“How did I... But I didn’t go to the airport. I didn’t fly, I never fly.”
“You told me that,” I said. “I’d forgotten.”
“I took the train,” he said. “There’s no security check, no metal detectors to pass through. I guess they’re not afraid of hijackers.”
“Not since Jesse James.”
“I went to New York,” he said, “and I found the building where he lived, and it turned out there was a bed-and-breakfast just a block and a half away. I didn’t know how long I’d be there but I didn’t think it could possibly take me more than a week. Assuming I would be able to do it.”
As it turned out, he could have done it the morning after his first night in the bed-and-breakfast. He’d gone to the little park so that he could watch the entrance to Leopold’s building, and the minute he saw the man emerge on crutches and carrying a newspaper, he somehow knew it was the man he sought. AIDS showed in the man’s face, and it was evident that the disease was in its later stages.
But he hadn’t brought the gun with him. It was in his room, wrapped in a dish towel and locked in his suitcase.
He brought it the following morning, and Byron Leopold was already on his bench in the park when he got there. It had occurred to him that there might be more than one AIDS victim living at that address, given that the neighborhood seemed to have a high concentration of homosexuals. While a quick death would undoubtedly constitute a blessed deliverance for this man, whoever he might be, it seemed prudent to make sure of his identity. This was, to be sure, murder for gain, however he chose to rationalize it, and it would profit him not at all to kill the wrong person.
“So I went up to him,” he said, “and I called him by name, and he nodded, and I said his name again, and he said yes, that he was Byron Leopold, or whatever he said, I don’t remember exactly. And I still wasn’t sure I would do it, you see, because I hadn’t committed myself. I could just walk away having made the identification, and then I could do it some other time. Or I could go back home and forget about it.
“‘Mr. Leopold?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Byron Leopold?’ ‘Yes, what is it?’ Something like that. And then I had the gun out and I was shooting him.”
He was vague on the details after that point. He started running, expecting pursuit, expecting capture. But no one came after him and no one caught him. By early evening he was back on the train, bound for Cleveland.
“I thought they would come for me,” he said.
“But no one did.”
“No. There were people in the park. Witnesses. I thought they’d furnish a description and one of those composite drawings would be in all the newspapers. I thought someone would make a connection between the insurance policy and myself. But there was nothing in the papers, nothing at all as far as I could see. And I kept waiting for someone to come to the door, but no one did.”
“It sounds as though you would have welcomed it.”
He nodded slowly. “I’ve thought about it all the time,” he said, “and I still can’t explain it, not to myself and certainly not to anybody else. I had the illusion that I could go to New York and kill this man, and then I could come back here, and the only change in my life would be that I would have more money.”
“But that’s not the way it was.”
“The instant I pulled the trigger,” he said, “the illusion vanished like a portrait in smoke blown away by a gust of wind. You couldn’t even see where it had been. And it was done, the man was dead, there was no reversing it.”
“There never is.”
“No, there never is, not one bit of the past. It’s all etched in stone. You can’t erase a word, not a syllable.” He sighed heavily. “I thought... well, never mind what I thought.”
“Tell me.”
“I thought it didn’t matter,” he said. “I thought he was going to die anyway. And he was!”
“Yes.”
“And so are we all, every last one of us. We’re all mortal. Does that mean it’s no crime to kill us?”
No crime for God, I thought. He does it all the time.
“I told myself I was doing him a favor,” he went on bitterly. “That I was giving him an easy out. What made me think that was what he wanted? If he’d been ready to die he could have taken pills, he could have put a plastic bag over his head. There are enough ways. For God’s sake, he lived on a high floor, he could have gone out the window. If that’s what he wanted.” He frowned. “You can tell he wasn’t eager to die. There was only one reason for him to sell that policy. It was to get money to live on. He wanted his life to be as comfortable as possible for as long as it lasted. So I provided the money,” he said, “and then I took away the life.”
He’d removed his glasses in the course of that speech, and now he put them on again and peered through them at me. “Well?” he said. “Now what happens?”
Always the beautiful question.
“You have some choices,” I said. “There’s a Cleveland police officer, a friend of a friend, who’s familiar with the situation. We can go to the stationhouse where you’ll be placed under arrest and officially informed of your rights.”
“The Miranda warning,” he said.
“Yes, that’s what they call it. Then of course you can have your attorney present, and he’ll explain your options. He’d probably advise you to waive extradition, in which case you’ll be escorted back to New York for arraignment.”
“I see.”
“Or you can accompany me voluntarily,” I said.
“To New York.”
“That’s right. The advantage in that, as far as you’re concerned, is chiefly that it cuts out a certain amount of delays and red tape. And there’s another personal consideration.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, I won’t use handcuffs,” I said. “If you’re officially in custody you’ll have to be cuffed throughout, and that can be both embarrassing and uncomfortable on the plane. I don’t have any official standing so I’m not bound by rules of that sort. All we’ll have to do is get two seats together.”
“On a plane,” he said.
“Oh, that’s right. You don’t fly.”
“I suppose it strikes you as terribly silly. Especially now.”
“If it’s a phobic condition the rules of logic don’t apply. Mr. Havemeyer, I don’t want to talk you into anything, but I’ll tell you this. If you’re officially taken into custody and escorted to New York, they’ll make you get on a plane.”
“But if I were to go with you—”
“How long does it take on the train?”
“Under twelve hours.”
“No kidding.”
“The Lake Shore Limited,” he said. “It leaves Cleveland at three in the morning and arrives at ten minutes of two in the afternoon.”
“And that’s how you went to New York?”
“It’s not that bad,” he said. “The seats recline. You can sleep. And there’s a dining car.”
You can fly it in a little over an hour, but even if I left him in a holding cell in Cleveland, I wouldn’t be able to catch a flight back until sometime the next morning.
“If you want,” I said, “I’ll take the train with you.”
He nodded. “I suppose that would be best,” he said.
23
It was a long night.
I left Havemeyer alone long enough to duck across the street to the car and bring Jason Griffin up to speed. He had plans for the evening but insisted it was no problem to cancel them, and that he’d be glad to take me and my prisoner to the train station. I told him he might as well join us inside the house, and he agreed that it would be more convenient than sitting in the car with the wide-mouthed jar his uncle had recommended.