by Shirley Lord
Shortly after, the lights in the loft went out. At nine-twenty? It was too early for Ginny to go to bed. Was it some kind of signal?
Renewed rain had driven him back into the car just as a dark sedan pulled up. So the lights had been a signal. Who was arriving now?
“Ms. Walker?”
“Yes…” A soft, tremulous voice.
“Sergeant O’Neill here…” Even at this tense moment, it amused Peet to use the old rank of the now too-big-for-his-boots, high-and-mighty CO. “I’ve come to escort you to the precinct”
“Thank God. I’ll be right down.”
Ginny pulled on her old black raincoat and ran down the stairs, thankful to leave the loft, which had become terrifyingly oppressive. Through the glass panels in the front door, she couldn’t see anyone waiting under the porch. She didn’t blame the sergeant. Even cops didn’t like getting their uniforms wet She opened the door and saw a dark sedan at the curb, the passenger door half open. She dashed across the pavement-God, it was coming down hard-and bent down to get in. “What a night, I’m-” She screamed one high scream as she saw who was waiting inside. There was a high buzz in her brain and the world went black.
Watching the sedan pull away from the curb with a screech of tires, Johnny heard the scream, Ginny’s scream, and he hit the accelerator so violently that the Oldsmobile shot across the street and ricocheted off the pavement He thought he’d lost them right there because the sedan went through a red light at the corner, but Johnny shortly found himself right behind them.
He was on automatic pilot, not aware of the traffic, not aware of anything except the car in front He’d been full of suspicion, seeing the sedan arrive and Ginny emerge soon after.
In a second everything had changed. He’d heard her scream. Whoever was driving the car wasn’t the person she’d expected to see. God in heaven, she was being abducted.
As he drove he remembered his father saying, “Cousin or no cousin, Ms. Walker could be in danger… Svank is gone, but the cesspool he created is still very much there… Why don’t you take her away from the cesspool?”
Why hadn’t he? The cousin was gone, but idiot that he’d been, not trusting his own emotions, he’d transferred his suspicions to her, his own Ginny. God, help him.
At Fourth and East Houston, at the point where the Bowery begins, the sedan swerved madly to avoid by inches a huge Mack truck backing out of a side turning. Although the rain was now torrential, instead of slowing down, the sedan began to pick up speed.
Too late, Johnny saw a car pass him and get between him and his quarry. He drove right up behind the interloper, hooting his horn, shouting, “Move over, you bastard, move over.” The car didn’t budge, but as long as he could still see where the sedan was headed, he tried to keep his panic down.
He was driving as dangerously as the sedan now, slipping and sliding all over the road. Suddenly, the sedan made a wild swerve to the left in the direction of the Manhattan Bridge. Where were they going? Who was driving the car like a lunatic in this downpour? Whoever it was had to have nerves of steel to keep the car on the road.
Who had made Ginny scream? He would get him; he had to get him, no matter what.
Through the driving rain he saw a sign to Kennedy. He shuddered, thinking of the desolate areas around the outskirts of the airport, the deserted coves in Far Rockaway, the deep waters of Jamaica Bay.
As he followed the sedan onto the bridge he heard a police siren. “Please God,” he prayed, “please God make the car in front stop.”
The sedan slowed slightly as it went through a giant pool of water, the spray hitting Johnny’s windshield and momentarily blocking his view. The police car was flashing him from behind; he moved over expecting it to flash the sedan, but it sped on by, fast ahead.
At the first light across the bridge, Johnny was close enough to get the first few numbers of the registration plate. M 15-but before he could catch the rest, the sedan took off in another sluice of water.
He was gaining on them when he hit another gigantic pool, obscuring everything for a vital few seconds, seconds in which the sedan disappeared from view.
He cursed and screamed. There was a phone booth on the corner. He couldn’t do it alone. There was no time to lose.
Johnny’s call was put through to Petersh just as he was leaving Ginny’s apartment. “Slow, slow…” The detective knew the guy was in love with the girl, but he couldn’t make out a word he was saying.
“Okay. Now I’ve got you. Kidnapped, you say. Repeat the car number… If you see it again, use this code to get through to me at once.” After being beeped at the ballgame, Petersh had rushed over to Ginny’s apartment where he got only her answering service when he called.
Now, seconds after crashing the phone down, Petersh put out a general alarm. “Special alert Calling all cars, intercept a dark sedan, possibly a Pontiac, license plates beginning M 15… traveling southeast on Bushwick, in the direction of Kennedy Airport. Intercept with caution, driver may be armed.”
Johnny drove slowly now through the rain, the poor lighting on the road where he’d lost the sedan making everything more difficult. He thought he heard another siren in the distance. He went in that direction. Ginny, Ginny, Ginny, hang on. I’ll find you. I love you.
As he arrived at an intersection, a car flashed across his vision. No two people could be driving as crazily as that in this weather. He swerved to miss a station wagon, made a dangerous U-turn and went after the speeding car.
Whoever was behind the wheel was insane, but he knew how to drive all right It made him think of… wait a minute… M 15. His father’s license plate M IS 67P, always pronounced in the family as M15 after the British Secret Service… and sixes and sevens to show what his father thought of them. M 15 67P.
Johnny gnashed his teeth. What the hell was going on? His father often drove like a madman, like one with nine lives or--what had he said about Svank? More like twenty. What the hell was going on?
It was too much of a coincidence to dismiss. He’d told his father Alex had dumped the jewels on Ginny, then retrieved them the night of Svank’s murder. Had he unintentionally given his father the idea that Ginny could be involved? Had he transferred his own subliminal suspicions of her to his father? He groaned. What had he done? Was his father using her as bait? There was nothing his father wouldn’t do for his own ends, Johnny knew that. If his father was putting Ginny’s life in jeopardy to break the Svank case and be a hero one more time before his retirement from journalism, he would kill him, he would kill him with his own hands. What had he done? What had he done… and where were they going?
“D’you pick up the message, Freddy?”
“Sure thing, Pete.”
“Did you pass it on to your pal?”
“What d’you mean!”
“You know what I mean. This is serious stuff, Freddy. I want to know now or I won’t answer for the consequences.”
“Okay, okay. We’ve all done it. What’s the harm?”
“This one’s different. The D.A.’s breathing down our necks, the FBI is breathing down his… So?”
“Okay, okay, yep, I passed the girl’s message on to QP. Thought he’d be in touch with you by now. What’s the problem?”
“I’ll deal with you later.”
“What’s the problem?” Forrester repeated plaintively. “He’s your buddy, too. Never put a foot wrong yet, only helped us as we’ve helped him. What’s your problem?”
There was no answer. Petersh was on his way.
The weather was getting worse. Johnny couldn’t even be sure that the car he was chasing was the same sedan he’d followed from Ginny’s apartment. He screamed profanities at the top of his voice to try to keep his panic under control. He was lost; didn’t even know which road he was on; straining to hear the police siren, hearing nothing but the moan of the wind, the steady splash as the Oldsmobile dashed through small and big floods.
Now there was more traffic building up. The car h
e’d seen back at the intersection was three or four cars in front. Where were they going? They’d passed the turnoff for Kennedy.
Out of the mist came the answer. Now he knew for sure it was his father at the wheel. He knew where he was taking Ginny. He didn’t know why, but he’d soon find out
A large sign loomed before him: AQUEDUCT RACETRACK, KEEP RIGHT. One of his father’s favorite hangouts, a place he could find blindfolded, a track he knew as intimately as any jockey. It would be deserted at this time of night, but his father would know a way in… and so would the police when he told them.
Sure enough Johnny saw the sedan take the right-hand fork. He started to look for a sign for telephones-it came about half a mile down the road. Whoever was planning to rendezvous with his father and Ginny at Aqueduct, Johnny was about to ruin the party.
What wild scheme had his father cooked up, thinking that with his Stallone mentality he could protect Ginny no matter what? This was one time his son was taking charge.
“Put me through to Detective Petersh. This is an xox emergency call,” he yelled, using the police code Petersh had given him.
“I can’t explain now, but I think my father’s with Ginny. He’s cooked something up, I’m sure of it They’re heading to Aqueduct, yes, yes, yes, I know it’s closed. Take my word for it. That’s where he’s headed. He knows it like a homing pigeon. I’ll meet you there.”
Keeping her eyes shut Ginny realized she was in a car, strapped in, traveling at a terrible speed. For a few minutes she couldn’t think what had happened. Then she remembered. She wanted to scream again, but she knew if she did the pad that had knocked her out would be clamped over her nostrils and there’d be no way she could escape.
She was in a car with Johnny’s father, the man she now knew to be a murderer. She kept her eyes shut, staying motionless, wondering if her hands were bound. Where were they going?
To her horror Peet said, “You can open your eyes, Ms. Walker. I know you’re fully awake. The chloroform never lasts more than thirty minutes.” In a perfectly normal conversational tone he continued, “D’you know where your charming cousin put the jewels?”
A chill went through her body as she heard him laugh, a short, caustic laugh.
“I do,” he said. “He told me before he got shot by some of our mutual friends from South America. In case you think I had anything to do with it, I did not, although I wasn’t surprised. I can assure you it’s not my style to shoot people in the back. I frightened your cousin into his confession. Unfortunately, he was too much of a big mouth, a show-off. The jewels are supposed to be in a safety deposit box, held, although he doesn’t know it, in the name of the honorable young doctor treating your cousin’s lover for AIDS. I thought you may also have a key? No?”
“Absolutely not Where are you taking me?”
’To one of my favorite places-whooa-” The car skidded dangerously through a sudden deep pool of water. “Haven’t driven like this in years. Haven’t needed to,” he added in the same conversational tone. “Pity about you, Ginny. I’m intrigued to know what so suddenly and unfortunately jogged your-” At that moment she heard the police siren; so did he; then another and another.
“Excuse me…” Peet crouched over the wheel.
Ginny watched in terror as the speedometer started to climb: 80-85-90 miles an hour.
With a sickening screech of tires, Peet twisted the car off to the right It bounced off an embankment, miraculously came down on all four wheels, and tore round a corner. Ginny saw a large sign coming up. She couldn’t believe it. Aqueduct Racetrack.
Was he going to kill her in a stable, where they’d never think of looking for her body, while he went off to Europe to begin his new life?
The sirens were getting closer-or were they going right by?
As Peet twisted and turned the car, driving in and out of buildings, with a prayer Ginny began to loosen her seat belt. If they hit something, they were both dead. If he had to slow down for any reason, she would try to make a run for it. The sirens were right behind them now, gaining on them.
He was making for the racetrack’s exit again. It was too late.
It was blocked by a car, but it wasn’t a police car and it wasn’t a cop standing in front either.
My God, it was Johnny, standing in the rain, in front of the car. Peet didn’t seem to be slowing down.
“It’s Johnny, your son,” she screamed. “Can’t you see? It’s your son Johnny.”
The unbelievable happened. With only a few feet to spare, Peet slammed on the brakes and Ginny pitched forward against the windshield. It was the last thing she remembered.
1997
11 WEST 77TH STREET, NEW YORK CITY
Johnny stared at the deep blue screen of his word processor. The cursor had been flickering at him unrelentingly for the past hour, urging him to type at least an opening paragraph. However hard he tried, he couldn’t find the words, he just couldn’t, deadline or no deadline.
The trial was over at last. The furor over the verdict had started to die down, but he knew it would forever be out there as a journalistic legal football, to be fished out and kicked around whenever somebody thought of another angle, or another big fish got caught in an unexpected net. Still, there was really nothing to stop him writing the inside story as only he could write it
Absolutely nothing, he told himself firmly. Wasn’t it the story he’d been waiting to write all his life?
He stared moodily at the screen, hoping for inspiration. If the umbilical cord hadn’t been cut by now, then he didn’t need a shrink-he needed a straitjacket.
It had been easy to hate his father before and during the trial, when, of course, the old man had performed so brilliantly.
Half the time he’d sounded like some modern-day King Arthur, helping rid the world of dirty scum like Svank. Only half the time, because from the beginning, the defense’s position had been that Peet had been unduly provoked, and that his role in Svank’s fatal fall had been nothing but an accident.
Ginny’s testimony had merely placed him at the scene of the crime, which he’d admitted. Although it was a miracle she was still alive and her concussion hadn’t been worse, the charges relating to her “abduction” hadn’t gone anywhere. She hadn’t been able to remember anything about the car chase and her final ordeal, and she’d pleaded with Johnny not to testify against his father.
The fact that no weapon or trace of any chloroform pad had been found had supported his father’s story, which was that when he learned Ginny was about to be kidnapped by the same drug-related gang who’d murdered her cousin, he’d acted on the spur of the moment to “take her somewhere safe.”
It was bullshit, but when the trial finally came to court, week after week, Johnny had been forced to accept that as far as those enforcing law and order were concerned, his father long ago had become “one of us” as opposed to “one of them.”
He would forever be amazed by women, because Ginny predicted the verdict, and even after all she’d been through, she didn’t appear to be upset, as he certainly was, when the judge ruled, “The prosecution’s case has failed to meet the law’s narrow criteria for a conviction on a criminally negligent homicide charge.”
By then so much of Svank’s dirty work had surfaced, there hadn’t been much of an outcry that Quentin Peet was going to walk out a free man. He’d lost his job; he’d been publicly reprimanded, if not disgraced, but to Johnny’s disgust, his father had been able to see for himself that the pandemonium in the courtroom had been more joyful than anything else.
Their eyes had met. Johnny had turned away. There was nothing more he had to say to a father who had so completely revealed himself that terrible day when he’d stood on the brakes to pull up a scant few feet from running him down.
He would remember for as long as he lived the rueful, disappointed look on his father’s face as he’d said, “You win, Johnny,” as if in not running his own son down, he’d lost; as if Quentin Peet had discove
red to his sorrow that at last there was someone in the world he couldn’t bring himself to destroy.
It was Ginny who’d helped him swallow the verdict, pointing out something he knew to be true from his brief experience with the drug world. “Wherever your father goes, however much money he has, he will spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.”
And now he, John Q. Peet, had the perfect opportunity to set the record straight about Sir Galahad.
Johnny sighed. Not today he couldn’t And maybe he never would. Next! was up for a national magazine award in April because of his pieces on Madame Saks, the homeless, and the civil libertarians. He was a blue-eyed boy because of this, so despite a fat New Yorker contract being dangled so temptingly before him, he didn’t really want to move. One day perhaps, if he ever felt restless, but not now.
There was no point in sitting in front of an empty screen any longer. He picked up the phone. “Ginny,” he said, “I’ve got writer’s block. Let’s go out to dinner.”
At the gala opening of Ginny Walker Fashion, Inc., a few floors up from Donna Karan, Virginia Walker blushed as Ginny introduced her as her greatest asset, “The best fitter and tailor and mother in the world”
She joined in the loud applause as Ginny declared, “Ginny Walker, Incorporated, is now officially open for business.”
As Ginny was starting a wonderful new chapter in her life, so was she, “a refugee from Florida,” as she’d seen herself described in an interview with Ginny that had already appeared in Women’s Wear Daily. She was a more than willing refugee. Overriding Graham’s moans and groans, she hadn’t hesitated to accept her daughter’s invitation to be part of her start-up operation-at least for the first few months.
To Virginia’s surprise, so far, she hadn’t missed Graham at all. If he didn’t like it, it was just too bad. She’d spent nearly thirty years as a camp follower. Now it was her turn to kick up her heels.