Marshall only slept for three hours. Five thirty and he was awake again, something in his blood. It was still raining. Up on Clarendon, the traffic was sparse, cars slow and black-windowed and hissing along through the groundwater. He knew he should take the subway – he could feel the heat from the MetroCard in his pocket – but he felt that efficiency was the governing concern right now.
He crossed Clarendon and waved down a westbound cab. The driver was off-shift, and gave him an off-meter fare: fifteen bucks across town to Sunset Park. The guy let him out on Fourth Avenue, under the BQE, and Marshall walked down to Fiftieth and stood at the corner. The Vialoux place was halfway along the block. An NYPD cruiser was still parked out front, tight in behind Ray’s car.
Marshall checked his watch. The graveyard shift ran until seven fifty. He had eighty minutes to kill, unless this guy planned to clock out early, factor in the drive and paperwork delays.
He walked south on Fourth until he found a coffee shop. He liked the way coffee was heading in New York. It used to be that if you wanted something elaborate, they’d give you a splash of cream, or a container of half-and-half on the side. As far as Marshall could tell, that had been the zenith of fancy. Now you could get a cappuccino just about anywhere, and every so often he’d find a place that did a kind of Antipodean take on it – something called a flat white, which Marshall approved of greatly. This place on Fourth didn’t know about flat whites yet, but the cappuccino they made him was pretty good.
The neighborhood was well awake now, stores open and the traffic getting heavy. No one paid him any notice. In an alley off Forty-third he found a mound of empty cardboard boxes, kicked through them until he found an offcut of plastic strapping. A good specimen: three-and-a-half feet. He stuffed it in his pocket and headed back up to Fiftieth.
At seven twenty-five, the cop car finally started up and pulled away toward Fifth Avenue. Clocking off early, but he probably figured if the last eight hours had been uneventful, the next twenty minutes would be similar. Marshall left his cup in a trash can and walked over to where Vialoux’s Crown Vic was parked curbside, dropped to a push-up position so he could see beneath the chassis. Nothing out of place. He checked the wheel wells in turn. Clear. Nothing under the front or rear fender. He took the length of plastic strapping from his pocket and halved it, went around to the driver’s side and passed the fold in the strap in between the window frame and the door pillar. He fed in another six inches off one of the tailing lengths, and the inserted portion separated to form a loop. He eased the loop down over the lock button on the top edge of the door, pulled the loop closed, and yanked upward. The button popped up, and Marshall opened the door and got into the car.
He smelled booze immediately, and he wondered if it was the product of a single spill, or just gradual buildup: months or years of maintenance pops. In any case, the culprit was in the glove compartment: Southern Comfort, a few inches remaining. Not just a wine man, after all. He placed the bottle on the seat while he sorted through detritus. Insurance documents, mechanics’ invoices and work summaries, a handful of receipts. Liquor, liquor, liquor. Appliances Connection. Maimonides Medical Center Parking. He wondered if Ray had been ill. He didn’t look himself last night. Then again, Marshall hadn’t seen him for probably a decade. Thin and frazzled might’ve been the new normal.
He checked the door pockets, leaned across to check beneath the passenger seat. A Snickers wrapper and an empty bottle of Southern Comfort. When he sat back upright, Hannah Vialoux was standing at his window.
When he was a cop, he used to marvel at these guys who didn’t recognize the stupidity of a given action until after the fact. Even then, a lot of the time they weren’t putting it together. And now here he was.
They looked at each other for a moment. Then Marshall cracked his door. He didn’t know what to say, so he went with, ‘Good morning.’
Hannah said, ‘I have a key, you know.’
‘Sorry. I wanted to look for something, I thought I could just be in and out without disturbing you.’
‘Something.’
He didn’t answer.
She said, ‘Come inside. Make sure you lock it after you.’
The entry hall smelled like toast and coffee. She went into the kitchen, but Marshall stayed by the door, unsure of himself, feeling like an idiot.
She said, ‘You’re lucky I saw you actually get in, and didn’t just glimpse you in the car. I might’ve had a heart attack. Or did you factor that into your risk assessment?’
He didn’t have anything for that straightaway. She emerged from the kitchen with a pot of coffee in one hand and two empty mugs in the other, eyebrows raised as if in mild curiosity. The overall effect was to reiterate his blunder, feigned breeziness drilling the message right to his bone marrow. He checked the time. Seven forty-two. Not a brilliant start to the day.
She nodded past his shoulder. ‘We’ll go in the living room.’
He moved in ahead of her and sat down on a sofa, making an effort not to go straight to the window. It had a pull for some reason: the place she’d seen the gunman.
This had been Ray Vialoux’s living room, but it didn’t feel like it, somehow – even if the photographs in the glass case and on the mantelpiece were of him, his family. Too soft, too intimate, too personal. Mismatched furniture in mismatched colors – heirloom pieces, Marshall thought, retained out of filial duty. An old tea wagon with a pink china tea set, a dark landscape painting, visibly textured with oil, a heavy faux-gilt frame. A busy feature wall of photographs: Ray and Hannah and Ella through the years. He tried to picture Ray in here, maybe in that armchair in the corner: a skewed window-shape of sunshine on the floor, Ray with the Times, up and open. He couldn’t make it fit. He thought about the Hannah Vialoux he knew in 2010, and he couldn’t make that fit, either. A woman who’d told him her marriage had run its course shouldn’t have a living room like this, a shrine to the happy life. He thought maybe it was all a prop. A diorama for how things should be.
Hannah put everything down on a low table in front of him, poured herself a mug of coffee. ‘Help yourself.’
She took a chair opposite, the table between them, and mirrored his pose: leaning forward, elbows to knees. He had the sense that every pause, every silence had this special quality to it, energized somehow. The charge of common history. The question was whether to acknowledge it or not.
The burner phone in his pocket buzzed. That would be Harry Rush, calling him back. Marshall ignored it. He said, ‘Look, I know that was dumb. I thought you might be still asleep, and I didn’t want to wake you for the sake of a theory that was wrong anyway.’
She gave a small shake of the head, kept her eyes on him. ‘I didn’t sleep.’
A patter of feet on the stairs, descending. Hannah said, ‘Ella, I’m just in here. Marshall’s back.’
He poured himself some coffee, parsed the line carefully, those last two words: Marshall’s back. Good thing, or bad thing?
He said, ‘I kept thinking about the timing last night. They were here, waving at you through the window, and then they were at the restaurant. So somehow they knew where Ray would be if he wasn’t home. I told Nevins they might’ve been tipped off, or been watching him long enough to establish some kind of routine, if he’d been going there regularly. But then I realized there was an easier option. They could’ve been tracking your cars.’
He sipped some coffee, not wanting to drown her in dark maybes, but she was sitting quietly, waiting for the rest of it.
Marshall said, ‘He took your car to the restaurant. Assuming they were tracking the vehicles, it made sense that they came here first. And then it would just be a case of, if it’s not this car, it’s the other one.’
His phone was buzzing again.
Hannah said, ‘I’ll give you a minute.’
‘No, don’t worry.’
But she was already walking out.
Marshall answered the phone.
Harry Rush said, ‘I got your message. Police have been calling me, too. I’m going in this afternoon to make a statement.’
‘I’m with Hannah right now.’
‘She doing OK?’
‘I don’t know. You checked out those names for me?’
‘Not yet. I wrote them down, though. D’Anton Lewis and Frank Cifaretti.’
‘I guess that’s a start.’
‘You think they hit him?’
‘I don’t know. I’m trying to square up the basics before I talk to them.’
‘Right. Did you have a package delivered? From eBay?’
‘Maybe. What is it?’
Quieter now, Harry talking offline: ‘Marlene, what was that package that came?’
A pause, and then Harry came back, full volume. ‘A jigsaw puzzle of a Jackson Pollock painting.’
Marshall said, ‘Is it Autumn Rhythm? Otherwise it’s not mine.’
Harry said, ‘You know, maybe you could get stuff sent to your own place? Or, no, tell you what: I’m going to open it, take out a random piece – just one. Call it a handling fee.’
‘I’ll drop by later.’
Harry hung up.
Marshall sat listening to voices through the wall, muffled but tense, a staccato rhythm, back-and-forth. Footsteps in the entry hall, and Hannah’s voice said, ‘Just keep in mind that I’m not the problem.’
Then she was back in the living room. She sat down across from Marshall again and said, ‘I had the same theory. That they were tracking the cars, I mean.’
She placed a small black rectangular object on the coffee table. Two inches to a side, maybe half an inch deep. Slender LED windows labeled GPS and POWER. An on-off button and another labeled SOS.
She said, ‘You’re the expert, but that to me looks like a tracking device. Don’t you think?’