The Murder on Mount Vernon Street

Eleven months went by; the winter and the spring went with them, and Pike did not use the address on the card.

He kept it in the back of the drawer in the desk in his flat, behind the checkbook and the insurance folder, and he did not look at it and he did not throw it away. He told himself at first that he was keeping it in case, and then the weeks folded over and he stopped telling himself anything about it at all.

It was a quiet year, as years go. Hale came to the office twice, in the spring and in the summer, and sat in the chair across the desk with his hat on his knee and talked about the college and a parcel of land in the western part of the state, and both times he looked ten years younger than his age. Once, in the summer visit, Hale said, quite easily, that the young man was in the past and that Pike should forget the lane and the whole business. Pike said that he had forgotten it. Hale smiled and said that was good, and thanked him, and went down the stairs.

Pike had not forgotten it. He had simply put it away, the way he put away a case that has gone cold, and he had gone on with the ordinary work of a lawyer's life, which is the reading of documents and the settling of estates and the small mercies of other people's families.

In October of the following year, a man was killed on Mount Vernon Street, on Beacon Hill, and the whole city learned about it before breakfast.

The witness was a woman who lived alone on the third floor of a house on the north side of the street, in a small apartment with a bay window that looked down onto the pavement and across it to the brick face of the houses opposite. What follows is what she told the police that night, in her own words as the officer took them down, and what the department wrote into its file. She was thirty or so and she worked at a hospital and she kept late hours and she never slept easily. Her sister, who lived across the city, had said she would come by that evening and had not come, so the woman sat up in the dark by the window with the light off and waited.

It was a clear night. The moon was up and past full and the street below was lit the way a street is lit in a painting, all the edges clean and the shadows sharp, and the woman had watched the street for a while and had thought, as she said later, that she had never felt more at peace with anything.

Then two men came into the street from the corner.

The first was older. He had white hair and he carried himself well and he walked slowly and he had the look of a man who had spent his life being listened to. He was a congressman, though the woman did not know that then. He was seventy-five years old and his name was Ward Ellis, and he had lived four blocks away for forty years and had known almost everybody on the street for most of that time, and he was out walking because he walked every night after dinner and because the weather was fine.

The second was smaller. He came the other way, from the far corner, and the woman noticed him only because of how quickly he came. He was young and short and he was in a good coat and he walked as though he were late. The two men met in the middle of the street, almost directly below the window.

The woman did not think anything of it. She thought the young man had stopped to ask directions, because the older man pointed down the street, and then pointed across it, and the two of them stood there in the moonlight.

Ellis was talking in his easy way. She could not hear the words. But she could see his face, and the moon was on it, and she remembered afterward that he had looked kind and a little amused and entirely at ease, the way a man looks when a stranger has asked him a simple question and he is glad to help.

The young man did not answer him.

He stood with his hands at his sides and his head down and listened, and the woman, watching, saw him move his weight from one foot to the other, and saw the hands working, and understood that he was not listening at all. There was something in his attitude that she could not name even later when she tried, a coiled stillness, as though the question had been asked of a dog.

Ellis must have seen it too, because he took a small step back.

And then the young man came apart.

He did not shout. He did not shove. He reached down and came up with a cane, a heavy black cane that had been hanging from his wrist, and he brought it round and down and struck the old man across the head and shoulders, once, so hard that the sound carried up the brick to the third-floor window, and then he struck again, and then again, and the old man went down onto the pavement and did not get up, and the young man continued to strike him where he lay, and it went on long enough that the woman, who had not screamed and had not looked away, began to understand that the street below was not a street anymore but a thing that was happening to her.

At some point the cane broke. She heard it. It gave in the middle with a dry crack, and one half flew off across the pavement and stopped in the gutter, and the young man kept the other half, and kept on striking with it, and then he began to trample, and then he stopped.

He stood over what was on the ground and looked down at it.

And then he laughed. She heard that too, through the glass, though the window was shut. It was not a long laugh, and it was not a laugh of triumph; she said afterward that it was the sound of a man setting down a weight he had carried a long way.

Then he looked up and down the street, unhurried, and he walked to the corner and put up his hand, and a car that had been turning the far corner stopped for him, and he got in, and the car went away toward the river.

The woman sat where she was for a while and then she went down onto the floor of the room and stayed there.

It was two in the morning when she came to herself and called the police. The body was still on the pavement. It had been there nearly an hour. The officer who came first wrote down that the man was dead before he hit the ground, which the medical examiner later agreed with and phrased differently.

There was a wallet on the body and a watch and a ring, which had not been touched. There was no other paper on it except a single envelope, sealed and stamped, that Ellis had been carrying to the post, and the envelope was addressed in his own hand to Warren Pike, Attorney, State Street, Boston.

The detective in charge of the case was named Ray Suarez. He was good at his work and did not like to be told so, Pike judged within a minute of meeting him, and he wrote things down in a small book and read them back to himself as though he had not written them.

The next morning, before Pike had had his coffee, a uniformed officer came to the flat on Marlborough Street with the envelope in a plastic sleeve.

Pike had known Ward Ellis for thirty years. Ellis was a client and had been for eleven years, and a friend before that, in the way of two men who serve on the same committee and disagree about nothing that matters. Pike turned the envelope over and looked at the fine, cramped, upright hand on the front of it, which was Ellis's hand, and did not need to open it to know that the man who wrote it was dead. He opened it anyway, with the officer watching him do it. There was one page in it, in the same hand: a young man who had been standing across from the house for a month, who had spoken to him twice on the street in a way that was not quite an approach, and whom he had not wanted to mention to his wife. He had been going to ask Pike what a man does about a thing like that. There was no name in it.

He dressed without hurrying and went down to the station, and they took him to a room with a sheet and a table, and he looked at the face on the table for about four seconds.

"It is Ward Ellis," he said. "I am sorry to say it. I have known him for thirty years and I am the executor of his estate."

Suarez wrote that down. When he had finished he asked Pike if he could not have been mistaken, and Pike said that he could not.

Then Suarez told him what the witness had seen. He told it in order, plainly, without decoration, and when he had finished he went to a locker and came back with something wrapped in paper and set it on the table between them and unwrapped it.

It was the broken half of a cane.

It was black and heavy and it had a short strap of leather still looped through the hole at the handle end, and the wood along the break was pale and splintered, and on the handle there was a thin ring of silver that Pike had put there himself, years ago, with three letters cut into it.

Pike looked at it for a while. He did not touch it.

"A person of small stature," he said.

"Particularly small and particularly wicked-looking is how the woman puts it," Suarez said. "She is a good witness. She stayed at the window the whole time and she did not look away until it was done, and she is not sure she could pick him out of a line, and she is sure about the height. Do you know this stick."

"I know it," Pike said.

He sat back. He had the sense, which he had not had in years, of a document he had signed long ago coming back to him across a desk.

"I gave it to a man," he said. "A heavy stick for a man who had just had knee surgery and needed something to lean on, and I gave him that one because it was the heaviest thing in the shop and because I thought the weight would do him good. He carried it for a while and then he stopped carrying it. I have seen it in Adrian's hall since, standing in the umbrella stand by the door. It was there in the spring. It was there in the summer."

Suarez looked at him for a moment.

"Whose hall," he said.

Pike told him. He told him the name and the address, and he told him that he would rather not say the rest of it in this room, and Suarez said that was fine and closed his book and put on his coat.

They went out to the street and got into a car. It was a little after ten in the morning and the fog had come in off the water and the city was going gray and soft at the edges, and the driver went slowly because he had to. Suarez did not talk and Pike did not talk, and the car crossed the river and worked its way up toward Central Square, past the shops and the laundries and the signs in three languages, and turned onto the street that was written on the card in Pike's desk.

It was not a good street, but it was not the worst street, and the building was a plain brick block with a door that opened onto the sidewalk. Pike had expected the young man to be in a room at the top of a loud staircase, and he was not. He was in a first-floor apartment at the back, behind a door that had a good lock on it and a name beside the bell that belonged to no one.

The woman who let them in owned the building. She was old and thin and ivory-faced, and she had the manners of a much better hotel, and when Suarez told her who he was and whose rooms these were, her face did something that Pike would have described in a file as quickened interest.

"Ah," she said. "Is he in trouble."

"He is in trouble," Suarez said.

"Then come in," she said. "He is not here. He was here in the night. He came in late and he went out again inside the hour and I have not seen him since. He comes and goes. It was two months once. That is not strange for him. He pays and he is quiet and I do not ask."

She had one key and she did not want to use it, and Suarez took it from her and used it.

The rooms behind the door were two in number, and they were one room and a small back room with a bed, and the first thing that struck Pike was that they were beautiful.

That was the word and he could not get past it. The building was cheap and the corridor was cheap and the door was cheap, and inside there was a thick carpet in a color that had been chosen and not fallen into, and a side table that was old and good, and a closet that was full of wine, and plate on the sideboard that was real silver, and on the wall a painting that Pike knew, because he had seen it in Adrian Hale's own dining room the year before.

The rooms had been used, and used hard, and left in a hurry.

The drawers stood open and the clothes were on the floor with the pockets turned out like gloves. The bed was stripped. On the hearth there was a pile of gray ash, and it was too much ash for a fire, and it was the wrong kind of ash.

Suarez went down on one knee by the hearth with a pair of tongs from a stand beside it and went through it without hurrying. He found a corner of something stiff and green and pulled it out and brushed it off, and it was the butt end of a checkbook, burned through except for the last few stubs, and on those stubs there were figures and initials, written in the fine cramped hand Pike had seen before, on a card in a lane and on a checkbook in a bank.

"The other half of the stick is behind the door," Suarez said, pointing with his chin. "I saw it when we came in. I do not think he meant to leave it and I do not think he noticed."

Pike stood in the middle of the beautiful room and looked at the ash that had been a checkbook and at the second half of a black cane with a leather strap leaning against the wall behind a door that had a name on it that belonged to no one, and he thought about a young man in a lane who had put a card in his pocket and told him to come and see him, and who had been so careful, in everything, to seem like a man with nothing to hide.

"Where is he," Pike said.

"He is gone," Suarez said. "He was gone before the woman downstairs knew he had come home. If he took the last car to the river, he could be anywhere, and people like this, they have somewhere. They always have somewhere."

He stood up and put the checkbook butt into a paper bag and wrote something on the outside of it with a pen.

"There is a bank on this," he said. "There will be a name and there will be money. There is always money. And when we find the money we will find him, or we will find the next place he goes when he runs out of it."

Pike did not answer. He was looking at the painting on the wall, the one that had hung in another house until the year before, and he was thinking that a man who is careful enough to bring his own carpet and his own wine and his own picture into a cheap flat at the back of a bad street is not a man who is hiding.

He is a man who has been given a room of his own.

The woman downstairs was still in the corridor when they came out, and she asked Suarez again what the young man had done, and Suarez told her that he had killed a man on Mount Vernon Street the night before, in front of a witness, with a cane. She was quiet for a moment. Then she said that she had always known there was something, that she had said so, that he had a way of looking at you, and she asked whether there would be a reward. Suarez told her that there would be one, and wrote her name in his book, and she seemed satisfied and a little ashamed of being satisfied.

On the way down to the car, Suarez said one more thing to Pike, in the tone of a man thinking out loud.

"The strange part is not the money," he said. "The money I understand. The strange part is the checkbook. A man burns a checkbook on his way out the door. That is what you do when you are finished with a name. That is not the act of a man who is running from a murder. That is the act of a man who is done being whoever he used to be."

Pike got into the car. The fog had thinned a little and the river was the color of a nickel, and he sat with his hands in his coat and watched the far bank come up, and he said nothing at all, because he had begun to understand that he had been wrong about the thing that mattered, and had been wrong about it for a year.

He had thought he was watching a man who was afraid of a young man.

He was beginning to think that what he had been watching, on Kirkland Street, across a fire, in a warm room, was a man who was afraid of the thing he had made.