* * *
On Monday, Mrs. Leverson, she of four jobs and a shiftless husband, came in to say he hadn’t been back all weekend and he’d called to tell her he would be away until Tuesday. “He says it’s business,” she said to Carter. Her tone was neutral.
“Do you believe him?”
“No,” she said, her tone unaltered. She looked dispassionately at him across the desk. She reminded him a little of a snapping turtle.
“Then I’ll start tomorrow. Have you written down his itinerary?”
“Itinerary,” she said. It was the closest thing to a smile he’d seen from her, bitter thing though it was. “He doesn’t have what you might call an itinerary, just the places he hangs around.”
Carter took a handwritten list from her. The paper bore an orange cartoon of an attractive stereotypical housewife in the lower-right corner, her thought bubble bearing the words Things to Do. He glanced down the list. It was depressingly stereotypical itself—a menu of bars and bookies. At the bottom was a list of three names and addresses. “Who are these?”
“Girlfriends,” she said. Her tone remained neutral.
“You know who they are and where they live? Why are you hiring me?”
“I know who they are, but I don’t have no proof. You get the proof.”
Carter nodded. He thought of Alfred Hill’s untouched bank account. Seven years of income, eighty-four paychecks. It sounded like a lot. Why was he taking jobs to photograph men fucking women, again? He had no idea. He considered telling Mrs. Leverson that circumstances had changed and he regretted that he would no longer be able to take on her investigation. She looked so worn through, though. Like she didn’t already have enough men letting her down in her life.
“Mrs. Leverson,” he said instead, “you’re in luck. I have a corporate client who has me over in that part of town anyway. I can cover both cases on their tab as far as expenses go. I won’t need to invoice you as well.”
She looked at him for several seconds as she digested his words. “I don’t take charity.”
“It isn’t charity, ma’am, it’s happenstance, a lucky accident. Serendipity.”
He didn’t think she knew what “serendipity” was, but then, why should she? In any case, the meaning was clear.
“That would be good,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, Mrs. Leverson. It’s just how the cards fell.” Her expenses would come to two or three hundred dollars, four hundred tops, he estimated. Paying for them would be Alfred Hill’s gift from the grave to her. He had a feeling Hill would have approved.
He also wondered if Hill was even in a grave.
Distracted, his attention was drawn back to Mrs. Leverson by the solid sound of a gun in a plastic zip-top bag being placed on his desk. Carter winced; the sound was louder than it should have been, but not simply in terms of volume. It was just wrong, a misremembered noise. He had to narrow his eyes. The sun was suddenly shining in through the window to his left.
He looked at the gun thinking he must have missed something while he was distracted. It was a .45-caliber import, Czech, he thought. In a sandwich bag. He looked at her and frowned.
“I got the gun, like you asked,” she said. She reached into her bag and took out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. He said nothing, not quite trusting himself, while she took one from the pack and lit up. She took a long, grateful drag on it, blew out the smoke into the office air, and looked at Carter. “I did it just like you said. I took it from where he keeps it in his nightstand, never touched it with my bare fingers, and put it straight in a baggie.” She nodded at the gun. “Unused one.”
She looked at him. “He’ll be back tomorrow night, around ten. I’m going to be out. That’s when you should do it.”
She flicked the tip of her cigarette clean in the ashtray on Carter’s desk.
Carter didn’t have an ashtray. He’d never had an ashtray. He hadn’t smoked since his teens.
He started to breathe in to speak, but let the breath sigh out again, unused. Mrs. Leverson’s hair seemed a few degrees darker red than earlier, and she wore it more loosely. He couldn’t see how the sunlight would make something appear darker.
Mrs. Leverson dropped her cigarette into the ashtray. She looked suddenly at Carter with a panicked expression, placed both hands flat on the desktop. Her eyes were wide, and she tried to say something, but all that came out was a shuddering, incoherent noise. Carter shoved his chair back, feeling the legs scrape against the carpet. Afterward, he would remember that sensation and be unable to reconcile it to the fact that his chair was an office model on wheels.
Mrs. Leverson was convulsing as if electrocuted. Her eyes swung spastically in their sockets as her teeth chattered. Carter rose, trying to remember the EMT training he’d had. She seemed to be seizing, and he could just about recall how to deal with that. The first thing he shouldn’t do was to put something in her mouth to bite on. Second, she might smash her face on the desk the way she was convulsing, so he should get her away from it. The floor was the safest place for her to ride it out while he called 911.
He reached the side of his desk, looked at Mrs. Leverson, and for a moment was unsure why he was thinking about fits. She was fine, the ashtray was gone, there was no smoke in the air, his chair had wheels, there was no gun in a baggie, God was in his Heaven, all was right with the world, except that Carter now entertained the possibility that he was becoming insane.
It worried him less than it ought, he found. He was still functional, after all, and he had heard so many times that a madman never knows that he’s mad. He had just suffered some sort of episode, that was all. He was overtired, that was all. He needed a vacation, that was all.
Mrs. Leverson didn’t seem to have noticed anything odd about his behavior. They concluded the meeting, he told her to carry on as usual, and he would do the rest.
After she had left the office, he went to the window and watched her walk across the parking lot. He couldn’t remember her face anymore. When he tried to recall it, he saw her sitting opposite him, her palms slapping the desktop, teeth clattering, eyes rolling. She wasn’t even human in his memory anymore. Her eyes clicked as they jerked this way and that. Her eyelids rose and fell mechanically. Her rictus grin was set into her face as an arrangement of hinge and armatures. In his mind’s eye, Mrs. Leverson was a life-size ventriloquist puppet. Watching her walk to her car, even her hair looked like the fake hair of a doll. He hoped she wouldn’t turn and look up at him.
She did not. She reached her car, unlocked the door, got in, and fussed over her bag for half a minute. Then she put on her seat belt, started the car, and drove away. Carter watched her until she was out of sight.
* * *
The following day found Carter watching Mr. Leverson spending his wife’s earnings in a variety of venues, mainly bars. In two of them, Carter observed louche Mr. Leverson being overfriendly with women, none of whom was Mrs. Leverson. Carter took photographs with a Nikon DSLR, a high-resolution piece of equipment that had cost slightly more than his gun. Between its CCD and the long lens, he could be taking the pictures from Queens, if he could have gotten a clear line of sight. Maybe from orbit. The pictures would still be sharp.
While he watched, he played games of “What if…?” In this case, what if he had access to spy satellites? Would it make his job any easier? He doubted it. Sifting through pictures of New Yorkers looking like dots, trying to find the right ones to zoom in on. Fine for looking at terrorist camps in the back of beyond, but not so much use when looking for one ant in the anthill of the city.
Thinking of people as ants made him think of Orson Welles in The Third Man. The people mere dots as seen from the Riesenrad, seen from on high. If one stopped moving, would anyone care so very much?
The camera made Carter feel a little Olympian. With every touch of the shutter switch, another nail was hammered into the coffin of Mr. Nat Leverson’s comfortable future. It was very easy. Carter was gla
d he’d passed on taking expenses for this job. They were working out as well below his forecasts anyway.
The downside of surveillance was that it was boring, and that meant Carter’s mind wandered. It kept wandering back to the meeting with Mrs. Leverson the day before. He tried to compartmentalize what he thought he had seen and heard in the same way he did his dreams, but—like them—the memory didn’t want to be contained. There were too many things wrong with it. Oddly, the one that bothered him most was nothing to do with Mrs. Leverson, the gun in a baggie, or the implication that Carter had been hired to murder Mr. Leverson. The thing that bothered him most was the sun slanting into the office. The sun never had slanted in like that, and never could. A row of office buildings across the parking lot stopped any low sunbeams and, as far as he knew, always had.
Maybe the sun had caught an open window and reflected in, he thought, but no. The sun had been beyond the buildings at that time; how could it have reflected off anything? This was almost a reassuring thought; if he had just spaced out for a moment, then the gun and all the rest of it was all part of the same daydream. If the sun had been a possibility, though, it made it harder to deny the rest of it. Carter was intent on denying it. Nothing had changed in the room. He was overworked, and he had entered some sort of fugue for a few seconds. The human mind is a delicate thing, after all. You have to look after it. It needs rest, and pleasant distraction.
Emily Lovecraft appeared in his mind’s eye. He’d enjoyed her company, even when talking turkey. Rothwell was a lucky man to be dating her. Fuck, he was a lucky man to be born a Rothwell. You didn’t have to be addicted to the society pages to know who the Rothwells were; they had the footprint of the Kennedy or Bush families, the only difference was no scion of theirs had yet been president, and how long could that state of affairs last? The Rothwells were born for politics, or law, and often both.
Carter couldn’t see how a guy like Ken Rothwell had settled on a book nerd like Emily. There must be any number of blue bloods who’d murder their own sisters to get on Rothwell’s arm. Maybe it was to do with his political ambitions. Some spin doctor on his payroll had come up with the idea of him going out with somebody who knew how much a loaf of bread cost. Then again, to Rothwell’s constituency a book nerd was a dangerous intellectual. No matter how he worked it, Carter couldn’t quite see what Rothwell wanted from that relationship. Unless, Carter was forced to concede, Rothwell simply loved her, and that was all there was to it. Weirder things had happened.
Mr. Leverson was sitting near the window of his current bar with a woman who wasn’t Mrs. Leverson. At one point, she dipped her finger in her drink and sucked it clean, taking her own sweet time over it, never breaking eye contact with her companion for a moment. For his part, he went a little slack-faced and started breathing through his mouth, watching her finger between her lips the whole time.
Yeah, thought Carter, taking more pictures with the polarized filter, all completely innocent. Why don’t you just blow him in public and then we can all go home?
* * *
On Wednesday morning, Carter photographed Mr. Nat Leverson leaving an apartment that was not his. He seemed pretty pleased with himself, and Carter concluded he had probably gotten blown after all.
Carter doubted he would get anything better on Mr. Leverson than that, so he made a note of the address and decided to spend the rest of the day in the office, working from there.
On his return, he found an e-mail waiting for him from Emily Lovecraft. The tone was awkward with forced humor, and he wondered if she was worried that he was going to change his mind about the bookstore.
She also said she’d been wondering what the connection between her uncle and Carter was, and thought it must be family, even if the Hill name was unfamiliar to Carter. She asked him if he had a family tree. Perhaps they could find a common ancestor. The tone remained awkward even into this simple request, but somehow differently from the earlier greetings. Carter got the impression she was more interested in the family tree than she was letting on.
He wrote back immediately to say hello, to reassure her by treating the partnership as a done deal that there was nothing to worry about on that front, and to say he had never had much interest in the genealogy of his family, but he had an aunt who did it as a hobby, and he would ask her if she would send him a copy of the family tree as it currently stood.
Carter sent the e-mail, and looked at the dispatch confirmation on his screen for a long moment. He shook his head; he was reading too much into a short message. The tone was awkward simply because he was still all but a stranger to her, that was all.
He checked the address he’d seen Mr. Leverson leave against the list of suspected girlfriends Mrs. Leverson had given him. One of the addresses matched. He would check city records to confirm the name just for purposes of due diligence, but the case was all but closed. He brought his case notes up to date, and turned his attention to something more personal.
Henry Weston continued to bother him. He’d almost managed to put the man out of his mind when Emily Lovecraft told him that Weston was not the bookstore’s lawyer and was unlikely to be Alfred Hill’s, either. He had to agree with her. Why Hill would ask somebody like Weston to be his executor, and why somebody like Weston would agree, was an intractable mystery. All Carter could think was that maybe they had history, maybe old college buddies or something.
There was no return in any of this, Carter knew, and it was a waste of time and effort, but at least it might stop the question nagging at him. So he fired up the databases, and prepared to research Alfred Hill, and then Henry Weston.
At the end of three hours, he had everything he would usually expect when doing a background check of an upstanding citizen like Alfred Hill. School, college, some tax data, a few general Internet hits, and then the trail stopped abruptly seven years before, as he knew it would.
By his laptop, Carter had a scratch pad he used to list the kinds of searches he would make, and to tick off as he made them, storing the gathered information on the computer itself. The sheet for Alfred Hill was largely checked.
The sheet for Henry Weston was hardly touched. He found Weston on institutional sites, sure enough—here was his name at Cornell, here were his company papers for Weston Edmunds, here was his membership in the American Bar Association (a small surprise to Carter, the ABA being more a teaching and ethics organization than vocational)—but there was almost nothing else. No professional gatherings, no blue plate dinners, no functions at all. It was as if Henry Weston lived in his office and only rarely left it.
If Carter didn’t know it was impossible, he would have suspected “Henry Weston” to be a synthetic identity, put together for witness protection or something similar. It was impossible. Weston was a family member of a distinguished legal dynasty with a pedigree of ninety years. It was inconceivable that he could be anyone else but Henry Weston.
Maybe, Carter concluded, he just really liked his privacy.
Chapter 8
THE HORROR IN THE PARKING LOT
It was a clear afternoon, and a clear walk across an uncrowded parking lot. There was nobody else within a hundred yards. Professor James Belasco had no reason to believe he was in the last minutes of his life. He was healthy and had, as far as he knew, no enemies who hated him enough to cause him harm.
In this latter point, he was incorrect. Soon he would die in unnecessary terror and confusion purely because he had an enemy who hated him greatly, yet had never shown him that hatred. Like Fortunato, he would die an ugly death because he did not realize there was a Montresor in his life.
All that was in his mind that afternoon was getting home, grading some papers, then carrying out a swift pass of the academic publications that had been stacking up in his e-mail. His personal interests in topology would garner most of his attention, but he would keep a pastoral eye out for anything that might impact the theses of his students.
He reached his five-year-old Ford Focus and un
locked the door. There was nothing, not a hackle rising or a sense of discomfort, to tell him he was being watched, nothing at all to tell him this was the last time he would unlock the door, climb in behind the wheel, and carelessly throw his briefcase onto the passenger seat.
Belasco leaned back in his seat, drew a deep breath, and sighed it out. He worked his head from one side to the other to relieve the tension he felt in his neck, tapped the steering wheel lightly with his fingertips. Finally, he drew on his seat belt, and reached for the key where it waited, unturned, in the ignition.
As he lifted his shoe from the rubber mat in the footwell, there was the distinct sound of water stirred by the movement. Belasco’s fingers hesitated on the key, and he looked down. The mat was dry, his feet were dry.
He frowned, put it from his mind, and went to turn the key again. As he did so, his foot shifted toward the gas pedal and, once again, there was the sound of water being disturbed.
Belasco looked down. There was no water in the footwell, although …
His frown became curious. There was something down there after all. In the air, he caught a glimpse of a fine white wisp that vanished as soon as he saw it. Then more appeared. It took him a moment to understand what he was seeing. It was like looking at light reflected from the surface of a lake, the crests of the waves and ripples showing more strongly than the troughs. He watched the layer of waterless ripples, visible only by the light coming through the car windows.
He was having some sort of perceptual event, he knew. Perhaps some sort of stroke. There was no water there, yet there was water there. Experimentally, he lowered his hand into the surface of the rippling plain and wafted it back and forth. The ripples broke against his hand, and he could distinctly hear the sound of water being splashed. He could even feel a sense of resistance to his fingers, and perhaps coolness. Yet when he lifted his fingers clear, the sensation immediately vanished. His fingers were not wet. There was no water.
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