Even the Wicked

"I guess I was speechless," I said. "I didn't know you were still looking for the witness."

"Ain't been nobody told me to stop."

"No, but—"

"An' the man got me started in this detectin' business, everybody say he like a dog with a bone. Once he get his teeth in somethin', he ain't about to turn it loose."

"Is that what they say?"

"So I gettin' to be the same my own self, like a dog with a bone.

'Sides, it be somethin' to do."

"And you found the dude."

"Took some doin'," he admitted. "He wasn't exactly lookin' to be found. But he saw the whole thing,

'cept it was more hearin' than seein'. He wasn't lookin' at first, and when he did look he was seein' it from behind. So he saw the back of the dude who did the shooting, and he didn't see the gun, just heard, you know, pop pop."

"That's what he heard? Pop pop?"

"What he heard was gunshots. What else you gone hear when somebody shoots a gun?"

"Everybody who was there heard the gunshots," I said, "and even if they hadn't the bullets in Leopold's body are fairly strong evidence that a couple of shots were fired. So if all this fellow did was hear the shots—"

"Ain't all he heard."

"Oh."

"That was all the man heard, you think I'd be botherin' you with it?"

"Sorry. What else did he hear?"

"Heard the dude say, 'Mr. Leopold?' Then he didn't hear nothin', so either Byron just nodded or his voice didn't carry. Then he heard the dude say, 'Byron Leopold?' An' maybe he looked up an' maybe he didn't, but the next he heard the dude was bustin' caps."

"Pop pop."

"Like that."

"When can I see this witness?"

"He might be pretty slow to talk to you. He already missed a few chances to talk to the police."

"I don't suppose the gentleman's a vice president at IBM."

"He in the park sellin' product," he said, "an' soon as the dude commences to shoot, he ready to call it a day hisself. I can maybe put you 'cross a table from him, but that don't mean he's gone talk to you.

'Sides, what you gonna axe him that I didn't axe him already?"

" 'Mr. Leopold? Byron Leopold?' "

"Don't sound to me like he's makin' it up."

"No," I said, "it doesn't."

* * *

An hour later I was watching him eat french fries at a Fourteenth Street coffee shop. His cheeseburger was but a memory. He was wearing baggy jeans and a denim jacket with a quilted lining. His railroader's cap was on the seat beside him.

I told him I had pretty much forgotten Byron Leopold.

"Why's that?" he wondered. "You come to the conclusion he died of natural causes?"

"When I thought about it at all," I said, "which wasn't often, I suppose I figured he'd been taken for someone else and killed in error.

Or that he'd unwittingly made an enemy in the neighborhood by sitting on the wrong bench or mouthing off at the wrong person. And he had AIDS, and he was far enough along so that the disease was visible.

Maybe somebody had an AIDS phobia and decided the best cure lay in killing off the victims."

"Like the dudes who set bums on fire."

"As a quick cure for the problem of homelessness. That's the idea.

I didn't think that was it, though, because that kind of killer doesn't act once and then go off and enter a monastery."

"He repeats."

"Usually." The waitress came by and filled my coffee cup without asking. The coffee wasn't very good, but there was plenty of it. I said, "

'Mr. Leopold? Byron Leopold?' "

"Like that."

"Making sure he's got the right person."

"Person he's supposed to shoot. Like he knows the name but he never met him before. We brainstormin', right? Battin' ideas back and forth?"

"Something like that," I agreed. "He sounds hired, doesn't he?"

"The killer? You mean like a pro?"

"Not like a pro," I said. "The whole thing's too raggedy-ass for a pro. Here's a man who's alone a lot, leads a very regular life, hasn't set up any security system to make himself hard to kill. It's easy to get close to him in private, so why would a professional hitman kill him in front of witnesses?"

"Only reason I said a pro, Joe, is you said hired."

"An amateur," I said, "hired by another amateur. It pretty much takes a pro to hire a pro. You need to be connected, you can't look up contract killers in the yellow pages. Ordinary citizens hire killers all the time, but there's nothing terribly professional about the people who work for them."

"An' it don't always work out the way it s'posed to," he said. "Like the other day in Washington Heights."

I knew the one he was talking about. It had been all over the papers the past few days. A Dominican teenager, bridling at her father's strict discipline, had engaged a pair of local hard cases to kill the man, enticing them with the prospect of the $20,000 he kept in a strongbox in the closet, considering it ever so much safer than the bank.