The Twelfth Card (54 page)

“Oh, she was that witness, right?”

“Yep. I need to get some papers to her this afternoon.
The district attorney’s going to be indicting some of the people involved in the case and we need her signature on a statement. Can I speak to her?”

“Sure. Hold on.” A pause as he asked someone else in the room about the girl’s schedule. Ashberry heard something about her being absent. The administrator came back on. “She’s not in school today. She’ll be back Monday.”

“Oh, is she at home?”

“Wait, hold on a minute . . . ”

Another voice was speaking to the principal, offering a suggestion.

Please, Ashberry thought . . .

The man came back on the line. “One of her teachers thinks she’s at Columbia this afternoon, working on some project.”

“The university?”

“Yeah. Try a Professor Mathers. I don’t have his first name, sorry.”

The administrator sounded preoccupied, but to make sure the man didn’t call the police just to check on him, Ashberry said in a dismissing way, “You know, I’ll just call the officers who’re guarding her. Thanks.”

“Yeah, so long.”

Ashberry hung up and paused, looking over the busy street. He’d only wanted her address but this might work out better—even though the principal didn’t sound surprised when Ashberry mentioned the guards, which meant that somebody might still be protecting her. He’d have to take that fact into account. He called the main Columbia switchboard and learned that Professor Mathers’s office hours today were from one to six.

How long would Geneva be there? Ashberry
wondered. He hoped it would be for most of the day; he had a lot to do.

*   *   *

At four-thirty that afternoon, William Ashberry was cruising in his BMW M5 through Harlem, looking around him. He didn’t think of the place in racial or cultural terms. He saw it as an opportunity. For him a man’s worth was determined by his ability to pay his debts on time—specifically, and from a self-interested point of view—a man’s ability to cough up the rent or mortgage on one of the redevelopment projects that Sanford Bank had going on in Harlem. If a borrower was black or Hispanic or white or Asian, if he was a drug dealer or an ad agency executive . . . didn’t matter. As long as he wrote that monthly check.

Now, on 125th Street, he passed one of the very buildings his bank was renovating. The graffiti had been scrubbed off, the interior gutted, building materials stacked on the ground floor. The old tenants had been given incentives to relocate. Some reluctant residents had been “urged” to and had taken the hint. Several new renters had already signed expensive leases, even though the construction wouldn’t be completed for six months.

He turned onto a crowded, commercial street, looking at the vendors. Not what he needed. The banker continued on his search—the final task in an afternoon that had been hectic, to say the least. After leaving his office at the Sanford Foundation he’d sped to his weekend house in New Jersey. There he’d unlocked the gun cabinet and removed his double-barreled shotgun. At the workbench in the garage he’d sawed the barrels off, making the gun only about eighteen inches long—a surprisingly
hard job, which had cost him a half dozen electric-saw blades. Tossing the discarded barrels into the pond behind the house, the banker had paused, looking around him, reflecting that this deck was the place where his oldest daughter would be getting married next year after she graduated from Vassar.

He’d remained there for a long moment, gazing at the sun breaking on the cold, blue water. Then he’d loaded the shortened gun and placed it and a dozen shells in a cardboard carton, covered them with some old books, newspapers and magazines. He wouldn’t need any props better than these; the professor and Geneva weren’t going to survive long enough to even look inside the box.

Dressed in a mismatched sports coat and suit, hair slicked back, with drugstore reading glasses—the best disguise he could come up with—Ashberry had then sped across the George Washington Bridge and into Harlem, where he now was, searching for the last prop for the drama.

Ah, there . . .

The banker parked and got out of the car. He walked up to the Nation of Islam street vendor and bought a kufi, an Islamic skullcap, drawing not the least blink of surprise from the man. Ashberry, who took the hat in his gloved hand (thanks again, Thompson), then returned to the car. When no one was looking he bent down and rubbed the hat on the ground beneath a telephone kiosk, where he guessed many people had stood during the past day or so. The hat would pick up some dirt and other evidence—ideally a hair or two—which would give the police even more false leads on the terrorist connection. He rubbed the inside of the hat on the mouthpiece of the phone to pick up saliva and sweat for DNA samples. Slipping the hat into the box with
the gun and magazines and books, he climbed back into the car and drove to Morningside Heights and onto the Columbia campus.

He now found the old faculty building that housed Mathers’s office. The businessman spotted a police car parked in front, an officer sitting in the front seat, looking vigilantly over the street. So she did have a guard.

Well, he could handle it. He’d survived tougher situations than this—on the streets of South Philly and in boardrooms down on Wall Street. Surprise was the best advantage—you could beat overwhelming odds if you did the unexpected.

Continuing along the street, he made a U-turn and parked behind the building, his car well out of sight and aimed toward the highway for a fast escape. He climbed out and looked around. Yes, it could work, he could approach the office from the side, then slip through the front door when the cop was looking elsewhere.

As for getting away, there was a back door to the building. Two ground-level windows too. If the cop ran for the building the minute he heard the shots, Ashberry could shoot him from one of the front windows. In any case he should have enough time to drop the kufi as evidence and get to his car before any other police arrived.

He found a pay phone. He called the school’s main switchboard.

“Columbia University,” a voice replied.

“Professor Mathers, please.”

“One moment.”

A black-inflected voice answered, “Hello?”

“Professor Mathers?”

“That’s right.”

In the persona of Steve Macy again, Ashberry explained
that he was an author from Philadelphia, doing research at the Lehman Library—the Columbia facility devoted to social science and journalism (the Sanford Foundation had given a lot of money to libraries and schools like this one. Ashberry had attended benefits there; he could describe it if he had to). He then said that one of the librarians had heard Mathers had been looking into nineteenth-century New York history, particularly the Reconstruction era. Was that right?

The professor gave a surprised laugh. “I am, as a matter of fact. It’s not for me, actually. I’m helping out a high school student. She’s with me right now.”

Thank God. The girl was still there. I can get it all over with now, get on with my life.

Ashberry said that he’d brought quite a lot of material up from Philly. Would he and this student be interested in taking a look?

The professor said they definitely would, thanked him then asked what would be a convenient time to come by.

When he was seventeen Billy Ashberry had held a box cutter against the thigh of an elderly shopkeeper and reminded him that the man’s protection payments were past due. The razor was going to cut one inch for every day the payment was late unless he paid up instantly. His voice had been as calm then as it was now, saying to Mathers, “I’m leaving tonight but I could drop by now. You can make copies if you want. You have a Xerox machine?”

“I do, yes.”

“I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

They hung up. Ashberry reached into the box and clicked the safety button on the shotgun to the off position. Then he hefted the carton and started toward the building, through a swirl of autumn leaves spun in tiny cyclones by the cold breeze.

“Professor?”

“You’re Steve Macy?” The dowdy professor, sporting a bow tie and tweed jacket, was sitting behind piles of papers covering his desk.

He smiled. “Yes, sir.”

“I’m Richard Mathers. This is Geneva Settle.”

A short teenage girl, her skin as dark as the professor’s, glanced at him and nodded. Then she looked eagerly at the box he carted. She was so young. Could he really kill her?

Then an image of his daughter’s wedding on the dock of his summer house flashed through his mind, followed by a series of fast thoughts: the Mercedes AMG his wife wanted, his membership at the Augusta golf course, the dinner plans he had this evening at L’Etoile, to which
The New York Times
had just given three stars.

Those images answered his question.

Ashberry set the box on the floor. No cops inside, he noticed with relief. He shook Mathers’s hand. And thought: Fuck, they can lift fingerprints from flesh. After the shootings he’d have to take the time to wipe off the man’s palms. (He remembered what Thompson Boyd had told him: When it came to death, you did everything by the book, or you walked away from the job.)

Ashberry smiled at the girl. Didn’t shake her hand. He looked around the office, judging angles.

“Sorry for the mess,” Mathers said.

“Mine isn’t any better,” he said with a faint laugh. The room was filled with books, magazines and stacks of photocopies. On the wall were a number of diplomas. Mathers was, it turned out, not a history but a law professor. And a well-known one, apparently. Ashberry was looking at a photo of the professor with Bill Clinton and another with former mayor Giuliani.

As he saw these photos, the remorse raised its head again but it was really nothing more than a faint blip on the screen by now. Ashberry was comfortable with the fact that he was in the room with two dead people.

They chatted for a few minutes, with Ashberry talking in vague terms about schools and libraries in Philadelphia, avoiding any direct comments about what he was looking into. He stayed on the offensive, asking the professor, “What exactly’re
you
researching?”

Mathers deferred to Geneva, who explained that they were trying to find out about her ancestor, Charles Singleton, a former slave. “It was pretty weird,” she said. “The police thought that there was this connection between him and some crimes, ones that just happened. That turned out to be pretty wack, I mean, it was wrong. But we’re all curious about what happened to him. Nobody seems to know.”

“Let’s take a look at what you’ve got,” Mathers said, clearing a spot on a low table in front of his desk. “I’ll get another chair.”

This is it, Ashberry thought. His heart began pounding fast. He then recalled the razor knife slipping into the shopkeeper’s flesh, cutting two inches for the two days of missed juice, Ashberry hardly hearing the man’s screams.

Recalled all the years of backbreaking work to get to where he was today.

Recalled Thompson Boyd’s dead eyes.

He was instantly calm.

As soon as Mathers stepped into the hallway, the banker glanced out the window. The policeman was still in the car, a good fifty feet away, and the building was so solid he might not even hear the gunshots. With the desk between himself and Geneva, he bent down, shuffling through the papers. He gripped the shotgun.

“Did you find any pictures?” Geneva asked. “I’d really like to find more about what the neighborhood looked like back then.”

“I have a few, I think.”

Mathers was returning. “Coffee?” he called from the hallway.

“No, thanks.”

Ashberry turned to the door.

Now!

He started to rise, pulling the gun from the box, keeping it below Geneva’s eye level.

Aiming at the doorway, finger around the trigger.

But something was wrong. Mathers wasn’t appearing.

It was then that Ashberry felt something metallic touch his ear.

“William Ashberry, you’re under arrest. I have a weapon.” It was the girl’s voice, though a very different sound, an adult voice. “Set that breakdown on the desk. Slow.”

Ashberry froze. “But—”

“The shotgun. Set it down.” The girl nudged his head with the pistol. “I’m a police officer. And I will use my firearm.”

Oh, Lord, no . . . It was all a trap!

“Listen up, now, you do what she’s telling you.” This was the professor—though, of course, it wasn’t Mathers at all. He was a stand-in too, a cop who was pretending to be the professor. He glanced sideways. The man had come back into the office through a side door. From his neck dangled an FBI identification card. He too held a pistol. How the hell had they gotten onto him? Ashberry wondered in disgust.

“An’ don’ move that muzzle so much’s a skinny little millimeter. We all together on that?”

“I’m not going to tell you again,” the girl said in a calm voice. “Do it now.”

Still he didn’t move.

Ashberry thought of his grandfather, the mobster, he thought of the screaming shopkeeper, he thought of his daughter’s wedding.

What would Thompson Boyd do?

Play it by the book and give up.

No fucking way. Ashberry dropped into a crouch and spun around, lightning fast, lifting the gun.

Somebody shouted, “Don’t!”

The last word he ever heard.

“Quite a view,” Thom said.

Lincoln Rhyme glanced out the window at the Hudson River, the rock cliffs of the Palisades on the opposite shore and the distant hills of New Jersey. Maybe Pennsylvania too. He turned away immediately, the expression on his face explaining that panoramic views, like people’s pointing them out, bored him senseless.

They were in the Sanford Foundation office of the late William Ashberry atop the Hiram Sanford Mansion on West Eighty-second Street. Wall Street was still digesting the news of the man’s death and his involvement in a series of crimes over the past few days. Not that the financial community had ground to a halt; compared with, say, the betrayals visited on shareholders and employees by executives of Enron and Global Crossing, the death of a crooked executive of a
profitable
company didn’t make compelling news.