'I really wish that fruitcake Valley hadn't killed himself,' Garth said seriously. 'After he told us where to find Vicky Brown, I'd have liked to ask him to be a bit more specific about when the world was going to end, and just what he thought was going to happen when it did.'
7
Malachy McCloskey seemed oddly subdued and distracted when Garth and I went in the next morning to make our formal statements concerning the suicide of Dr. Craig Valley; I had the feeling that the few days he had left before retirement were weighing heavily on him, and that we made him decidedly nervous. Despite the fact that the police detective apparently believed our story, the process was still maddeningly time-consuming, and it was past eleven by the time we got out of the precinct station. Garth headed for the 42nd Street library, while I hailed a cab.
Pier 42, on the Lower East Side, was the last maritime shipping facility left in New York City, and it was used primarily for the importation of bananas. But bananas came from the tropics, and I considered it a good possibility that one of the container ships might have been persuaded to bring in some soil along with its bananas.
I visited five offices and warehouses, talked with secretaries, warehouse foremen, and longshoremen. Not a few people thought I was joking when I asked if they knew anything about a load of a hundred tons of dirt. Then I told them why I wanted the information and quickly got their cooperation. What I didn't get was any useful information.
It was four o'clock by the time I finished working the area around Pier 42, and I realized with a growing sense of frustration that by the time I went back for my car and then made it through the rush hour crush of traffic in the Holland Tunnel, all of the shipping offices in Jersey City and Hoboken, across the river, would be closed.
I hailed a cab, went to the library to help Garth.
My brother was not encouraging; just in Manhattan, there were close to a hundred companies that supplied glass or plastic.
The next morning, the day before Christmas, I was up bright and early, driving Beloved-a modified Volkswagen Rabbit-down the East Side and through the Holland Tunnel to New Jersey, where most of the shipping companies had fled over the years to lower taxes and modernized container-shipping facilities.
I started in Jersey City, visiting companies in alphabetical order. At my first stop I found that a Christmas party, complete with jug wine, cookies, and a huge grab bag, was already in progress, although it was only nine thirty in the morning. I decided that did not bode well.
It didn't. Everywhere I went, Christmas parties were in progress, sometimes covertly, and more than one person I talked to had glassy eyes and liquor breath. Christmas music was everywhere, on the streets and in the offices; people were smiling, eager to cooperate.
Nobody knew anything about any shipment of Amazon rain forest soil.
By noon, I had covered less than half the companies on my list, and I still had Hoboken to visit. I tried to keep my frustration and anger tamped down, because I knew these emotions would only drain me of energy, but it was difficult; the good cheer that was evident everywhere only underlined the fact that somewhere-perhaps only a short distance away-there was a little girl who was not going to get any puppy for Christmas, only rending physical and psychological pain. To make matters worse, Christmas this year fell on a Friday, which meant that it would be three full days before Garth and I would be able to resume our search through corporate America.
After yet another fruitless visit, I put on my parka and trudged out of the shipping company office into a raw, gray afternoon that perfectly matched my mood. There was a cold drizzle that I was certain would soon change to snow, making my trip back into Manhattan even more slow and miserable. I was suddenly very tired, and depressed; my instincts told me that the rest of the day was going to be equally unproductive. I thought I might be coming down with a cold. I wanted to get back into Manhattan well before the heavy traffic started, but I knew I couldn't; I had to keep slogging along until I ran out of offices or they closed, because there was always the possibility that the very next one I went into might be the one that had shipped the dirt. If I quit early, I thought, Garth would have the right to punch me in the nose.
And I had another reason for wanting to stay on the job right up until the time I had to leave to meet Garth for dinner; I thought I just might have picked up a tail, and I wanted to be sure; if someone was following me, I wanted to make certain I didn't lose him.
The man I thought might be following me wore a tan parka with a fur-lined hood hiding his features, brown corduroy slacks which were tucked into the tops of old-fashioned rubber galoshes. The parka was bulky, but I gauged him to be of medium build, about five feet nine or ten. He had a kind of spring in his step and upright posture that somehow reminded me of how certain athletes move. Three times I had caught a glimpse of him as I had emerged from different shipping offices. There was always the possibility that he was a salesman of sorts making similar rounds, but he carried no briefcase or notebook. If he was a tail, and I was almost certain he was, he was the lousiest one I'd ever come across.
Just to test the waters, I casually walked three quarters of the way around the block, then abruptly headed down toward the river. I stood for a few minutes in a snow-covered meadow in a deserted park, watching legions of gulls hitching a free ride on the ice floes in the Hudson. Out in the harbor, the Statue of Liberty was just barely visible in the misty gray air. I walked out of the park, turned left, then right, then stopped to pretend that I was looking in a store window while I studied the reflections in the glass.
Lo and behold, my man with the springy step dressed in a tan parka floated through the sheen of the glass; he was on the opposite side of the street.
It was the best thing that had happened to me all day, and I loved it. Why anyone would want to waste his time following me while I wasted my time was beyond me, but I wasn't going to question providence.
As I turned away from the store window and walked at a decidedly moderate pace back toward Beloved, I noticed something else that was making a return appearance-a long, black limousine parked on my side of the street about a block and a half away. The limousine was out of place in the neighborhood, and I decided that my tail was being chauffeured about in style.
It was definitely amateur hour, I thought. Peter Patton, undoubtedly under orders from Henry Blaisdel, wanted to keep an eye on me. Apparently not willing to bring in professional help from the outside, Patton was using a company car and, no doubt, company personnel to do it. It was, of course, absurd to use a stretch limo to tail somebody, but Patton obviously didn't realize that. Or he didn't care; the stretch limo and obvious tail could be an attempt at intimidation, or even a show of contempt.
Outstanding.
If my man had wheels, it seemed to mean that he was under orders to keep following me wherever I went, as long as it looked like I was taking care of business. If I was getting too old to break Garth's nose, it probably meant I was getting too old for heroics-especially when there was so much to lose if I made a mistake. I certainly didn't want to come out on the losing side of a confrontation, and my tail's chauffeured limousine meant that I should have time for consultation with my burly backup troops. I made a mental note of the license plate of the limousine, then continued walking at a leisurely pace to where I'd parked Beloved.
Reasoning that maneuvering a stretch limo through rush hour traffic was no easy task, I took care to keep Beloved in the right-hand lane as I went back through the Holland Tunnel into Manhattan and headed uptown. The black limousine dutifully followed, keeping no more than three or four car lengths behind. I was beginning to feel insulted; I couldn't decide whether the driver thought I was blind, very stupid-or if he just didn't care if I knew he was behind me. I suspected it was the latter.
I'd left Jersey City not a moment too soon, because it was five minutes to seven by the time I'd negotiated my way back up to West Fifty-sixth Street. Normally, I'd have driven Beloved right into the brownstone's underground parking garage, since Rick's Steak House, where I was to meet Garth for our Christmas Eve dinner, was only a block away. However, I was afraid that the driver of the limousine, whose intelligence
I was seriously beginning to question, might think that I was bedding down for the night and drive away with the man in the tan parka; after leading them as far as I had, I couldn't risk that. It is well-nigh impossible to find a legal parking place on the streets in midtown Manhattan at any time, and it was hopeless on Christmas Eve.
