Lawrence Block - Hope to Die

The phone rang, and it was Ira Wentworth, wanting to know if I was busy. I told him my wife was fixing dinner and I was watching a ball game. Why?

"You've been in on all of this," he said, "and I figure you earned the right to see the rest of it. But I have to say you're better off staying where you are."

"I don't follow you."

"I don't follow myself," he said. "You want to come, be out in front of your building in five minutes. I'll swing by and pick you up."

Elaine was planning to make pasta, and I caught her before the water boiled and told her she was cooking for one. "Then I'll just have a salad," she said, "and we can eat when you get home, if you're still hungry. Where are you going?"

I told her I didn't know. I got T J away from the computer and we went downstairs. A minute or two after we hit the pavement, a Ford about three years old made an illegal U-turn in the middle of the block and pulled up right in front of us. I opened the door and was about to compliment Wentworth on his driving, but the expression on his face stopped me. I got in next to him and T J got in back and the car took off before we had the doors shut.

He said, "I don't know why I'm in such a rush. Nobody's going anywhere."

"What is he, holed up somewhere?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"Does he have hostages?"

He laughed, but there was no humor in it. "Same answer," he said.

I didn't say anything, and he turned at Broadway, slowed down long enough at a red light to make sure there was no oncoming traffic, then coasted through the intersection. He drove like a cop, trying not to hit anybody, but otherwise unconcerned about the traffic laws.

At Times Square he switched to Broadway. As we approached Thirty-fourth Street he said, "You're not going to ask where we're going?"

"I figured you'd tell me sooner or later."

" Brooklyn," he said.

" Coney Island Avenue? He went back there after all?"

He didn't say anything. At Thirty-first Street two cars stood side by side at a red light, waiting patiently for it to change. Wentworth swung around them, shot across the intersection, cut back in. Somebody leaned on his horn.

"I don't know why the hell they do that," he said. "Hit their horns. Time they do that, I'm already out of their lives."

"If they had guns," I said, "they wouldn't have to honk."

"An armed driver is a quiet driver," he said. "What I'm doing, I'll cut over Houston to Forsyth or Eldridge. Whichever one's southbound. Take that to Delancey and shoot over the bridge."

"Wrong bridge," I said. "If you take the Manhattan Bridge it's a straight shot down Flatbush Avenue."

"Thanks for the geography lesson," he said, "but that's not where we're going."

I don't know how much of it I knew then. Enough, at least, to keep my mouth shut.

Heading east on Houston Street he said, "Somebody mentioned the boyfriend. I forget his name, if I ever heard it in the first place."

"Peter Meredith."

"Somebody mentioned him back at Breit's apartment, and I was going to call somebody in Brooklyn, see about getting a car and a couple of uniforms out there. But then I thought somebody else was gonna take care of it, and it was way down on the list, you know? They were patients of his, but he's a doctor, a therapist, whatever the hell he is, you figure he's got a whole file cabinet full of patients, right? What are you gonna do, go sit on each and every one of them on the chance he might show up?"

"What happened?"

"Fire," he said. "Place went up like a fucking film warehouse. Meserole Street? Couple of blocks from Bushwick Terminal? Isn't that where you said it was?"

"That's right."

"You don't recall the street number, by any chance?"

I was reaching for my notebook when T J said, "One sixty-eight."

"That's some memory, Tom Jones."

"He was out there," I said.

"When was this?"

"Few days ago," T J said. "Met all but one of them. They showed me what they doin', the renovations an' all."

"They just gave you the grand tour?"

"They under the 'pression I from the Buildings Department," he said. "They was doin' a whole lot of work on that house."

"That's nothing," Wentworth said. "You're not gonna recognize the place."

It had taken them a while to get the fire under control, but it was out by the time we got there, and the last hook-and-ladder unit was just pulling away as Wentworth angled in next to a red NYFD inspector's car.

I saw, but barely registered, the crowds of onlookers, the booted firemen walking around, the house itself with its windows gone and great holes chopped in its roof. We walked in, escorted by a fire inspector and a cop from the local precinct. Crime lab personnel were on the scene, along with someone from the medical examiner's office.

We climbed stairs to the top floor and worked our way down. Most of the internal walls had been removed in the renovation, so we didn't have to go room to room; each floor was just one large room, and each room held its dead.

On the top floor, a large man lay on his side, one arm under his body, the other flung out to the side. He'd been pretty thoroughly roasted in the fire, and there wasn't enough of his face left to offer a clue of what he looked like.

"Stabbed twice, maybe more," somebody said. "They were all stabbed, though it's easier to tell with some of them than with the others. There's empty drums of muriatic acid all over the place. You use it to get plaster residue off brick, and it looks as though he sloshed it over their faces. But we won't know for a while how much damage the acid did and how much was the fire, because everybody got a second dousing with accelerant before the place went up."

T J said the dead man was Peter Meredith, basing his identification on the corpse's girth. One floor down we found two more bodies, killed the same way, disfigured and burned the same way. T J was less certain, but guessed we were looking at all that was left of Marsha Kittredge and Lucian Bemis. They lay side by side, with the smaller figure nestled in the crook of the larger one's arm.

The fire had been a little less intense on the first floor, at least at the front of the house where the two bodies lay. The man's hands and face had been bathed in muriatic acid, and his hair and most of his clothing had been burned away, but it was easy to spot the stab wounds in his chest.

"Kieran Eklund," T J said. "Never did meet him, but that there's Ruth Ann Lipinsky. Just about enough left of her to recognize."

She lay a few feet away, her face eroded by the acid, her hair burned away in the fire, her throat slashed. Blood had gouted from the wound and pooled around her, and big bloody footprints, still distinguishable after the fire, led diagonally across the floor to a stairway at the rear.

"He went out the back," I said, but the fire inspector shook his head.

"He didn't go anywhere," he said.

The stairs down to the basement had mostly burned away. A portable metal ladder, marked FDNY, had been laid down over what remained of it, and we made our way down it one at a time. The cellar floor was a couple of inches deep in water, among other things.

There was a pile of rags at the foot of the stairs. Except it wasn't a pile of rags.

"Crispiest critter of them all," the fire inspector said, nudging the corpse with a booted foot. "That's a hunting knife next to him, and what do you bet it's the one made those cuts upstairs? I'd say the odds are good. You want to know what happened?"

"I'd love to know what happened," Wentworth said.

"I can tell you how we reconstruct it, based on preliminary observations. It's all subject to change when we've reached the stage where we're ready to release a full report."

"Understood."

"He went floor by floor, starting at the top. Killed the guy on the top floor, came down a flight, did the man and woman, one more flight and killed the last couple. Though how he managed to do all that without anybody resisting is something I'm glad it's not my job to figure out."