SHE WOKE UP HEARING Lotte’s story replaying in her mind, had coffee with it, put up with it yammering at her in the cab, and got to the office in something less than a great mood.
Jay was already there, turned out in one of his stunning glen plaid suits with an almost subliminal touch of maroon deep in the weave, dashing from office to office, taking his stance at one window after another with a gigantic pair of binoculars. He would crane upward, trying to get the clearest, most angled view he could, muttering under his breath. He turned to Natalie, took one look, and said, “So what’s eating you?”
“Bad case of urban angst.”
“Oh, that. Old news, Nat, old news.” He grinned boyishly. “The peregrine falcons,” he said, “I saw one, he was swooping down from the vicinity of the top of the AT & T building—then I lost him, dammit. … We’re just too low here for any kind of decent bird-watching.” He put the binoculars back up to his eyes and fine-tuned the adjustment. He’d been a bird-watcher since his Boy Scout days, had shown her his guides—some dating back forty years—which he kept in his office: she was sure it was his most innocent vice. Charming, really, in such a sophisticated, urban creature.
“Well, stay at your post,” she said, turning to leave.
“Damn right,” he murmured, “damn right,” already absorbed in the idea of the soaring falcons.
An hour later on her way to the Xerox room she glimpsed him again, at another window, peering up through the eyepiece.
By eleven o’clock her ear was hurting from the telephone receiver digging into her small pearl earring and she needed coffee. She went and got it herself, brought it back to her desk, and the intercom began its dim, insistent buzzing. Lisa’s voice was low and amused: “I’ve got the fuzz out here for you.”
“The what?”
“Fuzz. A cop. Sergeant MacPherson, NYPD. Nice blue suit, brown shoes …”
“What does he want?”
“To see you.”
“Okay. Have him come in.” She’d thought of little but Lotte’s fears and warnings through the night and morning. Now, the police. The police?
Sergeant Danny MacPherson looked about her own age, central casting’s idea of a certain kind of cop: a tweed jacket, brown slacks (belying Lisa’s idea of humorous observation), a pale, rectangular face, a level gaze, hair longish and combed back from his flat forehead, a wide mouth with a firm set to the jaw: no colorful little quirks like the guys on “Hill Street Blues”: he seemed to date from the early age of television, before ugly and real became beautiful. He walked in, showed her his badge or ID card—she didn’t really look—and introduced himself. He didn’t smile. She bet he was first in his class at the police academy or the John Jay school.
“Ms. Rader,” he said, with acute attention to the Ms. “I’m running down this gun thing that ran in the Post. And the Times and the Daily News. Did you happen to see the news last night, by the way?” He sat down, crossed his well-creased slacks.
“No,” she said. There had been a surprisingly sardonic cast to his voice and she didn’t much like it. An Irish brogue, a smelly black cigar, and hairy knuckles would all have been more comforting.
“Well, I did. Your little incident was turned into a cute closer on the gossip portion of the show—it was practically word-for-word from Garfein’s column: a photograph of you, the story of what a big-time agent you are, then the scene you’re supposed to have witnessed. All that same garbage about how it might make a wonderful plot for a movie.” He folded his arms. “I wasn’t amused, Ms. Rader. Can you imagine why?”
“Not really,” she said, “aside from the fact that it’s not a very amusing story. As well as an invasion of my privacy. Which could conceivably put me in even more danger from the man who threw the gun away.” She felt Tony’s and Jay’s and Lotte’s concerns tugging at her, infiltrating her subconscious, MacPherson was bringing it all back.
“I wasn’t amused because I don’t like being left out of funny things involving guns. Frankly, it made me feel like a horses ass—do I make myself clear? This part of Manhattan is mine, Ms. Rader.”
“How very grand. Does that include all the people, too?”
“When guns are involved, it most certainly does. Now before I hear your story, I have a simple question. I can’t help wondering why you didn’t report what you saw to us right away. Before you called the newspapers and made sure you got as much publicity as you could. I’m just curious, you understand.”
“You tell me, Mr. MacPherson, is this your idea of police brutality? A withering crossfire of sarcasm—”
“Good lord, no.” MacPherson’s face changed fractionally, whether around the eyes or the mouth she wasn’t quite sure: perhaps it was what passed for his smile. “This was more in the line of an insult. But then, I’m not very happy about you and your newspaper friends. And I’m still wondering why you didn’t give us a call.”
“You tell me this is your turf. My God, if everybody who saw something weird went running to the cops … well, we’d spend our entire lives at the precinct house, wouldn’t we?”
“But why run to the newspapers?”
“I didn’t run to the newspapers.”
“You don’t say. … Well, why don’t you just tell me the whole story.”
“Why don’t you try not to be so supercilious.”
“It’s a deal, Ms. Rader. Maybe it’s out of my system.” He took a notebook from his jacket pocket and a fountain pen, which he carefully uncapped. “And maybe not,” he said. “We’ll see.”
“You aren’t my idea of a cop,” she said.
“I can live with that,” he said softly. “Now why don’t we just get on with it.”
MacPherson let her tell the story without interruption. When she had finished describing how Teddy had seen her into the cab, she took a breath, looked at him questioningly, wondering if there was anything left to tell him about that night.
MacPherson flipped through his notes, face expressionless. “You know,” he said quietly, “it would make a thriller, wouldn’t it?”
“No, it wouldn’t, actually.”
He still hadn’t looked up from his notes. “That touch about the laughter on the other side of the door? Frankly, my blood ran cold.”
She wasn’t sure if he meant it or was mocking her. She didn’t much like being off balance. “But it’s only an incident, not a plot. The plot is what would come later … and there isn’t any later, if you see what I mean. Life tends to be made up of incidents. The plot only shows up much later, if indeed there is a plot.”
“Aha. Well, I’m sure you know far more about fiction than I do.” He finally looked up. “The point is, so far as I can see, there either was a gun. Or wasn’t. Rainy night, a fair distance, a gun is rather small … but somebody did do the laughing number outside your door.” He gave a barely perceptible shrug. “We really must find that gun—”
“And wouldn’t it be a good idea to see if one was used in the immediate hours before he threw it away?”
“Yes, I’ll bet that would be a good idea, Ms. Rader.” The faint derision had edged back into his voice and she regretted having spoken. “Now, back to all the publicity. If you didn’t tell Mr. Garfein, who did?”
She told him about her conversation with Tony.
“Have you asked your former husband if he actually did mention it to his friend Garfein?”
“No. But it’s obvious, isn’t it?”
He looked skeptical.
“I haven’t spoken with him since. The whole thing made me angry. I didn’t want to have a fight with him.”
MacPherson seemed to think that wasn’t worth a reply. He stood up. “Show me the window. Show me where you were standing when you saw this man. Please.”
She got up, pointed, and he made a small, unhappy noise. “Do you wear glasses?” he asked.
“Contacts.”
“Could you possibly tear yourself away from being a hot superagent for a few moments?”
“It’s imaginable,” she said.
“Well, imagine it.” He put his notebook back in his pocket, capped the pen. “I want to find the gun.”
It was cold, crisp, and clear in the street. She followed MacPherson across to the construction site, to the contractor’s trailer, where they confronted a foreman in tan workclothes and a fur-lined parka jacket. He looked at MacPherson’s badge with considerable distrust, an attitude that changed only for the worse as he listened to MacPherson’s retelling of Natalie’s story.
“Nobody here found a gun,” he said. “Are you kidding? We’d all know about it—a job in Jersey City once, we found a stiff in a piling form, same difference. Gun—I’d know about it.” That seemed to end the discussion, from his point of view. He was pulling on the last inch of a cigarette. His face was red, chapped from the life he led.
MacPherson suggested that Natalie point out the exact spot the man had been in, the motion with which he’d thrown the gun, and then the three of them—ignored by the workmen—tramped around in the pit, far below street level. It was dirty and uneven and she was having a difficult time negotiating in her Italian shoes, which weren’t designed for treacherous footing. Everywhere she looked she confronted a sea of hardening cement, huge forms of wood and steel, machinery, swearing men in hardhats. The hardhat the foreman had given her made her feel like she was wearing a soup tureen, Quixote’s helmet of Mambrino. Her attention had wandered, trying to project where the gun might have landed, when she noticed that the relationship between MacPherson and the foreman was not improving.
MacPherson’s voice had gotten remarkably steely. “Just tear it up, soldier,” he said. He was pointing at a bed of moist-looking concrete that, she had to admit, looked as if it was in the right place to hide the gun.” Don’t argue with me, just tear it up or shovel it out. I’ve already got a warrant.”
“Fuck you, buddy, just fuck you and this nutty broad!” His voice fairly exploded and several of the workmen looked up, surprised, then grinned at the show.
MacPherson actually laughed. “You’re wonderful,” he said, smiling, moving close to the foreman, slapping him on the huge shoulder in a comradely gesture. Natalie stepped closer because MacPherson was lowering his voice, still smiling. “How would you like the building inspector’s men down here? You want that? Do you have any idea how sorry you and your bosses would be if I got Bracken and a couple of his guys down here? For a very close inspection of all your specs? I’m talking Fast Phil Bracken, get it? You’d be lucky to be a helper-third-class-journeyman-asshole by the time Fast Phil and your bosses got through with you, got done paying the fines. No, maybe they’d just dump you in a form and fill it with cement—now start digging, soldier.”
The foreman quietly surveyed the situation, weighing the pros and cons, then nodded genially and went off to commandeer some labor.
Natalie couldn’t help laughing. “Very impressive. Fast Phil must be a holy terror.”
MacPherson looked down at her. “I just made him up. What do I know about building inspectors? It’s sort of the idea—cops have to know how to scare people sometimes; don’t let anybody tell you differently.” His eyes followed the foreman. “Thank you for coming over, Ms. Rader. I always work better with an audience.” He took her arm and helped her back up to street level. “I’m going to hang around here, just in case this guy needs any further scaring. I’ll let you know what happens.” She watched him head back into the pit. Crossing the street, she looked up at the agency’s windows. In the corner window past the reflection Jay Danmeier stood with his binoculars. He wasn’t watching peregrine falcons. He was watching Natalie Rader. She shivered in the cold.
In the late afternoon, MacPherson came back to her office. He wore that shadow of a smile and was carrying a brown paper sack and a newspaper. Unfolding the paper on her desk, he dumped the contents of the sack. There was a heavy clunk.
“That’s a .38, Ms. Rader. A gun, you might say.”
It was disfigured by clinging bits of half-hardened cement. It seemed large and ugly and frightening. She had never seen a gun before, up close.
“It was right where it should have been. They had to move about five tons of wet cement. … I’m relieved there was a gun at the bottom of it, frankly.”
“But why didn’t someone see it before they poured the cement?”
“Those forms are full of leaves, sandwich wrappers, all kinds of debris. Who looks?”
She took a deep breath. She wanted the gun off her desk. MacPherson seemed to sense her response and scooped it up, newspaper and all, and put it back in the sack.
“What do you do now?” she asked.
“Do a work-up on the gun. Check here and there. We’ll keep busy.” He had his hand on the door, turned back. “Proves one thing, though.”
“It does?” She glanced at him, startled.
“Proves your imagination wasn’t working overtime. To tell you the truth, I thought maybe it was. Good afternoon, Ms. Rader.”
She stayed in the office until seven o’clock and once outside decided to walk home. She was damned if she’d let fear of the faceless gunman restrict her everyday life. It was a brisk night, dry for the first time in a week, and the bite of winter invigorated her. She walked crosstown to First Avenue and turned left, kept glancing back over her shoulder, feeling foolish, trying to ignore the frisson she felt whenever she noticed a man of a certain build in what was becoming a very common kind of trench coat She wondered at one point if a trench-coated fellow with clicking leather soles might actually be following her: she had heard him behind her as she passed through the dark shadows beneath the Roosevelt Island Tramway at Fifty-ninth. In the Sixties, still hearing his steady tread, she stopped at a florists window and watched him pass behind her in the reflection. He seemed utterly unaware of her and she gave a sigh of relief, calling herself a fool in the process. You couldn’t live your life worrying about an entire population clad largely in trench coats.
She stopped at a new, gleaming white shop, bought a wedge of cheese, some walnuts, and a cold green-and-white pasta salad. Two doors later she nipped in and bought an already chilled bottle of Orvieto. She was walking more quickly than she liked. In the next block it was a fresh box of Bonz for Sir, and by then she was practically racing.
She got home fed up with her own anxiety, fed up with her tendency to let it discolor a perfectly pleasant walk on a beautiful night.
She fumbled with her keys, her arms full of sacks, and finally managed both locks. Something struck her as strange as she stood silently before the door.
No half-barks and no scratching at the inside of the door. Where was he?
She swung open the door. Waited.
“Sir?” she called tentatively. “Where’s Sir? Where could Sir be?” That kind of babbling was sure to bring him.
It was so dark in the flat.
She went in, set the sacks on the mail table, and tripped over something as she went toward the light switch.
She fell to her knees.
She had tripped over the limp body of Sir. …