So I just hung there, my legs dangling over the swift moving current of the night tide.
But I couldn’t stay in one place. I was in a direct line with where the kid’s dead body lay. I wouldn’t be hard to find and I wanted to be hard to find.
God help me.
I began working my way, hand over hand, farther down the fence railing.
I was wishing I’d thought to blacken my fingers with dirt so they wouldn’t stand out so clearly. But I’d had a lot on my mind.
God help me.
I’d gone only about three feet when something dark appeared at the railing above my head. I looked up.
Into a face looking down at me.
I thought I was dead.
But it was the face that was dead.
Then the shoulders and the arms and the chest of a dead body. It was the kid who wanted so badly to be famous, being hoisted over the railing and pitched down into the anonymity of the East River. He made hardly any splash at all.
I just hung there for a long time, not daring to move, risking only shallow breaths. My fingers felt fragile as ice, I imagined them cracking and splintering away into tiny shards.
But I didn’t let go. I hung on.
It’s what I do.
And eventually I bucked up, started moving again, hand over hand down the railing. I took some of the weight onto my feet against the wall, while minimizing as much as I could the scuffling noises I made.
I lost track of my progress, and of time, until I finally came to an outcrop of building extending out over the river. It was a water-treatment facility. The air was perfumed with an aroma like Tide laundry detergent.
I heard shouting as I climbed up and back over the railing. A skeleton crew of workmen had spotted me and were threatening to call the cops.
I took off running.
Chapter Nineteen: NOBODY ON
I went north, slowing down to a walk when I got to the FDR Drive overpass at Stuyvesant Town. I crossed the street and entered the huge housing complex and disappeared into its winding, dimly lit paths, finally emerging again at 14th Street and Avenue B. I looked west. High above the rooflines the illuminated clock tower at Irving Place read a quarter after two.
I was tired and shaken—badly in need of a drink—but I didn’t go back to my office, not right away. There was one person I had to see first, one person who could be the key to all of this, and now I knew where she was, where she’d been all along.
If I was right, Michael Cassidy had taken the magnetic card key from me for one reason: after I’d left the hotel room, she’d returned and used the card key to get in again, and was probably still there. Only one way to find out.
So I headed back to the Bowery Plaza, on Third Avenue and St. Marks Place.
But I was too late. Parked in front of the hotel were an ambulance and a police cruiser, and just pulling up, one of the white and gold O.C.M.E. vans. Office of Chief Medical Examiner.
I kept my distance, not wanting to get involved, but needing to know what had happened. I saw a bearded young guy sitting cross-legged at the corner begging for spare change. He had a paper cup hanging by a string at the end of a short stick. He held it up to passersby as if it was a fishing pole. Up and down both arms, he had solid sleeves of tattoos, but whoever had done the work had used cheap ink. The interlocking images were hopelessly smudged, leaving his flesh muddied dark blue and purple as if with post-mortem lividity. I dug a quarter out of my pocket and dropped it in his cup.
“How they biting?” I asked.
“Not bad.” He reached into his cup and took out my quarter, and also a linty penny that was in there. He tossed the penny away on the sidewalk.
I said, “Gotta throw back the little ones.”
He grinned. One of his canines was chipped in half.
I asked, “You know what happened over there?” I pointed to the hotel with my thumb.
“Yep. Some lady killed herself in one of the rooms. Shot herself in the head. Heard one of the cops talkin’ to the ambulance guys. S’pose to be someone famous, but I ain’t never heard of her.”
“What was her name?”
“I dunno. Don’t ’member. Why?”
I shrugged. “Just curious.” Then I walked away.
Suicide? I didn’t buy that. Which left what? And who? Law Addison maybe? Finally disposing of a junkie ex- girlfriend? Or her husband, Ethan Ore, for the same reason and maybe one more: he might get a good movie out of it. But who else?
I tried to put it together in my mind. I’d seen the old guy Gower entering the hotel lobby that morning as I was leaving. He must’ve been making a delivery to Michael Cassidy. If he’d known where she was, then so had whoever had tried to kill me, and long before I’d figured it out. Ahead of me the whole time. No wonder he hadn’t hunted harder for me in the park, I was no threat to him. Not as much as the kid FL!P had been or Michael Cassidy herself. They each knew his face and now they were both dead.
The kid’s last words to me echoed in my brain.
“
I must…I must what?
Nothing came to me. And I felt like nothing ever would. My head was swimming and my soul was afraid. I walked back to my office in a daze. I hardly even noticed my favorite sight in the city, the brilliantly lit Art Deco spire of the Chrysler Building in the distance, looking so much like the kind of rocketships we once expected our fantastic future would hold. Now it might as well have been only a scale model.
Seated behind my desk again, I lit up a cigarette, and smoked. It didn’t help. But it didn’t hurt.
I opened my desk drawer and found where I’d tossed my gun. I also found the sealed envelope that contained the stuff I’d grabbed out of Owl’s pockets that morning.
Had it only been this morning? Felt like it’d all happened months ago.
I tore open the envelope and shook its contents onto my desk.
The receipt for George Rowell’s hotel dated 9/2/08. The broken plastic wristband from the wastebasket. The two sales leaflets for the men’s discount clothing store and the Persian rug wholesaler in Chelsea on West 21st. The pink pasteboard receipt for a parking garage.
Parking garage?
I looked at it like I’d never really seen it before. Maybe I hadn’t. I’d broken one of the rules—Matt would kill me—back at Metro, Matt had always tried to drum into me the golden rule:
Why in the world did Owl have a parking garage receipt in his pocket? He hadn’t driven into the city, I’d found his round-trip bus ticket from New Hampshire in his briefcase. So what the hell was this?
I looked.
And I saw.
It was one half of a parking garage claim check issued by E-Z Parking Garage at 446 East 10th Street. The same garage where Elena’s boyfriend Jeff worked.
A standard parking garage receipt, it listed alphabetically all the various makes and models of cars: Acura, Audi, BMW, Buick, Cady, Chev., Chrys., Corvet, Dodge, Ford, For’gn, Honda, Hyundai, Infiniti, Jaguar, Jeep, Lexus, Lincoln, Mazda, Mercury, M-Benz, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Olds., Peugeot, Plymouth, Pontiac, Porsche, Saab, Subaru, T-
