He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything. Except that he was lucky to be alive.
Shaken, he opted for a cab ride home.
Mitch hadn’t been to his apartment in over two weeks. It was stuffy and smelled musty. He turned on the air conditioners in the living room and bedroom. Checked his phone messages. Sorted through his mail. Thought long and hard about calling the police to tell them what had happened. Decided not to. Thought about calling Lieutenant Mitry to tell her what had happened. Decided not to do that either. He opened the fridge and threw out whatever had gone to blue in his absence, which was most everything. Made himself some scrambled eggs and stale toast. Sat at the dining table and ate, realizing to his surprise that this apartment didn’t feel like home anymore. His little cottage out on Big Sister felt more like home. Mitch had not expected this to happen. Most of his world was here, after all. His books, his tapes, his memories. Then again, he reflected, this had been their home. The carriage house was his. Maybe that explained it. Still, for Mitch this was a disconcerting feeling. He had never known a time in his entire life when he didn’t consider the city to be home.
Sitting there, he wondered how Clemmie was doing.
His afternoon screening was in the 666 Fifth Avenue building, near Rockefeller Center and St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Mitch forced himself to take the subway there, even though he didn’t much feel like it. He stood well away from the tracks while he was waiting for the train to come. And he kept glancing around the platform to see if anyone was showing too much interest in him. Or furtively looking away. No one was. No one did. He was not being followed. Or at least he didn’t think he was.
But he still felt exceedingly jumpy.
He also felt as if he were the only person on Fifth Avenue who had any actual business to conduct there. This was a phenomenon Mitch was still having trouble accepting. Fifth Avenue had undergone a remarkable transformation in the past few years. He almost never came upon businessmen with briefcases anymore. He came upon very few New Yorkers, period. Just tourists, the majority of them foreign, wearing cameras and sensible shoes. The shops along the avenue reflected this. The fine B. Dalton’s bookstore in the ground floor at 666 was now a store devoted to the sale of NBA merchandise. And the fabled Scribner’s bookstore across the street was now a Benetton.
The screening room was up on the ninth floor. It was small-two dozen plush seats for two dozen plush critics. Mitch knew all of the people who were slouched there, pale and round-shouldered. They were his compadres from New York’s other daily papers, from the local TV stations, from Time and Newsweek, from the network news and entertainment outlets. They were his fellow fungi, that rare breed of folks whose passion for the movies actually equaled his own. All of them had an opinion about Mitch. Some of them looked up to him. Some of them envied him. A few of the older, second-tier reviewers downright hated him for having attained so lofty a berth at such a tender age. It had taken Mitch a while to get used to this, but he had. He exchanged cordial greetings with one and all. Caught up on the latest news-what was hot, what was not. And then the lights dimmed and Mitch took a seat by himself with his press kit, feeling that same stirring of excited anticipation he always felt when he was about to see a brand-new film for the very first time.
This one, its studio’s major $160 million Fourth of July weekend release, was all about evil aliens inhabiting the body of the president and first lady. Fortunately for mankind, first daughter Heather noticed the difference. And knew how to operate a ray gun. It was painfully awful, Mitch felt. He was not alone in this. Several very distinguished New York film critics started talking back to the screen. One even stormed out in the middle. Mitch would never do either of those things. Movies were his religion. Every film, no matter how awful, was sacred. And every theater was a temple.
But he did find himself drifting away, his thoughts straying toward how contrived and false Hollywood’s big- budget thrills seemed compared to what real life had had to offer him lately. How devoid of genuine personal consequences such films were. How mindless and predictable and safe. Real life? Real life was not predictable and it was not safe. And there were no stunt doubles or feel-good Spielbergian moments to soften its blows. Real life was Maisie rotting away before his eyes. Real life was the sound of that shovel colliding with Niles Seymour’s leg.
Real life was that someone had just tried to kill him. But who? And why? Did he know something? What, damn it?
After it was over, Mitch headed back downstairs, momentarily disoriented by the late-day sunlight and the bustling cab traffic that greeted him out there on the avenue. Blinking and yawning, he trudged his way westward to his second screening, this one in an editing lab in a Times Square office building. All in a day’s work.
Mitch hated what had happened to Times Square. His Times Square was the spiritual cradle of the Jim Brown double bill, the Sonny Chiba triple bill and the peep show that never quit. It was garish, grotesque and glorious, an aging streetwalker with smeared lipstick and runs in her stockings. Mitch had always adored it. It was real. It was vulgar. It was New York.
The new Times Square was clean, safe and bogus-a processed cheese food theme park. Disney started the transformation when it cleaned up the New Amsterdam Theater so tourists would come see The Lion King roar on Broadway. And then pause afterward to shop at the smiling, happy Disney store, a giant shopping mall emporium festooned with billboards hawking the studio’s latest fun-filled family classics. Seemingly overnight, the genuine Times Square had been morphed into a Disneyfied version of Times Square-a soulless, fresh-scrubbed, crime-free urban tourist zone. All that was missing, Mitch felt, was a hologram of Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munchin dancing down Eighth Avenue in their sailor suits.
His second screening was the new Bruce Willis, which he found to be very much like the old Bruce Willis. If pressed, he could have written his entire review in five choice words: More broken glass, less hair.
Afterward, he met Lacy at Virgil’s, a boisterous two-story barbecue emporium on West Forty-fifth. Lacy came loaded with some choice office gossip-one of the paper’s editorial page columnists was sleeping with one of its Washington correspondents-and neither her husband, who was the managing editor, nor his wife, who worked for CNN, knew about it.
“If that’s the case, then how do you know about it?”
“Because I’m the one who used to be sleeping with him,” Lacy shot back, washing down a huge mouthful of pulled pork with a gulp of Dos Equis. Mitch’s editor was needle-thin, yet she ate and drank like a longshoreman. She could also chow down on barbecue while wearing white linen and not get a single drop of sauce on herself. He didn’t know how she did it. Any of it. “But enough about newsroom yakahoola,” she said. “I am way more anxious to hear about you, young sir. Tell me what it’s like to be mixed up in a true life murder.”
“It’s revealing,” he answered, chewing thoughtfully. “Fear has a way of bringing out the things that people ordinarily do their damnedest to hide about themselves. Human nature, I guess. We drop our guard. Say things to other people-people such as me-that we wouldn’t ordinarily say.”
“Such as…?” Lacy asked eagerly.
“What I’m discovering is that you’ve got this privileged, sheltered little enclave-let’s call it old money’s last bastion, because that’s literally what it is. And on the surface it’s all so beautiful and carefree and perfect. But, underneath, these people are just incredibly unhappy, messed up and obsessed with keeping up appearances.” He paused to sip his beer. “Dolly’s husband, Niles Seymour, didn’t belong there. They didn’t approve of him. He wasn’t one of them. And so one of them took him out. All three murders, I’d swear, spring from that single fact. And a single pathological fear.”
“Of what?”
“The outside world,” Mitch replied. “That’s what this is all about, Lacy. It’s not about some evil Freddie Kreuger lurking in their midst, sadistically picking off his victims one by one. It’s about the future. It’s about change.”
“You’ve changed,” Lacy observed, studying him carefully. “What’s her name?”
Mitch frowned at her. “Whose name?”
“The woman you’ve met.”
“I haven’t met anyone.”
“Oh, yes, you have.”
“Lacy, I haven’t met anyone.”
“Trust me, I know about these things,” Lacy assured him. “Other people’s love lives happens to be the only subject I’m truly an expert on. In every other way, I am a complete fraud, as you and I both know.” She delicately dabbed barbecue sauce from her mouth with her napkin and reached for her alligator handbag. “I’m very happy for
