Elevator Pitch

by Linwood Barclay

  “This is so kind of you,” she said.

  Valerie and Chris and Glover huddled in the doorway, behind the cameras, watching.

  “I wish I could do this for everyone in the city like yourself, Dorothy,” he said. “And I want you to know that we’re going to have everything back to normal very, very soon.”

  She reached into the bag and took out the granola parfait, then two cups. A slender string and a tiny label was hanging from under the lid on one.

  “Mine’s the tea,” the mayor said.

  “This looks delightful,” she said. “How much do I owe you?”

  Headley chuckled. “It’s on me.”

  She peered down into the bag at the one remaining item. It was the butter brioche, wrapped in wax paper. “My favorite,” she said. “But I usually start with the parfait, while the yogurt is still cold.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Headley said. A plastic spoon had been tossed into the bag. He handed it to her.

  “So, Dorothy, how have you been managing through the crisis?” he asked. He already knew the answer. Dorothy had been interviewed ahead of time by the staff, and her answers passed along to the mayor.

  “My landlord, Janos, is checking out the elevators right now. If he gets them up and running soon, I think I’m going to go out for lunch.”

  “Sounds like a good man,” Headley said as Dorothy dug into her parfait. She slid a spoonful of yogurt, strawberry, and granola into her mouth.

  The mayor took the lid off his tea, lifted out the bag, and let it drain against the top edge of the cup before setting it on the lid. “We think just about every elevator in the city will be back in service by the afternoon. Everyone’s really pulled together to—”

  “Oh my God!” Dorothy said.

  She had her spoon back in the yogurt and had unearthed something small and dark that appeared to have tiny legs and a tail attached to it.

  It was a dead mouse.

  Dorothy started to make gagging sounds, turned away from the table, and vomited onto the floor.

  “You can be sure we’re going to be taking this up with Brew Who,” Glover said, trailing after his father as they came out of the apartment building, headed for his limo. “This is outrageous. I’ll call the health department, get the inspectors in there, shut them down.”

  Valerie was already in the back of the car, phone in hand. The two TV stations covering the event had posted the video within minutes. By the time the mayor had raced down twelve flights of stairs, it was already trending.

  “How bad is it?” Headley asked as he got in the car.

  “It’ll blow over,” Valerie said. “You can make a joke about it later. I don’t see that you have any choice.”

  “It’ll be on every late-night show,” Headley said.

  Glover came around the other side of the car and opened the door.

  “No,” his father said, raising a hand.

  “What?” Glover said.

  “Find your own way back,” he said. “This stunt was all your idea. I never learn.”

  “Dad!” he said. “It should have worked. How could I know there was a mouse in her yogurt? You think I put it there?”

  “Close the door!”

  “Richard,” Valerie said softly. “You can’t—”

  “Now!” Headley shouted.

  Glover closed the door. Through the window, Valerie gave him a sympathetic tip of the head as the car pulled away. Then she shifted in her seat to look at her boss.

  “Don’t start with me,” he said.

  “He’s your son,” she said.

  “He walked me right into that. God damn it, if he excels at anything, it’s making me look like a fool.”

  “Look, if you—”

  Valerie’s phone shouted out news of an incoming text. She quickly dug it out of her purse and looked.

  “Something’s happened,” she said.

  “What?”

  “It’s Chris. Details just coming in.”

  “Of what? Christ, not another elevator thing.”

  “No, it’s a shooting. In a hotel.” She waited as more words appeared on her phone’s screen. “Two dead. The FBI took down the shooter. He’s … still alive.”

  “Who’s dead?”

  “Hang on … there’s a link.” She tapped on the screen. “That Flyovers guy. And a woman. It’s not clear. Wait, Chris is writing something else. The man the FBI shot, he could be the one who shot the Flyovers person.”

  “This isn’t clear at all,” Headley said.

  “Let me make some calls. But from what Chris is saying, this guy the FBI got, they like him for the taxi bombing, and maybe the elevator stuff, too. You’re gonna want to make a statement. That mouse in the parfait just got kicked off the six o’clock news.”

  Sixty-One

  Jerry Bourque and Lois Delgado had spent the morning working the phones, tracking where city-owned cars were garaged, and working up a list of vehicles that were not only part of the “green” pool but had plates ending in 13. Once they’d tracked down the car, they wanted to know who’d taken it to Simpson Elevator for a chat with Otto Petrenko.

  But then the captain showed up and told them to get their asses over to the Westerly Hotel in Fort Lee, on the other side of the George Washington Bridge, in New Jersey. There was a chance, the captain said, that what was going on there might have something to do with what he and Delgado were working on.

  Bourque made the case that just one of them should go. The other should stay back and try to make headway on finding that car.

  “Flip for it,” the captain said.

  They didn’t have to. Delgado said she was happy staying on the car, so Jerry headed off to New Jersey.

  On the way, he found out what made the Westerly a place of interest, beyond its usual charm.

  A week ago, a forty-four-year old man from Tulsa, Oklahoma, by the name of Garnet Wooler had rented a room on the second floor. This same Garnet Wooler, had, two hours earlier, been shot in the shoulder by an FBI agent in the lobby of the InterMajestic Hotel in midtown Manhattan as he was drawing a weapon. It was believed this same gun had been used to kill Eugene Clement and his wife, Estelle, just moments earlier in the men’s bathroom just off the hotel lobby.

  Wooler had been rushed to the hospital, where he was listed in serious but stable condition. And while he was able to talk, he had so far chosen not to. But police had found, in his pocket, a key card for the Westerly in Fort Lee.

  A quick check found that Mr. Wooler was not unknown to police, at least out in Tulsa, who knew him better as Bucky. There were two minor assault charges. One, on an ex-wife, was five years ago, and the second, eight years back, stemmed from a disagreement in a bar with someone who had opened his door into the side of Wooler’s pickup truck.

  Four years ago, Wooler had also been treated and released for burns to his upper body after goofing around with explosives on a buddy’s farm. He had, off and on, worked for a company that removed tree stumps by using dynamite. Given his history, it wasn’t a stretch to think he had the wherewithal to blow up a New York cab.

  Bourque’s captain had dispatched him to the scene because Clement had been, up until the moment he was fatally shot, the head of the Flyovers activist group, which might or might not have had something to do with taxi explosions and elevator plunges, and maybe even the murder of Otto Petrenko.

  While police had arrived on the scene nearly ninety minutes earlier, it was only moments before Bourque’s arrival that they gained access to Wooler’s room. Given that this man might be their bomber, they were proceeding with great caution. First, they didn’t know whether Garnet Wooler had been acting alone, or if he might have associates holed up at the hotel. Second, they needed to determine that the room had in no way been booby-trapped. No one wanted to trigger an explosion when they entered it.

  So a crane was used to lift police up to the second floor hotel room’s window so that they could scope the place out. In addition, a high-tech ca
mera on the end of a wire was inserted under the door to give a full view of the room’s interior.

  Confident, at last, that the room was safe to enter, police did so.

  Similar precautions were taken with the 2004 Dodge minivan registered to Wooler that was sitting in the hotel parking lot. As Bourque arrived, the van was being loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck and being taken to a forensics lab for examination.

  Judging by the number of official vehicles in the hotel lot and the surrounding streets, one could be forgiven for thinking a Newark-bound jet must have come down here. There were countless New York and New Jersey state police cruisers, cars bearing the NYPD logo, fire emergency vehicles, and enough black Tahoe and Suburban SUVs—most likely Homeland and FBI—to start a GM dealership.

  Bourque found a spot for his unmarked car and killed the engine.

  Flashing his badge, he got into the hotel and up to the second floor. The hallway outside Wooler’s room had been turned into a law enforcement convention. He made his way to the door, flashing his badge again. A rosy-cheeked FBI agent named Ben Baskin invited him in once Bourque had explained his interest.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Baskin. “I saw you at the meeting.”

  “What have you found?”

  “Shitload of stuff. The guy did not travel light. We’ve found rifles, couple more handguns, in addition to the one found on him. Ammunition. We think we’re going to find more weapons in the van. Also, some ammonium nitrate, Tannerite, some wire and—”

  “Bomb-making materials,” Bourque said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Same materials used in the taxi?”

  Baskin shrugged. “To be determined.”

  “How about any kind of electronics?”

  “Plenty. Couple of laptops. Burner phones. Other stuff.”

  “Anything that might be used, say, to hack into an elevator’s control system?”

  “Still searching. And like I say, we’ve still got the van to get through. We’re also trying to find out if our friend here was working with anyone else.”

  “What happened at the InterMajestic?”

  Baskin shook his head. “Our guy shot and killed Clement and his wife but we don’t know why, because it looks like Wooler was on the same team as Clement. Maybe Clement was telling him what to do, or came to New York to be closer to the action when it went down.”

  “But if they were somehow working together, why’d he shoot Clement and the wife?” Bourque asked.

  “Good question. Wooler’s said next to nothing, but he made one comment, something along the line that Clement’s wife thought they were gay. Wanted us to know that was not the case, at least where he was concerned.”

  “Guy’s facing terrorism charges, but that’s what he’d worried about.” Bourque shook his head. “You come across anything yet that connects Wooler to a guy named Otto Petrenko?”

  “No. If we do, you’ll be the first to hear about it. Anything else?” Baskin asked.

  Bourque thought a moment. “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t want to know if I have a partner named Robbins?”

  Bourque grinned. “No.”

  “You’re the first.”

  Before crossing back over the George Washington, Bourque pulled into a McDonald’s lot on Lemoine Avenue. He was starving, and didn’t have the time or inclination to find anything of higher nutritional value.

  He was wolfing a Big Mac and slurping down a Diet Coke when his cell phone, which he had placed on the table, rang.

  “Bourque,” he said, although with his mouth full it came out more like Burfk.

  “Get the marbles out of your mouth,” Lois Delgado said.

  “I’m grabbing a bite,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “McDonald’s.”

  “Yeah, thought I could smell it,” she said. “What’d you find?”

  He filled her in. When he was done, she said, “So, guess where I am.”

  Bourque took a sip of Coke. “In a room at the Plaza with Ryan Gosling.”

  “I mean right now, not where I was last night,” she said.

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m in the City Hall garage looking at a boring sedan with a license plate that ends in 13, and it’s got a dent in the bumper identical to the one in our picture.”

  “Whoa,” Bourque said, feeling his pulse quicken. “Now we just have to find out who signed it out that day.”

  “Already have,” she said.

  “Are you going to make me beg?” Bourque asked.

  “That’s exactly what Ryan said.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Here’s a question. Why do you think the mayor’s son would be wanting to meet with Otto Petrenko?”

  Bourque set down his drink. “The mayor’s son?”

  “Glover. Glover Headley. He’s one of his dad’s aides or advisers or whatever.”

  “Huh,” Bourque said. “I guess we should ask him.”

  Sixty-Two

  Thanks for coming.”

  Richard Headley gazed out over the assembled media. He couldn’t recall the press room ever being this crowded. There were even more representatives from TV and radio and print here today than there had been the day before. He hadn’t had very good news for them then. Today was looking a little better.

  “I just want to say a few words before Chief Washington arrives. She’ll be able to answer a lot of your questions in more detail. But there has been an arrest. Most of you already know about the shooting at the InterMajestic.”

  He quickly told them that the man who’d been arrested was a suspect in the taxi bombing.

  “At this time,” he said, “we can’t say this person is connected to the elevator tragedies, but I can confirm he is a person of interest. There is a strong link with the Flyovers group, which has, in recent months, established a pattern of fomenting chaos in coastal cities, of which we are definitely one. So with that possibly hopeful news, and reports coming in from across the city about the progress that is being made in restoring elevator service, I think it’s fair to say that things are looking up.”

  Several questions were shouted out, and Headley did his best to answer them, but in most cases said they would have to wait for the chief. To his relief, there was not one question about the granola parfait rodent.

  On the pretext of having to leave for another meeting, Headley offered his apologies and excused himself from the press room. When he returned to his office, Glover was there. Sitting on the couch, a remote in hand, watching CNN on the new TV that had been installed after the mayor had shattered the other one the day before.

  Glover stood.

  “I see you got back okay,” Headley said.

  Glover nodded. “I walked.”

  Headley’s eyes went wide. “From Ninetieth Street?”

  “Took me about two and a half hours. But it gave me lots of time to think.” He reached into his pocket and withdrew a white envelope, which he handed to his father. “About this.”

  “What’s this?” he asked. Written, in hand, on the front of the envelope was the word Dad.

  “I wasn’t sure who to make it out to,” Glover said. “I didn’t know whether to write ‘Dad,’ or ‘Father,’ or ‘Mayor Headley.’”

  The envelope was not sealed. Headley withdrew the single sheet of paper tucked inside, unfolded it, tossed the envelope onto the coffee table. He scanned the words. It didn’t take him more than ten seconds to read it.

  “What the hell is this?” Headley asked.

  “You’ll notice, on the actual letter, I made it out to the position, to Mayor Richard Headley. I guess, between that and the envelope, I covered all bases.”

  “You’re resigning?”

  Glover nodded. “Yes. As it says, in the letter, effective tomorrow. Or, I guess, midnight tonight.”

  “Why? You don’t give a reason in your letter.”

  “Because I’m tired of disappointing you. And I simply can’t take it anymore
.”

  “Can’t take what?”

  “The constant belittling. The put-downs. The eye rolls. Anyone else with an ounce of self-respect would have quit long ago, wouldn’t have put up with it for so long. Maybe that’s what took me so long. I’m all out of self-respect.”

  Headley was shaking his head. “This is ridiculous.”

  “More likely a relief, for you. Now you don’t have to actually fire me.” He took a breath. “Mom’s been dead a long time, Dad. If you’ve kept me on out of guilt, thinking maybe you owed it to her, you don’t have to feel that way any longer. I want to leave. Maybe my quitting will be my one chance to make you happy.”

  “Christ, Glover.”

  “The resignation, as it says in the letter, is effective at midnight. I’d still like to attend the Top of the Park event tonight, however. If it’s still on.”

  “It is,” Headley said. “Coughlin messaged me a while ago. He’s got the elevators working. Of course you can come.” He paused, then said, “That woman you hired. Arla Silbert.”

  “The one you fired,” Glover said. “Because she’s Barbara Matheson’s daughter.”

  Headley nodded quickly, as though wanting to brush over that part. “What else do you know about her?”

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “No reason. I just … wondered.”

  Glover turned and started heading for the door. He was almost out of the office when his father called out his name.

  “Yes?” Glover said, stopping and looking at the mayor.

  “I’m sorry about kicking you out of the limo.” He swallowed, hard. “That was wrong. It wasn’t your fault there was a goddamn mouse in that old lady’s breakfast.”

  “Actually, it was,” Glover said. “I put it there.”

  The mayor was standing by his desk, numb, when Valerie came into the room three minutes later.

  “What did Glover want?” she asked. “I saw him leaving and he looked kind of shook up.”

  He handed her the resignation letter. She scanned it quickly, then said, “Oh. Did you accept it?”

  Headley nodded. “He told me something that he did … I should be angry. I should be livid. But I’m not. I feel like I had it coming.”