Roger tapped a few keys. “What were you saying?”
I thought back. It appeared that staying the night was going to be very awkward. Maybe I could find a bed in a flophouse somewhere uptown. I had no idea where to start looking.
Roger looked up and gave me a questioning look. “Oh yeah. You want to stay. Sure. Sure. Whatever. As long as you like. How’s the tea?”
I cleared my throat and responded to the least problematic thing first. “The tea’s fine. Thanks.”
He repeated the questioning look. “You all right?”
“Maybe it would be better if I didn’t stay,” I said.
The questioning look morphed into confusion, then alarm, as my friend read my thoughts. “Oh, no. You have got to be shitting me.” He put his head down and covered his face with one hand. It took me a moment to realize that he was laughing. He finally looked up, his eyes wet with tears of laughter. “I guess I oughta be flattered.”
A really useful app would be one where you could dial back time and edit out the really stupid things you have just said.
“It looked . . .” I trailed off.
He continued to laugh, now at my embarrassment. “I told you. We were working.”
“Yeah, but . . .” I did it again.
“Yeah, well, they’re doing work in her building and they’ve got the water turned off.”
“I see.”
Savannah came back down the hall. She was dressed in an off-white turtleneck sweater, black jeans with a silver belt, and tall black boots. Her hair was still wet, but she had combed in a part and applied a minimal amount of makeup.
“What are you laughing about, you dirty old man?” She turned to me. “Was he making boob jokes again?”
Roger laughed harder.
“No,” I said.
She turned back to Roger. “Well?”
Roger grinned. “The great detective here saw you in a towel and did some deducing. He basically added two and two and came up with sixty-nine.”
Savannah looked at me. I did not deny, thereby giving her full confirmation. She looked back at Roger in his boxers, wifebeater, and threadbare robe.
“Eeeuuuw,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
They both laughed. Savannah turned back to Roger. “You’ve got some weird friends, Roger.”
I thought of defending myself—then I thought better. “Please excuse me,” I said. “It was a dumb mistake.”
“It was gross, is what it was.” Savannah tried to look deeply offended, which cracked up Roger again.
“Can I change the subject?” I said.
They both gave another laugh.
“Really. I came here for your help.” Some bit of desperation in my voice must have gotten through.
Roger responded first. “What do you need? You know you can stay here as long as you want.”
Savannah flopped into the big chair and threw one leg over an arm. “What can I do?”
“Thanks, Roger, but I’ve got to keep moving. I’ll be gone in the morning. If I stay, those guys in the tracksuits will eventually find me.”
Roger and Savannah shared a quick look. “Those guys are scary,” she said.
“Someone has been tracking me—all over. They’ve tried to kill me. Three times.”
“Where’s the Kid?” Roger asked.
“The Kid and Wanda are safe. And more than comfortable. I’ve got them hiding out on a beach somewhere warm.”
“I volunteer to watch over them,” Roger said.
I smiled. “Not this time. I’ve gone to a good bit of trouble to make sure they’re far away from any danger.”
“What do you need?” he said.
“I need to leave a phone here—plugged in and charging. It won’t ring, it will just forward calls to me.”
“Fine. Leave it behind the couch.”
“And me?” Savannah swung around and leaned forward.
“The two of you. Tomorrow morning. These guys may already be here and watching the building. They know Roger and I are close. I need a diversion so that I can get away. Can you come back here in the a.m.?”
They shared another look and both nodded. “We’ll work out something,” Roger said. “But where will you be going?”
“If you don’t know, then you don’t have to lie when those guys come around the bar asking.”
I left Roger and Savannah to their planning and stretched out on the couch. I was asleep in seconds.
Roger shook me awake. Savannah was gone, the lights were low, and the television was on softly.
“Sorry, but I thought you might want to see this.”
The ten o’clock local news. A perky Asian-American woman was telling the world that there was late-breaking news in the Selena Haley murder case. Defense team computer analysts had been able to reconstruct the image of the license plate from the “mystery Rolls-Royce” seen leaving the Haley estate the night of the murder.
I sat up, fully awake.
“Philip Haley has maintained his innocence ever since his arrest last week outside of a New York City nightclub. He was released on bail Monday, after paying a five-million-dollar appearance bond and surrendering his passport. He has been in seclusion at his wife’s estate on the North Shore of Long Island for the past two days. Haley’s lawyer spoke to Channel Eight tonight as this new evidence has come to light.”
They cut to the lawyer and another talking head, who took their time repeating the information the woman had relayed much more succinctly. The lawyer refused to speculate on the owner of the vehicle in question. He used the words “digitally enhanced” like he knew what they meant. Then they cut to a clip showing the Rolls leaving the driveway—the same footage that I had watched with Jenkins almost a week ago—only this time the camera zoomed in on an easily readable plate.
“I expect to hear from the Nassau County DA’s office first thing tomorrow morning. They will, no doubt, be dropping all charges against my client.” The lawyer finished strong.
“What do you think?” Roger asked.
“I saw that picture last week, Roger.” The news continued with a story about Lotto winners who had gone broke within a year or two of winning. “Turn it off, okay? There’s no way somebody reconstructed anything from what I saw. ‘Digitally enhanced,’ my ass. This is some very fresh bullshit.”
“Really? I thought they could do all kinds of things with digital pictures these days. I saw it on 24.”
“Maybe,” I said, though I didn’t think so at all. They could make them fool the eye—that was easy—but a good technician would know the image had been altered. “But I know a guy.”
“Call him up,” Roger said.
“Not so easy,” I said. “But tomorrow I’m going to set about finding him.”
39
Roger and I were huddled inside the security door to his building, watching the street and waiting for Savannah’s call.
“You think it’s just the two of them?”
“Has to be,” I said. “If they’re covering all of the possible places I could be holed up in around the city, they’ve already got a small army at work.”
There were two men, white and early forties, dressed in shabby suits, white shirts, and no ties, sitting in the front seat of a dented and dusty Chevy Impala across the street. A steady stream of gray smoke came from the muffler—they were running the engine to keep warm. The car was blocking a fire hydrant. Maybe I’d get lucky and a police car would come by and force them to leave.
“Who are they?”
“No idea. Private detectives? Off-duty cops? Russian gangsters? Mercenaries? I’d bet someone like Chuck Penn can hire hundreds of guys like that with one phone call.”
Roger’s cell phone rang, causing us both to start, even though we’d been waiting for the signal for ten minu
tes.
Roger put the phone to his ear and listened. He nodded once and clicked off. “Magic time,” he said.
“Break a leg,” I said.
“Call me sometime when you just want to catch a beer or something, will ya?” He pushed open the door and walked out. He climbed the three steps to the sidewalk and hurried across the street.
The two guys in the car saw him, followed him for just a moment with their eyes, and dismissed him almost at the same moment. They weren’t there looking for a short, older man with a slightly bowlegged walk. Roger slipped between two parked cars and stopped in front of the awning of the apartment building across the street. He leaned against the wall and waited.
A yellow cab came down the block and pulled to the curb. A tall, leggy redhead got out wearing a long winter coat and carrying a big leather purse hooked over one arm. The coat hung open, revealing a magnificent body, barely contained within a black minidress with a hemline that stopped one stitch this side of indecent exposure. Savannah managed to look both elegant and slutty. She strode toward the door of the building in tall heels, the coat swinging wide.
I checked on the two watchers. The guy on the passenger side had definitely noticed the woman only twenty feet away. He tapped the driver on the arm and his head swung around also.
Roger came off the wall and spoke to Savannah as she passed him. She stopped, turned, and put both hands on hips and jutted out her chin before saying something back. It appeared that the two of them were having a particularly rude conversation. It escalated quickly. A second later, she began screeching.
“You bass-tid. You little bass-tid,” she shrieked in a tone-perfect impersonation of a girl from Ozone Park. She swung the big leather bag. Roger put his arms up in defense and backed away, Savannah coming on strong. She staggered wildly on the towering heels and the red wig came off, sending her into even greater screams as she pounded on my friend. Savannah was a good actress.
It was such a great show that I almost stayed watching too long. The two guys in the Impala were smiling, pointing, and laughing. I pushed open the front door and slipped out. I kept my head down and walked in the opposite direction, toward Amsterdam. I looked back quickly as I turned the corner. The doorman had come out of the building and was trying to calm the lady down. Roger took his opportunity and ran, making his escape.
I lengthened my stride and made mine as well.
—
It used to be called Hell’s Kitchen, but that was when the Westies ran the West Side. They’d been gone for a while. What the police, the Mafia, and Rudy Giuliani had separately or collectively failed to do had been accomplished by Yuppies and gentrification. The tenements had been converted into condos or torn down and replaced with luxury high-rises. But there were still some relics of the past.
St. Patrick’s Thrift Shop catered to a mixed crowd. There were two well-dressed twenty-somethings going through the racks of silk blouses, designer camis, and once-worn party dresses, and there was a sable coat–wearing matron haggling over a Liberty scarf. And there was me.
I had missed more than a few hours of sleep in the past few days, and I hadn’t shaved since waking up in Santa Fe; I looked the part of a once prosperous executive on the verge of becoming homeless. I just needed to fill out my costume.
“I want to swap this,” I said, indicating the long sheepskin coat, “for a woolen overcoat. A warm hat. Gloves would be good, too.”
The clerk—a watery-eyed woman in her seventies, wearing a quilted cardigan and the kind of soft-soled sensible shoes that I had thought did not exist this side of the Hudson River—looked me over. My wrinkled suit, my graying white shirt, the sleeping bag under my arm. I confused her.
“Navy? Black? Gray? Camel’s hair? I have some in blond, and one or two in brown. What size do you need?”
“Something very large and very long. Something I can sleep in if I need to.”
Twenty minutes later, I was outfitted in a voluminous charcoal-colored woolen coat that hung two inches wider than my shoulders and almost reached my ankles, a blue woolen scarf with a Giants logo, and a pair of stained ski mittens. I looked myself over. The coat was far too clean, but a day or two on the street would fix that. Shoes! My Allen Edmonds looked like new.
“Do you have men’s shoes?” I asked.
“There’s not much of a selection,” she said.
“I’ll swap you these for anything that fits.”
She looked and then raised her eyebrows. “I think you ought to keep those. I always think a man looks so put together when he’s wearing wingtips.”
Skeli liked wingtips. Angie had always tried to get me to buy Italian slip-ons. I never liked them. They made me feel like I was always about to float up off the ground.
The clerk and I compromised. She sold me a beat-up pair of Eccos, with a sole that appeared to be made of tractor tire, and a canvas backpack into which I placed my wingtips and the gear I was carrying. The backpack helped to complete the picture. The essential accessory for the well-fitted-out urban homeless man.
I didn’t haggle. I paid in cash. Her eyebrows shot up again when I pulled out the roll of fifty-dollar bills, still thick enough to choke a python. I made a mental note to carry some smaller bills in another pocket, so that I wouldn’t be flashing the kind of money that might get me killed on the street.
Then I went looking for Benjamin McKenna. Or Richard Kimble. Just as long as I didn’t have to play Jason Bourne.
40
At least it was sunny. It was also very cold.
I skirted the edge of Foley Square and took a seat on a bench opposite the park. One more homeless man on a bench across from the courthouse would not draw anyone’s attention. There were four other men who looked much the same as I did within fifty feet. Nevertheless, I tucked the cell phone into my sleeve and hunched over. A homeless man talking on a cell phone might stand out just enough to get me caught.
Special Agent Marcus Brady answered his phone on the first ring, as though he had been waiting for the call.
“Brady.”
“Hello. Just an old friend calling.”
He gave a long, low whistle. “Hello, old friend. You’ve become almost famous. Did you know?”
“I kind of figured.”
“That little dustup at Newark Airport put you on the map.”
“It’s amazing what you can do when you’re terrified.”
“Self-defense? That’s good. Be sure and use that argument when the janitor tells the court how you bloodied both of those men and walked away without a scratch.”
“Who were those guys? Do you know?”
“One left before security got on the scene. Cameras caught him getting into a cab. The driver says he dropped him in Newark. He’s gone. Where are you?”
“Across the street,” I said.
“Uh-huh. I didn’t really think you’d give me a straight answer.”
“And the other one?”
“The one you popped with the mop handle? He told the Jersey troopers that he didn’t want to press charges. They didn’t give him the satisfaction. When they asked for ID, he handed them a phony passport. Then they called us. He’s being held by ICE until we sort things out.”
“I was worried I might have killed him.”
“So now you have the FBI looking for you, along with everybody else.”
“Any idea who they were working for?” I said.
“You are not my case. All I know is what people are talking about on the elevator.”
“But did you hear anything?”
“The guy with the broken nose has since forgotten how to speak English,” he said.
“Could he be Honduran?”
“Do they speak Russian there?”
“Russian?” I said.
“He’s hired muscle.”
“I think the
other one—the one who got away—was driving the car last week when they tried to shoot me.”
“An incident that never officially happened because you failed to make a report—despite my advice.”
“It happened.”
“If you get pulled over for anything—a broken taillight—keep your hands in sight. From your description, you are a very dangerous person.”
“The police won’t find me. That’s not who has me worried.”
“You should come in. They know about the VW van. They tracked you as far as Pennsylvania. They know you’ve been using secondary roads since, staying off the highway. All you need is for some local deputy who’s seen too many Clint Eastwood movies to get all heroic and your son gets to watch his father bleed out on a back road somewhere in Pennsyltucky.”
“They know the Kid’s with me?” The sleeping bag, the clothes I bought. The Happy Meal.
“I know that you have a generally negative view of the abilities of people in my profession, but don’t get comfortable with it. These guys are very good.”
“That’s great.”
I caught him offsides. “Really? And why is it good?”
“Because if you guys think he’s with me, then the bad guys think so, too. And if they’re looking for him with me, they’re not looking somewhere else.”
“Come in, Jason. You’re not safe out there. The Kid’s not safe.”
“I can’t. Someone is trying to kill me and he’s got access. You put me in some nice safe jail and he’ll find me in no time. Believe me, I’m much safer under the radar.”
“Next time you call, I will be tracking your phone.”
“Hah! Come on. You’re already tracking me. Next time I call, you can tell me where I was and I’ll tell you how well you did. Later.”
I clicked off.
Was it safe to assume that if the FBI thought I was still on my way west, that anyone else who was chasing me would think the same? One of the first rules of trading—assume nothing.
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