Hard Stop (15 page)

I dreamt of skyscrapers and industrial plants, men in suits and women in heels, hard faces and eyes filled with aspiration and dismay. A lost world.

Eddie woke me with a single bark. I knew what time it was by the bark’s tone and timbre. Dinner time. I opened my eyes and was rewarded with a nice sunset below a lavender sky. And the company of Joe Sullivan, sitting next to me drinking one of Burton’s special beers.

“I was happy to let you sleep,” said Sullivan. “Just have my beer and go home.”

I went into the house to throw water on my face and change my clothes, shaking off the weight of sleep and the lingering dream state. I must have been more tired than I realized. I threw Eddie’s food in a bowl and got Sullivan another beer. I filled my tumbler with ice water. For novelty’s sake.

When I got back Sullivan asked me how it went with Ross and Veckstrom. I told him everything I could remember. He wrote it down in his case book.

I apologized to him. “If I’d known this was going to happen I wouldn’t have involved you at all. You’d be clean,” I said.

He waved it off.

“You didn’t know. Like you said, we got a new situation here.”

He asked me to tell him whatever I knew that I hadn’t told Ross and Veckstrom. I did. I owed him that. I only left out theory and conjecture. No point in confusing the facts with all that stuff.

“When do you get the forensics?” I asked him.

“In a day or two. Prints a little before that.”

“Maybe that’ll settle everything.”

“I’m not going to keep you out of this, am I?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Okay,” he said. “Just try to tell me what you’re doing. And I’ll tell you. Like, for example, after I leave here I’m bringing in Robert Dobson. Easy pickings, since I know where he lives. Now, you tell me what you’re doing.”

“Having dinner and resting up for insomnia.”

“Let me write that down.”

“See if Dobson’ll give up the other roommates. No reason why he shouldn’t. If not, you got the mail. That should do it. And ask him about Angel. Don’t know the last name. I’m guessing the connection is back in the City. That’s where I’m going tomorrow. See? Full disclosure. My new way.”

He looked unconvinced, but found it in himself to politely finish off a few more of Burton’s beers.

Between him and Honest Boy Ackerman, I might have to get Burton over here to replenish my supply.

Eisler, Johnson’s building had the good sense to install a coffee shop right in the lobby. Not exactly a shop, more like a big pushcart and a few bistro tables. The coffee was great, and
you could make yourself sick on Danish pastries and stuffed croissants, which I did, mostly to appear like a normal customer rather than the stalker I actually was.

My disguise was one of the suits I’d rescued from my house in Stamford before the demolition. It still fit fine, though the cut was probably dated. Which would only reinforce the look of a middle-aged office rat hiding out with a crossword puzzle and double latte.

I’d picked eleven in the morning to begin the stakeout, and allocated a maximum of two hours. Lingering longer than that might draw the attention of people staring at a bank of security monitors somewhere. I hoped it was enough time. As usual, I didn’t have much of a Plan B.

I assumed the crossword puzzle was great cover until I realized I’d have it solved in about a half hour.

“Why is it the last few are always the toughest to get?” I asked the lady sitting to my right, hoping to burnish my act.

“Why do you think they’re the last?” she asked, leaving an unsaid but implied “you schmuck” hanging in the air.

“Yeah. I guess you’re right,” I said, cheered by her observation.

I spent the next hour staring off into space trying to squeeze the name of a river in Russia, six letters long beginning with “Dn,” out of my memory. I wrote it down when I saw Jerome Gelb stride by. I tossed the paper in front of my crabby neighbor so she could share my triumph.

Gelb moved very fluidly, a nice City gait capable of gracefully covering a lot of ground in a short time. I was pressed to keep up without looking like I was trying to. I checked my watch once a block to convey hurry—the guilty employee finding himself gone a little too long from the office.

Gelb suddenly stopped and stepped off the curb, looking down the avenue, I assumed to catch a cab. I strode past
him and raised my hand. I got lucky when a cab shot out from the cross street and pulled over. I jumped in and we buzzed by Gelb, who glowered at what he rightly thought was a dirty cab snatch. I turned my head away and rubbed my face.

The cabbie looked at me over his shoulder.

“And?” he asked.

“Pull over here on the right, will ya? Behind that van,” I said.

“Big ride. A whole block,” he said, but did as I asked, cutting across four lanes with a heedless jerk of the steer-ing wheel that anywhere else would have caused a massive pile-up.

“Just wait here,” I said.

I had a good view of Gelb, his hand still extended from the end of his long, thin arm. No cabbie could miss it. The next one didn’t.

“Okay,” I said as they flew by, heading downtown, “follow that cab.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

Gelb’s cab was timing the lights well, so we quickly ate up several blocks. As we began to hit the intersections on the yellow, I asked the cabbie to move alongside so we wouldn’t get caught at a red.

“You’re really following him, aren’t you?” said Benny Roscoe, the name I read off his permit.

“I am.”

“You a cop?”

“Engineer.”

“Then is this legal?” he asked.

“Absolutely. Engineers have all the same authority.”

Both cabs stopped at a red light at the next intersection. I slid down in my seat.

“Try not to look over at him,” I said. “Let him get a little ahead when the light changes.”

“Got it, Kojak.”

We settled into the usual rhythm of a cab ride down a Manhattan avenue—hurtling, undulating momentum interrupted by sudden lurching stops, abrupt lane changes, a series of near front-end collisions and generous application of the horn. Throughout Roscoe did a fine job of keeping pace with our quarry without calling undue attention, though he had to push the speed envelope occasionally to take up the slack.

“I’ll cover the ticket,” I said.

“You got that right.”

Down around 23rd Street Gelb cut over to Broadway, then continued south. We had a tense moment when a box truck got between us, but Roscoe managed to cut around on the right, using a wide entrance to a parking garage to cheat into the sidewalk space. No pedestrians were killed in the maneuver.

Gelb took Broadway past the Village and into SoHo. His cab turned onto Spring Street and stopped.

“Go halfway down and let me out,” I said, dropping a fifty dollar bill through the security slot, covering both the fare and the unscheduled stunt driving. “Nice work.”

“Not a problem. A car chase always breaks up the day.”

Gelb was easy to spot, heading west. He crossed Mercer, then walked to the end of the next block, crossing Greene and ducking into a restaurant that took up the whole corner. I gave it a few seconds, then followed him in.

The place featured a U-shaped bar anchoring the center of the room, lit by floor-to-ceiling tinted windows. The booze was on brass racks over the bartenders’ heads, the upper strata reachable by a ladder like the one in Donovan’s library.

There were also a few stool-high round tables between the bar and the window walls where Gelb was talking with a young woman who’d apparently saved him a seat. I sat at the bar on the other side of the U so I could keep them in direct view. I ordered an Absolut on the rocks to maintain authenticity.

The first fifteen minutes or so involved the usual boring stuff. Ordering food and drink, running to the restroom, settling in. Then it picked up when I saw the woman run her high-heeled foot up the inside of Gelb’s calf. She might have seen him grin in response. It looked to me more like a leer, though to be fair, I was sitting much farther away.

The woman leaned closer into the table and started fiddling with a necklace that hung between her breasts. Gelb leaned in as well. He held his drink by the rim of the glass and swirled it around to either melt the ice or send another suggestive message. He didn’t have to do it for my sake. My intuitive powers were up to the challenge.

Not knowing when I’d be back, I left a ten dollar bill on the bar. I walked over and set my drink down on their table. Gelb looked up with a jolt.

“Hey, Jerome,” I said, “Floyd Patterson again. Mrs. Gelb, I presume?” I added, looking at his ring finger, then his lunch date.

What followed was an awkward silence. For them. For me it was just a silence.

“No, actually,” said the woman, putting out her hand, “I’m Marla Cantor. A colleague of Jerome’s.”

“Oh,” I said, happily, “wonderful. Fine firm you folks work for.”

“So, Floyd,” said Gelb, not quite through his teeth, “what can I do for you this time?”

“That’d be a private matter, Mr. Gelb. I think you’d want
that,” I said, keeping my smile as big as a face that almost never smiled would let it.

He grimaced, but judging by the red flush on his cheeks, he was eager to deal quickly with the situation. He made stammering apologies to Marla, who graciously wouldn’t hear of it. She said she’d concentrate on her salad and be there when he came back.

We went out to the sidewalk. I led him across the street to a shop that had a huge display window with a sill deep enough to sit on. We were both well dressed enough to loiter there while I asked him a few questions.

“I’ve consulted with our attorneys, by the way,” said Gelb. “They’re unaware of any action being taken against Eisler, Johnson.”

“That’s because there isn’t any,” I told him.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Shut up and listen. I found Iku Kinjo. Dead. It was very upsetting. When I think about how you talked about her, I get even more upset.”

“I wasn’t happy with her, but I didn’t want her dead, for God’s sake.”

“Your wife know about Marla?” I asked.

The rosy little patches on his cheeks drained away, turning his skin back to white.

“I resent the implication.”

“Don’t waste my time with all that. Assume I got the goods.”

“You’re a private investigator,” he said in a hushed breath.

“Doesn’t matter what I am. You need to tell me why you think Iku dropped out of sight. And you need to do it in the next five seconds.”

I looked at my watch.

“I don’t know,” he said, rushing out the words. “Honestly, I don’t. She just didn’t come in one day.”

“What kind of a mood was she in?”

“Tense. But who at Eisler isn’t? She seemed tired and a little frayed at the edges, but that’s also nothing unusual. Our relationship was one hundred percent professional,” he said, his eyes twitching toward the joint across the street, as if catching the irony. “So if she was concerned about something at work or in her personal life, I wouldn’t know. And that’s the honest-to-God truth.”

“So she was handling her job.”

“Iku? We used to think she dictated memos in her sleep. Everything brilliant, all the time.”

“Jealous of her, huh?” I asked.

He smirked.

“Yeah, of her talent. Not what it got her. I want a life outside of work.”

“Apparently.”

He was a really tall guy, but sitting there on the windowsill in SoHo, he’d begun to shrink. I felt a little bad for him, but not enough to take out the hook. Not yet.

“What was she working on? The big stuff.”

“Consolidated Global Energies. You’d know it as Con Globe. Oil-based, refining and petrochemical. Though her regular assignment was the hedge fund, Phillip Craig. And the usual load of small stuff that Eisler likes to pile on to maintain their reputation as the sweatshop of the consultancy trade.”

I made the mistake of stopping to think. Gelb took the opening.

“I need to get back to my table,” he said.

“Yeah, ’course you do.”

He stood up and looked down at me. I leaned back so I wouldn’t wrench my neck looking up at him.