Jeffrey caught Stasny’s arm just before the restaurateur disappeared into his kitchen. “What’s going on?” he demanded.
“If I knew, monsieur, I would tell you,” Stasny snapped back, pulling himself free, pushing the door back.
“Someone screamed,” Jeffrey said. He wasn’t saying it to impart information. He wanted an appropriate response and wasn’t getting one.
Stasny looked back at him with something distinctly forlorn, perhaps even desperate, in his eyes. “I know nothing, monsieur. I can do nothing,” he said with a sense of urgency that seemed to imply that nothing would be accomplished by detaining him.
A second scream, briefer than the first, came from somewhere above the dining room. Jeffrey glanced around wildly but couldn’t locate it. When his eyes went back to Stasny, the dandified little man was already in motion along the wall toward an inconspicuous-looking door at the side of the room.
But it was Noel Garver who got to the door first, which put him in a position to lead the charge up the stairs. Jeffrey, who dashed past Stasny, shouldered his way through other men hurrying in the same direction and grabbed at Garver’s shoulder. It didn’t even matter that this man had no business being here. In fact, Jeffrey barely even registered who it was he was shoving aside. He simply wanted to get upstairs and get there fast.
Garver, though, flung out an arm and lurched into Jeffrey’s path. He knew an exclusive when he heard one, and he wasn’t about to let Jeffrey Blaine or anyone else stop him. For a moment the two of them became tangled up with each other, blocking the way of all those behind. But only for a moment. Jeffrey slammed Garver aside and ran to the first door he came to at the top of the stairs. He threw it open.
Renée Goldschmidt was scrambling into her dress. The stocky young man with whom Jeffrey had exchanged words earlier in the evening was fully clothed but obviously disarranged. He held his hands up in front of him as though he were trying to keep Blaine from charging into the room and he said, “That wasn’t her, man, we’re fine.”
Renée said, “I am, I’m fine. Really.”
She was holding up the top of her dress with her hands.
An avalanche of jumbled thoughts cascaded through Jeffrey’s mind. He didn’t know where his daughter was, and all he could do now was hope that it hadn’t been her screaming. How the hell had he let those boys out of his sight for a moment?
He turned and bolted from the room, pushing past Noel Garver, who was on his way in. Richie Demarest stepped toward Garver and said, “Get out of here.”
“Who are you?” Garver asked. “What’s going on?”
Richie Demarest slammed Garver back against the wall so hard that for a moment the supercilious old gossip columnist thought he had lost consciousness. He thought he had fallen, even though he was still on his feet. Richie Demarest grabbed a fistful of Garver’s shirt in each hand and shoved the man through the door, then slammed it in his face.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey had charged up to the next door and tried to open it. It was locked. He pounded with his fist. “Open this door and open it now,” he called.
He could hear movement inside the room.
“Open it,” he repeated. “Now.”
A crowd had gathered behind him, at least half a dozen men, and maybe a few women.
He heard the bolt turn and he opened the door himself. Georgie Vallo looked him right in the eye and said, “She’s okay. It’s nothing.”
Amy Laidlaw was on the floor and she wasn’t moving. Her pantyhose were on the floor by her head and the heavy brocaded skirt of her Ungaro dress was bunched around her waist.
Wally Schliester hadn’t really been asleep. He was resting with his eyes closed, dreaming in a sort of half-assed way, perfectly aware of where he was, perfectly aware that the images dancing around in his brain weren’t quite real. He could see himself back home in St. Louis, sitting in a car outside town on the banks of the river, with sleet lashing the car and the levee and the water but the windows wide open anyway so they could smoke without asphyxiating each other. They smoked cigarettes and cheap cigars because they liked the way the cigars looked. There were three of them and they had three six-packs they kept on the floor so that they could shove them under the seat in case the cops wandered by. It had happened a couple of times, but it wasn’t the same cops the second time, so the boys were simply sent home with a warning. If it had been the same cops, they could have lost their licenses.
Honest, Officer, we’re not doing anything, Schliester remembered himself saying. We’re just sitting here like a bunch of Heinekens.
He didn’t actually say that to the cop. He said it when they were rehearsing what they would say if the cops showed up again. They laughed till they thought they were going to be sick, which, considering the cigar smoke, the cigarette smoke, and half a dozen brewskies apiece, was certainly within the realm of possibility. It wasn’t such a great line, they agreed later, although it was a pretty good joke. It was the way he said it, with just the right mix of earnestness and drunken slur. You had to be there. For months after that, they could crack each other up just with the word Heinekens.
Those were good days. Like something out of a Bruce Springsteen song. He laughed in his drowsy recollection, just as Gogarty’s elbow prodded him awake, and wondered for a second if either of the guys would laugh if he called them up right now, in the middle of the night, ten years later, and said it again. They weren’t in touch with each other anymore.
“Ready to rumble, boychik?” Gogarty asked.
Schliester was only twenty-eight years old, young for assignment to an organized crime task force. Gogarty hadn’t called him anything but boychik since the day he joined the unit on loan from the St. Louis PD.
Gogarty opened his door and a shock wave of brittlely cold air slammed into Schliester, bringing him completely awake. He wasn’t in St. Louis, he was on a street in Little Italy near the bottom of Manhattan Island, New York, New York. Gogarty was sweeping bushels of snow off the windshield with his forearm, so the quality of the light in the car kept improving every second. The heater had kept the windshield nice and warm, so the layer touching the glass wasn’t frozen. Otherwise, Gogarty would have been scraping for hours. Instead, he was back inside in less than a minute, pulling the door closed behind him.
“He’s moving,” he said. “Don’t you want to see where he goes?”
“He’s probably going home if he has any sense,” Schliester suggested.
Gogarty slammed the car into gear and Schliester leaned over to see out of the part of the windshield that was clear. His head was practically on Gogarty’s shoulder. In fact it was on Gogarty’s shoulder. “What the fuck’s the matter with you?” Gogarty growled.
Schliester sat up a little straighter. He felt the car slip and skate sideways. He heard the wheels spin and then the back end came around another couple dozen degrees, apparently giving up on the effort to climb through the slush pile between the curb lane and the traffic lane. They were sideways and they were stuck.
“He’s in that fucking Mercedes,” Gogarty said in the same growl, and then, apparently addressing his own car, he said, “C’mon c’mon c’mon.”
Schliester couldn’t see any Mercedes. He weighed the advisability of telling Gogarty to ease back on the pedal so the back wheels wouldn’t spin but he knew better than to tell his partner anything. Maybe in a couple months. “Is he moving or sliding?” he asked instead.
“Fucking funny,” Gogarty shot back. “We’re going to lose him.”
Normally when tires are spinning they keep spinning unless someone does something else. Gogarty wasn’t doing anything else. He kept stomping on the accelerator, swearing, and stopping, stomp, swear, stop, stomp-swear-stop. But someone must have been listening to his curses, because all of a sudden the tires caught something under the slush and the car jumped forward with a weird kind of leap that sent it like a thrown dart straight at a snow-covered car parked at the opposite curb.
“Good
Christ,” Gogarty said, and spun the wheel like a kid in a bumper car.
That wasn’t what kept them from hitting, because the direction the wheels were facing had nothing to do with the direction the car was going. The only reason they didn’t hit was because they stopped a few inches short.
Gogarty slammed it into reverse, backed out till he was straight, and then set out after the Mercedes, which had just made a right turn about a block and a half ahead.
Gogarty made the right.
The rest was easy.
In his Mercedes, Chet Fiore led them up First Avenue into the middle Forties, where he turned left.
“What the fuck is a slug like Chet Fiore doing in a neighborhood like this?” Schliester wondered out loud.
Chet Fiore was anything but a slug. He was thirty-five years old, so good-looking even men acknowledged the fact. No more than a quarter inch under six feet tall, with smooth, even features and dark eyes that could have made him a movie star. But why be a movie star when you had a chance to be the most important crime boss in New York City?
Right now he was Gaetano Falcone’s right hand. If not his right nut. Imagine what kind of future a guy like that had.
“He’s getting out of the fucking car is what he’s doing,” Gogarty said.
Fiore got out of the backseat of the Mercedes. His driver kept the engine idling. A whole bunch of people with cameras was clustered on the other side of the street behind a barricade, with a police captain standing in front of them. Given the neighborhood, with the United Nations only a few blocks away, Schliester assumed that one of these buildings had to be an embassy, but he didn’t see any flags. Gogarty assumed the same thing.
They watched Fiore hurry across a cleared chunk of sidewalk, under an awning, and into a building that wasn’t identified in any way.
“What have we here?” Schliester asked.
It was a rhetorical question, but Gogarty hated rhetorical questions even more than real questions, unless he was the one asking them. Of course they didn’t know what the fuck they had here. If they knew that, they wouldn’t have to be here, would they?
Schliester got out of the car and walked over to the captain. He showed his ID. “What’s going on?” he asked.
A minute later he was back in the car.
Gogarty looked over at him, which was as close as he would come to asking what his partner found out.
“It’s a fucking birthday party,” Schliester said. “Do you fucking believe that?”
Jeffrey assumed the man was a cop because of the way he took charge instantly, with an assurance that was nothing short of breathtaking. He pushed through the men ringed outside the door like a running back breaking through the line and into the clear. He looked down at Amy Laidlaw, still lying on the floor, still crying, then up at Jeffrey.
“You’re Blaine?” he asked.
“That’s right.”
“And this is your party?”
“My daughter’s birthday party,” Jeffrey said, and then realized that might have sounded like an evasion, so he quickly added, “Yes, that’s right.”
Chet Fiore’s eyes met his for a moment, a brief moment in which it seemed as though he had asked and received answers to a whole series of questions he hadn’t bothered to say aloud. Jeffrey felt the way he imagined women feel when men undress them with their eyes.
Then Fiore crouched down over the girl, kneeling on the floor by her head. She was lying on her side, curled up. He bent so low his lips were practically at her ear, and he said something Jeffrey couldn’t hear. The girl rolled onto her back and opened her eyes. Fiore brushed the tears out of them with a fingertip. The gentleness of the gesture surprised Jeffrey, and he would have smiled if smiling had been a possibility at a time like this.
Amy didn’t say anything, and Fiore got to his feet, reassuring the girl with a gesture that it was all right for her to stay where she was. “Is this the boy?” he asked, indicating Georgie Vallo.
Jeffrey simply said, “Yes.”
Fiore nodded. By this time it was clear to him that Blaine mistook him for a cop and he didn’t see any need, for the time being at least, to disabuse him of the notion. It made things simpler. “Don’t let anyone in here,” he said. “Have someone call her folks.”
Jeffrey turned to go make the call. He felt like a husband being sent for boiling water by the midwife.
“Not you,” Fiore barked. “Have someone else do it. You stay with her.” To Georgie Vallo he said, “Come with me.”
Roger Bogard, a junior man at Layne Bentley, was one of the men at the door. He said he’d make the call.
Amy said, “Call my mom,” in a small voice that made her sound like a very young child. They were the first words she had spoken, and it came as a relief to hear her speak.
Jeffrey didn’t like being trapped with Amy, who didn’t seem to require any attention. The situation was ugly already, but if it wasn’t handled correctly events would follow their own law of entropy, turning quickly and irredeemably uglier. It was obvious to Jeffrey that the first thing he had to do was talk to the officer. He wanted a line drawn between the things that had to be done and the things that could be avoided. As he looked around to see if there was anyone in the room he could get to stay with Amy, he saw Phyllis squeezing sideways through the door, wiggling past the men who seemed to be stuck in the doorway like leaves in a drain.
Phyllis didn’t ask any questions and Jeffrey didn’t feel the need to tell her anything. She took up a position by Amy’s head and said a few reassuring words to the girl while Jeffrey hurried out into the hallway. He checked the other rooms on the floor, but they were closed and empty, except for a busboy sweeping up some broken crockery in the room where Jeffrey found Renée Goldschmidt. The busboy looked up when the door opened and then back to the tip of his broom, as though the mess at his feet were the only mess that mattered.
Jeffrey stepped back out to the corridor and pulled the door closed after him. The incongruous sound of music came up from downstairs and he wondered who had asked the band to start playing again. Maybe it was a good idea, turning the party back into a party. He hurried to the stairs and started down, then stopped halfway when he saw the detective coming up.
“Let’s take her downstairs,” the man said. “There’s an office. She’ll be better off there.”
Jeffrey followed him back to the room. The man’s suit was Italian, expensive, following the lines from his broad middleweight shoulders to his narrow, welterweight hips. His shoes didn’t look like anything a cop would wear, either, and for the first time Jeffrey wondered who this man might be.
Before Fiore stepped into the room, he dispersed the men still milling in the corridor, sending them all back down to the party. He waited until they were gone before opening the door.
Amy was sitting up, on a chair. She was dressed, and it even seemed that her hair had been fixed up, restored to order. Phyllis’s doing. She put a great deal of stock in these things. She was sitting next to the girl. It didn’t seem they had been speaking.
“We’re all going to go downstairs,” Fiore suggested. “There’s an office. No one will come in.”
Amy shook her head with surprising vehemence, like someone who has been struck mute and struggles to make up for the indignity of silence with an intensity of gesture.
“No, no,” Fiore said. “You don’t want to stay here.”
He held out a hand and she took it. They went down a different set of stairs that led them directly to the kitchen, and then into Stasny’s office, where Fiore sat next to Amy on a small couch. The shelves were lined with supplies and ledgers, and the desk was piled with invoices and receipts. Phyllis and Jeffrey stood just inside the door.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?” Fiore asked softly.
Amy shook her head.
“What’s the boy’s name?” he asked, to give her a question that she could answer without talking about anything.
“George,” she said. �
�Georgie.”
Okay, that was a start. He asked her if this was her first date with Georgie and she shook her head. “Amy, have you ever had sex with him before?” he asked.
She started to cry and Phyllis stepped forward protectively. But Fiore held up a hand to stop her there, halfway into the room. Amy sobbed silently for what seemed like a long time, and then words started to come in a blubbering incoherent jumble. They never had sex before. They fooled around, but they never went all the way. She shook her head to reinforce the point. And then she said, “I kind of promised him,” and fell silent again.
Fiore said nothing for a long time, waiting with fathomless patience. Finally he said simply, “You promised him?”
“I told him it would be different. I told him Jessica’s party would be different.”
Phyllis winced almost as though she had been slapped. What right did this girl have making promises about Jessica’s party?
“That it would be different?” Fiore asked.
Amy nodded again, her body shaking with sobs. She looked across the room and said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Blaine,” as though she knew what Jessica’s mother was thinking.
There was a soft knock on the door and Jeffrey turned to open it. Stasny leaned in and said, “Her father is here.”
He pronounced it vatter.
“He’ll kill me,” Amy wailed, clasping both of Fiore’s hands in hers. “I said Mom, I said call my mom.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Fiore said, getting to his feet.
For an awkward moment she seemed not to realize that she was required to release him. Jeffrey said, “Tell him to wait right there,” and then Fiore was stepping past him through the door. Did he already know what he was going to say to the father? Jeffrey wondered. Just from the way this man held himself, Jeffrey knew the answer. There are some people who are always at least one conversation ahead, with the words unrolling as though they had been said already. Jeffrey followed him out of the office.
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