She got to the top, where the wall stopped, making space for a half-height divide in expensive-looking wood. She turned, looking into a space I couldn’t see, holding the gun low in her hand where it couldn’t be seen by whoever was on the top floor. She glanced down at me, gave an upward nod, and disappeared from view.
I went up the remaining steps, wondering if it wouldn’t be better to turn around, go find my car, and drive back to the house to grab anything that seemed necessary to starting a new life somewhere else.
But I didn’t want a new life.
That meant I could not run.
At the top I stuck my head cautiously up over the divide. I saw a big open space that ran the length and width of the building. A handful of couches, shabby chic, angled for discretion. A few dining tables with pert little chairs. A couple of big skylights made it light and airy. Artfully battered floorboards, paintings that were well above the usual local standard. At the back was a waitress station, to one side a discreet dumbwaiter.
The fabled upper dining room, I guess. And at the far end, three people I recognized. The Thompsons and Peter Grant—my boss.
They turned to look at me as if I were a low-echelon waiter bringing an undesired check.
Peter Grant watched me walk up. A week ago it might have seemed cool, encountering my boss in this locale. The guy who would have found it so felt like a previous incarnation of me, however, one long dead and unevolved for the present circumstances.
“Sir,” I said.
His gaze was cool and unreadable. Not unfriendly, exactly. But not friendly, either.
“I still think this is a bad idea,” he said, not to me, and then left. Nobody said anything to cover the sound of his feet going down the wooden stairs.
Meanwhile the woman I’d come with took up a position on the side of the room. Her feet were planted apart, her hands together at her waist. Her gun had gone back to where it had come from, but I didn’t think it would take her long to retrieve it should the need arise.
“What does he look like?” Tony asked me.
“Who?”
“Don’t play dumb,” Marie said. “I agree with Peter. I don’t think this conversation should be taking place. Rise to the occasion or we’ll kick you out right now.”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“What does he look like?” Tony asked again. He appeared to have ignored the entire exchange.
“Assuming you mean the guy who hauled me out of The Breakers, he’s . . . just a guy. Dark hair with touches of gray. When I saw him he was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. Early, midfifties. But I don’t know.”
“He’s fifty-three,” Tony said absently.
“You know him.”
“Yes, we did.”
“He appears to feel more warmly about you guys. He actually seemed very keen to renew your acquaintance.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He showed me a picture.”
“A picture?” Marie’s beady eyes were on me through a drifting cloud of smoke. The cigarette looked like it was held in a large bird’s claw, but I noticed for the first time just how thin the wrist supporting it was.
I nodded through the big window. “Outside the Columbia. You plus the Wilkinses and Mr. Grant. And David Warner. Looked like you were all having a high old time.”
Tony kept pushing methodically forward. “Jane says he killed Hazel Wilkins. That you saw her body.”
I glanced back at the woman at parade rest on the side of the room. She kept looking straight ahead. “She’s really called Jane?”
“I have no idea,” Tony said.
“Yeah, he killed Hazel. He admitted it, though he didn’t seem proud of it. He had the body there, in the corner. And he’d done something to David Warner, too.”
This had them both far more interested. “Done what?”
“I don’t know. The place where he took me had blood on the floor, and a broken chair. But he said Warner had escaped.”
“Did he mention anyone else? Names of the people he’s working with? Accomplices or partners?”
“He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who needed any.”
The Thompsons looked at each other.
“No,” Marie said firmly. “It can’t just be him on his own. He was a loser. Was then, will still be now. He can’t be doing all this by himself.”
She turned back to me. “Anything else? What else did he say to you?”
“Not much, but he showed me something. About his body. Someone had carved a word on it.”
“We’re done here,” Marie said, turning away.
I was aware that Jane whatever-her-name-was had started to listen more closely.
“He woke one morning with no recollection of what had happened the previous night,” I said. “The night that photograph outside the Columbia was taken. And the cops turned up at his house soon afterward and arrested him for murder.”
“Take him away,” Marie said to the other woman. Jane didn’t move. “Did you hear me?”
“I heard.”
“So—are you going to do it?”
“No. I want to hear you answer his question.”
“He didn’t ask one.”
“Yeah, he did,” Jane said. “I’ll repeat it for the hard of thinking. It went something like: ‘What the fuck?’ ”
“You’re fired,” Marie said.
“Excellent,” Jane said. The gun was back in her hand now. “That means I don’t have to be polite to your beat-up old face anymore, or do what you say, or put up with you acting the grand Southern belle the entire time. And now that I’m here on my own reconnaissance, let’s put it another way:
“Jesus,” Tony said distractedly. “Marie, we don’t need this right now.”
His wife turned her head smartly toward him, but suddenly it was Tony who seemed the stronger of the two. Marie looked old and a little frightened.
Tony moved his hand out toward hers. It didn’t reach, but something passed between them.
Marie blinked, disengaged from the argument with Jane as if it had never happened.
“Bill,” Tony said, “we’ve got a situation. You’ve gathered that. You’re a bright guy. David Warner has been a, well, not a friend of ours, but an acquaintance, over a long period of time. Now he’s disappeared, or is dead, and we’re hearing disquieting things about a cellar under his house.”
“What kind of things?” I asked, aware that—wrongly, as it turned out—this was a house I’d thought I was going to help sell.
“It’s not relevant,” Tony said. “The key matter is that we’re running a little scared.”
“Join the club,” I said.
Tony smiled thinly. “I guess you’ve hit on it there.” He breathed out, rubbed his temples. “I’m going to tell you this because I’m done with it, and because I think you’re owed. It can’t go any further. Understand?”
“Tell me what?”
“It was just a game.”
CHAPTER FORTY
“Phil and I knew each other since we were kids,” Tony said. “We were born here when it was known for fruit and Ringling and squat else. Phil went to college up in Tallahassee. I traveled, tried a bunch of different things before I went into construction. Phil became one of those management guys, always moving on, trouble-shooting a company and then jumping onto the next thing. We kept in touch and would meet up every now
