Elevator Pitch

by Linwood Barclay

  It was Arla.

  There really hadn’t been a moment all day when Arla wasn’t in her thoughts. Even when Barbara had been with the Chatsworths, or talking to Stuart Bland’s mother, Arla was on her mind. Barbara had been unable to stop thinking about Arla’s new job and what had motivated her to go after it. Had she done it to drive her mother nuts, or was it really a position she wanted, that she believed would challenge her?

  Barbara, in one moment, would think her reaction to Arla’s news at breakfast had been perfectly justified. And in the next, she would feel she’d totally blown it. She replayed the conversation in her head countless times.

  I should have said … and I shouldn’t have said …

  Barbara picked up the phone and read the message.

  You up?

  Barbara typed YES in return.

  Is it too late to call?

  Barbara quickly tapped NO.

  She only had to wait ten seconds for the phone to ring with its distinctive typing chime.

  “Hey,” Barbara said.

  “Hey,” Arla said. “I know it’s late and all but—”

  “No, it’s okay. I’m still up. Everything all right?”

  “Yeah, sure, things are good.”

  Barbara hesitated before asking, “How was the first day?”

  “It was … interesting.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “No, I mean, it really was interesting. I hadn’t even started and I ended up going to that second elevator accident.”

  Arla filled her in.

  “God,” Barbara said. “You saw what happened?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You okay?”

  “I guess. Although I’m sure I’ll have nightmares or something. When I saw it, I thought, don’t be a wuss. Don’t freak out. Believe me, it wasn’t easy.”

  Barbara hesitated before asking, “Did you meet him?”

  “You mean the mayor?”

  “Yes.”

  “No. And Glover didn’t introduce me, either. I’m too low level.”

  “Glover? You met his son?”

  “Yeah. He oversees the department that hired me. So he showed me around because everyone else was off at a seminar.”

  “Glover’s your boss?”

  “I’ll have several. There’s my immediate supervisor, then Glover, and then, I guess, well, ultimately we’re all working for the mayor, right?” Arla paused. “Look, Mom, about this morning—”

  “Yeah, it’s okay. I—”

  “No, I said some things and I’m sorry. I’ve been working through a lot of stuff. I’m trying to sort them out. I didn’t take this job to be all in your face. I mean, maybe a little, but this is something I could—”

  “It’s okay,” Barbara said again, her voice soft, reflective. “It’s your life.”

  “The mayor’s hard to get a handle on. I saw him do something really nice today, when no one was watching, with this kid who’d been in the elevator where this woman got killed. But with Glover, for example, he’s a shit.”

  “Well.”

  “He was telling me tonight—we grabbed a bite—about how complicated his relationship with his father is. But listen, that’s not why I called. It’s kind of tricky to talk about and I probably shouldn’t say anything, but Glover said—”

  “Getting this close to the mayor’s son, you need to be careful about that.”

  “What?”

  Barbara thought a moment before offering a reason. “If they find out who your mother is, they’ll question your motives.”

  “I told you. This job has nothing to do with you.”

  “I’m just saying, watch your step with him.”

  “I don’t need your advice,” Arla said, an edge in her voice.

  “I don’t—I’m just trying to—”

  “You know what?” Arla said. “You’re right. I was going to tell you something, but now I realize that’s not a good idea.”

  “Tell me what?”

  Arla didn’t answer.

  “Arla?”

  It took Barbara a moment to realize her daughter had ended the call.

  “Shit,” she said and tossed the phone onto the floor.

  She flopped back on the bed, her head crushing the pillow. A minute later, she turned out her light, and stared at the ceiling until dawn.

  Thirty-Four

  I’m going to say something to him,” the boy says. “I am. I don’t care if he gets mad.”

  His mother shakes her head angrily. “No, you’re not. I’ve known him longer than you have. There’s no talking to him.”

  “He’s so mean. You should—”

  But the boy stops himself. What he wants to tell his mother is that she should stand up for herself. That she shouldn’t take any more shit from this man. But he can’t bring himself to do that because he knows that everything she does, she does for him. She does not deserve his scorn or criticism.

  And yet.

  “If something isn’t done,” he says, and it is at this point that his voice starts to break, “you could, you know …”

  “Don’t be silly,” she says. “Nothing is going to happen to me.” She smiles. “I’m made of tough stuff. Don’t you worry about me.”

  “But last night,” the boy says, “you said your heart felt like—”

  “Enough,” she says sternly. “Go do your homework.”

  WEDNESDAY

  Thirty-Five

  I will never come to this hotel again.

  Elliot Cantor pressed the Down button for what had to be the tenth time. No, not pressed. He stabbed the button. He was angry at the button. Elliot wanted to kick this button’s ass. He wanted to put this button in a blender and slice and dice it to death.

  Elliot loathed this elevator. This one, and the one next to it. A thirty-story hotel with a dozen or more rooms per floor needed more than two elevators. Both of them were always busy.

  “I don’t believe this,” Elliot said.

  His partner, Leonard Faulks, said, “It’s okay. It’ll get here eventually.”

  “I’ve got my doubts,” Elliot said.

  Elliot and Leonard, both thirty-one years old and both from Toronto, were on a weeklong trip to New York. They’d both been here before on business in their respective jobs—Elliot was a financial adviser and Leonard a freelance book editor—but they had never visited together. A friend had recommended to Elliot that they stay at the Klaxton 49, one of four Manhattan hotels owned and managed by the small Klaxton chain. Elliot did the booking online after reading good things on TripAdvisor. Well, his review was not going to be like the others. He’d already been writing it in his head. It was going to read something like this:

  “This 30-story hotel may be clean and centrally located and the staff are nice enough but DO NOT GO HERE UNLESS YOU LOVE TO WAIT FOR FIVE FUCKING HOURS FOR THE ELEVATOR TO ARRIVE.”

  This had been their experience since day one. They were on the fifteenth floor, the building’s midpoint. Had they been given a room on a lower floor, they would have used the stairs. And even now, Elliot was considering them. Descending was a lot easier than ascending. Not that the two of them weren’t in good shape, but sometimes, after seven or eight hours of walking all over Manhattan, the last thing you wanted to face when you got back to the hotel was a grueling climb.

  Elliot was watching the numbered lights to see where the two elevators were. One was at the fifth floor and moving up. The other was on the twentieth floor and moving down. And the time the elevators were spending on each number was evidence that many guests were boarding and exiting.

  The ascending elevator stopped at seven, then nine, then twelve. Elliot was hopeful that last person to disembark would be at fifteen, meaning they could step right on and go down. But the descending elevator was now on the move, heading toward them. Only two floors away now.

  “Why don’t you press it again?” Leonard said.

  Elliot gave him a look, knowing he was being needled
, but that didn’t stop him from doing exactly what Leonard asked. He hit the button.

  He attacked the button.

  The descending elevator stopped one floor above them.

  “This has to be it,” Leonard said, striking an optimistic note, hoping his partner would calm down.

  The elevator moved. They heard it whiz past in the shaft.

  It did not stop for them.

  The light flashed at fourteen, twelve, nine. It was heading straight to the lobby.

  Elliot, in a sign of defeat, slowly leaned his head forward and rested it on the wall above the buttons.

  The elevator coming up went right past fifteen and stopped at twenty-two. Leonard watched, wondering if it would keep on going up, or start coming back down.

  Now it was coming down.

  “Elliot,” he said cautiously.

  Elliot raised his head slowly, then looked up at the numbers. The second elevator was three … two … one floor way.

  They did not hear the sound of something whooshing past. The elevator sounded as though it was coming to a stop.

  And then the doors opened.

  “Sweet Jesus, it’s a miracle,” said Elliot.

  That was the good news. The bad news was that the car was nearly full. Jammed into the back were an elderly couple who were clearly at the end of their stay, each one clutching the handle of a wheeled carry-on bag. Also on board were a fortyish woman in a pink tracksuit and two teenage girls, also in matching tracksuits and running shoes. Elliot didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out these were the woman’s daughters.

  At least there was still just enough room for him and Leonard to get on without having to scrunch shoulders.

  No one said anything as they boarded, but there seemed a collective sense of despair in the car; the others had been waiting an eternity as well for this ride to street level.

  Leonard went to press the L, for Lobby, but it was already lit.

  The car began to descend.

  And then stopped.

  They had gone one entire floor.

  One of the teenage girls said, “Of course.”

  The doors parted to reveal a young couple and—Elliot wanted to scream—a stroller with a small child in it.

  “Uh,” said Elliot, “I don’t think so. We’re pretty full here.”

  “No, we can do it,” the father said, pushing in the stroller first, bumping the tiny rubber wheels over the metal edge.

  Everyone else in the elevator had to back up. Once the father had the stroller in, he positioned it sideways so as to make space for the mother. She stepped in and waited for the doors to close.

  “I always wanted to feel like a sardine,” Leonard whispered into his partner’s ear.

  Someone had to say it, Elliot thought.

  The elevator descended one more floor, and then stopped again.

  A groan slipped through the lips of everyone in the elevator, with the exception of the couple who had just entered, and their child, of course, who was oblivious to everyone else’s aggravation.

  “Seriously, this is too much,” said the elderly man to his wife.

  “The way this is going we’ll miss our flight,” she said softly. “If there’s traffic, we’ll never get to LaGuardia in time.”

  The doors parted.

  Everyone thought, Jesus Christ no.

  Before them stood a man in his early twenties, about five-ten and easily three hundred pounds. He was decked out in a pair of shorts, and a pair of oversized, unlaced sneakers, and an “I Love New York” sleeveless shirt where “Love” was a heart symbol. The thick laces trailed behind him like bright orange worms.

  “I really think you’re gonna have to wait for the next one,” Elliot said.

  “Fuck that,” he said. “I’ve been standing here ten minutes.”

  He started to board, forcing his body into the mass of human flesh. The small boy in the stroller looked up, wide-eyed, at this towering mass of person hovering over him.

  The large man continued to force everyone to squeeze back even farther. The older woman said, “I don’t think I can breathe,” although that might have had less to do with being compressed and more to do with the newest passenger’s sleeveless shirt.

  He was, not to put too fine a point on it, aromatic.

  Everyone was jammed in so tightly that the man did not even try to turn around. He faced the back wall of the elevator and said to one of the teenage girls who was closest to the panel of buttons, “Can you hit Lobby?”

  “It already is,” she said.

  Her sister said, “Hit the Close button.”

  “The what?”

  She pointed to the button with the two triangular symbols pointing at each other. Her sister hit the button.

  The doors started to close, then bounced back. The newest passenger’s butt was in the way.

  It was the girls’ mother’s turn to speak up. “Honestly, I think you’re going to have to take the next—”

  But rather than get off, the man pushed in even farther, his belly hovering over the head of the child in the stroller. The girl pushed the button again.

  The doors once again attempted to close, and this time they made it.

  “Shit!” said one of the girls, looking down.

  The door had closed on a trailing orange shoelace from one of the big man’s unlaced sneakers. As the car started to move downward, the slack went out of the lace. In less than a second, the shoe it was attached to was dragged suddenly to the door, which pitched the large man forward.

  As his meaty leg was yanked upward, the top half of his body toppled. Like a great oak falling in the forest, he went straight to the floor, narrowly missing the child, but hitting the arms of the stroller, pitching the boy upward, like he was on a teeter totter and someone had dropped a boulder at the other end.

  Everyone screamed. The teenage girls’ screams came out more like shrieks.

  No sooner had the big man hit the floor than he started to lift up as his one leg headed toward the top of the door.

  But then the shoe was ripped from his foot. He came crashing down again. The shoe sailed up to the center of the door until the lace snapped, and it dropped back down.

  “Benjy!” the mother screamed, reaching over the man to see that her child was okay.

  “Fuckin’ hell!” Elliot shouted.

  Somehow, impossibly, everyone had pushed back to allow room for the fallen man. The girls were literally perched on Leonard’s feet. The child’s father’s arms were spread wide against the wall of the car.

  The toddler was crying. The stroller was a write-off.

  And then the doors opened.

  They had reached the lobby.

  Half a dozen people waiting to board recoiled in horror at the sight of the collapsed man. The girls managed to step around him, quickly followed by their mother. Once out, they stopped and turned to offer help.

  The big man slowly got up off the floor. Elliot actually extended a hand to help him.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  The man nodded, then spotted his shoe, minus half a lace, on the floor of the car. Leonard grabbed it and handed it over.

  “Please!” said the older woman, still at the back of the car. “Let us out! We have to catch a plane!”

  She and her husband navigated their way around the others, but as soon as they exited the elevator they were faced with a throng of people who’d been waiting for it.

  “Look what you did!” said the small child’s mother, who now had the toddler in her arms and was pointing to the mangled stroller.

  “Uh, sorry,” he said.

  “You should never have gotten on,” the father said. “And Christ, maybe this’ll teach you to tie up your shoes.”

  “I said I was sorry. Anyway, it’s the hotel’s fault. The door grabbed my lace.”

  The parents shook their heads as they hauled the busted stroller off the elevator.

  “You sure you’re okay?” Leonard asked
.

  The big man nodded slowly. “I might have twisted my ankle,” he said, looking down at his socked foot. “But I guess I’m all right.”

  “Okay,” he said, then looked at Elliot and gave him a shrug that said, I guess we’re done here.

  As the two headed through the lobby, Elliot said, “I thought that guy was going to lose his leg or something.”

  “I want my granola parfait from Le Pain Quotidien,” Leonard said, “and then we’re going to see if we can move to another hotel.”

  Elliot smiled. “So now you’re the one who’s fed up.”

  As they came out of the hotel, Leonard said, “That guy could have crushed us to death.”

  “So, what, you’re looking for a hotel that bans fatties? That sounds very un-PC.”

  They took a moment to get their bearings as they stood on the sidewalk. A yellow Prius cab was working its way down the street.

  Leonard pointed east. “It’s that way.”

  “No,” Elliot said, grabbing his arm. “I’m pretty sure Le Pain’s that way.”

  The cab was sixty feet away.

  “Wait,” Leonard said, looking one way and then the other. “I hate to admit this, but I think you’re right.”

  The cab passed by the hotel doors.

  “Okay, then let’s—”

  And that was when the bomb in the Prius exploded.

  Thirty-Six

  Three minutes after the taxi explosion on East Forty-Ninth Street, eight people were huddled out in front of the three elevators in the lobby of the twenty-story Gormley Building on Seventh Avenue between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets. A man and a woman who were closest to the closed doors were both gazing at their phones. The woman was reading the New York Times and the man was scanning information from an app that tracked the stock market. He shook his head slowly, not liking what he was seeing.

  Of the six people behind them, most were on phones, others sipped expensive lattes from Starbucks cups. Every few seconds, someone would glance upward to see what floor the car was currently on.