When I arrived at the precinct the following morning, Bernie was already there. I couldn’t tell if he’d stayed there all night. He told me he had just gotten off the phone with Dan Rasdale, O’Flaherty’s parole officer.
“He said he’s been missing a couple of his boys ’cause of their work hours, and he was hoping to sneak up on them this Sunday.”
“I just hope he’s better than Hozec’s P.O.,” I said. “Did he tell you anything about O’Flaherty?”
Bernie read what he had wrote down: “Nessun O’Flaherty, 57 years old. Twenty-two years ago, when he was thirty-five, O’Flaherty graduated from Queens Law. But before he could take the bar exam, his wife accused him of statutory rape. He’d apparently been screwing his underage stepdaughter. He was a drunk, and during the arrest he popped a police officer, which earned him a couple of years inside. He passed the bar in jail.”
“Christ!” I said, “with a first-time statutory rape he probably would’ve got off with probation.”
“It gets worse. In prison he gets into a fight with another inmate and kills the guy. He gets another ten years added to his sentence, and after a series of fights and other charges, he doesn’t get out until a year and a half ago. He’s got fifteen months left on his parole.”
“Amazing he’s managed to stay clean.”
Bernie went on: “O’Flaherty stopped showing up at his AA meetings about a year back. Roughly nine months ago, he got picked up for jostling in Times Square.” This meant he was bumping into passersby then picking their pocket while they were distracted. “The plaintiff vanished before they could have him swear out a complaint. Then, about six months ago, he got picked up by the pussy posse during a big hooker sting in the area. He was charged with a 230-02, but that’s only a class B misdemeanor, not enough to put him back in jail. He also got picked up for slapping a female tourist. Again the parole officer tried to put him back in, but the fucking tourist refused to fill out a complaint.”
“Where is he now?”
“An SRO on Fortieth and Eighth, across from Port Authority.”
We double-parked in front of O’Flaherty’s dump, which turned out to be across the street from where Bernie had clobbered Youngblood, on Eighth Avenue between Fortieth and Forty-first. Every other building on its side of the block had been pulled down as part of New York’s latest nip and tuck. Engraved in the filthy stone over the doorway I could just make out the building’s name, The Centurion, one of those many urban details no one notices any longer. Inside we saw it was clearly a place where neglected seniors slowly ran out their clocks.
Bernie recognized the desk clerk, a retired cop named Hal. He asked him if he knew O’Flaherty.
“Sure, he’s a regular hero around these parts.” The clerk explained that the ex-con had been instrumental in getting a stay of execution for the old hotel. He had managed to unify the remaining tenants in the dilapidated building and lobby local politicians, and somehow convinced the court to grant a six-month injunction against knocking down this final, teetering domino at the end of the dying block.
“Have you ever seen O’Flaherty with any prosses, or smacking anyone around?” Bernie asked.
“Nessun? No, he’s harmless. Why, what did he do?”
“We got some dead girls in the area. Is he upstairs?”
“I doubt it. Every morning, he’s out early. He goes to the OTB on Forty-fourth and Seventh. He loves the ponies. Spends the day out.”
“At the OTB?”
“He used to hang out at the Cupcake Cafe over on Ninth, but from what I heard, he would complain that the holes were too big in their donuts, so they eighty-sixed him. Try the Starbucks at Thirty-eighth and Eighth.” He gave us a brief description of O’Flaherty
As we walked over there, Bernie said he wanted to try a little test. Once we’d located our suspect, I was to watch O’Flaherty closely as Bernie walked past him. It was my job to determine whether O’Flaherty recognized Bernie. If he did, he was probably the one who’d mugged Bernie, since Bernie had never previously met him.
Three-quarters homeless shelter, one-quarter corporate refueling depot, the Starbucks was an amusing blender of social classes. Sleeping junkies, turned-out shut-ins, and misguided tourists were interspersed among the usual laptop jockeys, who I liked to believe were struggling writers. But it was the steady flow of busy yuppies who popped in, bought their sugary hot fuel, and dashed back out, that bankrolled the franchise. In the back, settled in a cozy armchair which he probably shared with endless microscopic parasites, was our lapsed sex offender. He was a balding, jaundiced man with dark, deeply inset eyes. A gray trench coat insulated him in the poorly heated establishment, and an old fedora with clipped-on waterproofing rested on the coffee table. When we got closer I could see his ruddy, pockmarked cheeks. Matching the stereotype, every capillary in his nose had been ruptured by booze. If I hadn’t known he was in his late fifties, I’d have guessed he was at least ten years older. To his credit, the ex-con was deeply engrossed in an old leatherback.
Outside, Bernie had taken off his coat, scarf, and jacket, rolled them into a ball, and handed them to me. With a discarded section of the New York Times folded under his arm, he now lumbered by the old ne’er-do-weller and plunked himself down in a chair across from him. I watched diligently as O’Flaherty glanced up at Bernie. He seemed to genuinely take note of him, but there was no display of guilt, or any indication of twitchiness.
“Excuse me,” I finally approached. Bernie took back his coat.
“If it’s locked, it’s occupied,” O’Flaherty muttered without looking up. He thought I was inquiring about the bathroom. Its door was right there, a foul odor emanating from behind it.
“Nessun?” Bernie asked.
“Officer.” He looked up with a pleasant smile. Either he had great instincts or he was Bernie’s mugger—and our killer. Then looking at me, he joked, “What’s this, Take Your Daughter to Work Day?”
“Actually it’s Take Your Convict to Jail Day,” Bernie countered. “Parole violation.”
O’Flaherty closed his book. It was a weather-beaten copy of Bullfinch’s Mythology. He gulped down the dregs of his small coffee, grabbed his hat, and labored to his feet. I could see him grimace as he shuffled along.
“What’s with the leg?” Bernie asked, perhaps wondering if he was being mocked.
“Hip replacement in my right leg two years ago, and the cartilage in my right knee is shot.” O’Flaherty explained. “An old prison injury that just gets worse and worse.” We let him walk the few blocks in silence before directing him to the Lumina.
“You’re not carrying anything?” Bernie asked before opening the car door. “Drugs or weapons?”
“No.”
“I better not hit a needle,” Bernie said as he patted him down, then cuffed him. I opened the back door and helped O’Flaherty inside, Bernie slid in next to him. For the first time with him, I got to drive.
“Christ it’s a freezer in here,” O’Flaherty said, as Bernie started going through his pockets. “What’s this—a shakedown?”
“Got any ID?”
“Library card, voter’s registration,” he replied as Bernie pulled out his wallet.
“You went to Sacred Heart?” Bernie asked, seeing something.
“Oh yeah, you too?”
“For two years.”
“You know Sister Mary Ellen?”
“Oh God, did she fill her habit.” Bernie replied. “You knew Father Bill?”
“Shit, don’t get me started. That poofter tried to finger my holy ghost every chance he got.”
“He almost caught me in the boy’s room once. I never ran so fast.”
“Oh, I miss the old days. Cardinal Spellman mighta sucked off an altar boy or two, but we had style and power back then.”
The two of them made the Roman Catholic Church sound like the golden days of the mafia.
I parked in the rear of the precinct on Thirty-sixth. Bernie tried to suppress his own limp as he led O’Flaherty upstairs to an interrogation room. Before our suspect could sit down, Bernie had him take off his coat and told him to roll up his sleeve. When O’Flaherty did so, I watched Bernie looking carefully at him. I thought he was looking for possible track marks, but when he made him undress to reveal his chest, back, and neck, I realized he was hoping to find a defensive wound, a possible scratch or bruise on his arms inflicted by poor Jane. None were apparent.
“So what are you doing for money these days?” Bernie asked.
“Disability,” he said. “This isn’t just about a parole violation, is it? What am I suspected of, exactly?”
“You tell us.”
“Oh wait! You’re her, aren’t you, officer?” he asked, suddenly turning to me.
“What are you talking about?”
“I saw the photos, read about those killings. Tall, sexy, and blonde, and here you are.”
“Do I look like one of the victims?”
“You look like all of them, which is why you’re the bait,” he replied. “But here’s my question: how do you know he didn’t kill all those girls just hoping the NYPD would eventually sacrifice you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s saying, he killed all the blonde hookers so that he’d eventually find a blonde cop posing as a hooker,” Bernie said, amused.
“Not me, and not quite,” Nessun replied, staring at me. “I’m saying those hookers were the bait; the killer was just waiting for the NYPD to toss you into the bear trap.”
“And now that you know I’m the bait, you wouldn’t come on to me?”
“That’s right,” he said with a smile.
“How about that guy you pickpocketed at the Starbucks a few months back,” I replied. “What was the matter—he didn’t have a credit card?”
“An innocent mistake. I thought it was my coat. That’s why the good man dropped the charges.”
“Did you think it was your wife when you got stung with the hooker?” Bernie asked.
“In enlightened countries prostitution is legal.”
“See a lot of hookers, do you?” I asked.
“The last one I saw was just some curly haired runaway, followed me home from the bus depot across the street.”
“And that’s when you choked her?” I asked, approaching him.
“Hey, I’ve had hundreds of bus depot runaways in my place and I never touched the one of them.”
“Tell us about the last one,” Bernie said.
“She laid back on my bed and I could see right up her skirt. Damned if that wasn’t the day her knickers were in the wash. So young, she hardly had any hair down there.” Narrowing his eyes right at me, he smiled and in a throaty tone, added, “Damned if she didn’t look just like you.”
I just meant to scare him. but accidentally I dropped my clunky Motorola police radio right on his bum knee.
“Fuck!” he screamed, clutching it painfully.
“It just slipped out of my hands,” I said to Bernie, who smiled, probably thinking I was finally toughening up.
“Accidents happen,” Bernie said philosophically.
As O’Flaherty clenched his knee, tears flowed down his cheek. I honestly felt bad for him, but I knew I couldn’t let on. When he struggled to stand up on his one good leg I pushed him back into his chair.
“Let’s start again. The last girl you were with?”
“I don’t remember. Honest to God . . . Christ!” He spoke between gasps, still squeezing out the pain. He claimed he had to get something from his coat pocket. Bernie checked the pocket and found some loose pills.
“Looky here,” he showed me. “Possession of narcotics, a class C felony. That’s a ticket back upstate.”
“They’re Advil, just over-the-counter painkillers.”
“We won’t know that for a couple days, until we get the lab reports back.”
“I don’t think I can walk,” O’Flaherty groaned.
Bernie gave him two pills. He swallowed them then looked fearfully at me.
“You want out, start talking.”
“I spent the last fifteen years in jail because one night I got into a fight with my bitchy teenage stepdaughter, and she gets back at me by telling my wife that I’m screwing her.”
“You went to jail ’cause you hit a cop.”
“Then you killed an inmate.”
“Fucker grabbed my Thanksgiving turkey right off my plate—the best meal of the year. But his neck looked just as juicy, so my fork went right into his jugular.”
“Sure, a piece of turkey for ten years of your life,” said Bernie, as if it seemed like a fair trade to him.
“Would you believe me if I told you I had ten grand in Microsoft stock in 1982? It would’ve been worth a couple million today, if I’d just left it there.”
“In Microsoft?”
“No one believes me, but an aunt left me the cash, and someone in law school gave me the tip, so I bought the stock. But I sold it the day after I got arrested to pay for a lawyer. The ambulance chaser turned out to be worthless. I shoulda defended myself.”
“We each create our own life,” I said, “and everything that comes with it.” The Renunciate had said that during his last class.
“Sick . . . alone . . . broke. I’m the youngest resident in a hotel of dying old losers.”
“And in six months you’re all going to be evicted anyway,” Bernie added blithely.
“My family owned a brownstone on Forty-fifth between Tenth and Eleventh, right across from Shamrock Stables. It was taken by the city in ’89 for nonpayment of taxes. All I got now is what you see.”
“You like tall blondes, don’t you?” Bernie asked.
“Please, I can barely walk, let alone whack off anymore.”
“Just give us someone who saw you on these three particular days,” Bernie said, flipping through his notepad. He read out the dates and times of the four murders, including Jane Hansen’s death two days ago.
Two days ago was still fresh in his head. He told us he was hanging in the lobby with Hal, the retired cop, and a half a dozen geriatrics.
“Call and confirm it!” he said eagerly. “We have a fixed routine on Fridays. We eat hot sandwiches and watch the replays of the races at Belmont and Aqueduct.”
When Bernie pressed him about the other murder dates, O’Flaherty said he wasn’t sure about anything beyond a week ago. But he was definitely watching the races with Hal and others on any given Friday. He never missed one.
Bernie put the old guy in lockup, then he called the retired cop. Hal said they didn’t meet every single Friday, but most weeks they did. As luck would have it, Mary Lynn MacArthur’s body was discovered on Friday, but that wasn’t enough to rule him out.
“Is there another clerk who might’ve seen O’Flaherty?”
“No, Rubin leaves the TV off. Keeps his own counsel.”
Bernie thanked him and hung up. Just to be on the safe side, Bernie said we should check O’Flaherty’s room.
“Do we have enough to get a warrant?”
“All we need is his parole officer. Bernie called Danny Rasdale and explained that we wanted to search his ex-con’s room. He had to reassure Rasdale: “No, no forensic people at this stage, we’ll go in on our own first and just look around. If we find anything suspicious, I’ll call them after . . . When’s your lunch break? . . . Okay, we’ll drop by your office and pick you up at noon, then.”
Bernie hung up. Apparently he’d been stood up by parole officers before, and learned the best way to get them to the suspect’s residence was to take them there himself.
Now Bernie took a sheet of paper and walked over to the holding cage where O’Flaherty was sitting.
“Make you a deal,” he said to the prisoner, “Let us search your room and we’ll cut you loose.”
“You like playing tiddlywinks, don’t you?” O’Flaherty smiled. “We both know that since I’m a predicate felon, you don’t need my permission. All you have to do is get my PO to join you.”
Bernie turned around and stormed into the hallway.
I followed him out there. “What’s the matter?”
“He’s on to us.”
“What do you mean?”
“He might be bullshitting, but if he knows we can toss his room, the odds of us catching something in there are pretty damn long.”
We had to try it, though. With O’Flaherty sitting in lockup, at noon Bernie and I headed over to the parole office on Fortieth, where we found ourselves standing in the packed waiting area with all the sad and misbegotten types waiting for Rasdale, who was running late, just as Bernie had predicted.
When he finally came out twenty minutes later, Rasdale turned out to be a walking beer belly. But he moved surprisingly quickly. In about five minutes we were in O’Flaherty’s squalid lobby just around the corner. Hal gave us a passkey and together we went up in an incredibly slow elevator to his room on the top floor. His private bathroom looked like it had never been cleaned, but his room was spotless. His clothes were all on hangers or folded in a cardboard box. His bookcase was stuffed full but neat. Even his bed was made.
The only unsavory thing about the room was a faint odor of horse shit. Rasdale explained that O’Flaherty liked to visit the stables over on Forty-fifth Street. Apparently he was friends with one of the buggy drivers.
There was little by way of display: a couple of library books (overdue, I checked) stacked next to his bed, some disability insurance documents taped to the back of his door, and over his bed he had stuck up a postcard. I moved closer to look at it and gasped. It was the vision I’d had in class during final relaxation a few days ago. The postcard showed a gleaming golden woman, standing on a pedestal, holding a bow and arrow.
“The place is too fucking clean for a sleazebucket like him,” Bernie was saying to the PO. “He was definitely expecting us.”
“O’Flaherty is really a sad case,” Rasdale said. “He’s sharp as a rusty razor. I mean, he’s one of my few cons who sounds uptown all the way, but he has this major fucking chip on his shoulder, and it’ll always keep him in the gutter.”
“What is it?”
“He believes he was cheated out of his true destiny.”
“He’s not dead yet,” I said. “Why can’t he reach his destiny now?”
“It’s a lot easier to be bitter than to try and succeed,” Bernie said.
“Actually, this isn’t even about his life really, it’s more about this area,” Rasdale said. “He obsesses about the developers destroying his old neighborhood.”
“When your best days are behind you, it’s difficult not to live in the past,” Bernie responded dolefully.
“I tried telling him that he should be a tour guide—he can point to any corner within a ten-block radius of here and tell you who lived where, and what stores and shops came and went over the past forty years.”
” Good for him,” Bernie said. “Almost no one has a clue about this city’s past. Hell, we might as well be an overpopulated Provo, Utah.”
“Do you think he’s capable of killing and decapitating four women?” I tried to cut to the chase.
“I got a dozen other guys who I’d suggest first, but you never know.”
“He did it,” Bernie said simply.
“Just because he keeps a clean room?” Rasdale asked.
“Our killer is a DNA wiper. Just like this guy.”
“He’s got a solid alibi for the evening of Jane Hansen’s murder,” I reminded Bernie.
“Yeah and that was the one fucking murder that was different from the others, wasn’t it?”
“It wasn’t that different,” I said, lifting the untaped bottom of the postcard, so I could read the title: Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Diana, [Greek Goddess of the Hunt].
“What the hell are you looking at?” Bernie asked, coming toward me. I didn’t want to talk about it because I knew he’d think I was crazy if I told him I’d seen the image in a vision.
“Just a postcard.”
He looked at it for a moment and said, “I met her.”
“You met a Greek goddess, did you?”
“Actually, that was a common fallacy.”
“What was?”
Bernie sighed. “Let me try this again. Ever heard of Evelyn Nesbit?”
“Nope.”
“She was this It girl about a hundred years ago, and a lot of people think she posed for that statue, because of the way the story’s told in that novel Ragtime. The statue used to be on top of the old Madison Square Garden, and Evelyn Nesbit was the lover of Stanford White, the architect who designed it. But she wasn’t the model for that”—he pointed to the postcard—“she was only a child when the statue was made.
“And you met her?”
“Yeah, once, in the early 1960s. I was a kid and she was an old lady.”
“And who exactly was she?” I asked.
“A model, and a chorus girl. You know what? Just rent the movie Ragtime.” He paused, then added, “Only remember, she didn’t actually pose for that statue.”
Rasdale cut in. “So what do you think?”
“I think this is our guy,” Bernie said flatly.
“What exactly is it that tells you it’s him?” I asked, intrigued by his rock-hard confidence.
“Intuition,” he replied. “Bert used to say that was the most valuable tool a detective had.”
“He’s right,” Rasdale added. “I can feel it in my gut when one of my boys has gone off the reservation.”
While they were chatting, I took a couple steps away, closed my eyes, and tried to push out all external thoughts. Nothing came to me. I took some shallow hyperbreaths and focused on the striking image of the hunter goddess. Then I realized all was oddly silent around me. When I opened my eyes, Bernie and Dan were just staring at me.
“So are you calling CSU or not?” Danny asked Bernie. “Because I got a roomful of ex-cons waiting for me back at the office.”
“No, they won’t find anything,” Bernie said.
I looked over the contents of O’Flaherty’s bookcase. It was mostly histories of New York City. There were also a handful of books on horse racing; the guy sure loved his ponies. An old tourist book of the city dating back to the ’50s had little yellow post-its leafing along the top. And there were three large old picture books showing Times Square over a century ago. There were a couple of general history books, flipping through them, I didn’t see any references to Catherine of Alexandria in their indexes.
We walked Rasdale back to the State Parole Office, where we thanked him for his help and watched him hustle up the steps.
“What the hell was going on back there?” Bernie asked me as he pulled out a cigarette.
“What?” I thought he was referring to the postcard of Diana again.
“You, with the closed eyes and deep breathing.”
“Oh, I thought I was getting a migraine,” I lied. If I told Bernie about the whole Kundalini thing, I know he’d transfer me straight back to NSU.
He struck a match, lit his cigarette, and immediately started coughing. I silently nodded.
“Hey, I’ve smoked for thirty-five years without so much as having to clear my throat,” he said. “This fucking cough is from inhaling two hundred stories of glass, plaster, and everything else that was in those goddamn towers.”
“At the time you were working on the excavation, you couldn’t tell the air was toxic?”
“I was wheezing at the time, but the goddamn EPA and every other government agency said it was all fine, just a little dust and smoke—fucking Christine Todd Whitman!”
By the time we got back to the precinct, O’Flaherty had been hauled off to Central Booking. It would take the night to get a court date for skipping out on his parole appointments. Unless he had any other outstanding warrants, he’d be released tomorrow.
At five o’clock, we all conferred on our progress. Of the seven names Alex and Annie were supposed to check out, they had cleared five—two suspects were in prison, two had solid alibis for most if not all of the murders, and the last one had turned up in Potter’s Field.
We had five more to go. Though Bernie couldn’t shake the feeling that O’Flaherty was the one, the rest of us were doubtful, and felt disappointed that we were running out of suspects. The confidence I’d gained from my Kundalini experience, that vision of Diana, was fading.
While I was on-line, I Googled Diana, Goddess of the Hunt, and was startled to find I had some things in common with her. Diana was said to have been a tall blonde—like me. Also, like me, she had a twin, the god Apollo. Okay, my brother Carl was hardly a god, but we were close to one another, like Diana and Apollo apparently were. Then it got even more personal: I read that Diana had remained a virgin, even if it was for different reasons than mine. She supposedly prayed to Zeus not be distracted by the confusion of sexual desire so she could stay focused on her sacred mission, which was the protection of childbirth. So she was the goddess of hunting, but she was also a sworn defender of women. Which was kind of my role in life, too. All that gave me something to think about.
After the humiliation of being stared at in O’Flaherty’s hotel room, I decided to skip the beginner’s class, which was mainly stretches, and try the master class later that night. The Renunciate hadn’t arrived when I got there. For the other members of the class, it seemed to be Off-White Pajama Day: two heavy, older men with long scraggly beards bookended two emaciated older women. They all wore turbans. They all had their hands folded, their eyelids closed, and seemed to be on some higher plane of consciousness. I feared that once they opened their eyes and saw I had sneaked in, they’d toss me the hell out for not being in uniform. After a moment though, hoping that maybe I might gain some guidance from these learned elders, I took a deep gulp of their air and spoke softly to the nearest lady, “How did you know when you first released your Kundalini?”
Their eyes all popped open and for a moment I thought they were going to laugh.
“There is nothing subtle about it,” she said. I lost myself completely, then I spent the night weeping in supreme ecstasy.”
“I breathed through waves of heat,” the other woman chimed in. “That’s how I knew it was happening.”
“That’s your chakras running full throttle,” replied the barely younger old man.
“My Sahasrara was spinning so fast,” the older woman added.
“As were my Anahata and Vishudda,” the older old man whispered. I had a feeling these terms might be Sanskrit for the gall bladder and the spleen.
“Have any of you ever seen anything unusual while this was happening?”
“I think I know what you’re getting at,” said the older woman. “It must be scary if you don’t know what you’re seeing. You’re seeing a person’s aura.”
“What’s that?”
“Usually a color radiating from them,” the other woman replied, and the first one nodded.
“Have any of you ever seen anything like an image of a statue?” I asked, tiring of the new age bullshit.
“A statue?” one repeated, while the others shook their heads. “That sounds more like a Christian thing. There are no statues here.”
At this point, the Renunciate entered, and we all closed our eyes and mouths. He took his place at the mat in the front of the class. Closing his eyes, he began his ancient chants, as though summoning up the spirits. The breathing and the poses all started out the same as in the other classes, but here he slowly led us to positions that were far more challenging. Unlike the easier classes, he gave no explanations or advice. He simply did the moves and his students silently followed. Aside from their strength and flexibility, I strangely admired their shameless ability to fart without apology. They seemed to unfold and contort their late middle-aged bodies in ways that only the purest of heart could venture. The Renunciate finally got to the inversions. I was proud that I could hold a handstand, but looking around I realized the other yogis were actually balanced on their turbans, their arms against their sides. During final relaxation, I lay flat; this time, instead of seeing anything, I closed my eyes and wondered if the vision I’d had of the statue of Diana earlier was the sign that some divine force was telling me, per that picture on his postcard, that Nessun was our killer.
On the short walk home, the cold air gripped my hot skin like the frosted hand of God. I decided to skip dinner and, after a hot shower, barely made it to bed.
“No! Please!”
I awoke with a start. From the rhythmic thumps against the common wall, I knew Maggie was getting seriously banged. When I first became friends with her, I was going to ask her to move her bed, but I came to see the occasional rapping as a reminder that I had to start my own sex life.
“Stop it, I’m begging you!”
I sat up and wondered if I should intervene. Grabbing a glass, I pressed it against the wall to try and determine if she was okay.
“Say it!”
I clearly heard the male command and recognized the voice from somewhere. I could barely hear her reply.
“She’ll never go for it.”
“Just say it, if you want me to stop,” he said in a calmer tone.
“All right! I’ll do it! Stop!”
After a few more minutes I heard Maggie moaning steadily until finally it sounded like she was climaxing. Then, when I heard the man groaning, I realized who he was.
About a half an hour later, when the clock said six, I heard her door open. I was able to confirm my suspicions by looking through the peephole. The gnarled face of Crispin Marachino flashed by as he left.
By Monday afternoon we had checked out the remaining five suspects on Bernie’s list. Two had gotten permission to move out of state. Two more were keeping their noses clean, according to their parole officers’ accounts, and had good alibis. Only one was a fugitive. According to his ex-wife he’d last been spotted in the state of Delaware.
At the end of the day, when we realized our suspect list was a bust, Annie said the good news was that the computer tech from One PP was finally on his way over. The Marilyn web site connection was now our best hope for moving forward. Only then did I remember that Miriam Williams had flown to Europe yesterday.
The tech support guy turned out to be Indian-American, but from his Westernized demeanor I knew he’d never practiced any form of yoga. Raj said he had done some work on the case already at Police Plaza. He had discovered that the horrific images of Jane had been sent from a computer in the Midtown Manhattan Library on Fifth Avenue at Fortieth Street, which had been open until 11 p.m. that night. He inspected Miriam’s’ laptop, which we had kept in Bernie’s office.
“What exactly is the deal with using the library computers?” Bernie asked.
“They allow you to use them for fifteen-minutes at a time, but you have to sign in first.”
“It’s probably the closest library for O’Flaherty,” I pointed out.
“Let’s take a walk,” Bernie said, rising slowly onto his tricky foot and grabbing his coat.
“Are you sure you’re up for this?” I asked. He had been wincing all day. But as if it were possessed, his bum foot seemed to lead him right out the door.
Halfway into our little walk, Bernie started gasping for air. When he seemed to get dizzy, I feared he was having a heart attack. On the northeast corner of Thirty-ninth and Seventh Avenue, he parked himself on a short metal platform that held a steel sculpture of an old Jewish man sitting at a sewing machine.
“Let’s go back to the precinct,” I suggested.
Bernie looked up at the garment district statue he was sitting under and said: “There was a lot more jerking off around here than sewing. If they’re going to put up a memorial, it should be to all the lonely guys who whacked off in the porn arcades around Times Square.”
He pulled his inhaler from his coat and took a deep suck from it, then rose to his feet and resumed walking, throwing his foot out before him like an anvil. When we got to the library, we found a dozen old PCs side by side. We carefully inspected the sign-in sheet, looking for the names of people who had used the computer at 7:45 p.m., roughly the time the jpegs had been sent in to Miriam. It proved to be useless: most of the names were illegible, and of course there were no closed-circuit cameras. Before Bernie could even begin to describe O’Flaherty, the librarian was shaking her head. Apparently she never saw anybody, ever.
“We know O’Flaherty uses the library,” I said to Bernie. “Why don’t we check his withdrawal records to establish if he was here that day, and see if there’s a match with the times the jpegs were uploaded.”
Bernie barely nodded. He never gave anyone any credit.
After an hour of going through various bureaucratic channels, we discovered that O’Flaherty’s most recent withdrawals were all made at the Donnell branch up on Fifty-third and Fifth. I was going to suggest walking up there and checking their sign-in sheet to see if he might’ve logged in for any cyber-hijinks up there as well, but I didn’t have the heart to put Bernie through another lengthy walk.
Not long after I got home that evening, I heard Maggie’s delicate Morse code knocks at my door. We hadn’t seen each other since the celebrity party at Miriam’s house.
As soon as I opened the door, Maggie handed me a frosty bottle of Grey Goose vodka – I didn’t know why, nor did I care. I took out two tall thin-stemmed aperitif glasses and poured us each a shot.
“I know you have a big crush on Noel Holden,” I said. “I wish I could just wrap him up and give him to you.” I was trying to give Maggie the opportunity to mention her fling with Crispin.
“Don’t you want him?” Maggie asked instead.
“Maggie, he spends most of his time out in LA, and he has a million adoring fans. Even if he did sleep with me, it would only be a matter of time before he’d toss me aside for the next coat-check girl.”
“If you really feel that way, why are you seeing him?” she asked.
“I’m not. It’s over.” I didn’t want to explain the whole fingerprints thing.
“So you wouldn’t be angry if he . . . if I . . .”
“If you what?”
“Well, if one day a miracle should occur and I got together with him.”
I stood there a moment wondering if she was insane.
“Go for it, girl,” I finally said. I shouldn’t’ve been surprised by her reluctance to talk about Crispin. After all, this was where her crazy flag flapped out of control.
We clinked glasses and knocked back our vodka. After another drink, Maggie dashed back to her apartment—probably to watch the same dumbass TV shows as I did on the opposite side of the same wall—all alone.