Watch You Die (5 page)

“God forbid.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to be the person who made any promises.”

“Were you?”

“No.”

“Who?”

“I can’t be sure.”

“Guess.”

“That’s all I can tell you. At least three people were buried in this lot and we’ll never know who. Their families won’t have closure. That’s what bothers me so much, I think. And the possibility that after twenty-five years working my heart out for a city I love they would sell out to the bad guys for a real estate deal that’s going to make a few developers rich, and be the jewel in our mayor’s crown if everything goes his way. It disturbs me. And the scheming going into the cover-up – that disturbs me, too.” He wiped his forehead again and checked his watch. Tendrils of sunlight were reaching into the dark sky. He glanced over his shoulder at Flatbush Avenue. “Be very careful what you do with this.”

“I will.”

“But please don’t turn your back on it.” He caught my eye and I nodded, and implicit in that nod was a promise we both acknowledged in silence. Then he turned and walked away.

I watched him, tall and straight in the early dawn. He buckled his bike helmet under his chin and
disappeared
around the corner. I walked down to Fourth Avenue where I could catch a subway into Manhattan. On the corner of Fourth and Pacific I saw Abe Starkman whizzing past on a white racing bike, shoulders hunched over his handlebars and necktie flapping behind him.

It was easy getting a seat on the subway this early. I jotted notes all the way into midtown. Abe Starkman had tossed me a giant hot potato. I needed to think it through and do some preliminary research. When I had some information to bolster (or not) his credibility, then I would talk with Elliot, my editor. But my brain was buzzing in a bad way and thinking clearly right now wasn’t easy. I slipped my notebook into my bag, sat back and closed my eyes until the train pulled into 42nd Street.

The first thing I did when I ascended onto Seventh Avenue was get coffee and a bagel at the nearest deli. While I had been in the tunnels the sun had fully risen and the morning rush had started. I took a few sips of coffee – the warm caffeine bursting awake synapses in my brain – then walked toward the
Times
building carrying my brown-bag breakfast in one hand and dialing Nat on my cell with the other hand. I had to call twice before he groggily answered.

“Mom?”

“Up and at ’em, Sonny Boy. Time for school.”

“What time is it?”

“Almost seven fifteen.”

“Where are you?”

“Walking into my office building. Pushing the elevator button. About to step into the elevator and lose this connection. Eighth floor, seventh, sixth, here it comes.”

“Spare me the countdown.”

“Are you getting up?”

“Hey, Mom, who kept calling last night? That was loco.”

“Totally loco. In fact, better not answer it this morning if it starts ringing again.”

“Trust me, I won’t.”

“Remember to lock up behind you when you leave and—”

“Mom!”

“OK! I love you, Nat. Have a great day. I’ll wait for you outside school after the show.”

“See ya later, Mom.”

The newsroom was humming when I walked in and headed to my desk. Courtney, a young Metro crime reporter I’d befriended, was talking on the phone, leaning back in her chair with her long legs crossed at the knee. Her straight blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail, which generally meant she planned to stay in the office writing until her shift ended midday. She had long, lustrous hair she
always
deployed in its full glory when out on assignment. Though I was older by a decade we had bonded in our agreement of how our femininity, though in some ways it held us back professionally, was inevitably part of our arsenal. Where we differed was in precisely how to use it. She was of a younger generation who wore high heels and short skirts and expected to go far. I was of an older generation who feared that if we dressed that way at work we’d end up nowhere. Plus I had life experience that told me that you went farther on brains and integrity. Courtney had those in spades but she also had the legs and the hair. I couldn’t blame her for using them to her advantage though it worried me to think that her
feminine wiles
approach might cause some kind of professional backlash sooner or later.

I winked at Courtney and lifted my chin in hello, not wanting to disturb her call, but there was something she wanted to communicate to me enough that she gestured to my brown bag, shook her head and shrugged her shoulders. I had no idea what she was trying to get across.

Until I reached my desk. The roller shade was partway down, blanketing half my desktop in shadow. The other half looked stage-lit, accentuating the fact that a breakfast identical to the one in my bag had already been delivered for me.

The poppy bagel with chive cream cheese was
sliced
in half and laid out on a white paper plate with crinkled edges. Beside it a paper cup, I LOVE NEW YORK with a red heart for
love
leaning along two sides, sat with its lid pressed tightly on. Coffee, I assumed. Coffee with milk, just as I liked it. What else had Brian at the corner deli revealed about my tastes yesterday when Joe and I waited in line?

Joe. Sleep stealer. I emptied my brown paper bag, removed the breakfast I had bought, put this other breakfast in the bag and rolled closed the top. Then I tossed the bag into the garbage can. Only now did I see the note he had left with the food:

Sorry about last night, Darcy. I was too eager for feedback. I feel terrible that my calling probably bothered you. It won’t happen again. Promise
.

That defused my irritation enough to stop and think. He realized he had made a mistake and he was sorry. He had bought me breakfast as a peace offering, which was actually a thoughtful gesture, wasn’t it? I had a choice: I could hold a grudge and things would be really uncomfortable whenever I ran into him at work, or I could accept his apology and let it go. I ate my breakfast and stewed on it. Finally I decided on number two, forgive and forget. Hugo had talked a lot about the power of diplomacy, not
getting
self-righteously stuck on the finer points of a conflict, how important it was to stay focused on the larger picture. I wasn’t sure exactly what the conflict with Joe had been about – had I bruised his ego? – but I would give him the benefit of the doubt. He was ashamed of himself. Wasn’t that enough punishment? Anyway, I had other, more important things on my mind and didn’t want to fret too much about Joe and his youthful preoccupations.

I checked email while finishing my breakfast. After a few minutes Courtney came over and leaned on my desk.

“So what’s with the new guy from the mailroom?”

I shook my head, smiled, leaned back in my chair. “He used to live on Martha’s Vineyard. We didn’t exactly know each other but he recognized me and we had lunch yesterday. Yada yada yada.”

“He’s got a crush on you.”

“I’m not so sure about that. I think he’s just new here and he wants to make connections.”

“I saw him drop off the breakfast. The way he set it up – he rearranged it twice. He likes you.”

“Maybe. But if he does, he shouldn’t.”

“Puppy love,” she said, and leaned in to needle me some more when her ringing phone summoned her back to her work.

I expected Joe to stop by my desk and continue the drama of his overenthusiasms, taking the
temperature
of his apology and so on. But two hours passed with no sign of him, which was nothing if not a relief.

I got to work on the bones story. The first thing I did was check out Abe Starkman, who on paper looked squeaky clean in a way that correlated with what my intuition had told me in person: that he was a whistle-blower, the real thing. Next I went to the Department of Buildings website and found the public record for the purchase of the nineteen lots: a deal between Metro Partners, the seller, and Livingston & Sons, the buyer, just as Abe had described. Then I checked out Russet Cleanup, a toxic waste removal outfit that had been in business under two years and had already racked up complaints with the Better Business Bureau though no city violations, which seemed a paradox as normally the two went hand in hand. Everything, so far, seemed to bolster Abe’s version of events.

Just after nine, Elliot arrived. He whizzed through the newsroom nodding and helloing and high-fiving all the way to his corner office. His next move was always to review phone messages then make his way to the coffee pot that sat on a low bookcase across the newsroom. As soon as he installed himself behind his desk, I poured two cups of coffee and headed to his office.

“Thank you!” As he took the styrofoam cup he
quickly
sipped to make sure it was prepared to his liking, light with half a packet of sweetener. One of the first things a reporter learned in Elliot’s newsroom was how he drank his coffee; it was the surest way to snag his attention before other business did.

“Mind if I close the door?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Go ahead.”

I shut the door and sat across from him. His hair was still wet from the shower and he wore a pristine white shirt open at the neck. I suspected he’d been up for hours as his wife also worked and they had young daughters whose nanny often arrived late. I could imagine the mad rush for the shower and the door. A portrait of his family smiled at me from an enlarged photo propped on a file cabinet behind him.

He took another drink of his coffee then set it down beside him and leaned forwards, arms folded together on his desk, ready to listen.

I told him everything about the phone call yesterday and my meeting with Abe Starkman to whom I referred only as an “anonymous source who works at the Department of Buildings”.

“Did you get the call yet?”

“Nope. But it’s still early. Buildings doesn’t open until nine.”

“Right. They’ll want it to seem as normal as possible. When they do call, Darcy –
if
they call – treat it like you would any other piece of information
coming
from a government agency. Take notes, get contact info and thank them. If they tell you to call Russet Cleanup, call Russet Cleanup. Then come talk to me and we’ll take it from there. No story until we investigate this fully. Ticking off City Hall is not something we like to do on an everyday basis. OK?” He shifted to face his computer. I could see he was itching to move his day along.

“One more question, Elliot.”

“Yup.”

“I’d like it to stay my story. I mean, after they do their environmental bit with me about the chemical drums and Russet. I’m very interested in this.”

He considered me a moment. “I’m sure you are. It could be very interesting. But government corruption isn’t your area of expertise … so we’ll see.”

“Some people think government corruption and environmental issues are exactly the same thing.”

He smiled, then repeated himself: “We’ll see.”

“Should I check out the bones in the meantime? Make sure they really exist?”

“Not yet. Let me think on it. Just wait and see if that call comes.”

I got back to work, on alert for the phone to ring. It didn’t. Meanwhile I hunkered down to see how much information I could wrest out of public and private databases, LexisNexis and the
Times
’ own archives. I searched for stray facts, back story, local
history
, mob lore, anything that seemed reasonably connectable to Abe’s claim about the dug-up bones. For example, I learned that prior to 1978 when the chemical factory was built the city had seen 558 presumed mob hits to seventeen related murder convictions to almost ten thousand unsolved missing persons cases. Whole people had vanished off the face of the earth, thousands in this city alone, since they started keeping records in the mid-1800s. Prior to 1978 two other buildings had stood in that very spot, the first having been erected in 1795 and the second in 1871. For over two hundred years the only opportunities to hide bodies in that lot had been just after the American Revolution, at the birth of the industrial age and in the drug-addled disco-crazed late 1970s.

It was only a guess but I chose door number three, 1978. And I was intrigued by Abe Starkman’s assertion that Tony T may have gotten a better deal than the developer-city silent partnership had realized when they (allegedly) brokered an agreement to buy his land for part-cash, part-favors. The city wouldn’t have factored in that their blind eye would have to encompass three murder victims and leave them forever unnamed. No wonder they wanted the bones to disappear into the forensics stacks. It was safer for the city to sweep this one under the rug and leave it there. And it would be safer, for Abe and me and the
Times
,
to forget about it, too. Business–government–mob corruption was an old and dangerous story.

But the bones, if they were real, had a story to tell. Leaving those people unnamed and forgotten would be an unspeakable lapse in our own humanity. In my heart I knew that we had to find out who they were … and how they got there. Hugo’s death had taught and was teaching me so many things, one of which was that you completely lose someone only when you stop remembering.

The afternoon came and went without the awaited phone call. I had to leave the office at four to make sure I’d be seated in the theater at Nat’s school for the five o’clock performance. Park Slope’s M.S. 51 was one of Brooklyn’s most popular middle schools but every subway was at least a ten-minute walk away. Luckily I made it on time and didn’t miss a moment of the show, an hour and a half of joyous small moments that got my mind off the bones and Joe and my exhaustion and onto what was most important. Nat was important. His song was important and especially important was his voice, booming and creaking as it swung through the raucous number his teacher had chosen. Nat had wanted to sing a ballad, slow and sad, but his teacher had given him this happy comedic song instead. I could practically see his bogged-down spirit lift as he sang,
center
stage, alone in a spotlight. When he was through, applause was thunderous. I clapped louder than everyone else, my eyes filling with tears. Before the applause had fully died down I heard a voice lean in behind me.