“Which means he’s the man.”
“Yes.”
“‘What man?’ The man with the power.’ Remember that?”
“Vaguely.”
“‘What power?’ ‘The power of voodoo.’”
“It comes back to me now.”
“‘Who do?’ ‘You do.’ They don’t write ‘em like that anymore, Matt.”
“No, and I can see why. He must feel powerless himself, don’t you figure?”
“Who, the man with the power?”
“The man who wrote this.”
“Let’s see.” He held the letter, scanned it. “Powerless, huh?”
“Don’t you think so?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I suppose that’s what the Feebies would say if they did a profile of him. He resents the power others have over him and seeks to redress the balance by threatening their lives. Plus he wet the bed when he was a kid.”
“Funny how they always tell you that.”
“Like it’s going to help you find the son of a bitch. ‘Hey, the FBI says our guy used to wet the bed, so I want you guys out on the street looking for a grown-up little pisspot.’ Useful bit of knowledge when you’re mounting a manhunt, but they always toss it in.”
“I know.”
“Along with the information that he came from a dysfunctional family. Jesus, that’s helpful, isn’t it? A dysfunctional family, holy shit, whoever heard of such a thing?”
“If you came from a dysfunctional family,” I said solemnly, “you’d wet the bed, too.”
“And probably kill a few people while I was at it. It’s all part of the package.” He frowned at the letter. “Powerless and resenting the power of others. Yeah, I suppose so. It’s a hard theory to argue with. But you know what he reminds me of, Will Number Two?”
“What?”
“A list of pet peeves like you’d write up for the high school yearbook. ‘What really pisses me off is insincere people, snap quizzes in algebra class, and lumpy mashed potatoes.’”
“Well, who likes lumpy mashed potatoes?”
“Not me. They make me want to kill the pope. But isn’t that how it reads? ‘Here’s a list of the people who really piss me off.”
“You’re right.”
“I am, aren’t I?” He pushed his stool back. “The son of a bitch doesn’t sound like a homicidal maniac. He just sounds like a nut with a hair up his ass.”
18
The next couple of days were a three-ring circus for the media. Marty McGraw broke the story of the new letter from Will, with “WILL’S BAAAAACK!” on his newspaper’s front page. Reporters hurried around town interviewing his three prospective victims, each of whom seemed to take the distinction more as an insult than a threat.
Peter Tully chose to see Will not as a personal foe but as an enemy of organized labor as a whole. He issued a statement linking the anonymous letter writer with the repressive anti-union forces as exemplified by the mayor and the governor. There was a wonderful cadence of old-fashioned lefty rhetoric to his words. You could almost hear the Almanac Singers in the background, harmonizing on “Union Maid” and “Miner’s Lifeguard,” songs to fan the flames of discontent.
Judge Marvin Rome managed to view Will’s attack as an assault on civil liberties and the rights of the accused. The one time I saw him on the news, he was linking Will with prosecutors and police officers who were willing to call an end run around the Bill of Rights in order to railroad a defendant — “invariably poor, and all too often black” — into a prison cell. Will’s threat, he assured the public, would no more lead him to compromise his principles than had the vilification he’d received over the years from DAs and cops and their lackeys in the press. He would go on dispensing true justice and tempering it with mercy.
Regis Kilbourne turned the whole thing into a free-speech issue, lamenting a world in which a critic might feel constrained in any way from the free expression of his views. He went on to say the worst constraints came not from government censorship or his newspaper’s editorial policy, but from “those very aspects of oneself one tends to regard as emblematic of one’s better nature.” Friendship, compassion, and a sense of fair play seemed to be the worst offenders, tempting one to give a kinder, gentler review than the material might otherwise deserve. “If I have dared to inflict pain, to destroy a cherished relationship, to crush a perhaps promising career, all for the sake of a higher truth, can simple physical fear possibly sway me from my course? Indeed, it cannot and it will not.”
They were all going to carry on bravely, but that didn’t mean they were ready to make Will’s work easier for him. Peter Tully declined police protection but went about guarded by a thuggish phalanx of husky well-armed union members. Judge Rome accepted the NYPD’s offer and supplemented their ranks with some additional cops he hired as moonlighters. (This struck some people as curious, and a Post reporter quoted an unnamed source: “If Will really wants to kill Harold Rome, odds are he’s a cop himself.”) Regis Kilbourne also took the police protection, and, at each of the openings and previews he attended, his companion was not one of the dewy-eyed and pouting young women he favored, but a burly plainclothes cop with a five o’clock shadow and an expression of bored bemusement.
Will’s letter, targeting three prominent New Yorkers at once, would have been enough all by itself to keep the story hot for a week or more. Long before it had a chance to die down, McGraw broke the news that Adrian Whitfield, already famous as Will’s most recent victim, had now been definitely determined by police investigators to have been Will himself. (One of the TV news shows hit the air with a news flash hours before the Daily News was on the street with it, but Marty was the first to have all the details.)
While nobody knew quite what to make of it, everybody remained determined to make the most of it. I’d hoped the cops would keep me out of it, and they may have done what they could, but there was just too much media attention for anyone to slip by unnoticed. After the first phone call we learned to let the answering machine screen everything. I took to leaving my building via the service entrance, which kept to a minimum the number of reporters who caught up with me. I had to enter through the lobby, however, and that was when they were apt to corner me, sometimes with microphones and cameras, sometimes with notebooks. I was poor fodder for either medium, though, shouldering wordlessly past them, giving them nothing, not even a smile or a frown.
I saw myself on TV one evening. I was visible for less time than it took an off-camera voice to identify me as the Manhattan-based private detective, formerly employed by Adrian Whitfield, whose investigation into his client’s death had led to Whitfield’s unmasking. “It’s great,” Elaine said. “You could very easily look angry or impatient or guilty or embarrassed, the way people do when they won’t talk to the press. But instead you manage to look sort of harried and oblivious, like a man trying to get off a crowded subway car before they close the doors.”
I’ve been in the limelight before over the years, though it’s never shined that brightly on me, nor have I basked in it for very long. I’ve never cared for it and I didn’t like it any better this time around. Fortunately it didn’t seem to affect me much. A few people at AA meetings made veiled reference to my momentary fame. “I’ve been reading about you in the papers,” they might say, or, “Saw you on TV the other night.” I would deflect the remark with a smile and a shrug, and nobody pursued the subject. The greater portion of my AA acquaintances couldn’t make a connection between the PI named Scudder who’d unmasked Will and that guy Matt who usually sat in the back row. They might know my story, but relatively few of them knew my last name. AA is like that.