Even the Wicked

"I guess he had things on his mind." He turned to me, his eyes probing mine. "You know what I think? I think you have to take what you've got and hand it to the cops."

"What makes you say that?"

"Because otherwise they'll be running down false trails and barking up wrong trees for months on end.

How many men do you suppose they've got assigned to Will?"

"No idea."

"A substantial number, though."

"Obviously."

"Well, you could let them waste their time," he said, "on the assumption that it would keep them from making trouble for somebody else, but I don't even know if that's true. Who knows how many lives they're going to turn inside out looking for Will?" He yawned. "But there's a more basic consideration.

Who's your client? How do you best serve his interests?"

"The only client I've had has been Adrian."

"Well, you haven't resigned and he hasn't fired you. I'd say he's still your client."

"According to that line of reasoning, I ought to let it lie."

He shook his head. "You're missing something, Matt. Why did Adrian hire you?"

"I wouldn't take any payment for advising him on how to go about protecting himself. I suppose this was his way of paying me for my time."

"What did he engage you to do?"

"To investigate the whole case. I told him I couldn't be expected to accomplish much." I remembered something. "He alluded to my tendency to stay with a case. Stubbornness, you could call it."

"You could indeed. Don't you see? He wanted you to solve it. He didn't want to leave loose ends. He wanted to baffle everybody, he wanted the audience holding its breath when the curtain went down. But then, after a decent interval, he wants a chance to come out and take a bow. And that's where you come in."

I thought about it. "I don't know," I said. "Why not just leave a letter to be delivered a certain amount of time after his death? As far as that goes, let's remember that we're talking about a multiple murderer with delusions of grandeur. Do you really think you can read his mind?"

"Throw all that out, then. The hell with what he wanted and what he didn't want. You're a detective. It's who you are and it's what you do.

That's why you stayed with it and that's why you solved it."

"If I've solved it."

"And that's why you'll sit down with your friend Durkin tomorrow and tell him what you've got."

"Because it's who I am and what I do."

"Uh-huh. And I'm afraid you're stuck with it."

16

The phone rang the next morning while we were having breakfast.

Elaine answered it, and it was TJ, checking to see if she wanted him to spell her at the shop. She talked with him, then said, "Hang on," and passed me the phone.

"It ain't the peach pits," he said. "You got to crack the pits, and there's this kernel inside."

"What are you talking about?"

"Talkin' 'bout cyanide, Clyde. Like he put in the scotch bottle? I can't say if you could kill yourself eatin'

peach kernels, but there was a dude did it with apricots. Didn't eat but fifteen or twenty of 'em, and that was enough."

"Apricot kernels, you mean."

There was a pause, and I could picture his eyes rolling. "If you could die from eatin' fifteen or twenty apricots, don't you think they'd make 'em put a warnin' on the package? Dude cracked open the pits, ate the kernels, an' that was his last meal."

"And it was suicide?"

"Couldn't find out for sure. Could be he was tryin' to cure cancer.

There's this drug they make outta

apricot kernels, and you've got people swearin' it works and people swearin' it don't. Laetrile? Might be I ain't pronouncin' it right."

"I've heard of it."

"So this dude who ate the kernels, could be he was on a do-it-yourself Laetrile project. But we was wonderin' if you could kill yourself that" way, eatin' peach pits, an' if fifteen or twenty's all it takes, I guess the answer's yes, at least with apricots. Assumin' you fool enough to try."

"Somehow I don't think Adrian got cyanide from apricot kernels."

"No, but that leaves a whole lot of other ways to get it. Turns out there's all kinds of industrial uses for that shit." He went on to tell me some of them. "So his name might turn up on a list," he said, "or Allen Johnson's might, but they might not. On account of there's so many different ways to get it."

"How do you happen to know all this?"

"Computer."

"You don't have a computer."

"This girl does."

"What girl?"

"Girl I know. Not like the Kongs, she ain't no hacker, don't know how to do anything tricky, sneakin'

into networks an' data bases and all of that. She just use it to do her homework and balance her checkbook an' shit."

"So you asked her computer about peach pits and cyanide and it spat out all that information?"

"You don't ask the computer nothin'. Computer just a machine."

"Oh."

"She got this on-line service, see, and you hook up to that and browse these different message boards.

An' when you find somebody might know the answer to your question, you send him an E-mail. An' he E-mails you back. Like talkin',

'cept it on the screen."

"Oh."