by Andrew Case
“What do you need me to do, boss?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
WAITING
It was warm and soft outside, the kind of summer night where you start out sixteen and stay up late and pretty soon you’re thirty-four with a kid and you don’t know where it all went. Leonard was worse even than that. His body ached in a thousand places. He had fled a hospital without getting discharged. He was probably wanted by the police. His only hope of coming through was to get the proof that Christine Davenport had been putting together. Proof about the cops. Proof about Eliot. He stepped up from the Wall Street subway and walked toward number Twenty-Six. With his change of clothes he was presentable, but only barely. Even with the badge, he would arouse suspicion if he tried to go in. He would have to wait for Veronica out here.
The monuments to capitalism past—the stock exchange, the Federal Reserve—loomed larger without the daytime crowds, and Leonard felt suddenly small beside them. He was reminded that he was only a petty bureaucrat, someone with maybe a little power over those even pettier. To the gangsters who flashed in and out of here all day, Leonard and the cops were both equivalent suckers working too hard for too little money. Whether he ran a city agency or pushed paper around the back rooms, at the end of the day, he went back to the Ebbets Field Apartments and the banker went back to Rye. They had no trouble keeping the streets clean here, sanitation strike or no.
Leonard had just seen how the strike was hitting everyone else. He had cut through the Whitman Houses on the way to the subway. Black plastic bags had been torn open and shredded through the courtyard, spilling spoiled fruit and coffee grounds. The fresh rot had been blown into piles.
But on Wall Street, the trash wasn’t so bad. The corner bins were overflowing with the soda cups and fast-food wrappers, sure, but nothing had burst and spilled across the sidewalk. The street was already quiet. Fifteen minutes after the closing bell, the subways were crammed with administrators and traders and all manner of support staff. When Leonard had passed Trinity Church, the eternal traffic of Lower Broadway still slogged toward downtown tunnels, but Wall Street itself was dark and still and silent. Throughout the rest of the night, the others would trickle out, never lingering, heading to celebrate at a discreet underground club or just meandering home. Leonard saw a figure in the revolving door. Veronica was on her way out. She saw him. Her fierce green eyes, for the first time since Leonard had met her, flashed with a hint of fear. Maybe she was just surprised to see him; she looked at him and spoke.
“You’ve changed.”
“I got some clothes. I’m staying with a friend.”
“Don’t tell me who.”
“I’ve seen your file. They were trying to sink the boat. I don’t know what Davenport showed Eliot, but if you’re right, she had something more. She knew where they were hitting next.”
Veronica looked inside her building, back toward the elevator bank. “You have to hurry. Eliot spoke to me again this afternoon. He called me into his office. I think he knows that we’re onto him.”
“Okay.”
“You have to stop the next attack. You have to find out what the next one is going to be. You’re in danger. We both are.”
Leonard steeled himself despite the evening swelter. “I’m going to Davenport’s.”
“The police already searched it, I’m sure. If there were anything there, they would have found it.”
“The police searched for evidence of her murder. They weren’t looking for what I’m looking for.”
“If you find it, come by to tell me. Here at the office. Anywhere. I’m worried about Eliot. About what he knows. The sooner you find anything out, the sooner we can act. And then we’ll be safe.”
Leonard nodded. A slim breeze drifted between the heavy, old buildings.
“Okay.” He turned away from her. He could hear the thin clatter of her heels on the broad flagstones, making the deep, full city sound like just another medieval village. The sound of a bored tourist on her way home from checking the Duomo off her list.
Leonard set out north from Wall on another long walk, this one to Davenport’s apartment. He walked softly on the cobblestones himself. The click of Veronica’s footsteps faded away and Leonard made his way up Nassau Street. At night, total silence here. Or at least it ought to have been. He stopped when he thought he heard another pair of footsteps behind him. He turned around to see only the thick and still darkness. His imagination. He set back onto his walk, pretending he didn’t hear the other footsteps start back up again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
REAL ESTATE
Christine Davenport had lived with her husband and child in what had once been a quiet apartment building on Perry Street. Some couples, some families, people doing just well enough to put down roots in what wasn’t exactly the heart of the village. At one time, the old units could see unobstructed over low, abandoned warehouses. Then developers began to take advantage of favorable zoning laws, tax breaks, and river views to raze the last light industrial pockets of Manhattan and push the new Village all the way to the shore. The old tenements and townhouses, where the alcoholic artists of the 1920s had sung each other miserable poems, had long since become single-family residences. The only place for apartments was west. So they had risen, cold metal and sharp glass that blotted the water from the windows of the merely well-off. It was a neighborhood for those who were rich but not banker-rich, people with enough money to do everything except stop developers from putting up a forty-story rhombus between themselves and the river.
The new units blocking the precious view were stocked with hedge funders and tech tycoons. They insisted on kitchen counters made of Italian limestone that chipped if you cooked on it, couches made of gauzy fabric that stained if you breathed on it, and other luxuries that showed off your wealth but made your life generally uncomfortable. Davenport’s tidy two bedroom, a pretty nice place in most of the city, would look almost dumpy by comparison. Leonard had been there once, had met her husband and kid and seen what was left of her view after the last condo had gone in. A sliver of water and a bit of Hoboken were on display to the south if you tilted your head just the right way.
She’d been dead almost a week. The cops would have already done a search, like Veronica said. He’d put on a good face for her, but he wasn’t all that hopeful he’d find anything. If the official verdict was that she was a jumper, though, Leonard still had a chance. The NYPD doesn’t send its firecrackers to suicides. If there had been a knife or a gun stuck under a pillow cushion, they would have found it, but if Davenport had hidden something to stay hidden, it would still be there.
Leonard stood in front of the stout brick building after his weary summer promenade. Even after midnight, people had been out on the streets, drinking beer in paper bags, listening to baseball on the radio. The old New York was beginning to show its face after over a decade in hiding—a city that was middling poor and a little on edge but sparked with life. People complained, but walking the length of Broadway on a summer night, Leonard had seen that there was a song in the city as well. New York was finally having a little burst of freedom, or maybe, Leonard thought, it was only having a rebound from the past twenty constricting years. Maybe New York had grown so safe, so sterile, and so cold so quickly that it had hit a wall, and the only thing happening now was to spring back.
The boom had been bad for street life; people had stayed inside, checking their stock portfolios at all hours and rubbing their hands at the paper value of their apartments. Now that the bust had finally settled in, people cut their budgets and split a pizza with their friends at a park. They stayed out late. The cops had better things to do now, with street crime creeping up, than to smack down on open-container laws. The quality of life, long kept in check by wealth, was returning.
But not to Perry Street. Tucked away from the main drags of the Village, extending to the water, it was still and quiet a
nd too clean. At nearly one in the morning at the tail end of August, the building was dark upstairs. Davenport’s lobby was bright and spare, trying to keep up with the pristine neighbors—white walls, white couches, powerful light. The apartment building as art gallery, minus any art. Leonard swerved through the doors and was met with the weight of overpowering air conditioning. He suddenly could feel his sweat start to freeze in place.
There was a saggy doorman inside, reading the Post and listening to a radio at the same time. A guy who had spent a lot of time plopped in a chair like this doing just about nothing—he’d once been in pretty good shape, maybe, but now bulged in the waist, legs, and forearms. His eyes were clear and his hair was thinning and he drank from an oversized Styrofoam soda cup. Maybe he’d spiked his Pepsi to get through the night, and who could blame him. The radio droned with baseball—the Yankees were on the West Coast, which meant the game would last well past one. The guard looked up at him, and Leonard held up his badge, nonchalant.
“Follow-up on the Davenport suicide.”
His jowls sagged as he looked up from his paper. “Uniform guys have come already.”
“We have some new intel on a possible fraud. City Hall stuff.”
“Lady’s already dead.”
“It might implicate some other people.” Leonard stepped toward the guard, giving off his best air of shared confidence. “I’d appreciate you keeping this quiet. It’s sensitive. If the wrong people find out, they might start destroying documents.”
“Uniform guys already took her computer.”
“We have some intel.” Leonard could tell that the guy had been a cop once. He was heavy now, but even a few years in the NYPD can get you set up with the kind of work he had, which you can then keep for life. “Where were you on the job?”
He chuckled. “That was a long time ago. I did six years in the Seven-Seven. Found out I wasn’t going to make detective and didn’t want to keep walking around waiting to get shot.”
Leonard’s old neighborhood. Back before the bakeries and the cocktail lounges and the sustainable seafood shop had driven him just outside of its boundaries and into the Seven-Oh. “I know the Seven-Seven. Before they redrew the precinct lines. Prospect Heights.”
“We called it Crown Heights then. Cause that’s what it is.”
“The rough side.”
“Both sides of it were rough then.”
“I suppose they were.”
Leonard smiled at him. People love to talk. People love to believe that their memories of the good old days—or the bad ones—still mean something. That what happened to them is relevant, which means they must be relevant too. Once you get someone to think you’re on the same side, warm, together, maybe they stop asking you questions.
Leonard could sense the guard looking him over. Wondering if maybe Leonard wasn’t dressed up enough to be a cop. Remembering all the task force guys who would go to church in their Jets hoodies if their wives would let them get away with it. But Leonard knew that the guard would let him pass. It was either that or call a precinct to check him out, and calling a precinct would always be too much work for a guy waiting for his retirement by working overnight security. The guard nodded, swigged his soda, and lifted his paper back up to his eyebrows.
Leonard walked past him to the elevators, which had been redone a few years ago but already looked tired. People put up all-white interiors and it looks cool and minimalist for a moment, and then smudges start to show, hands propping people up against the wall when they come home drunk, someone bringing their kids over to their friend’s house for brunch, a patina of grime covering the elegance, unless it is constantly scrubbed, repainted. All the sorts of things that building management is likely to cut back on when the place is undersold and understaffed. The elevator dinged and Leonard stepped inside.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
COLD
The elevator doors sprung open and Leonard walked out into the pristine hallway of the sixth floor. The apartment was unlocked. The cops had probably left it that way. He slipped inside.
The place was a mess. Leonard had heard that Davenport’s husband and son had left in a hurry, and hadn’t taken much. Whatever they left behind was tossed in a few different heaps in a few different rooms. The smaller bedroom, a closet with a window really, was awash in little-boy clothes hiding sharp plastic toys, traps to the unwary. The broad kitchen opened into an oblong living room, all of it strewn with papers. The husband was a professor, Leonard knew, and it seemed as though every book in the place had been opened and shaken and tossed on the floor, just to make sure no secret suicide note had been tucked inside one. At the far end of the living room was the view Leonard had once seen: a tiny balcony just big enough for maybe two people to squeeze out on, and floor-to-ceiling glass walls that gave Leonard the sense that he was going to fall at any moment. He slid open one of the doors and stepped out.
Heat seeped into the apartment—every indoor space in New York competes to be colder than the next in summer, driving you to sickness when you come in from the comforting swelter. Leonard stood on the balcony. Looking south, he could make out the harbor by the financial center where Davenport’s body had been found, the two piers jutting gently into the Hudson.
He turned back into the apartment. The mess that had taken over the floor was everything that had already been looked at. He had to see what had been left in place. He started in the boy’s bedroom. It was incredibly small. There was a toddler bed tucked against one wall. It barely fit. The boy was five, he would be getting to be just too large for this. And the next size bed wouldn’t fit in here. Leonard lifted the mattress and looked below. He sorted through the dresser, the colorful little-boy underwear and a collection of soccer jerseys. He tapped the sides of the dresser for hidden space. Nothing. He felt rushed, antsy, as though something was coming. He reminded himself not to hurry. He breathed deep. No one knew he was here except for the guard downstairs. And the guard downstairs didn’t care.
There was nothing in the boy’s room. He wandered back out to the living room. The books were a mess. The couch had been overturned, then set back. He checked between the cushions but there was nothing there. That’s what the cops would have done. Sitting on the couch he looked past the stone countertop and into the kitchen. A dozen cabinets, a thousand places to tuck something.
He passed a block of knives untouched on the countertop, the refrigerator decorated with careless magnets, a vase that probably very recently held flowers, disposed of by a forgiving cop. He opened cabinet after cabinet. Plastic kids’ cups and sturdy plates dominated. Leonard shook a few of the thermoses for sounds that something had been left inside. Nothing.
He opened the fridge. It was empty, the gentle cool a small refreshment on a long night. The same with the freezer. Not even a tray of ice cubes. He closed the door and stared at the fridge, a half-dozen magnets making a minor constellation on its face.
The magnets. There was a full plastic alphabet, but then something else. Six metal disks, too utilitarian to be some sort of game, pinning no shopping lists or school lunch calendars in place, parked in a line across the right side of the door. Leonard picked one off the fridge. He turned it in his hand. Davenport was smart enough to know that the best place to hide something was in plain sight. He tugged at the magnet, but it was solid, just a piece of metal left on the fridge for no particular reason.
Leonard snapped the magnet back onto the fridge and looked at the other five, close. Smooth uneventful little circles, one after the other. Except one. One had a faint crease down the middle of it. Leonard plucked it from the fridge. He snapped it apart. A flash drive presented itself out of one arc. It was a clever little hiding place. Once upon a time, you couldn’t even wave a flash drive near a magnet without erasing it. He would take it back to Roshni and look through it. He slid the magnet into his pocket and breathed out. He was almost there. If the drive had D
avenport’s investigation on it, the whole thing would be solved. He could show it to Veronica and together they would expose Eliot’s scheme.
He turned back to the room, and found himself staring down the barrel of a Glock nine-millimeter handgun.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
GRAVITY
Behind the gun was a young guy with a chubby face. Clean-shaven, short curly hair, sort of spacey eyes. Leonard would have thought he looked like a sweet kid if he weren’t holding that gun. Leonard recognized the nameplate from the stacks of paper he’d been reading.
“Officer Del Rio. Welcome to the neighborhood.”
“Don’t do anything stupid.”
“I won’t do anything stupid. I won’t shoot anyone, for example.”
“We should have got you long before this.” That wasn’t any surprise. Leonard had figured it was the Harbor Patrol who had been after him. This guy at the head of the line.
“You didn’t feel like bringing along your pal Officer Davies this time? Or is he even a real cop?”
Officer Del Rio pointed the gun to Leonard’s pocket.
“Take it out.”
Leonard reached toward his pants. “I’m going to move slowly. You asked me, so just keep your cool.”
His shoulder hurt as he reached in. He slid his hand into his pants and pulled out the magnet with the flash drive inside. He lifted it out and held it between his thumb and index finger.
“Hand it over.”
“Or else you’re going to shoot me? You’ll walk out of the apartment and leave me here dead? Do you think that security guard downstairs won’t be able to ID you? I bet you showed him your shield. Gave your name. He’s going to come up here and find a body and tell the DA that Officer Del Rio of the Harbor Patrol followed me in. Give them your Tax ID and everything.”