“Move it. Move it, Casual Air. You son of a bitch.”
Past the clubhouse turn and pounding into the home stretch, both horses, for some inexplicable reason, quit. They simply faded as if they’d lost interest or just run out of gas. A pair of disreputable hayburners, Vagrant and Tollkeeper, flew past them along with another horse. Coming Sunday and Casual Air finished fourth and fifth respectively. Both out of the money.
Mooney and Fritzi went home bumper to bumper on the expressway, both glowering in embattled silence all the way back to Manhattan. The quality of their luck in the first race was indicative of how they fared throughout the rest of the day. They’d lost about a thousand dollars between them, added to which Wizard, their own entry in the fourth race, had hardly covered himself with glory. By the time they reached 83rd Street, neither of them was feeling very kindly disposed toward the world.
Upstairs, there was a message from Mulvaney on their answering machine. “Where the hell have you been?” the chief of detectives snarled when Mooney finally reached him on the phone. “I’ve had the goddamned M. E. on the phone to me six times this afternoon looking for you.”
“It’s a sorry thing when a man can’t even go to his dentist without —”
“Don’t give me that dentist crap, Mooney. You better come up with something better than that. This time he’s out for blood, and personally —”
“You hope he gets it, right? What’s that old bag of gas blowing off about now?”
“That girl you pulled out of the drain last month?”
“What about her?”
“They’ve got an ID on her.”
“How’d they get it?”
“Someone called the Sixth Precinct this morning. Gave her name and address. Wouldn’t leave his own name.”
“Would you?” Mooney quipped sarcastically.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just thinking out loud. Probably the same joker who tipped the Forty-fourth and told ‘em to go fish her out of the drain in the first place.”
“Name’s Cara Bailey. Four twenty East Seventy-third. It’s a brownstone. She had a second-floor walkthrough. Landlord said she’s been missing three weeks.”
“Why the hell didn’t he notify anyone?”
“Says he figured she was on vacation. We went up there and pulled a set of prints. We matched them downtown with what the M.E.‘s got. It’s her, all right.”
“So what the hell are you so browned off about?”
“What the hell am I browned off about?” Mooney could hear the words gagging in the chief of detectives’ throat. “I’ve had a half-dozen guys up on Seventy-third Street all day, doing your goddamned job, while you’re off at the flats.”
“So I slipped out for a couple of hours. Big deal.”
“Big deal is right. It should’ve been you up there on Seventy-third Street pulling prints. There’s a family up in Great Barrington has to be notified.”
Mooney groaned. “Oh, Christ, Mulvaney. Don’t give me that job. If you’ve a shred of decency, I beg you.”
“You notify those people tonight, Frank. Get ‘em down here first thing in the morning to make an identification. Then get on to the girl’s boss.”
“Her boss?”
“She worked for some kind of literary agency up on Fifty-seventh Street. Crane, Poole Associates. You get your ass up there tomorrow and —”
By that time Mooney was steaming. “Listen, I’m just sitting down to dinner.”
“How swell for you. I’m not. I’m three hours away from dinner. Buried under a mound of turd here. Anything yet on those number scribblings?”
Mooney sighed, resigned to what he knew must follow. “The math professor up at Columbia tells me they looked to him like a fixed series.”
“A fixed what?”
“He says they’re things called fibonacci numbers, tribonacci numbers …”
“Oh, Christ.”
“Yeah, I know. He’s got a lot of fancy names for it. Integer sequences. Combinatorics. Numbers theory. Solid state physics. It all boils down to the fact that there are repetitions of certain sequences all throughout nature, and these sequences sometimes tie things together which you wouldn’t normally think tie together. Get it?”
“No,” Mulvaney snapped. “I’m not too big on nature. What the hell does that tell me specifically about these numbers we keep finding?”
Mooney swallowed hard. “Nothing. But you know that string of numbers we found down in the drain on that Bailey job last month, fourteen, twenty-three, twenty-eight, thirty-four, forty-two?”
“What about ‘em?”
“Mussacchio over at the Nineteenth swears they’re also the local stops on the West Side IRT.”
“Terrific. Now we can start patrolling the whole goddamned subway.”
“I’m also talking to a linguist guy up at Natural History,” Mooney went on with failing courage. “He’s sure the numbers have something to do with the alphabet.”
“Alphabet?” Mulvaney s voice made a sharp squeal as if he’d been struck.
“The idea being that in standard cryptography you can assign a numerical value for every letter in the alphabet, A being one; B, two; C, three; and so forth.”
“Brilliant. And how does that jibe with the numbers we’ve got?”
“It doesn’t. At least not for the Roman alphabet. Now he’s checking the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Greek, the Pythagorean, the Phoenician, the Syriac …”
“And what’s all this supposed to tell us?”
“Who knows? Maybe that our guy is a Syrian math whiz. How the hell should I know?”
“Sounds like a pile of horseshit to me.”
“Bingo.”
“Anything new on that Torrelson job?”
There wasn’t, but Mooney felt it might be prudent to make it appear there was. “Well, maybe.”
“Maybe what?”
“The car. It looks like it’s green.”
“Green what?”
“Just that. That’s all we know.”
Mulvaney made a strangled sound. “You really outdid yourself, didn’t you?”
“We squeezed a little more out of the old dame next door. We’re trying to put a make on the car now.”
“Take my advice, Frank. You try hard. Real hard. There’s a lot of people watching you.”
“I’ll try not to disappoint them,” Mooney remarked sourly and started to hang up.
“And one more thing.” Mulvaney’s voice took an ominous drop. “I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”
The sudden transition from rage to that of almost collegial intimacy made Mooney uneasy. “About what?”
“Not on the phone. In my office. Tomorrow.”
A long, rather strained pause ensued. “Fine. I’ll see you in the morning,” Mooney snapped and hung up the phone. When he turned, Fritzi was there, staring hard at him.
“Looks like you lost your best friend.”
“Worse, even. I lost three hundred bucks.”
“I lost seven hundred,” she beamed. “You don’t see me down in the mouth.”
“That’s different. You’re rich.”
“If I am, sailor, so are you.” She gave the flesh above his waist a pinch. “What’re you eating tonight?”
“Crow.”
“Don’t have any. What about pot roast?”
“Pot roast,” Sanchez intoned sepulchrally from his perch. “Pot roast.”
SEVEN
“THIS IS IT.”
Slumped in the backseat of the squad car, Mooney looked up from his Daily News.
“Four-thirty West Fifty-seventh.”
“What’s the name of the guy again?”
Pickering extracted the small sheet of crumpled paper from his pocket, smoothing it out on his knee. “Crane, Poole Associates. Room fourteen oh three. It’s Crane we’re looking for.”
Mooney nodded.
“Mr. Avery Crane.”
Grumbling to himself, Mooney lum
bered up out of the squad car. “Wait here for us, Lopez,” he called over his shoulder at the driver. “We’ll be down in twenty minutes.”
“And she just stopped coming in?”
“Not like that. Not all at once. She tried coming in for a short time after. She was pretty shaky, so we tried her on half days.”
“And?”
“It went okay for a while. But it just got to be too much for her. For one thing, the work suffered. Messed up contracts. Didn’t give messages. Didn’t return phone calls. Stuff like that. She was distracted. Finally we suggested she take a vacation. With pay,” Mr. Crane hastened to add. He was a natty, fastidious man. Manicured and barbered impeccably. A vision in gray sideburns and good British tailoring. About him was an air of expensive cologne and the sort of inflated self-importance that becomes quickly annoyed with any interruption of its normal routine.
They were standing in a stairwell on the thirtieth floor of 430 West 57th Street.
“This the only stairwell on the floor?” Mooney asked. “That’s right. That’s the way they built them in nineteen twelve. Nowadays the fire code insists on a fire exit as well.”
Mooney gave the doorknob several sharp twists. “And the door’s always kept locked on the stairwell side like this?”
“If it wasn’t, we’d have every creep on Fifty-seventh Street flitting around up here. As it is …” His voice trailed off and he glanced at the two policemen uneasily. “I guess I don’t have to tell you people.”
Mooney sensed in the small, dapper figure before him another solid citizen, eager to inform a member of the local constabulary how badly they were doing their job.
“That washroom she was going to at the time …” He doodled in his pad. “That’s the only one on this floor?”
“Only women’s room. There’s a men’s room too. There are just eight tenants on the floor. You can’t get into them without a key.”
“Then he must’ve come up on the elevator,” Pickering said, “since those stairwell doors are always locked.”
Crane nodded. “I’d say so. Must’ve been just getting off the elevator when she stepped out of the office on her way to the washroom.”
“And that’s when he grabbed her and pulled her in here?”
“That’s essentially it. At least, that’s the story she told the police afterward.”
“He must’ve had to go all the way back down the steps, thirty flights to get out, since he couldn’t get back into the hall through this door,” Pickering added thoughtfully.
Mooney stared upward into the shadowy well soaring thirty more flights above them. “Nobody heard anything?”
“Only after. When he’d left. Then we heard her screaming and pounding on the door to get back into the hall.”
“Probably kept her quiet with that knife.”
“It was a big knife, she said.”
Mooney nodded. “We have a description of it.”
“It was awful,” Crane said, and for the first time that morning, he appeared shaken. “Clothes torn. Pretty well banged up. Hysterical.”
“Anyone else get a look at him besides her?” Mooney asked. “What about the elevator man?”
“We haven’t had an elevator operator here for twenty years. These things are all automatic now.”
“But you’ve got a dispatcher downstairs,” Pickering said.
“We always have one or two on duty. But they don’t notice who comes or goes.”
“No strange, odd-looking characters?”
Crane’s features formed a funny, pained expression. “Ever get a load of some of these messengers that promenade around the city nowadays?”
“I get your point,” Mooney snapped, dismissing the line of questioning.
“She gave a fairly good description to the police, though,” Crane added.
Mooney sighed and flicked several pages back in his pad. He started to read aloud. “Blond hair. Caucasian. Average height — five eight, five nine — weight approximately a hundred fifty pounds. Wore a full-length, dark-brown leather coat over jeans. A Basque shirt. Was extremely polite. Apologetic was Miss Bailey’s word.” Mooney snapped the pad shut. “I guess that’s about it.” They started back slowly up the steps through the airless, dimly lit stairwell.
“She never did make an identification, did she?”
Crane took out a key and proceeded to unlock the hall door.
“The chief at Midtown South said she came down to a couple of lineups with guys pretty much fitting that general description and with known records for sex offenses. She couldn’t recognize anyone. Just too jumpy by then, I guess.”
They stepped back out onto the floor and strolled toward a door with Crane, Poole, Inc., and Member SAR, ILAA stenciled in black letters on a frosted glass window.
“Christ, wouldn’t you be?” Crane fretted. “Young kid like that. Right out of school. Twenty-two years old. First job in New York. Assaulted in a goddamned stairwell at knife point. Then suddenly she starts seeing this guy in all kinds of places. Outside on the street when she goes out to lunch. Lurking in doorways near her apartment. Clearly following her around. Just waiting for a chance to grab her again. And each time she calls the police they don’t do a damned thing.”
Mooney sighed. He could see where this was leading. “It’s a big city, Mr. Crane. Lot of funny people walking around off the leash, as you say. The police answered her calls three times. Never found anything.”
“Well, if it takes them twenty minutes to get over here, of course —”
“They were there inside of five to six minutes each time.”
“That isn’t what she said.”
“I’ve got the operations reports right here.” Mooney spoke with gruff persistence. “The girl herself claimed she’d only get quick glimpses of the guy, then he’d be gone.”
“All right,” Crane conceded. “All right.” His head drooped and he appeared momentarily contrite. “It’s just a damned shame when people get into trouble in this city, real trouble, and go to the police. The police don’t exactly break their necks to help.”
“She could’ve just been imagining things,” Pickering said reasonably. “She was in a pretty bad state of mind by then.”
By that time Mr. Crane was grinding his teeth. “I hope you didn’t say that to her parents when they came down to identify the body.” He yanked open the door to his office. “Has anyone spoken to her family?”
“I did.” Mooney’s voice was barely a whisper. “Thanks very much for your help.” Mooney thrust a hand toward him. Crane stared at the big red paw for a moment as if faintly repelled by it. At last he thrust out his hand begrudgingly.
Mooney shook the limp, bony hand. “Just one more thing, if you don’t mind. Miss Bailey — she didn’t happen to say anything about this fellow’s teeth?”
Crane stared at him, bemused.
“Did she say they were stained or broken? Anything like that?”
He considered that a moment, then shrugged. “No. Nothing like that at all.”
EIGHT
I still think of you. Don’t be scared. Not in the bad old way, but in the way it was (or in the way I used to think it was) before all that … business. I regret it now. My memory of things is shot. Today, for a change, it’s okay, and I see your face … actually see it. But only when I say your name. Will you believe there are days when I can’t get your face into my head? Try as I may to dredge it up … use tricks like imagining you the way you looked at certain times, all I can manage is a land of fuzzy outline, all runny and plugged with light, like a photo over-exposed.
My life is still pretty much the same. I drive around all day and sometimes all night. I eat in the car and sleep in it. I let it take me where it wants. Sometimes we go for hours, up and down the state. All the way to the border on up into Canada. We cruise around up there a bit, then turn back.
We play a game together, Mother and me, in which I try to guess where she’s taking me while she tries to keep fro
m me our destination. Sometimes she surprises me, but mostly in the end I figure her out. Sometimes we’ll go for hours, stopping maybe just for gas, then start again. No food. No sleep. Happy as larks, we two. Not on pills like in the bad old days. Just on myself. Me and Mother. Mother sends her best. She turned 160,000 miles the other day, and still pretty as when I first saw her. Then it was you and me and her. The Holy Trinity, we used to say. I sometimes think, if things were different, if the past weren’t what it was, we could … still … But no, I’m older now and I know better.
My routine is still … well, you know … pretty much the same. Like what it was when we were together. I look for places with a window open, or a door half-shut. Like where someone has just gone in, but not yet closed the door. Like maybe someone with packages they haven’t yet put down. That’s the easiest. I’ve gotten so I can tell when a window or a door is unlocked, even when it isn’t open. I can even tell fifty or a hundred feet off, or whizzing by at sixty in a car on the speedway, if a window is unlatched.
It’s gotten to be a kind of instinct with me. I can always tell if something’s gonna be good. You look at a place and you can pretty much tell from the condition of things outside what you can expect once you get in. Like, how recent it’s been painted, if the lawn’s mowed, if the shades are up or down in the middle of the day, or if the mailbox is so jammed that all the mail and newspapers and stuff are scattered on the ground around it.
You’d be amazed what you can tell from the garden, from plants and things. Folks who’ve got a lot of bread to stick in the ground also have a lot of great stuff sitting around inside, just waiting for someone like me. Tires, VCRs, PCs, cameras, super audio stuff. Stuff like that you can just throw in the trunk of your car and turn over quick for cash, no questions asked.
I don’t feel bad about things I’ve done. I feel good about them. Not everyone could’ve done those things. Not everyone has the guts for it. I’m no different from all the others. God made me just the way He made them. So He must’ve had some reason for putting me here. I do what I’ve been put here to do. Everything is preordained. The pattern is all in the numbers, and I’m as much a victim of that as all those who chance to cross my path.
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