Elevator Pitch

by Linwood Barclay

  “Did you hear what I said up there?” Estelle asked. “You should sue her and the network for—”

  “No,” he said firmly. “It’s more than just one arrogant TV host or one network. It’s a bigger battle than that.”

  Estelle placed a hand on his arm. “What do you want to do? Do you want to go home? We can, you know. If this has ruined everything, we don’t have to stay. I can see if I can get our money back on the tickets.”

  “Tickets?” he said.

  “You remember we have tickets for that show tonight. But it’s okay, we can—”

  “No, we’re going.” He lifted his head and gave it a small shake, as though trying to rid himself of the anger he felt. Then he forced his mouth into a smile. “We’re not going let them stop us from having a good time.”

  Estelle smiled. “You’re sure?”

  Clement nodded. “I’d forgotten about the show. What are we seeing?”

  “It’s that one with all the dancing,” Estelle said. “I know that doesn’t exactly narrow it down. You’re probably going to hate it, anyway.”

  “All those nancy boys prancing about the stage? I wouldn’t miss it for the world. In the meantime, I’m going to take you out for a fabulous lunch. How does the Capital Grille sound?”

  “Sure,” his wife said.

  “I’ll get us a cab,” he said. “You stay here.”

  He stepped off the sidewalk and walked out between two parked cars. He came up around the side of one of them as he waved his hand in the air.

  Behind him, he heard a window power down.

  “Hey,” someone said.

  Eugene Clement did not turn around when he heard Bucky’s voice. Looking up the street, Clement said, “Still on track?”

  “Yes.”

  “Keep your eyes open. The world knows I’m here. There’s probably a heightened alert already.”

  “Got it.”

  “We’re good to go.”

  Clement heard the window power up as a yellow cab swerved across the street and came to a stop in front of him. Clement opened the back door and called out to his wife.

  “Madam,” he said, “your chariot has arrived.”

  Twenty-Three

  Barbara had been in the funeral home for the better part of half an hour.

  Chris Vallins was getting tired of waiting across the street for her to come out. It wasn’t hard to figure out why she might be here, given that in her column she’d written about losing a friend in the Monday elevator accident. The dead woman’s name had been Paula Chatsworth.

  To confirm, he had looked up this funeral home on his phone and called to ask if the Chatsworth service would be held there. And if so, when? Asking for a friend, he said. The woman who answered said that while the home had been involved, the service for the Chatsworth woman was going to be held up in Montpelier.

  Ah, well, thank you very much, he said.

  Chris believed he was going to have to do more than just follow Barbara Matheson around and make a few online inquiries. If you really wanted to find the dirt on someone, you broke into their place. You got on their computer and read their emails. You looked into the bottom bedroom dresser drawer and checked out the sex toys.

  But one thing had come out of today’s efforts that had piqued his curiosity. Who was the woman Barbara had met with at the Morning Star? They hadn’t talked long. The other woman hadn’t even ordered breakfast. Was she a source? Was she someone passing along information to Barbara? Vallins could not recall seeing the woman in the time he had been working for the mayor’s office, but the city employed a lot of people who could be privy to the kind of information Barbara would like to have. Even though Chris had seen her from across the street, he was confident he’d recognize the woman if he saw her again. And he had her picture.

  Vallins started hearing music and glanced to the north. A shabbily dressed man was coming his way, pushing a rickety shopping cart with nothing in it but an ’80s-style boom box that was playing at full volume.

  “You can’t always get what you want …”

  Wasn’t that the truth, Vallins thought, giving the man a nod as he wheeled his cart past him. The man was bobbing his head to the music and took one hand off the cart’s handle long enough to give Vallins a thumbs-up.

  Vallins couldn’t help but smile.

  Finally, Barbara emerged from the funeral home and started walking back toward Second Avenue.

  Vallins was on the move again.

  When the Manhattan Today writer got to the corner, she crossed Twenty-Seventh, looking down at the phone in her hand the entire time. A cab shot past, the driver giving her the horn. Without even looking up, Barbara sent her free hand skyward and gave the cabbie the finger.

  She went into the Duane Reade on the corner.

  Chris followed her in, still keeping his distance, and found that Barbara had gone down the feminine hygiene products aisle. He knew he was going to look especially conspicuous hanging around that part of the store, so he decided to go back outside and wait for her to emerge. He found a spot a few yards down the sidewalk where he could watch the door of the drug store.

  While he waited, his own phone rang. He dug it out of his jacket, saw Valerie on the screen.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Where the hell are you?” Valerie asked.

  “I’m running an errand for the mayor.”

  “What kind of errand?”

  “If he wanted you to know I’m guessing he would have told you.”

  A sigh at the other end. Then, “There’s been another elevator plunge.”

  “You’re shittin’ me.”

  “No.”

  “Where?”

  “On York, just south of Rockefeller University. Some big-deal Russian scientist got killed.”

  “Jesus,” Chris said. “Are you there?”

  “Yeah. Homeland Security’s here, too.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Maybe because of who it was who got killed. You ever heard of Fanya Petrov?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “Beats me.”

  Barbara, a small Duane Reade bag in hand, came out of the store. She glanced into the bag, as if checking that she remembered everything.

  “I gotta go,” Chris told Valerie. Without waiting for a response, he ended the call and slipped the phone back into his jacket.

  Barbara was heading north, holding the bag in her left hand, her phone in her right. As she crossed Twenty-Eighth Street, she put the phone to her ear, spoke to someone. The call lasted little more than thirty seconds, which led Chris to think maybe she’d only left a voice mail.

  As she continued on, she appeared to be searching for something on her phone. Maybe another number, someone else she wanted to get in touch with. Or maybe she was on some site, thumbing through headlines.

  She did write a column, after all, Chris thought, making an allowance for how she never put the phone away. She probably read through several dozen news sites every day. And then she’d be calling people and interviewing them and turning the shit they said into a piece for Manhattan Today. But right now, in the wake of what she had written lately about the mayor, it would be nice to know exactly what she was reading and who she might be getting in touch with. And why had she gone to the funeral home, anyway? Was it simply to offer condolences, or was there more to it than that?

  Chris found himself closing the distance between himself and Barbara, fooling himself into thinking that if he got near enough, he’d be able to see what was on her phone before she put it away, or to her ear. Chris had an astounding number of talents, skills that no one even knew about, but there were limits to what he could do.

  Between Thirtieth and Thirty-First, Barbara nearly walked into an elderly woman coming in the other direction. Her bat-like radar had her dodging out of the way just in time.

  As they neared Thirty-Second Street, Chris started to worry.

  If Barbara had been looking up as she approached the
intersection on the west side of Second, she might have noticed the Don’t Walk warning blazing from the traffic signal on the other side. But Barbara, oblivious, kept on walking.

  Coming from the left, a once-white van nearly eaten away by rust was approaching at high speed. It careened around a taxi that had pulled over to pick up a fare. The driver was flooring it, hoping to make it across Second before the light turned red. The engine roared hoarsely, as if suffering from automotive emphysema.

  Barbara stepped off the sidewalk and into the intersection.

  Everything happened in milliseconds. Chris expected Barbara’s seemingly innate sense of where she was and what was going on around her to kick in.

  As the truck bore down on her, Chris realized with startling clarity that was not going to happen.

  Fuck, he thought.

  Twenty-Four

  When Jerry Bourque and Lois Delgado finished talking to Gunther Willem, manager of Simpson Elevator, they went into the back shop to talk to the other employees. The company, counting Willem and the woman in the office, had nine. Eight, now that Petrenko was going to be removed from the payroll. Four more were on the premises, two were out on a call together.

  Bourque and Delgado split them up, each interviewing two men. All four were asked further questions about the dead man, whether they had noticed anything out of the ordinary with him in recent weeks, whether he seemed on edge, worried about anything. Did Petrenko have any vices he kept secret from his wife? Did he gamble? Did he use drugs? Was he seeing anyone on the side? Did he frequent prostitutes?

  And, finally, who was the man who’d come to visit him? The one he went out onto the street to talk to?

  None of the four claimed to have seen Petrenko talking to the mystery man.

  The two employees not on-site were on a call at a twelve-story apartment building on Clermont Avenue in Brooklyn, just south of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

  Delgado drove. They parked on the street and buzzed the superintendent when they entered the lobby. The building’s two elevators were out of commission during the servicing, and the two technicians from Simpson Elevator were on the twelfth floor.

  “Can they get one going?” Bourque asked.

  The super said, “I told them, can you do one at a time? But no, they shut them both down at once. Everyone in the building is complaining.”

  “No problem,” Delgado said. “We’ll take the stairs.”

  A wave of anxiety washed over Bourque.

  His lungs felt absolutely fine. He hadn’t taken a hit off his inhaler yet today. Climbing eleven flights of stairs shouldn’t have been a problem for him. A few months ago, he might have taken half those flights two steps at a time.

  But that was before.

  Could he make it to the twelfth floor? What if his airways started to constrict along the way? And Bourque had been dealing with this issue long enough to know that just worrying about an attack was enough to bring one on.

  I’ll be fine, he told himself. I can do this. Just don’t think—

  It was like, Bourque realized, when someone told you not to think about an elephant, Dumbo popped into your head.

  So when Bourque told himself Don’t think about the drops, he thought about the drops.

  “You coming?” Delgado said to her partner.

  “Right behind you,” he said.

  It hit him by the fourth floor. His windpipe started to shrink down to the size of a straw.

  When they were nearly to the fifth, Bourque called up to Delgado, who was half a dozen steps ahead, “I just got a text.”

  Delgado glanced back, stopped.

  “Just go on, I’ll catch up,” he said, taking the phone from his jacket, looking at the screen and nodding as if to confirm he was right about receiving a message.

  “What is it?” Delgado asked.

  “I got it,” Bourque said dismissively.

  Delgado climbed on.

  Once she’d made a turn in the stairwell and was out of sight, Bourque put the phone back into his jacket. He gripped the railing with one hand to steady himself, then dug into his pocket with the other and came out with his inhaler.

  But before wrapping his mouth around it, he decided to give his doctor’s advice one more try.

  Focus.

  What had he suggested? Focus on five things you see. Five things you hear.

  I’m in a fucking concrete stairwell. There aren’t five things to see or five things to hear.

  That was okay. He could wing it. Like, think of five Paul Newman movies.

  There was The Sting. Cool Hand Luke. Harper. That was three. Oh, and The Verdict and that one where he was the pool hustler, what the hell was that one called. Weren’t there actually two? There was the original, that was—fuck, The Hustler. A movie about a pool hustler might just be called The Hustler. But then, twenty-five years later, he reprised the character in a movie with Tom Cruise. Had Color in the title. What the hell was that one—

  He was still wheezing.

  From a couple of floors above, Delgado’s voice echoed, “You okay down there?”

  “Yeah!” he managed to shout. “Coming!”

  The hell with it.

  He exhaled, put the puffer between his lips, squeezed it, and drew the medicated mist deep into his lungs. Keeping his lips sealed, he did a mental count to ten, then exhaled. He repeated the process, then slipped the inhaler back into his pocket.

  Christ, it was all he could do to hold his breath for ten seconds. You watched these movies, where James Bond is rescuing someone underwater for minutes at a time without coming up for air. How the hell was that even possible?

  Plenty of takes, that was how.

  Bourque felt his windpipe enlarging, his lungs filling with the stale air of the stairwell. Time to move on.

  He caught up with his partner at the tenth floor. Even she had stopped to catch her breath, and Bourque took pleasure in overtaking her. “Haven’t got all day,” he said.

  “Bite me,” Delgado said.

  They came out onto the twelfth floor and at the hallway’s end, directly in front of an open elevator door, were two men on their knees, huddled over a large toolbox. One was white, thin, probably midforties; the other was black, heavyset, late twenties. Even from the end of the hallway, the detectives could tell that there was no elevator car beyond the opening. What they could see was the cinder block back wall of the shaft and various vertical cables.

  “Hey,” Bourque said.

  The black one turned, then said to his partner, “Cops are here.”

  The two men stood. Bourque and Delgado showed their badges and offered hands to shake but the repairmen begged off, displaying oily, greasy palms.

  “I’m Walter,” the older man said. “This is Terrence.”

  Terrence nodded. “They told us you were coming.”

  “So you know what this is about,” Delgado said.

  “Can’t believe Otto’s dead,” Walter said. “Jesus. You do what we do for a living, you figure if you’re gonna go, it’ll probably be because you went through an open door by mistake,” at which point he nodded toward the elevator shaft.

  “Yeah,” said Terrence, and then, gesturing toward his coworker, “or some moron knocks you in.”

  “What happened to him?” Walter asked.

  Bourque did the usual dance of not answering and asked the two men the same questions he and Delgado had asked the others. Had they noticed anything odd about Otto in recent weeks?

  They had not.

  Had they seen the man who’d dropped by to see him at Simpson Elevator?

  Again, they both shook their heads.

  “Why?” asked Walter. “You think this guy did something to Otto?”

  “We’d like to talk to him,” Delgado said.

  Terrence said, “Hang on.”

  “What?” Delgado asked.

  He dug a rag out of his pocket and started to wipe off his hands. “So I’ve been wanting to buy a car. Like, I always liked Must
angs, so I’ve been going through the online ads, you know, seeing if someone has a decent used one, because no way I can afford a new one, and I’m not totally nuts about the latest design, anyway. I kind of like the ones from around 2005, 2006, you know?”

  “Okay,” said Bourque.

  “So I find one in Queens and I call the guy. It’s a 2005, and he’s asking about thirty-five hundred for it, and I tell him I want to have a look at it, but I’m kinda busy, and he says, where d’ya work, I could run it by, you could check it out. Which makes the guy sound a bit desperate, so I’m thinking he might take a lowball offer, so I say okay. So he comes over, this is like, two weeks ago. Parks it at the curb and I come out to have a look at it.”

  Walter said, “Terrence here takes a long time to get to the point.”

  “That’s okay,” Bourque said.

  His hands cleared of the worst of the grease, he pulled a phone from his pocket and tapped on the photos icon.

  “I wanted to take a few pictures of it, from all angles. Told the guy I wasn’t ready to make up my mind but having some shots to refresh my memory later would be a good idea. So, like, here’s the shots.”

  He held the camera in front of the detectives and swiped through the pictures. Many of them were close-ups of parts of the blue car, including one of the rear wheel well.

  “A lot of rust there. I could probably fix it myself, but if I made a big deal about it he’d probably come down a bit more. Okay, here’s the one I was thinking of.”

  The photo he’d landed on was a full shot of the car, parked on the street.

  “So, if you look back here, that’s Otto,” he said. “On the sidewalk.”

  “May I?” Bourque asked, holding out his hand.

  Terrence gave him the phone. With his index finger and thumb, Bourque enlarged the photo, zeroing in on the background. There was another car beyond the Mustang. A plain, dark sedan. One man was leaning against it, arms folded, talking to Otto, perched on the curb. The man was white, maybe six feet, gray hair. He looked to be wearing a suit. But the bigger Bourque made the picture, the less distinct it became.

  “What about the car?” Delgado asked.

  Bourque shifted the focus to the car. The Mustang in the foreground cut off the left half of the orangey-yellow plate, and the part that could be seen was blurry.