Lawrence Block - Hope to Die

"They were patients of his," I said. "He was somewhere between a father figure and a cult leader."

"Maybe they drank Kool-Aid first," Wentworth said.

"Whatever," the fire inspector said. "He killed the last one and went upstairs again and did what he did with the muriatic acid, and then poured accelerant over the bodies and elsewhere on the various floors. It looks as though he had all kinds of accelerants to choose from and it looks as though he used them all. Paint thinner, turpentine, joint compound, different kinds of solvents. They were artists, and between their art supplies and what they were using for renovation, they had enough accelerant to burn down Mount Everest. Worked his way down killing, worked his way down a second time with the acid and the accelerant.

"Time he got down here he was running low on accelerant, or maybe it was beginning to dawn on him that he better move his ass before the place went up like a torch. So he went a little light on the accelerant, and he stepped in the blood, and tracked it across the floor."

"Sloppy," somebody said.

"Down here," the inspector went on, "is what he was saving the rest of the accelerant for, and his instincts were good, because fire burns up, not down. He splashed shit all over the place, and then he did something you never want to do when you're fixing to burn your house down."

"Lit a cigarette?"

"Well, he could have, if he was dumber than shit. If he was not quite that stupid, my guess is he decided he needed a little more light, and he flicked that switch right over there. You flick a light switch, you're apt to get a little bit of a spark. You never see it and it doesn't amount to anything, unless you happen to be in a room full of volatile fumes, which he was. Boom- instant explosion, instant wall of flame, and we can only hope he knows better next time."

"Fucking electricity," someone said. "He shoulda used a candle."

"If only," the inspector said. "One other possibility, before you all clear out of here and go home to the dinners you've no longer got any stomach for. It's just as possible he knew what he was doing. If he figured it was all up and he wanted to join his fellow cult members in the next world, well, this way he'd go fast. It might not be much fun while it lasted, but it wouldn't last very long. Any questions, gentlemen?"

Wentworth said, "Anybody got a flashlight?" And, when one was handed to him, "Is it all right to turn this on? Is it safe?"

"I don't think you get a spark from a flashlight," the inspector said. "And you may not have noticed it, but they already had their fire here."

"Looks like something on that wall," Wentworth said, and flicked on the flashlight.

"I noticed that before," the inspector said. "I thought it was blood at first, but it looks like he used red paint."

" 'I came like water and like wind I go. Audrey Beardsley.' Who in the hell is Audrey Beardsley?"

"I think it's Aubrey Beardsley."

"Is that a B? All right, maybe it is. Same question. Who the hell is Aubrey Beardsley?"

"An illustrator," I said. "Around the turn of the century. And he didn't write those lines. They're from the The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám."

"Maybe Beardsley was easier to spell," someone suggested.

Wentworth said, "Arden Brill, Adam Breit, and Aubrey Beardsley. I guess he wanted to hang on to his monogrammed luggage." He pointed the flashlight at all that was left of our mystery man. He said, "Well? Does he look familiar?"

He didn't even look human. Then something caught my eye, and I reached for the flashlight. I stooped down and aimed it where I'd seen a glint of something, reached and picked it up.

A gold chain, its links melted and fused. And, hanging from it, an O-shaped disc of mottled pink stone.

On Saturday Mostly Mozart had its final concert of the season. I went with Elaine, and we took ourselves out to a late dinner afterward. The festival had lasted just four weeks, and had served as muted accompaniment for more bloodshed than you get in your average opera. The death toll was pretty high- Byrne and Susan Hollander, Jason Bierman, Carl Ivanko, Lia Parkman, Deena Sur from the massage parlor, Peter Meredith and his four housemates, and, finally, Adam Breit or Arden Brill or Aubrey Beardsley, as you prefer.

That's an even dozen, but the count reached thirteen the middle of the following week, when Ira Wentworth told me he'd played a hunch, and had the ME's office run some checks on unidentified corpses they'd accumulated during the past eight or ten months. A floater, recovered from the Hudson in the spring after having spent a couple of months in the water, was now identifiable on the basis of dental records as all that was left of Harold Fischer. The distinguished paleontologist hadn't gone to France after all, and it was now clear how Adam Breit, unable to pay his rent at Broadway and Waverly, had suddenly been able to afford a handsome apartment in an elegant building on Central Park West.

I brought Wentworth into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee, and again he commented on how good it was. I asked what dental records or anything else might have had to say about the body in the basement, and he said, "It's got to be him, don't you think?"

"It'd be nice to confirm it. What about DNA? Can't they get it from a burned body?"

"They can get it from dinosaur bones," he said. "Remember Jurassic Park? They got plenty of DNA from him."

"And?"

"And there's nothing to match it to, that's the whole problem."

"What about the Kleenex in the massage parlor?"

"Somebody went through the bucket of tissues," he said. "You know, whenever I start whining that I've got the worst job in America, just remind me of that poor schmuck, will you? But they went through it and they didn't find anything that matched. Which might mean he's a fucking criminal genius who really did fish his own scum-soaked tissue out of the bucket, or it might mean that little scientific report we found on his computer was founded upon a lie."

"He never went to the massage parlor?"

"He never got off. He didn't come, and therefore there was no reason for her to use a Kleenex and no DNA to throw away. And that's why he killed her, but he didn't want to face the fact he was sexually inadequate, so he told himself that's not how it happened, here's how it happened, and wrote it all up."

" 'I may be a killer, but I ain't no limp-dick wuss.' "

"Something like that, yeah."

"Maybe," I said. "Of course there's another possibility we haven't mentioned."

"I don't even want to think about it."

"He faked his own death once already," I said, "and left a stooge behind in his place."

"Jason Bierman."

"Uh-huh. Fire inspector said there were two possibilities, either he accidentally touched off the explosion and fire before he could get out of the building, or he wanted to go down with the ship. I thought of a third one right away."

"So did I. You know what bothered me the most?"

"The bloody footprints."

"Got it in one. The fucking bloody footprints. Leading right straight to the cellar stairs, just so we'd know to look. You know the word that comes to mind? Cute."

"Which is something else he's done before."

"Every time he had the chance."

"What about dental records, Ira? Fire or no fire, he'd still have teeth in his jaw."

"Absolutely, but what are you gonna match 'em to? The floater in the Hudson had teeth, too, but we had to know to look at Harold Fischer's dental records before they told us anything. The problem with Adam Breit is we don't know who the hell he was before he became Adam Breit. He never lived in New York under that name, not that there's a record, except for a year and a half at Broadway and Waverly and eight months on Central Park West. He never went to medical school anywhere in America under that name, never joined any professional societies. Did he just fake the whole thing as far as his credentials as a therapist are concerned? It might not be the hardest thing in the world. You're never called upon to remove an appendix, or read an x-ray. You just nod your head every once in a while and say things like 'Well, how did that make you feel?' There've been impostors who posed successfully as doctors, as lawyers, and as the son of Sidney Poitier."