The ship arrived at Poughkeepsie a little before eleven, and would stay at the dock for ten minutes. Now Greg was sorry he hadn’t taken the train up to Albany; if he had, he could get off now, because he had just about everything he needed for his story, except the name of the girl in the wheelchair and the identity of the VIP, which would take no time at all. But he’d driven up this afternoon, so his car was up there, so he had to do the round-trip. But that was okay, there could still be more to learn.
A little after eleven, the ship steamed out away from Poughkeepsie, made a long curving arc out to the middle of the river, then slowly pivoted on its own axis there, while the customers who could tear themselves away from the gaming tables crowded along the rails to stare, until the prow was finally pointed upstream, white foam now giving it an Edwardian collar as the ship’s engines deepened their hum and they started up against the current.
Well, he might as well get his two “who” questions answered, so as the lights of Poughkeepsie faded in the night darkness behind them Greg went looking for the girl in the wheelchair and his VIP.
He found the VIP first, in the casino, with his bodyguards and Susan Cahill, glowering in disapproval at the roulette wheels. The floor manager, a neat young guy in the royal blue and gold uniform of the ship, stood at parade rest just inside the casino door, and Greg approached him, saying, “Excuse me. That must be somebody important, I guess.”
“Hethinks so,” the floor manager said. He had some sort of southern accent.
Greg laughed. “Who does he think he is?”
“New York State assemblyman,” the floor manager said. “Not that big a deal, Iwouldn’t think. Name’s Kotkind, he’s from Brooklyn.”
Greg blinked, and stared at the VIP and his entourage across the way. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” the floor manager said, and took a business card out of his shirt pocket. “Gave me his card, you see? Handing them out to anybody in the crew he talks to. I told him I don’t vote in his district, and he said that’s okay, when he runs for statewide office I can vote for him then. Pretty pleased with himself, huh?”
Greg looked at the card, and it was Assemblyman Morton Kotkind’s card, sure enough; he’d seen it before. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “Thanks.” And he left there, to try to think this out. What the heck was going on here?
Coming out of the casino, he was just in time to see the nearby elevator door close, with the girl in the wheelchair and her chauffeur companion inside. Going up. He’s the one I’ll talk to, Greg thought. He felt confused, and didn’t want to blow his cover or make a stupid mistake, so he felt he needed somebody to discuss the thing with, and that chauffeur had struck him right away as a competent no-nonsense kind of guy.
Up the stairs he went, and saw the chauffeur just pushing the wheelchair out onto the glass-enclosed promenade. Greg followed, and found very few people up here now, there being so little to see at night, except the few lights of little river towns. The chauffeur pushed the wheelchair slowly along, in no hurry, apparently just to keep in motion. Greg hurried to catch up.
6
Mike Carlow was glad this was the last night. He’d been pushing this damn wheelchair around for over a week, carrying Noelle’s slops into the men’s room, doing his strong silent (but caring) number, and he was bored with it.
Also, just pushing the wheelchair got to be a drag. But he’d learned early the first night out that he had to keep the wheelchair moving. Stop somewhere, and the sympathetic people started hovering around, asking questions, being pains in the ass. Noelle could pitch a faint every once in a while to make them lay off, but that was work, too. It was simpler to just keep moving.
Of course, even then you still got the pushy ones, of all types, old and young, male and female. Of them, Carlow thought he probably disliked the young males the worst, the ones who came on all sympathetic and concerned but you could see in their eyes that what they really wanted was to fuck Noelle’s brains out.
Not that Carlow wanted Noelle for himself. He was meeting her for the first time on this job, he liked her, he thought she was stand-up and could be counted on, but she wasn’t the kind of woman who appealed to him in that other way. For that, he liked a heftier woman, someone out of his own world, the kind you’d meet in the auto race circuit, who could change a tire and whose favorite food was pancakes.
For Mike Carlow, everything related back to the track and the fast cars. He’d driven his first race when he was fourteen, won for the first time when he was sixteen, and had never much cared about anything else. For instance, he’d figured it out early that the amount of gasoline in the gas tank affected the car’s center of gravity, constantly shifting the center of gravity as the fuel was used up, so while still in high school he’d designed a car that wouldn’t have that problem because there wasn’t any gas tank; the car was built around a frame of hollow aluminum tubing, and the tubing held the gas. When someone told him it was crazy to want to drive a car where he’d be completely surrounded by gasoline, he’d said, “So what?” He still couldn’t see what was wrong with the idea, and didn’t understand why no official at any track in America would permit such a design into a race.
Still, there were other cars and other designs that they wouldaccept, so Carlow was reasonably happy. Every year or so he took a job like this one, to raise the money to build more race cars, and every year, one way or another, he survived both his obsession with race cars and the heists he went on to support that obsession.
“Excuse me.”
Carlow looked around and it was one of the young studs, in fact one that had hit on them earlier in the evening until Noelle had gone all faint on him. Not wanting to have to deal with the same guy twice in one outing, and also feeling some of the impatience that comes when you know the job is almost finished, and feeling illused because he’d come up here to the promenade because it wasn’tfull of annoying people after dark, Carlow gave him a pretty icy look and said, “Yes?”
“Do you mind?” The guy was young and eager like before, but now he also seemed troubled. “I need to talk to somebody,” he said, “and I was going to come see you two, anyway. I’m just not sure what to do.”
The promenade had benches along the inner wall, but the rest was clear. Down ahead toward the stern, a few people strolled along, moving away. Back toward the prow, an exhausted older couple sat on a bench barely awake. Carlow took all this in because he had a sense for this kind of problem when he was on a job, a sense that told him when there was a rip in the fabric, and he just had the feeling there was a rip in the fabric coming right now. The question was, what had gone wrong, and what could they do about it? “Sure,” he said. “Why don’t you sit on the bench here so Jane Ann can be part of the conversation.”
