Elevator Pitch

by Linwood Barclay

  Arla smiled. “Like with you, sometimes.”

  “Like with me most of the time,” he said. “It’s kind of an open secret.” He sighed. “There’s even a ‘poor Glover’ hashtag on Twitter where people post times when my father humiliates me.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess it balances out, considering there’s like half a dozen other Twitter accounts devoted to making fun of him.”

  Arla gave him a sly look. “Which one of them is yours?”

  That made him laugh again. “I’ll never tell. The thing is, I get what he’s trying to do. His dad was tough with him, and that turned him into someone with drive and ambition. He figures, if he’s tough with me, he’ll get the same result. He’ll turn me into the kind of man he is.” He paused. “I don’t know that I want to become the kind of man he is.”

  “Sure,” Arla said. “I get that. We all have to be, you know, our authentic selves.” She rolled her eyes self-deprecatingly. “Or some new age bullshit like that.”

  Glover nodded. “God, I can’t believe I’m telling you all this.” He ran his hand over his head. “Well, look, I don’t want to keep you from anything. I wanted to buy you a drink and make sure that you survived.”

  Arla paused a moment before asking, “You wanna get something to eat? I mean, we’re just sitting here and it’s dinnertime and all. But you totally don’t have to. You probably have to go help the mayor do something.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Great,” Arla said, smiling. “And listen, I’ll get this because you’ve been so—”

  “No, that’s nuts.” He grinned. “I can bill the city for this one. I’ll write if off as employee training.”

  “Well, you strike me as a very good trainer,” Arla said.

  As soon as she said it, she thought, what the hell was that? You strike me as a very good trainer. Why did she say something like that? As soon as the words left her lips she realized it sounded like some Fifty Shades come-on, which it was not.

  Unless it was.

  No, it was not. She had to come back with something else.

  “The whole department,” she said, “seems very equipped to bring new people up to speed, to train them in the latest data analysis.”

  Okay, she thought. Not a bad recovery. She couldn’t tell, from Glover’s expression, whether he’d interpreted her previous comment as sexual. That was probably a good sign.

  But then Glover leaned in even closer.

  “You know, we have to be very careful these days. I don’t want my sitting here with you, having a drink, having dinner, to be seen in any way as inappropriate. You’re not under any pressure to stay. We’re living in a post-Weinstein world now.”

  “Dinner was my idea, remember?” she said.

  Glover smiled. “It’s nice talking to you.”

  “Yeah,” Arla said slowly.

  Glover sat back in his chair and raised his palms. “You know, about work. It’s good, talking about all the things that need to get done.”

  “Of course, right,” she said.

  He turned his head, scanned the room. “If you see a waiter, let me know and I can score us some menus.”

  “So,” Arla said, signaling a change in the conversation’s direction, “what did your dad want?”

  “Hmm?”

  “When we were at the accident, and he texted you to come upstairs?”

  “Oh, yeah, we had to walk all the way to the top.” He stopped looking for someone to bring him a menu and leaned in conspiratorially. “I don’t even know if I should tell you about it.”

  “Why? What?”

  Glover rubbed his chin, trying to decide how much to share with Arla. “You have to promise not to tell anyone.”

  Arla felt her pulse quicken. “Yeah, sure, of course.”

  “There was this guy from the building department, and this other guy from Homeland Security or something.”

  “You’re kidding. Why would someone from Homeland be there?”

  His voice went even quieter. “They think the elevator was sabotaged.”

  Her mouth dropped open and her voice rose. “Seriously?”

  Heads turned at a nearby table.

  Through gritted teeth, he said, “Shh. I can’t tell you this if you’re going to look like I just told you I’m gay or something.” A pause. “Which I’m not.”

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  “Anyway, it looks like the ‘accident’ was deliberate. Yesterday’s, too.” His face grew grim, yet he also looked excited to be able to share privileged information. “Looks like, by the same person.”

  “Oh my God. So, it’s terrorism?”

  “Could be,” he said. “It would have to be someone very smart to be able to pull it off. Lots of technical know-how required.” Glover smiled, as if in admiration of whoever had done it. “And this is kind of curious, although I haven’t mentioned it to my dad because he’s been such a prick lately—pardon my French—but people who supported my father lived in both of those buildings.”

  “You think that means anything?”

  Glover shrugged. “Probably not. I mean, there’s probably people in every skyscraper in Manhattan who supported him.” A pause. “Hard as that is to believe at times.”

  “So what are they doing about it?” she asked.

  “Last I heard, they’re quietly putting out the word to every landlord in the city to check the elevators. Not giving the real reason why. They’re making up some excuse. Maybe to do with the cameras that were installed.”

  “Cameras?”

  He filled her in about what had been found on top of the elevator cars. “If that’s all that it was, it might just be a Peeping Tom thing. But it’s way worse than that.”

  “But if it’s happened twice, it could happen again. Don’t people need to be warned?”

  Glover shook his head. “They don’t want to start a panic. Listen, I’m gonna go find us some menus.”

  He got up from the table in search of a waiter.

  Arla watched him walk away, thinking, Oh my God, my mom so needs to know this.

  Thirty-Two

  My feet are dead,” Estelle Clement said to her husband, Eugene, as she sat on the edge of the bed in their hotel room. She had kicked off her shoes and was massaging her right foot with both hands. “What an idiot I was, wearing heels to the show tonight.”

  “I told you,” Eugene said.

  “I thought we’d be able to get a cab after. I never dreamed we’d have to walk all the way back. We should have gotten one of those Ubers.”

  “I never take those,” he said. “There’s a record. Where you were, where you went, when you took the trip.”

  “You don’t want the world to know we went to a show and came back to the hotel?” she asked.

  “I just … don’t like being tracked,” he said.

  “You’ve been on edge ever since that TV thing,” she said.

  The mention of TV prompted Clement to pick up the remote. He pointed it at the television and turned it on. He flipped through channels until he found news.

  “Did we come all the way from Denver so you could watch TV?” she asked.

  He ignored her.

  Estelle said, “Fine.” Having massaged her feet enough that she felt she could walk, she strolled over to the window. “There’s not much of a view. You should have booked us on a higher floor.”

  “This was all they had,” Clement snapped. On the screen was a reporter, standing out front of a high-rise building. The chyron across the bottom read: Second Elevator Disaster in Two Days. He had the volume set too low to make out what she was saying.

  His wife reached across the bed for her purse and dug out her cell phone. “I’m gonna text the kids.”

  “Do that.”

  “We’ve got two more days,” she said, with what sounded like a hint of resignation in her voice. “What about tomorrow?”

  “Why don’t we talk about it at breakfast?” he s
aid. “I’m trying to watch this.”

  She hadn’t started texting yet. She was glaring at her husband.

  “Eugene,” she said.

  “Hmm?”

  “Look at me.”

  He sighed, turned and said, “What?”

  She asked, “Who was that man?”

  “What man?”

  “The man sitting in the car, after the interview, when you were getting the cab. The one you talked to with your back to him.”

  Clement’s face grew concerned. “I’m not sure I’m following you.”

  “He put down his window and he said something to you. You had a conversation.”

  “He was probably telling me to stop leaning on his car,” Clement said.

  “Do you know him?” she asked.

  “Of course not,” he said.

  “Because I think I’ve seen him before.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I only had a quick look at him. But at home, I thought I saw you talking to him once. On the street. And I even thought I saw him in the lobby.”

  “I’d never seen him before in my life.”

  “So you did see him? Today you had your back to him when you talked to him.”

  Clement was briefly flustered. “I didn’t see him. I didn’t see anybody. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  Estelle was quiet for a moment before she asked, “Why did we do this trip?”

  “What? It’s our anniversary, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I was surprised when you proposed it.”

  He tossed the remote onto the bed and rolled his eyes. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Because it’s the first really nice thing you’ve done in a long time.”

  “This is what I get. I plan a trip, I fly us to New York, and now I’ve done something wrong. What do you want from me, Estelle?”

  She considered the question. “Well, for starters, to love me again, if that’s not asking too much.”

  He looked at her, said nothing.

  She sat back down on the bed. “You don’t even … I know I’m not twenty-one anymore, that the years take their toll, but … I’d like to think you still found me even a little … attractive.”

  “Of course I do,” he said without conviction, glancing for half a second back at the television.

  “The prescription … worked, but you still don’t seem to want—”

  “I really don’t want to have this conversation again, Estelle.”

  “You never want to have this conversation.”

  “Maybe because we don’t need to have this conversation.”

  “If you would just talk to—”

  “I don’t need to talk to anyone.”

  Estelle said nothing for several seconds. Then, “It’s a myth that it’s always women who lose interest.”

  Clement briefly closed his eyes and sighed. “This has been a very stressful year for me. Getting the organization up and running. Getting the word out. Dealing with all these baseless accusations. It’s taking a toll. Surely to God you can see that. Maybe you need to stop thinking about yourself all the time and try to imagine what I’m going through.”

  That cut deep. She eyed him scornfully. Her voice was cold and even when she said, “Everything I do is for you.”

  He waved his hands in the air, let them fall to his sides. “Fine, okay, you do.”

  “I think the reason we came here has nothing to do with our anniversary.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said.

  She got up from the bed, went to the bathroom, and closed the door. When Clement heard her turn the lock, he grabbed the remote.

  Maybe, he thought, he could catch the rest of that elevator report on a different newscast.

  Thirty-Three

  Barbara, as was her routine at night before turning off the lights, was sitting cross-legged on her bed, MacBook in her lap. She was jumping from website to website, reading the latest from the New York Times, Politico, the Hill, The Huffington Post, CNN, BuzzFeed.

  She’d taken some more painkillers for her elbow, which still hurt like hell. Despite Chris Vallins’s plea, she had not sought medical attention. She fell. No big deal. People fell all the time. And her elbow still worked. She knew this for a fact because she had used her right arm to empty a bottle of chardonnay into a wineglass when she’d come home.

  She’d had a hard time getting Chris Vallins out of her head the rest of the day. She was feeling things for him she did not want to feel.

  Get over it, she told herself.

  Barbara had made some calls when she returned home. She wanted to reach family members of the others who had died in Monday’s elevator crash and ask if any spooky officials in black SUVs had come to see them, too, to tell them to keep their questions to themselves, to not speak to the media. She figured that was a better place to start, since she was going to run into more problems—especially considering she did not speak Russian—trying to find relatives of the woman who’d died in today’s elevator incident.

  She had no luck getting any of Sherry D’Agostino’s relatives to call back. Ditto for the family of Barton Fieldgate.

  But she did get through to Stuart Bland’s mother.

  Stuart, as it turned out, had still lived at home.

  “I told him to leave that lady alone,” she said tearfully once Barbara had identified herself. “He went to her house and nearly got in trouble. He wouldn’t have been in that elevator if he’d listened to me.”

  It took several more questions for Barbara to get the full picture, that Stuart was trying to get a producer to look at a script he had written. That was what had taken him to the Lansing Tower.

  “At first, they thought he had something to do with it,” Bland’s mother said. “Because he was using a phony ID. For FedEx. So that made them suspicious. But he couldn’t have had anything to do with it. That’s just crazy. He could barely get his bicycle chain back on. I think I convinced them. But I shouldn’t even be telling you this.”

  “Why?”

  “The man said.”

  “What man?”

  “The man who came to see me. From the government.”

  “Did he say which department?”

  “He didn’t say. But I could tell.”

  “What was his name?”

  “I’m not sure he told me. He didn’t leave a card. I have to go.”

  And she hung up.

  Barbara wrote a piece for Manhattan Today, but it didn’t take long and she wasn’t very happy with it. Recounting her conversations with Bland’s mother and Paula’s parents, she asked her readers, “Who is this mystery man?” Why would someone want the families of the victims to keep a low profile while the elevator accident was being investigated? Why would they be pressured not to ask questions? Barbara did not speculate in her piece. She did not mention the FBI or CIA or Homeland Security. She didn’t have anything solid enough to do that.

  And Vallins hadn’t been any help when she’d asked him about it. If he knew anything, he wasn’t saying.

  And he never did answer the bald question, the bastard. Okay, so maybe that was too personal. Just as well she’d resisted the urge to run her hand over his head.

  Looking again at the story she posted, she fretted at how light it was on facts. But maybe someone who did know something would read it and get in touch. That was often how it worked. A story that was incomplete could produce more leads than a story that didn’t run at all.

  It had produced a few responses already, not that they were in any way useful. Just comments from, as Barbara’s father once referred to those who call in to radio talk shows, a “cavalcade of nincompoops.” There was spicydragon, who said, “Anybody that old who still lives with his mommy deserves to die.” And there were these words of wisdom from DeepStateHarry: “We r all being watched. There r black vans everyware.”

  Barbara was about to move on from the Manhattan Today website when one other comment caugh
t her eye.

  “Hope you are feeling better.”

  It was from GoingDown.

  Barbara felt, along with the persistent, dull pain in her elbow, a chill run down her spine.

  “Hope you are feeling better.”

  Barbara thought back to when Chris Vallins had tackled her in the middle of the street. All this time, she’d thought he was the only one keeping an eye on her. Was it possible someone else was, too? Whoever this GoingDown person was, had he—or she—seen that van nearly hit her? When she screamed in pain about her elbow, had this person heard her?

  Barbara tried to think back to the scene. There was the old lady who got her phone. That postal worker. The woman with the shopping cart. Was it one of them?

  GoingDown had been the one, in a response to her last article, to express condolences about Paula Chatsworth.

  Okay, that’s what GoingDown is referring to. Not my fall today.

  Barbara touched her hand to her chest. Her heart had, briefly, raced at the thought that she was being watched. She was getting paranoid. Thinking about mysterious men in black SUVs had prompted her mind to go places it shouldn’t.

  “Chill out, girl,” she said under her breath.

  That was when she moved off the Manhattan Today site and started surfing all the other news outlets.

  The so-called experts said screens should be avoided an hour before bedtime. Artificial light from phones and tablets and laptops messed up sleeping patterns, they argued. Bullshit, Barbara thought. This was what she did every night. Even if she had someone over. If some man wanted to roll over and go to sleep after a fuck, that was fine with her. But don’t expect her to ignore what was going on in the world. Frankly, this was one of the reasons why she didn’t like having men spend the night. Not only did they want you to put the laptop away, they expected you to make them breakfast.

  Fuck that.

  Barbara closed the laptop, killed the lights, and put her head on the pillow. She was about to close her eyes when she noticed her phone, sitting screen-side up on the covers next to her, light up with a text. Barbara glanced over.