but this dude who said he was real tight with Him.”
“The abortion guy. What was his name?”
“How quickly we forget.”
“Roswell Berry. Will got him right in his hotel room, didn’t he? I forget which hotel, but why is it something tells me it was the Hilton?”
“Why indeed?”
“You have reason to think our boy Will’s a guy named Johnson?”
“It’s a name he may have been using.”
“No wonder the Hilton wouldn’t tell you anything. You wouldn’t have been the first caller trying to get something out of them. All the tabloids, guarding the public’s right to know. The Omaha PD must have slammed the lid shut.”
“That would be my guess.”
“You know how many detectives are working on Will? I can’t tell you the number, but what I do know is I’m not one of them. How do I justify sticking my nose in?”
“Maybe this doesn’t have anything to do with Will,” I said. “Maybe it’s a simple investigation of a robbery suspect who pulled a series of holdups in this precinct and may have fled to Omaha.”
“Where he’s got relatives. But instead of staying with them we think he holed up at the Hilton. We know the dates, and the name he used. That’s some story, Matt.”
“You probably won’t have to tell it,” I said. “You’re a New York police detective with a question that’s easy to answer. Why should they give you a hard time?”
“People have never needed a reason in the past.” He picked up the phone. “Here’s a question that’s not easy to answer. Why the hell am I doing this?”
“Allen W. Johnson,” he said. “That’s Allen with two L’s and an E. I don’t know what the W stands for. I don’t suppose it stands for Will.”
“I’m not sure it stands for anything.”
“Stayed two nights and paid cash. As a matter of fact, the Omaha cops checked on everybody staying at the hotel as part of their investigation of Berry’s murder. Anybody paid cash, that was a red flag. So Mr. Allen Johnson definitely had their attention.”
“Did they have a chance to talk to him?”
“He’d already checked out. Never used the phone or charged anything to his room.”
“I don’t suppose they’ve got a description of him.”
“Yeah, they got a real useful one. He was a man and he was wearing a suit.”
“Narrows it down.”
“He checked out after Will got Berry with the coat hanger, but before the body was discovered. So why take a second look at him?”
“He paid cash.”
He shook his head. “Not when he checked in. He gave them a credit card and they ran a slip. Then when he checked out he gave them cash. Apparently that’s common. The card simplifies checking in, but you’ve got reasons for settling up in cash. Maybe the card’s maxed out, or maybe you don’t want the bill showing up at your house because you don’t want your wife to know you were over at the Hilton humping your secretary.”
“And when you pay in cash—”
“They tear up the slip they took an imprint on. So nobody ever knows if the card’s a phony, because they don’t run it by the credit card company until you check out.”
“So we know he had a credit card,” I said, “whether or not it was a good one. And he had a piece of photo ID in the same name.”
“Did I miss something? How do we know that?”
“He had to show it to get on the plane.”
“If he had the credit card for backup,” he said, “the other could be any damn thing long as it had his picture on it. One of those pieces of shit they print for you on Forty-second Street, says you’re a student at the School of Hard Knox.”
“Like I said,” TJ murmured.
“Tell me about this guy,” Joe said. “Since you got my attention. How’d you get on to him?”
“From the airline records.”
“New York to Omaha?”
“Philadelphia to Omaha.”
“Where did Philadelphia come from?”
“I think the Quakers settled it.”
“I mean—”
“It’s too complicated to go into,” I said, “but I was looking for someone who flew Philly to Omaha and back again. He fit the time frame.”
“You mean he went out before Berry got killed and came back afterward.”
“It was a little tighter fit than that.”
“Uh-huh. Who is he, you want to tell me that?”
“Just a name,” I said. “And a face, if he showed photo ID, but I haven’t seen the face.”
“He’s just a man in a suit, like the girl at the hotel remembered.”
“Right.”
“Help me out here, Ma
tt. What have you got that I should be passing on to somebody?”
“I haven’t got anything.”
“If Will’s out there running around, looking for fresh names for his list—”
“Will’s retired,” I said.
“Oh, right. We got his word for that, don’t we?”
“And nobody’s heard a peep out of him since.”
“Which makes the department look pretty stupid, wasting manpower and resources chasing a perpetrator who no longer represents a danger to the community. How’s this your business, anyway? Who’s your client?”
“That’s confidential.”
“Oh, come on. Don’t give me that shit.”
“As a matter of fact, it’s privileged. I’m working for an attorney.”
“Jesus, I’m impressed. Wait a minute, it comes back to me. Weren’t you working for the last vic? Whitfield?”
“That’s right. I wasn’t doing much, I advised him on security and steered him to Wally Donn at Reliable.”
“Which did him a whole lot of good.”
“I think they did what they could.”
“I suppose so.”
“Whitfield hired me as an investigator,” I said. “Not that there was much for me to investigate.”
“And you’re still at it? That’s the attorney you’re working for? What are you, billing the estate?”
“He paid me a retainer.”
“And it covers what you’re doing now?”
“It’ll have to.”
“What have you got, Matt?”
“All I’ve got is Allen Johnson, and I told you how I got him.”
“Why’d you check those flights?”
“A hunch.”
“Yeah, right. You know what I do when I get a hunch?”
“You bet a bunch?”
He shook his head. “I buy a lottery ticket,” he said, “and I’ve never won yet, which shows how good my hunches are. You’d think I’d learn.”
“All it takes is a dollar and a dream.”
“That’s catchy,” he said. “I’ll have to remember that. Now, if there’s nothing else—”
“Actually…”
“This better be good.”
“I was just thinking,” I said, “that it would be interesting to know if Allen W. Johnson ever bought cyanide.”
He was silent for a long moment, thinking. Then he said, “Somebody must have checked the records when Whitfield got killed. Especially after the autopsy showed he was terminal and there was all that speculation that he killed himself. But Will’s last letter scotched that line of thought.”
“It proved he killed Whitfield.”
“Uh-huh. It even mentioned cyanide, if I remember correctly. The cyanide had to come from somewhere, didn’t it? It smells like almonds, but you can’t make it out of almonds, can you?”
“I think you can extract minute quantities from peach pits,” I said, “but somehow I don’t think that’s how Will got it.”
“And if he bought it where you had to sign for it, and had to show ID—”
“Maybe he signed in as Allen Johnson.”
He thought it over, straightened up in his seat. He said, “You know what? I think you should find out who’s in charge of the investigation into Will and his wacky ways and ask him to look it up for you. You’re a nice fellow, make a good first impression, and a hundred years ago you used to be on the job yourself. I’m sure they’ll be happy to cooperate with you.”
“I’d just hate to keep you from getting the credit.”
“Credit,” he said heavily. “Is that how you remember it from your days on the force? Is that what you used to get for butting into somebody else’s case? Credit?”
“It’s a little different when the case is stalled.”
“This one? It can be stalled six different ways, it can have a dead battery and four flat tires, and it’s still high-profile and high-priority. You see Marty McGraw this morning?”
“The last time I saw him was around the time of Will’s last letter.”
“I don’t mean him, I mean his column. You read it today?” I hadn’t. “He had a hair up his ass about something, and I can’t even remember what it was. Last line of the column—‘Where’s Will now that we need him?’”
“He didn’t write that.”
“The hell he didn’t. Hang on a minute, there must be a copy of the News around here somewhere.” He returned with a paper. “I didn’t have it word for word, but that’s how it adds up. Here, read it yourself.”
I looked where he was pointing and read the final paragraph aloud. “‘You find yourself thinking of a certain anonymous letter writer of recent memory, and saying of him what some unfunny folks used to say of Lee Harvey Oswald. Where is he now that we need him?’”
“What did I tell you?”
“I can’t believe he wrote that.”
“Why not? He wrote the first one, saying Richie Vollmer wasn’t fit to live. Which, I have to say, was a hard position to find fault with. But it sure got Will’s motor running.”
14
By the time we got out of there TJ was hungry again, and I realized I hadn’t had anything but coffee since breakfast. We found a pizza place with tables and I got us a couple of Sicilian slices.
“I was at this one place,” he said, “they had pizza with fruit on it. You ever hear of that?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“Never tried it, though?”
“It never sounded like a good idea to me.”
“Me either,” he said. “Had pineapple on it, an’ somethin’ else, but I disremember what. Wasn’t peaches, though. Was that straight what you was sayin’ before? Peach pits really got cyanide in them?”
“Traces of it.”
“How many of ’em you have to eat before you kill yourself?”
“You don’t have to eat any of them before you kill yourself. You just put a gun in your mouth and—”
“You know what I mean, Dean. You couldn’t poison somebody with peach pits ‘cause he’d take one bite an’ make a face an’ spit it out. But could somebody lookin’ to commit suicide choke down enough of them to do the job?”
“I have no idea,” I said. “Of course if we had a computer I’m sure you could find out in no time.”
“You right, you know. All you gotta do is post the question on the Internet and some fool E-mail you the answer. How we gonna find out if Johnson bought the cyanide?”
“We’ll wait.”
“For what?”
“For Joe Durkin to make a phone call.”
“Which he just said he ain’t about to do.”
“That’s what he said.”
“Said it like he meant it, too.”
I nodded. “But it’ll stick in his mind,” I said. “And tomorrow or the next day he’ll pick up the phone.”
“An’ if he don’t?”
“I’m not sure it matters. I know what happened. I’d need to fit a couple more things together in order to prove it, but I don’t even know if I want to do that.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I’m not sure I see the point.”
“Biggest story all year,” he said. “Man sells newspapers even when he don’t do nothin’.”
“Where is he now that we need him?”
“Whole city’s holdin’ its breath, wants to know what he’s gonna do next. Say he’s retired, but maybe he bidin’ his time. Everybody waitin’ on his next move, wonderin’ what’s the next name on his list.”
“But we know better.”
“When you know the truth,” he said, “don’t you have to tell somebody? Isn’t that what detectin’ is, findin’ out the truth an’ tellin’ somebody?”
“Not always. Sometimes it’s finding out the truth and keeping it to yourself.”
He thought about it. “Be a real big story,” he said.
“I suppose so.”
“Story of the year, what they’d be callin’ it.”
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