The Killing

It was nine months later, in October, that the city of Cambridge woke up to a murder.

The details were few, and horrible, and the only reason they were on the front page of every paper in the Northeast was that the dead man was Judge Merritt Ashby.

What the police had was one witness, and what they had of her was a statement taken twice and signed and read out at the inquest in November. She worked nights as a home health aide, in a house that backed onto a service lane near the river. She had gone up to bed a little after eleven. The night was clear. The lane below her window was lit up flat and bright by a nearly full moon. She was, by her own account, a romantic girl, and she sat down on the storage chest under the window to enjoy it — she said afterwards, often, and always with tears, that she had never in her life felt so at peace with the world or so kindly disposed toward everyone in it.

And as she sat, she became aware of an older man, silver-haired, beautifully dressed, coming along the lane. And coming up toward him, to meet him, a second man — small, and at first she paid him no attention at all.

They met directly beneath her window. The older man bowed, and spoke to him politely, and the moon was on his face, and she was pleased to watch it, because it seemed to her to be the face of a genuinely good person. She could not hear what was said. Once or twice it seemed as if the older man were asking directions: he pointed east, down the lane.

Then her eye went to the other one, and her stomach dropped, because she knew him. He had been to the house. He had come once, on business with her employer, and she had disliked him so much that she had asked whether he had to come again.

He was carrying a cane, turning it over in his hands. He answered nothing at all, and stood there listening with the patience of a man about to lose it. The judge pointed east and said something else, and the small man brought his heel down on the pavement, once, hard. She heard it. Two floors up, through a shut window, she heard that heel, and she would say so for the rest of her life. Then the cane came up over his shoulder. The judge took one half-step back. And the small man went past all bounds and struck him down, and stood over him, and beat him, and beat him, until she heard the bones break from the second floor and saw the body jump in the road.

Then she fainted. When she came to it was two in the morning, and she called the police. That was the whole of what she saw; the statement ran to four pages, and most of the rest of it was about the moon.

The man was long gone. The dead man lay in the middle of the lane, mangled beyond any useful description. The cane had been of some dense tropical hardwood, and the force of the thing had snapped it in half: one broken length lay in the gutter, and the other, without question, had been taken away.

In the judge's pockets were a wallet with nine hundred dollars in it and a watch worth more. No cards. No papers. Only one thing: a stamped, sealed envelope, addressed in a fine hand to Howard Vane, Esq.

They brought it to Vane's office the next morning before he was dressed, and when he had heard the story he stood a moment with his hand flat on the envelope and said, “I'll say nothing until I have seen the body.” He opened it in the car. Inside was a single sheet in Adrian Kessler's hand, dated three days earlier, about nothing at all: a question about a right-of-way on the Fenwick Street property, on a matter the two of them had settled four years before. Vane put it back in his pocket and did not mention it to anyone for a year.

He was at the station by nine.

“Yes,” he said, looking down. “I know him. I am very sorry to tell you that this is Judge Merritt Ashby.”

“Jesus,” said the officer. And then, without any change of voice at all, in the flat tone of a man who has just been handed the best week of his career: “This is going to be very large. Perhaps you can help us with the other one.”

He told Vane what the aide had seen, and laid the broken half of the cane on the table.

Vane had already gone cold at the name Voss. When they put the stick in front of him, he went colder still, because he knew it. It was a blackthorn cane with a silver band, and he had bought it in Dublin in 2009 and given it to Adrian Kessler for Christmas.

“Is this Voss a small man?” he asked.

“Small,” said the officer. “And according to the witness, extremely unpleasant to look at.”

Vane was quiet for a moment. Then he said: “If you'll come with me in my car, I think I can take you to where he lives.”

It was a quarter past nine, and the fog that had been threatening all morning had come down on the city. They drove across the river slowly, through streets that opened and closed and opened again, and Vane looked out at the traffic going the other way, and understood that he was frightened of the police in a way he had not been frightened of anything since he was a boy.

On Fenwick Street the fog lifted for a moment and showed him a cheap courtyard, a laundromat with a broken sign, a shuttered taqueria, three men standing around a shopping cart, and half a dozen kids in the doorways; and then the fog came down again, and shut it all off, like a curtain drawn across a stage. This was where Calvin Voss lived. Voss, who was heir to a third of a company Vane had personally valued at four hundred million dollars.

A woman answered the door. She was old, and precise, and her manners belonged in a better building than the one she was standing in. Yes, Mr. Voss kept rooms here. He had come in very late the previous night — very late — and gone again within the hour. There was nothing strange in that; his habits were irregular; he was often away; in fact it had been nearly two months since she had seen him before last night.

“Very well,” said Vane. “We would like to see the rooms.” And when she began to explain that this was impossible, he added: “I had better tell you who this is. This is Detective Marisol Ruiz, Cambridge Police.”

Something came into the old woman's face — a flash of mean delight.

“Ah,” she said. “He's in trouble. What has he done?”

Vane and Ruiz exchanged a look.

“Well, now,” said Ruiz. “He doesn't seem to be a very popular gentleman. Let's have a look.”

The building was empty except for her, and Voss had used two rooms in it. They were furnished with real money and surprisingly good taste: a wine fridge, silver on the sideboard, a lithograph on the wall that Vane suspected had come out of Kessler's house, rugs that matched the drapes. And they had been gone over in a hurry. Clothes on the floor with the pockets turned inside out. Every drawer pulled and dropped. And on the hearth, a pile of gray ash, as though a quantity of paper had been burned there not long before.

Ruiz went through the ash with a letter opener and came up with the spine of a checkbook, which had survived. Behind the door, they found the other half of the blackthorn cane. And a call to the bank established that there was a balance in the name of Calvin Voss of slightly over two hundred thousand dollars, on deposit, in an account opened eight years before.

“You can rely on it, Mr. Vane,” said Ruiz, and Vane, who had spent forty years listening to people, could hear the pleasure in it. “I've got him. He lost his nerve, or he'd never have left the stick, and he'd never have burned the checkbook. Money is that man's whole life. All we have to do is wait for him at the bank and get the flyers out.”

Which proved, in the event, easier said than done. Calvin Voss, it turned out, was known to almost nobody. His signature card at the bank, which should have carried a thumbprint and a second piece of identification, carried neither, and the clerk who had opened the account in 2016 had died the following winter. He had never been photographed. The electricity at the Fenwick Street rooms was in the landlord's name and paid in cash, monthly, in an envelope. And the four people who had seen him close up described him so differently that Ruiz, at one point, put down the file and walked around the block.

They agreed on one thing only. The doorman said that in eight years Voss had never once looked at him — at his face, that is; he looked at the doorman's shoes. The woman who cleaned the rooms said the same thing in different words: that his eyes went past you and settled somewhere behind you. Ruiz wrote both of those down, and then sat looking at the two sentences for a while, and then closed the file.