Small Town

As were his whereabouts. The Carpenter had stayed at the same Midtown flophouse for several days after his attack on the three Chelsea bars, moving out only a day or two before his picture was on every front page. He left without telling anybody, just walked off and didn’t come back. By the time a tip brought the police to the hotel, his room had long since been given to another man. He’d left nothing behind, aside from fingerprints that made it certain he’d been there.

Since then there’d been no end of sightings, no end of squad cars dispatched to locations throughout the five boroughs. But nothing had panned out. William Boyce Harbinger, aka the Carpenter, had vanished from the earth or into it.

Over coffee he said, “Actually, there’s a possibility the charges might be dropped. That’s what my attorney’s pushing for.”

“I should hope so. That’s Maury Winters, if I’m not mistaken? Now there’s a man who could write a book. Of course his best stories are probably ones he’s not allowed to tell.”

They traded Maury Winters stories and then Creighton felt sufficiently at ease to raise a question that had been bothering him. “If there was no case,” he said. “If it turned out Harbinger somehow got into the woman’s apartment and killed her—”

“Which I’m convinced is what happened.”

“Well, would it be harmful from a publishing standpoint? If there was no trial, and the story more or less petered out?”

“And would we consequently drop you like a hot rock? John, you don’t need to go on trial for your life in order to become a star. You’re a star already.”

“That’s very nice, but my sales figures—”

“A, never amounted to much, and B, are meaningless at this point. You’re a man who’s been the focus of considerable attention, and on the strength of that plus your unquestioned talent and ability and, I must say, an agent with more savvy than most, you’ve become a writer able to command a three-million-dollar advance. Which I was thrilled to pay, and not because I had hopes that you’d say something poignant on Court TV, or have a second career as an astronaut and be the first man to set foot on Mars. As far as promotion and publicity are concerned, you’re already as hot a ticket as you have to be.”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“Well, be sure. John, I didn’t just make a deal for one book. I bought your whole backlist, which we’ll bring out in paper a month before we do Darker Than Water in hardcover, and I like that title more and more, I hope you go on liking it yourself. Where was I?”

“The backlist.”

“The backlist, which we’ll sell the hell out of, trust me, but let me remind you that we also bought Darker Than Water plus the book that comes after it. You’re not even thinking about that second book, and there’s no reason why you should be, but I’m thinking about it, and I’m thinking of the books you’ll write after that, which we haven’t contracted for but will when the time comes. I want you at Crown until the end of time, John, or until I retire, whichever comes first, and that’s not because I think I can milk a few sales out of a few newspaper headlines. So all I want is for you to live and be well and write some terrific books, and if that lunatic walked into a police station tomorrow and confessed to everything from the Lindbergh kidnapping on, and said that oh, by the way, there was a woman he strangled on Charles Street, John, I’d be the second happiest person on the planet.”

“The second happiest? Oh, because I’d be the happiest.”

“Wouldn’t you? And I’ll tell you something else, just from a purely promotional standpoint, and that’s to have a best-selling author who it turns out was falsely accused of a crime committed by the notorious Carpenter — John, if you were a publicist, do you think you’d have much trouble getting a little media coverage for somebody like that?” She sighed. “But first they have to catch the son of a bitch, and the sooner the better. How he must hate us!”

“Us?”

“New Yorkers. For living when his children died. And his wife, or do you think he killed her himself?”

There’d been speculation to that effect; the physician, long the Harbinger family doctor, admitted under questioning that he’d signed the death certificate without looking too closely. It had looked like a suicide to him, and out of sympathy to the widower he’d written cardiac arrest in the space for cause of death. Which was true enough, in that the woman’s heart had indeed ceased to beat.

The cremation, and the subsequent disappearance of the ashes, made it forever impossible to determine whether Carole Harbinger’s death had or had not been at her husband’s hands. Whether it was part of his problem, in other words, or part of his solution.

He said, “I don’t know if he hates us. I don’t know what it is that drives him. The Curry Hill murders, the bloodbath that got him his name, that looked like a thrill killing, but that’s not what drives this guy. I don’t see him as having any fun.”

“God, I should hope not!”