by Andrew Case
Veronica reached to whisk away the sweat with a tissue and tossed it into her pristine wastebasket. Under the muffled hum of the machine, she gave a short soft sob. She had always been afraid, and she still was. But for the first time in a long while, she was no longer in doubt. She knew what would happen next. She turned back to the demanding hum of her terminal. It would all be over soon.
CHAPTER TWELVE
LEAKS
Tony Licata sweated past the plaza and up the steps to City Hall. When they ask to talk to you at night, you have to go. It won’t do to pick up the phone. Licata had always walked to get his stories. When he had started, it had been the only way. He’d been assigned to courts, which meant the first stop each day was the clerk’s desk at Manhattan State Supreme to read the filings from the night before. Nothing hits the wood like a lawsuit. One girlfriend suing to get back jewelry that her married boyfriend had given to another girl he was dating. A Queens shoe salesman suing his pediatrician for making the moves on the daughter. You need sex, money, and a certain ick factor that people think they don’t want to hear about. But people don’t really know what they want to hear about.
Licata would read the filings and tart them up for scandal. Every aggrieved widow desperate. Every girlfriend a starlet in the making; if you find a way to suggest she was a stripper, even better. And every target a Wall Street big shot—you could bust out the dollar signs in the headlines so long as the guy had some kind of connection to finance, even if the closest he came to the big time was manning the residential mortgage servicing desk at the Bank of Nova Scotia.
Now the filings were all online, and most of the shops hired some law-school dropout to read them all at nine o’clock and flag any that the paper could use. The kids didn’t understand what made a story worthwhile, so Licata never read what they sent out anyway. They loved rock stars getting arraigned for not paying child support. That’s never front page. None of them had read a tabloid a day in their lives before working at one. Licata had moved on to crime, the city desk, but he kept one of the clerks at Manhattan State Supreme on his payroll just in case. They knew their own dockets better than the kids did anyway. Fifty bucks for anything that makes it in the paper. Two-fifty if it hits the wood. Licata could track down the angry plaintiffs and explain that, by cooperating, their case would be worth a lot more money. Bring a photographer if the woman is the least bit attractive. Licata still got a court byline once a month on average. As often as not, they were cases that the kid working for the paper had missed.
But the courts beat was just a side gig to him now, a way to get himself a little extra juice when leaning on frustrated detectives or ambitious deputy commissioners. Information in city government was usually a buyer’s market. Or it always had been. The price of paperwork was usually a hearty meal and a couple of rounds at the Blarney Stone. Tony knew which detectives at IAB could be counted on to photocopy their closing reports and slip them under the table while telling raucous stories of locker room antics. Guys who’d been passed over for narcotics or homicide teams and took their revenge on the whole department for sticking them in Internal Affairs. But that was before e-mail, before cell phones, before the department could call a service provider and find out who every detective had spoken to over the past six months. You so much as call an IAB detective and leave a message nowadays and your editor gets a call back from his lieutenant. Guys knew they were being watched: even their print jobs were logged and tallied. It was too much of a risk for a cop to walk out with a stack of papers under his arm nowadays.
So in twenty years Licata had slowly been pushed to the outside. Once upon a time, if one cop had shot another, Licata would get a call from a friendly source and be standing at the scene before the EMTs had swept away the body, taking off-the-record statements from the lead detective. Now he was stuck in line with the cub reporters, trying to put the best spin he could on the dead statements released by the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information. And in that game he was behind the cubs, who thought journalism was about taking whatever information the public officials deigned to release and adding their own clever comments. Kids took press releases and mocked them up on their blogs and said they were journalists. Licata still thought that the purpose of being a reporter was to report—to get information that no one else had access to and disseminate it. But he knew he was falling behind. In the digital age, the information market favored the seller after all. And when the seller called you, you had better show up.
Which was why Tony Licata was hiking up the broad stone stairway into City Hall after sunset. His daily copy was filed; he ordinarily would have been at the Blarney Stone telling a few stories about the good old days himself. Tonight he was all ears.
There was no guard at the front desk; security was set at the perimeter and anyone who made it as far as the plaza was presumed safe to head into the building itself. Licata passed the swinging wooden gate that led to the prim ceremonial Blue Room on his left, like saloon doors you had to pass through on your way to every press conference. But he wasn’t going to a presser today; he swung up the marble staircase to the official offices. The hub of the biggest city in the country and you’d think that somewhere there would be an elevator. At the top, he turned left, away from the City Council chambers and toward the executive suite.
The new administration had swept out the old bullpen and re-established the hierarchy of executive administration. No more sea of cubicles for even the most senior officers and the mayor himself; the new progressives insisted on the trappings of authority. Sturdy cherry doors now closed off the populists from the world they promised they were bettering. Tony Licata stepped through the empty antechamber and toward a door left just a smidgeon open, decked with a trim chrome nameplate: Deputy Mayor Victor Ells.
One knock was enough. “Is that you, Tony? Come on in.”
Licata pushed open the door and saw Ells posturing behind his desk. A broad man with a politician’s smile that you couldn’t help but believe even if you knew it was fake. The casually rumpled suit that signaled he was always hard at work, and smooth silver hair—hair that looked as though it had been ironed and pressed. From the beginning, this man had always seemed to be as much in charge as his boss. He had nothing to say from behind a podium, he didn’t deliver speeches or even get mentioned in them, but when deputy commissioners needed to quietly resign, it was a call from Ells that would make it happen. The rest of the floor was empty. Even at the highest levels of power, city employees get to go home to their families at some point. Licata stepped inside and took a seat.
“I’m glad you could come by and talk to me.”
“Yeah, well it’s been a pretty dry week. Only a cop shooting a cop and your office of misconduct is walled up on it.”
“I thought they were going to move you over to Sanitation. You could cover the strike.”
It was Ells’s way of showing that he had sources too. Just that morning Licata’s editor had floated the idea of him moving off of the police desk and covering Sanitation. A great gig for the next two weeks if they end up striking. Then you’re stuck the rest of your life reporting on whether the snowplows came out on time or not.
“They haven’t hung me up just yet. Maybe they never will. If I come in with something worth their while.”
“That’s right. Give me the hard sell. I invited you here, after all.”
Licata always found out the terms up front. When a deputy mayor has a secret, the price is higher than a round of Killian’s. “What are you looking for me to do?”
Ells slid a small stapled packet across his desk. “That’s Detective Mulino’s statement. He didn’t know the color of the day. He says he saw a gun, but you know they didn’t find one. He was bumbling his way through the whole thing.”
Licata didn’t reach for the paper. Touching it would mean accepting the terms, and he hadn’t been given any terms yet. “And what do you need?”
> It was the deputy mayor’s turn to lean out, to take in the room. He had a broad smile and a sharp pair of eyes and if he didn’t look much like a natural politician, he looked like a natural leader. “You’re going to want to sit on this too. You know there have been some rumors that my boss might be hanging it up after the one term. With the little disasters, the crime. It may just be too much for him. I just want you to remember, when the time comes for the right person to make an announcement, who has helped you out along the way.”
So, he could get the confidential file from a deputy mayor so long as he promised to puff that deputy mayor up when he took the next step and announced he was running. There were worse things. If Ells won, after all, then Licata would be in a position to get strategic leaks directly from City Hall. Ells knew that, of course. It was all part of the bargain.
“I can live with that.”
“I knew you could.”
Licata reached across the desk to pick up the file. Ells smiled. The deal was struck.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE CORNER
It woke her sometime after two, thick chemical smoke that stung Christine Davenport’s eyes. She sat up in bed. She could barely see through the room. There was no fire, just brutal, mean smoke, smoke that wasn’t from burning wood or paper. It reminded her of the smell made when she had melted the sippy cups by leaving them too close to the stove. Her husband was asleep beside her. He barely rolled over. Davenport sprung out of bed and ran to the boy’s room.
She turned the corner into the room that wasn’t really built as a bedroom. The boy was sleeping, as oblivious to the smoke as his father. She twisted him up to sitting and he blinked awake. It wasn’t as though they couldn’t breathe, and she couldn’t see any actual fire. By this time her husband was standing at the door, waving his hand back and forth like that would do any good. She hefted the boy up, half onto her shoulder. As she turned from the miniature bedroom she saw that the smoke was chugging in from outside. They had left the window facing Perry Street open and something below was burning. Hoisting the boy, she turned to her husband.
“Can you go close that? And check why the alarms didn’t go off.”
The boy, groggy, swept his head from her neck to her shoulder. There was no danger now, maybe, but she still wanted to get out of the apartment. You never can tell.
“Mommy?”
“Shh. We’re going downstairs. We’re going to see what’s going on.”
“What’s that smell?”
“Shh.”
“Can I have some milk?”
They moved in slow motion, Adam struggling to shut the window and Davenport screwing a lid onto the cup of milk. She tied a pair of proper shoes on Henry and stepped into a pair of slippers herself. They were on the sixth floor. Never use the elevator in a fire. But there wasn’t a fire in the building as far as they knew. Still better to be safe. She slipped down the broad stairwell, carrying the boy, her husband trailing.
In the stairwell, safely away from the smoke, she gathered her thoughts and she held her son’s hand. The panic was over. Her thoughts drifted back to the worry she had suffered all afternoon. She hadn’t been able to read Eliot. Usually, when the tables turned, you knew right away. Once-eager executives suddenly coy, asking immediately if all of this is really necessary. But the man in the wool suit in summer had taken the news quietly. Maybe he had something to hide. Maybe he knew who did. It was something more than walking a midlevel trader over to the feds, but Davenport couldn’t tell how much more. That’s why she had taken the precautions that afternoon. A place to secure everything she had found so far. To preserve it. Just in case.
By the third floor Henry was up and walking on his own, one hand in his mother’s and the other gripping the milk. Their clothes smelled. The entire apartment would have to be cleaned. Another expense. The sleepy overnight doorman was more alert than Davenport had ever seen him as she tugged her son out toward the street. As soon as they turned from the desk toward the exit, they were silenced by the heat and the sound of it.
In front of their building, right below their corner window, a car raged with flame, spitting out the acrid smoke and those thick, slimy wisps that slither off of things that aren’t supposed to burn but are nevertheless burning. A twenty-year-old Volvo, car seat in the back. It was instantly recognizable to Christine Davenport. Some sort of liquid, leaking from deep within the skeleton of the machine, dribbled down the street, afire the whole time. Henry’s eyes widened at the scene. Adam’s eyes traced the smoke as it drifted up through the neighborhood trees into their window, and turned to Christine.
“Chris, that’s . . .”
She had the boy in her arms and was already out the front door.
“C’mon. Let’s go look at the fire.”
There were two uniform cops standing by the front of the wreckage, trying to shoo off sightseers and keep what little traffic was still on the streets to a minimum. It was late, dark, but Davenport hadn’t looked at a clock before leaving. She stared at the blistering upholstery, the plastic curling away from her son’s car seat through the window. She tried to remember if anything valuable had been left inside. Not that she would reach in to get it now. Even in the vestibule, beyond the door, she could feel the heat. There was no sign of a crash; just the smoking wreck of what once was her car. Carrying her boy, Davenport pressed through the window and walked up to the cop, who gestured to move along.
“That’s my car. The smoke woke us up. What happened?”
The cop looked to his partner. The partner smirked, and Davenport sensed he looked a little too happy given the circumstance. “It’s her car. You may as well.”
The cop scowled at the burning car. “Some animal tried to appropriate the vehicle. Apparently he left his hot-wiring skills back in Brownsville and couldn’t get it to start.” The cop shrugged. “So he figures that if he douses the whole thing with gasoline we won’t find his fingerprints. Genius that he is, he manages to trap himself inside after setting the fire. We have him in the ICU. You gotta tell the insurance we’re keeping the car as evidence.”
“Oh. Okay. Thank you.”
So that was that. The car thieves were on their way back. Some of them were just smart enough to try to conceal their tracks and just dumb enough to almost kill themselves in the process. No one could keep the rush of the real New York from seeping back in somewhere. Davenport nodded to the cops and turned back to her building. Henry’s bright brown eyes kept fast on the flames. Her husband had already started his way upstairs, and Davenport walked her son back inside, the last defense from the outside world, and felt safe taking the elevator back to her apartment.
As the smoke emptied from the apartment, Christine set the boy down back in his toddler bed, his smile drifting away as his body gave in to sleep. She sat with him for a moment. She could protect him if it came to that. Maybe she’d take him for an afternoon at the playground sometime. She stroked his hair, stood up, and walked back into the living room. Adam was still uselessly waving at what was left of the smoke when she spoke to him.
“We have to tell the insurance company that they’re impounding it.”
Her husband too seemed perhaps not concerned enough. “It’s okay. It was old. I hope they even give us enough to get another.” The car was no use to Davenport after all. It was her husband who drove, on the three days a week that he had to be in New Jersey, living the academic dream of the musty, thoughtful man in a frumpy old car. Maybe he was hoping for another clunker to replace it. He would probably be ashamed to drive something more modern.
She walked past him and set up a fan in the window. Set to exhaust, it wouldn’t do much, but it was better than swinging your arm at it. Her husband slipped around the corner from the window and into the real bedroom. Not that it was much bigger than the too-small bedroom. You could fit a bed in it anyway. The smoke was clearing, but the smell still li
ngered, stark, acrid. A hint of fear in it. Adam called faintly from the bed as Davenport watched the smoke clear. “Are you coming to bed?”
Davenport sat on the sill, looking downward. “Just a minute.” She stared out at the melting car, the plastic now burnt away and the metal husk glowing with heat. It was a magic, throbbing sight. A bright-pink skeleton surrounded by quicksilver fire on an otherwise ordinary street. She couldn’t turn away from it; the tires popped one by one and the chassis slumped to the asphalt.
Then she looked up and down the street and felt suddenly cold. Two cars down from her burning wreck was a sleek, black SUV. The car after that was an S-Class. The whole block was peppered with luxury automobiles and here she was supposed to believe that the neighborhood car thief had targeted a battered Volvo with an odometer in the high one-fifties.
She stared out at the two uniform cops keeping guard, watching the car melt away. They had been there before the fire department. According to them, a man had been pulled out of the car and taken to the hospital, but no ambulance siren had woken her up. From below, one of the cops saw her looking at him and stared back, offering a firm quiet stare and a thin smile.
The Little Fear hadn’t come back after all. This was the real thing. Or at least it was a warning. The real thing wouldn’t be only the smell. Whoever it was knew where she lived. Knew her car. Knew she had a son. She slipped into Henry’s room and started packing a bag. Her husband’s parents were in New Jersey, they could stay there. Cut down on his commute, now that he didn’t have a car anyway. Take the first bus in the morning. See if it was too late to enroll the boy in school out there. The boy would miss the last week of camp, another expense down the drain, but now very much worth it. There was no point in waking Adam or Henry, they were useless at packing themselves up anyway. She would stay up, have them ready, shuttle them off to the suburbs until the danger had passed. She would stay behind and finish what she needed to do. She turned to the bathroom and started to peel out her son’s necessities, neatly filing away the toothbrush, comb, and soap into tidy plastic bins, planning her own next move as she packed for her careless boys.