I didn’t stay that hot for that long, perhaps because I managed to avoid adding any fuel to the fire myself. The press didn’t need me to build the case against Adrian Whitfield, which got a little stronger and solider day by day. If there’d been room for doubt, the police kept finding bits of hard evidence to fill it in. Airline and hotel employees had ID’d his photo, and NYNEX records had turned up some calls that didn’t admit to a more innocent explanation, including two to a residential hotel on upper Broadway. There was no way to guess what hotel guest he’d talked to, but Richie Vollmer had been living there, registered under an alias, and both calls were logged the day before Richie’s death.
The clearer it became that Adrian was the original Will, the murkier the waters grew around Will #2. A whole string of deaths had given the first Will a grim credibility. A threat, after all, has a certain undeniable authority when it’s uttered by a man with blood on his hands.
But when the threat comes from a copycat, and when everybody damn well knows he’s a copycat, how much weight do you attach to it? That was a question that was getting asked a lot, on TV and in the papers, and I can only assume the police were asking it themselves. As far as anyone could tell, the man (or woman, for all anyone knew) who’d written out a death sentence for the unlikely partnership of Tully, Rome & Kilbourne had never killed anything but time. That being the case, how much of a danger was he? And what did you do about it?
You had to do something. They still empty schools and office buildings when some joker phones in a bomb threat, even when they know it’s almost certainly a hoax. The fire engines roll when the alarm goes off, the fact notwithstanding that most calls turn out to be false alarms. (The NYFD started taking down most of their red streetcorner call boxes when statistics showed that virtually all alarms called in from the street were the work of pranksters. But they had to physically dismantle the boxes. They couldn’t leave them standing and ignore the alarms.)
Meanwhile, everybody waited to see what would happen next. The three men named in Will’s letter probably waited with a little more urgency than the rest of the public, but even they probably found themselves paying a little less attention as the days passed and nothing untoward took place.
Like Benny the Suitcase, bored to tears with the job of starting Tony Furillo’s car every morning. Complaining that nothing ever happened.
One day I caught a noon meeting at the Citicorp building and spent an hour or two in the stores, trying to get an early start on my Christmas shopping. I didn’t find a thing to buy, and I just wound up feeling overwhelmed by the season.
It happens every year. Even before the Salvation Army Santas can get out there and start competing with the homeless for handouts, I find myself haunted by all the ghosts of Christmas past.
I’ve largely come to terms with the failure of my first marriage, with my shortcomings as a husband and a father. “Clearing up the wreckage of the past” is what they call that ritual in AA, and it’s a process you neglect at your peril.
I’d done all that, making amends, forgiving others and forgiving myself, systematically laying the ghosts of my own history. I didn’t rush into it the way some people do, but I kept working at it over time. There was a series of long talks with my sponsor, a lot of soul-searching, plenty of thought and a certain amount of action. And I would have to say it worked. Here was something that had haunted me for years, and now it doesn’t.
Except when it does, and that is most apt to happen around the time November starts to bleed into December. The days get shorter and shorter, the sun gives less and less light, and I start to remember every present I didn’t get around to buying, every argument I ever had, every nasty remark I ever made, and every night I found a reason to stay in the city instead of hauling my sad ass home to Syosset.
So when I’d walked home from my failed shopping spree I went not to the Parc Vendôme but to the hotel across the street. I told myself I couldn’t face a media gauntlet in the lobby, but in fact I had no reason to expect to encounter one. The reporters had understandably lost interest in the fellow who walked through them as if he was trying to get off the subway.
I said hello to Jacob behind the desk and exchanged nods with a fellow who spends most of his waking hours in the Northwestern’s faded lobby. The poor bastard moved into the hotel years before I did, and sooner or later he’ll die there. I don’t suppose he stands much chance of marrying a beautiful woman and moving across the street.
I went up to my room. I put the TV on, took a quick tour of the channels, and switched it off again. I pulled a chair over to the window and sat there, looking out at everything and nothing.
After a while I picked up the phone, made a call. Jim Faber answered the phone himself, saying “Faber Printing” in the gruff voice in which I have come to find considerable reassurance over the years. It was good to hear his voice now, and I said as much.
“Matter of fact,” I said, “just dialing your number made me feel better.”
“Well, hell,” he said. “I can remember times I’d be getting to the bar for the first one of the day, and really needing it. You know, feeling like I was going to jump right out of my skin?”
“I remember the feeling.”
“And once the drink was poured I could relax. I hadn’t had it yet, it wasn’t in my bloodstream spreading peace and love to every cell in my body, but just knowing it was there had the same effect. But what can be so bad that you’re actually driven to call your sponsor?”
“Oh, the joy of the season.”
“Uh-huh. Everybody’s favorite time of year. I don’t suppose you’ve been to a meeting within recent memory.”
“I left one about two hours ago.”
“That a fact. What’s keeping you busy these days, besides guilt and self-pity? You hot on the trail of Will’s replacement?”
“He’s got half the cops in town after him,” I said, “and all the reporters. He doesn’t need me.”
“Seriously? You’re not investigating the case?”
“Of course not. I’d just get in everybody’s way.”
“So what is it you’re doing, if you’re not doing that?”
“Nothing, really.”
“Well, there’s your answer,” he said. “Get off your ass and do something.”
He rang off. I hung up the phone and looked out the window. The city was still out there. I went out to take another crack at it.
19
I couldn’t do much in what was left of that afternoon. All I really managed was to figure out which people to see and what questions to ask them.
That would have to wait until morning. Meanwhile Elaine and I caught the new Woody Allen movie and listened to a piano trio at Iridium. Walking home, I told her the season was getting to me.
“Well, I’m not an alcoholic,” she said, “and I’m not even a Christian, and it gets to me. It gets to everybody. Why should you be different?”
“What drew me to you in the first place,” I said, “was your wonderfully incisive mind.”
“Rats. All these years I thought it was my ass.”
“Your ass,” I said.
“You can’t have forgotten it.”
“When we get home,” I said, “I’ll refresh my memory.”
In the morning I put on a suit and tie and went downtown to the Chase branch on Abingdon Square where Byron Leopold had done his banking. The bank officer I sat down with was a bright young woman named Nancy Chang. Early on she said, “I can’t help it, I have to ask. Does this have anything to do with the man who’s writing those letters?” I assured her it didn’t. “Because I recognized your name right away from the newspaper stories. You’re the man who broke the case.”