Small Town

There were things he would have to do. Shevlin’s hands and head would have to be disposed of properly. He didn’t care if someone found the other body parts, although it would be fine with him, and not all that unlikely, if they escaped detection and spent eternity in a landfill. But it didn’t matter, really, if the city discovered that one more of its residents had died. His sole interest lay in keeping them from knowing to whom the various body parts had once belonged.

Fingerprints and dental records made the hands and head considerably more identifiable than the rest of the man. He could knock out the teeth, toss them in the river. Weight the toothless skull and sink it somewhere. Slice the flesh from the palms and the tips of the fingers before disposing of the hands.

A call to Shevlin’s office would keep his absence from setting off any alarms. If someone did miss him and got the doorman to check his apartment, they’d find nothing suspicious within. He didn’t think anyone would think to check the boat, certainly not for a while.

And he only needed it for a while.

The motion of the boat was restful, even hypnotic. He dozed off and slept for a little while, then woke up and stayed where he was, enjoying the gentle rocking motion, enjoying the tight quarters, enjoying everything about his new home.

He felt wonderfully at peace.

twenty-five

The caller, who’d given his name as if she ought to recognize it, had a straightforward request. Would she, as a gallery owner in Chelsea, be willing to donate a piece of art to be auctioned for the benefit of Chelsea Remembers?

What, she wondered, was that? It couldn’t be the first thing that came to mind, which was a memoir by an ex-president’s daughter. But what the hell was it?

She confessed to an unfamiliarity with the cause, and the caller explained that Chelsea Remembers was an organization formed to raise funds for a memorial to the neighborhood residents, male and female, gay and straight, who had lost their lives in the Carpenter’s savage firebombing spree.

She said, “A memorial? Like a statue?”

“There’s been no decision yet as to what form the memorial might take. A statue is certainly a possibility, but there have been suggestions ranging from special streetlights in front of the three sites to an annual release of doves.”

Ravens, she thought, would better suit the men who’d perished at Death Row. Ravens with just a touch of polish on their talons.

Just say yes, it’s a worthy cause, I’d love to help, she told herself. But something made her say, “Maybe I’m missing something. What’s the point, exactly?”

“The point?”

“I mean, do we have to throw up a monument every time somebody steps in front of a bus? How much bad public sculpture does a city need? I mean—”

The voice turned to ice. “Miss Pomerance, our small community lost eighty-seven members in one utterly horrific hour. The lucky ones were burned to death at once. The others spent hours or days in agony and then died. Still others recovered, and after a few years of skin grafts some of them may actually look halfway human. The point, if you will, would seem to be implicit in the organization’s name. The point is that Chelsea remembers.”

“I—”

But he hadn’t finished. “We can only show our remembrance by doing something. Few of the victims had dependents, so aiding the families of the victims would indeed be pointless. Many were estranged from their families, if they had families at all. This neighborhood was their family, Miss Pomerance, and some memorial, some bad and surely unnecessary piece of public sculpture, would seem to some of us to be a good deal better than nothing.”

“I am terribly sorry,” she said. “Please tell me your name again.”

“It’s Harwood Zeller.”

Oh, God, she did know who he was. He owned several buildings on Ninth Avenue, and operated a restaurant in one of them and an antique shop in another.

“I have to apologize,” she told him. “I don’t know what got into me. Actually I do, I just got off the phone with my mother, and—”

“Say no more. When I get off the phone with my mother, I’m apt to bite people.”

“You’re very gracious, and of course I’ll want to contribute something.”

She got the particulars, made notes, and by the time she got off the phone they were on Woody and Susan terms. She pushed back her chair and tried to figure out what her misplaced burst of candor was going to cost her. If she’d just said yes in the first place she could have made them perfectly happy with one of her mistakes, perhaps a Lynah Throp watercolor. She had a dozen of them moldering in her storage bin, bold primitives of fanciful animals that had impressed her on first sight and had never impressed anyone else, not even a little. She’d never sell them — she’d never display them again, so how could she? — and the chance to unload one and get a tax deduction in the balance was a godsend.