13
THE NEXT MORNING, the front page of the Herald was dominated by a pretty good picture of Al Z slumped in his seat at the Wang, beside the headline “Gangland Leader Slain.” There are few words that newspaper subeditors like better than “gangland” and “slain,” except maybe “sex” and “puppy,” and the Herald had opted to display them in a point size so large there was barely enough room for the story.
Tommy Caci's throat had been cut from left to right. The wound was so deep that it had severed both of the common carotid arteries and the external and internal jugulars, virtually decapitating him. Mr. Pudd had then stabbed Al Z through the back of the head with a long, thin blade, which punctured his cerebellum and sliced into his cerebral cortex. Finally, using a small, very sharp knife, he had made an angled incision about three quarters of the way up the middle finger of Al Z's right hand and sliced off the top joint.
I learned this not from the Herald, but from Detective Sergeant McCann who rang me on my cell phone as I sat at Rachel's breakfast table reading the newspapers. Rachel was in the bathtub, humming Al Green songs out of key.
“Guy had some balls, taking out two men in a public place,” commented McCann. “There are no cameras on the fire exits, so we got no visual apart from your description. Some guy in the loading bay took the license; came from an Impala stolen two days ago in Concord, so zilch there. The killer had to gain access to the VIP lounge using a key card, so we figure he came prepared with one he made himself. It's not that hard to run one up, you know what you're doing. Al Z went to every first night—he may have been a mean, crooked son of a bitch, but he had class—and he always sat in or near those seats, so it wasn't too difficult to guess where he'd be. As for the missing finger joint, we're guessing it's a calling card and we're checking VICAP for equivalent MOs.”
He asked me if I remembered anything else from the previous night—I knew it wasn't simply a courtesy call—but I told him that I couldn't help him. He asked me to stay in touch, and I assured him that I would.
McCann was right; Pudd had taken a huge risk to get to Al Z. Maybe he had no choice. There was no way to get at Al Z in his office or his home, because he was always surrounded by his people and his windows were designed to repel anything smaller than a warhead. At the theater, with Tommy behind him and hundreds of people around him, he could have been forgiven for feeling secure, but he had underestimated the tenacity of his killer. When the opportunity presented itself, Pudd seized it.
It struck me that Pudd might also be tying up loose ends, and there were only so many reasons why someone felt compelled to do that. Primary among them was as a preparation for disappearance, to ensure that there was nobody left to continue the hunt. My guess was that if Pudd chose to vanish, then nobody would ever find him. He had survived this long even with a price on his head, so he could evaporate like dew after sunrise if he chose.
Something else bothered me; it looked like bugs weren't the only things that Pudd liked to collect. He also wanted skin and bone, removing joints and sections of skin from each of his victims. His taste in souvenirs was distinctive, but Pudd didn't strike me as the kind of man who would mutilate dead bodies just so he could put the pieces in jars and admire them. There had to be a better reason.
I sat at the breakfast table, the newspapers now abandoned, and wondered if I should simply turn over all I knew to the police. Not that what I knew was a great deal, but the deaths of Epstein, Beck, Al Z, and Grace Peltier were all connected, linked either to the Fellowship itself or to actions that Grace's biological father, Jack Mercier, was taking against it. It was about time for a serious face-to-face talk with Mr. Mercier, and I didn't think that either of us was going to enjoy it very much. I was about to pack my bag in preparation for my return to Scarborough when I got my second call of the morning, and from a not entirely unexpected source. It was Mickey Shine. Caller ID could only tell me that the number he was calling from was private, and concealed.
“You see the papers?” he asked.
“I was there,” I told him.
“You know who did it?”
“I think it was our mutual acquaintance.”
There was a silence on the other end of the line. “How did he find out about your meeting with Al?”
“He may have been keeping tabs on us,” I conceded. “But it could also be that he was aware of Al Z's interest in him for some time, and that my investigation precipitated a course of action he'd been planning for some time.” He had learned from his pets that if something starts tugging at the farthest reaches of your web, then it's a good idea to find out what that might be and, if you can, to make it stop.
“You weren't out at your apartment last night,” I continued. “I checked up on you.”
“I left town as soon as I heard. Somebody called me about Al's death, a friend from way back, and I knew it had to be Pudd. Nobody else would dare make a move like that against Al Z.”
“Where are you?”
“New York.”
“Think you can lose yourself there, Mickey?”
“I have people down here. I'll make some calls, see what they can do for me.”
“We need to talk some more before you disappear. I get the feeling you haven't told me all that you know.”
I thought he would demur. Instead, he admitted: “Some I know, some I'm just guessing.”
“Meet me. I'll come down to you.”
“I don't know . . .”
“Mickey, are you going to keep running from this guy for the rest of your life? That doesn't sound like much of an existence.”
“It's better than being dead.” He didn't sound too sure.
“You know what he's doing, don't you?” I asked him. “You know what the threat of being ‘written’ means. You've figured it out.”
He didn't reply immediately, and I half expected to hear the connection being ended.
“The Cloisters,” he said suddenly. “Ten tomorrow. There's an exhibition in the Treasury you might want to take a look at before I get there. It'll answer some of your questions, and I'll try to fill in the gaps. But you're not there at ten and I walk away. You'll never see me again.”
With that, he hung up.
I booked a ticket on the Delta shuttle to La Guardia, then called Angel and Louis at the Copley. Rachel and I met them for coffee in the Starbucks on Newbury before I caught a cab to Logan. I was in New York by 1:30 P.M. and checked into a double room in the Larchmont on West Eleventh Street in the Village. The Larchmont wasn't the kind of place Donald Trump was likely to be frequenting but it was clean and inexpensive, and unlike most New York budget hotels, its double rooms weren't so small that you had to step outside to change your mind. In addition, it had a security-locked front entrance and a doorman the size of the Flatiron Building, so unwanted visitors would be kept to a minimum.
The city was unseasonably hot and humid, and I was soaked in sweat by the time I reached the hotel. The weather was due to break that night, but until then the A/C would be on full blast throughout the city, while those too poor to afford it made do with cheap fans. After a quick shower in a shared bathroom, I caught a cab uptown to West Eighty-sixth Street. B'Nai Jeshurun, the synagogue with which Yossi Epstein had until recently been involved, had an office on West Eighty-ninth, close by the Claremont Riding Academy, and it seemed that while I was in Manhattan it might be useful to try to find out a little more about the murdered rabbi. The noise of children leaving P.S.166 echoed in my ears as I walked to the synagogue's office, but it was a wasted trip. Nobody at B'Nai Jeshurun seemed able to tell me much more than I already knew about Yossi Epstein, and I was referred instead to the Orensanz Center on Norfolk Street on the Lower East Side, where Epstein had relocated after his falling-out with the Upper West Side congregation.