To the side Murray Helmore turned to Cathy, rubbing his hands and smiling broadly. He said, “Well. I thought that went quite well, didn’t you?”
And downstairs, Danny was jogging from the reception area to the next floor when he met Patrick, almost colliding with him as they each rounded a bend in the stairwell. Danny lifted his hands in mock submission and said, “Patrick. They let you leave your station?”
“Yeah, I…overheard one of those cops saying there was a commotion down at reception. Thought I’d check it out. I wasn’t really doing much up there anyway.”
“Well, it was a wasted trip, my friend. For all concerned. Another fucking false alarm.”
Patrick tutted, a soft click at the back of his mouth. “That’s… Shit. That’s too bad.”
Danny made as if to speak, then whirled around, slapping his hand off the white painted wall, grimacing, lips drawn back over pale gums. “Goddamit,” he said. “He was here, Patrick, or somewhere nearby. I know it. And I let him go.”
Patrick put his arm on Danny’s shoulder. “Look, don’t beat yourself up about it. You’re doing your best, Danny.”
“Yeah, I know, I’m just…really, seriously annoyed at myself. And at him, and at this whole fucking mess.” He stopped, smiled, rolled his eyes to heaven. “Come on, let’s go back upstairs.”
They trotted up the stairs together, then the next flight, not speaking, each mulling things over. By the time they had reached the studio and were walking toward Bailey’s desk, around which a knot of people stood talking, half an idea was germinating in Danny’s mind.
He called over, “Mr. Bailey. Hello? Mr. Bailey? Do something for me, please: ring that number again.”
Bailey looked at him dumbly.
Danny said, “Please. Ring it again. If Wilde is still somewhere in the vicinity, someone may hear the ring tone. I don’t know. It’s a long shot, but… Let’s give it a go, okay?”
Bailey looked to the others clustered around him, as if seeking affirmation that he wasn’t alone in thinking this cop was clutching at some pretty goddamn unlikely straws. None was forthcoming, so he shrugged and redialed. Silence—Bailey sighed, smugly and obviously—and then a phone was heard…and very close by. Surprised, people crept around, trying to locate its source.
Danny flapped his arms and hissed, “Shhh! Quiet, everyone, please. Just…quiet.”
He listened, zoning in; then dashed to a corner, crawled under a desk…nothing there but a wastepaper basket. Danny pulled it out, upended it; the phone fell out. He lifted it and stared at the screen in bewilderment. It was still ringing, flashing yellow and vibrating slightly. He pressed connect and heard Bailey’s heavy, astounded breathing on the other end.
Danny killed the connection and muttered, “How the hell…?”
He looked around—everyone was staring in amazement at the phone and at him. Cathy shook her head with the disordered but resigned expression of one who’s just seen a ghost. Danny looked back at the phone, then shook his head and laughed.
He muttered, “Well, fuck me gently with a chainsaw. I give up. Either this guy is the invisible man or, or…or I don’t know what. Or this is all a conspiracy and you’re all involved, or something. Fuck…me.”
Bailey whispered to Cathy, “What did I tell you, Cathy? About a conspiracy?”
She glared at him. Jesus, Jonathon. How obtuse can one man be? She would have slapped him across the head but there was a policeman in the room.
Lenny Bruce was on a roll, his voice carrying from a handheld stereo, positioned in the hallway, to the bathroom where Danny lay submerged in thick suds. This was one of Lenny’s terrifying, wildly funny riffs on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the comedian’s frantic delivery cranking up the still-palpable sense of hysteria, of mass dread. The room was dark save for a weak shaving light over the washbasin, and Danny settled his body deeper into the water, soothing his aching limbs and tired mind. He gingerly reached for the thin joint smoldering in a triangular ashtray and took a long, calming drag. The drug crawled through his system, ever so slowly, an almost imperceptible relaxing effect. Danny mumbled a song lyric, “How I love you, Mary-Jane”, and thought, Could a cop really use a term like “Mary-Jane”? He might have to amend it, for personal purposes, to “How I love you, Schedule 1 controlled substance.”
He smiled at his joke, easing into the water further and placing the joint to his lips, and then his phone rang. He scrambled for it, knocking the joint and ashtray to the ground, and pressed the button to connect.
“Danny Everard. Yes, James… What time? …Okay. Did they give a cause of death? Alright. Thank you for calling, James. What…? Yeah, sure it changes matters. They’re not just kidnappers anymore; they’re killers. …Okay, I’ll talk to you then. G’night.”
So Coronado was dead. Okay—that changed things. Turned them up another notch. Danny pushed the door ajar, dampening the sound of Lenny and his manic screams of delighted terror. He thought for a moment and dialed straight through to Peter’s voicemail.
“Peter—it’s Danny. Don’t reply to this message, I just… I wanna apologize for the other night, and for not calling like we arranged. I was, ah…caught up. Anyway, sorry again. I was an asshole, and I know it. Listen, I’m gonna be busy for a while. This case, it’s… I’ll call you when this is over, okay? …I love you.”
He hung up, let out a long groan, and submerged his head beneath the foam.
Chapter 10
Shootout
“THE fucking guy is dead, Paddy. He’s dead, and we fucking killed him!”
Patrick gazed up at a poster of a kitschy 1950s sci-fi movie which hung on the wall of his parents’ basement. He didn’t want to think about Robert’s words, not yet. He stared at the poster, taking in all its elements separately, then together. The garish, primary colors, so popular at that time; the chunky, comic book typeface used for the name of the movie; the pneumatic girl shrieking in the foreground, the granite-jawed hero turned toward the background; the alien monster lumbering toward them, looking every inch the cardboard cut-out it no doubt was. He’d enjoyed that movie, enjoyed the cheap ironic thrills of its sheer awfulness, when he’d watched it during a sci-fi festival in a seamy little theater in LA, three or four years back. And of course, he’d had to buy the poster afterward. A little memento of the event; something to mark the moment.
He sat on a beanbag, against the wall, underneath a shelf heaving with electronic gizmos, stacks of CDs, several books. Robert Eustace—AKA Waters, AKA the long-haired guy encountered by Danny at the TV studios—sat at a computer desk. He was crying. The tears rolled down his pale, soft face as he slugged back a beer and pulled at clumps of his sandy hair. On the ground next to Patrick sat a huge, black-haired man, stubbled and bear-like, a biker sort: Whitman, AKA Alessandro “Sandro” Tomassi. His face was blank of expression. He stared at the ground, at his thick-soled black boots.
Patrick rested his head in his hands and said quietly, “We didn’t kill him, Robert; I killed him. I’ll take the responsibility for it.”
Robert swallowed more beer, choking back his sobs. He said, “It doesn’t matter who takes the fall, Paddy. The pimp is dead, and this whole thing has gotten out of control. We fucking said there’d be no killing. No one was supposed to die!”
Sandro stood and moved across, putting a burly arm around Robert. He didn’t say anything. He turned and raised his eyebrows to Patrick who looked toward the ceiling, anguish on his face. There was the camouflage netting, pinioned to the four corners, a gift from Lillian some years previously: “LA LUCHA CONTINÚA.” She’d always teased him about his admiration of Che Guevara.
“There you go, sweet-pea,” she’d said. “My little revolutionary. Some inspiration for your future.”
Patrick had laughed and thrown the banner over her, and they’d fallen together to the floor of his room. He smiled and remembered how Lillian used to bundle her hair up in a loose bun, how graceful it made her neck look. She was a fine woman.
“LA LUCHA CONTINÚA.” The struggle continues. Good enough.
Patrick stood, determined. He said, “I’m sorry, Robert. You don’t know how sorry I am. It wasn’t meant to happen, but it did. I took a human life, and I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my time here. But we can’t let that stop us. We’re near the end now. This wasn’t something that could have gone on indefinitely. We’re just beginning the work, we’re starting the chain-reaction. And now we’re near the end of our part and we have to make a final statement. Will you make it with us?”
Robert was still crying; he took another drink and burbled, “Guy is… This fucking Coronado is dead, man. I can’t get my head around this, I can’t…”
They let him talk himself out. There was silence for a few moments. Patrick crouched down beside Robert and whispered, “Will you do this one last thing? Robert?”
Robert hesitated, shaking his head angrily; then he lifted his bloodshot eyes to Patrick’s and nodded.
No. It just didn’t fit right.
He couldn’t, if pressed, have said exactly what was hinky about that interview with Wilde, but it was something. Danny had always trusted his instinct, despite a proud reliance on rationality and rigorous mental processes to understand events. He sat in his office and shook his head, and he knew: something about the voice didn’t fit. He pushed play on an audio recording of the interview.
Wilde was saying, “For a group of men to kick another to death because of his sexuality is unacceptable…” He pressed fast-forward, the voice squeaking like a hyperactive mechanical mouse, then pushed the play button again: “…man is brave and honest and feminine. And willing to do whatever needs to be done…”
Danny sat up sharply. “There. The voice. A different speaker. It’s a different fucking speaker!”
He pressed stop, stood up, and began pacing the floor, mumbling to himself, running it through, playing the mental riff. “Okay. Think this through logically, Everard. You went down to the lobby. You walked around. You saw…nothing much. You stepped back inside. You turned… No—the tech team called you: they’d located the signal. Then you turned, and bumped into that guy…”
He absentmindedly lit a cigarette and stood there for a moment, not smoking it. A thin wisp of smoke drifted past his eye line and something clicked in his mind. Now go. He opened the door just as another detective, an overweight, red-faced man, stuck his head in and said, “Daniel-san. We’re all going getting some early supper; wanna come with?”
Danny shoved the cigarette into his hand. “Sorry, Jonesy. Somewhere I gotta be. Finish that for me, would you?”
He stepped into the corridor and walked briskly away. Jones called after him: “Thanks, Everard. I’d appreciate it even more if I actually smoked and it wasn’t totally fuckin’ illegal in here, but hey…”
Danny sprinted into the Network 4 building, flashing his badge at the receptionist and pointing upward. He said, “Cathy Morrissey? Is she here?”
Jennifer replied, “No, I think she’s gone home for the evening, sir. Would you like me to…?”
“No, no, it’s fine. I’m just going to her office, okay?”
Jennifer said, with her customary indifference, “Sure thing.”
Danny debated taking the elevator before sprinting the three flights to Cathy’s office. He could feel it, the illumination of his nerve ends, the whole body beginning to spark. He knew he was closing in. He ran down the brightly lit corridor and entered her office, closing the door behind him. He moved to the desk, tossing around the papers and bits of detritus scattered there, then scanned the walls frantically. Keep it cool, Danny boy. Much haste means less speed, and all that. Memos, postcards, silly signs… And there, in the corner, partly hidden, a photograph of Patrick and Cathy at a party: arms around each other, and beside Cathy…the long-haired guy from the lobby. Closer all the time.
Danny pulled the photo down and dialed on his cell phone: “Cathy? It’s Danny Everard. Cathy, I’m in your office and there’s something really important I have to ask you. Are you ready? You have a photo on your wall—small, a snapshot with a disposable camera—it’s of you, and Patrick, and a third man… Yeah, it’s a party of some kind… Yeah. I need to know his name… Think, Cathy… Robert. Is that all you remember? Robert something; a friend of Patrick. Alright. A friend of Patrick…”
He closed his eyes, thinking of a possible chronology, imagining…
Visualizing Patrick leaving the studio immediately after him; going downstairs by a different route; passing Robert in the lobby and discreetly collecting the phone; slipping into a quiet corner to finish the interview; meeting Danny on the stairs and returning to the studio with him; dropping the phone into the wastepaper basket.
It’s possible. To hell with that, it’s more than possible. It’s likely. That’s what happened. He was startled by Cathy’s voice on the other end of the line, sounding a million miles away but simultaneously up close.
Danny snapped back to reality and said, “What…? Yeah, I’m still here. Listen, thanks, Cathy—you’ve been more than helpful. Do you have Patrick’s home address? Ask at reception, okay. …I can’t right now. I’ll explain it later, I promise. Please—trust me. Thank you.” He hung up and spun around, energized and infuriated. “Fuck it! I had him. I had him yesterday and the day before and the day before that.” Danny looked at the photo again. “I had you, Patrick. I had you that night, and I had you yesterday, and I let you go, kiddo.” A pause. “Why did you play that game yesterday? Why take risks like that? Did you want to be caught, Patrick?”
He smiled bitterly. “You’re about to be.”
Danny crumpled the photo into his pocket and moved.
The evening was getting chilly, underneath a blue-black sky, as hip-hop star Eye Dog trotted down the steps to the street in front of his Midtown recording studio. His recording studio—his own, not two blocks from Radio City Music Hall, bought with the proceeds of his 25 million record sales. Eye Dog was king of the hill now, and the money was rolling in. The studio, the cars, the mansion, the jewelry, the women queuing up to fuck him and the men to pay him respect. If his old acquaintances could only see him now—his parents, his teachers, rival rappers from the old days, that evil bitch he’d called his wife for a brief spell, those pussy journalists who’d described him as an ignorant thug, a cheap punk. Suck on that, you faggot fucks.
He felt good about life right then, and good about that recording session. The new tracks were shit hot. Jelly Skell and Dee-Monn were still inside, sipping cognac and discussing Jelly’s new helicopter. Man, a fucking helicopter! The thought of that skinny fool parading around in a helicopter made Eye Dog laugh. He’d have to find out the price of one of those things for himself. His limo pulled up as he hit the curb, right on cue, and the back door popped open. Eye Dog sat in and lowered his trademark diamond-encrusted monocle from his eye. Fucking thing looked good but it got pretty uncomfortable after a while.
He hit the driver intercom: “Right on time as usual, Donner. Turn up the heating back here, would you, man? Pretty damn cold outside.”
The door locks snapped down and Eye Dog could see the driver, through the smoked glass partition, lift his head and fix on a balaclava. He frowned and said, “What is this shit? Donner? Is that you?”
The partition slid down smoothly. The driver turned to Eye Dog, pointing a gun.
He said, “Donner is a goner. And so are you.”
A tranquilizer dart in the neck knocked Eye Dog out in less than five seconds.
A regular, well-kept house on a quiet street. Lace curtains in the windows and pot plants by the front door. An elaborate brass knocker. Beautifully detailed stained glass in a semi-circle over the door. Columbia University nearby, elegant brownstones, leaves turning to red and gold, a discreet air of affluence. So this is the place.
Danny approached cautiously. He pulled his gun, chambered it, crept up the steps. He listened; no sound from within. In fact, no sounds at all—this rea
lly was the definition of a sleepy residential area. Danny pulled out his radio and hesitated. He decided not to call it in; he’d play it out a little first, try and minimize any trouble. He was scared: not for himself, but of how Patrick would react if cornered. A part of him was already regretting it, but he had decided to try and reason with the guy, talk him into coming quietly. It wasn’t that he owed that much to Patrick, or maybe it was; he didn’t fucking know anymore.
He pushed against the door—locked. Danny leaned his foot back for leverage, and hesitated again: he had no warrant. Legally, he had no right to enter this building without the owner’s permission. But he had probable cause, right? His ass was fried if this went wrong; worse, Patrick could walk on a technicality. Danny juggled the two contentions in his head, weighing one against the other, gamble against reward. He was on the trail of a known and dangerous criminal; it would be an abdication of responsibility to allow anything further to develop. But if he could prove that, then get a warrant. But how fast could he rouse a judge to sign one?
No more buts. He lifted his leg again and kicked hard.
Danny moved, carefully but swiftly, through the house—empty. He’d known it would be. Inside, it was as normal and blandly middle-class as its façade. Expensive, tasteful rugs, classic furniture, family pictures and mahogany bookshelves; he was almost starting to doubt his own convictions. He reached the basement, the door of which was padlocked. Danny took a step back, fired, snapping the metal. He knocked off the lock with the gun-butt and stepped inside…
And all his fears were confirmed: Patrick was Wilde. Even though he had been expecting this, he still found it baffling, almost unthinkable. But the evidence was undeniable. He rifled through drawers and desktops, mentally catalogued the film and audio equipment, registered the sort of books Patrick had been reading. Danny joggled the computer mouse and the screen came to bright life with a “shh” sound. He opened Internet Explorer and flicked through the History option, noting websites Patrick had visited: pages popped up with information on weaponry, technology, cutting-edge equipment. Why hadn’t he deleted the History? Folders on the computer desktop, with essays on gender, homophobia, societal trends, dozens of them.
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