Lucid Intervals

by Stuart Woods

  “Of course.”

  “But something light. I think I gained five pounds last night.”

  “How about the Dover sole?”

  “Perfect.”

  He ordered the same for both of them, and Dino ordered pasta. He also ordered Felicity a Rob Roy.

  “So,” Felicity said, “have you begun our little project?”

  “I’m not listening,” Dino said.

  “You may listen,” Felicity replied. “In fact, you may even be of help. Go on, Stone.”

  “My guy has gotten access to the security tapes at the Seagram Building on or around the dates you gave us,” Stone said. “We’ll review them tomorrow.”

  “Good thought,” she said. “What else?”

  “One of my guys also mentioned an Englishman’s love of his tailor, and it seems likely that he’s still having his clothes made.”

  “A very good possibility,” Felicity said. “My father practically went into mourning when his tailor died.”

  “We’re looking at New York tailors who make English-style suits.”

  “Very good.”

  “Since Dino can listen now, may I show him the photo?”

  “Better yet, I’ll give him a copy,” Felicity said, opening her briefcase and handing the picture to Dino.

  “Who’s the guy?” Dino asked.

  Stone explained. “Do you have access to the FBI’s facial comparison program?”

  “I can manage that,” Dino said.

  “I’m sure Felicity would appreciate it if you’d run that photograph. Who knows, maybe we’ll get a match.”

  “It’s twelve years old,” Felicity reminded him.

  “Ask them if they can age him twelve years,” Stone said.

  “Okay.”

  “And ask them to give him a nose job, too.”

  “Yeah, that’s quite a honker,” Dino said, looking at the man’s profile.

  Felicity laughed. “Yes, it is quite a honker.”

  “There’s something else I have to tell you,” Stone said to Felicity, “which is unrelated to your work.”

  “And what might that be?” She took a sip of her Rob Roy.

  “A woman has been hanging around across the street from my house for… a while.”

  “I’m not surprised,” she said.

  “The thing is, she’s dangerous.”

  “And what makes her dangerous?”

  “Mental illness and a considerable facility with a knife.”

  “An unattractive combination,” Felicity said. “What does she look like?”

  “Like a Sicilian princess,” Stone said.

  “That’s a good description,” Dino agreed. “It’s also what she is, right to the bone.”

  “Should I go about armed?” Felicity asked.

  “It couldn’t hurt,” Stone said. “I’ll loan you something, if you like.”

  “Oh, I can manage,” Felicity said.

  9

  Stone sat in Bob Cantor’s van, parked right outside the Turtle Bay house, and looked at the surveillance tapes from the Seagram Building.

  “I’ve copied them and done some editing and enhancing,” Cantor said, “so what you’re seeing is the most likely candidates.”

  Stone watched a videotape of men entering the building and the elevators. An hour later he said, “Stop.”

  “Which one?” Cantor said.

  “The one with the hat, the beefy one.”

  “Why him?”

  “It’s his walk, it’s not completely natural. Do you see what I mean?”

  Cantor rewound and watched the man. “Yeah, I see what you mean about the walk. It’s like one leg is stiffer than the other. Maybe he has an artificial leg?”

  “I don’t think so, but I was told he walks funny.”

  “Who wears a hat these days?” Cantor asked. “Nobody.”

  “Maybe an English gentleman,” Stone said.

  “Are his clothes custom-made?”

  “Freeze the shot,” Stone said, then looked carefully at the man’s back. “I think so.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “For a start, his suit jacket has double pleats; ready-made suits more commonly have a center pleat. Then look at his shoulders: there’s no wrinkle near the collar, and there’s no puckering on the center seam. The sleeve has four buttons, too, and it looks like they have buttonholes. A man could get that from an expensive shop, but it all adds up to bespoke.”

  “Bespoke?”

  “What the Brits call custom-made. He’s showing more shirt collar than usual, too. His shirts are probably custom as well, so make a note to check out shirtmakers, starting with Turnbull and Asser. And the hat is a Trilby, taupe in color. That’s very British. See if you can find a shot of him in the elevator.”

  “Why?”

  “Because a gentleman removes his hat in an elevator.”

  Cantor ran through some more shots at high speed. “Here we go,” he said.

  “Maybe we can see what floor button he pushes,” Stone said, but the man didn’t push a button. He removed his hat, though, revealing a head full of dark hair, gray at the temples. The camera was set high, in a corner, and they could see only the back of his head.

  “He’s not balding,” Cantor said.

  “Maybe. He didn’t push any buttons; he was apparently going to a floor somebody else had already pushed.” Sure enough, the man followed another passenger off the elevator.

  “That’s an express elevator,” Cantor said. “It goes only to the higher floors.”

  “Yeah,” Stone said. “The trouble is, none of what we see here actually makes him as our guy. Okay, his clothes look English, and he wears a hat; that’s about it. We don’t know if our guy has gained a lot of weight over the years or gone bald. I can’t tell if he’s wearing a toupee. We can’t really see his nose, either.”

  “Well there’s one thing about him I like,” Cantor said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Of all the people we’ve looked at on this date, he has the most to recommend him.”

  “Good point. What’s the date?”

  “A couple of weeks ago.”

  “Let’s look at the earlier dates, too,” Stone said, and Cantor racked up another cassette and began his search. An hour later he was done.

  “Nope,” Cantor said. “We don’t have him on the earlier dates, just the most recent one.”

  “How many men appear on both dates?” Stone asked.

  “I don’t know, dozens, maybe many dozens. A lot of them work in the building every day.”

  “Well, this guy, Mister Smith, doesn’t seem to work in the building. I think he’s visiting.”

  “Visiting who?”

  “Could be anybody-doctor, lawyer, dentist.”

  “Are there dentists in the Seagram Building?”

  “I don’t know. They’d be really, really expensive dentists, though, if they had offices there.”

  “Nah,” Cantor said, “medical professionals need special plumbing and electrical; they mostly stick to buildings that specialize.”

  “Can we do more to identify the floor he got off on?”

  “I’ve tried,” Cantor said, “but people’s heads were in the way of the buttons.”

  “Do we have shots of him returning to the lobby?” Stone asked.

  “I haven’t seen any,” Cantor replied. “I’ll go through them again, though.”

  “Let me know what you find,” Stone said, getting up from his seat. “I can’t look at that screen anymore.” He looked through one of the van’s darkened windows across the street. No sign of Dolce. “Bob, there’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “I’m being stalked by a tall, slender, dark-haired woman. She stands across the street and stares at my house.”

  “Maybe she’s in real estate.”

  “No. I know her. She was traveling with a keeper, but she knifed him the day before yesterday, then disappeared.”

  “You w
ant somebody in the house?”

  “Yes, please. Joan is frightened, and I have a houseguest, too. I don’t want them hurt.”

  “Do you want the stalker hurt?”

  “No, not if it can be avoided.”

  “I’ll put Peter Leahy on it,” Cantor said.

  “Tell Peter to cuff her, if he can, but tell him to watch his ass; she’s very good with a knife.”

  “Jesus, Stone, where do you find these women?”

  “There’s only one like her,” Stone replied, “and she found me.”

  10

  Stone sat with Felicity, tucked into a corner table at La Goulue, one of his favorite restaurants. “You seem a little tired,” he said, as she took her first sip of her Rob Roy.

  “It’s the job,” she said, “and it doesn’t change much when I’m out of the country. Of course, when I’m in New York I have you to, ah, entertain me.”

  “The pleasure is all mine.”

  She smiled. “Don’t you believe it.”

  “Tell me about the job,” Stone said. “As much as you can anyway.”

  “There are the usual things,” she said. “Agents get themselves killed, sometimes for little or no reason. Last month I had two die in a car crash in Rome. Of course it was on that racetrack the Italians call the Piazza del Popolo. It’s insane.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I have to make the phone calls and write the letters, and even in the case of the car crash, the spouses don’t want to believe there wasn’t foul play. They’ve spent years worrying that a husband or wife will be taken out by the opposition, and I think it’s something of a letdown when they’re lost to a simple accident.”

  “Is running the firm more fun than working in it?”

  Felicity thought about that for a moment. “Marginally,” she said finally. It’s more fun to know everything instead of just about your own assignment; it’s fun to put the pieces together when you have all the information, or at least all of it that’s available.”

  “You don’t always have it all?”

  “Of course not. Even in my position I can’t know everything, and Whitehall and Downing Street are insatiable; they have an almost religious belief that their service is all-seeing, all-knowing. We could be closer to that if they would triple our budget, but that’s not going to happen unless there’s another war.”

  “What about terrorism?”

  “MI-5 does all the domestic stuff; we’re the foreign service, and we did get about a twenty percent bump in the years after 9/11, but inflation has eaten that up. I still have to send one agent out when I’d rather send two or three. Deciding where to allocate the resources is the hardest part of the job.”

  “Is there anything fun about it?”

  “The equipment is fun. We’ve long since surpassed that Q fellow in the Bond films.” She leaned close to his ear. “I have a pen in my purse that can administer a drug without your feeling it. Then I could walk out in the middle of dinner, and you’d be dead of cardiac arrest before you got to dessert. And the autopsy would reveal nothing.” She smiled. “We call it the toe tag.”

  “Is that the sort of information Stanley Whitestone was selling?”

  She grimaced. “He was selling everything but, thank God, not the toe tag; that was after his time. If word got out about that, there would be husbands dropping dead every day in their dozens, and not a few wives, too.”

  “That reminds me,” Stone said. He produced his iPhone, pressed a couple of buttons and showed her a minute or so of the Seagram footage. “I don’t know if this is the guy,” he said, “but we eliminated all the other candidates. This one has the virtue of dressing British and walking funny.”

  “The quality is very good,” she said. “Amazing, in fact. Where did you get the equipment?”

  “The cameras are high-definition, off-the-shelf stuff; the iPhone comes from the Apple Store at Fifty-ninth and Fifth.”

  “Let me see it again,” she said, and she watched closely as he reran it.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think he walks funny,” she said, “and I’ve been trying to picture exactly how and why Stanley walked funny. If this is Stanley, then all that weight he has gained has accentuated his gait.” She handed the phone back to Stone. “This is a very good effort,” she said. “It would have taken a lot longer if my people had done it. Can you e-mail me the images?”

  “Of course.” Stone tapped a few buttons. “It’s done.”

  “Now,” she said, “can you find this man?”

  “If he returns to the Seagram Building,” Stone said. “My guy has alerted security there to keep an eye out for him.”

  “Have we heard from Dino and the FBI yet?” she asked.

  “No, the FBI takes longer than my guys and your guys put together, but it’s a remarkable system for plucking faces out of the files. Do you think Stanley Whitestone might have committed a crime in this country?”

  “I don’t doubt it for a moment,” she said, “but I’d be very surprised if the FBI or anybody else has caught him doing it.”

  “Well, if he has been caught at something and his image pops up, the FBI will be all over this.”

  “And if he should fall into their hands,” she said, emptying her drink, “he’ll tell them everything he knows about us and all he can make up, just to stay out of prison.”

  “Perhaps I should have thought of that before asking Dino to do this.”

  “No, I think it was the right thing; it might turn up something, and we might get to him before the FBI does.”

  “Whatever you could say. I might still be able to stop Dino.”

  “No, this isn’t going to be easy; we’re going to need every resource available. The trail is very cold.”

  “As you wish.”

  She looked at him closely. “Subject change,” she said. “Why are you still alone?”

  Stone blinked. “Why are you?” he asked.

  “My work,” she replied. “Now back to you.”

  “I don’t know, really. They come and they go. I get dumped a lot.”

  “Why?”

  “I think they think I’m incapable of commitment.”

  “Is that true?”

  “No, I don’t think so, but I’m very careful about who I commit to. Don’t you think you’re blaming too much on your work?”

  “I tried to explain this before: it works better if we’re both in the service. We are the only people who understand us. Say I married some barrister or stockbroker. There would be a constant schedule of work-related social events, and I would make very few of them. I work all hours, and men get lonely, just as women do. Men are not understanding when you tell them nothing about what you do. It drives them crazy.”

  “I suppose I can understand that, but you’ve told me quite a lot tonight.”

  Felicity laughed. “If, say, the Chinese or the North Koreans captured you and you told them everything I’ve told you, they would kill you because you told them nothing.”

  “See,” Stone said, laughing. And then their dinner arrived.

  11

  Stone was at his desk the following morning when Herbie Fisher appeared at his office door, unannounced. The phone buzzed, and Stone picked it up. “Yes?”

  “Mr. Herbert Fisher to see you,” Joan said drily.

  “Thank you so much,” Stone said, and hung up. “What can I do for you, Herbie?” he asked.

  Herbie came in and took a seat across the desk from Stone. “I know who’s trying to kill me,” he said.

  Stone held up a hand, a stopping motion. “Herbie, think back a couple of years: someone was trying to kill you then, remember? Dattila the Hun?”

  “Oh, yeah. I remember that.”

  “We sued him, remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Uh, I shot him.”

  “Right.”

  “It was easier than suing him.”

  “Easier for you,�
� Stone said, remembering what he had had to do to keep Herbie from being tried. “If you kill somebody else you think is trying to kill you, the DA is going to remember that little incident with Dattila. You understand?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Don’t guess, Herbie, know it. You can’t make a habit of that sort of thing and stay out of prison.”

  “All right, I know it.”

  “Now, who’s trying to kill you?”

  “My bookie,” Herbie said.

  “And what is his motive?”

  “I stopped betting with him.”

  “You got a new bookie?”

  “No, I just stopped betting. I went into the bar he works out of, put a hundred and forty-eight grand on the bar-that squared me with him-and told him I wasn’t betting anymore.”

  “What was his reaction?”

  “He didn’t take it very well,” Herbie said.

  “He didn’t take it very well how?”

  “Well, first he shook my hand and slapped me on the back and offered me a credit line of a quarter million.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad,” Stone said.

  “When I told him I wasn’t betting anymore he backhanded me across the face and told me if I tried betting with anybody else he would kill me.”

  “He assumed you would change bookies?”

  “I guess.”

  “I suppose that would upset him.”

  “I explained it to him: I told him I just wasn’t going to bet anymore… with anybody. That really pissed him off, like I had violated his constitutional rights or something.”

  “And you think he took it hard enough to want to kill you.”

  “Well, if I’m not going to bet anymore, what does he have to lose?”

  “Herbie,” Stone said, “that may be the first entirely logical thing you’ve ever said to me. You’ve just had a lucid interval.”

  Herbie looked puzzled. “Huh?”

  “You paid off your loan shark, too, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. I only owed him ninety grand.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “Not very well, either. Of course, he’s my bookie’s brother, so maybe it runs in the family. He told me I would have to go right on paying the vigorish, and I told him to go fuck himself.”