“How?”
“Same pattern, same stab wounds… and there are others.”
“How many others?”
The woman in the booth behind them turned to see if the detective was going to be all right.
“Do you want some water?” asked Tim.
He dismissed him with an abrupt shake of his head. “And he harassed the lawyer.”
“Harassed?”
“Provoked… as he did you…”
“How?”
“On the street… knew the details. It’s how we got on to him.” Now the detective was having trouble breathing. When he wasn’t coughing, he was wheezing to take in air.
“Do you have him in custody? I could take a look at him, maybe then—”
“Can’t locate him… he might have fled…” The detective stopped talking and abandoned himself entirely to coughing. He was barely able to say he needed some air before standing and walking out of the diner, trailed by his oxygen tank.
Tim waited for the waitress to bring around the check. He paid up front and then joined the detective outside. He found him smoking a cigarette. His coughing was all cleared up. Tim handed back the photograph and the sketch.
“I can’t tell you one way or the other,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
The detective looked down the avenue and exhaled before returning a baleful gaze. “Right now he’s just a person of interest in a single murder. But if we can tie him to Evelyn Hobbs, we can maybe tie him to the others. There are six, maybe as many as eight. And people, family members, who need to know what happened.”
“You were adamant,” he said. “Remember? Only one suspect.”
“I know.”
“He hanged himself in prison.”
“I know,” said the detective. “I know.”
The detective thought he knew something but he knew nothing. What did it matter, these other people? R.H. would never know the details. He would never know the name of the man who might be responsible. That was the travesty. This death-sealed ignorance, and the indifference to that ignorance by any power higher than man.
The detective snuffed his cigarette out under his shoe. “You’re the only one we’ve got,” he said. “The one guy in the world if we’re going to get anywhere on this.”
“Don’t pin that on me,” he said. “You’re the one who didn’t believe my client.”
“And I feel awful about that.”
“Awful enough to kill yourself?”
The detective was taken aback. “To kill myself?” He had fired up a new cigarette and now blew out a dismissive stream. “No,” he said. “Not to kill myself.”
“Then you should feel indifferent,” said Tim.
His departures from the room were peremptory. A sudden movement, a glimpse of him passing through the doorway, and he was gone. “Going now,” he might say. He might be in the middle of recounting for her things he’d seen. “Back soon.”
If they were lucky, he had time to turn his head so that she saw he was addressing her and not some ghost standing before him.
Some days he left, and as he walked, he brooded that his final words to her one day might be, “Going now.”
He did not want his final good-bye to be a hasty good-bye.
He returned one morning smelling of fresh snow and brick mortar, car exhaust and woodsmoke. Was that all in her head? She wanted him to resume telling her what he’d seen. He brought the world inside for her. He stood over the bed.
“I want to say good-bye” he said.
“But you just got here.”
“I mean as if it were for the last time.”
“Why do you want to do that?”
He explained. They had the opportunity, before it was too late, to preempt the regret that nothing or too little had been said between them. She agreed that that might be important. He assumed a serious expression. He did not have anything prepared. He took her hand, kissed it, and said good-bye. She thought there would be more to it, but nothing more came. She started to laugh.
“Is that it?”
“I guess so.”
“Well,” she said. “Good-bye, then!”
They spent the next several hours in each other’s company, long after they’d said good-bye. Then, against everyone’s sunniest assessments, in defiance of the grimmest percentages, and to her own astonishment, she began to recover.
It was wonderfully swift. He watched as her weight started to hold. Every time he returned to her room, she seemed to have gained back some measure of strength. She was up. She was getting off the bed to go to the bathroom. She was walking the hallways on her own. The final phase of the clinical trial came to an end and she was released.
She went home to that apartment where they had lived happily during the time between his second recurrence and his third, final, permanent one. She hadn’t sold it, as he had assumed, but had kept it, hoping someday that he would return to her and that they would resume their life together there. It was the same old place with the same furnishings, the lived-in chairs and pretty Persian rugs, the books lined up on the built-in shelves, the fireplace. He stood in the doorway a nostalgic stranger.
He had been living in parks and rented rooms, his home base the cancer center on the Upper East Side. Now it shifted to the parlor-floor apartment in the West Village. He left and returned frequently, but discovered this difference. Upon his arrival, he no longer found her hanging over an uncharted abyss, but rinsing a glass or making herself a grilled-cheese sandwich, or doing something downright vigorous, like scrubbing the bathtub. It occurred naturally then, as the days passed and he came to the ends of walks and faced the myriad challenges of reversing course — the tedious backtracking, the physical exhaustion — that the urgency to return, the motivation to get back to her, began to wane.
A livery wrangler orchestrated the waiting lawyers through the drizzle into towncars on Eighth Avenue, holding an umbrella over their heads, opening and closing the back doors. The sky was wrecked and darkening.
He stood outside the old bastion under the arcade, staring at the revolving doors. Once upon a time, he could have taught a master class in entering with authority. Now he was building up to something, summoning courage. There was some dismay. There was also indifference. He struggled to recall all the significance, investment, meaning, now petrified.
He entered, walked across the lobby, and stepped on the escalator. Midway up he glided toward a man he recognized. It was Peter, his old associate. He stared at Peter, unafraid to size up or be sized up. Peter’s hair had thinned and he had grown enormously fat. He was cultivating a massive heart attack under an expensive wool coat. The flamboyant signature of a red bow tie sat framed between the coat’s lapels. Just as they passed, Peter finally graced him with a glance. He might have quickly turned away again if Tim hadn’t been staring as hard as he was. He flipped Peter the bird. Peter continued to descend, now following the hostile stranger with offended eyes.
Frank Novovian had also gone fat. His head no longer shaved to the skin, his dirty gray hair was clumped and patchy, like the quills of a feather permanently skewed by a rough hand. His retiring slouch behind the security post said there was no going back. “Can I help you?” he asked.
“My name is Tim Farnsworth,” he said. “I wonder if you remember me.”
Frank held him suspended in a surprised and penetrating gaze. He lifted an inch off the chair, righting his jellied form, which immediately settled back into place. All at once his expression broke into clarity.
“I sure do,” he said. “Like it was yesterday.”
He waited around for Frank’s shift to end and then they walked to a bar on Ninth Avenue. Frank continued to express surprise at his reappearance after so many years. He might have thought Tim was dead. Most likely he hadn’t thought of him at all. Tim didn’t ask.