He filmed the man dropping to his death, filmed his cart-wheeling hands and wide-open eyes, filmed his last few moments of life before his head exploded on the sidewalk and his body collapsed on top of it in a broken heap.
For Wolfhagen’s sake, he held the shot for a lingering moment before he jerked the camera back to the open window, where Carmen was hurrying about the room, covering her ass.
Why did she go against the plan? She was supposed to have knocked Hayes unconscious, wipe her prints from the gun and then place it in his hand while firing a bullet into his brain. It was simple. It had been her idea. So, why did she change her mind? Why did she deliberately take this chance?
The fool was going to get caught.
He watched her move quickly and efficiently, her eyes missing nothing. When she was finished, she grabbed her briefcase and left the room. Thirty-five seconds, maybe forty. Though he hated to admit it, Spocatti doubted whether he could do better.
Still, she had to get out of the building.
He adjusted his earphone and listened to her run down the hallway to the bank of elevators. His mind like a camera, he imagined her stepping into the car, punching the button marked “L” and composing herself in the reflection of the mirrored doors as the elevator plummeted twenty floors.
“That one was for you, Vincent,” she said into the microphone. “I would have given him a kiss on the lips before showing him to the window, but I didn’t want to make you blush.”
Spocatti was having none of it. She’d taken a stupid, unnecessary risk. If she didn’t get out of the building safely, if she somehow got caught, the police would know that the deaths of the Coles and Mark Andrews were related, leaving Spocatti with a far more difficult task when it came time to kill the other men and women on Wolfhagen’s list.
He glanced at his watch, then lifted the binoculars from his neck and looked down at the sidewalk. Hayes had been on the ground for several minutes and still no one had found his body. Spocatti looked up and down Wall Street, saw no one on its deserted sidewalks, no cars on the barren street. He listened to the elevator doors whisk open and heard Carmen’s shoes click across the marble-tiled floor.
Her breathing was controlled. There was a firmness in her step that suggested confidence. “The lobby’s empty,” she said in a low voice. “Just me and the security guard. Shouldn’t take more than five minutes to get the tapes and I’m out of here.”
But Spocatti was no longer listening to her, couldn’t listen to her, because down below on the street, a woman was moving hesitantly toward Hayes’ body.
He lifted the binoculars to his eyes and leaned toward the window, bringing her face into focus. She was Hispanic, had long, wiry black hair and was wearing a faded blue work uniform. Her hands were buried in the fold of her bosom. Her face was pale with horror. She looked up at the open window from which Hayes was pushed and put her hand over her mouth. Though Spocatti couldn’t hear her, he knew the woman was screaming.
And then he heard, in the distance, the faint wail of police sirens.
He pressed a finger over his earphone and listened for Carmen, but her voice had been severed, cut short by static. He tapped the device, heard nothing and checked the radio that was their only link. The dial was at zero. Somehow, her microphone was disengaged.
Incredulous, he turned back to the window. Sirens blaring, blue lights flashing, two police cars shot around William Street and pulled alongside Hayes and the woman standing over him. The officers stepped out of their cars, looked at what had been one of Wall Street’s most powerful financiers and immediately radioed ahead for help.
Spocatti moved to the semi-automatic rifle that was anchored to the window beside him.
He looked down through the powerful telescope and brought one of the officers into view. He gently squeezed the trigger and watched the laser’s tiny pinpoint of red light appear on the back of the man’s head. If the situation got out of hand and Carmen needed help, Spocatti would kill these officers and that woman. He would fire five neat holes into the backs of five shaken people.
He didn’t know how long he stood at that window.
As word spread of Hayes’ death, the area outside the building gradually filled with the media and the curious.
Photographs were being taken of the body. The woman who found Hayes had been taken away by the police. Inside Hayes’ office, detectives were picking through the remains of a life. There was no sign of Carmen.
He was fearing the worst when he heard the jangling of a key and the door behind him swing open.
And there she was, her white silk blouse and black, loose-fitting jacket stained with the blood of a dead man. She moved to the center of the room and stood there, her eyes like a light turned to his face. She tossed the attaché case onto the floor and it popped open, exposing the bloodied, pale blue towel, the white gloves and the surveillance tapes.
Spocatti was about to speak when something in her expression caused him to pause. For a moment, he forgot his anger and listened.
“The book,” she said. “Maggie Cain,” she said. “Everyone on our list is being interviewed by her. We need to call Wolfhagen now and let him know.”
But when they called his La Jolla estate, there was no answer.
~~~~
CHAPTER SIX
Wolfhagen danced.
He arrived in New York just as the lights of Manhattan were beginning to shine, took a cab from LaGuardia, rented a room at The Plaza, snorted four lines of meth and had wine sent to his room.
He twirled.
No one knew he was here and that’s how he wanted it. He came to play and to cause a little trouble, and he wanted to do so as quietly as he could for as long as he could.
This was an important trip.
He poured himself another glass of wine--his third--sipped it and tripped into the bathroom. He was high, blissfully high, the drug threading like needles through his system. Earlier, he lit candles, several scented candles, and the bathroom now glowed with the rich smells of vanilla and jasmine.
He put the glass down on the marble vanity and began to undress. He reached for the phone next to the toilet, tapped out Carra’s personal number and slammed down the receiver when she answered. He looked at his reflection in the wide spotless mirror and marveled at the shadows stealing like thieves across his arms and chest.
He opened his leather shaving kit and exposed the glimmering gold blade. He wiggled out of his pants and swung his veiny rope of a penis from side to side--smack, smack, smack. He flexed his muscles and knew at this moment that his body was indeed beautiful.
He wouldn’t look at his face.
He drank more wine and did a jig in front of the mirror. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply, his mind spinning out and grasping the memory of the little nothing shit who came to his home in La Jolla that morning to tell him in her stupid lilting star-struck voice: “Your wife has decided to sell, Mr. Wolfhagen. We’d like to show the estate at noon.”
He’d shut the door in her face and called Carra, who told him in that fucking controlled voice of hers that if he dropped this ridiculous alimony suit of his, he could have the damned house and everything in it. “But you’ll never get a cent of my father’s money, Max. Not a penny. I won’t let it happen. He made his fortune without your help, he willed it to me and it’s staying with me.”
And so Wolfhagen danced.
He picked up the phone and dialed again. This time the line rang longer, but it was Carra who answered, her voice quick, all business. “What is it, Max?”
“I’ll tell them everything,” he said. “I’ll go to all the papers and tell everyone. I don’t care. I’m in New York now. I have nothing to lose. Don’t you fucking dare sell my home. Don’t you fucking dare try it. I’ll ruin--”
“You’re in New York?”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“I’m going to smash that fucking face of yours.”
The line went
dead. Wolfhagen hit the redial button but this time Carra didn’t answer. The line rang and rang and rang--and his rage grew.
He dropped the phone to the marble tile and tripped back into the bedroom. He grabbed the can of shaving cream from his open suitcase, tossed it high in the air, reached out blind hands to grasp it, and laughed, laughed, laughed when it struck his bare shoulder, hit the carpet and rolled toward the television, where CNN played without sound.
Wolfhagen turned up the sound.
He picked up the can of cream and tip-toed back into the bathroom. The high was evening out, but he was determined to maintain it, determined to make it last. He danced and he danced, moving his arms and swinging his head, rolling his eyes and baring his crowded teeth. The shadows on the walls moved with him in wild, jumbled rhythms.
But it was fruitless. He was losing it. He swung his hips harder and turned in complete circles, glimpsing his face once, twice, three times in the mirror. And that killed it. The illusion snapped. He stopped to stare at his face. That face. God, how he hated it. The hooked nose, the crooked teeth, the slanting eyes. This wasn’t him! It was wrong! He was better than that face!
Before he showered, he would shave.
The shaving cream went on easily. He smoothed it on his arms, chest and stomach, rubbed it over his buttocks, through the stubble at his groin and down the length of his legs. He was fastidious in his application. His hands moved slowly and carefully, covering the two-day’s growth with broad, foamy sweeps. Five days ago, he had his back waxed. It would be another week before he needed to go there again.
He rinsed his hands in the sink and left the water running. He took the gold straight razor and went to work, scraping away the hair he hated.
How could he have been born this way? Why had God done this to him? When he was thirteen, he had been taunted in the school showers by the other boys. He was made fun of because of the dense black hair that crawled up his back, covered his forearms and stomach, flourished with the stubborn determination of weeds in the peaks and valleys of his chest. His legs were sheathed with it.
At the time, Wolfhagen’s parents were poor and couldn’t afford a doctor to tell them that their son suffered from an acute imbalance of testosterone. They were uneducated and couldn’t know the psychological scars already carved into their child’s mind. But they were not insensitive. They weren’t blind to the faults of nature. And so in the summer of his fourteenth year, only days before he started a new school year, Wolfhagen’s mother began a ritual that lasted a lifetime--with soap and water, she shaved him.
“It hurts, Mama. Stop!”
“Stand still.”
“But I’m bleeding!”
“It’s either this, or you’ll catch it from those little bastards at school.”
As he matured, his skin toughened along with his soul. While the hair may have vanished, the jeers from his classmates didn’t. They knew he shaved. They could see the stubble on his arms and legs in gym class, could smell it on him as though it were an odor, reeking and awful. They called him a freak to his face. Some spit on him in the halls.
At lunchtime, anonymous arms swung out to strike, while anonymous hands reached out to slap. Through it all, Max learned more than any of them. He learned the darkness of the human heart and just how deeply a person could hate.
His escape became books and literature. He found sanity in the lives of fiction’s characters. He graduated second in his class, earning a four-year scholarship to Yale School of Management, where he redefined himself and became so much more.
He needed to call Carra again. He knew she was having a party tonight and he was going. All it would take was one threat. One potent little threat. Then he could revel in all the shocked faces that greeted him while he humiliated her.
He was slicing away the hair on his chest, maneuvering carefully around the peak of his left nipple, when he heard on the television the news of Gerald Hayes’ death.
Wolfhagen stepped out of the bathroom, his body dripping a mixture of hair and shaving cream onto the Oriental rug. He moved to the center of the bedroom and stared at the television.
Hayes was dead, a possible suicide. There was an eye-witness, Maria Martinez, who was in the opposite building when Hayes fell past her window. The police were questioning Martinez and would make a statement by morning. They were not ruling out murder.
Neither was Wolfhagen.
He reached behind him for a chair and instead caught a glimpse of himself in the full-length mirror on the wall to his right. A thin river of blood was running from his chest down the length of his muscled stomach, stopping to pool in the foam at his groin before dripping from the head of his penis to the carpet.
He looked down at his bare feet and saw that they were speckled with blood and shaving cream. The sight startled him. He usually was so careful. He couldn’t remember a time when he had last cut himself. As he stood there, watching, he felt a sudden, deep rush of shame and embarrassment.
He put his free hand over his slippery, bloody penis and the shame turned to rage.
~~~~
CHAPTER SEVEN
Spocatti paced.
He walked past the window, walked past Carmen, walked back to the window, paused and looked across at Hayes’ office. In silence, he watched the police rifle through the man’s desk, bag folders, make notes, say little. He saw one of the detectives pick up the marble paperweight on the edge of the desk and wondered again just how carefully Carmen had cleaned it.
He stepped away from the window and looked at her. She was seated cross-legged in the center of the room, his MacBook humming in her lap, her face glowing in the bluish black. She wouldn’t look at him. She knew better. Her fingers raced over keys he couldn’t see.
“What’s the number, Carmen?”
“Almost there.”
“You said that a minute ago.”
“The wireless in this place is shit.”
She typed faster, stopped, leaned toward the screen and read off the number.
Spocatti removed his cell and dialed his contact at the First Precinct. It was late. Chances were she wouldn’t be in.
But the woman answered. “This is Rice,” the detective said.
Spocatti smiled. “Brenda,” he said. “And I thought you’d be home in bed, fast asleep in the arms of your lover.”
Silence.
“You know who this is?”
“Of course.”
“Can you talk?”
“Hold on.”
The sound of a chair sliding back, a door clicking shut. Then her voice, lower than before. “Okay,” she said. “What is it?”
“I need a name.”
“A name.”
“And an address.”
“An address.”
“And whatever else you can find out about the woman who saw Gerald Hayes fall from his office window.”
“Right,” she said. “When?”
“Put it this way,” Spocatti said. “You get back to me in twenty minutes with the information I need, and I’ll personally see to it that money won’t be a problem for you or your family ever again.”
* * *
It took her fifteen minutes to secure her future.
Spocatti picked up the phone and listened. “Her name is Maria Martinez,” Rice said. “Lives on 145th Street. Has a daughter, five years old. Three priors for drug trafficking, two for prostitution. Had an addiction to heroin and crack. This was six years ago. Now’s she’s off welfare, off drugs and has three jobs, one of them cleaning offices in lower Manhattan for Queen Bee Cleaning. Looks as if she’s turned herself into an upstanding member of the slums.”
Rice paused. “And you’re going to kill her.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Spocatti said. “I’ve never killed anyone. Tell me what she knows.”
“She didn’t see anything,” Rice said. “Said she was cleaning a window when she looked out and saw Hayes hitting the concrete.”
&n
bsp; “She didn’t see anyone in Hayes’ office?”
“No.”
“What does our beloved Chief Grindle think?”
“He thinks she’s lying.”
“So do I. Give me her exact address.”
She gave it to him.
He thanked her, hung up the phone and looked at Carmen, who had moved across the room and now was stuffing her blood-stained clothes into a gray duffel bag. Spocatti watched her change into black pants and a black top. She pulled her hair away from her face, secured it with an elastic and lifted her pant leg. She holstered her gun in the calf strap. “Are you expecting an apology from me?” she asked.
He didn’t answer.
“Because I won’t apologize,” she said. “You would have done the same thing had you been there.”
“No, I wouldn’t have.”
“I’ve seen you do worse.”
“I won’t deny that,” he said. “But I wouldn’t have pushed Hayes out that window. It wasn’t necessary. It was juvenile. You’re too proud to admit it and that’s what disappoints me.” He started to walk past her. “But that’s your age and probably your gender, so I can look past it--this time.”
He shot her a sidelong glance, his eyes bright despite the dark room. “It’ll be interesting to see how you handle Maria Martinez.”
~~~~
CHAPTER EIGHT
The van, a slate-blue Ford Spocatti picked up in Queens, farted little clouds of exhaust as it ribboned through the city.
It was rust-spotted and fender-dented, but its engine was strong and it drew no attention on these streets, which, Carmen knew, was the reason he bought it in the first place. He hit a string of green lights and sailed to 145th Street, just off the Harlem River, where he parked across from Maria Martinez’s tenement and sat waiting with the engine off for the police to bring her home.
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