Die For You

Jesamyn came to stand beside him. “Wow,” she said, looking around the wreckage. “Someone’s angry.”

He gazed at Isabel’s smashed image. “Very,” he said. “Very angry.”

“So how’d they get in?”

They looked at each other.

“One of the doormen,” said Breslow, answering her own question, as they moved quickly from the apartment. Grady paused to lock the door behind him as Jez moved down the hall to call the elevator.

“The six P.M. to six A.M. guy hadn’t shown up yet when we arrived,” said Crowe as the doors shut and the elevator moved down the shaft. “That polish in the bathroom was still wet. They were here during Shane’s shift.”

“Twelve-hour shifts?” mused Breslow. “Is that legal?”

“I don’t know,” said Crowe. “I guess that’s the job. You do it or you don’t.”

“Who signs on for twelve hours of catering to rich people, letting in their maids, accepting packages, dry cleaning?”

“The doorman gig; it’s like a thing, you know. An identity. A history of service.”

“Service to the rich? No thanks.”

Crowe didn’t think their job was that different. Protect and serve. Not just the rich, no, but the rich always wound up getting the best service-the fastest response time, the most respect-didn’t they? Even from the cops. If your brother plays golf with the senator, then people care when your daughter gets raped or your wife mugged. In the projects, girls are raped, people robbed every day. It doesn’t make the news. Sometimes the uniforms don’t even show. When they do, their disdain, their apathy is apparent. Not always, but often enough. He worked the South Bronx for years; he knew how those guys felt about the perps, and the vics, too. Attitudes were very different in Midtown North, where the rich lived and worked.

Charlie Shane was gone when they arrived back in the lobby. His replacement was a skinny, disshelved-looking guy with a five o’clock shadow and an untended shrub of dirty-blond hair.

Crowe pulled out his notebook and flipped through a couple of pages to find the guy’s name. He wrote down everything in his notebook-details, thoughts, observations, questions. He figured it would come in handy one day when he wrote his novel. Until then it kept him sharp; writing down what people told him helped his recall. What he couldn’t recall was always there.

“Timothy Teaford?” he said as they approached.

“Yeah,” he said. He seemed even younger up close, and sleepier. Crowe noticed a tattoo snaking out of his cuff, looked like one of those tribal bands that were so popular these days. Crowe identified himself, explained the situation as Breslow made some more calls.

“That’s messed up,” Teaford said. “They’re nice people. Good tippers.”

“Late for work today?”

“I’ve been sick,” he said. “Missed my shift last night. Flu.”

Crowe felt Breslow shifting backward slightly. She was totally germphobic. “You don’t have kids,” she’d said when he first teased her about this. “Benjy gets a cold? That can trash two weeks-sleepless nights, ear infection if it doesn’t go away, trips to the doctor. A flu? Forget about it.”

“Can anyone confirm you were home last night?”

He shrugged. “My girlfriend brought me Taco Bell and we watched a movie. She spent the night.”

“So who covered your shift here?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I called in. I don’t know who he got to cover.”

“Who’s ‘he’?”

“Charlie Shane. He’s the supervisor.”

Grady looked back through his notes. Shane didn’t mention Teaford missing his shift, only that he’d been late this evening.

“Where is he now? Still in the building?”

“Actually, the weird thing is, he wasn’t here when I showed up. No one was. The door was locked and the desk was empty. One of the residents had to let me in.”

“Unusual behavior for him?”

“Uh, yeah,” said Teaford. “I swear that guy would put a cot in the office and live here if they’d let him.” He issued the sentence not with mockery but with a kind of youthful wonder, as if job dedication was something he just didn’t understand, something from another era, like dinosaurs. “Honestly, I can’t imagine him leaving the desk until someone showed up.”

“Did he leave a note?” Breslow asked. She’d ended her call with Dispatch and was poised to dial again.

Teaford shook his head. He really was a mess-his uniform wrinkled, some kind of old washed-in stain on his collar. Crowe could see a little yellow crust in his eye. But there was something sweet about him, something innocent and appealing.

“You got a way to reach him?” Crowe asked.

Teaford leaned down, squinted, and read a number that Crowe could see was taped on the desk. Jez dialed and waited. “Voice mail,” she said after a minute.

“Mr. Shane, this is NYPD Detective Jesamyn Breslow. You need to call us or return to the building immediately.” She left her number.

“All the time I been here, I never got voice mail on that number. He always answers,” Teaford said with a concerned frown. “You think he’s okay?”

Crowe wasn’t as worried about Shane’s well-being as he was about not having had an instinct about the guy, about one of them not staying down here while the other went up. Not that it would have been smart, or even protocol, for one of them to enter the apartment alone, especially considering what they found.

“I called for uniformed officers to go wait at Shane’s apartment in the unlikely event that he just went home,” said Jez. She was all action, no dwelling on mistakes or wasting time second-guessing. She just worked in the present tense. He’d read somewhere that this quality, the ability to operate in the framework of how things are, not how you wish they were or think they should be, was the factor that separated those who survived extreme circumstances from those who didn’t. He might have brooded for ten more minutes before doing what she’d already done.

She was at the elevator, clicking her pen vigorously on the palm of her hand, a very annoying nervous habit she had, as he finished getting Teaford’s girlfriend’s name, address, and phone number and telling him to stay put. Teaford looked scared when Crowe glanced back at him, but he didn’t look guilty, not to Crowe. But what did he know? He’d already made one mistake in judgment; it wasn’t so far-fetched that he’d make another.

“Stop fuming, Crowe,” Jez told him. “We couldn’t have known.” She’d stepped into the elevator and was holding the door.

“It’s our job to know.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. It’s our job to find out”

He looked back at the doorman, who was now talking on his cell phone. “I’ll wait down here until the uniforms arrive.”

“Suit yourself.” She released the doors.

“Don’t touch anything until the techs get here,” he said. He saw her roll her eyes as the doors shut.

A minute later, he heard the approach of cruisers-this wasn’t an emergency call, but cops liked to turn on lights and sirens to get around fast, to have some fun in an otherwise slow precinct. He remembered the adrenaline rush of the car speeding through the city streets, especially at night. It was the coolest feeling in the world, as if everything else gave way while you raced into the fray. Sometimes they’d turn down their radios so they couldn’t hear when a chase had been called off, when they’d been ordered to let the perp-car thief, armed robber, whatever kind of scumbag-get away instead of risk civilian lives on the street with a car chase. They wanted to catch the skell they were pursuing; the adrenaline and testosterone racing through their systems demanded release, satisfaction. This was why so many car chases ended with the perp getting the crap kicked out of him. This was why the chases got called off.

His father frowned on this type of behavior. “The heroes are the guys that come home every night to their families,” he used to say, “who protect themselves and their partners so that they can live to be the men their wives and children need.”