But not in plain view. After briefly pretending that he was Steichen, he left where he thought that the great photographer had placed his camera and retreated toward the trees, walkways, and benches of the park. At night, he became only one of the park’s many indistinct visitors, most of them homeless, lounging on the benches.
He thought, and he waited.
On schedule at eleven o’clock, Burt Forsyth got out of a taxi on Fifth Avenue. As the taxi drove away, merging with the headlights of traffic, Burt paused just long enough to light a cigarette, the glow from his lighter possibly intended as a beacon, something to attract Pittman’s attention and help Pittman recognize him.
Then Burt walked into the park, passing the war memorial flagpole. Obviously, Pittman thought, I’m supposed to go over to him. He doesn’t know where I am.
After staring behind Burt to see if anyone was following, Pittman stood from his shadow-obscured bench.
But as he approached, Burt’s expression intensified. He shook his head slightly, firmly in what seemed a warning. He gestured unobtrusively ahead and continued past Pittman.
Pittman did his best not to call out to Burt. I’m supposed to follow, is that it? In case we’ve got company? To be extracautious?
As casually as he could make it seem, Pittman took a path that ran parallel to the one Burt had chosen. Burt crossed the park, went up to Twenty-sixth Street, and proceeded to the right along it. Following, Pittman walked by a white marble court building, turned east onto Twenty-sixth Street, ignored the darkened expensive shops on his right, and concentrated on Burt ahead of him.
Halfway along the block, Burt abruptly stepped out of sight beneath a makeshift roof that protected the sidewalk in a construction area. When Pittman hurried to catch up to him, he saw that Burt was waiting in the shadows behind two Dumpsters and a jungle of metal scaffolds.
Pittman veered toward him.
“I don’t know what to do, Burt. The television news makes me look like a maniac.”
“I told you it was bad. What happened? How did you get into this mess?”
“I didn’t kill Millgate.”
“Then why were you seen running from his room?”
“There’s an innocent explanation.”
“Innocent? Your fingerprints are on his life-support system. What were you doing in—?”
“Burt, you have to believe me. This is all a big mistake. Whatever caused Millgate’s death, I had nothing to do with it.”
“Hey, I believe you. But I’m not the one you have to convince. How will you explain to the police about—?”
A sudden shadow made Burt turn from the scaffolding toward the sidewalk. Hearing a noise, Pittman glanced in that direction as well, seeing a man loom into view. The man was silhouetted by a streetlight, so Pittman couldn’t see his face, but he could see the oversized windbreaker the man wore.
The man made a gesture, pulling something out.
No! Pittman stumbled back. Trapped, he bumped against garbage cans.
Cornered, seeing the pistol the man was aiming, Pittman had no other defense except to raise his gym bag, preparing to throw it.
When the man fired, the pistol’s silencer reduced the sound of the shot so that it wasn’t any louder than a fist against a pillow.
The bullet hit the gym bag, bursting through, missing Pittman as he lost his balance, falling among garbage cans, striking concrete.
The gunman came into the shadows. Pittman stared up at him in panic, expecting the next bullet to be between his eyes. But a metallic clatter startled the gunman and made him swing toward Burt, who had stumbled against a section of scaffolding. The gunman shot him in the chest.
Gasping, Burt lurched back.
By then, Pittman was frantically yanking at the zipper on his gym bag.
As the gunman returned his attention to Pittman, Burt collided against the bars of the scaffolding and rebounded off them, pawing at the air, involuntarily grabbing the first thing in front of him: the gunman. Finding Burt’s arms around his shoulders, the gunman pulled them away, spun, and shot him again, this time in the face.
Pittman had the gym bag open.
The gunman pivoted toward him and raised the pistol.
Pittman gripped the .45, cocked it, and pulled the trigger. The unsilenced .45 made a roar that seemed all the worse because it contrasted with the three previous muffled shots. The roar felt like hands slamming against Pittman’s ears. It echoed, amplified by the narrow confines. Pittman’s ears rang as he fired and fired again.
Then he stopped.
Because he didn’t have a target. The man was no longer there.
The confinement had helped Pittman’s aim. The gunman was on his back, blood spewing from his chest, throat, and left eye.
Pittman retched, tasting bile. But he couldn’t allow himself to give in. Burt. He had to help Burt. He scrambled toward him, felt for a pulse, but he couldn’t find one. No! Burt!
Despite the torturous ringing in his ears, he suddenly heard shouting, a siren in the distance. He felt paralyzed with shock. His eyes stung as he took one last look at his friend. Then, with the siren wailing nearer, his paralysis broke. He rushed to grab the gym bag, shoved the .45 into it, and charged away from the scaffolds.
As a woman screamed on the opposite side of the street, Pittman raced east along Twenty-sixth Street in the direction of Park Avenue. God help me, he kept thinking.
But he and God weren’t on the best of terms. Because God had allowed Jeremy to die. So Pittman pleaded to the only element of an afterlife of which he was certain.
Jeremy, listen carefully. Please. Son, please. You have to help your father.
16
How long do I have before the police come after me? Pittman thought.
An inward voice urged him to run, to keep running, never to stop. But another inward voice, which reminded Pittman of Jeremy, warned him that running would attract attention. Slow down. Act like nothing’s wrong.
Behind him, in the distance, Pittman heard sirens. The police would find the bodies. They’d talk to the woman who had screamed when she heard the shots and saw Pittman scramble out of the construction area. They’d start searching for a man with a gym bag who’d run along Twenty-sixth Street toward Park Avenue.
Get rid of the gym bag, the inward voice said, and again Pittman thought it sounded remarkably like Jeremy.
Get rid of it? But the bag has my clothes, the gun.
Hey, what good will the clothes and the gun do you if you’re in jail?
Walking, trying not to show his tension and his impulse to hurry, Pittman crossed Park Avenue. On the other side, along Twenty-sixth Street, cars and pedestrians thinned. He came to another construction area. Hearing more sirens, he glanced around him, saw no one looking in his direction, and dropped the gym bag into a Dumpster.
He turned south on Lexington Avenue. Sweating, still forcing himself to walk slowly, he skirted Gramercy Park, which was locked for the night. Continuing south, then heading west, hoping he didn’t attract attention, he eventually came to Union Square Park and was struck by how much his life had changed in the six hours since he’d gotten off a subway here and had walked to his apartment.
But he couldn’t go to his apartment now, that was sure, and he didn’t know where else he could go. The police would be watching friends he might ask for help. Hotels would be warned to watch for anyone using his credit card. What the hell am I going to do?
17
“Hey, what’s all them sirens about?” a stoop-shouldered, beard-stubbled man asked. He was slumped on a metal bench, holding what was obviously a pint of alcohol concealed in a paper bag. His overcoat had no elbows. His hair was mussed. He had two missing front teeth. Pittman had the sense that the man, who looked sixty, was possibly thirty.
“Damned if I know.” Exhausted, Pittman sat next to him.
The man didn’t respond for a moment. “What?”
“The sirens.”
“Huh?”
“They’re disturbin’ my peace ’n’ quiet.”
“Mine, too.”
“Hey, I din’t say you could sit there.”
Siren wailing, dome lights flashing, a police car raced around the park and sped north on Broadway.
“Another one,” the man said. “Disturbin’ my… Damn it, you’re still sittin’ there.” The man clutched his bottle. “My bench. I din’t say you could…”
Another police car wailed by.
“Take it easy,” Pittman said.
“Yur tryin’ to steal my bench,” the man said louder.
“I told you, take it easy.”
“Where’s a policeman?”
“I’ll pay rent.”
“What’s ’at?”
“I’ll pay rent. You’re right. This is your bench. But I’ll pay to share it with you. How does ten dollars sound?”
“Ten… ?”
“And I’ll trade you my overcoat for yours.”
The woman who had screamed when Pittman scrambled from the bodies would tell the police that the man with the gym bag had been wearing a tan overcoat. The coat that Pittman wanted to trade for was dark blue.
“Trade?”
“I want to share the bench.”
The man looked suspicious. “Les see your money.”
Pittman gave him the ten-dollar bill he’d gotten from the cook at the diner, the last cash he had, except for a few coins.
“And the coat.”
Pittman traded with him. The man’s coat stank of perspiration. Pittman set it beside him.
Switching his bottle from hand to hand, the man struggled into the coat. “Nice.”
“Yep.”
“Warm.”
“Yep.”
“My lucky day.” The man squinted at Pittman, raised the bottle to his lips, upended it, drank the remainder of its contents, and dropped the bottle behind him onto the grass. “Goin’ for another bottle. Guard the bench.”
“It’ll be here when you get back.”
“Damn well better be.”
The man staggered from the park, heading south on Broadway.
As another police car wailed by, Pittman slumped lower on the bench, hoping to blend with the park’s other residents.
The night’s chill in combination with the aftermath of adrenaline made him hug himself, shivering. Urgent thoughts assaulted his mind.
Burt had said he suspected a detective was watching him from a table in the restaurant. Maybe it wasn’t a detective, Pittman thought. Maybe it was the gunman, who followed Burt from the restaurant, hoping I’d be in touch with him.
But the gunman didn’t need to kill Burt. Burt wasn’t a threat to him. In the darkness, Burt wouldn’t have been able to identify him.
Pittman felt colder. In the shadowy park, he hugged himself harder. The son of a bitch, he didn’t have to kill Burt!
A movement to Pittman’s right distracted him. Still slumped on the bench, he turned his head, focusing sharply on two figures moving toward him. They didn’t wear uniforms. They weren’t policemen, unless they were working under cover. But they didn’t move with the authority of policemen. They seemed to creep.
Predators. They must have seen me give money to the guy who was on this bench. Now they want money, too.
Pittman sat up. The figures came closer.
If there’s trouble, I’ll attract the police.
Pittman stood to walk away, but the shambling figures reached him. He braced himself for an attack.
“Goddamn it,” a slurred voice said. “Git away from him. He’s mine. I foun’ him. He’s rentin’ my bench.”
The figures glared at the man in Pittman’s overcoat, who was coming back with a bottle in a paper bag.
“Din’t you hear me? Git.” The man fumbled in his grimy pants and pulled out a church key-style bottle opener. He jabbed its point at them. “Move yur asses away from my bench. ’S mine. Mine and his.”
The sullen figures hesitated, then shifted back toward the shadows from which they had risen.
“Bastards.” The man slumped onto the bench. “They’da taken my bench in a minute. Gotta keep watchin’.”
“That’s the truth.”
The man drank from his bottle. “Lie down.”
“What?” Pittman asked suspiciously.
“Git some sleep. You look beat.”
Pittman didn’t move.
“I won’t let those bastards git to you. I always stay up, guardin’ my bench.”
18
Pittman woke with a start. The shadows were gone. The air was pale, the sun not yet risen over the city’s buildings. Traffic was sporadic.
As he became fully alert, his memories from the previous night made him flinch. He sat upright. The man to whom he’d given his trench coat was no longer on the bench.
But someone else was—a well-dressed, slender, gray-haired man who wore spectacles. Pittman had the sense that the man, who seemed to be in his fifties, had nudged his knee.
“Did you sleep well?”
Skin prickling, Pittman had no idea if this was a policeman or a pervert. He debated what to answer. “No, not really.”
“That’s understandable. When I slept on a bench like this, I always woke up with back trouble.”
“When you did?”
“Before I reformed. You look like you’re recently down on your luck. Fairly good clothes. But that overcoat. Where on earth did you get that overcoat?”
Pittman realized that the grungy blue coat was draped across his lap. The man to whom he’d given his own coat must have covered Pittman when, despite all his effort not to, he drifted off to sleep. That would have been about 3:00 A.M.
“I got it from a friend.”
“Certainly. Well, no doubt you wonder what I’m doing here.”
Pittman didn’t respond.
“My name is Reverend Thomas Watley. I come here every morning to see if the park has any new occupants. The other residents are quite familiar with me. In fact, at the moment, they’ve gone to my church. Every morning at six, a free, although modest, breakfast is available. There’s also a place to shower, shave, and relieve oneself. Would you care to join us?”
Pittman still didn’t respond.
“I do conduct a religious service, but your attendance is not required, if that’s what worries you.”
Pittman kept staring.
“Well, then.” The man shrugged. “I must get back to my guests.” He held out his hand.
At first Pittman thought that the man wanted to shake hands, but then he realized that the man was trying to give him something.
“In case you decide not to join us, here’s five dollars. I know it isn’t much, but sometimes it takes only a little boost to raise a person back to where he was. Remember, whatever caused your downfall, it’s not irremediable. The problem can be solved.”
“Reverend, I very much doubt that,” Pittman said bitterly.
“Oh?”
“Unless you can raise the dead.”
“You lost your…?”
“Son.”
“Ah.” The reverend shook his head. “You have my sincerest condolences. There is no greater burden.”
“Then what makes you think my problem can be solved?”
This time, it was the reverend who didn’t respond.
“Thank you for the money, Reverend. I can use it.”
19
Wearing the grungy blue coat, Pittman stooped his shoulders and tried to look as defeated as he felt, making himself walk unsteadily up Lexington Avenue. The sun rose above buildings. Traffic increased. Horns blared.
Pittman wanted it to seem that he was oblivious to anything but objects along the sidewalk. Trying to appear off balance, he turned from Lexington onto Twenty-sixth Street. He stooped and pretended to pick up a coin, looked at his palm with satisfaction, then put the pretend coin into his dingy coat.
He risk
ed a glance ahead of him and saw some slight commotion in the next block between Park Avenue and Madison, near Madison Square Park. The dome lights on a stationary police car were flashing. The bodies would have been removed by now. The investigation of the crime scene would be concluding.
Burt. Sickened by what had happened last night, Pittman continued to waver along Twenty-sixth Street. When he came to some garbage cans, he lifted their lids and snooped inside. He moved on. He came to other garbage cans and inspected them as well, ignoring the smell. Then he came to a Dumpster. Trying to look awkward, he struggled up the side of the bin, poked around in it, clutched his gym bag, lurched down, and reversed his direction, heading back toward Lexington. He was far enough away that the police would not have noticed him, especially as disheveled as he looked. After all, he thought caustically, the homeless are invisible.
20
About the only thing in his favor, Pittman decided, was that it was Saturday. The man he needed to contact would more likely be at home than at work. The trouble was that when Pittman looked in a Manhattan telephone directory, he didn’t find any listing for the name of the man he was looking for: Brian Botulfson. He called information and asked an operator to see if Brian Botulfson was listed in any of the other boroughs.
In Brooklyn. The operator wouldn’t give Pittman the address, though, forcing him to walk to the New York Public Library, where he looked in the directory for Brooklyn and found the address he wanted. He could have phoned Brian, but one of the things he’d learned early as a reporter was that while phone contact had the merit of efficiency, it couldn’t compare to an in-person interview. The subject could get rid of you on the phone merely by hanging up, but a face-to-face meeting was often so intimidating that a subject would agree to talk.
Pittman had met Brian only a couple of times, mostly in connection with Brian’s arrest for using his computer to access top secret Defense Department files. The last occasion had been seven years ago when Brian had done Pittman a favor, obtaining Jonathan Millgate’s unlisted telephone numbers. Now Pittman needed another favor, but there was a chance that Brian either wouldn’t remember their previous conversations or wouldn’t care—at least on the phone. The contact had to be one-on-one.
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