A Falling Knife (Hollow City Series)

by Andrew Case

  “Every deal we make is above board. Every transaction is vetted. We buy land from the lowest seller and we sell it to the highest buyer. That’s the way business works.”

  “Sure. But do all of your buyers agree? I mean, you’ve never had someone call you up and tell you that they think they got screwed? You’re dealing with foreign companies, they may not always think they are bound by the rules you’re using.”

  Of course they didn’t agree. If you buy and sell twenty buildings, and nobody thinks that you screwed them, then they all probably screwed you instead. Eleanor didn’t have to justify herself to him. She was beginning to get angry. He was in her office, wanted by the police, and accusing her of—what exactly? Being a capitalist?

  “What are you trying to imply?”

  “Do you know where Robert Armstrong works now?”

  “I haven’t kept up with him.”

  “Why would you? Why would you care who he is talking to? Or who is wiring him hundreds of thousands of dollars? But if I told you he was working as the property manager for 80 Smithdale Street, you wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “No.” It would make sense. A crook working for a slumlord. A slumlord who didn’t know how to manage his own building. Promoting misery was such a hard way to make money, too. Verringer seemed to enjoy inflicting pain on the people who lived in his rathole. And he was probably barely scraping by to boot. It wasn’t rocket science to figure out how to turn an honest profit on a building like that. In fact, she was holding the answer in her hand. She pulled the stack of paper closer.

  “And would it surprise you to learn that a Malaysian holding company paid 80 Smithdale two hundred thousand dollars last month? Would you imagine why they would want to do that?”

  Eleanor’s arm went cold. Her offer papers suddenly felt as though they were made out of solid iron. Her hand drooped to her waist but she kept her fingers clutched around them. The Malaysian fund. Eleanor had flipped a plot of land that was supposed to end up in the footprint of the arena going up on Atlantic Avenue. She had promised the buyer that it would be in the footprint, or at the very worst right next to it. Maybe open a sports bar. A luxury hotel for athletes and rock stars. But she hadn’t told them that the zoning wasn’t quite right.

  When you are in Malaysia, it’s not so easy to lobby the city council to flip your zoning to residential. So instead of a space for a forty-story market rate condo building, the plot was a car wash. And was going to stay a car wash. The community activists had fought to keep the zoning outside of the footprint exactly in place. They were preserving the community’s character. And if the community’s character was a McDonald’s on one side of the street and a car wash on the other, so be it. It was just as Eleanor had suspected would happen. Not that she had told the buyer about her suspicions.

  “You’re saying they paid off Robert Armstrong.”

  “And maybe Armstrong paid off Manny Reeves. And maybe he wanted to kill Wade Valiant because he worried that Wade would turn him in. Or maybe he just wanted to get your business in the paper. In a bad way. Maybe he just wanted people to walk around thinking less-than-glorious thoughts about Hill and Associates. And maybe I’m not the villain anymore, Eleanor. Maybe I’m here to help.”

  It would be a way to get two birds with one stone. Kill off Wade Valiant and smear Eleanor Hill. And Robert Armstrong would be happy to do both of them. She hadn’t told the police the rest of what she knew. That Manny Reeves had come to her twice in the past six months asking for an advance on his pay. He had said that his kid was sick, but Hill and Associates offered good medical. They always say their kid is sick when they want money. Maybe he had been out to Aqueduct too often. Maybe his wife wanted a new kitchen. She hadn’t given in, and he had stopped asking. But that only meant that he had needed money. For something. She was holding the packet up to her chest now, her sleeve dangling down her forearm. Leonard was staring, now, at her wrist.

  “What is that?”

  She cocked her head to see where he was looking. The gray band that she wore around her wrist. “This?”

  She grabbed the wristband with her left hand and snapped it open. The snap connecting it was a USB port on one side that slid seamlessly into the other. “It’s a flash drive. I just got so sick of carrying paper around all the time. I barely notice it most of the time. I can keep everything in it.”

  Leonard stared at the wristband. There was something working in his mind. He was suddenly distracted. “I’ve never seen one of those before. I never thought of that.”

  “Well. You can find them almost anywhere.”

  But his head was racing now, she could see. She put down the papers. The bid was going to have to wait. The secretary could copy the whole thing tomorrow. She should have gone home an hour ago, to tell the truth.

  When she turned out from the office, Leonard was on his phone. Intent, quiet. Maybe she was close to convincing him that she was a victim too, after all. A victim of Robert Armstrong. A victim of whoever ran the overseas fund. A victim of the community board that was trying to stop her from building nearly free apartments. A victim of her father, who was perfectly happy to profit off of her success until it meant a moment of worry for him. She was carrying the burden. She was the one doing everything: buying, selling, building. And somehow everyone turned back toward her, thought ill of her, complained of her.

  Eleanor stared at Leonard as he slid his phone back into his pocket. His face was raw and gray; he looked even worse than he had when he had come in, covered with pepper spray.

  “That was Detective Mulino. They have found a ping from Adam Davenport’s phone. He’s inside the Seventy-First Precinct. We have to find out what he’s doing in there.”

  The man with the missing son. She had heard it on the radio that morning. Of course a little white boy would take immediate precedence over everything else. Eleanor sighed. She had, at least, set the papers down. Leonard might be able to help her clear her business’s name. But for the time being, that meant following him as he tracked down the soft man from the community board.

  “All right, then. Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Leonard’s fingernails dug into the armrest of Eleanor Hill’s Lexus as she pulled it out onto Flatbush and peeled down toward the park. He couldn’t settle into the soft luxury of the car. He didn’t drive himself; he hadn’t since he moved to the city. The only time he had found himself in a car had been on a police ride-along or the occasional splurge in a taxi. Like most forced comforts, this car made him feel tense, awkward. He stared at the road ahead, late enough that the traffic had cleared. The massive arena was empty, purposefully plated with rusted metal to look more artisan. That was Brooklyn nowadays. Corporations building ugly toys to fool people into thinking they were handmade.

  Eleanor would help. He was grateful for that. He had realized, as soon as he escaped Davenport’s house, that he needed an ally. And he realized as soon as he had told her what had happened that she wasn’t a murderer. She might have sold a building for more than it was worth, but she hadn’t killed Wade Valiant. And she hadn’t kidnapped Adam’s son.

  Eleanor understood that the cops aren’t always right, that sometimes you need to get around them in order to find the truth, that the line between victim and perpetrator isn’t always so clean. Eleanor Hill was raised to distrust the police, and she would understand. And since Robert Armstrong was messed up in all of this, she might feel just responsible enough to help. At the very least, she would know what he looked like.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about Eleanor’s wristband. As soon as he had seen it, he had known why Adam Davenport’s son was missing. A storage device, in lieu of lots of paper. Davenport had been investigating, up to the moment of her death. He had found some of what she had discovered—all of it, he had thought at the time—hidden in a flash drive on a magnet on her fridge. It had been buried in plain sight. But the emails on the Hill and Associates servers had convinced him there was m
ore. Davenport is onto us. Veronica Dean surfacing again. And he thought of Christine, desperate to hide what she had found. He could see her now, snapping a green wristband around her son’s arm, telling him to keep it safe. Knowing what it contained. And all at once he saw a motive for snatching the boy. Finding Adam Davenport suddenly meant the world to Leonard.

  Eleanor swung the Lexus through the roundabout at the entrance to the park. The towering arch, meant to mimic Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, but a little more golden, a little more ostentatious. So American. The library slid by on their left and they cruised downhill on Flatbush Avenue, park on both sides of them and no lights in their way. Eleanor, eyes on the road, steady without rushing, finally spoke.

  “Why would he go to the precinct?”

  “He thought the cops weren’t doing enough. Parents never do. But they make things worse when they get involved. Missing children don’t just pop up on the street.”

  “But if the police haven’t found anything out yet . . .”

  Leonard had thought of that. And surely Adam Davenport had too. You can kidnap a child for a reason: you want ransom, you want to make a deal. But the police hadn’t received a call. There was no list of demands. And if someone steals a child without making a demand, then giving the child back isn’t part of the plan. The kidnapper wants something from the child itself. Something hideous, something ordinary. Or as Leonard thought now, information. Only once you get what you need from a child, now you have a witness. Giving the child back makes it so much more likely that you will be caught. And children are exceptionally easy to kill.

  “We don’t know if the police found anything or not. They could have a lead that they didn’t share with Adam. But even if the investigation is stalled, confronting them in the precinct is going to make it worse. If that is what Adam did, things could go very badly.” Leonard had seen those complaints too, once upon a day. People stricken with grief, anger, or fear. A man who had tried to push his way past the firefighters on his stoop, screaming that his daughter was in the upstairs bedroom. The police had pulled that man back and beaten him with their nightsticks. He had his reasons, but he was obstructing governmental administration. And his daughter was already dead. Adam Davenport didn’t know the rules. He wouldn’t know what he could and could not do. He was likely to storm the precinct looking for his son and end up in the hospital, or worse.

  They came out of the park and sped past Eleanor’s own building, the condo on Empire where Wade Valiant had fallen. The orange netting fluttered in the moonlight, promising momentary romance on future balconies. Eleanor didn’t look up from the road, slowing as the car turned left down Empire. Leonard could see the row of empty businesses. He saw the door he had slipped through on his way to Adam Davenport’s house. Where he had broken in and been pepper-sprayed by a cop. And now he was headed straight for the precinct.

  He gritted his teeth. Mulino would be there. Mulino wouldn’t let him get arrested. At least, not until after they had found the boy. They drove past the row of abandoned commercial lots—the planned footprint for Eleanor Hill’s next project. She didn’t bat an eye. She knew the whole block by heart.

  “Here.”

  The precinct was squat, cement, square. Built in the 1970s when the urban planners took their cues from Soviet Brutalism. Square columns along the front, and tall, narrow slits for windows, no wider than six inches but almost eight feet high. Good luck getting an off-the-rack pane to replace one of those when it gives out. Eleanor slowed the car and pulled into the small lot. Leonard reminded himself to take it slowly. One small step at a time. Don’t be surprised by anything. He wasn’t a cop himself; he didn’t have a gun. If there was a manic scene inside the precinct, his only tool for solving it would be his voice.

  When Eleanor opened the door for him, he could see right away that something was wrong. They were in the peak of the four-to-twelve tour, when the guys who like to make arrests are usually bringing in a petty drug dealer or an addict or someone who picked a fight in a bar the moment he stepped inside. Even slow precincts are noisy and active at night, and the Seven-One was not ordinarily a slow precinct.

  But it was dead silent when Eleanor and Leonard walked in. There was no sergeant at the desk. There was no row of Police Administrative Assistants typing carbon-copy forms through electric typewriters. No one in the holding cell. The main floor of the precinct was entirely deserted. Four steel-gauge desks, dating surely from when the place was first built, sat empty, case files and food wrappers left haphazardly on them. Leonard looked at Eleanor. Cops are social animals—if there is a reason for one to run down the hallway, there is every chance that ten of his buddies will follow suit. But for an entire tour to abandon a precinct, something has to be seriously out of whack. Desk sergeants do not leave their posts for nothing.

  “Down there.”

  Eleanor had walked ahead of him. Leonard, through force of habit, never passed the desk sergeant without permission. The Seven-One had the traditional barrier—a waist-high swinging door, like an amusement park would use for its Wild West Saloon. But no one was about to invite him inside a deserted precinct, so he followed Eleanor. Across the room there was an open door leading to a stairway. As he approached, he could hear voices below. He couldn’t make out what was being said. One voice was calm but authoritative, the way cops speak to a criminal or an emotionally disturbed person. Don’t jump off the ledge. Put down the knife. Just step out of the car with your hands up and it will all be all right. Eleanor was at the top of the stairs when Leonard joined her. She started down them and he put his hand on her shoulder.

  “We should wait, Eleanor.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re not cops. We could make things worse.”

  She gave him a sad, serious look. “You know this guy. None of them know this guy. Don’t you want to help him?”

  Leonard paused. Trying to help Christine Davenport last year hadn’t done any good. Trying to find out what she had learned had almost gotten him killed, had gotten him six months at Moriah Shock while someone else took credit for what he had found out. What good would it do to help Adam Davenport? Maybe there was a standoff. Maybe they would burst in and a jittery cop would shoot them both. Or maybe he was just giving in to fear. Maybe he ought to listen to this woman, who a few days ago he thought might have conspired to kill her own employee. Now she was willing to walk into a room full of armed men to help someone she barely knew. He had badly underestimated her.

  “Okay.”

  Eleanor led the way, Leonard a few steps behind. He wondered, for a moment, where Ralph Mulino was. Mulino had called them to say that Davenport was at the precinct, after all. He should have been there already. Maybe he was downstairs with everyone too.

  They hit the basement floor and started down a wide hall. The same contractors, it seemed, had built all the public schools and half the police precincts sometime around 1972. Someone with a surplus of splattered light brown linoleum tile, the better to hide the dirt and blood that would spill on trips between holding cells. The voices were coming from the last door on the right. When Eleanor reached it, she turned the corner and Leonard followed.

  The tiny room was impossibly crowded. Leonard and Eleanor could see only the backs of maybe fifty heads. Most of the officers were kneeling and most of them were uniformed. The crowd seemed a thick, dark brew of identical bodies, all of them focused on the small doorway at the back of the room. About a half dozen of the cops had their guns drawn. None of them spoke; they were a small army of identical soldiers, holding their ground, waiting for a command. Standing to the right in a white shirt was the captain. He was maybe fifty, his military haircut bleeding gray and his broad, dark face laced with worry. He was staring at the door too, but kept glancing to his right as well. His gun sat holstered on his left hip.

  The figure on the right got Leonard’s attention first. Adam Davenport was sitting in a blue, molded plastic chair that was too small for him, probably also swiped from
a school some thirty years ago. He was holding his right knee and squinting. Blood trickled out from between the creases of his knuckles, down his fingers and into small plops on the floor. He squeezed tighter, both with his hands on the wound and with his eyes, either to keep the pain at bay or to keep from seeing what was in front of him.

  Because in front of him, silhouetted in the back door, open to the air, was a boy. Around seven, Leonard would guess. Hair cut short with a mini-pompadour in the front, soft, small features, and as Leonard saw right away, a green wristband over his left wrist. But Leonard didn’t say anything about the green wristband. No one in the room was paying attention to it, and neither was the boy. They were looking at only one thing—the gun being held to the boy’s temple.

  The child was quivering, and the captain was preparing to speak again. The row of cops with their guns drawn was silent. He noticed Leonard and Eleanor come in, but flashed only a quick look to silence them. He couldn’t be distracted now. Leonard touched Eleanor’s shoulder. She understood too. Don’t intervene. They both stared at the man with the gun pointed at the boy.

  Trim, white, young, the man holding the Davenport boy had a cop’s posture and bearing even though he was out of uniform. Leonard noticed, behind the boy’s head, the hint of a chain around the man’s neck. There would be a detective’s badge at the end of that. Then it hit him. Leonard recognized this guy. He had seen him on the building site when he spoke to Mulino after Valiant had died. Bruder. One of Mulino’s detectives. The captain spoke.

  “Just let us get the dad out of here, Timmy. Let us get a bus for him, get him to a hospital.”