Elevator Pitch

by Linwood Barclay

  Pregnant, Barbara was thinking. History repeating itself.

  “So …” Arla said. “I got a job.”

  Barbara blinked. “You have a job. So this is a new job?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, that’s good. Congrats. You didn’t like what you were doing?”

  “No, it was okay. And I learned a lot of stuff there that I can do at the new place.”

  “So where are you moving to?”

  “Okay, so, you know at the job I had, I was doing all this survey stuff. Analytics, interpreting data, all that kind of thing.”

  “Right. What marketing is all about.”

  “No one makes a decision these days without looking at all the data. No one in business goes with just their gut.”

  “Gut feelings are all I’ve ever had,” Barbara said. “I don’t understand any of this stuff you’re talking about.”

  “It’s the way the world’s going,” Arla said. “I mean, even if you’re sure your own instincts are right, no one wants to make a move without data to support it.”

  “And let me guess,” Barbara said. “Sometimes the data tells you what the people want, so that’s what you give them, even if, in your heart, that’s not what you want to do.”

  Arla shrugged. “Pretty much. You find out what the people are hankering for and deliver it.” She shook her head. “God, who uses a word like ‘hankering’ anymore?”

  Barbara chuckled.

  Arla continued. “Anyway, you want to know if your message is getting out there, and if it is, if it’s reaching the target audience. All that stuff. It’s pretty fascinating. The company I just left, we were doing a lot of work for the entertainment industry. What movies people like and why, data from advance screenings. Funny thing is, even when you have a movie you think will be a hit, it can go out there and sink like a stone.”

  “Sure,” Barbara said.

  “But I was thinking, what if I could take those kinds of skills and apply them in a way that would have some more meaning? You know, instead of finding a way to make some airhead pop star even more popular, what if you could expose people to issues that matter, and make them care?”

  “That actually sounds like a good thing,” Barbara said. “So who are you going to work for? Planned Parenthood? The ACLU? Save the Whales?”

  “Not one of them,” Arla said. “But still, a place where I can do some good.”

  “So, tell me,” her mother said.

  “You promise you won’t get mad.”

  Barbara sat back on the bench. Oh, no, she thought. She’s gone to the dark side. She’s working for Facebook.

  The waiter delivered the ham and cheddar omelette, but Barbara didn’t even look at it. “Just tell me.”

  “I got a job with the mayor’s office,” Arla said.

  Barbara was too stunned to speak.

  “Pretty cool, huh?”

  Barbara found her voice and said, “This mayor? The mayor of New York?”

  Arla nodded and smiled. “I haven’t actually met him yet. I mean, maybe I never will. You can work for someone like that and never come face-to-face. You’re just one of the minions, right? But you never know.” She leaned across the table and whispered conspiratorially, “I hear rumors he’s thinking of going for a Senate seat, or maybe even something bigger than that. Imagine being on the ground floor if that happens.”

  Clearly, Arla had not read Barbara’s latest column that put out that rumor. Barbara pushed her plate to one side and leaned in, their foreheads almost touching.

  “I get it,” she said.

  “Get what?” Arla said.

  “It’s creative, I’ll grant you that.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Arla said, leaning back into her seat.

  “Don’t be cute, Arla.”

  “Honestly, I don’t know what you mean, Mother.”

  “Did you actually plan it? Did you think, wouldn’t it be great if I could work for the man my mother’s been trying to get the goods on since he took office? The man is totally corrupt, you know. Always doing favors for his friends. Or did the mayor’s office seek you out?” Barbara suddenly smiled. “I could see it happening that way.”

  “Not everything is about you.”

  “Headley figures out who you are and offers you a job just to stick it to me. Were you headhunted? Maybe he figures if I know you’re working for him, I’ll back off. Or I’ll take him up on his offer.”

  “What offer?”

  “Never mind.”

  “I saw the position advertised online,” Arla said. “And I applied. I went for an interview, and I got it. If you’re suggesting I was hired just to even some score with you, then thanks for the insult. I’m good at what I do. I got hired because I bring something to the table.”

  “You went after it to spite me.”

  “You’re not even hearing me anymore.”

  “You wanted to rub my nose in it,” Barbara said.

  Arla eyed her mother pitiably. “I’d have thought, being a writer and all, you could do better than a cliché like that.”

  “Once they find out you’re my daughter, they’ll probably fire you.”

  “Well, unless you’re planning to tell them, I should be fine.”

  Arla’s last name was Silbert, as was Barbara’s. Matheson was actually Barbara’s middle name, which honored her mother’s side of the family. She’d chosen to write under it years earlier, so Arla wasn’t likely to be found out on name recognition alone.

  “You know, it’d be nice, if just once, you could acknowledge that I can accomplish something on my own. Maybe even congratulate me.”

  Barbara said nothing.

  Arla sighed resignedly and looked at her watch. “Shit, I have to run. Don’t want to be late on my first day.” She flashed a smile as she slid out of the booth. “Thanks for the coffee. Always nice to catch up.”

  She turned and walked out. Barbara watched as she reached the sidewalk, turned right, and walked past the window, heading south.

  Barbara looked at the omelette. She was sorry she’d quit smoking years ago. She wished she had a butt to grind into it.

  Thirteen

  Jerry Bourque was at his desk. Lois Delgado sat across from him, drinking coffee from a paper cup.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Kid’s sick,” she said. “Barfed her guts up first thing.”

  Delgado had been married ten years to a firefighter named Albert. They had a seven-year-old daughter, Abigail. Abby for short.

  “Al’s shift starts late, so with any luck I’ll be home before he leaves, and if not, we’ll get his mother to come over.”

  “That’ll be nice,” he said.

  She shot him a look across the two desks. “Don’t get me started.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Bullshit.” Delgado rolled her eyes. “She’s a snoop. She went into the medicine cabinet last time, looking around.”

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  “All the prescriptions, I had them all turned exactly halfway, so only the right side of the labels were exposed. Like, all you’d see of my name on the prescription is ‘gado.’ You know what I mean?”

  “I get it.”

  “So after she’s been there, I check, they’re all facing every which way. Pretty much in the same spot—she covered her tracks that much—but not sitting the way I left them. I got one of those mini-safes, like they have in the hotels? Put it in our bedroom closet. One day she says, she just happened to see it when she found Abby in there, wanting to try on my shoes. Oh, she says, I see you have a safe? What’s that for? It’s driving her crazy. Thing is, it’s the only place I can keep something where I know she won’t see it. Financial papers, stuff like that. I tell her it’s where I keep my gun.”

  “She buying that?”

  “She knows I already have a lockbox for it. Maybe I can get her thinking I’m building an arsenal. But she probably
suspects.”

  “Albert ever decides to have an affair, he hasn’t got a chance of getting away with it.”

  “No kidding,” Delgado said. “I’ve told him, you mess around, I’ll kill you and I know how to cover my tracks.”

  Bourque believed she had the skills, if not the actual inclination. “And if you decide to have an affair,” he said, “you’ll know how to get away with it.”

  Delgado smiled. “No way Albert’s finding out about Ryan.”

  Bourque grinned. Delgado had a thing for actor Ryan Gosling. She’d seen all his movies multiple times. Once, on a trip to Canada, she even drove by the Burlington high school he’d attended. A photo of him from a magazine was taped to the edge of her computer monitor.

  “I think, maybe having his picture there would be a clue,” Bourque said.

  Delgado shook her head. “It’s the opposite. If he and I were seeing each other, putting that picture there would be the last thing I’d do. It actually keeps anyone from being suspicious.”

  “Brilliant,” Bourque said.

  “Anything back on the DNA?”

  “Don’t make me laugh. How about the tip of the finger? Were they able to pull a print off it?”

  Delgado said, “Waiting. Looks like a pinkie. They found it about twenty yards north of the bench the body’d been dumped behind, just to the edge of the path, in the flower bed. Once we get a print, and they do the DNA, we’ll find out if our guy’s in the system. The hands were callused, suggesting the vic did physical work.”

  “And the socks are a dead end. So far.”

  Delgado said the review of surveillance video along the High Line was also going nowhere, at the moment. “But at least there’s this.” Delgado pointed to her computer monitor. “I’m sending it to you.”

  Bourque signed in and called up the file his partner had shared. It was a picture from the coroner’s report of the dead man’s cobra tattoo.

  “That tat might be the best thing we’ve got at the moment,” he said.

  Delgado nodded. “It’s something. We can start hitting tattoo parlors. Wondering if it’s time to put out a release. White male, best guess is between forty and fifty years old, photo of the tattoo, those socks.”

  “I’m gonna make another call to Missing Persons,” Bourque said. “Maybe somebody’s worried Daddy didn’t come home.”

  “Knock yourself out,” Delgado said.

  Bourque first went onto the NYPD’s Missing Persons Twitter feed, then its website. Most of the missing were categorized as “silver alerts,” which applied primarily to senior citizens with Alzheimer’s disease or some other form of dementia. These were folks who’d wandered away from home or a facility, and in most cases turned up okay. Many of the others were kids who’d failed to come home. But the likelihood that any of these were child abductions was low. These were youngsters who’d had a fight with their parents, or stayed over at a friend’s house without thinking that a call home might be a good idea. If a child had been taken, odds were it was a parental abduction, a custody fight that spiraled out of control. That didn’t mean it was any less serious an event. Some parental abductions ended up very badly. Murder-suicide, for example. Teach the other spouse a lesson.

  What didn’t come up on the Missing Persons list very often were middle-aged men or women without any history of mental disabilities.

  Bourque didn’t see any recent postings that sounded like the High Line victim. There were a couple of men who had been missing for several months who were, as the saying went, “known to police,” and could very likely be residing at the bottom of the East River, but the man Bourque was hoping to identify was very recently deceased.

  He put in a call to the Missing Persons bureau to ask if they’d had any reports about a middle-aged white male they’d not yet put on the website.

  “Funny you should ask,” they said.

  The house was on Thirty-Second Street, between Broadway, to the south, and Thirty-First Avenue to the north, in the Astoria part of Queens. It was a two-story semidetached, gates across the driveway that were intended to keep anyone from ripping off the ten-year-old Ford Explorer parked there. It sat on a slab of concrete that sloped downward toward a single garage door.

  Lois Delgado parked their unmarked Ford Crown Vic out front, although anybody who knew anything would immediately be able to spot it as a police car with its plain minihubcaps, lights inside the front grille and atop the rear window shelf, and antenna on the trunk lid.

  Bourque got out the passenger side and waited until Delgado had rounded the car so they could approach the front door together. She rang the bell and stood ahead of him.

  Seconds later, the curtain was pulled back an inch. A woman peeked out. They heard a deadbolt turn and a chain come off before the door opened.

  “Mrs. Petrenko?” Delgado said. “Eileen Petrenko?”

  The woman was in her forties, about five-four, plump, her brown hair pulled back tightly into a bun. She eyed the two of them with apprehension.

  “Mrs. Petrenko, I’m Detective Delgado and this is Detective Bourque.”

  “Oh my,” she said. “Have you found him? Please tell me you’ve found him.”

  “Could we come in?” Delgado asked.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” she said, holding open the door.

  They entered a cramped living room that was a mess of newspapers, magazines, and small office boxes up against one wall.

  “I’ve been going out of my mind,” Eileen said, wringing her hands nervously. “Have you found him? Where is he? Has he gone back to Cleveland? He hates it here, I know that, but I can’t believe he’d just go back there without saying a word. I called his sister, and she hasn’t seen him, and if he was going back he’d have got in touch with her, I know he would.”

  “Can we sit down?” Bourque asked.

  Eileen cleared the couch of newspapers so the two detectives could sit. She took a seat across from them. There was a framed photo of her and a round-faced man with grayish, brush-cut hair on the small table next to her.

  “This is Mr. Petrenko?” Delgado asked.

  The woman picked up the picture and looked despairingly at it. “I’ve barely slept for two days,” she said.

  Bourque had his notebook out. “I know you’ve been over this with the officers who spoke with you yesterday morning, but I wonder if you’d mind going over it with us.”

  The woman kept the framed photo in her lap and nodded.

  “Your husband’s full name?”

  “Otto Mikhail Petrenko.”

  “Can you spell that?”

  She did.

  “Date of birth?”

  “Um, February third, 1975.”

  “Where was Mr. Petrenko born?” Delgado asked. “What kind of name is that?”

  “Russian,” his wife said. “Except for Otto. That is German. He was named after an uncle in Germany. Mikhail was his father’s name. He was born in Voronezh, but his parents slipped out of the country and into Finland shortly after he was born, and then, eventually, to America, when Otto was around four years old. They settled in Ohio, which is where Otto grew up, and where we met in Cleveland.”

  “And how long have you been married, Mrs. Petrenko?” Delgado asked, her voice soft and full of concern.

  “Seventeen years,” she said.

  “The two of you have children? Or do you live here alone?”

  “It’s just us,” she said, looking uncomfortable. “Otto had siblings, but …” Her voice trailed off.

  “And you own this house?”

  She shook her head. “We’re renting. Otto didn’t want to buy. He didn’t know whether he wanted to stay here.”

  “In Queens?” Bourque asked.

  “In New York. Anywhere here.”

  “You moved here from Cleveland?”

  “Three years ago,” she said. She glanced at the boxes along one wall. “We’ve still got things in boxes, if you can believe it. It’s not important stuff. We’d move
it to the basement, but it’s awfully musty down there.”

  “What about the garage?”

  “We’ve got furniture in there,” she said. “Our place in Cleveland was bigger, so we had stuff we couldn’t place, so we just leave it in there. We haven’t been able to get the car in the garage since we got here. Is this important?”

  “I’m sorry,” Delgado said, offering an apologetic smile. “Sometimes we tend to wander. Tell us about when you last saw Otto.”

  “Two nights ago,” she said. “Sunday night.”

  “What time would this have been?”

  She thought a moment. “Around eight? I know it was after 60 Minutes. The show had just ended when Otto said he was going out. He didn’t show up for work yesterday, and he didn’t show up today.”

  “Did he say where he was going on Sunday night?”

  Eileen Petrenko shook her head. “I just thought, maybe out for a drink.”

  “I noticed the Icon when we were driving around,” Bourque said.

  Another head shake, but this one was more violent. “He wouldn’t go to that kind of bar.”

  Bourque glanced at Delgado. She said, “I think it’s a gay bar.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Anywhere else he might have gone?”

  “There’s the Break, the billiards place,” she said. “Sometimes he goes there. Mostly he watches the others play because he’s not very good. But when he hadn’t come home by eleven, I went down there looking for him, and he wasn’t there. They hadn’t seen him. Then I wondered if maybe he’d gone to a movie. I don’t like movies, so sometimes he goes alone.”

  “He likes movies?” Bourque asked.

  Eileen nodded her head toward the boxes along the wall. “Half of them are filled with DVDs. He likes to collect. There’s even some of them on VHS. On cassette, you know? And we don’t even have a VCR anymore. Threw it out years ago.”

  “What’s his favorite movie?” Bourque asked.

  She had to think. “He likes adventure ones. Like with Indiana Jones or that John Wick person, that kind of movie. Action ones. He likes the fighting ones, where they’re doing the kung fu or whatever it’s called. I don’t watch those.”

  “One of my favorites,” Bourque mused, “is that one, with the shark? Where they had to close the beaches?”