City on Fire (94 page)

“So you wouldn’t want to see this draft of his article?” The girl brandished the folder she’d been holding. “And you must have already heard about Mercer’s boyfriend.”

“Roommate,” Goodman corrected her, with a pained look.

She ignored him, setting the folder on the edge of Pulaski’s desk, almost daring him not to reach for it. “Word on the street is, your victim was running with some bad people.”

“That particular wild goose has been chased. The Post-Whosits. Tell me something I don’t know.”

“How about that the same people are now coming after Mercer’s boyfriend? Sorry. Roommate. William. He moved out in March, after a fight, and has been missing ever since.”

Now Goodman ignored the correction. “I know, it sounded nuts to me, too,” he said, “but then I saw them. Men disguised as electricians, staking out our apartment. Or one man, at least.”

“What makes you think these so-called bad men haven’t caught up to your roommate already?”

“This was just this morning. I saw them with my own eyes.”

The sheaf of pages before Pulaski seemed to tremble. A vision of underground connections flashed before him again, only inverted. A towering construction like a tree strung with lights, shimmering, changing, and in the middle, a darkness—the object or concept holding the visible together. But more likely that was the stomp of protesters in the plaza making the whole building shake. Anyway, these two sounded like druggies. What could the boyfriend, roommate, William Wilcox or whoever (his notes from the Goodman interview were in one of these boxes) possibly have to do with Samantha Cicciaro? In the street below, someone was exploring the megaphone’s repertoire of built-in noises, its whoops and low groans. “Miss Nguyen, Mr. Goodman. Maybe if you’d brought this to me before the middle of July—”

And now inside and outside began to blur, as if the cacophony were not in the street, but in the hall outside his door. “It’s not until the middle of July that someone breaks in and tries to torch my apartment! Did I mention that part? They had to be after the article, or maybe the ’zines.”

“What’s a ’zine? Look, I’m sorry you had to go through whatever it is you went through, but you’re in Homicide, folks. If you feel better leaving this with me, I’ll have someone from Burglary follow up …”

She was quicker than he was, though, and snatched the folder back. “Hell, no.”

“This is how the system works. You take a number, you get on line.”

“Seems like there are some pissed-off New Yorkers out there who are starting to doubt the system does work.” A spine of steel, this one. On another day, he might have admired it. “You can find people, can’t you?” she said. “So you’re going to help us find William. We’re going to make sure no one else gets killed.”

But he had a spine of his own, however crooked. “Would you listen to yourselves? Disguises? Out to get people? And who’s been killed? The Cicciaro girl is still alive.”

“Can’t you see it? Richard, is your answer. It’s obvious he was …” She couldn’t finish the sentence, but for a second Pulaski glimpsed under all her anger, her willfulness, the raw need to believe. And maybe could even relate. Did he have things backward himself?

“I suppose I might have a few minutes. I’ll take a quick look at his article before my next appointment, how’s that?” She loosened her grip on the folder. He sank back and opened it, trying to pretend there was no audience. The first thing to hit him was the absence of typos. He’d forgotten what a natural Richard had been, back when his column was coming out weekly. How lucid, how sure of himself. Though possibly too much so. Still, Pulaski felt vindicated, and also disappointed; for a dozen pages or more, “The Fireworkers” could have been one of his Time-Life books, rambling on about pyrotechnics, China, Marco Polo … Where were these two getting their homicidal conspiracy? And how had he nearly fallen for it, even for a second? Was that how badly he needed to escape?

A cough made him glance up. The noise had entered the building after all, for here at the door stood a uniformed officer, looking puzzled. “Sir? I’ve got these folks you asked for?” Just beyond was a man in a tailored jacket. And there to the left, looking glumly at his handcuffs, was the kid whose red hair, and whatever else, Pulaski had almost forgotten. “You want me to take them to the box?”

Pulaski closed the folder. “No, in here’s fine for both.”

The officer sat his charge down roughly in the one remaining chair. But before Pulaski could find a respectful way to tell the other two to take a hike, the boy looked up and blanched. “Hey! What the hell are you doing here?”

82

AND SUDDENLY THEY WERE ALL AROUND HIM, crowding him, like kids at school, so he couldn’t breathe, and he almost expected them to start pounding fists into palms, chanting, Fight! Fight! except he wasn’t sure who’d do the fighting. There was the lying jock in the jacket, that asshole, whom Charlie would have welcomed a crack at, even if it would only earn him a shiner, and there was the beat cop who’d driven them both here from the hospital. There was the little hermit crab of a plainclothesman. There was Billy Three-Sticks’s boyfriend and next to him the lady, looking somehow uncomfortable. Then the hermit crab found room to scuttle forward, and the leather-backed shield at his waist was right up in Charlie’s face. “What is who doing here, kid?”

Crap. It had just slipped out. Charlie’s blood was still up from the throng they’d passed through downstairs, and from trying to wriggle away in the reception area (hence the cuffs). But now it was a game of Think Fast. Explaining he meant the black guy—that would out him as a Peeping Tom. Then again, admitting he recognized the Asian lady from a picture in that apartment yesterday would expose his complicity in arson. Nope, if there was an answer that would keep him out of juvie, it was the crustacean himself, with whom he’d been eye-to-eye just last week, in the East Village. “You,” Charlie said. “I meant you.”

“It’s my office. Of course I’m going to be here.”

Before Charlie could respond to this, the man was rising to receive an object, the blade folded in its sheath. “That’s courtesy of your informant,” the beat cop told him. “Says he got it off the boy. You’ll want to take a look, sir.”

Charlie tried to appear unperturbed, but having his hands behind his back made it hard to sit up straight, forcing him into a parody of deformity. If this turned into a full-blown asthma attack, he’d really be screwed. He heard the underling clear his throat. “Uh, sir? Dispatch says for crowd control it’s all uniforms on deck downstairs. Should I ask if they can spare a couple Homicide guys?”

His superior reached some decision. “I think under the circumstances I can handle things from here.”

“Yes, sir.” And there went one of the five. So why didn’t Charlie feel 20 percent more at ease? Because the hermit crab was bending down again. His face, which had seemed merely weathered, now had gullies and canyons. “Look here, son. Do you know who I am?”

“Sure.” Charlie’s voice chose that moment to crack; it came out as puling. “You’re a pig.”

The cop’s smile never wavered. “And what does that make you?”

“Scared stiff, obviously,” the lady said, from somewhere behind him. “Why don’t you give him breathing room, for crying out loud? And are the handcuffs really necessary?”

Charlie started to protest that he’d never been less scared in his life, but to his relief the three men were drawing back, insofar as there was any space to draw back into. The office, half-packed, was no bigger than a penalty box.

“He said in the car his name was Daniel,” said the Asshole.

“No I didn’t,” Charlie lied, to spite him. “My name’s Charlie.”

“Okay, but who are you, Charlie? The name doesn’t tell us much. For example, I’m Larry Pulaski, but I’m also a Deputy Inspector with the NYPD. Meaning I’m here to solve crimes.”

“This is still America,” Charlie said. “I don’t have to tell you anything.”

The Asshole had seemed agitated before, with an eye toward the window and the protest outside, but now he gathered himself. “Speaking of which, Inspector Pulaski, you forgot to mention on the phone that you were planning to drag me all the way down here.”

“It’s a formality. I’m sure this won’t take long.” Pulaski seemed to see the man as a diversion from his prime object. But wasn’t it worth asking, just in terms of crime-solving, what had brought this Asshole to Sam’s hospital room to begin with? Charlie would have asked it himself, but he didn’t believe in ratting out even his enemies.

“It may be a formality, Inspector, but I was supposed to pick my kids up from day camp by three thirty. They’ll think something happened to me.”

“Something must have. It was past four when you rang me from the hospital.”

The man reddened, but pressed on. “I lost track of time. Is that an arrestable offense?”

“No one’s talking about arrest.”

“Good. Because you have my name, I’m clearly more than happy to talk all you want later, but right now, I’m leaving to go get my kids. The little one’s six years old.”

Charlie tried to form a thought-beam. Say no. Make him take some heat, too. But Pulaski just asked how he could be reached. The man fumbled in his suitcoat, came up with a card. While the black guy and the Asian lady looked on, Pulaski studied it. “Expect to hear from someone tomorrow. Until then, I suppose I can’t keep you.”

Unbelievable! If Charlie had a business card, would he be sent waltzing out of here with no further questions? No, because he wouldn’t be able to reach it; his fucking hands were still locked behind his back.

Pulaski tapped the card on the desk, considering. “I might as well make some introductions. Charlie, this is Miss Nguyen—”

“Can’t you at least get him some water or something?”

“—and this is Mr. Goodman, who found the girl on New Year’s Eve.”

He what? Charlie couldn’t help but jolt upright. But it was impossible to match the black guy, this weary post-teen, to the form hunched next to Sam in the snow, waiting for the cops to arrive. And when he turned back to the desk, Pulaski was braced against it, with a look like he knew everything that had happened to Charlie since. He put a hand on the folder beside him. Files on the PHP? Oddly, the thought was calming. What Nicky had been preparing all these months would be revealed to the Prophet Charlie at last. And no one would be able to blame him for anything.

“So now that you’re up to speed,” Pulaski said, “I do need to ask you some things, Charlie. Starting with Samantha Cicciaro. You knew her, didn’t you?”

Being honest couldn’t make Charlie look any worse, for once. “She was my best friend.”

And did he know who shot her? Pulaski asked.

This was probably supposed to make him feel panicky again. Still, the answer was no.

“All right, changing gears then. Take a good look at these two.” Was he sure he’d never seen Miss Nguyen or Mr. Goodman before? “And does the name Richard Groskoph mean anything to you?”

The black guy spoke up: “Are we ever going to get back to William?”

But these were the wrong questions! Nothing about Liberty Heights, nothing about two sevens clashing or PostHumanism or the little house out back. Inspector Pulaski, so powerful five minutes ago, didn’t even seem to be on the right case! “Look, like I told your guy, I was just visiting my friend at the hospital, and that’s all I have to say. If you’re going to keep me, I hear it has to be for something. So …”

“How about possession of a banned weapon? Would that work?” asked Pulaski, whose omniscience, it was now clear, was limited to ways of torturing Charlie.

“This is bogus. You wouldn’t be doing this if I was some rich asshole. Don’t I have the right to an attorney?”

Pulaski weighed the sheath in his palm. “Are you aware that concealing a blade longer than three inches is illegal in the State of New York?”

“You’re bluffing.”

“See, this is what I’m talking about”—the woman had jumped in again—“people running around with switchblades.”

“Now where did I pack my measuring tape …”

But when Pulaski pressed the button on the blade, it might as well have lopped off a finger, is how surprised they all looked. What popped out was not a knife, but a black plastic comb too cheap to actually use. And at that moment, Charlie felt as far from understanding as he’d ever been in his life. It was right up there with finding Sam, or burying Dad. For what if he really had needed the blade to stop someone, not some jerk in a business suit, but someone actually capable of … But come on, how blind can you be? The person he’d needed to stop all along was Nicky. He’d been telling himself the PHP’s violence was purely a means, but this comb, in its very uselessness, seemed to throw into final relief the question of ends. Like, what if Nicky’s fantasies had been leading someplace so dangerous he didn’t trust even his closest allies to follow him there? And what if, on the last point at least, he was right?

Charlie turned to the lady. “Can I just say that I’m sorry?”

“Sorry for what?”

“I know that was your apartment we were in yesterday. I saw your picture on the fridge.”

“You little punk!” But then she turned to Pulaski. “See? I knew it wasn’t an ordinary burglary.”

“Right,” Pulaski said. “Like you knew this was a knife.”

Charlie pretended not to hear. “It wasn’t my idea to set the fire or anything.”

“—But in fact that’s not entirely true,” she went on. “You guys did take something.”

“I didn’t take anything, lady. I saved your dog. The fire was all Nicky.”

She cocked her head. “Also known as Iggy, right? The manuscript uses both. ‘NC’ stands for Nicky?”

“Um, sure, I guess. Nicky Chaos.”

“Whoa.” She held up a hand. “Hang on. This is Captain Chaos, the wannabe artist?”

Another fatal blurt—was he officially a rodent yet?

“Jenny, you’re talking about someone who played in William’s band,” the black guy said. “Why on earth would he be mixed up in a plot to kill his bandmate?”

Kill his bandmate? The lady now came over and grabbed an armrest. Squatted before Charlie. She wore a cheap black digital watch, and was really very pretty, though tired. “This is serious, Charlie. I understand you’re devastated about your friend …” But it was a ploy; he’d read Penthouse Forum, he knew what went on. She would get him alone and she would tell him she was terribly sorry for him and attracted to him and offer to suck his penis if he would do the right thing. And the hell of it was he would probably tell her everything he knew. Which was still next to nothing. He got up and sort of limped to the window. No one stopped him. There were reactionaries teeming antlike below. The river beyond, dying as the sun did. A blaze of red on the bridge’s wires, threatening to remind him of something, but the height had him too scared to think.