“It was the chloral hydrate,” I said. “And the funny thing is it wouldn’t have flagged anybody’s attention but mine. He only had a very small dose of chloral in him, not enough to have any pronounced effect on him. Certainly not enough to kill him.

“But he was a sober alcoholic, and that meant he shouldn’t have any chloral hydrate in him. As far as Eddie was concerned, sobriety was unequivocal. It meant no alcohol and no mood-changing or sedative drugs. He’d tried dicking around with marijuana shortly after he came into the program and he knew that didn’t work. He wouldn’t take something to help him sleep, not even one of those over-the-counter preparations, let alone a real drug like chloral hydrate. If he couldn’t sleep he’d have stayed awake. Nobody ever died from lack of sleep. That’s what they tell you when you first get sober, and God knows I heard it enough myself. ‘Nobody ever died from lack of sleep.’ Sometimes I wanted to throw a chair at the person who said it, but it turned out they were right.”

She was standing with her back to the refrigerator, one hand pressed palm-first against the white surface.

“I’d wanted to find out if he died sober,” I went on. “It seemed important to me, maybe because it would have been his one victory in a life that had been nothing but a chain of small defeats. And when I learned about the chloral I couldn’t let go of it. I went up to his apartment and I gave it a pretty decent search. If he’d had any pills there, I think I would have found them. Then I came downstairs and found a bottle of chloral hydrate in your medicine cabinet.”

“He said he couldn’t sleep, that he was going nuts. He wouldn’t take a drink or a bottle of beer so I gave him a couple of drops in a cup of coffee.”

“That’s no good, Willa. I gave you a chance to tell me that after I searched his place.”

“Well, you made such a big deal out of it. You made it sound as though giving a sedative to an alcoholic was like giving apples with razor blades in them to Halloween trick-or-treaters. I sort of hinted at it. I said he might have bought a pill on the street, or somebody might have given him one.”

“Coral hydrate.”

She looked at me.

“That’s what you called it. We had a conversation about it, and you were very good about getting the name of the drug wrong, as though this were the first time you were hearing about it. That was a nice touch, casual as could be, but the timing wasn’t so good. Because I was hearing it all just a few minutes after seeing a bottle of liquid chloral in your medicine chest.”

“I just knew it was something to take to go to sleep. I didn’t know the name of it.”

“It was typed right on the label.”

“Maybe I never read it properly in the first place. Maybe it never registered, maybe I haven’t got a mind for that kind of detail.”

“You? The woman who knew what Paris green was? The woman who would know how to poison a municipal water system if the word came down from the party leadership?”

“Then maybe it was just a slip of the tongue.”

“Just a slip of the tongue. And then, the next time I looked, the bottle was gone from the medicine cabinet.”

She sighed. “I can explain. It’s going to make me sound stupid, but I can explain.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“I gave him the chloral hydrate. I didn’t know any reason not to, for God’s sake. He came in to talk and he wasn’t going to have any coffee because he told me he was having a terrible time sleeping. I guess there was something on his mind, the same thing he was going to tell you about, but he didn’t give any indication what it was.”

“And?”

“I told him decaf wouldn’t keep him awake, and that this particular brand seemed to help people to sleep, at least it had that effect on me. And then I put a couple of drops of the chloral hydrate in his cup but didn’t let him know what I was doing. And he drank it right down and went up to bed, and the next time I saw him was when I walked in there with you and he was dead.”

“And the reason you didn’t say anything—”

“Was because I thought I’d killed him! I thought the dose I gave him made him drowsy, and then as a result he lost consciousness while he was half strangling himself, and that was why he died. And by this time you and I were sleeping together, and I was terrified you’d hold it against me, I knew what a fanatic you are about sobriety, and I couldn’t see what purpose it would serve to admit that I’d done something that might have contributed to his death.” She held her hands at her sides. “That may make me guilty of something, Matt. But it doesn’t mean I killed him.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Do you see, darling? Do you see what—”

“What I’m beginning to see is how good you are at improvisation. I suppose you had good training, living under false colors for all those years, putting up one front after another for your neighbors and co-workers. It must have been a great education.”

“You’re talking about the lies I told earlier. I’m not proud of that but I guess it’s true. I guess I’ve learned to lie as a reflex. And now I have to learn a new way of behavior, now that I’m involved with someone who’s really important to me. It’s a different ball game now, isn’t it, and I—”

“Cut the shit, Willa.”

She recoiled as if from a blow. “It won’t work,” I told her. “You didn’t just slip him a Mickey. You knotted the clothesline around the neck and hanged him from the pipe. It wouldn’t have been hard for you to do. You’re a big strong woman and he was a little guy, and he wouldn’t have put up a fight once you’d knocked him out with the chloral. You set the stage nicely, you stripped him, you put a couple of bondage magazines where they’d tell a good story. Where did you buy the magazines? Times Square?”

“I didn’t buy the magazines. I didn’t do any of the things you just said.”

“One of the clerks down there might remember you. You’re a striking woman, and they don’t get that many female customers in the first place. I don’t suppose it would take a whole lot of legwork to turn up a clerk who remembers you.”

“Matt, if you could hear yourself. The awful things you’re accusing me of. I know you’re tired, I know the kind of day you’ve had, but—”

“I told you to cut the crap. I know you killed him, Willa. You closed the windows to hold the smell in a little longer, to make the medical evidence a little less precise. Then you waited for someone to notice the stench and report it, to you or to the cops. You were in no hurry. You didn’t really care how long it took before the body was discovered. What mattered was that he was dead. That way his secret could die with him.”

“What secret?”

“The one he had trouble living with. The one you didn’t dare let him tell me. About all the other people you killed.”

I said, “Poor Mrs. Mangan. All her old friends are dying while she sits around waiting for her own death. And the ones who don’t die are moving away. There was a landlord around the corner who moved junkies into the building so that they would terrorize his rent-controlled tenants. He got fined for it. He should have gone to jail, the son of a bitch.”

She looked right at me. It was hard to read her face, hard to guess what was going on behind it.

“But a lot of people have been moving out of the neighborhood willingly,” I went on. “Their landlords buy them out, offer them five or ten or twenty thousand dollars to give up their apartments. It must confuse the hell out of them, to get offered more to vacate an apartment than they’ve paid all their lives to live in it. Of course, once they take the money, they can’t find a place they can afford to live in.”

“That’s the system.”

“It’s a funny system. You pay steady rent on a couple of rooms for twenty or thirty years and the guy who owns the building pays a small fortune to get rid of you. You’d think he’d want to hang on to a good steady tenant, but then the same kind of thing happens in business. Companies pay their best employees big bonuses to take early retirement and get the hell out. That way they can replace them with young kids who’ll work for lower salaries. You wouldn’t think it would work that way, but it does.”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“Don’t you? I managed to get hold of the autopsy report on Gertrude Grod. She had the apartment directly above Eddie’s, and she died right around the time he was starting to get sober. She had just about as much chloral hydrate in her as Eddie did. And her physician never prescribed the drug for her, and neither did anyone on staff at Roosevelt or St. Clare’s. I figure you knocked on her door and got her to invite you in for a cup of tea, and when she was looking the other way you dosed her cup. On your way out you could have made sure the window gates were unlocked, so that Eddie could slip in a few hours later with a knife.”

“Why would he do this for me?”

“My guess is you had a sexual hold on him, but it could have been anything. He was just starting to get sober and he wasn’t a model of mental health at the time. And you’re pretty good at getting people to do what you want them to do. You probably convinced Eddie he’d be doing the old lady a favor. I’ve heard you rap on the subject, how nobody should have to grow old that way. And she’d never know what happened to her, the drug would keep her from waking up, and so she’d never feel a thing. All he had to do was go out his window, climb up a flight, and stick a knife into a sleeping woman.”

“Why wouldn’t I just knife her myself? If I was already in her apartment and I got her to drink a dose of chloral.”

“You wanted it to go in the books as a burglary. Eddie could make it a lot more convincing. He could lock her door from the inside and put the chain latch on before he went back out the window. I saw the police report. They had to break the door down. That was a nice touch, made it look a lot less like a possible inside job.”

“Why would I want her dead?”

“That’s easy. You wanted her apartment.”

“Look around you,” she said. “I’ve already got an apartment. Ground floor, no stairs to climb. What did I need with hers?”

“I spent a lot of time downtown today. Most of the morning and a good part of the afternoon. It’s hard to chase things through the municipal record system, but if you know how to do it and what you’re looking for, there’s a lot you can find out. I found out who owns this building. An outfit called Daskap Realty Corp.”

“I could have told you that.”

“I also found out who owns Daskap. A woman named Wilma Rosser. I don’t suppose it would be terribly hard to prove that Wilma Rosser and Willa Rossiter are the same person. You bought the building and moved in, but you told everybody that you were just the super, that you got the apartment in return for your services.”

“You have to do that,” she said. “No landlord can live on the premises unless you hide the fact from your tenants. Otherwise they’re after you all the time for one thing or another. I had to be able to shrug and say the landlord says no or I can’t reach the landlord or whatever I had to say.”

“It must have been tough,” I said. “Trying to generate a positive cash flow here, with all of the tenants paying rent way below market.”

“It is tough,” she admitted. “The woman you mentioned, Gertrude Grod. She was rent-controlled, of course. Her annual rent came to less than what it cost to heat her place during the winter. But you can’t believe I’d kill her because of that.”

“Her among others. You don’t own just this building. You’re the principal in two other corporations besides Daskap. One of them, also owned ultimately by Wilma Rosser, owns the building next door. Another, owned by W. P. Taggart, owns two buildings across the street, the ones where you’re the superintendent. Wilma P. Rosser was divorced from Elroy Hugh Taggart three years ago in New Mexico.”

“I got in the habit of using different names. My political background and all.”

“The buildings across the street have been a very unsafe place to live since you bought them. Five people have died over there in the past year and a half. One was a suicide. They found her with her head in the oven. The rest all died of natural causes. Heart attacks, respiratory failure. When frail old people die alone, no one looks too hard to see what did it. You can smother an old man in his sleep, you can haul an old lady across the floor and leave her with her head in the gas oven. That’s a little dangerous because there’s always the possibility of an explosion, and you wouldn’t want to blow up the building just to kill a tenant. That’s probably why you only used that method once.”

“There’s no evidence of any of this,” she said. “Old people die all the time. It’s not my fault if the actuarial tables caught up with some of my tenants.”

“They were all full of chloral hydrate, Willa.”

She started to say something. Her mouth opened, but something stopped the words. She breathed heavily, in and out, and then her hand moved to her mouth and her index finger rubbed at the gum above the two false teeth, replacements for the ones she’d lost in Chicago. She sighed again, heavily, and something went out of her face and the set of her shoulders.

She picked up her coffee cup, took it over to the sink and emptied it. She got the bottle of Teacher’s from the cabinet and filled the cup. She drank deeply and shuddered. “God,” she said, “you must miss this stuff.”

“Sometimes.”

“I’d miss it. Matt, they were just waiting to die, just hanging on and hanging on.”

“And you were doing them a favor.”

“I was doing everybody a favor, myself included. There are twenty-four apartments in this building, all with pretty much the same layout. Renovated and sold as co-ops, every apartment in the building would bring a minimum of a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. You could probably get a little more for the front ones. They’re a little nicer, they’re airier, the light’s better. Maybe you could up the numbers a little if you did a really nice renovation. Do you know what that comes to?”

“Two million dollars?”

“Closer to three. That’s for each building. Buying them cost me every cent I inherited from my parents, and they’re mortgaged to the hilt. The rent roll barely covers payments and taxes and maintenance. I have a few tenants in each building who are paying close to market, and otherwise I couldn’t keep the buildings. Matt, do you think it’s fair that a landlord has to subsidize tenants by letting them hang on to an apartment for a tenth of what it’s worth?”

“Of course not. The fair thing is for them to die and for you to make twelve million dollars.”

“I wouldn’t be making that much. Once I’ve got a large percentage of vacant apartments I can sell the buildings to somebody who specializes in co-op conversions. If everything comes together the way it should, my profit will be about a million dollars a building.”

“So you’ll make four million.”

“I might hang on to one of the buildings. I’m not sure, I haven’t decided. But either way I’ll make a lot of money.”

“It sounds like a lot to me.”

“It’s actually less than it sounds like. A millionaire used to be a really rich person. Now when the top prize in a lottery is a million dollars it’s considered small-time. But I could live nicely on a couple of million dollars.”

“It’s a shame you won’t be able to.”

“Why won’t I?” She reached out and took my hand, and I felt her energy. “Matt, there won’t be any more killings. That ended a long time ago.”

“A tenant in this building died not two months ago.”

“In this building? Matt, that was Carl White, he died of cancer, for God’s sake!”

“He was full of chloral, Willa.”

Her shoulders sagged. “He was dying of cancer,” she said. “He would have died of his own accord in another month or two. He was in pain all the time.” She raised her eyes to mine. “You can believe what you want about me, Matt. You can think I’m the reincarnation of Lucrezia Borgia, but you really can’t turn Carl White’s death into a murder for gain. All I did was lose whatever rent he would have paid in however many months of life he’d have had left to him.”

“Then why did you kill him?”

“You’ll try to find a way to twist this, but it was an act of mercy.”

“What about Eddie Dunphy? Was that an act of mercy?”

“Oh, God,” she said. “That was the only one I regret. The others were people who would have killed themselves if they’d had the wit to think of it. No, Eddie wasn’t an act of mercy. Killing him was an act of self-preservation.”

“You were afraid he would talk.”

“I knew he would talk. He actually waltzed in here and told me he would talk. He was in AA, the poor damned fool, and he was babbling like some kind of religious convert who had Jesus Christ appear to him on the side of his toaster oven. He said he had to sit down with someone and tell him everything, but that I didn’t have anything to worry about because he would keep my name out of it. ‘I killed somebody in my building so the landlady could get her apartment, but I won’t tell you who put me up to it.’ He said the person he was going to tell wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“He was right. I wouldn’t have.”

“You’d have overlooked multiple homicide?”

I nodded. “I’d have been breaking the law, but it wouldn’t be the first law I ever broke or the first homicide I overlooked. God never appointed me to go around the world righting wrongs. I’m not a priest, but anything he said to me would have been under the seal of the confessional as far as I was concerned. I told him I’d keep his confidence and I would have.”

“Will you keep mine?” She moved closer to me, and her hands fastened first on my wrists, then moved to my forearms. “Matt,” she said, “I invited you in here the first day to find out how much you knew. But I didn’t have to take you to bed to manage that. I went to bed with you because I wanted to.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I didn’t count on falling in love with you,” she said, “but it happened. I feel foolish saying it now because you’ll twist it, but it happens to be the truth. I don’t know if you’re in love with me. I think you were starting to be, and I think that’s why you’re angry with me now. But there’s been something real and strong between us from the beginning, and I feel it now, and I know you do, too. Don’t you?”

“I don’t know what I feel.”

“I think you do. And you’re a good influence on me, you’ve already got me making real coffee. Matt, why don’t you give us a chance?”

“How can I do that?”

“It’s the easiest thing in the world. All you have to do is forget everything we said tonight. Matt, you just told me you weren’t put on the planet to right all wrongs. You’d have let it go if Eddie had told you about it. Why can’t you do as much for me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why not?” She leaned a little closer, and I could smell the scotch on her breath, and remember how her mouth tasted. She said, “Matt, I’m not going to kill anybody else. That’s over forever, I swear it is. And there’s no real proof I ever killed anyone, is there? A couple of people had a non-lethal dose of a common drug in their systems. Nobody can prove I gave it to them. Nobody can even prove I had it in my possession.”

“I copied the label the other day. I’ve got the number of the prescription, the issuing pharmacy, the date of issue, the physician’s name—”

“The doctor will tell you I have trouble getting to sleep. I bought the chloral for my own consumption. Matt, there’s no real physical evidence. And I’m a respectable citizen, I’m a property owner, I can afford good lawyers. How good a case could they make against me when all they have is circumstantial evidence?”

“That’s a good question.”

“And why should we go through all of that?” She laid a hand on my cheek, stroked along the grain of my beard. “Matt, darling, we’re both tense, it’s all crazy, it’s a crazy day. Why don’t we go to bed? Right now, the two of us, why don’t we take off our clothes and go to bed and see how we feel afterward. How does that sound to you?”

“Tell me how you killed him, Willa.”

“I swear he never felt a thing, he never knew what was happening. I went up to his room to talk with him. He let me in. I gave him a cup of tea and put the drops in it. Then I came back downstairs, and when I went up again later he was sleeping like a lamb.”

“And what did you do?”

“What you said. It was clever of you to figure it out. You’re a good detective.”

“How’d you manage it?”

“He was already stripped. All he was wearing was the T-shirt. I got the clothesline hooked up, and then I sat him up and fixed the noose around his neck. He never woke up. I just pulled up on the clothesline and let his own body weight shut off his oxygen. That’s all.”

“And Mrs. Grod?”

“It was the way you figured it. I got her to take the chloral and I unlocked her window gates. I didn’t kill her. Eddie did that. He made it look like a struggle, too, and he locked the doors from inside and went back downstairs on the fire escape. Matt, they were all tired of life, the ones I killed. I just gave them a hand in the direction they were already heading.”

“The merciful angel of death.”

“Matt?”

I took her hands from my shoulders, stepped back. Her eyes widened, and I could see her trying to gauge which way I was leaning. I took a full breath and let it out and took off my suit jacket and hung it over the back of the chair.

“Ah, my darling,” she said.

I took off my tie and strung it over the jacket. I unbuttoned my shirt, tugged it out of the waistband of my slacks. She smiled and moved to embrace me. I lifted a hand to hold her off.

“Matt—”

I drew my undershirt up over my head and off. She couldn’t miss the wire. She saw it right away, wrapped around my middle, taped to my skin, but it took a minute or two for the implications to sink in.

Then she got it, and her shoulders sagged with the knowledge and her face collapsed. One hand reached out, gripping the table to keep her from falling.

While she was pouring herself more scotch, I got back into my clothes.