by Glenn Cooper
In contrast to Will, Nancy loved the city. She'd grown up in suburban White Plains. Her grandparents still lived in Queens, off-the-boat Poles with thick accents and old-country ways. White Plains was home but the city had been her playpen, the place where she learned about music and art, where she had her first drink, where she lost her virginity in her dorm at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where she passed the bar after graduating top of her class at Fordham Law, where she landed her first Bureau job after Quantico. She lacked the time or money to experience New York to its fullest, but she made it her business to keep a finger on the city's pulse.
They crossed over the murky Harlem River and found their way to the corner of West 140th Street and Nicholas Avenue, where the twelve-story building complex was conveniently marked by a half-dozen squad cars from the Thirty-second Precinct, Manhattan North. St. Nicholas Avenue was wide and clean, bordered on the west by a thin strip of mint-green park, the buffer zone between the neighborhood and the CCNY campus. The area looked surprisingly prosperous. Nancy's smug look said, I told you so.
Lucius Robertson's apartment was parkside on the top floor. Its large windows captured St. Nicholas Park, the compact college campus, and beyond it the Hudson River and the heavily forested New Jersey Palisades. In the distance a brick-red cargo barge, the length of a football field, was steaming south under tug power. The sun glinted off an antique brass telescope standing on a tripod, and Will was drawn to it, seized by a boyish impulse to look through its eyepiece.
He resisted and flashed his badge, prompting, "The cavalry's here!" from a precinct lieutenant, a hefty African-American who could hardly wait to take off. The uniformed cops and detectives were also relieved. Their shifts had been stretched and they aspired to make better use of their precious summer evening. Cold beer and barbecues were higher on their agendas than babysitting.
Will asked the lieutenant, "Where's our guy?"
"In the bedroom, lying down. We checked the apartment out. Even had a dog in. It's clean."
"You got the postcard?"
It was bagged and tagged. Lucius Jefferson Robertson, 384 West 140th Street, New York, NY 10030. On the flip side: the little coffin and June 11, 2009.
Will passed it to Nancy and checked out the place. The furniture was modern, expensive, a couple of nice Orientals, eggshell walls plastered with gallery quality twentieth century oils. An entire expanse of wall hung with framed vinyl records and CDs. Next to the kitchen a Steinway grand with sheet music stacked high on the closed top. A wall unit crammed with a high-end stereo system and hundreds of CDs.
"What is this guy, a musician?" Will asked.
The lieutenant nodded. "Jazz. I never heard of him but Monroe says he's famous."
A skinny white cop said on cue: "Yeah, he's famous."
After a brief discussion, it was agreed that this situation belonged to the FBI now. The precinct would cover the front and rear of the building through the night but the FBI would take "custody" of Mr. Robertson and watch him as long as they liked. All that was left was to meet their charge. The lieutenant called through the bedroom door, "Mr. Robertson, could you come out, sir? We got the FBI here to see you."
Through the door: "All right, I'm coming."
Robertson looked like a weary traveler, thin and stooped, shuffling out from his bedroom in slippers, loose trousers, Chambray shirt and a thin yellow cardigan. He was an old-looking sixty-six. The lines on his face were so deep you could lose a dime in a fold. His skin tones were pure black without a hint of brown except on the palms of his long-fingered hands, which were pale, cafe-au-lait. His hair and beard were close-cropped, more salt than pepper.
He spotted the new faces. "How do you do?" he said to Will and Nancy. "I'm sorry to cause so much fuss."
Will and Nancy formally introduced themselves.
"Please don't call me Mr. Robertson," the man protested. "My friends call me Clive."
Before long the police cleared out. The sun was low over the Hudson and began deepening and expanding like a fat blood orange. Will closed the curtains in the living room and pulled the blinds in Clive's bedroom. There hadn't been a sniper shooting yet but the Doomsday killer was mixing things up. He and Nancy reinspected every inch of the apartment, and while she remained with Clive, Will swept the hallway and stairwell.
The formal interview was straightforward-there wasn't much to tell. Clive had gotten back into town mid-afternoon from a three-city tour with his quintet. No one had a key to his apartment and to the best of his knowledge nothing had been disturbed in his absence. After an uneventful flight from Chicago, he took a yellow cab directly from the airport to his building, where he found the postcard buried in a week's accumulation of mail. He immediately recognized it for what it was, called 911, and that was that.
Nancy walked him through the names and addresses of the Doomsday victims but Clive shook his head sadly at each mention. He didn't know any of them. "Why would this fellow want to harm me?" he lamented in his gravelly drawl. "I'm just a piano player."
Nancy shut her notebook and Will shrugged. They were done. It was almost eight o'clock. Four hours to go before Doomsday was up.
"My refrigerator's empty 'cause I been away. Otherwise I'd offer you two somethin' to eat."
"We'll order out," Will said. "What's good around here?" Then quickly, "It's on the government."
Clive suggested the ribs from Charley's on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, got on the phone and painstakingly placed a complicated order with five different sides. "Use my name," Will whispered, writing it out for Clive in block letters.
While they waited, they agreed on a plan. Clive wouldn't leave their sight till midnight. He wouldn't answer the phone. While he slept, they would keep vigil in the living room, and come morning they'd reevaluate the threat level and work out a new protection scheme.
Then they sat in silence, Clive fidgeting in his favorite armchair, frowning, scratching at his beard. He wasn't comfortable with visitors, especially straitlaced FBI agents who might as well have beamed into his living room from another planet.
Nancy craned her neck and studied his paintings until her eyebrows suddenly rose and she exclaimed, "Is that a de Kooning?" She was pointing at a large canvas with abstract bursts and smudges of primary colors.
"Very good, young lady, that's exactly what that is. You know your art."
"It's amazing," she gushed. "It must be worth a fortune."
Will squinted at it. To his eye, it looked like the kind of thing a kid brought home to stick on the refrigerator.
"It is very valuable," Clive said. "Willem gave it to me many years ago. I named a piece of music after him so we were all square, but I think I got the better deal."
That set the two of them off, jabbering about modern art, a subject about which Nancy seemed quite knowledgeable. Will loosened his tie, checked his watch, and listened to his belly rumbling. It had already been a long day. If not for Mueller's hole in the heart, he'd be on his sofa now, watching TV, swigging scotch. He hated him more and more.
Knuckles were rapping against the front door. Will drew his Glock. "Take him to the bedroom." Nancy wrapped her arm around Clive's waist and hurried him away while Will peeked through the peephole.
It was a police officer holding a huge paper sack. "I got your ribs," the patrolman called out. "If you don't want 'em, me and the guys'll have 'em."
The ribs were good-no, great. The three of them sat in a civilized circle around Clive's small dining room table and ate greedily, scooping up sides of mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, sweet corn, rice and beans and collard greens, chewing and swallowing in quiet, the food too delicious to be spoiled by small talk. Clive finished first, then Will, both of them cross-eyed full.
Nancy kept going for another five minutes, keeping the forkfuls coming. Both men watched with a kind of grudging admiration, politely killing some time by tearing open packets of moist towelettes and fussily cleaning barbecue sauce off each finger.
Assignment to the New York Office was a good news/bad news story. The good news: New York. The bad news: New York. Her GS-10 grade carried a base salary of about $38,000 with a Law Enforcement Availability Pay kicker of another $9,500. Where were you going to live in New York making under fifty grand? For her, the answer was back home in White Plains, where she got her old room back bundled with mama's cooking and special bag lunches. She worked long hours and never saw the inside of a gym. In three years her weight steadily escalated again, padding her small frame.
Will and Clive were watching her like she was a contestant at a hot-dog-eating contest. Mortified, she blushed and laid down her utensils.
They cleared the table and washed up like a little family. It was nearly ten.
Will parted the curtains a few inches with his finger. It was inky dark. Tiptoed, he looked straight down and saw two cruisers at the curb, where they were supposed to be. He let the curtains close and checked the dead bolt on the front door. How determined was this killer? With a police cordon, what would his move be? Would he back off and accept defeat? After all, he'd already murdered an old lady less than twenty-four hours ago. Serial killers weren't typically high-energy types but this guy was killing in bunches. Would he come crashing through the wall of the adjacent apartment? Rappel down from the roof and blast through a window? Blow up the whole damn building to get his victim? Will didn't have a feel for the perp but he was an outlier and the lack of predictability made him very uneasy.
Clive was back in his favorite chair trying to convince himself that time was his friend. He was bonding with Nancy, who seemed entranced by the slow precise cadence of his voice. The two of them were talking about music. It sounded to Will like she knew a fair bit about that subject too.
"You're kidding," she said. "You played with Miles?"
"Oh yeah, I played with them all. I played with Herbie, I played with Dizzy and Sonny and Ornette. I been blessed."
"Who was your favorite?"
"Well, that would have to be Miles, young lady. Not necessarily as a human being, if you know what I'm sayin', but as a musician, my my! That was not a trumpet in his hands, that was a horn he got straight from God. Oh no, that weren't no mortal thing. He didn't make music, he made magic. When I played with him, I thought the heavens was going to open up and angels was going to pour on out. You want me to put on some Miles right now so I can show you what I mean?"
"I'd rather hear some of your music," she replied.
"You are trying to charm me, young Miss FBI! And you are being successful." He said to Will, "You know your colleague here is a charmer?"
"This is our first day together."
"She's got a personality. You can go far with that." He pushed himself up from the chair and made his way to the piano, sat on the stool and made a few fists to loosen his joints. "I got to play soft now, on account of the neighbors, you see." He began to play. Slow, cool music, obliquely tender, with haunting hints of melodies that disappeared into the mist to return anew down the line. He played for a good long time with his eyes closed, occasionally humming a few bars of accompaniment. Nancy was mesmerized but Will kept up his guard, checking his watch, listening through the notes for taps or scratches or thumps in the night.
When Clive finished, when the last note faded to nothingness, Nancy said, "Oh my God, that was beautiful. Thank you so much."
"No, thank you for listening and for watching over me tonight." He sank back into his easy chair. "Thanks to both of you. You're making me feel real safe and I appreciate that. Say, chief," he said to Will, "am I allowed to have a nightcap?"
"What do you want? I'll get it for you."
"Over in the kitchen cupboard to the right of the sink, I got a nice bottle of Jack. Don't you go puttin' no ice in it."
Will found the bottle, half full. He unscrewed the top and sniffed. Could someone have poisoned it? Is that how this was supposed to go down? Then, an inspired thought: I need to protect this man and I could use a drink. He poured himself two fingers and downed it fast. Tasted like bourbon. A nice little buzz started. I'll wait for half a minute to see if I die, if not, the man gets his nightcap, he thought, impressed with his own logic.
"Find it, chief?" Clive called out from the other room.
"Yeah. Be right there."
Since he'd survived, he brought out a glass and handed it to Clive, who sniffed his breath and remarked, "Glad to see you helped yourself, my man."
Nancy glared at him.
"Quality control, like a Roman food taster," Will said, but Nancy looked horrified.
Clive started sipping and talking. "You know what, Miss FBI, I'm going to send you some CDs of my group, the Clive Robertson Five. We're just a bunch of old-timers but we still got our thing going on, if you know what I'm sayin'. We still cookin' with gas, though my man, Harry Smiley, on drums, he passes plenty of gas too."
Almost an hour later he was still talking about life on the road, keyboard styles, the music business. His drink was finished. His voice trailed off, his eyes fluttered closed, and he began to softly snore.
"What should we do?" Nancy asked quietly.
"We've got an hour till midnight. Let's have him stay right there and wait this out." He got up.
"Where're you going?"
"To the bathroom. You okay with that?"
She nodded sullenly.
He hissed at her. "What? Did you think I was going to get another drink? For Christ's sake, I needed to make sure it wasn't poisoned."
"Self-sacrifice," she observed. "Admirable."
He took a leak and came back angry.
He strained to control his volume. "You know, partner, you need to get off your high horse if you want to work with me." He demanded, "How old are you?"
"Thirty."
"Well, sweetheart, when I got into this game, you were in junior high, okay?"
"Don't call me sweetheart!" she hissed.
"You're right, that was inappropriate. In a million fucking years you'd never be my sweetheart."
She responded with a full blast of whispered fury. "Well that's good news because the last time you dated someone in the office you almost got fired. Way to go, Will. Remind me never to take career advice from you."
Clive snorted and half stirred. They both went mute and glared at each other.
Will wasn't surprised she knew about his checkered past; it wasn't exactly a state secret. But he was impressed she had brought it up so quickly. It usually took him longer to push a woman to her boiling point. She had balls, he'd give her that.
He had taken the transfer to New York six years earlier, when Hal Sheridan finally kicked him out of the nest after convincing the H.R. group in Washington that he could handle a managerial assignment. The New York office thought he was an acceptable candidate for Supervisor of Major Thefts and Violent Crimes. He was sent back to Quantico for a management course, where they crammed his head with everything a modern FBI supervisor needed. Sure he knew he wasn't supposed to screw the admins, even the ones in another department, but Quantico never put a picture of Rita Mather in their training manuals.
Rita was so perfectly luscious, so fragrant, so inviting, and so allegedly spectacular in bed that essentially he had no choice. They hid their affair for months, until her boss in White Collar Crimes didn't ante up the raise she was expecting and she asked Will to intervene. When he demurred, she blew up and outed him. A huge mess ensued: disciplinary hearings, lawyers up the wazoo, H.R. into overdrive. He came wi
thin a hairsbreadth of termination but Hal Sheridan intervened and brokered a quiet demotion to let him finish out his twenty. On a Friday, Sue Sanchez reported to him; on the Monday, he reported to her.
Of course he considered resigning but, oh, that pension-so near and dear. He accepted his fate, took his mandatory sexual harassment training, did his job adequately, and kicked up his drinking a notch.
Before he could retort to Nancy, Clive stirred, his eyes blinking open. He was lost for a few moments then remembered where he was. He smacked at his dry lips and nervously checked the fine old Cartier on his wrist. "Well, I ain't dead yet. Okay if I go pee on my own without federal assistance, chief?"
"Not a problem."
Clive saw that Nancy was upset. "You all right, Miss FBI? You look mad. You're not mad at me, are you?"
"Of course not."
"Must be mad at the chief then."
Clive rocked himself upright and painfully straightened his arthritic knees.
He took two steps and abruptly stopped. His face was a mixture of puzzlement and alarm.
"Oh, my!"
Will whipped his head around, scanning the room. What was happening?
In a fraction of a second he ruled out a gunshot.
No shattered glass, no impact thud, no crimson spray.
Nancy cried out, "Will!" when she saw Clive tipping past his balance point and nose-diving the floor.
He fell so hard his nasal bones pulverized on impact and splattered the carpet with an abstract pattern of blood resembling a Jackson Pollock painting. If it had been captured on canvas, Clive would have been pleased to add it to his collection.
SEVEN MONTHS EARLIER
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA
P eter Benedict saw his reflection and marveled at the way his image was chopped up and scrambled by the optics of the glass. The front of the building was a deeply concave surface, soaring ten stories over Wilshire Boulevard, almost sucking you in off the sidewalk toward the two-story disc of a lobby. There was an austere slate courtyard, cool and empty except for a Henry Moore bronze, a lobulated and vaguely human conception off to one side. The building glass was flawlessly mirrorlike, capturing the mood and color of the environs, and this being Beverly Hills, the mood was usually bright and the color a rich sky blue. Because the concavity was so severe, the glass also caught the images from other panes, tossing them like a salad-clouds, buildings, the Moore, pedestrians, and cars jumbled together.