Small Town

by Lawrence Block

Page 68

 

  It actually occurred to him to wear the vest today, but it was summer, for God’s sake, and you could sweat to death inside the damn thing, and it weighed a ton, too. And he was just going to talk to people, and so he did not expect to get shot at. And if by some incredible fluke, if by some crazy quirk of fate, if his wild-ass wholly irrational hunch paid off and the Carpenter was somewhere in all of this, well, there was no reason to believe that William Boyce Harbinger had ever owned a gun, or had one in his possession, or even knew for sure which end the bullet came out of. A Kevlar vest wouldn’t do you any good if somebody came at you with a hammer and a chisel, and only slowed you down if you were trying to outrun a Molotov cocktail.

  So it was home in his closet, and that was fine, because he felt silly enough carrying the gun.

  She came back with two names written on a slip of paper, and was reaching to pour him another cup of coffee. He stopped her, took the slip from her. The top name had an asterisk next to it, and she explained that was the man who’d taken her statement for the missing persons report. The other man was the one she’d talked to the first time, just in case he needed to talk with him as well.

  And he’d let her know as soon as he found out something? He told her she could count on it.

  S H E V L I N ’ S A P A R T M E N T B U I L D I N G W A S on the north side of Eighty-sixth Street, between Columbus and Amsterdam. That put it in the Twenty-fourth Precinct, Eighty-sixth Street being the dividing line, but Helen Mazarin had not gone to the Two-Four station house, three-quarters of a mile away on West One Hun-dredth. Instead she’d reasonably enough walked four blocks to the Two-Oh on West Eighty-second, and Buckram did the same.

  The desk sergeant, Bert Herdig, had a big round red face and not much hair, and what he had left was cropped close to his skull.

  He recognized Buckram right away, called him Commissioner before he could introduce himself, said it was an honor to have him there, and what could he do for him? Did some fool of a patrol officer hang a ticket on the commissioner’s windshield? If so just hand it over, and it would go no further.

  “A woman came in a few days ago, filled out a missing persons report,” he said. “Her name’s Mazarin, and the missing man’s Peter Shevlin. ”

  “Of Eighty-sixth Street,” Herdig said, and stroked his chin.

  “Don’t tell me something’s happened to the poor man. ”

  “Well, that’s the question. He hasn’t turned up yet. ”

  “He might not, if he’s playing golf in the Poconos. ”

  “Is that where you think he went?”

  “It’s where I’d go,” Herdig said, “if I had the time and the money. Could I ask the nature of your interest, Commissioner?”

  “A favor for a friend. ”

  “Ah, right,” Herdig said. “Everybody has friends and sooner or later they all want favors. Mrs. Mazarin’s the friend?” He shook his head. “The friend of a friend. ”

  “Ah. You’ve met the lady?”

  “Just this morning. ”

  “She’d come in once before I saw her,” Herdig said. “Did she mention that?”

  “She did. ”

  “Tony Dundalk talked to her then, and more or less sent her on her way. Because it didn’t sound like any cause for alarm. ”

  “And she came back. ”

  “She did. I thought, let’s put the lady’s mind at ease, so I took her statement and filled out a report. ”

  “But you didn’t send it in. ”

  He shook his head. “Sending it in doesn’t accomplish anything.

  Nobody’s gonna be running around knocking on doors, looking for an old man who’s minding his own business. All that happens is somebody wants to know why I’m sending in an MP report on a case that doesn’t meet the standards. I made her happy, but I stuck the report in a file. ”

  “And let it go at that. ”

  “No,” Herdig said, “I called his place of employment, spoke to the head of the department. No, Shevlin hadn’t been in for whatever it was, a week or so, something like that. And yes, they’d had a call, said he wouldn’t be in. They didn’t seem concerned, and after I talked to them neither was I. ”

  “Did she tell you about Shevlin’s boat?”

  “To tell you the truth,” Herdig said, “I had a little trouble following her on that subject. Did I miss something important?”

  “Probably not. Did you take notes when you talked to his employer?”

  “His department head. Yes, I took notes. ”

  “And filed them? I wonder if I could see the file. ” Herdig looked troubled. “Uh, well,” he said. “You know, I’d do anything to help here, Commissioner, but there’s a question of official standing. My understanding, you’re no longer officially connected with the department. ”

  “Not for a few years now. ”

  “So you’ve got no official interest in this particular matter. ”

  “None,” he agreed, “which is convenient all around, isn’t it? It means I don’t have to file a report, and neither do you. It also means nobody’s going to ask you where the regulations say you’re supposed to take down a statement and fill out a missing persons report and then conveniently lose it in a file drawer somewhere. ” He smiled pleasantly. “Of course,” he said, “if I pick up that phone and call around, you’re likely to get a call back from someone with so much brass on his uniform you won’t be able to spot the blue underneath it. And I guarantee you he’ll have enough official standing to mobilize the National Guard. ”

  “I take your point,” Herdig said. “Just give me a minute, okay?” P E T E R S H E V L I N W A S E M P L O Y E D by a firm called Fitzmaurice & Liebold, with an address on Sixth Avenue that would put it in or near Rockefeller Center. His supervisor, and the man who’d put Herdig’s mind to rest, not that it was all that troubled to begin with, was one Wallace Weingartner.

  Buckram bought a couple of sandwiches at a deli, got a can of Heineken to go with them, and had lunch on a bench in Central Park. The beer made the enterprise technically illegal, in that he was consuming an alcoholic beverage in the park. Striking a blow for freedom, he told himself, and enjoyed his meal.

  He was eating al fresco so he could make a phone call, and he’d always felt the use of cell phones in restaurants was an infinitely greater evil than, say, drinking a beer in public. After he’d bagged his trash and dropped it in a litter basket, he returned to his bench and managed to get the number at Fitzmaurice & Liebold, whose offices he was reasonably certain would be closed today, the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. But you never knew what sort of workaholic Wally Winegardner might be, so it seemed worth a try.

  The offices were closed, of course, but the voice that answered gave him options; if he knew his party’s extension he could press it, and, if not, he could find it by entering the first three digits of the party’s last name. He pressed 9-4-6, the numeric equivalent of W-I-N, and that gave him a choice of two parties, neither of them Winegardner. He tried to get back to the previous prompt but couldn’t navigate through the system, so he gave up and broke the connection and went through the whole thing again. This time, on a hunch, he pressed 9-3-4, for W-E-I, and learned in short order that Wallace Weingartner’s extension was 161. He pressed that, and after four rings got a voice mail pickup, with a woman’s voice—Weingartner’s secretary, he supposed, or the firm’s official telephone voice—inviting him to leave his message at the tone.

  He rang off and put the cell phone away. He could let it go, he thought, but that meant letting it go until Tuesday, because the office would be closed tomorrow and Monday. And Tuesday was the third, and a week from Wednesday was the eleventh.

  And he couldn’t help thinking the Carpenter was out there.

  Well, hell, everybody damn well knew he was out there, but he also felt he was somehow connected to the disappearance of Peter Shevlin.

  Made no sense. If he really thought so, he should stop trying
to figure out how to track down Weingartner (and wouldn’t you think a cop with a name like Herdig would jot down the German spelling?) and call someone who could hook him up with whoever was heading the Carpenter task force. But he couldn’t do that, because if he had the guy on the phone right this minute he wouldn’t have anything substantive to tell him. He didn’t even have a hunch, for God’s sake. Just a feeling, and one that made increasingly less sense the more he examined it.

  He got out the phone again, called 1-212-555-1212, and actually got to talk to a human being, who came back and told him that Wallace Weingartner didn’t have a listed phone in the borough of Manhattan. Not in the 212 listings, anyway. He tried 917, the code for local cell phones, figuring old Wally might have his phone along even if he was up in the mountains or down on the Jersey shore. He could call the poor bastard without even knowing where he was.

  No listing.

  He put the phone in his pocket and gave up.

  V I K T O R W A S S T I L L O N duty, and not happy at the thought of letting him into the Shevlin apartment. When pressed, he explained that he was a Russian Jew from Odessa, in the Ukraine, and that the building’s super and all the other doormen and maintenance personnel were Hispanic. If anything turned up missing from the apartment, who would they say took it?

  “My shift is up at four. Then is Marcos. You tell him what you want, he lets you in. No problem. ”

  “If I have to come back,” he said, “it won’t be at four o’clock, it’ll be twenty minutes from now, and you’ll still be on duty. And I’ll have a couple of uniformed cops with me, and I’ll pick the ones with the loudest voices. ”

  Viktor turned away, looking unhappy, and found a key in the desk drawer. “Here,” he said. “You go. Anybody asks, you can tell them I never set foot in that apartment. ”

  No, he thought, instead you gave a total stranger the unattended run of the place. For that they ought to give you a medal.

  He went upstairs, let himself in, sniffed the air, and was grateful for what he didn’t smell. Because it was entirely possible Shevlin could have been lying dead somewhere in the apartment, in a closet or under a bed or in the tub with the shower curtain screening him from view. If his death had been close enough in time to the earlier visit, and if the doorman who’d made the last check had just taken a quick look around . . . well, the poor bastard would be pretty ripe by now.

  But in fact the poor bastard wasn’t there at all. Buckram spent the better part of an hour trying to learn something useful, and invading Shevlin’s privacy rather thoroughly in the process. You learned that in police work, learned to search drawers and closets without blinking, to go through papers and correspondence with the enthusiasm of a voyeur and the ardor of a spy.

  What he didn’t find was anything to establish Shevlin’s presence in the apartment since Helen Mazarin had decided he was missing. His checkbook didn’t have an entry after that date. There were newspapers stacked beside a chair in the living room, magazines arranged on the coffee table, none of them more recent than the date of his presumed disappearance.