The Letter Writer (2 page)

All the more reason for me to work actively to scour these accumulated items from my conscious mind. As I said before, I do not hoard, I do not gather, I do not analyze. Almost from the moment I have committed a client's thoughts or wishes to the printed page, I begin rolling them into a ball, figuratively speaking, before tossing them onto the mental waste heap of the hazy and the forgotten, where they may no longer trouble my thoughts.

Or so I thought until a few days ago, when a small item in the pages of the
Daily News
made me realize that some of those discarded secrets apparently remain adrift, just beneath the surface. They are, to use a disturbing modern analogy, like those U-boats which lurk offshore, awaiting their moment. As I scanned the newspaper story it felt as if a submerged memory had fired a torpedo, which then exploded to reveal other thoughts, many of them fearful. Alarming, even, because this has always been my greatest worry about the nature of my work—an anxious dread that, someday, some long-buried item would find its way back to the light and take on a life of its own, malignant, redoubled in strength, capable of harm.

A few hours ago that dread was realized in the most terrible of ways, and I was an eyewitness to its grisly aftermath. That event moved me to take action, or at least to contemplate the possibility. It is also why I quickly began learning as much as I could about Mr. Cain, because I have reached the crucial moment when I must decide what, if anything, to do next. It is now Friday, with the hands on the clock approaching midnight. By Monday morning I must either drop this matter or seek the assistance of Mr. Cain, the newly employed detective, the bringer of portents.

My only hesitation is that he, too, is likely to be threatened by the potency of what I know. Is this not often the nature of a dark secret, once illuminated? I am reminded of the advice of a wise and powerful man I once knew, who said, “If one man knows something, it's a secret. If two know it, eleven know it. When three know it, a hundred and eleven know it.” He called this the mathematics of danger, may he rest in peace.

But here is my dilemma: Mr. Cain might also be at risk if I choose
not
to act. Even from my remote vantage point I sense that he may have already slipped into currents of influence which he neither knows nor understands, dangerously adrift among hazards he cannot see. By seeking his assistance, I might also be able to save him.

It would be incorrect to leave you with the impression that my motives are entirely selfless. They are not. A name has surfaced in this affair which leads me to believe that, unless actions are soon taken, then I, too, may be vulnerable. So perhaps my decision is already made. If so, then on Monday I will journey to the precinct building on 30th Street, where I will tell Mr. Cain what I know, offer my help, and hope for the best.

Wish me well, then. Wish us all well.

FIRST DAY ON THE JOB,
half an hour left on his shift, when the call came in. There was a body in the Hudson, down by the docks at the end of 30th. Captain Mulhearn wore a big crooked smile as he carried the sheet over to Woodrow Cain's desk, like he was delivering a housewarming gift to a neighbor he didn't particularly like.

“All yours, Southern Boy. Welcome to the third district, and enjoy your night on the town.”

Twenty minutes later, his left thigh stiff after sitting all day, Cain limped carefully through the dark, crossing railroad ties and wet cobbles, and then stepping beneath the trestled gloom of Twelfth Avenue as he approached the muted shimmer of the waterfront.

Just ahead were two uniformed cops in silhouette, illuminated dimly by the twinkle of Hoboken on the far shore. They were talking, hands in motion, not yet aware of his presence.

Cain stopped to listen.

“I say we poke him.”

“Poke him?”

“Toward downtown, with a stick. One of those things with a crook on it, like the swabbies use.”

“A boat hook? Where we gonna find a boat hook?”

“Okay, so maybe we throw something. Make enough waves so he gets pushed back into the current at the end of the pier. Presto, he floats on down to the tenth. Then he's their problem.”

“It don't work that way. Besides, what if the tide's coming in? Then he floats uptown a couple blocks and we've turned a one-hour job into a whole night's headache, and I'm freezing my ass off as it is.”

“Whadda you mean, ‘tide'? It's a fucking river. It's upstream or downstream, and the tenth is downstream.”

“With a tide, numbnuts. Besides, he's bumping the wharf, so he's already ours. It's in the
Manual of Procedure.
‘Cases Occurring on Piers, Boats, and Navigable Waters.' Jurisdiction depends on which bulkhead or pier the body comes to rest on.”

Cain stepped forward, looming up out of the shadows like a ghost. The cop advocating the boat hook strategy jumped like he'd been goosed, while the one on the right reached for his sidearm.

“At ease, gentlemen.” Cain flashed his brand new shield. He recognized the patrolman on the right from the station house. “Officer Petrowski is correct. Article 7 from the manual. It was a question on the sergeant's exam.”

“They made you take that? I heard you was a charity hire.”

“Made me take all kinds of tests. So what have we got?”

“Floater. Have a look.”

Cain peered down from the bulkhead. Bottles and trash formed an atoll around a man's body, facedown in the dark water. Fully clothed, but bloated tightly in a T-shirt and work pants, like a roasting sausage ready to burst its casing with a pop and a sizzle. The smell of dead fish, boat fuel, and putrefaction wafted up to him in the gloom. Something rippled the water from just beneath the surface, a carp or a swimming rodent, nosing around the body. Bile surged to the base of his throat. He swallowed to keep it down, leaving a sour burn. Then he stepped back, took a deep breath. Petrowski and the other cop were talking again.

“You gettin' that smell?” the first one asked.

“What'd you expect?”

“No. Like something burning. You smell that?”

“It's the
Normandie.
”

“Can't be. That was, what, two months ago?”

“But she's still there, laying on her side. Burnt stuff really holds its stink, and it's less than twenty blocks away. So when the wind's right…”

“See? It's blowing south. If we'd just pushed him out far enough—”

Cain interrupted. “Did y'all call the morgue?”

“Fifteen minutes ago,” Petrowski said. “Said they were on their way.”

“Then I need y'all to secure the area.”

“Nothing down here this time of night but bums and railroad bulls.”

“Then keep the bums and bulls away. Split up, one to either side.”

“Yes, sir.”

They headed off in the same direction, Cain shaking his head at the insolence. He began counting to ten under his breath while they resumed their conversation in lowered tones.

“ ‘Y'all.' You get that? Said it twice, like he's from Dogpatch in the funny papers. So what did the krauts put in it to make it burn like that?”

“The
Normandie
? That wasn't the krauts. It was a dumb fuck welder with an acetylene torch. Threw a spark on some packing straw.”

“Likely story.”

“It was in the papers.”

“Like I said. If—”

“Hey!”
Cain shouted.

The cops froze.

“You guys forget how to secure a scene? One to either side. Now split up and get moving!”

“Yes, sir,” Petrowski answered.

“New guy who don't know shit,” the other one grumbled. “Already throwing his weight around.”

“He's got a rabbi.”

“Figures.”

“His father-in-law is what I hear. Some white-shoe asshole on Wall Street.”

Second time today he'd overheard a cop muttering about his rabbi. Cain was Baptist, and his father-in-law was Episcopal, but the meaning was obvious enough. A ward heeler, a political hack. A guy who called in favors from the powers that be. Obviously his new colleagues had found out that Cain's father-in-law, Harris Euston, a partner with a patrician law firm on Wall Street, had put in a word for him.

True enough, but it rankled all the same. Probably explained why everyone at the station house had been so standoffish. A few nods and hellos, not a whole lot more. He supposed he understood. Half the cops on the force seemed to be studying for the sergeant's exam, trying to climb the next rung on the ladder, to the level he'd already reached. He'd heard them firing questions back and forth in the break room while he ate his lunch alone, a ham sandwich with a Lucky for dessert, everyone acting like he was invisible. Although later Captain Mulhearn had said something about going out for beers next week, first round on him, like it was a rite of passage. So there was that to look forward to, he supposed.

The dimmed headlights of the meat wagon crept toward Cain down 30th, past the high brick walls of the Stanley Soap Works. Two men hopped out, equipped with netting and what looked like a pair of giant tongs. They got to work like it was no big deal, an everyday occurrence. Maybe it was.

For Cain it was a milestone—his first corpse in New York. He'd come across only one other floater, years ago, similarly bloated. A poor soul who'd snagged on a fallen tree in the Neuse River. Presumed drowned, until they rolled him over and saw the damage from a shotgun blast. Pellets of lead had remained lodged in his skin even as his chest wheezed out the sump of the river like a broken accordion. It took a week to make an ID, but Cain never solved it, and so far this one looked equally promising.

Cain had never grown accustomed to the gore and grief of homicides, but he was passionate about working them. Unsolved cases never faded over time. Like debts, they accrued interest and weighed on his mind. He was not particularly religious, but whenever he contemplated an afterlife he imagined being accosted from the moment he arrived by everyone whose murder he'd never closed, and who wanted to begin eternity like that?

Within minutes the guys from the morgue had maneuvered the body onto the dock next to a giant pile of coal. They flipped him onto his back, which made a slapping noise like a landed fish. The eye sockets were empty. Foul gases erupted from the open mouth along with a gray stream of water that rolled down his cheeks like spilled gravy.

Cain swallowed fast and breathed through his mouth. He stepped forward for a closer look.

A pink scar ran diagonally across the man's forehead toward a big dent in the cranium. Someone had bashed him hard enough to either kill him or knock him cold. Cain wondered if the man had still been alive when he hit the water. He imagined a body falling from way up on the George Washington Bridge, miles north of here, an impact which surely would've finished the job. But that seemed like a dumb place to dispose of a body—too showy, nothing that a professional would do. They'd use a boat, although a thorough practitioner would've also weighted the body to make it sink. Unless he was in too much of a hurry. Perhaps he—or they—had been interrupted, or were new to the business. Not that Cain knew much about how the murder business worked up here.

He reached into an overcoat pocket and withdrew a dog-eared steno pad, the latest in a series dating to his first days on the job back in Horton. The NYPD had given him an official one—a memo book, Mulhearn called it—but Cain preferred his old one, maybe because he used them for more than just work. Scribbled on pages between the case notes were grocery lists, nature sketches, birthday reminders, a bad poem or two. Having all those things in the same place made his life feel more stitched together, which seemed more important than ever now that almost everything else had fallen apart. Although he'd always wondered what the consequences would be if his notebook ever got entered into evidence—all those private musings and observations, laid out for judge and jury. His life in miniature, scarred by bullet points, cross-outs, and erasures. Cain on the page was a mess, barely legible.

“Anything in his back pockets?”

They shrugged.

“Heave him back over.”

They looked at each other for a second, then did as he asked, uncorking more gases, a cold smell of mud, the sediment of centuries from the bottom of the Hudson. Cain crouched and slid his hand into the man's front right trouser pocket, wet and tight.

“Hey,” one of the morgue guys said. “You shouldn't be doin' that.”

Cain pried loose a stick of gum, still in its wrapper. Stuck to it was a sodden ticket stub from a movie theater, the print faintly legible. Nothing else. He stood and wrote down the details.

“Pull up his shirt.”

They hesitated, gave him a look.

“C'mon. The sleeves, too.”

On the man's chest there was a scatter of a dozen or so small black circles—cigarette burns? Cain had once seen them on the body of a child, a memory that made him pause in his writing. On the man's right shoulder was a small, crude tattoo of a woman's name in cursive, “Sabine.” Otherwise, there was nothing that might identify him. Someone at the morgue would take his fingerprints, but without a name to go on there would be no way to make a match with the thousands upon thousands that were on file.

“Not carrying any ID, huh?” one of the morgue guys asked.

Cain shook his head.

“Another John Doe, then.”

“You get a lot of those?”

“Ninth this week. Maybe seven hundred a year.”

“Seven hundred?”
Cain shifted his weight to keep his bad leg from stiffening. “What happens to them?”

“With most of 'em, some friend or relative comes by in a week or two, stakes a claim, gives 'em a decent burial. If not, we keep 'em three months. Then it's off to City Island, up in the Bronx.”

“A potter's field?”

The guy nodded. “Big damn place. More than a hundred thousand. Stinks to high heaven.”

Cain shook his head in amazement. That was more populous than any city in his home state. He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose, the gases lingering in his nostrils. He knew from experience that his overcoat would smell this way in the morning. To him, at least.

“We'll take it from here unless you need to see more. Our pencil pusher will be around with some papers to sign.”

Cain nodded and stepped toward the bulkhead, where he cleared his throat and spit into the water, which again rippled from below, some creature rising to inspect the latest contribution. He pulled out his pack of Luckies, the flare of the match flashing on the river as he inhaled deeply, a small moment of tribute to his home state. Bright leaf tobacco, like his dad used to grow. Cain had once helped hang it, leaf by leaf, in big barns in the fields east of Horton, where the smell of curing fires had been as much a part of fall as carved pumpkins and college football.

A guy walked up out of the darkness, notebook in hand.

“You handling this?”

Cain nodded.

“Got an ID yet?”

“No. Nothing in his pockets but a gum wrapper and a ticket stub.”

“Beemans?”

“Huh?”

“The gum wrapper.”

He consulted his notebook. “Blackjack.”

“Anything else?”

“Big blow to the head, looked like. A bunch of small marks on his chest, you'll see 'em. Cigarette burns, if I had to guess. A small tattoo on his right shoulder with a name, Sabine.”

He asked Cain to spell it, so he did.

“Cause of death?”

“Thought that was your department?”

The guy smiled, kept scribbling.

“What about the stub? Ballgame?”

“Some movie theater on 96th.”

“The one up in Yorkville?”

“Don't know. Maybe.”

“Then he's either been in the drink a while, or never did his laundry. That joint's been closed since December. Kraut hangout. Shut down right after Pearl. The whole neighborhood's kraut.”

The guy scribbled for a few seconds more, then asked another question.

“And your name is?”

“Woodrow Cain. Detective sergeant, third division.”

“Kane with a K, like the movie?”

“With a C.”

“Like Cain and Abel?”

“In name only. Woodrow as in Wilson.”

Officer Petrowski ambled up.

“Hey, Cain. The morgue guy is here.”

“I got it covered.”

“No, dunce, back over by the body. You ain't talking to this jackal, I hope?” He scowled and drifted back into the night.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Sam Willett,
Daily News.
”

“Fuck.”

“Is that official?”

Cain frowned and gave him a pleading look that said
Go easy.
In return he got a look that said
Fat chance.