“What the hell is this?” I snapped as my world went black.
“Down on the floor.”
The black guy took hold of my shoulders and guided me into position, semifetal, my ear against the hump. The cops got back into the front seat. The engine fired up. They spoke not a word.
This was all wrong.
Wherever it was I was being taken, the driver didn’t take the direct route. Most of Manhattan is a grid. You go north-south, you go east-west. In the Village, it gets all screwy, as well as down in Chinatown and in the Wall Street area. But where we were, midtown, everything is straight streets and ninety-degree turns. From the floor of the car, I tried to track our course, but after several sets of turns that could only suggest redundancies and doubling back, I was lost. Which I assumed was the point.
I thought again about Margo. By now even Margo would have moved off the bed. She’d have heard all the sirens coming up from near the park, and she’d have flipped on her television. She’d be one of the many millions of New Yorkers who were now glued to their sets. What was I saying? Not just New Yorkers, people all across the country. The network jinglemeisters were probably scrambling right now to lay down little five-second tracks in just the right tone: solemn yet provocatively urgent. The graphics people would have worked even faster. Their work was probably already up on the screen, blending with the horrific images.
THANKSGIVING DAY MASSACRE
MAYHEM IN MANHATTAN
PARADE OF TERROR
Margo would be sitting at her kitchen table watching the breaking reports. I could picture her, bare feet pulled up onto the chair, the Rangers jersey pulled over her legs, covering her like a tent. Her stomach would be grumbling for want of bagels.
And she’d know. Margo knows me. The same way her mother knew her old man when he was still in the game. My being gone this long, she’d know that somehow I had gotten myself involved. But Margo also knows the odds. She’d know in her heart of hearts that in all likelihood, I was probably okay. As she likes to say, I seem to have been born under the watchful eye of the Saint of Reckless Dumb Luck.
Even so, she’d be having fingernails for breakfast.
WE STOPPED. TWENTY MINUTES OF DRIVING, BY MY ESTIMATE. TAKING into account the little maneuvers to throw me off, we were still in Manhattan. I would have sussed out easily enough if we had traveled over a bridge or through a tunnel. My ear was close to the ground. Literally.
The two policemen got out of the car. Nothing happened for the next five minutes except that my calves cramped, first one, then the other. Finally, the men in blue returned and the rear door was opened. Unfolding me from the floor was not exactly a ballet, but we all did what we had to do. Outside the car, one of the cops adjusted the bag to sit straighter on my head.
“Thank you.”
I was taken by both elbows and led forward. “Step up,” one of the cops said. About twenty steps later, he said it again. I heard the click of a door being opened, and I was led inside. Even under the bag, I could practically taste the staleness of the air. I was somewhere cold.
We walked a few more feet and then stopped. I waited. After about twenty seconds, I said, “I hope you guys appreciate how docile I’m being.”
Gumdrop told me to shut up. This seemed to be his specialty.
“Listen,” I said. “I don’t know what academy you two attended, but you’ve both got a lot to learn about bringing a person in. This is bullshit. Take this goddamn bag off my head.”
Nothing. A moment later, I heard a small metallic squeaking sound. “Take three steps,” the black guy instructed. My elbows were released. I took the three steps.
“Later,” Gumdrop muttered, and I heard the squeaking again. Nothing. Then the ground shifted suddenly.
Elevator.
Going up.
I was pretty sure I was alone now.
3
SOMEONE WAS WAITING FOR ME WHEN THE ELEVATOR DOOR SLID open. My arm was grabbed tightly and I was yanked forward. I stumbled a few steps and jerked free.
“Whoever you are, fuck you.”
A gravelly voice muttered, “Just c’mon.”
My arm was taken again and I let myself be led forward. Tile floor, not wood. Something in the slap of the shoes. My other senses were already picking up the slack. We walked about fifty paces before we stopped.
“Sit down.”
I lowered myself carefully. The fingers of my cuffed hands found the chair before the rest of me did. Straight-backed metal chair. I perched lightly on the edge. Between the tumble down the steps at the Bethesda Fountain and my being curled up on the floor of a police car, my muscles were beginning to show me their aches. Even so, I tensed my legs, ready to leap. The bag was lifted from my head. The gravelly voice sounded. “Oh shit.”
The handcuffs were unlocked. I heard them being tossed onto a table as I kneaded the circulation back into my wrists, then I reached up and tugged off the blindfold.
I was in a room about the size of a small classroom. No windows, completely unadorned. The walls were painted infirmary green, circa several decades ago. A ridgeline of what looked like coffee stains ran about four feet off the floor along the wall facing me. Overhead, a bank of fluorescent lights buzzed, giving off cold, colorless light.
I was seated at the long end of a rectangular wooden table. The paper bag was on the table. So were the handcuffs.
Seated across from me was a large man in his late fifties. Huge chest. He was in a charcoal suit with a red tiepin. The tented handkerchief in his front pocket was a pale blue that somewhat matched his eyes, which were small, hard, clear and currently boring angrily into mine. His salty hair was cropped short and sat flat on his scalp, sort of a modified Roman-emperor look. On the local news, you don’t tend to notice the old acne scars. You see putty-colored skin, a twice-broken nose and an imposing ugliness that, in his job, seems to work in his favor. You also don’t notice the labored breathing. The man in front of me looked like he had just finished a couple of laps around a horse corral.
“Hello, Commissioner,” I said coolly. I massaged my right wrist again as I glanced about the dreary room. “I don’t know. Perhaps maybe a nice landscape over there? Pick the place right up. What do you think?”
Police Commissioner Tommy Carroll came forward, resting his arms heavily on the table. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
I met his angry gaze with as placid a one as I could muster under the circumstances. “I don’t even know where ‘here’ is.”
“We’re in the Municipal Building.”
“Oh. Really? What floor?”
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
I could practically see the gears spinning in his head. The eyes were like blue-tinted windows behind which the thoughts were tumbling at high speed. Carroll probed the inside of his cheek with his tongue, as if fiddling with a jawbreaker. He stared hard at me a few seconds. Then he checked his watch. “I need to be across the street in fifteen minutes. You can imagine the hell that’s breaking loose.”
“I’ve just been through a little hell breaking loose myself, Tommy. I gather you’ve heard.”
“There were two guys with guns out there. That’s the report I got. You were one of them?”
“Not my gun. I lifted it from a dead cop.”
“McNally.”
“We didn’t have the chance to properly introduce ourselves.” I indicated the bag on the table. “What gives, Tommy? Some bizarre new suspect-protection program? I know you’ve got budget crunches, but paper bags? What are we doing here? Why aren’t we in a police station?”
“I can’t talk right now.” He looked at his watch once more. “Look. I need to hear your story. I need it short and sweet. We’ll talk again later. And I mean soon. An hour. But I’ve got to be three fucking places at once right now, and one of them can’t be here. For the record, you’re not here, either. Now, what the fuck happened out there? Give it to me clean. And quick. I mean it.”
Carroll glanced
at his watch three more times in the two minutes it took me to tell my side of the story. As I spoke, his eyes moved to the wall behind me, as if maybe he was using it as a place to project my story.
“That’s it,” I said when I was finished. “How many casualties are we talking?”
His eyes snapped back to me. “First reports from the scene have seven confirmed dead. That could change, of course. It’s nuts out there. We don’t know what they’re getting at the hospitals. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
I sent an eyebrow up the pole. “You’ve got seven dead. One cop and at least a couple of kids. You might want to think about putting the word ‘lucky’ away for another day.”
“Seven isn’t seventeen.”
“It’s not zero, either.”
He waved it off. “Were there any other people in the vicinity when you shot this guy? Did you notice?”
I shrugged. “Nobody else was by the fountain. I know that much. If there had been, I wouldn’t have shot. Why? Are you looking for witnesses?”
“I’m just trying to picture the scene.”
“I didn’t see anybody.”
“Look. I don’t want you talking to anyone about this. Okay? Nobody. It’s important. Not until you and I have had a chance to talk.”
“This isn’t a talk?”
“Not enough of one. I’ve got to get over to City Hall. The mayor is facing the cameras in about ten minutes. I’m sure he’ll want me to say a few words.”
Of course he would. My father had held Tommy Carroll’s post for four years before his abrupt resignation nearly fifteen years ago. I know how it works. During the time my old man was top cop, it seemed that I used to see him more often on the tube than I did in real life. The other large reason for that was that he didn’t live with my mother and me. He hadn’t been married to my mother. He was married to another woman. The real wife. That’s why I don’t share his name. He and the wife lived uptown, in every sense of the word, just off Park Avenue, along with their two kids. So he didn’t get down to see us all that much. It was less than a week after he stepped down from his post that he disappeared. Then no one saw him at all, not even the rich wife and the well-tended kids. It was soon after this that I met Margo’s father. I hired him to nose about for the old man, and before the year was out, I had a PI license of my very own. It made it easier to join in the hunt. For all the good it did.
I was twenty-five then, a couple of years of John Jay already under my belt, followed by something of a flameout, then a couple of years behind a bar on Ludlow Street. Now I finally had a legal gun in my pocket. It wasn’t exactly following in the old man’s footsteps, but I’d say overall it has worked out fine. I’m my own boss. I fetch my own coffee. I answer my own phone. If I don’t like a case, I don’t take the case. Life could be worse… as that little flameout showed me.
And I’m one up on the old man’s former colleague sitting across the table from me: I’ve had my nose broken only once.
Tommy Carroll leaned forward. “Look, I want you to sit tight-”
I cut him off. “I’m not going to sit in this hole waiting for you.”
“I just told you, I’ve got to get the hell over to City Hall.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Not a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“You know the Three Roses?”
“I know it.”
“Go there. I’m sure they’ll have the tube on. You can watch the show. Give me another ten minutes after Leavitt and I wrap things up, then come over to City Hall. You know Stacy, my assistant? I’ll have her positioned out on the steps to look for you. She’ll escort you in.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He handed me a twenty. “Live it up.”
“Thank you, kind sir,” I said, pocketing the bill. “But may I say for the record that something is very fucked up here?”
He stood up. Tommy Carroll standing up is like an ocean liner rising up on its aft.
“You may say it,” Carroll said. “But not for the record.” He jabbed a thick finger against the tabletop. “There is no record.”
COMMISSIONER CARROLL LET ME OUT THROUGH A BASEMENT DOOR. It led out to the corner of Police Plaza, where on weekdays you’ve got a half-dozen or so food kiosks waiting to serve lunch to the hundreds of civil servants who’ve been up in the Municipal Building all morning, passing the city bureaucracy around from office to office and desk to desk. This being Thanksgiving, the plaza was deserted. Two police cars were parked at the curb on Centre Street. The two cops who had brought me in, plus the one who had collared the shooter, stood next to the cars. One of these patrol cars, I thought, should be parked in front of a hospital, not here.
“Avoid them,” Carroll said. “Just circle around them and get to the bar. And I’m serious about this, Fritz, don’t breathe a word to anyone until after we’ve talked. Promise me.”
I nodded. A nod is not a promise. I was calling Margo the moment I got to the bar. And no big ugly police commissioner was going to stop me.
I traced a wide circle around the two police cars. Only Gumdrop looked over my way. I shot him with a finger pistol and trotted across the street.
The Three Roses is tucked into an alley-like street that sees all of a single wedge of sunshine for approximately ten to twenty minutes once a day, depending on the season. The bar is two doors in from the corner, between a pizza joint and a bail bondsman’s office. I moved into the shadowed street, went flat against the wall of the pizza joint, and looked back over toward the cop cars. The police commissioner was talking with his men. Whatever he was saying, he was using his hands to emphasize his point, slapping the knuckles of one into the open palm of the other. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or he was just being emphatic. My experience with Tommy Carroll is that there’s not much difference. This went on for about a minute, then he checked his watch for maybe the hundredth time, turned and started back for the door he and I had used. One of the cops went with him. The one who had nabbed the shooter.
I went back down the shadowy street and into the bar. As Carroll had predicted, the television set was on. The handful of patrons were all gazing up at it. The expressions on their faces were pretty much identical. They were watching a replay of footage that had been taken several minutes after the Beretta had done its damage. The Mother Goose float was in the center of the screen. Several bodies were visible lying on the street and on the far sidewalk, being tended to by either EMS or regular folks from the crowd. People wandered in zigzags all over the street. An old-timer at the bar was shaking his bony head in dismay. “That’s one fucked-up parade.”
I asked the bartender for a glass of seltzer and took it to the rear of the place, where I wedged my shoulder into a corner so I could use the pay phone on the wall and still keep an eye on the television. Margo answered on the second ring.
“I misplaced the bagels,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
I heard a sound that I took to be a long breath being let out. Either that or my sweetie had suffered a puncture and was leaking.
“Where are you?”
“I’m in a bar.”
“Ten-thirty in the morning,” Margo said. “How colorful.”
“Trust me. They’re not letting too many colors into this place.”
“I feel stupid asking, but you do know what happened up at the parade while you were out, right?”
“Don’t feel stupid. Yes. I wandered up to take a peek.”
“Before or after?”
“During.”
There was another pause. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. A little scrape here, a little banged up there.”
“You got caught up in the stampede?”
Up on the television, they were showing footage of the parade prior to all hell breaking loose. The Spider-Man float. The Pink Panther. A two-story dog poking its head out of a Christmas stocking.
“I got caught up chasing after the shooter,” I said.
“
Is that right? Hmmm. I’m not surprised.”
“I’m not surprised you’re not surprised.”
“The television is saying that the guy who did it was caught. They say he was shot by the police.”
“By the police? That’s not what happened. I shot him, Margo. I chased him into the park. I winged him at the Bethesda Fountain.” This was the conversation Tommy Carroll had warned me not to have. “But for the moment I think it would be best if you kept that piece of information between you, me and the pillow.”
“What do you mean you shot him? Your gun’s here. The cute little fellow’s been keeping me company in your absence.”
“I borrowed a gun from a policeman.”
“Borrowed a… Why couldn’t he just shoot him himself?”
“He was already dead.”
There was another pause. The longest one yet. Finally she spoke. “Could you just do me one favor? Could you drag yourself away from your little bar and get back over here? We were having a very sweet morning until you went out for the damn bagels.”
“I’d love to, but I can’t, I’m sorry. Not yet. I’ve got a little sorting out to do on account of my sticking my nose where it didn’t belong.”
“You’re going to sort it out in a bar?”
“It’s a long story. To be honest, I don’t know how it goes yet. I’m not even supposed to be talking to you.”
“Me? What have I done?”
On the television, the picture cut to what appeared to be a scene from a Broadway musical. The stage held a mock-up of the broad side of an ocean liner, and a chorus of about twenty male singers in scrubbed white sailor suits, sailor caps and hundred-watt smiles were lined up at the rail, engaged in some sort of manic clog dancing. While their feet smacked out the vigorous patty-cake, their arms were swinging and jerking as they waved snappy red and blue semaphores in perfect unison. I have to admit, my musical-theater gene is profoundly underdeveloped, so maybe what looked like utter inanity to me was actually Tony-winning choreographic genius. Whatever it was, I couldn’t figure out what it was doing on the television screen right in the middle of live news coverage of a bloody massacre.
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