The doorman had found a taxi, so we raced out from the awning, scrambled into the backseat. I saw I had a missed call from Blumenstein and two from Hopper. He’d also sent a text.
I’m out on bail. A million thanks. Heading to your apt
Good. I couldn’t wait to ask him what he’d seen inside the townhouse—not to mention the question How in the hell had he known how to break in?
74
As Nora and I entered my building, she stopped in alarm and grabbed my arm, pointing at the lock on my front door.
It was smashed, the wood splintered.
Slowly I pushed the door. It was dark inside, no noise but the pounding of the rain.
I stepped into the foyer.
“Don’t,” whispered Nora. “Someone might still be here—”
I pressed a finger to my lips and crept farther down the hall, my every step creaking on the wooden floors. Suddenly I heard a muffled thud coming from the living room.
I raced to the doorway just in time to see a man climbing out the window, violent rain pummeling his black coat and knit cap as he scrambled over the flower box and jumped out of sight.
I wheeled past Nora and back down the hallway, seeing the intruder streak past the building, heading west down Perry.
I ran outside and took off after him. He was already halfway down the block, charging past a pedestrian—who I realized was Hopper.
“Catch that guy!” I shouted.
Seeing me barreling toward him, Hopper spun around and took off after the man, who’d just disappeared onto West Fourth.
The intruder was too short to be Theo. It had to be someone else.
Hopper disappeared around the corner. When I reached the intersection seconds later, he was already chasing the man around the block onto Charles. I ran after them, dodging cars, chained bicycles, people hauling shopping bags. The intruder made the light at Hudson, Hopper racing after him, shouting, though the resounding cracks of thunder drowned out the words. Within minutes, I’d made it to the West Side Highway, where there was a pileup of cars. Hopper tore across the median, reaching the other side, though I was forced to wait as the light turned green.
The man was hightailing it north down the bike path along Hudson River Park, past a few police barricades. Suddenly, he swerved left, heading toward Pier 46, and then vanished.
The light turned yellow, and with a break in the traffic, I sprinted across, catching up to Hopper on the bike path.
“I lost him,” he said, panting.
I stared down the track, shielding my eyes from the rain. Apart from a couple walking a German shepherd, it was deserted. But the pier, a popular recreational spot, was busy, some thirty or forty people strolling the promenade, armed with slickers and umbrellas.
“He’s on the pier,” I said. “I’ll check this end. You search the other side.” I took off, passing a family of tourists in plastic ponchos; a young man walking a Jack Russell; a pair of teenagers giggling, huddled under a brown coat.
No sign of him.
I moved past a crowd of joggers in raingear stretching on the railing and spotted a lone man at the very end of the pier.
He was seated on a bench, staring at the Hudson River, his back to me. He wore a khaki coat, a bright red umbrella over his head. Yet there was something strange about him, and as I approached I saw what it was: Not only was his thinning gray hair disheveled, as if he’d just yanked a knit cap off, but his shoulders were rising and falling, as if he was out of breath.
Casually, I stepped alongside the bench beside a trashcan, some six feet away, and turned to see his face.
It was just an old man, his hand resting atop the handle of a quad orthopedic cane, his jeans soaked. There was a large blue JanSport backpack beside him, and the remains of a Subway sandwich.
I must have seemed brazen, studying him so intently, but he only glanced at me and smiled, muttering something.
“What was that?” I shouted.
“Think we’ll need Noah’s Ark?”
I smiled blandly and stepped in front of him, walking to the end of the pier. The downpour was so severe now, there was barely a difference between the swelling gray river and the rain.
I turned to check out the old man again, just to be sure.
But he was still hunched there harmlessly, the rain streaming in a gurgling waterfall off the red umbrella around him.
He smiled again, beckoning me to approach, and I realized from his excited expression he’d actually mistaken my stares for some kind of sexual overture.
He was some old gay geezer, out here cruising.
Jesus Christ.
“Would you like to share?” he shouted at me, looking up at his red umbrella, which made his complexion pink. “Actually, I think I have an extra.” Licking his lips, he unzipped the backpack, fumbling inside.
I held up a hand, waving him off, and moved quickly down the walkway just as a resounding crack of lightning struck, followed by another rumble of thunder. As I reached the northern side of the pier, I saw that there was a commotion, a small crowd forming back along the bike path. I sprinted toward it, jostling through the onlookers to find Hopper, as well as another man, helping an elderly African American woman to her feet.
The poor woman was sobbing and completely drenched, wearing only a thin pink housedress, clutching her arm in pain.
“What happened?” I asked a woman next to me.
“She just got mugged. The asshole even stole her cane.”
No sooner had she said the words, I was fighting my way through the crowd, racing as fast as I could back along the pathway.
The old man was already gone.
When I reached the empty bench, I could only stare down at it in anger.
There, abandoned, was the red umbrella, the backpack, the orthopedic cane and trench coat, the Subway sandwich wrappers. The cunning son of a bitch had probably taken them out of the trashcan so he’d appear to be enjoying a leisurely lunch.
Exactly where he’d been sitting was a small white scrap, facedown on the bench.
I picked it up. It was my business card.
75
I returned the belongings to the woman.
Every item was hers: the blue JanSport backpack, the red umbrella, the cane and coat. No money was missing. Her assailant had come from behind her, brutally wrenching her things away, shoving her down on the sidewalk.
“No way that was an old man!” Hopper shouted over the downpour as we jogged across Greenwich Street, heading back to Perry.
“I’m telling you. It was.”
“Then he’s been eating his friggin’ Wheaties, because he had the torque of a Suzuki. What’d he steal?”
“We’re about to find out.”
We picked up our pace. I could hardly calm myself to think, it had happened so quickly. Yet I had a feeling I shouldn’t have been so cavalier about leaving Nora alone. I hadn’t stopped to consider if the intruder had an accomplice.
We raced into my building. She wasn’t in the hallway.
“Nora!”
I shoved open the door, racing through the foyer. Nothing in the living room had been disturbed. I hurried down the hall to my office and stopped dead.
It looked like there’d been an earthquake. Papers and boxes, files, entire shelves had been ransacked and dumped on the floor. A window was open, rain pouring in. Nora was moving frantically around the wreckage.
“What’s the matter? Are you hurt?”
“He’s gone.”
“What?”
She was panicked. “Septimus. I can’t find him.”
I spotted the empty birdcage on the floor.
“Where the hell’s my laptop?” I shouted.
“Everything’s been stolen. Someone else was here. I heard him go out the window, but I didn’t see him.” She moved to the closet, the wooden door hanging off the runner.
I scaled through the mess to the window, angrily slamming it closed. My filing cabinets were pulled open, the
papers looted. My old framed Time articles had been pulled off the wall. The Le Samouraï poster was hanging cockeyed, so Alain Delon—usually gazing out coolly in his fedora at something beyond the room—now contemplated the floor. Was that some type of cryptic message? A hint that I was shortsighted, wasn’t seeing straight?
I righted the frame, seized the leather cushions, and threw them to the couch. I grabbed one of the fallen shelves and heaved it upright, stepping on a picture frame lying facedown. I picked it up, seeing with a twinge of horror that it was my favorite shot of Sam, taken when she was hours old. The glass had been smashed. I shook out the shards, set it on my desk, then stepped over to the overturned box of Cordova research.
I almost laughed.
It was empty—except for the Meet Yumi escort flier that I’d pocketed back at 83 Henry. The half-naked girl stared mischievously at me, as if to whisper, Are you really that surprised?
I couldn’t fathom my stupidity. I’d known we were being followed, yet like some reckless fool, I’d taken no precautions, which now seemed especially idiotic, considering that the last time I’d gone after Cordova, my life had collapsed around me like a cheap vaudeville set. Now my notes were in the hands of the very subject of my investigation. Cordova would be reading my every note, every brainstormed thought and scrawl. He’d be perusing my head like a department store. My laptop had a password, but any decent hacker could override it. Now Cordova would know everything we knew about Ashley’s final days.
Whatever edge we might have had after breaking into Oubliette, the Waldorf, Briarwood, knowing that Ashley had been searching for this person called the Spider—it was gone.
I picked up my stereo, putting the receiver back on the shelf, and saw with disbelief Ashley’s CD was gone, too. This gave way to another alarming thought.
“Where’s Ashley’s police file?”
Nora was still digging through the closet.
“Ashley’s file that I got illegally from Sharon Falcone—you were reading it two days ago. Where is it?”
She turned, her face distraught.
“I don’t know.”
She began to cry, so I started trawling through the rubble myself. I couldn’t imagine the ripple effect of that file going public: Sharon losing her job; her career ending in disgrace due to my own folly; my name appearing in print yet again as something toxic. It made me so furious, it took me a moment to realize that Hopper was shouting for us.
We found him in the kitchen, standing by the open oven door.
The parakeet was inside, frantically fluttering around the fan.
Nora rushed forward, gently capturing the bird. He was alive but trembling violently.
“Was the oven on?” she asked Hopper.
“No.”
As she tended to the bird, Hopper looked meaningfully at me.
He was thinking what I was. This was no act of clemency. It was a threat. Sparing the bird sent a clear message: They were in control. They wanted to toy with the bird, play with it, petrify the fragile thing a little longer. But if they’d wanted to, they could have killed it.
And so the same was true for us.
76
We spent the next few hours cleaning up my office, while a locksmith replaced the bolt on the front door. Everything about Ashley and Cordova had been taken, with a few exceptions—my old Crowthorpe Falls notes, Iona’s Bachelor Party Entertainment business card. We found these items under the couch, which suggested that my study had been trashed first, then scoured for information on the Cordovas.
In another stroke of luck, they’d left behind Ashley’s coat—we found it still crammed into the Whole Foods bag behind the door, probably assumed to be garbage. We also found Sharon Falcone’s police file. Two days ago, Nora had taken it upstairs to review before bed. It was still on her bedside table—a sign the intruders had never made it upstairs.
I kept thinking about Olivia Endicott. It was certainly convenient that while we were uptown listening to her, the intruders had unmitigated access to my apartment. I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d misread her. Had she been in on the whole thing from the start and tipped them off to the appointment? Why? What motivation did Olivia have to protect Cordova?
There was also an unsettling symmetry to what had happened. We were following Ashley’s footsteps; Theo Cordova had followed ours. Hopper broke into their home last night; today, they broke into mine. Searching for the man on the pier, I’d only encountered myself, my business card. Were they genuinely threatened by what we were doing? Or were they treating it as a game, mirroring our actions, boomeranging them back onto us, one violation of the Cordovas’ privacy resulting in one of mine, one invasion for another?
I didn’t know what any of it meant, but at least one thing Olivia had said seemed about right: The space around Cordova distorts … the speed of light slackens, information gets scrambled, rational minds grow illogical, hysterical.
I went upstairs and took a shower, gave Hopper some towels so he could, too. I was planning to order some Chinese food and then quiz him about the townhouse—he’d briefly mentioned he hadn’t seen very much before he was caught. I left Nora monitoring Septimus and retreated to my bedroom to clean out the old safe in my closet. I hadn’t used it in years, but going forward, all notes and evidence would have to be locked inside.
I was clearing out some old redacted files when there was a knock behind me.
Nora was in the doorway, her face ashen.
“What’s the matter? Is it Septimus?”
She shook her head, beckoning me to follow her.
She’d put on deafening music in the living room, the volume turned up so loud it drowned out our footsteps. She crept to the very end of the hallway, pointing at the bathroom door—open just a crack.
Hopper was inside, the faucet running. I wasn’t in the habit of spying on men in bathrooms, but she animatedly gestured that I take a look.
I leaned forward. Hopper was at the sink, brushing his teeth, a towel around his waist.
And then I saw it.
77
“What’s going on?” asked Hopper, stepping into the living room.
“Have a seat,” I said. “We’re going to have a little chat.”
“Right. The townhouse.”
“Not the townhouse,” said Nora crossly. “The tattoo on your foot.”
He froze, astonished. “What?”
“Ashley’s kirin,” she said. “You have the other half.”
He eyed the door.
“Hopper, we saw it. You lied to us.”
He glared at her, then suddenly darted for the doorway, but I was ready. I grabbed him by the back of his T-shirt and shoved him hard into a club chair.
“That tattoo on your fucking ankle. Start talking.”
He appeared to be too shocked to speak, or else was trying to think up another excuse. After a minute, Nora rose and poured him a glass of scotch.
“Thanks,” he muttered sullenly. He took a sip, staring into the glass. “To know her and then not,” he said, his voice low, “is like serving a life sentence. You see everything at a distance, through thick glass and telephones and visiting hours. Nothing tastes like anything. Bars everywhere you look.” He smiled softly. “You can never get out.”
He raised his head, gazing at us intently, as if remembering we were there. He actually looked relieved.
And just like that, he began to tell us all about her as the rain beat the windows like an army trying to get in.
78
“I didn’t lie to you,” Hopper said. “Six Silver Lakes was how I met Ashley. And it was true, that bet we made. She did blow me off. And that incident with that kid everyone made fun of. Orlando. When he took the ecstasy and Ash took the blame for all of us. That happened, okay? What I didn’t tell you was I’d been planning to break the hell out.”
“Of Six Silver Lakes?” I asked.
He nodded. “I’d had it with the entire operation. Even after the rattlesnake incid
ent, we still had another six weeks. I wasn’t about to keep swallowing the bullshit. Sure, thanks to Ash, Hawk Feather was scared shitless, but so what? Every day it was a hundred degrees. The kids were budding Ted Bundys, the counselors perverted fucks. At night you could hear one of them, Wall Walker, jerking off in his tent. It was only a matter of time before he tried to get someone to join him. The only girl worth talking to, Ash, didn’t give me the time of day. So I thought, Fuck it. One of the female counselors, this headshrinker, Horsehair, she was always checking out this map she kept hidden in her backpack, thinking she was covert about it. One night, when she was having a one-on-one with one of the girls, I stole it. I saw on the map that if you made it out of Zion National Park, there was an interstate pretty close that could take you west into Nevada. If I got to the road I could easily hitch a ride with a truck driver. I’d traveled with truckers before. Most hate cops, so they’re trustworthy as hell. The others are so hyped up on meth they don’t know who the hell’s tagging along with them. My plan was to get to Vegas.
“Horsehair made a big stink about her stolen map and there was a major inquisition around the campfire. People’s backpacks got searched, but they didn’t find a thing. The counselors figured Horsehair had lost it. But I’d hidden it under the foot insert in my hiking boot. I came up with an escape plan. I’d ration my food, keeping the extra in the bottom of my sleeping bag. I’d wait for us to reach the camping spot in closest proximity to that highway. From what I calculated, we’d reach it in three days. From there, the highway was half a day’s hike. I’d sneak off after everyone was asleep. This one counselor, Four Crows, was supposed to keep an all-night watch, but she secretly retired around one, so I’d have no problem. But there was something I hadn’t considered. Orlando.”
Hopper ran his hands through his hair. “We shared a tent. You get assigned a tentmate at the outset. Orlando was mine. One night I was up studying the map, and all of a sudden I heard in the dark, ‘Hopper, whatcha looking at?’ He’d woken up and was spying on me. I didn’t know for how long. I told him I thought I saw a lizard and to go the fuck back to sleep. But he was a sly kid. He was used to people lying to him. The next morning when I woke up he’d gone through all of my things and found the map. He said he knew I was planning to run away, and if I didn’t take him with me, he was going to tell the counselors.”
Night Film: A Novel Page 33