I went inside, and she closed the top of the Dutch door with a bang behind me. I jumped. “This way please.”
I was led into a book-lined office, the kind they shoot TV commercials in. There were framed diplomas on the wall (what would a patient do if he ever walked into a doctor’s office with no framed diplomas on the wall? Leave? Insist on seeing them?) announcing in Latin that Barbara Metzenbaum was hot stuff, honors all over the place. I was glad that Faith was in such good hands.
The whole place looked like money, which shouldn’t have been surprising, considering the whole neighborhood looked like money. Something about living in New York, though, makes you instantly classify as rich any store, office or home that has a hundred square feet of bare carpet anywhere in it.
I expected to be invited to take a seat, to have a chance to be more fully impressed with the place while the nurse went off to find the doctor.
She didn’t say anything. I found the silence a little uncomfortable, so I said something. “Nice office.”
“I like it,” the young woman said, and went behind the desk and sat down.
I expect the idea was for me to blurt out something like, “You’re the doctor?” Fortunately, I was too busy thinking it to say it. Prosperous Murray Hill obstetrician/gynecologists should not look seventeen years old. They should be tall, striking brunettes who wear their hair in buns or twists, not petite strawberry blondes with their hair neck-length and parted (slightly crookedly) in the middle. They should be wearing some chic three-piece suit, or some kind of simple thing under a lab coat. They should not wear the lab coat over a madras shirt and tan corduroy trousers. They should not have freckles. They should not scorn makeup, and look incredibly cute without it.
They should not be mad at me.
“Mr. Ross, are you responsible for this?” If she were an M.D., she’d have to be about my age. Older, with an established practice like this. She looked like a teenager browned off at someone for reading her diary.
“For what?”
“You know perfectly well what.”
I hate when people do that. This wasn’t the time to make a point of it, however. “No, actually, my sister is behind it. Sue. She said you wouldn’t mind—”
“Your sister can’t be responsible for what I’m talking about, Mr. Ross.”
“You think I—”
“Are you the father of that child?”
“Didn’t they tell you anything?”
She looked at me with big brown eyes. Nice contrast with the hair. She shouldn’t have been able to make me feel like she could thrash me within an inch of my life if she wanted to, but she did.
“They told me the most ridiculous story I’ve ever heard in my life.”
“I agree.”
That threw her off stride. “You admit it’s a lie?”
“No, I agree it’s ridiculous. I spent most of a day trying to prove it was false. I found out it was true, instead.”
“Look, Mr. Ross. I have no objection to unmarried pregnancies…”
“I do.”
“… but if I’m going to do my best for an expectant mother, I have to have a medical history on the father, as well.”
“I can see you get one,” I told her. “That was part of the checking I did.” I got a look at her face and said, “I don’t expect you to believe me until you see it.”
She smiled, even though she didn’t want to. “That’s good.”
“Are you still going to treat Faith? I mean, if she goes into labor before I can get it to you?”
“Of course. And whether you’re the father or not, I assume you care about her.”
“She’s a friend. Known each other since we were kids.”
“Physically, she’s in great shape. Emotionally…”
“Told you another weird story, didn’t she?”
“Is this one true?”
“I don’t know. The scary thing is, it might just be.”
“Take care of her.”
“Working on it. I’ll get that report to you as soon as possible.”
“That would be a help.” She didn’t say whether it would be a help medically, or in finding out if I was a liar.
“Would there be any objection if I brought it in person?”
“Why should there be?” she said. She started shuffling papers on her desk.
I left the office and joined the girls, then got a taxi for home. I spent most of the trip wondering if I’d been encouraged or not. I try never to ask a woman out until I’m sure she’s going to say yes. There is something about me that makes being rejected feel like being the star attraction at a public disemboweling. The only trouble with my system is that it usually takes me six months to decide it’s safe to ask, and by that time, she’s usually married. Still, it was something to daydream about. At least she didn’t say she’d puke if she saw me again. And my mother would be so pleased. Every Jewish mother wants her child to meet a nice doctor.
It was one of those rare days in New York—a day when the macadam in the street is actually visible between the cars, and the traffic actually moves. No one can explain why this happens. Does some mass benign instinct sweep through the suburbs and make the commuters decide to take the train that day? Have all the double-parked tractor-trailers made their deliveries the day before? Or does some freak atmospheric condition shrink each car an inch or two, thereby making several miles of new space? If you can figure it out, and learn how to produce the condition at will, not only will you be a billionaire, you will be the most beloved of New Yorkers since Fiorello La Guardia.
We stopped only for traffic lights, so instead of forty-five minutes to get crosstown four blocks and uptown forty-five, it took about twelve. That gives me time, I thought, to do a little thinking before I had to head over to The Grayness to meet Peter Letron.
Then Peter showed up, running full tilt from around the corner on York Avenue. Faith saw him first, and screamed. Peter was yelling something, but Faith, joined shortly by the usually unflappable Sue, drowned him out. They tried to crawl into my pocket. Failing that, they crouched down behind me.
I had to admit she had a point. Peter looked fairly maniacal. I told the girls to get inside. I stood my ground. I mean, I am not two-fisted death, or anything, but I was bigger than Peter was, and he didn’t seem to have a gun or a knife, so what the hell.
Then I made out what he was yelling. “No! Don’t go inside! Don’t go inside!”
It occurred to me to yell back, “Why the hell not?” But that could wait until he got closer.
Just then, Sue came back out of the doorway. She was dragging Faith by the arm, but the only reason Faith wasn’t in front was that she was slowed down by her bulk.
Sue was breathless. “It’s a trap,” she told me.
“Louis is inside.” Peter was still running full tilt, but he had enough wind to continue to yell. I remembered he did glass blowing. “It’s a trap!” he yelled. “Louis is inside!”
Faith looked at me, I looked at her. We both looked at Sue, we all looked at Peter. He was almost upon us, but we were now too bewildered to do anything but let him run.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
IT HAD BEEN A very small, very compact bomb. The doorman had a few cuts on his face, but he was healthy enough. He was calling the police as I went into the lobby to assess the damage. It was still the tacky-elegant combination of marble floors, foil wallpaper and fake tropical plants it had always been. There was no smoke, and no more smell than a hibachi makes. There was a mess on the floor, but it would have been just as bad a mess if someone had come back from D’Agostino’s around the corner, slipped on the marble, fallen down and broken a bottle of cranberry juice.
So how come I wanted to throw up?
I devoted myself to fighting off the feeling. Eventually, my brain was able to get past the idea that it was in fact a dead body down there, and go to work on details. The hair. The face. The topcoat, at least the parts of it below the breastbone and above the
navel, all of which had been relatively untouched by the explosion. Even the scarf. I recognized them all from yesterday. Louis Letron.
There were a few scraps of cardboard and brown paper around, something that added to the supermarket motif. A couple of large pieces of paper had landed writing up. One of them said, “by hand,” and the other read “aith Le,” and maybe more, but the rest was obscured by blood.
That settled that. I came out of my trance, and realized I had left my sister and Faith on the sidewalk with another of the dreaded Letron brothers. I ran back outside to deal with the crisis. This did not please the doorman, who had undoubtedly just been told by a desk sergeant not to let anyone leave the scene. He shouted something after me; I told him I’d be back.
There was no crisis, at least nothing that had to be dealt with immediately. The girls weren’t ready for the Easter parade, but they weren’t cowering in fear, either. Peter kept apologizing and explaining.
“I saw Louis leaving the suite as I was coming back—I’d been down to a hobby shop on Seventh Avenue for supplies—and while we were saying hello, I noticed the address on the package.”
“Addressed to Faith?” I said.
He nodded. “To Faith in care of you. I was going to ask him about it, but I didn’t. I didn’t think it would do any good. First, he covered it up, the address, I mean, and when he saw I’d caught him at it, he smiled and said it was a peace offering.” Peter cleared his throat.
A piece offering, I thought. To separate her and the baby into component pieces. Luck, in the form of defective materials or Louis’s own incompetence, were the only things that kept it from happening. For the first time since all this started, Faith could have broken down into hysterics with my complete sympathy. Naturally, she didn’t. She adopted an attitude best described as grim triumph.
“I told you,” she said. “Didn’t I say they were after me?”
“Faith,” Peter said. “Not they. Honestly. I’m sick over this. To think that my own brother…” And then he had hysterics, and Faith (of all people) began to soothe him. Obviously she was getting in some there-there practice for impending motherhood.
Sue took me aside for a word. “Well, big brother,” she said. “This removes the last of your doubts, doesn’t it?”
I didn’t even bother to laugh.
“What are we going to do now?” Sue wanted to know.
“I think we’d better tell the whole story to the police when they get here. And I’ll be careful handling packages from here on in.”
“I mean about Faith,” she said.
“The cops are used to looking out for people. I am an amateur. If Peter hadn’t shown up when he did; if Louis somehow hadn’t set the bomb off himself, we all would have been dead.”
“We can’t abandon Faith now!”
“Hallelujah!”
“Making fun of me isn’t going to help. Faith is on the brink of collapse, Harry, and if we walk away from her, she might lose the baby, or go nuts or something.”
“She seems to be taking things really well, actually.”
“You don’t know her at all, do you? Sure she looks like she’s taking it fine, now. That’s because her brain is only letting her intellect know what’s going on. When it filters through to her emotions, watch out.”
“Thank you, Dr. Freud. I thought you were a geology major.”
“Ha, ha. I thought you were a friend.”
“Ha, ha yourself, twerp.” She hates it when I call her twerp. “Anyway, who said anything about walking away from her? All I’m saying is we’re going to be guided by what Faith wants us to do for her (she may not be too pleased with me, after this, you know), and what the cops let us do for her.”
“Where are the cops?” Sue wanted to know. The answer came to her through the cool November breeze in the form of sirens.
I heard them, too, and I thought of how excited I used to be when I heard them as a kid. I’d be a reporter, I thought, and I’d follow those sirens to exciting and important events, and I’d tell everybody about it…
That’s when I came down with a sudden attack of Dr. Journalist and Mr. Hide. Even as I was strolling the few yards to the phone booth, even as I identified myself to the city desk (“Harry who?”), even as I gave a report of the explosion (but not of the intrigue behind it—that could wait for a byline); in short, even as I functioned like a Real Reporter, I wanted to run away. I knew what kind of feast those vultures (we vultures?) would make out of a story like this, and I regretted it already.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW is Thanksgiving,” I said.
The detective was wearing a five-hundred-dollar, three-piece suit. He hooked his thumbs in the armholes of his vest like Lionel Barrymore and said, “So?”
It was a fair response, since it had had nothing to do with the question he’d asked in the first place, which had been something like, “You mean, this girl is your sister’s best friend, and she disappears for three years, and here you are, a reporter for a big newspaper, with all this investigative machinery you could use, which you admit you eventually did use, to find out where she was and what she was up to, and you didn’t?”
Maybe I made the Thanksgiving remark because I was thinking how much nicer it would be to be eating turkey and watching the Detroit Lions play football than it was to be answering questions like that one. Or perhaps it was supposed to be a subtle reminder to Detective Lieutenant Craig Rogers that if he kept asking questions with nine clauses in them, we’d still be here day after tomorrow.
“Here” was some godforsaken building in the East Nineties currently masquerading as the Nineteenth Precinct. The Nineteenth Precinct used to be located on a charming, unobtrusive, quiet, tree-lined block on East Sixty-seventh. To see a police precinct amid all that affluence was reassuring. It nurtured an illusion that here on the Upper East Side, crime was not only being fought, but defeated. No more—they had moved uptown, on the theory, I guess, that the police should be close to where the crime is. I forgot whether the move was supposed to be temporary or permanent, but either way, I didn’t like it much, and the neighbors in the old location were going to like it even less. Now they’d have to come up into the shadow of Spanish Harlem to report they’d been burglarized, or robbed of their imported racing bicycles.
Craig Rogers didn’t seem to like it much, either, but that was probably a side effect of the impression I got that he didn’t like anything much. Except himself. He liked himself just fine. He had a habit of taking sidelong glances at the apple-green walls, as if he were checking to see if a mirror had grown there since the last time he looked. I concede he had every right to be pleased by what he might see if there had been a mirror.
I had never met Craig Rogers before, but I had heard of him. He was newsworthy. He was the City’s youngest homicide lieutenant, and he had a spectacular record. His latest triumph had been an art-forgery murder scandal the previous summer, though he looked uncharacteristically sheepish when I mentioned it. “I had a lot of help on that one,” he said.
If he didn’t get so much ink and airtime for being good at his job, he might have found the amount of publicity he got for other reasons embarrassing. He was always turning up on lists of “handsomest” and “most eligible” bachelors in New York, and his name had even been seen occasionally in gossip columns, usually for showing up at a nightclub with a TV starlet on his arm.
Right now, though, he wanted to know about Thanksgiving.
“Nothing,” I said. “I was just being wistful.”
“Try being truthful.”
This was the point where I should get indignant, or at least sarcastic. They did it in all the best private-eye movies.
I didn’t. I just told him that truthful was all I ever wanted to be, and answered his question. Of course, I ignored the real point of the question—the suggestion that I did in fact find out about Faith ahead of time, and participated with the Letrons in some unspecified plan to do her dirty.
I wasn’t worried about it, since they’d find out what a lot of hot air it was when they spoke to Faith.
“I might have tried to do something about finding Faith”—it was impossible to talk about her without sounding like the 700 Club—“if my sister had asked me to, but she didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I think she was hurt, her best friend taking off that way. Besides, even if I wanted to find her, I wouldn’t have known where to begin.”
“You knew where to begin when you finally got started.”
He couldn’t be that stupid, I told myself. My ego wouldn’t let me believe he thought I was, either. No wonder the private eyes in the movies always got sarcastic.
I restrained myself. “Lieutenant,” I said sincerely, “I knew where to start because Faith told me where to start. You have infinitely more experience at investigations than I do. You must know—I mean, haven’t you found that it’s easier to check a story than to dig it up from scratch?”
Rogers showed me a handsome grin. “Okay, Ross,” he said. “You don’t seem to be hiding a guilty conscience about this stuff.”
I decided it was okay to sigh. I hadn’t realized how tense I was.
“But I still don’t trust you.”
Cutting a sigh off in the middle hurts.
“You want to know why? I’ll tell you why.”
Santa Claus is coming to town, I speculated silently.
Wrong again. “Because you’re a reporter. I have no gripe with reporters, mind you.” He shouldn’t, I thought, with all the publicity he gets. “But I’ve never known a reporter who didn’t think there was at least one little fact that would look better making its first appearance in the newspaper than in a police report.”
“I just do the TV listings,” I told him. I don’t think I sniveled. I like to think of myself as a man who has never sniveled in his life. But I couldn’t vouch for it.
Rogers’s reaction left it open. “I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m letting you go.”
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