The Big Fear (16 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

ESCAPE

The car squealed south on the FDR and Veronica threaded into the wave of traffic before taking a breath. Leonard curled himself into a ball in the front seat. Now that he wasn’t worried about being caught, the pain was back. He started to stretch out as Veronica eased off of the accelerator. His feet had just reached the floor when she spoke.

“Look behind us. Is there anyone?”

Leonard slid around and checked the road. The hospital towered behind them, the United Nations ahead, and the traffic buzzed on both sides. But nothing unusual. A sunny summer afternoon commute.

“No. I don’t think so.”

Leonard slumped back round to face forward. He pulled the seat belt shut. Veronica sped past a taxi and cut in front of it. Her fingers were taut on the wheel, the fingernails digging into the leather. The road curved east and the on-ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge appeared. He looked up at the bridge and over to Veronica.

“How did you find me? How did you know I would be coming out the back?”

“It was in the paper. The investigation is ongoing. I was planning on checking in to visit you. They have cops at the entrance, and when I said I was coming to see you they tried to stop me. If you were coming out that way you weren’t going to make it. You were either going to be coming out of that garage or you weren’t going to be coming out at all.”

Leonard nodded. He had been even closer to getting locked up than he thought.

One hand on the wheel, she reached across him to his wounded shoulder. “How do you feel?”

“I’m okay.” Five minutes earlier, Leonard had been afraid for his life. In the chase, with his instincts running full throttle, he had forgotten about mere pain. Now the beating was talking to him again, reminding him. As they took a broad turn up the bridge, Leonard saw the fresh bright downtown sparkle in front of him. Magnificent glass condominiums rising sixty stories, the newly finished complex of towers, all scoffing at the mere Woolworth Building, a stone relic chugging along into the twenty-first century. It all seemed stained somehow, false. A glittering future that had been imposed upon the city, laughing at people who had liked things the way it had been before. Thinking of it slipping back to that raucous past, Leonard felt almost a hint of relief. They swooped onto the bridge.

“Do you know who did this to you?”

He turned to look at her. Her eyes were steady on the road, watching the hum of cars pressing their luck along the bridge. She was the one who had told him what Davenport had really been up to. That Eliot Holm-Anderson had been betting against companies and blowing them up. That the little disasters weren’t just the by-product of a swiftly collapsing city but acts of affirmative sabotage. That Davenport had known. Veronica had trusted him with dangerous information, so it was only right that he trust her back.

“I was beat up by a cop.”

“What?”

He told her the whole story. Coming home at night. Seeing the car; Victor Ells. And Officer Davies. “Mulino doesn’t believe me. He thinks at best it was someone who bought a fake uniform. But I’m pretty good at spotting that.”

Veronica pulled the car down the long exit off the bridge. “Why would they assault you? You had only just spoken to me. You hadn’t found anything out yet.”

“I wonder about that.” They wouldn’t have known about his talk with Veronica. But they would have known he was investigating Mulino. And they just might have known that he had his doubts about whether Mulino had done it. About whether the trophy was worth it after all. Leaking the interview to the papers had been a test balloon. It wasn’t great for the cop, but it didn’t lead to marches in the street demanding his head. And if your jury pool is skeptical of your best evidence, you don’t have a case. Just maybe, word had got out that Leonard wasn’t as convinced as he was supposed to be that Mulino was the fall guy. And if the cops came after Leonard for that, it would mean that they were laying the trap for Mulino after all.

They were on the surface streets now, cruising along the midafternoon glut of Brooklyn, meandering on Atlantic Avenue toward the arena, the hub of Flatbush, the noise. “They aren’t going to stop looking for you, Leonard.”

“I know that. I got rid of my phone.” It wouldn’t only be the dirty officers who were searching now. Someone would manage to put a warrant out for his arrest. Leaving the scene of an accident, trespass, material witness. It didn’t really matter. All they needed to do was to say that they wanted to talk to him, they had come after him in the hospital, and he had run away. Any cop that came across him would pull him in on the warrant, no questions asked. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could talk your way out of. And once he was in custody, he’d eventually get brought to the people who were looking for him. And at that point, it would get ugly.

“Good. Smart move.” Veronica circled around the library and turned the car down Bedford. “I’m going to bring you home. You shouldn’t stay long. The cops will look for you there. But you should have time to change your clothes and take a shower.”

“Thank you. Thank you for all of this.” His shoulder had started throbbing again, a mean solid pain.

“I wish I could protect you, Leonard. But I’m in danger myself. If Eliot knew what I was doing . . .”

“I’m grateful, Veronica. Really.”

“If you get enough to turn them in, I can help you. Davenport came to Eliot. And she had found out enough. She had found out what he was doing. And you found out that Rowson was calling EHA. There are cops who are in on it, who know when the next little disaster is going to happen. You need to find the connection. How did he hire them? Who picks the targets? Who tells Eliot what they’ve picked, when they’re attacking? How did they get paid?”

They were nearing his apartment. “And most importantly, Leonard, who are they going to hit next? I know some people in the FBI. They would be more than happy to take Eliot down. But we need to know more. We need to tell them what the target is.”

“How am I going to do that?”

“Davenport was investigating the firm. She found out enough to confront Eliot. Enough to get killed. Maybe they killed her because she was going to expose them, but maybe they killed her because she knew something. If anyone had figured out who they were going to hit next, she did. You have to find out where she would have kept it. Let me know when you have that.”

“I don’t know how I’m going to do that.”

“You’re going to have to try.”

They pulled up to his building. The street was calm, the usual midafternoon bearded bicyclists parading their authenticity. He already knew where he was going to go. Somewhere that, until today, he most likely wouldn’t have been welcome. Where he would never have wanted or tried to visit. But the situation had changed; he might need help from a crackpot. He was starting to feel like a crackpot himself after all.

“Thank you again, Veronica.”

“You have to be careful. They are going to be looking at who your friends are. Who you send e-mails to. Don’t go anywhere obvious. Don’t even tell me.”

“I know.”

“Good luck.”

Leonard opened the door of the car. He gritted his teeth and walked toward his home, sensing the quiet danger that now surrounded him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

SEARCH AND SEIZURE

For once, the elevator worked. When Leonard reached his floor, he rounded the corner to find his door sitting wide open. Glued to it was a bright-orange placard, NYPD’s standard issue to let the unwary know that their apartment had been subjected to a legal search. Leonard had investigated dozens of complaints from unlucky residents who had come home to ransacked apartments, unable to tell which of their missing possessions had been seized by police as evidence and what had been swiped later by scavengers. At the bottom of the sticker announcing the search, there was a phone number to call to have police technicians come and replace the door if the Warrant Squad had to take it off the hinges or bust it in. Leonard knew that the number in fact rang to a cubicle in One Police Plaza that hadn’t been staffed in seven years. He had investigated those complaints too.

The door hadn’t been knocked in and hadn’t been taken off; it swung listlessly into his apartment. The search team had done everything proper, going to the management office and showing the warrant. At one point, the office had probably been on a first name basis with the warrant guys, maybe had a full-time assistant super assigned to opening apartments for the cops. It would have been a dangerous gig. Nowadays it probably was a novelty. Or just coming back into style, like the rest of it. Leonard wouldn’t have to call the number at the bottom of the placard. The open door meant that if the cops weren’t still inside, they hadn’t bothered to close it when they left. They never do.

Leonard toed open the door. His apartment was a mess. The couch askew, his mattress flung to the wall, jars of mustard spilled from the refrigerator onto the cheap tile. The police never precisely clean up after serving a search warrant, but there was an added note of malice in how thoroughly Leonard’s apartment had been tossed. And what had they been looking for, after all? What evidence could they find here that he had killed Davenport? If that was even what they were after.

He turned to his desk. His computer was gone. Maybe some enterprising neighbor came by and hauled it off after the cops left the door open. Or maybe that’s what the warrant team wanted Leonard to think. He slid his hand into his pocket, where he impossibly held the flash drive from Veronica. He wouldn’t even be able to look at what was on here.

Turning back to the door, he tried to peel off the placard. It was stuck with industrial glue; it wouldn’t budge without steel wool or a plaster scraper. His neighbors would see the signal of shame for however long it would take Leonard before he could come back. And Leonard didn’t know when he was coming back. He had only just figured out where he was going next.

Leaving the sadly swinging door, Leonard pieced through the apartment. He fished a duffel bag from the general wreck of the floor. The police had sought him out at the hospital and had already been here once. They would come back soon enough. He pulled a change of clothes from the floor and stuffed them in the bag. He needed to see what was on the drive Veronica gave him, and he needed to find what Davenport had been working on. There was no time even to take a shower. He was hitting the road.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

THE LONG WALK

Live in this city long enough and pretty soon you will go on a long walk. The first one is romantic. Maybe you thought it was sweet and crazy to stroll from Chinatown across the Brooklyn Bridge with that girl who had read that same book you had, which you thought meant she understood you so well. Maybe you traced the Battle of Brooklyn, or you got convinced by some athletic friend to stomp the length of Broadway. You made it almost all the way to Thirty-Fourth Street before you wore out and took a train home.

The next long walk took you by surprise. You were in your office playing Snood, and the lights went off and you clamored downstairs to the news of the Great Blackout of 2003: The subways were out and you were told to get home to avoid the inevitable looting and panic. So you ditched your dress shoes for ten-dollar sneakers purchased from an instant entrepreneur, passed the ice cream stores and butcher shops offering catastrophic discounts, and went to the roof of your building to watch the chaos unfold. But instead, you shared with your neighbors a bottle of wine and a gorgeous uncluttered view of the starscape.

Or the time the snow swept in so quickly that it threw the subway out of whack and you had to sludge home. You were only two stops away, but your numb toes took hours to stomp through the drifts. Later you boasted to friends that you were caught in the Blizzard of 1996, 2007, 2010, pretending it was much harsher than it really was.

Of course, if you were downtown when the buildings came down, if you were in your office and heard that a plane had crashed and went outside to stare up at the commotion, because that’s what New Yorkers do, and you had seen a scorched fifteen-foot piece of metal tearing a gash in the middle of Greenwich Street, and blood and steel and people twisting their way down, then you were in the greatest long walk of all, with Armageddon over your shoulder, a rain of leases and promissory notes and litigious letters collecting into forgotten piles at your feet.

Leonard had been on plenty of long walks.

But that day was different. The subway was working fine. There was no shared catastrophe. After jamming together a change of clothes, he unbandaged his shoulder and checked the mirror. His back was a map of welts, purple rising among the shoulder blades. He wrapped only half of the bandage back on and left the rest in his sink. He took a last sad look at his little apartment before venturing back out for his trek up Flatbush, past the zoo, past the museum, past everything.

Leonard couldn’t help but notice the garbage. The trash bags were set out up and down the street, bundled and bursting. There were far too many of them; the corner bins were swelling and even in front of the local businesses, there didn’t seem to have been a collection. Then he got it. The sanitation talks had broken down and the strike had begun. The supers had put the loads out as usual, but no one had come to pick them up. Not on the collection day, and not on the day after either. Garbage on the streets; just one more little disaster to add to the pile.

The Premier League bars and snout-to-tail restaurants that lined Vanderbilt Avenue quickly gave way to a McDonald’s, a gas station, and the bright fences sealing off the new arena. Only a few blocks and the whole thing emptied out into the Whitman housing project. Not like Ebbets Fields. Whitman was downtown but still harsh, true misery that its brownstone neighbors pretended not to see.

Then Leonard wasn’t quite anywhere exactly. The Navy Yard was a place, but it wasn’t exactly a neighborhood. Close to it all but still in the middle of nowhere; the only corner of Brooklyn that the developers had yet to reach. The last place where the land was still cheap. Leonard knew the address by heart; he had seen it neatly blocked into the sign-in sheet every month at the DIMAC meeting for years.

Leonard stood next to a weary brick building, across from the Navy Yard. The Yard itself had been spruced and polished: now there was a museum, a playground, and a sea of industrial microsites. But Leonard’s destination was here, on the other side of Flushing Avenue. No one had renovated this place. It had once been a warehouse or a mill, had been abandoned for years, and would stay cheap until the market caught up with it. For now, the stairs were worn and unlit, the walls were thick with decades of dinge, and Leonard didn’t even stop to consider that it hadn’t been necessary to buzz before walking in the front door. He was headed up to the third floor. He passed painted steel doors that hid entrepreneurs who couldn’t afford the cost or the attention of the Navy Yard. Someone was probably stapling together bags to be hawked as real Givenchys on Canal Street. Someone might be using another floor as a stash house. And some were worse.

He reached the third floor. His back hurt and his legs were tired. He was sweaty and there was a metallic smell in the air. His shoulder throbbed so insistently that he swore he could hear it. He looked around, sure that he hadn’t been followed. There were no lights or windows in the stairwell; it felt as though night had come early. He walked down the hallway and found the number he was looking for.

He banged on the door.

H
e stood still in the empty summer afternoon, listening to the straggling noise behind the door. It swung open and revealed a marathon woman in a silk suit. Roshni Saal. The head of the August 15 Coalition. She looked over Leonard’s beaten face and his soiled shirt and smiled.

“If it isn’t Leonard Mitchell. I always knew you would come around to our side.”

“I need a place to stay.”

“Of course you do. Come right in.”