Even the Wicked

He said, "What did you do, arrest him? I'm not sure of the legal status of that."

"He's with me voluntarily," I said. "I've got a full confession on tape. I'm not sure of the legal status of that, either, but I've got it, along with the gun he used."

"That's pretty amazing," he said. He offered to have the train met by a contingent of cops, but I didn't think that was necessary.

Havemeyer was coming in voluntarily, and I thought he'd be more comfortable surrendering at the precinct. Besides, I'd promised to keep him out of handcuffs as long as possible.

I wanted to second-guess myself when we got to Grand Central.

There was a light rain falling and it had the usual effect of making the taxis disappear. But before too long one pulled up to discharge a passenger and we grabbed it and headed downtown.

* * *

I didn't have to stick around too long at the Sixth. I turned over the gun (which, unwrapped, turned out to be a .38 revolver, with live rounds in three of its six chambers) to Conley, along with the tape of Havemeyer's confession. I answered a battery of questions, then dictated a statement.

"I'm glad I was around when you called," Conley told me, "and lucky I even remembered what you were talking about. I don't suppose I have to tell you we weren't exactly pushing this one."

"That's no surprise."

"Triage," he said. "You put in your time on the ones you stand a chance of breaking. And the ones where there's a lot of heat from up top."

"That's how it's always been."

"And always will be, would be my guess. Point is, this wasn't a front-burner case, not after the first seventy-two hours. And the whole city's so nuts today, especially the department, it's a wonder I remember my own name, let alone yours and Byron Leopold's."

"Why is the city so nuts?"

"You don't know? Where the hell did you spend the past twelve hours?"

"On a train."

"Oh, right. But even so, didn't you see a newspaper? Listen to the radio? You came through Grand Central, you must have walked past a newsstand."

"I had luggage to carry and a confessed murderer to escort," I reminded him. "I didn't have time to care what was happening in Bosnia."

"Forget Bosnia. Bosnia didn't make the headlines today. It was all Will this morning."

"Will?"

He nodded. "Either it's Number One back from the dead or Number Two's more dangerous than anybody thought. You know the theater critic?"

"Regis Kilbourne."

"That's the one," he said. "Will got him last night."

24

You could almost say he'd been asking for it.

I'd somehow missed the column he wrote. It had appeared toward the end of the previous week, not in the Arts section where his reviews always ran, but on the Times's oped page. I've since had a look at that issue of the paper, and it seems to me I read Safire's column that day, an inside-the-mind-of piece on a pair of presidential hopefuls. So I very likely took a look at what Regis Kilbourne had to say, and probably stopped reading before I got to the payoff.

That would have been natural enough, because his brief essay started off as a spirited defense of freedom of the press. He'd said the same things before, in response to having been given a spot on Will's list, going on about a critic's profound responsibilities to his conscience and his public. I might very well have decided I didn't have to listen to all that again.

He'd used up the greater portion of his 850 words before he got to the point. The rest of his column was given over to a review of a dramatic production, but this particular show was staged neither on nor off Broadway but all over town. He reviewed Will, and he gave him a bad notice.

"It is customary but by no means imperative," he wrote, "to revisit a long-running show after a substantive change in the cast. When the original production was essentially a star vehicle, such revisits are almost always disappointing. And this is certainly true in the case of what, were it mounted as a Broadway musical, some producer would surely entitle Will! complete down to the nowobligatory exclamation point.

"In its first incarnation, Will! was unquestionably good theater.

With the late Adrian Whitfield quietly elegant in the title role, the production had a powerful grip on its audience of eight million New Yorkers.

But what succeeded initially as brilliant tragedy (albeit not unleavened by its comic moments) has come back to us as farce, and a farce with all the zest and sparkle of a fallen soufflé.

"With Whitfield's death and unmasking, his understudy has emerged from the wings—and has fallen flat on his face. Will Number Two, as we seem to be calling him, is a man of bombast and empty rage.

We take this pale copy seriously only because we remember the original.