Around noon, shortly after we left Albany, I made a phone call. You could do that, they had a phone you could use, just running your credit card through a slot. I called the Sixth Precinct and managed to get Harris Conley. I told him I was on my way back from Cleveland with a suspect in the killing of Byron Leopold. I didn’t even have to remind him who Byron Leopold was, but then it’s a name that sticks in your mind.
He said, “What did you do, arrest him? I’m not sure of the legal status of that.”
“He’s with me voluntarily,” I said. “I’ve got a full confession on tape. I’m not sure of the legal status of that, either, but I’ve got it, along with the gun he used.”
“That’s pretty amazing,” he said. He offered to have the train met by a contingent of cops, but I didn’t think that was necessary. Havemeyer was coming in voluntarily, and I thought he’d be more comfortable surrendering at the precinct. Besides, I’d promised to keep him out of handcuffs as long as possible.
I wanted to second-guess myself when we got to Grand Central. There was a light rain falling and it had the usual effect of making the taxis disappear. But before too long one pulled up to discharge a passenger and we grabbed it and headed downtown.
I didn’t have to stick around too long at the Sixth. I turned over the gun (which, unwrapped, turned out to be a .38 revolver, with live rounds in three of its six chambers) to Conley, along with the tape of Havemeyer’s confession. I answered a battery of questions, then dictated a statement.
“I’m glad I was around when you called,” Conley told me, “and lucky I even remembered what you were talking about. I don’t suppose I have to tell you we weren’t exactly pushing this one.”
“That’s no surprise.”
“Triage,” he said. “You put in your time on the ones you stand a chance of breaking. And the ones where there’s a lot of heat from up top.”
“That’s how it’s always been.”
“And always will be, would be my guess. Point is, this wasn’t a front-burner case, not after the first seventy-two hours. And the whole city’s so nuts today, especially the department, it’s a wonder I remember my own name, let alone yours and Byron Leopold’s.”
“Why is the city so nuts?”
“You don’t know? Where the hell did you spend the past twelve hours?”
“On a train.”
“Oh, right. But even so, didn’t you see a newspaper? Listen to the radio? You came through Grand Central, you must have walked past a newsstand.”
“I had luggage to carry and a confessed murderer to escort,” I reminded him. “I didn’t have time to care what was happening in Bosnia.”
“Forget Bosnia. Bosnia didn’t make the headlines today. It was all Will this morning.”
“Will?”
He nodded. “Either it’s Number One back from the dead or Number Two’s more dangerous than anybody thought. You know the theater critic?”
“Regis Kilbourne.”
“That’s the one,” he said. “Will got him last night.”
24
You could almost say he’d been asking for it.
I’d somehow missed the column he wrote. It had appeared toward the end of the previous week, not in the Arts section where his reviews always ran, but on the Times’s oped page. I’ve since had a look at that issue of the paper, and it seems to me I read Safire’s column that day, an inside-the-mind-of piece on a pair of presidential hopefuls. So I very likely took a look at what Regis Kilbourne had to say, and probably stopped reading before I got to the payoff.
That would have been natural enough, because his brief essay started off as a spirited defense of freedom of the press. He’d said the same things before, in response to having been given a spot on Will’s list, going on about a critic’s profound responsibilities to his conscience and his public. I might very well have decided I didn’t have to listen to all that again.
He’d used up the greater portion of his 850 words before he got to the point. The rest of his column was given over to a review of a dramatic production, but this particular show was staged neither on nor off Broadway but all over town. He reviewed Will, and he gave him a bad notice.
“It is customary but by no means imperative,” he wrote, “to revisit a long-running show after a substantive change in the cast. When the original production was essentially a star vehicle, such revisits are almost always disappointing. And this is certainly true in the case of what, were it mounted as a Broadway musical, some producer would surely entitle Will! complete down to the nowobligatory exclamation point.
“In its first incarnation, Will! was unquestionably good theater. With the late Adrian Whitfield quietly elegant in the title role, the production had a powerful grip on its audience of eight million New Yorkers. But what succeeded initially as brilliant tragedy (albeit not unleavened by its comic moments) has come back to us as farce, and a farce with all the zest and sparkle of a fallen soufflé.
“With Whitfield’s death and unmasking, his understudy has emerged from the wings — and has fallen flat on his face. Will Number Two, as we seem to be calling him, is a man of bombast and empty rage. We take this pale copy seriously only because we remember the original.
“No more. ‘You’re only a pack of cards,’ Alice said, scattering her adversaries to the four corners of Wonderland. I say the same to this craven who drapes himself in the fallen Whitfield’s garb. No longer will I go about guarded and live as if under siege. No longer will one seat of my two on the aisle be taken up by a burly chap who’d much rather be home watching ‘NYPD Blue.’ I’m taking my life back, and I can only recommend the same course of action to the current Will. Close the show, strike the set — and get a life.”
Kilbourne had made his decision on his own, but he’d let the cops know about it before his oped piece informed the rest of the world. While they’d advised against it, nobody tried very hard to talk him out of it. They’d reached much the same conclusion he had. Copycat killers can be as dangerous as the original, but it was beginning to look as though Will wasn’t a copycat killer after all. He was a copycat letter writer. He would still be pursued, and eventually caught, but there was a lot less urgency attached to the matter.
So Tuesday night, while I was playing hearts with a college student and a confessed murderer in the kitchen of a ranch house in Lakewood, Ohio, Regis Kilbourne was watching a preview performance of the new P.J. Barry play, Poor Little Rhode Island. His companion was a young woman named Melba Rogin, who looked like a model but was in fact a fashion photographer. After the performance the two had drinks and a light supper at Joe Alien’s, then took a taxi to the brownstone in Chelsea where he had a floor-through apartment on the parlor floor.
At 1:15 or thereabouts he suggested she stay over, but she had an early shoot and wanted to get home. (One of the tabloids had her speculating on what would have happened if she’d stayed the night. Would Kilbourne still be alive? Or would she have died along with him?) He walked to Seventh Avenue with her and put her in a cab headed downtown — her loft was on Crosby Street — and the last she saw of him he was on his way home.
He evidently went straight back to his apartment, and sometime within the next hour or two he had a visitor. It appeared that either Will had managed to get hold of a key or Kilbourne let him in, as there were no signs of forced entry. Nor did Kilbourne seem to have resisted his killer. He’d been struck on the head with some heavy object, the blow delivered with enough force to have very likely rendered him unconscious. He’d either fallen to the floor or been laid out there, facedown. Then the killer stabbed him in the back with a Sabatier carbon-steel kitchen knife, which had been subsequently removed from the corpse, washed in the sink, and placed in the wire basket to dry.