Small Town

by Lawrence Block

Page 72

 

  Something occurred to him, and he went looking for the photo-copies Herdig had made for him at the Two-Oh. He read Shevlin’s description—height, weight, age, complexion, color of hair, color of eyes.

  At seventy-two, Peter Shevlin was ten years older than the Carpenter, but everything else was pretty much on target. If you put the two men in a lineup they probably looked entirely different, but that was the point; you could put them in a lineup, because they were close enough in physical type.

  Close enough to fool the big galoot with the black beard? Popeye’s worst nightmare?

  Yeah, maybe.

  If he’d been working the case with a partner they’d toss ideas back and forth, batting them around, throwing verbal spaghetti on the wall to see what stuck. He was running a solitaire version of the same game, tossing his own ideas in the air and taking a swing at them.

  Maybe he needed a partner. Maybe he should call Galvin, let him try for another brass ring.

  Maybe he should call whoever was heading up the Carpenter task force. Odds were good it was someone he knew, and a hundred percent certain it was someone who knew him.

  And if the Carpenter was hanging out, keeping an eye on things?

  No way they could infiltrate an area like the Boat Basin in force without making their presence obvious. If he was on the boat, well, fine, they’d have him sewn up tight. But if he wasn’t?

  And if he had never been there in the first place, if Peter Shevlin was having a hot time with somebody else’s wife and didn’t want the world to know about it, then what? And wouldn’t the word get around that a certain former police commissioner was just a little bit past it?

  You couldn’t go in without backup, he thought. Not unless you were out of your mind. Not even if you were out of your mind.

  But you could take a look first. You could do that much. Hang out, sneak a peek, make sure the wild goose was there for the chasing. You could do that, couldn’t you?

  He took his cell phone, his holstered . 38. Found a set of handcuffs, dropped them in a jacket pocket. And, feeling a little foolish, and wishing the day were cooler, he stripped to the waist and dressed again, this time with the Kevlar vest underneath his shirt.

  thirty-eight

  THE NANCY DEEwas still in its slip.

  Buckram had figured it would be. The Carpenter would use darkness. He was, from all accounts, a man who shrank from the limelight and sought out the shadows. He’d almost certainly board the ship after the sun had set, when there was less light to be seen by and fewer eyes to see him. If he was going to take the boat out, he’d do so then. Or he’d keep his hands off the tiller and catch a few hours of sleep, leaving well before daybreak.

  What was the best way to do this?

  He could board the boat now. He’d had a glance at the lock on the cabin door earlier, and it hadn’t looked terribly challenging.

  And why should it be? Out on the water you worried about pirates, not burglars. He’d added a handcuff key to his key ring before he left the apartment, and while he was at it he included the flat strip of flexible steel that had opened more than a few doors for him over the years. He’d be inside the Nancy Dee’s cabin almost as quickly as if he had the key.

  And then he’d be waiting there when the Carpenter showed up.

  He’d hear the man coming, feel the boat shift when he came on board, and have a gun in his hand when the man came through the cabin door. With the advantage of surprise, he’d have the son of a bitch collared and cuffed before he knew what was happening.

  And if it was Shevlin?

  Well, hell. He’d tell him he was under arrest for making every-

  body crazy, and then he’d relent and send him home to Helen Mazarin, which would be punishment enough.

  But it wouldn’t be Shevlin. Shevlin was dead, he was sure of it, and the man who came into the cabin would be the man who’d killed him.

  There were other approaches he could make. He could stake out the Boat Basin and grab the Carpenter as soon as he showed up. He might be hard to spot in a crowd, but he wouldn’t be in a crowd, he’d be by himself, heading for the pier.

  Mr. Harbinger? No, don’t move, and keep your hands in plain sight. Down on the ground, hands behind your back . . .

  Easier with two people, easier still with three or four. Hard to corner a man when you were by yourself. You could run at him full speed, tackle him without warning, but you ran the risk of bystanders misreading the situation and interfering—plus a whole lot of egg on your face if you tackled some visiting fireman from Waukegan.

  And if the tackle wasn’t perfect, and if the Carpenter made a break for it, then where were you? Even if you were willing to shoot at him, against regulations for cops, flat-out illegal for a private citizen, you risked missing him and hitting somebody else.

  No, the best thing was to lay in wait and take him by surprise.

  Now?

  Now the sun was still high in the sky, and hot enough to make him question the wisdom of the Kevlar vest. Riverside Park was a human beehive, swarming with joggers and skaters and parents pushing strollers and people walking dogs. Everybody on the Upper West Side who hadn’t escaped for the holiday weekend had apparently decided to come to the park for a breath of fresh air.

  There wasn’t any, not at the moment, but if some happened to blow down from Ontario, they were ready to grab their share of it.

  Hard to spot anybody in that sea of people. He looked for a place to sit, passed up a bench he could have shared with a woman who was feeding pigeons, shared another with an Asian man who was reading a copy of El Diario.

  He sat back, relaxed. But kept his eyes open.

  T H E M O V I E S W E R E B E T T E R during the week.

  The films, of course, were essentially the same, irrespective of the day or time they were shown. But the theaters served better as refuge and dormitory on weekday afternoons, when even the most popular films drew tiny audiences. Saturdays and Sundays attendance increased dramatically, which was good for the theater owners and the film studios, but not as good for the Carpenter.

  Still, he’d learned how to manage. You showed up when the box office opened, bought a ticket for a film. If there was a foreign-language feature with subtitles, you chose that, knowing that it would remain relatively deserted no matter what day it was. Failing that, you avoided any picture designed to appeal to the young.

  Anything animated, anything with children or animals on the poster.

  If the featured performers were ones he recognized, the audience was likely to be sparse. Because that meant the actors were older than average, and so were the people who came to see them. Such films were among the more popular on weekday afternoons, when the elderly made up the greater portion of the audience. On weekends, however, when senior rates were not available, the old folks stayed home, and the young watched Brad Pitt or Scooby-Doo.

  There were other useful maneuvers. The best seats, from the Carpenter’s point of view, were on either side against the wall, and at the rear of the theater. This did not put you all that far from the screen. In the old days, when screens were much larger and movie houses cavernous, it was a different matter. But you were as far away as you could get, and unless the showing was a sellout (and it wouldn’t be, unless you’d made a gross error in your film selection) there’d be no one sitting near you, neither to the side or immediately in front.

  Because screens had gotten smaller along with the theaters, you might not be able to see too well from where you were, and if you’d been lucky enough to find a foreign film, well, you could forget about trying to read the subtitles. But entertainment wasn’t the point. A secure and restful environment, that was your prime consideration.

  The tricky part came when the picture ended. You couldn’t just stay in your seat and wait for the next showing, because they’d clear the house and walk through the length of each row, picking up at least some of the popcorn tubs
and candy wrappers left behind by the departing moviegoers. You could try saying you’d come in halfway through the picture, he supposed, but he wasn’t at all sure that would work; worse yet, it invited attention, and that was what you most wanted to avoid.

  What you had to do was plan. By the time you bought your ticket, you already knew what film you’d go to after you left the first theater. Today, for example, the Carpenter had been one of the first at the box office, one of the first to take a seat—in the rear, of course, and against the right-hand wall—for a showing of a film starring Clint Eastwood. He dozed through the commercials, dozed through the coming attractions, and dozed on and off through the picture, opening his eyes each time gunfire roused him and checking his watch before drifting off again.

  When one such check showed only fifteen minutes before the film was scheduled to end, the Carpenter left the theater, having to disturb only one person, a tiny little woman perched on the aisle seat. Anyone who noticed him leave at that point in the film would take him for a man who had to go to the bathroom, and the Carpenter did precisely that. Nor was the visit undertaken purely for purposes of deception; the Carpenter could have held out until the end of the film, but welcomed the opportunity to relieve himself.

  Having done so, he went to the refreshment stand and bought popcorn, then headed for the theater that was next on his list, where a film based on a Henry James novel was scheduled to begin in twenty minutes. The timing was right, and he couldn’t imagine that any film based on anything by Henry James could draw a young audience. Carrying his popcorn, mingling with other people with the same destination, the Carpenter did not look like someone sneaking into a second film that he hadn’t paid for.

  He didn’t see how it could occur to anyone to stop him and demand a look at his ticket stub, and of course no one did.

  The commercials and coming attractions were the same ones he’d seen before the first picture, and indeed ones he’d seen repeatedly in recent days. He found them comfortingly familiar.

  And the feature film, once it started, was wonderfully soothing, with no gunfire to rouse him, or even voices raised in anger. The interruptions had played a useful role during the Eastwood movie, but now the Carpenter was perfectly willing to doze right through to the end. Two films would provide him with all the sleep he needed.

  He closed his eyes and settled in to enjoy the show.

  Y O U R T W O W O R S T E N E M I E S on a stakeout were your bladder and your brain.

  The first was obvious. Sit around for hours on end, and sooner or later you had to take a leak. Even if you were a camel, the time came when you had to go. If you were in a parked car, you brought a jar along, hoping when you used it that nothing happened in midstream, that you didn’t get caught in a firefight with the jar in one hand and your dick in the other. And, since things rarely happened that abruptly, and often didn’t happen at all, you were generally okay.

  If you didn’t have a car to sit in, if you were in fact out in public view on a park bench, a jar wouldn’t help. You’d be better off getting on all fours and lifting a leg against a tree, hoping they’d take you for a funny-looking German shepherd. So what you had to do was desert your post, and that was acceptable when you had a partner who could watch twice as hard in your absence. When you were alone, well, it meant that for a while there was no one minding the store.