jigsaw puzzle.
And then this old, terrible elevator brought you to the very bottom. I’d come here once before, on a case for Leo—a runaway had made her home here, had found shelter here in the middle of one of the worst blizzards New York had ever seen, and then had died here with a filthy needle stuck in her arm, her skin a cyanotic blue. Her parents had paid us the better part of their savings to find her and had spent the rest to have her brought home and buried. I’d never felt worse about taking someone’s money.
The door to the room in which Julia Cortenay had died was labeled “Trash Room,” but the room behind it was actually empty and unused, a left-behind remnant of a scientific experiment some NYU professors had long ago paid the city to house there. They’d needed a safe, quiet place to set up a delicate instrument designed to detect cosmic rays, which apparently could penetrate the 180 feet of solid rock overhead while other forms of radiation could not. They’d set up their machine and watched it for years and then at some point they’d taken it away, wiser or not I couldn’t tell you. But the room was still there and Julia Cortenay had found it, and I needed a place to hide, and I found it now.
It wasn’t empty today. There was a wizened heap of skin and clothes in one dark corner, sucking down swallows from a bottle half hidden in the folds of a brown paper bag. He looked up at me, briefly, and then down again. I wasn’t a cop; I wasn’t, apparently, a threat; I didn’t matter. The air in the room held the rank smell of sweat and piss, and when I pulled the door shut behind me there was almost no light, just a single bulb glowing feebly overhead.
In the station near Stu’s home, I’d made two purchases: a cheap digital watch with a plastic band and, with the last of my quarters, another copy of the
They train them, I think, in the newsroom, the way they train Rottweilers to attack, by giving them raw meat to sniff so that if they ever get the scent again later in life they start salivating. And my case gave them plenty to drool over. There was the sex angle—Ramos had been found in my bed, after all; fully clothed, it’s true, but that didn’t stop them from speculating. There was my history of arrests—only two, but that was two more than most of their readers had. And then there was my mysterious escape from the apartment just moments before the police arrived. I was a
What leads, I wondered. And on the jump page I found out. They’d found the button that had come off my shirt, had found Ramos’ blood on it; and in a dumpster several blocks away—god damn it—they’d found the shirt, with more blood, and the wallet, with more blood still.
I balled up the paper and threw in the corner. I was well and truly screwed, I knew that now. What the hell had I been thinking? It was all the fault of movies, and books. Men survive on the run for years in books, your Jean Valjeans, your Fugitives. Harrison Ford makes it look so easy. It never smelled like this in the movies. No one wound up cowering under 180 feet of rock and thinking maybe it’d be just as well never to come up again.
I looked at the watch, pressing one of the buttons on its side to faintly illuminate its face. Hours to go. Hours till it was as dark outside as it was down here, till I could make my way under cover of night to the Cop Cot and to Susan.
And then what?
I didn’t know. I couldn’t think that far ahead.
I slept in snatches, waking once to find the other man tugging gently on one of my shoes. I shook my foot but he didn’t let go—he’d committed to his bit of larceny and by god he was going to follow through. I felt bad kicking him and did it as gently as I could. He tipped backwards and crawled back to his corner, defeated.
Hours later, demonstrating a more congenial bit of cellmate spirit, he came near again and offered me a hit off his bottle. I declined. This seemed to make him madder than the kick had.
He didn’t bother me again. Or if he did, it was while I was asleep and I’d just as soon not know.
The watch’s alarm chimed at eight. I rode the elevator back up and the nearly empty train downtown. I’d taken the crumpled newspaper with me and I held it in front of me in my seat, the front few pages folded back so an underwear ad was showing on one side and Page Six on the other. Gossip, movie stars, an editorial cartoon— nothing to attract attention, nothing with my name or face on it.
The train let me out on 72nd Street. To the east, Central Park loomed against the night sky, its ranks of trees penned in behind a waist-high stone wall. There were pedestrians but they had places to be and brushed past me without a glance. I kept my head down, my hands in my pockets, my shoulders high; I tried not to appear to be in a rush. Once inside the park, I cut across a patch of grass and into the shadows of the trees. I kept off the paths, stayed out of the cones of light cast by the old-fashioned metal streetlamps. At one intersection, I spotted a pair of uniformed policemen talking, one of them swinging his nightstick by its leather strap, and I did an about face that would have been the envy of any marine and quietly fled in the opposite direction.
The park is long but narrow, and even taking a circuitous path it doesn’t take you long to cross from west to east. I found myself at the foot of the hill on whose crest the Cop Cot sat with ten minutes to spare. I climbed it quickly and found it empty, thank god. I didn’t sit and wait, though—the place was too exposed, too open to view from all sides. I walked a dozen yards away to where a cluster of trees offered at least partial concealment.
One man showed up, sat briefly on one of the Cop Cot’s wooden benches, sipped from a steaming cardboard cup. He stood again when Susan arrived, exchanged a few words with her, and left. Very polite, New Yorkers. Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise.
I waited a few more minutes, but no one else appeared. Finally, when it seemed safe, I whistled softly.
Susan looked in my direction, her hand up to shield her eyes. She was wearing knitted gloves and a heavy overcoat and a scarf. The funny thing is that I didn’t feel cold until I saw how she was dressed. Then I realized I was shivering.
“Susan,” I hissed. “Over here.”
She walked in my direction, and when she was within reach, I pulled her toward me by the wrist, led her deeper into the shadows. I sank to a crouch between the roots of a huge maple and Susan took a seat beside me. She pulled a Mini Maglite out of her pocket and switched it on, aiming it down at the ground.
“Did anyone follow you?” I said.
“Of course not,” she said. “But John—listen to me. This is no good. You’ve got to turn yourself in. You’re all over the news.”
“I know.”
“Do you? In the cab over here, on the radio, the top story was how they have footage of you from two ATMs, one downtown and one I think up on 32nd Street.” She reached out, touched the side of my face. My beard was coming in again and the fabric of her glove caught on it. “You can’t keep running like this forever.”
“I don’t have to run forever. Just long enough.”
“What’s long enough?” she said.
“That depends on what you’ve found.”
She set her handbag down, opened it, dug inside. Under her cell phone, her wallet, a pack of tissues, she found a sheaf of papers secured with a paper clip. She took it out. “Well, I saw Mrs. Burke. She’s a piece of work, all right. I can’t say I’d want to be her daughter. But there’s something you’ve got to respect about her. She really loved Dorrie. In her way.”
“I’m sure.”
“She’s taking the body back with her to Philly. There’s going to be a funeral tomorrow morning at a place called—” she flipped through the papers “—Greenmount. Where her sister’s buried, if I got the name right.”
She had. I’d found it online when I’d been tracking down information for Dorrie—Greenmount Cemetery on Front Street, row after row of neatly kept graves, plenty of room for a girl who’d died at 13. Plenty for one who’d died at 24.
“She’s as convinced as you are that someone killed her daughter, though in her case it’s entirely an act of faith. I told her that, told her she was probably wasting her money. You’d have been proud of me.”
“She hired you anyway?”
“She hired us anyway.” She flipped through the papers some more. “I also reached Brian Vincent, by phone. It’s his real name and he was happy to talk to me. He’s an art director with BBD&O, which I guess is one of
