Even the Wicked

I liked the idea of someone with a private grudge. It wouldn't be the first time someone had concealed a personal motive behind the smoke screen of serial murder. Sometimes an opportunist would disguise his own solitary act of homicide to look as though it was part of somebody else's string—I'd had a case like that once, the killer used an ice pick and so did the imitator. And I'd known of cases where the killer committed several purposeless murders at random to establish a pattern of serial murder, then struck down someone he had reason to kill as part of that same pattern. It was a way to divert suspicion from oneself when one would otherwise be the first and most obvious suspect. But it didn't work, because routine police work sooner or later led someone to take a look at everybody with an individual motive, and once they started looking they always found something.

If this was a smoke screen, Will was certainly blowing a lot of smoke. Writing letters to newspapers and knocking off a batch of public figures was a long way from strangling a string of housewives so that you could wring your own wife's neck without being obvious about it.

But maybe he just plain got into it. That happens. The man who did the housewives killed four of them before he left his own wife with her panty hose knotted around her neck. And he went on to do three more before they caught him. I can't believe he went on that long just to make it look good. My guess is he was enjoying himself.

* * *

The good weather held into the weekend. Sunday it was supposed to rain, but it didn't, and by late that afternoon it was hot and hazy.

Monday was worse, with a high of ninety-two and the air like wet wool.

Tuesday was more of the same, and that afternoon I got a phone call that diverted my attention from Will for the time being.

The caller was a woman I knew named Ginnie. She said, "God, I'm so upset. You've heard about Byron?"

"I know he's ill."

"He's dead."

I knew Ginnie from AA. She lived at Fifty-third and Ninth and came to meetings at St. Paul's. Byron was a friend of hers, and I'd met him a few times at meetings, but he lived in the Village and mostly attended meetings down there. He came into the program because he couldn't stop drinking, but some years before that he'd been a heroin addict, and he'd shared needles, and shortly after he got sober he had the antibody test and turned out to be HIV-positive. You'd think people would react to such news by saying the hell with it and going out and getting drunk, and I suppose some of them do, but a lot don't.

Byron didn't. He stayed sober and went to meetings, and he took the drugs his doctor gave him, along with a nutritional regimen designed to strengthen his immune system. This may have done him some good, but it didn't keep him from coming down with AIDS.

"I'm sorry to hear that," I said. "The last time I saw him would have been in March or April. I ran into him at a meeting in the Village. I think it was Perry Street."

"That's where he mostly went."

"I remember noticing that he didn't look well."

"Matt, AIDS would have killed him but it didn't get the chance.

Somebody shot him."

"Somebody—"

"Pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger. Now why in God's name would anybody do a thing like that?"

Gently I said, "Ginnie, he'd be the one with the best reason."

"What?"

"Maybe he did it himself."

"Oh Christ," she said, impatient with me. "He was in a public place, Matt. You know that little park across the street from his building?"

"I don't know where he lived."

"Horatio Street. Not the Van Gogh but the prewar apartment building next door to it. There's a little park across the street. Abingdon Square? No, that's the other one."

"Jackson Square."

"I guess so. He was sitting there this morning with a cup of coffee and the morning paper. And a man walked up to him and shot him dead."

"Did they catch the shooter?"

"He got away."

"But there were witnesses."

"There were people in the park. It was early, so it was still comfortable. It's an oven but there now."

"I know."

"Thank God for air-conditioning. Byron should have stayed in his own air-conditioned apartment, but he liked the sun. He said he'd spent his whole life staying out of it, but now he seemed to get energy from it.

Solar energy. He said one good thing about being HIV-positive is you didn't have to worry about skin cancer. You didn't know him well, did you, Matt?"

"Hardly at all."

"You know how he got the virus."

"Sharing needles, as I understand it."

"That's right. He wasn't gay."

"I gathered as much."

"Living in the Village and having AIDS, it'd be natural to assume that he was. But he was straight. Very much so."

"Oh?"

"I was sort of in love with him."

"I see."