Crazy for Cornelia (27 page)

That was the second time he’d asked.

“Some welfare hotel. I wanted to get away. My phone was ringing.”

“Telephones these days, you’re allowed to take ’em off the hook,” Eddie offered. “Get well, Kevin. There’s other residents
in the building still have to give you Christmas tips. ‘Tis the season to have money, you hear what I’m saying? You owe me
for this job, kid.”

Kevin climbed back onto the sofa carefully. When he saw her, he felt giddy, and brushed her hair with his hand, seeing little
flecks of gold.

She definitely wasn’t crazy. Not the way Philip Grace wrote about her, and Marne wrote her off, and the workers at 840 Fifth
gossiped about her. But there seemed to be two Cornelia Lords. There was the Girl Who’ll Always Have Everything, and the one
who could look into his soul and know things. He wondered which one would wake up and greet him this morning.

He dozed lightly, jumped when he felt himself going to sleep. He didn’t want her to wake up first and run away. For all her
good points, she was still a flight risk. But he seriously doubted she would run away from him, since she promised to show
him something that meant a lot to her that concerned the inventor Nikola Tesla. Hard to believe a girl like that would care
about a dead inventor.

But it was even harder to believe that she cared about Kevin Doyle.

He wouldn’t be a total idiot, getting twisted up in some romantic fantasy. Maybe he was a fling for her. If he tried to make
anything more out of it, the social class curtain would come crashing down on his head. This was New York City, not one of
Vlad’s fairy tales. But right now he felt safe and warm with her, scrunched up together.

His ear and shoulder hurt, but curling up with Cornelia Lord gave him a better false sense of well-being than the Percocets.
His eyes closed again and he slept.

Cornelia saw 10:06 in red numerals. Her eyes darted around the studio, as she collected her thoughts.

She felt Kevin’s arm around her, deliciously warm. She felt tingly, as she had from the moment she had first seen his corona.
Kevin Doyle had plenty of hurt under the splendid corona. She could understand his sorrow over his mother, and his need to
make Saint Sebastian perfect for her.

She admired that.

For the first time, she also realized that Kevin Doyle was handsome. His face spoke of both wildness and decency. The tender
mouth and chin that sprouted morning whiskers looked noble, like Sebastian.

He thrilled and disturbed her. She could connect with Kevin Doyle. She could feel his grief; terribly new and raw, and quite
familiar. But caution should forbid, shouldn’t it? He had swept her off her feet—off the street if she wanted to be literal
about it—in such a display of bravado, it would be easy to make a misstep here. His corona, his decency, excited her. But
she could be taking a risk, confiding in him about Tesla.

She had just trusted Tucker and look where that had gotten her.

She sat up suddenly. Oh, God. She had to warn her father that Tucker had become entangled with old Han Koi. That ugly double
corona that snaked from the Kois to encircle Tucker, that was the sign. Coronas couldn’t lie. Or could they?

She bit her lip, trying to recall exactly what she had seen. She had, after all, chugged most of a bottle of New York State
champagne on an empty stomach. That could have been enough to cloud her perception of things.

What did the blackish brown corona really tell her? She tried to imagine convincing her father of what she believed to be
true, without the supporting evidence of the Koi corona. Tucker had definitely lied to her about the South America business.
The old man on the screen was fake. Tucker’s people had returned the supplies. There would be no grand adventure in Brazil
with Tucker.

But
why
had he duped her? Perhaps just to enlist her help with the voting stock. Maybe he would be the one who couldn’t wait to dump
her
.

Who could tell?

Tucker still revealed no corona of his own. Maybe he just sort of used other people’s coronas, like other people rented cars.
Maybe the Kois had only
tried
to ensnare Tucker. She needed a second opinion
desperately. But nobody advertised a “Corona Hotline” in the Manhattan Yellow Pages.

Now quite sober and blissfully snug on this cramped couch where Kevin Doyle wrapped his warmth around her—like the little
wicker love seat on the Lords’ sunporch that she shared with her mother—she couldn’t be so sure about Tucker and the Kois.

What she knew for certain was the joyous charge of being with Kevin Doyle.

She regretted his hurt at her discovery of the fiber optics. It seemed so obvious to her, but of course he didn’t have Dr.
Powers showing him new developments in electricity.
He wasn’t of her world
, Chester would say.

And snobbery could work both ways, couldn’t it? She felt his resentment of her for being rich. On the other hand…

No. Too many hands. A clumsy octopus of doubt. She would tell Kevin Doyle about Tesla and be very careful not to compromise
him for helping her so many times now. No matter what, she wouldn’t make him lose his job. And she wouldn’t waffle, flipping
back and forth like her father. She would call Chester and tell him her suspicions about Tucker, and that would be that.

She gently stroked Kevin’s face with her fingertips until he opened his eyes.

“Good morning,” she greeted him. “How do you feel about museums?”

“She’s not with her friends. Not at any of her haunts,” Chester told Edgar Chase on the telephone. “I think we might have
to get the police involved, discreetly.”

“You don’t get the police involved discreetly,” Edgar explained. “Even if we speak to the commissioner, there’s no assurance.”

Chester listened but didn’t hear, worn and preoccupied. Tucker had slept in a guest room, after sitting in Chester’s study
all night making telephone calls. Tucker had already dispatched his people, that busy, well-scrubbed youth gang, and even
some private investigators to check Cornelia’s friends, her acquaintances, anywhere she could possibly have run to hide.

His daughter had vanished.

Rubbing his nose, he thought of her trudging through the snow somewhere alone. He desperately hoped she would stay in a reasonably
good neighborhood. Thank God New York City had a mayor who cracked down on street crime.

“Mr. Lord.” O’Connell appeared at the door to Chester’s study. “There’s a gentleman to see you who claims to have information.”

“Goodbye, Edgar.” Chester hung up with a clatter and took the business card O’Connell handed him. He recognized the card with
its double-door logo of the International Brotherhood of Portal Operators. It read, “Edward J. Feeney, Delegate,” a man he
had met representing the doormen of 840 Fifth in their labor negotiations with his co-op board.

Feeney entered the study. His too-small suit was rumpled, and there were small stains on his hand-painted tie. He had random
gray whiskers that had eluded the razor jutting out from his rough, reddened jowls. They gave him a seedy look, like a small-time
gangster ready to be gunned down in a barber’s chair. Chester watched him as he tried to balance his bulk on the smallest
chair, then finally gave up and moved to a larger one. Feeney’s lumpy face seemed oddly pleased. His eyes actually twinkled.
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, clutching a rolled-up newspaper in his fists.

“Can I call you Chester?”

Chester clenched his hands in his lap. “If you promise to get to the point, Mr. Feeney.”

“You seen this morning’s
Globe
?”

Chester saw Feeney smirk, just enough to make his blood rush to his head. He steeled himself.

“No. Only the
Times
,” Chester told him. “There was an article about… the accident in the Metro section.”

Eddie Feeney pursed his lips and nonchalantly unrolled the newspaper.

“Doorman Saves Deb from Dad,” the front page screamed.

Chester flinched at the sad, grainy image of Cornelia twisted in the horse blanket in the snow, being plucked by the young
doorman named Doyle from the jaws of Chester’s own car. Naturally, the photographer had captured the exact moment when his
car struck Doyle, recording the full measure of the young doorman’s agony. He imagined it would prove useful for some personal
injury lawyer.

Chester focused on Feeney. He had a bulldog’s jowls. Yet Chester recalled that Edward J. Feeney, delegate, had never, in
his negotiations on behalf of his Portal Operators union revealed even a trace of that breed’s loyalty. Feeney looked out
for himself, first, then his men. “Your point, Mr. Feeney?”

“This guy is my nephew.” Eddie tapped a stubby finger twice on Kevin Doyle’s likeness. “I got a feeling your daughter’s with
him.”

Chester tried to visualize Cornelia with the doorman. Anything seemed possible now.

“Why would you think that?” he asked.

“I’m just saying, I got a hunch. If I helped you out—”

Chester cut off this unsavory whiff of a money demand before it could leave Feeney’s mean little mouth.

“Thank you for your time,” he told him. “We’ll discuss compensation if this proves true. Please keep it to yourself.”

“Keep what to myself?”

Chester frowned before he realized the man was joking. While O’Connell swept Eddie Feeney out to the foyer, Chester walked
upstairs to check several guest rooms, and finally found Tucker. He shook the boy awake. While Cornelia slept like a little
girl, Tucker sprawled across the small guest bed in his boxer shorts like a monstrous Gulliver, snoring loudly.

“Chester,” Tucker squinted at him. “What?”

“Do you think it’s possible that Cornelia is with the doorman?”

Tucker didn’t take long to collect himself. “You mean that guy Doyle?” He yawned. “I checked him out. Lives in a slum. I sent
somebody to look at his apartment and there was nobody home.”

“He behaved well at the hospital,” Chester remembered, “refused to talk to the media. But if he’s taken Cornelia…”

“Chester,” Tucker said with a sigh. “That guy’s a loser. He couldn’t get her to go with him unless she wanted to, and trust
me, she wouldn’t want to.”

This was definitely Corny’s place.

He saw the look of almost religious rapture that made her skin flush and her eyes seem to glitter.

Kevin looked around the New York Tesla Museum and its few visitors.

“We aren’t open to the public yet,” she explained. “Just the students and Tesla Society members who drop by. And people who
need to get inside.”

Some he figured were students, busy peering at signs and taking notes. And some homeless people wrapped like mummies in their
layers of ragtag clothes and faces streaked with permanent dirt. During the winter months, chased out of Midtown where they
might annoy the tourists, they went anywhere they could warm up. He had to admit that even the homeless drop-ins looked curious
about the exhibits. Some other people, whose eyes burned with the fire of true believers, drifted in and out. Did Tesla have
groupies? They were mostly young, dressed neatly enough, but some had their shirt collars buttoned up all the way to the top
and buzzcut hair that could have been styled by Black and Decker.

Kevin looked up. The museum was a knocked-open space four stories high and half a block square, full of exhibits. There were
old-time inventions and photographs of the wacky inventor.

In the middle a steel-girded tower shaped like a stainless steel mushroom with a bulbous head shot up almost to the roof.
Directly over the tower, a massive skylight had been installed in the ceiling. It was made up of two huge glass panels set
on tracks.

“Does the skylight open up?” he asked her.

“Sure. When we want to raise the tower.”

She stared at the tower and spoke in the same hushed voice she had used for his Sebastian. Here he felt a sinking feeling
that Cornelia Lord was a little too devoted. A self-made nun in the Church of the Wrong Assumption.

“You paid for this museum?”

“Some of it. I spent nine months helping to convert this space. I found the curator, came up with some of the exhibits. But
the owner of the building leases it to us for a dollar a year. He belongs to the New York Tesla Society, too.”

She gripped his good arm in excitement. Around the tower objects dangled on wires. Kevin saw that they were models of odd
airships, tent-shaped with aluminum wings that looked like they couldn’t
get off the ground in a tornado. Scattered among the models, he saw silvery disks with lumps in the middle. Uh, oh. Flying
saucers.

Coronas. Tesla Towers. Flying saucers. Cornelia had definitely made good on her promise to show him something he’d never seen
before. Anybody else, he would have written this stuff off. But he couldn’t deny that her exuberance was catching.

“How’d the tower work?”

“It didn’t. His investors pulled the plug too early. It’s a long story.” Her eyes took a detour through sadness, then came
back. “He designed it to broadcast free electricity through the atmosphere so anybody could use it. Like radio waves. If he
had his way, the whole world could run on free electricity. Houses. Factories. Cars. Even boats and planes. After he got the
little bugs out, of course.”

“Bugs?” Kevin studied the tower and the hanging plane models. Electricity didn’t work like that. Tesla must have had the balls
of a brass monkey. “He was way ahead of his time, I guess.”

“That’s what they said about Leonardo da Vinci, Kevin. Watch.”

She moved over to the control panel, flipped a switch underneath, and fiddled with a button and a joystick.

He heard a rumble from the ceiling like a subway train, and looked up to see the big glass and steel panels in the roof begin
moving apart. She flicked another switch and the platform groaned and lifted the giant mushroom of the Tesla Tower. It lumbered
up toward the roof in a whine of pneumatics. Then the tower’s head poked through the roof, jutting through the opening as
light poured in from the sky.