The fact was, Emily was an attractive lady to whom I’d become quite attached. Not quite firmly enough for my liking, but I did get to sample her lipstick in the back of a taxi after the case’s conclusion. I remembered its taste fondly. Very fondly, in fact.
Thinking about it, I suddenly remembered the kiss I’d shared with Mary Catherine on the moonlit beach the night before. That was pretty good, too, come to think of it. Being single was fun, though confusing at times.
Affirmative, I thumbed.Mike Bennett, Chief of the Library Cops.
LOL, she hit me back as I was getting into the elevator. I heard ur leaning toward a single actor. U need something to bounce, don’t forget ur cousins down here at Quantico.
Kissing cousins, I thought.
“You coming or what, text boy?” my boss, Miriam, said as the elevator door opened on eleven. “You’re worse than my twelve-year-old.”
“Coming, Mother,” I said, tucking away my phone before it got confiscated.
Chapter 13
BERGER’S HAIR WAS STILL wet from his shower as he drove his blue Mercedes eastbound out of Manhattan on the Cross Bronx Expressway. Spotting a seagull on the top rail of an exhaust-blackened overpass, he consulted the satellite navigation system screen on the convertible’s polished wood dash. Not yet noon and he was almost there. He was running just the way he liked to, ahead of schedule.
He sipped at a container of black coffee and then slid it back into the cup holder before putting on his turn indicator and easing onto the exit ramp for I-95 North. Minutes later, he pulled off at exit eleven in the northbound lane toward the Pelham section of the Bronx. He drove around for ten minutes before he stopped on a deserted strip of Baychester Avenue.
He sat and stared out at the vista of urban blight. Massive weeds known as ghetto palm trees commanded the cracks in the stained cement sidewalk beside him. In the distance beyond them were buildings, block upon block of massive, ugly brick apartment buildings.
The cluster of decrepit high-rises was called Co-op City. From what he’d read, it was the largest single residential development in the United States. Built on a swampy landfill in the 1960s, it was supposed to be the progressive answer to New York City’s middle-class housing problem. Instead, like most unfortunate progressive solutions, it had quickly become the problem.
Berger wondered what the urban wasteland had looked like in December of 1975. Worse, he decided with a shake of his head.
Enough nonsense, he thought as he drained his cup. He closed his eyes and cleared his mind of everything but the job at hand. He took several slow, deep breaths like an actor waiting backstage.
He was still sitting there doing his breathing exercises when the kitted-out pearl gray Denali SUV that he was waiting for passed and pulled over a couple of hundred feet ahead.
“What have we here?” Berger said to himself as a young Hispanic woman got out of the truck. Berger lifted a pair of binoculars off the seat beside him and quickly focused. She was about fifteen or sixteen. She was wearing oversize Nicole Richie glasses, a lot of makeup, a scandalously slight yellow bikini top, and denim shorts that were definitely not mother-approved.
Berger flipped open the manila folder that the binocs had been sitting on. He glanced at the photograph of the girl whose name was Aida Morales. It was her, Berger decided. Target confirmed.
The Denali pulled away from the curb, and the girl started walking down the sidewalk toward where Berger sat in the parked car. Berger held back a smile. He couldn’t have set up his blind better in a dream.
He quickly checked himself in the rearview mirror. He was already wearing the clothes, baggy brown polyester slacks and an even baggier white shirt, butterfly collar buttoned to the neck. He’d padded the shirt with a wadded-up laundry bag to make himself look heavier.
When she arrived at the turn for her building’s back entrance, he took out the curly black wig from the paper bag beside him and put it on. He checked himself in the mirror, adjusting the shaggy wig until he was satisfied.
She was halfway down the back alley of her building with her all-but-naked back to him when he started running and yelling.
“Excuse me, miss. Excuse me. Excuse me!” he cried.
She stopped. She did a double take when she saw the wig. But by then he was too close, and it was too late.
Berger pulled the knife from the sheath at his back. It was a shining machete-like military survival knife with a nine-inch blade. Rambo would have been proud.
“Yell and I’ll carve your fucking eyes out of your skull,” he said as he bunched her bathing suit top at her back like puppet strings. He hauled her the quick twenty steps to the loading dock by the building’s rear even faster than he had visualized. He dragged her into the space between the dock’s truck-size garbage compacter and the wall. A little plastic chair sat in the space next to the dock. It was probably where the building’s janitor fucked off, he thought.
“Here, have a seat. Get comfy,” Berger said, sitting her down on it hard.
Instead of taping her mouth as he had planned, he decided to go ahead and start stabbing her. The garbage stench and the buzzing of the flies were too much for him.
The first quick thrust was to her right shoulder. She screamed behind his cupped hand and looked up at the windows and back terraces of her twenty-story building for help. But there were just humming, dripping air conditioners and blank, empty panes of glass. They were all alone.
She screamed two more times as Berger removed the knife with a slight tug and then thrust it forward into her left shoulder. She started to weep silently as her blood dripped to the nasty, stained cement.
“There, see?” he said, patting her on the cheek with his free bloody hand. “It’s not so bad, right? Almost done, baby. In a minute, we’ll both be out of this stinking hole. You’re doing so fine.”
Chapter 14
STILL AT MY DESK LATE SUNDAY AFTERNOON, I’d spent the last two hours scouring the NYPD and FBI databases for any open cases involving the name Lawrence. Though there were quite a few, not one of them seemed to have anything to do with explosives or serial bombings. My eyes felt like blown fuses after I’d sifted through case after irrelevant case.
I glanced up from my computer at the cartoon on the wall of my cubicle, where two cops were arresting a guy next to a dead Pillsbury Doughboy. “His fingerprints match the one on the victim’s belly,” one of the cops was saying.
If only I could catch a slam dunk like that, I thought, groaning as I rubbed my tired, nonsmiling Irish eyes with the heels of my hands.
Scattered around the bullpen behind me, half a dozen other Major Case detectives were running down the lead on the European explosive and questioning potential witnesses and library staff. So far, just like me, they had compiled exactly squat. Without witnesses or likely suspects to connect to the disturbing incident, I was betting it was going to stay that way. At least until our unknown subject struck again. Which was about as depressing as it was gut-churning.
It was getting dark when I finally clocked out and drove back to the Point. Fortunately, most of the traffic was in the opposite lane, heading back into the city from Long Island, so I made decent time for a change.
My gang had quite a surprise for me as it turned out. It started innocently enough. Trent was sitting by himself in the otherwise empty family room when I opened the front door.
“Hey, buddy. Where is everyone?”
“Finally,” Trent said, putting down the deck of Uno cards he was playing with. He lifted up my swim trunks sitting on the couch beside him and tossed them at me.
He stood and folded his arms.
“You need to put these on and follow me,” he said cryptically.
“Where?” I said.
“No questions,” Trent said.
My family was nuttier than I was, I thought, after I got changed and let Trent lead me down the two blocks toward the dark beach. Down toward the water’s edge, I saw a crowd beside a bonfire. The
Black Eyed Peas song “I Gotta Feeling” was blasting.
“Surprise!” everyone yelled as I stepped toward them.
I staggered over, unable to believe it. All my guys were there. They’d brought out the grill, and I could smell ribs smoking. A tub of ice and drinks and a tray of s’mores sat on a blanket. A Bennett beach party was in full swing.
“What the heck is this? It isn’t my birthday.”
“Since you couldn’t be here for a day at the beach,” Mary Catherine said, stepping out of the shadows and handing me a gigantic Day-Glo blue plastic margarita glass, “we thought you might like a night at it. It was all the kids’ idea.”
“Wow,” I said.
“We love you, Dad,” Jane said, dropping a plastic lei around my neck and giving me a kiss. “Is that so surprising?”
“Oh, yes, Daddy-Waddy. We wuv you so much,” said Ricky, tossing a soaking-wet Nerf football at my head. I even managed to catch it without spilling a drop of booze.
After a few more stress-killing margaritas and laughter from watching Seamus dance to “Wipe Out,” I was ready for the water. I gathered everyone up and drew a line in the sand with the heel of my bare foot.
“Okay. On your mark, get set…”
They were already bolting, the little cheating stinkers. I hit the ocean a second behind them. I collided with the water face-first, a nail bomb of salt and cold exploding through my skull. Damn, I needed this. My familia was awesome. I was so lucky. We all were.
I let the water knock me silly, then got up and threw someone small who smelled like a s’more up onto my shoulders and waited for the next dark wave. Everyone was screaming and laughing.
I stared up at the night sky, freezing and having an absolute panic. There was a roar, and another wave came straight at us. We howled as if to scare it away, but it was having none of it. It kept on coming.
“Hold on tight!” I screamed as tiny sticky fingers dug into my hair.
Chapter 15
IT WAS DARK WHEN Berger pulled the Mercedes under the cold, garish lights of a BP gas station at Tenth Avenue and 36th Street back in Manhattan.
He’d bagged his bloody clothes and changed back into jeans and a T-shirt immediately after the stabbing. Directly from the scene, he’d driven over the Throggs Neck Bridge, where he’d tossed everything, including the knife and the wig. For the past several hours, he’d been driving around the five boroughs, winding down, blowing off steam, and, as always, thinking and planning. He actually did some of his best thinking behind the wheel.
He’d pulled over now not just to fill his tank, but because his braced left knee was starting its all-too-familiar whine. Hey, greetings from down here, big guy, his knee seemed to say. Remember me? Iraq, RPG, the piece of shattered rebar that burned through me, cooking all my muscles, ligaments, nerves, and blood vessels into tomato soup? Yeah, well, I’m sorry to bring it up, but I’m starting to hurt like a bitch down here, bud, and was just wondering what you were planning to do about it?
Gritting his teeth at the pain, Berger popped the gas cap and dragged himself up and out of the car, rubbing his leg. He dry-swallowed a Percocet, or “Vitamin P,” as he liked to call it, as he filled the tank.
Twenty minutes later, he was piloting the convertible uptown near Columbia University in the Morningside Heights neighborhood. He went west and found meandering Riverside Drive, perhaps the coolest street in Manhattan. He passed Grant’s Tomb, all lit up, its bright white Greek columns and rotunda pale against the indigo summer night sky.
He smiled as he cruised Riverside Drive’s elegant curves. He had a lot to smile about. Beautiful architecture on his right, dark water on his left, Percocet in his bloodstream. He started blowing some red lights just for the heck of it, cutting people off, putting Stuttgart’s latest V8 incarnation through its paces.
He really couldn’t get enough of his new $100,000 toy. Its brute propulsion off the line. How low it squatted in the serpentine curves. Like Oscar Wilde said, “I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best,” he thought.
Tired of screwing around, Berger picked it up. Slaloming taxis, he hit the esplanade at 125th doing a suicidal eighty. When he spotted the full moon over the Hudson, he actually howled at it.
Then he thought of something.
Why not?
He suddenly sat up on the seat and drove with his feet the way Jack Nicholson did in a movie he saw once.
Wind in his face, holy madness roaring through his skull, Berger sat high up above the windshield, his bare feet on the wheel, arms folded like a genie riding a magic carpet. A woman in a car he flew past started honking her horn. He honked back. With his foot.
Nicholson wished he had balls as big as mine, Berger thought.
He really did feel good. Alive for the first time in years. Which was ironic, since he’d probably be as dead as old Ulysses S. back there in a week’s time.
All in Lawrence’s honor, of course.
Berger howled again as he dropped back down into his seat and pounded the sports car’s German-engineered accelerator into its German-engineered floor.
Chapter 16
A SILVER BENTLEY ARNAGE with a Union Jack bumper sticker pulled away from the hunter green awning as Berger came hobbling up 77th Street with the cane he kept in the Merc’s trunk.
Did the Bentley belong to landed gentry? he thought. The Windsors visiting from Buckingham Palace? Of course not. It was Jonathan Brickman from 7A, the biggest WASP-aspiring Jew since Ralph “Lifshitz” Lauren.
Berger was only joking. He actually liked Brickman. He’d sat on the board when they reviewed the businessman’s co-op application. He had the trifecta of impeccable creds, Jonathan did. Princeton, Harvard, Goldman Sachs. His financials were mind-boggling even for the Silk Stocking District.
Jonathan was a pleasant fellow, too. Amiable, self-deprecating, handsome, and crisp in his bespoke Savile Row pinstripe. The only thing the gentleman financier had left to do was get a Times wedding announcement for his debutante daughter so he could die and go to heaven, or maybe Greenwich.
Berger even liked Brickman’s Anglophile Ralph Lauren yearnings. What wasn’t to like about Ralph Lauren’s Great Gatsby –like idealized aristocratic world, filled with beautiful homes and clothes and furnishings and people? Brickman was attempting to become brighter, happier, better. In a word, more. What could be more triumphant and life-affirming than that?
When Berger entered the bird’s-eye maple-paneled lobby, he saw the Sunday doorman packed down with Brickman’s Coach leather bags. His name was Tony. Or at least that was what he said it was. His real name was probably Artan or Besnik or Zug, he figured, given the Croatian twang in his voice.
Welcome to New York, Berger thought with a grin, where Albanians want to be Italians, Jews want to be WASPs, and the mayor wants to be emperor for life.
“Mr. Berger, yes, please,” Tony said. “If you give me a moment, I’ll press the elevator door button for you.”
He was actually serious. Literally lifting a finger was considered quite gauche by some of the building’s more obnoxious residents.
“I got this one, Tony,” Berger said, actually pressing the button himself to open it. “Call it an early Christmas tip.”
On the top floor, the mahogany-paneled elevator opened onto a high coffered-ceiling hallway. The single door at the end of it led to Berger’s penthouse.
Brickman had actually made a discreet and quite handsome offer for it several years before. But some things, like seven thousand multilevel square feet overlooking Central Park, even a billionaire’s money couldn’t buy.
As he always did once inside the front door, Berger paused with reverence before the two items in the foyer. To the left on a built-in marble shelf sat a dark-lacquer jug of Vienna porcelain, a near flawless example of Loius XV–style chinoiserie. On the right was Salvador Dali’s devastating Basket of Bread, the masterpiece that he painted just before being expelled from Madrid’s Academia de San Fer
nando for truthfully telling the faculty that they lacked the authority to judge him.
Standing before them, Berger felt the beauty and sanctuary of his home descend upon him like a balm. Some would say the old, dark apartment could probably use a remod, but he wouldn’t touch a thing. The veneer of the paneled dusty hallways made him feel like he was living inside an Old Master’s painting.
This place had been built at a time when there was still a natural aristocracy, respect for rank and privilege and passion and talent. An urge to ascend. There were ghosts here. Ghosts of great men and women. Great ambitions. He felt them welcome him home.
He decided to draw himself a bath. And what a bath it was, he thought, entering his favorite room. Inside the four-hundred-square-foot vault of Tyrolean marble sat a small swimming pool of a sunken tub. On its right stood a baronial fireplace big enough to roast an ox on a spit. On its left, a wall of French doors opened onto the highest of the sprawling apartment’s many balconies.
Berger particularly loved being in here in the wintertime. When there was snow on the balcony, he’d open the doors and have the fire roaring as he lay covered in bubbles, looking out at the lights.
He opened the doors before he disrobed and lowered himself slowly into the hot bath.
He floated on his back, resting while staring out at the city lights, yellow and white, across the dark sea of trees.
Tomorrow he would be “kickin’ it up to levels unknown,” to borrow the words of some obnoxious Food Network chef. This weekend was nothing compared with what people would wake up to tomorrow morning.
Tomorrow was going to be one hell of a day.
Chapter 17
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