Eight Million Ways to Die

A Jewish queen and a Dairy Queen, I thought, and thought of Donna.



"Maybe they were sisters," I suggested.



"Sisters?"



"Under the skin."



I wanted breakfast, but when I hit the street I bought a paper before I did anything else, and I could see right away that it wasn't going to make a good accompaniment for my bacon and eggs. Hotel Ripper Claims Second Victim, the top teaser headline announced. And then, in big block caps, sex-change hooker butchered in queens.



I folded it, tucked it under my arm. I don't know what I thought I was going to do first, read the paper or eat, but my feet decided for me and picked neither of those choices. I walked two blocks before I realized I was heading for the Y on West Sixty-third, and that I was going to get there just in time for the twelve-thirty meeting.



What the hell, I thought. Their coffee was as good as anybody else's.



I got out of there an hour later and had breakfast in a Greek joint around the corner on Broadway. I read the paper while I ate. It didn't seem to bother me now.



There wasn't much in the story I didn't already know. The victim was described as having lived in the East Village; I'd somehow assumed she lived across the river in Queens. Garfein had mentioned Floral Park, just across the line in Nassau County, and evidently that was where she'd grown up. Her parents, according to the Post, had both died several years earlier in an air crash. Mark/Sara/Cookie's sole surviving relative was a brother, Adrian Blaustein, a wholesale jeweler residing in Forest Hills with offices on West Forty-seventh Street. He was out of the country and had not yet been notified of his brother's death.



His brother's death? Or his sister's? How did a relative relate to someone who'd changed sex? How did a respectable businessman regard a brother-turned-sister who turned quick tricks in strangers' parked cars? What would Cookie Blue's death mean to Adrian Blaustein?



What did it mean to me?



Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. Any man's death, any woman's death, any death in between. But did it diminish me? And was I truly involved?



I could still feel the trigger of the.32 trembling beneath my finger.



I ordered another cup of coffee and turned to a story about a young soldier home on furlough, playing pickup basketball at a sandlot game in the Bronx. A gun had apparently fallen out of some bystander's pocket, discharging on impact, and the bullet had struck this young serviceman and killed him instantly. I read the story through a second time and sat there shaking my head at it.



One more way to die. Jesus, there really were eight million of them, weren't there?



At twenty to nine that evening I slipped into the basement of a church on Prince Street in SoHo. I got myself a cup of coffee, and while I looked for a seat I scanned the room for Jan. She was near the front on the right-hand side. I sat further back near the coffee.



The speaker was a woman in her thirties who drank for ten years and spent the last three of them on the Bowery, panhandling and wiping windshields to get money for wine. "Even on the Bowery," she said, "there are some people who know how to take care of themselves. Some of the men down there always carry a razor and a bar of soap. I gravitated straight to the other kind, the ones who don't shave and don't wash and don't change their clothes. A little voice in my head said, 'Rita, you're right where you belong.' "



During the break I ran into Jan on her way to the coffee urn. She seemed pleased to see me. "I was in the neighborhood," I explained, "and it got to be meeting time. It occurred to me I might see you here."



"Oh, this is one of my regular meetings," she said. "We'll go for coffee after, okay?"



"Sure."



A dozen of us wound up around a couple of tables in a coffee shop on West Broadway. I didn't take a very active part in the conversation, or pay too much attention to it. Eventually the waiter distributed separate checks. Jan paid hers and I paid mine and the two of us headed downtown toward her place.



I said, "I didn't just happen to be in the neighborhood."



"There's a big surprise."



"I wanted to talk to you. I don't know if you read today's paper-"



"About the killing in Queens? Yes, I did."



"I was out there. I'm all wound up and I feel the need to talk about it."



We went up to her loft and she made a pot of coffee. I sat with a cup of coffee in front of me and by the time I stopped talking and took a sip it was cold. I brought her up to date, told her about Kim's fur jacket, about the drunken kids and the broken wine bottle, about the trip to Queens and what we'd found there. And I told her, too, how I'd spent this afternoon, riding the subway across the river and walking around Long Island City, returning to knock on doors in Cookie Blue's East Village tenement, then crossed the island to work the gay bars on Christopher Street and up and down West Street.



By then it had been late enough to get in touch with Joe Durkin and learn what the lab had come up with.



"It was the same killer," I told Jan. "And he used the same weapon. He's tall, right handed, and pretty powerful, and he keeps a sharp edge on his machete, or whatever the hell he uses."



Phone checks with Arkansas yielded nothing. The Fort Smith street address was a phony, predictably enough, and the auto license plate belonged to an orange Volkswagen owned by a nursery school teacher in Fayetteville.



"And she only drove it on Sundays," Jan said.



"Something like that. He made up the whole Arkansas business the same as he made up Fort Wayne, Indiana. But the license plate was real, or almost real. Somebody thought to check the hot-car sheet, and there was a navy blue Impala stolen off the street in Jackson Heights just a couple hours before Cookie was killed. The plate number's the same as he used checking in except for a pair of digits reversed, and of course it's a New York plate instead of Arkansas.



"The car fits the motel clerk's description, such as it was. It also fits what they got from some other hookers who were on the stroll when Cookie was picked up. They say there was a car like that cruising around for a while before the dude in it made up his mind and picked up Cookie.



"The car hasn't turned up yet, but that doesn't mean he's still driving it. It can take a long time before an abandoned stolen car turns up. Sometimes the thieves leave 'em in a No Parking zone and the police tow truck hauls them to the pound. That's not supposed to happen, somebody's supposed to check towed cars against the hot sheet, but it doesn't always go the way it's supposed to. It doesn't matter. It'll turn out the killer dumped the car twenty minutes after he finished with Cookie, and that he wiped it clean of prints."



"Matt, can't you let go of it?"



"Of the whole business?"



She nodded. "It's police procedure from here on in, isn't it? Sifting evidence, running down all the details."



"I suppose so."



"And it's not as though they're likely to put this on the shelf and forget about it, the way you thought they might when it was just Kim who was dead. The papers wouldn't let them shelve it even if they wanted to."



"That's true."



"So is there a reason why you have to push yourself on this? You already gave your client his money's worth."



"Did I?"



"Didn't you? I think you worked harder for the money than he did."



"I guess you're right."



"So why stay with it? What can you do that the whole police force can't?"



I wrestled with that one. After a moment I said, "There's got to be a connection."



"What kind of connection?"



"Between Kim and Cookie. Because, damnit, otherwise they don't make sense. A psycho killer always has a pattern for what he's doing, even if it only exists in his own mind. Kim and Cookie didn't look alike and didn't have similar lives. For Christ's sake, they weren't even the same sex to start with. Kim worked off a phone in her own apartment and had a pimp. Cookie was a transsexual streetwalker doing the johns in their cars. She was an outlaw. Chance is doing some double-checking to see if she had a pimp nobody knew about, but it doesn't look likely."



I drank some cold coffee. "And he picked Cookie," I went on. "He took his time, he drove up and down those streets, he made sure he got her and not somebody else. Where's the connection? It's not a matter of type. She was a completely different physical type from Kim."



"Something in her personal life?"



"Maybe. Her personal life's hard to trace. She lived in the East Village and tricked in Long Island City. I couldn't find anybody in the West Side gay bars who knew her. She didn't have a pimp and she didn't have a lover. Her neighbors on East Fifth Street never knew she was a prostitute, and only a few of them suspected she wasn't a woman. Her only family's her brother and he doesn't even know she's dead."



I talked some more. Ricone wasn't an Italian word, and if it was a name it was an uncommon one. I'd checked telephone directories for Manhattan and Queens without finding a single Ricone listed.



When I ran dry she got more coffee for both of us and we sat for a few minutes without speaking. Then I said, "Thanks."



"For the coffee?"



"For listening. I feel better now. I had to talk my way through it."



"Talking always helps."



"I suppose so."



"You don't talk at meetings, do you?"



"Jesus, I couldn't talk about this stuff."



"Not specifically, maybe, but you could talk about what you're going through and the way it makes you feel. That might help more than you think, Matt."



"I don't think I could do it. Hell, I can't even say I'm an alcoholic. 'My name is Matt and I pass.' I could phone it in."



"Maybe that'll change."



"Maybe."



"How long have you been sober, Matt?"



I had to think. "Eight days."



"Gee, that's terrific. What's so funny?"



"Something I've noticed. One person asks another how long he's been sober, and whatever the answer is, the reply is, 'Gee, that's terrific, that's wonderful.' If I said eight days or eight years the reaction'd be the same. 'Gee, isn't that great, isn't that terrific.' "



"Well, it is."



"I guess."



"What's terrific is that you're sober. Eight years is terrific and so is eight days."



"Uh-huh."



"What's the matter?"



"Nothing. Sunny's funeral is tomorrow afternoon."



"Are you going?"



"I said I would."



"Are you worried about that?"



"Worried?"



"Nervous, anxious."



"I don't know about that. I'm not looking forward to it." I looked into her large gray eyes, then looked away. "Eight days is as long as I've gone," I said casually. "I had eight days last time, and then I drank."



"That doesn't mean you have to drink tomorrow."



"Oh, shit, I know that. I'm not going to drink tomorrow."



"Take someone with you."



"What do you mean?"



"To the funeral. Ask someone from the program to go along with you."



"I couldn't ask anyone to do that."



"Of course you could."



"Who? There's nobody I know well enough to ask."