Elevator Pitch

by Linwood Barclay

  “Is he one of your followers?” Estelle asked. “Goes around blowing things up?”

  Clement blinked. Bucky said, “Shit.”

  “You think I don’t know?” Estelle said, looking at her husband. Her voice rose. “The thing is, I don’t know which is worse. If he’s your boyfriend, or one of your bombers?”

  “Lady—Mrs. Clement—you need to shut the fuck up,” Bucky said.

  Clement shot him a look. “Don’t speak to my wife that way, Bucky.”

  Bucky looked at Clement as though he’d never set eyes on him before. He was seeing him in a new light. No longer the mentor. Now a threat.

  “Or maybe he’s both,” Estelle said, not shutting up, and definitely not getting any quieter. She glared at her husband and shrieked, “Maybe makes your bombs, and then he gets down on his knees and—”

  That was when Bucky shot her.

  He’d quickly taken the silencer-equipped Glock from where he’d tucked it into the back of his jeans, hidden under his jacket, pointed it at Estelle and pulled the trigger.

  The bullet caught her in the throat, passed through her neck and struck the closest urinal, shattering porcelain and spilling the deodorizing urinal puck to the floor.

  Estelle went down.

  Clement screamed “NOOOOO!” and, momentarily paralyzed by what he’d seen, looked at Bucky, eyes wide, mouth open.

  “What in God’s—”

  Bucky shot Clement in the chest. He staggered back a step, looked down disbelievingly at the blossom of red on his shirt. He dropped to one knee.

  Bucky put another bullet into him, this one into the forehead. Clement went down.

  “I’m real sorry, Mr. Clement,” Bucky said. “Especially this being your anniversary and all.” He tucked the gun back into his pants, straightened his jacket, and walked out of the men’s room.

  Fifty-Eight

  Barbara threw back the covers and padded quietly on her bare feet to the kitchen.

  There was a pounding in her head demanding coffee, but it was calling out for painkillers even more insistently. Barbara opened the cupboard, tapped out two pills from a container, popped them into her mouth, and washed them down with a handful of tap water.

  She put a paper cone into the coffee maker and spooned in twice as much ground dark roast as she usually put in each morning. Once the water had been added, she pushed the button and waited for the first drops of coffee to appear. The pot could not fill quickly enough. She glanced at the four empty wine bottles on the counter. She was, to put it mildly, very hung over.

  When the coffee was ready, she filled a mug and stirred in some sweetener. Then she stepped quietly back into the bedroom and sat down gingerly on one side of the bed.

  “Hey,” Barbara whispered. “I made some coffee.”

  Arla, sleeping on her stomach, had her face buried in the pillow. She made a low, barely audible grunting noise, then slowly rolled over, her hair dragging across her face.

  Blinking several times as she adjusted to the light coming in through the window, Arla said, “I feel like a piece of shit that’s been stuffed inside another piece of shit.”

  “Join the club,” Barbara said. “You want some Tylenol or aspirin or anything? You want it, I’ve got it.”

  Arla started to pull herself up, her back resting against the headboard. As she reached for the mug, she said, “Let me see if this does the trick first.”

  She glanced at the cell phone on the bedside table, picked it up. “It’s dead. What time is it?”

  “Nearly ten,” Barbara said.

  Arla snorted. “Looks like I’m gonna be late for work.”

  Barbara said nothing. With her free hand, Arla patted her mother’s knee. “Joke.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve said that enough.” Arla took a sip of coffee, closed her eyes briefly. “Bliss. You did it just right. What time did we finally fall asleep?”

  “Around five, I think,” Barbara said.

  “God.”

  “Let me get a cup. I’ll be right back.”

  Barbara slipped out to the kitchen, filled a mug for herself, and returned. Arla hadn’t moved. Barbara went around to the opposite side of the bed and got in it, back to the headboard, next to her daughter.

  “I haven’t got much in the way of breakfast,” she said apologetically. “Does Uber Eats deliver this early?”

  “I need a hangover breakfast bad,” Arla said. She glanced down at herself, took in the blue T-shirt and white pajama bottoms she was wearing. “Thanks for the PJs,” she said.

  “No problem,” Barbara said, her shoulder touching Arla’s. It was, she thought, the greatest feeling in the world.

  “It’s all really fucked up, isn’t it?” Arla said.

  “That’s an understatement.”

  “The mayor of New York is my father.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he’s never known anything about me.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And Glover is my half brother.”

  “Yup.”

  “And he’s never known about me, either.”

  “That’s right.” Barbara paused. “And that’s all on me.”

  Arla ran her finger around the rim of her coffee cup. “I wonder if that’s why I was feeling this, I don’t know, kind of attraction. To Glover. Maybe I saw something of myself in him. We were connecting on some genetic, sibling-like level.”

  “I guess that’s possible.”

  Arla put her coffee on the table and half turned to face her mother. “These days, like, right now, does Headley have any idea?”

  “About what?”

  “That this Barbara Matheson who’s writing about him, that you’re that person? The one he slept with years ago?”

  Barbara slowly shook her head. “No. I’m sure of it. I don’t look much like I did at that age. My hair’s a different color and, well, I’m a little chunkier. I wrote under a different name. It was a long time ago. And we only met a couple of times. The night it happened, and then when I told him.”

  “And he denied it. Said he had no memory of you, or the party, or anything.”

  Barbara nodded.

  This was not the first time Arla had asked the question. Barbara had told her story—the unexpurgated truth—several times since they’d arrived at her apartment the night before. After Barbara had dropped the bombshell in Maxwell’s about Glover, she’d persuaded Arla to leave with her, promising to tell her all the things she had wanted to know since she was born.

  They had gone back to Barbara’s apartment—after climbing several flights of stairs, they were pretty weary by the time they got there—and opened the first of four bottles of wine. Barbara told Arla her story, stopping and answering, as honestly as she could, every question that Arla had along the way.

  Arla had thought the reason there was no father listed on her birth certificate was because her mother really wasn’t sure.

  “You kind of, you know, as I got older, let me think you were—God, this is going to sound so judgy—a bit of a slut,” she had said at one point. “You said my father had gone to the other side of the country, found a life there.”

  “Yeah,” Barbara said. “I guess I thought that would discourage you from trying to find him, to make a connection. Telling you, when you were little, that he was out west, it was like saying he was on another planet. It was the same lie I told my parents, so they wouldn’t go looking for him, trying to get him to do the right thing. Thing is, he might as well have been a thousand miles away instead of right here in the city. I’ve always felt you can’t force someone to care. I wasn’t going to go after Richard, make him submit to a blood test, to prove what I already knew. If he didn’t want to be a father, I wasn’t going to coerce him into being one.”

  “But you could have at least gotten support. Made him help financially.”

  “I probably should have. I guess I was too proud. Too headstrong. Independent to a fault. I thought, ‘
Fuck you, I don’t need your help.’”

  “But you took your parents’ help,” Arla said. “You made me a burden to them, when you could have lightened the load for them by making Richard assume some responsibility.”

  “You were never a burden to them,” Barbara said. “They loved you more than you can ever know.”

  “Just a burden to you, then,” Arla said.

  Barbara looked away.

  “I’m sorry,” Arla said.

  “That’s okay. I deserve that. I can’t change what I did. All I can do is try to make better decisions moving forward.”

  Arla was quiet for several seconds before she said, “Do you think he’d want to know now?”

  Barbara said, “I don’t know.” She thought for a moment. “I think he might have recognized the name.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I was in his office, all he knew was that a child of mine was working in his administration. He didn’t know your name. When I walked out, I told him. I said ‘Silbert.’”

  “Which was the name he’d have known you by. If he remembered.”

  “Yeah.” Barbara shrugged. “I just don’t know.”

  Arla sipped some coffee. “I’d like … to talk to him.”

  “I get that,” Barbara said. “But I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”

  “It’s not really your decision.”

  Barbara looked at Arla. “I know.” She looked into her cup. “I need more coffee. You?”

  Arla handed over her mug. As Barbara was heading into the kitchen, Arla called out a question: “Is it revenge?”

  “Is what revenge?”

  “Writing about the mayor. Going after him. Is it all about getting even?”

  There was silence while Barbara filled the cups. When she came back into the bedroom, she said, “No. I mean, for years I never wrote about him at all. I was already covering the New York political scene. And then he came onto it, and attracted a following, and ran for mayor, and won. I’d have written about anyone who did that.”

  She handed Arla her coffee.

  “Yeah, but didn’t you see that as a chance to finally go after him?”

  “No,” Barbara said defensively. “I don’t believe so.”

  “Have you told your editors? You sure haven’t told your readers.”

  Barbara took a moment to answer. “No.”

  “What do you think they’d say if they found out, if they knew?”

  Another pause. “They would probably say I have a conflict. That I can’t be objective.”

  “Would they be right?”

  “They’d have a point,” Barbara said. “But they’d be wrong.”

  “So if I confronted the mayor, and this all got out, you could lose your job,” Arla said. “Payback.”

  Barbara got back onto the bed, careful not to spill her coffee.

  “You know,” Arla said, “if you did lose your job, you should write a book.”

  “I have written books.”

  “Ghost-written. You should write your own story. You become a reporter when you’re a kid. You get knocked up, but that doesn’t stop you. Your parents raise the baby. Okay, some people may judge. But you get a rep as a tough journalist in the craziest city in the world, and then you have to confess to your daughter that the mayor is her fucking father. It writes itself.”

  “Stop,” Barbara said.

  “I would read that. Like, if I were somebody else.” Her eyes lit up as she remembered something. “You know, there’s a woman in my building who’s some hotshot editor at one of the big publishing houses. You should talk to her. I bet you could get a book deal, easy.” Arla’s stomach growled. “I have got to find something to eat.”

  She swung her legs down to the floor and went into the kitchen. Barbara could hear the fridge door opening.

  “You weren’t kidding,” Arla said. “How do you feel about frozen pizza for breakfast? Or—hello, what’s this?”

  Barbara came into the kitchen and saw Arla holding up two tickets the size of postcards, words in fancy script printed on the highstock paper.

  “These were by the toaster,” Arla said.

  “They’re media invites to tonight’s Top of the Park opening. The ribbon-cutting for that zillion-story condo tower that overlooks Central Park. Probably won’t even happen if the elevators are down.” She thought about that. “Although, knowing Rodney Coughlin, he’ll find a way.”

  “Will the mayor be there?” Arla asked.

  “Everybody will be there,” her mother said.

  “I see two passes here,” Arla said. “Have you got a plus-one yet?”

  Fifty-Nine

  Given that the FBI were keeping tabs on Eugene Clement, there was an agency presence in the hotel.

  An agent by the name of Renata Geller had observed Clement leave the dining area, where he and his wife were having breakfast, and head down the hallway where the men’s room was located. She could not exactly follow him in there, and at the moment, she was on her own. Had she been partnered with a male agent at the time, they might have discussed whether he should wander in there, too.

  Only moments after Clement got up, his wife, Estelle, did the same. Within seconds, Agent Geller realized she was also heading down the hall to the washrooms. She thought that was odd. Dining couples tended to go in shifts, unless they were done with their meal. The Clements hadn’t even ordered yet.

  When Agent Geller and her husband went out to dinner, that was how they did it. One at a time. You didn’t want the waiter to think you’d walked out. You didn’t want to lose your table.

  Oh, well, Agent Geller thought. When you have to go, you have to go.

  Two minutes went by. Then three. Neither Clement nor his wife returned.

  Shit, Agent Geller thought. The Clements knew they were being watched, and had given them the slip. They weren’t coming back to their table. They’d found a back way out of the hotel. How was she going to explain this to her—

  And then she heard the scream.

  A man’s scream.

  “NOOOOO!”

  She started running down the hallway toward the washrooms.

  A man came charging out of the men’s. Midthirties, scraggly hair. He was tucking something into the back of his jeans. Agent Geller was pretty sure what it was.

  She looked at him, raised her weapon, and barked: “Stop! FBI!”

  The man looked at her, wide-eyed, then reached for the gun he’d slipped under his belt. Before he could raise it, Agent Geller fired.

  The man’s body spun so quickly that the gun flew out of his hand. He hit the hallway floor. Writhing, he looked for the gun, which was some ten feet away. He started crawling toward it, leaving a red, bloody streak on the hotel floor.

  But within a second Agent Geller was standing between him and the weapon.

  “Do. Not. Move.”

  “Oh, shit,” he said. “Shit, shit.”

  Blood continued to drain out of him. The bullet had gone into his right shoulder.

  “The Clements,” she said. It was a question.

  “She shouldn’t … have come into the men’s,” the man said, struggling to get the words out. “You’re … not supposed to do that.”

  Sixty

  Mayor Richard Headley was about to come out of the stairwell on the twelfth floor of an East Ninetieth Street apartment building, clutching a takeout bag from Brew Who, a coffee shop on Lexington. Inside the bag were a granola parfait, a butter brioche, and an Americano.

  Waiting in the hallway for him was a camera crew from NY1. They were posted outside the apartment door of Dorothy Stinson, eighty-two. Dorothy was standing in the open doorway, waiting for the mayor’s arrival. She looked as excited as a young girl waiting for Santa to come down the chimney.

  Valerie Langdon and Chris Vallins were huddled behind the news crews. At the sound of an incoming text, Valerie glanced down at her phone. It was Glover, who was coming up the stairs with the mayor.

&nb
sp; One floor away.

  “They’re almost here,” Valerie whispered to the cameraman.

  The news reporter holding the mike had already done her setup. She’d interviewed Dorothy, who told the story of how every normal morning she took the elevator down to the lobby, then walked to Brew Who for her treat. She’d been doing this daily for five years, ever since her husband had died. He used to make her breakfast every morning, and after his passing, she’d decided she wasn’t going to start doing it for herself.

  She might have dared to walk down the twelve flights to the lobby, although this gave her pause, given that she’d had a couple of tripping incidents in the past year. But even if she could get to street level without incident, there was no way she could the climb twelve flights back up to her place. One of Dorothy’s neighbors had written about her situation on the City Hall website, and it was Glover who’d spotted it.

  Despite Headley’s renewed reluctance to embrace Glover’s suggestions, he thought this one was worth a shot.

  “Let’s do it.”

  As Valerie and Chris huddled, waiting for the mayor to appear, Valerie whispered, “Has he seemed a bit … off lately?”

  Chris leaned in close to her so as not to be heard by the camera crew. “A little, maybe.”

  “I noticed it after Matheson left yesterday,” she said. “He seemed, I don’t know, preoccupied.”

  “There is kind of a lot going on,” Vallins said. “Could be—”

  He stopped talking when he saw the stairway door open at the end of the hall. Headley emerged, all smiles. He walked briskly to Dorothy, giving her a hug, and then handing her the bag with a Brew Who logo on the side. A few seconds later, Glover entered the hall.

  Dorothy giggled. “It’s not every day the mayor pays a visit. Won’t you come in?”

  “Love to,” Headley said, following her into the small apartment. The TV crew slipped in after him.

  Dorothy didn’t have so much a kitchen as a nook. The apartment, except for a bathroom off to one side, was a studio. A bed on the far wall, a couple of chairs and a television, and just inside the main door, a short counter, hot plate, and cupboards. Dorothy directed the mayor to a small, badly chipped, Formica-topped table and two padded chairs with aluminum framing. They both sat.