There Fell a Shadow (27 page)

I fought to keep the disdain out of my voice. “Call him off, Wexler,” I said again. “I filed the story before I left. What have you got to gain now?”

“Time,” he answered immediately. “I still need time.” He faced me fully again. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back. He stood very erect. “Whatever happens now, I will lose everything. I will lose Anne, when she finds out the truth, and very little else matters. But if I can somehow persuade you to hold the story for one day, one single day, Wells, I will have time to gather whatever … liquid assets are available to me, and make my way out of the country. If I must live in exile, I would like to live comfortably. That's not too much to ask.”

“If I hold the story, you'll let Chandler go.”

He nodded. “Correct.”

“Right now.”

“Of course not. If you hold the story, I will call Geoffrey and tell him not to kill her. When I am safely out of the country, he will release her.”

I glanced at my watch. Thirty-five minutes left.

“It's done,” I said. “Call him.”

“I have your word.”

“Yes. Call him.”

Wexler seemed to consider this for a moment. Then he nodded once. He gestured at me to follow and headed toward the draped entranceway that led to the living room.

He ducked under the drape. I followed. I saw the walls of gilded mirrors reflecting the marble statues back and forth at one another. Wexler was moving among the sofas and chairs with their scrolled legs and arms. Moving toward a little oaken table on which sat an antique telephone. I took two steps toward him and stopped.

Someone had come up behind me and placed a gun barrel against the base of my skull.

I
raised my hands. It seemed like the thing to do. Wexler stopped and turned to me. He looked surprised, as if he'd just remembered something.

“Oh … William,” he said. “No, no, there's no need for that. Mr. Wells and I have come to an understanding.”

“Yeah, William,” I said. “An understanding.”

The gun barrel was pulled away from my head. William came sidling around me into view. He turned out to be the guy who had chased me through F.A.O. Schwarz. He looked jumpy as a moth on a light bulb.

Wexler stood by the phone table waiting for him. William came up beside him. Wexler extended his hand, palm up. William gave him the gun.

“Thank you,” Wexler said. And to me: “I'm sorry. When I saw you coming, I didn't have much time to prepare. I thought it best to have William in reserve. You understand?”

“Most natural thing in the world,” I said.

Wexler smiled thinly. He turned to the phone. He picked up the handset. I put my hands down. The grandfather clock chimed. Eleven-thirty.

Wexler stuck his dialing finger in the rotator.

The doorbell rang. Wexler tilted his head like a bird trying to get a look at something.

Goddamn it! Goddamn it
, I thought.
Not now
.

It was the cops. I'd told Cochran to send them, and maybe I should have waited for them to show up. But now the timing was all wrong. They were the last thing I wanted. The last thing in the world.

“Who on earth is
that
?” Wexler murmured. Absently he began to replace the handset.

“Listen, would you call first,” I said.

“What?” He looked up at me, dazed.

That was all the time it took. The maid was at the door. Good old efficient Terry. I heard the latch click. I heard Gottlieb's voice, flat and hard and sharp as a knife blade: “Police!”

Wexler heard it, too. For a moment, he seemed not to comprehend. In another, it seemed to wash over him in a great red wave of understanding and anger. He stared at the drapery that hid the hall. He turned and stared at me. Back at the drapery again. And then he panicked.

That, after all, was Wexler's way: he panicked. He always had. He'd panicked when he faked a story because he thought he might not make it on the up-and-up. He panicked when he was faced with traveling through rebel lines. He panicked when he robbed Collins and sold out Eleanora. And he panicked when he saw Paul and ordered the killing of Colt. That was who he was, that was what he did. He was weak and he panicked. He panicked now.

The drapery was thrown aside. Gottlieb came charging through at the head of a wedge of patrolmen. He was resplendent in his mustard-colored jacket and peach shirt, his stocky shoulders squared, two cops striding on either side of him.

Wexler—his watery eyes wide—raised his pistol at him.

The wedge of cops exploded in all directions. The patrolmen dove for cover. Two dropped to the floor. One went skidding under a sofa. One went flying over a chair, went headfirst into a statue of a young man. The statue began to totter.

Gottlieb stayed on his feet. He stepped to one side, shoving me out of the way with his shoulder. At the same time, his hand shot inside his mustard-colored coat.

Wexler waved the big gun wildly. He fired it. It bucked in his hand. Gottlieb yanked out his detective's special.

I stumbled against a chair, one of my knees planted in the seat cushion. Beside me, the statue tilted this way and that.

Wexler brought his gun under control. He leveled it at Gottlieb. The detective took aim.

I held my hands up. I screamed crazily. “Don't fire, don't fire, don't fire!”

Gottlieb fired first. A black hole appeared at the dead center of Wexler's forehead. The rest of his brow seemed to cave into that hole from either side. Wexler skidded back across the floor on his heels. Then he fell over stiffly. He bounced on the floor stiffly. He was dead.

There was a second of silence. It seemed to go on forever. Wexler's body seemed to rock, head to toe, as it settled endlessly. William's mouth seemed to open and open and open on a cry of mourning, but the cry never seemed to come. The tottering statue finally fell with a crash. William cried out. The statue's head broke off and it rolled across the floor:
burrump burrump burrump
.

Gottlieb shook his head. “Ooh, I hate things like this,” he said.

“Oh Christ,” I said. “Chandler.”

I started running for the hall.

“John, wait!” Gottlieb shouted.

I couldn't wait. It was twenty-five minutes to noon.

I
f there are police, I will kill her
.

My old friend, the murder-man. He was out there now, on his own.

I will kill her in my not-very-pretty way
.

Without Wexler to call him off, I'd have to go after him alone. One sight of the police and he'd tear her to pieces. He'd said so, and I believed him. I'd seen the man at work.

I was out the town house door. I skittered down the front steps. The street was blocked with cop cars. It would take me fifteen minutes just to get the Dodge out of it.

I started running. Toward Fifth Avenue. Dimly, at my back, I heard a shout: “There he is, Officers! There he is! That's the man who dented my BMW!” I did not slow down.

I could see as I approached the Avenue that there were cabs everywhere. They were heading downtown toward that gathering mass of Christmas-shopping fares. That mass that would soon have traffic on lower Fifth at a standstill. I reached the corner and held out my hand. Luck was with me. A cab pulled over at once.

I leaned in at the driver's window desperately.

“Can you speak English?” I cried.

He poked his round, mustachioed face at me. “Jes. A leetle.”

“Can you get me to Crosby Street in fifteen minutes?”

His eyes widened.

“For twenty bucks,” I said.

His eyes widened some more. “I weel try, my freng.”

I jumped in the back. There were twenty-three minutes left.

It took him twenty. I don't know how he did it. Down Fifth awhile. Over to Park. Around Grand Central. On down into the jumbled streets and squares below Twenty-third. He never sped up much, he never slowed down. I think he hit every light. I think he won every tug-of-war for street space with the other cabs. In the Village, where the roads narrowed to single lanes crushed between cafés, I think he invented empty byroads, then took us down them.

They were twenty excruciating minutes, all the same. Helpless, I sat in the back, my eyes shooting from my watch to the street signs. I told myself that Geoffrey would not kill her at the stroke of noon. He would phone in first, try to reach Wexler. He would find out something was wrong. Maybe he would abandon plan A and move to another. Maybe a lot of things.

I lit a cigarette, took a drag. It felt fine. I leaned back with my head against the seat. I thought of Wexler's brow caving in around the black spot in the center. I thought of his body rocking on the floor. I thought I had never tasted a better cigarette than this. I did not know anything could taste so good.

I sat up with a start. I had lost track of myself. Drifted off in my own thoughts. For a second I felt panic rising in me as I wondered what time it was. I looked at my watch. Seventeen of. Thirty seconds had passed since I'd looked last. It had seemed like an hour.

And the driver kept to his course.

We hit the spot with three whole minutes to spare. Three whole minutes for Chandler to keep living. The driver left me off on the corner of Crosby and Spring. I handed my last thirty dollars across the seat to him.

“You're a genius,” I said, and jumped out of the car.

Even at noon, Crosby Street looked dark. The heavy walls of the old loft buildings leaned close to each other from either side of the warped cobbled lane. The air, when you looked down the road, seemed overhung with shadows. There was no one in sight. No cars. No signs of life at all.

The address Geoffrey had given me belonged to a loft building that sat right on the corner. Six stories of concrete. A heavy, rounded cornice rimmed the flat top. Rows of pilasters marked every floor.

On the side facing Spring, a rusting fire escape zigzagged down from between some of the windows. On Crosby Street, there were only the windows. Huge windows. Great blank screens staring out on either side. They were pivot-hung, the kind that swivel on a pivot in the center. They were the same kind as the ones in Colt's room. The ones through which Geoffrey had vanished after nearly killing me. The blank stare of those windows made the building look abandoned.

I jogged a few steps down Crosby until I reached the building's front door. It was a heavy wooden door with black paint chipping off it. There was a For Rent plaque screwed into the wall beside it. I didn't recognize the realtor's name, but it was a good guess the building belonged to Wexler.

I pushed through the door into a gray, shabby vestibule. My feet scraped over the curling floor tiles. There were mailboxes on one wall. There were no names on any of them. There were buzzer buttons in a line beside a speaker. The buttons were unmarked also, but Geoffrey had told me to hit the one for the third floor.

Somewhere, outside, I heard a church bell ringing. I reached for the button. Chandler started to scream.

I heard her only dimly. A thin cry from inside, beyond the door. I jammed my finger against the button. I hit it again and again. I heard the screaming stop.

I looked at my watch. It was twelve on the money.

“Jesus!” I hissed to myself. “You asshole! Jesus!”

The speaker crackled at my left shoulder. Geoffrey's voice followed.

“Mr. Wells,” he said. “Good of you to come.”

The buzzer sounded. I pushed the door open. I let it swing shut again. I turned and sprinted out of the vestibule onto the street.

I had figured from the beginning that he meant to kill us both. He had let Chandler see his face, after all. And though Wexler's motive for getting rid of us vanished when I got wise to him and wrote my story, Geoffrey still had a good enough reason to want the two of us out of the way.

I did not plan to lumber up the stairs while he waited for me. I did not plan to have him meet me at the front door.

I hurried around back to Spring Street instead. I stood under the building's fire escape. The ladder was in the up position. It dangled about two feet above my head. I jumped. I felt a muscle in my armpit tear. I grabbed hold of the ladder. For a second I dangled in the air. I felt a muscle in my shoulder tear. Then the ladder came loose and rattled down.