In a Heartbeat (2 page)

4

Dr. Art Jacobs, the eminent cardiologist, hurried into the emergency room, summoned from a Broadway opening-night party by the chief resident, who had worked with him and knew him to be a good friend of the patient.

In an impeccably cut tuxedo, Art Jacobs was as out of place in the seething emergency room, with its bloody, mutilated bodies and hordes of wailing, terrified relatives, as an orchid in a cow pasture. Fifty-six years old, tall, balding, and dapper, he wore what was left of his silver hair long over his collar to remind himself that he was not totally hairless yet.

He looked down at his friend as the resident in charge filled him in on the seriousness of Vincent’s condition.

He adjusted his glasses, thinking how terrible it was to see a big man like Ed Vincent, rugged, larger than life, brought down to this pale specter on an emergency room gurney. “Has he been alert at all since he got here?”

“For a couple of seconds. Said he had to get out of here,” the resident told him with a wry grin.

“Can’t say I blame him. Who’s operating?”

“We got lucky. Frank Orenbach was on the premises.”

Jacobs nodded. He knew Orenbach, knew he was a good and capable surgeon.

“I’ll assist,” he said, walking toward the scrub room. “It’s all I can do for you, Ed,” he said. “Besides pray,” he added grimly.

Art Jacobs had known Ed for fifteen years and considered himself a good friend. Ed sent Art’s wife flowers on her birthday. They dined together once a month at the old-fashioned little Italian place in Greenwich Village that Ed liked. He had met Ed’s girlfriends as well as many of his numerous business acquaintances. But he had never once been invited to Ed’s home atop the Vincent Towers on Fifth Avenue.

Ed was funny that way, and Art accepted it. The man guarded his privacy like the Holy Grail, and in these days of public muckraking and exposés by the tabloid media, he did not blame him. And, as far as he knew, no one—not even a woman—had ever visited Ed’s personal nirvana, the beach house. While other rich men socialized in summer mansions in the Hamptons, Ed Vincent took himself off for long weekends of solitude, fishing from his old forty-foot Europa, or painting his deck, or just hanging out with the gulls and the seals. He liked it that way, and Art admired him for his freedom and independence.

He only wished he could do more to help him now.

5

Detective Camelia was getting exactly nowhere. There were no witnesses to the shooting. Only the mechanic who was to take care of the Cessna had heard the shots and come running from the hangar. He said he thought he saw a pickup pulling away but was so panicked he could not even recall the color or make, let alone the number.

“What d’ya want me to tell ya,” he yelled. “Ed Vincent’s lying on the floor, bleeding all over the place, and I’m supposed to be writing down license numbers? I was on the phone to medical emergency, you asshole.”

Camelia raised his eyebrows, and the mechanic remembered who he was talking to and growled an apology. “Y’know how it is.” He gave a little shrug. “I’m upset. I worked for the guy. I liked him. It’s tough shit that this has happened to him.”

“You’re right. And you did the right thing,” Camelia said to calm him down, hoping he might recall something later. Often witnesses remembered more than they thought initially. Something might just pop into his mind. That it was a white Chevy or a Dodge Ram, for instance. And that the guy driving it was Caucasian, or black, or Hispanic. Anything was possible. He could only hope.

The hangar and the area outside, where the cement was liberally stained with Ed Vincent’s blood, had been cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape. Camelia didn’t know how a man could lose that much blood and still live, even a big guy like Vincent. He guessed it was a question of mind over matter at that point. Strength of will over strength of body. Give the man credit, he would never have thought he’d still be in the land of the living, even though it was only just.

Detectives were still combing the area, and forensics was doing its stuff, searching for hairs, for fibers and powder burns, for greasy tire marks and possible gasoline leaks from the pickup’s engine. Tiny pieces of nothing that could amount to everything in the final scientific puzzle they would try to solve.

Watching them, Camelia sometimes wished he had chosen that field. He had graduated from the police academy. He could have gone on from there, but he’d had a wife and two kids by then, and besides, he enjoyed the action, the camaraderie of the precinct house. He even enjoyed the ribbing he got over his name—
“Hey,
Camille,”
they would shout at him, laughing as the wiry little Sicilian gave them an angry black-eyed glare. It was his life. He liked it. He felt a part of the NYPD in a way that the scientists with their solitary pursuits were not.

He had worked his way up through the ranks after years driving a patrol car in the Bronx. Those were really the hard times, he thought. Nothing could ever equal those rough, tough days. He crossed himself thankfully. Like Ed Vincent, he was lucky to be alive, and he knew it.

After the patrol car, he had done time on the bomb squad, then vice, drugs, and, finally, homicide. He had seen it all. Been there, done that. And he never dreamed about it at night. No sir, he kept his work life in one compartment and his home life in another. When he got home late, Claudia would already be sleeping. She would curl herself, spoonlike, around him, and he never thought about another thing, except the way she felt, and the way she smelled so sweet of Arpège, his favorite perfume. He was a lucky man. Luckier, he knew now, than the rich guy on the operating table.

Detective Jonas Machado drew a chalk circle on the cement around a shell casing, and the crime-scene photographer took pictures of it, showing its measurements and location. Machado picked up the brass with tweezers and dropped it into a Ziploc. “That’s three,” he said to Camelia. “We’re missing one.”

“Looks like one went through the fuselage.” Camelia peered into the customized silver Cessna, taking a minute to admire the taupe leather seats. He thought the interior of the little aircraft looked like an expensive sport-utility vehicle. “They probably missed him with that shot,” he said. “So there should be one slug inside the aircraft, plus at least one other. Keep on looking, Machado. We need it.”

He sighed, watching the ongoing search. All they had so far were three .40mm bullet casings and the information that a pickup had been observed departing the scene of the crime. Not one of his better nights in police work.

This one was going to be a toughie. And with an important man like Vincent, all hell would break loose once the media found out. Meanwhile, there was a blanket of silence until the next of kin could be found and informed. Trouble was, so far they had failed to turn up any next of kin. Sooner or later they would have to tell the press. That was, of course, if the nosy bastards didn’t find out first.

6

Vincent Towers Fifth was an imposing building clad in pale unpolished travertine, soaring fifty floors above Fifth Avenue, with a fabulous view of the park. The smartly dressed doorman had a look of alarm when the squad cars drew up outside. Police were definitely not a part of daily life at Vincent Towers.

The concierge came hurrying, anxious to remove whatever trouble there might be from the pristine lobby of his building. But the expression on his face altered when Camelia showed him the search warrant, told him there had been an accident and that Mr. Vincent was in the hospital.

The elevator walls were paneled in pale wood, and a beveled mirror reflected back the men’s silent images as they soared smoothly upward. Then the door slid back silently and they were in the foyer of the penthouse.

The concierge hovered near Camelia, watching his every move as he sauntered through the rooms, eyeing the sparse decor, the simple bedroom, the stark bathroom. He thought it surely looked like a bachelor pad to him, though “pad” was hardly the right word. This place could have been inhabited by a monk.

The concierge was breathing down his neck again and Camelia sighed as he said, “It’s okay, sir, you can leave now. I’m not gonna steal the silver.” If there was any silver to steal, he thought, still surprised by how austerely Vincent lived. And him, such a rich guy. Maybe money didn’t mean everything after all.

The elevator
ping
ed again and Camelia’s cohorts arrived, men in blue looking tough and businesslike. Forensics was there too. And, of course, the photographer.

“Nothin’s been touched,” he told them. “Take your pictures before we start turning the place over. And I want every print in the place. Okay?”

He waited while the police photographer did his stuff, then he set to work, starting in the bedroom.

The bed was made up with fresh sheets— Camelia checked just to make sure. There wasn’t a speck of dust in the room, nor much comfort, either, he thought, remembering his own cozy master bedroom. Kind of a love nest, Claudia had made it, in deep red paisley with muted lighting and soft rugs. None of that here. Ed Vincent obviously didn’t like frills.

The bathroom was tiled in stark white and the shower doors were clear sheets of thick glass, not a scrap of gold in sight. Luxury reduced to minimalism. Not Camelia’s style, but who could tell with rich folks? Whoever had said they were different from us had gotten it right.

No water spots on the shower doors, no toothpaste uncapped, no mess in the sink. A pile of plain white towels awaited the master, as did a single Lucite toothbrush and a fresh bar of fragrance-free white soap in the matching dish. Looking for clues to an attempted murder in here was like searching for a snowball in a glacier.

Camelia dialed the concierge on the house phone. “Who cleans Mr. Vincent’s apartment?” he asked.

“It’s the building cleaning service, sir. They come every day.”

“So they were here this morning?”

“No, sir, not yet. They were here yesterday, though.”

“Thanks. One of my men will be down shortly. You give him the name of the cleaning service— he’ll want to speak to the person in charge of Mr. Vincent’s apartment.”

“Yes, sir.” The concierge was all business now. Camelia guessed he was nervous about men in blue littering his posh lobby. Well, tough. This was more serious than a few rich folks getting upset. Ed Vincent was almost a dead man.

He opened the drawers, sifted through the few personal things in there, the kinds of things any man kept in his bathroom—electric razor, spare toothbrushes, condoms. . . . Camelia wondered whether the spare toothbrushes were for his female overnight guests—and he was glad that Ed practiced safe sex.

He went through the drawers in the enormous walk-in closet that would easily have accommodated one of his kid’s bedrooms. He hated going through a man’s things, hated prying into his life, but this was his job. And he was nothing if not thorough. But this time, thoroughness got him exactly nowhere.

The print man told him there were very few prints because the place had been thoroughly cleaned, and the uniforms found nothing of significance, though they went through every pocket of every garment, as well as every cupboard and drawer. It beat Camelia how the man could live without a trace of clutter. There was even nothing in the refrigerator, not even the rich-bachelor token bottle of champagne. He just didn’t get it. If it were not for the clothes in the closet, he would have sworn that nobody lived here.

Sighing, he called it a wrap. “Thanks, guys,” he said as they departed in the soundless elevator. Then he walked back into the closet and studied the small safe set into the wall. It would take a locksmith as well as a warrant, and he got on his cell phone to try to organize both.

He was thinking of his small, immaculate home in Queens. Kind of lived in, a touch worn after four kids. But it was a real home. This was merely a shelter from the storm. A cave.

After that he called Claudia, just to say hi and ask what she was up to. Not that he was controlling or anything, he just liked to know where his family was. Claudia believed it was a spin-off from his job. The Permanent Detective, she called him, with that nice silky laugh of hers.

She would hate this place, he thought as he waited for the elevator. Give her the creeps. It was less like a home than any hotel room, and he wondered again about Ed Vincent, the man. Who he was. And what he was.

7

There
was
a place between life and death, Ed knew it now. It was called “limbo,” and it was the most frustrating place to be, halfway between earth and heaven. It felt more like hell, with all the worries and problems of life and none of the ease and relaxation of death.
How
dare they do this to me.

He thrashed wildly in the narrow hospital bed, and the watchful ICU nurse hurried to his side. Her patient was just three hours out of O.R. His status was critical. She checked the ventilator that kept him breathing, checked the drains in his chest and the tubes feeding fluids into his veins. She watched the monitor for a minute, then looked again at her patient. He was still now, though his breathing sounded as labored and raucous as a tractor engine.

He was big, six-four, broad-shouldered, rugged, but right now he looked far different from the great, handsome bear of a man she had seen on TV, at the opening of one of his new Vincent Towers buildings in Manhattan.

She looked at her watch. It was midnight, and the doctor on duty would be doing his rounds soon. Plus, no doubt Mr. Vincent’s own medic, Art Jacobs, would also make an appearance.

She checked her other intensive care patient, a woman just out of the O.R. after an emergency quadruple bypass following a heart attack earlier that evening. Each nurse in ICU had two patients under her care. This second one had gotten a break. She would live. Her first patient, Mr. Vincent, might not be so lucky.

There was nothing else she could do for either of them right now. She walked back to the nurses’ station, where a wall of monitors displayed each patient’s current state, took a Diet Coke out of the refrigerator, and sank thankfully into a chair. It was going to be a long night.

Which was just what Ed Vincent was thinking. In fact, he was thinking this might be the longest night of his life. Perhaps, like a drowning man, his life should be passing before his eyes. Isn’t that what was supposed to happen when you were dying? God, it was ironic how all the old sayings and myths just flew into his brain, when the truth was that nobody really knew what happened, because nobody who had died had ever lived to tell the tale.

Zelda,
he thought, agonized.
Ah, Zelda, you
crazy, pixie-faced golden girl.

He’d never met anyone like her. Extroverted, ditsy, outspoken. With Zelda, every entrance was an Entrance. Every meal a Feast. Every meeting a Rendezvous. She had the happy knack of making an Event out of the most ordinary occasion. He figured even brushing her teeth must be a scene from a movie.

“Where’s the real you?” he’d asked her once, bewildered and laughing.

“I wish I knew,” she’d replied serenely. “I’m out there somewhere.”

She certainly was.

She had popped into his life “out of the blue,” you might say. He’d thought she was nuts, then. Still did in a way, but it was her nuttiness that he loved. He loved her seven-year-old daughter, Riley. He even liked that ratty little terrier of hers that bit his ankles every time it saw him.

Zelda was unique. Though of course “Zelda” was not her real name. Only
he
called her that, because of her Georgia-peach accent and her southern charm. “You’re straight out of Fitzgerald,” he had said, laughing. “They should have called you Zelda.”

She had laughed with him, and from then on it had become his name for her. Only she knew that name. Only he knew what it meant. And she called him “honey.” He had been surprised when, at their first meeting, she addressed him as “Mr. Vincent, honey.” Until she’d apologized and told him not to mind her, she was from the south and called everybody honey, that’s just the way she was.

Oh, what he would give to hear her call him honey one more time. Even “hon” would do.

She lived at 139 Ascot Street, Santa Monica, California, in an old craftsman-style Victorian cottage on a leafy side street, a place so small that when he first saw it, it had reminded him of his own birthplace, a two-room cabin in the foothills of the Great Smokies.

“Hi, Zel,” he would say on the phone from New York. “How’s my girl today?”

“Busy,” she might snap. “It’s suppertime here, and I’m just giving Riley her grits.”

He laughed, imagining her with the phone tucked into her shoulder as she juggled pots and pans on the stove. Of course, she wasn’t fixing grits. And a cook Zelda was not. Nevertheless, she insisted on giving Riley a home-cooked meal, including fresh vegetables, every night.

And she kept Sundays free only for Riley. Even he had not been included. Riley’s day was Riley’s, to do whatever she wanted. Which usually meant homemade buttermilk pancakes for breakfast while still in their PJs, then rollerblading on the Venice boardwalk, afterward catching a bite of lunch and maybe a movie. Then supper somewhere later, to which he had been privileged to be invited several times by Riley herself.

What a kid she was. Had he ever been lucky enough to have one of his own, he would have wanted her to be like Riley, with her mop of copper-red curls, her big brown eyes just like her mom’s, and that engaging gap-toothed smile. He’d even mentioned to her that it might be a mistake to grow new teeth, it was so cute just the way it was.

“Thanks a lot,” she had replied, whistling slightly through the gap as she spoke, “but I don’t think I’d be a very good kisser without my front teeth.”

“Kissing? What kissing?”
Zelda had been so outraged at the idea, Ed and Riley had laughed at her.

Good times,
he thought. Those were such
good
times. What a pity he hadn’t written them down. Then he thought,
Listen, buddy, make
the most of this day. This may be all there is.

He shifted restlessly in the narrow bed, heard the nurse’s soft rubber-soled footsteps, felt her cool fingers on his wrist as she took his pulse. He heard her say, “Good evening, Dr. Jacobs.” Then his friend and doctor replied, “How’s our patient, Nurse?”

“Much the same, sir. Though he has been a little restless.”

“How’re you doin’, Ed?”

Art Jacobs bent over him. Ed could smell his cologne, guessed he’d been out to dinner and was wearing his usual smart Italian suit. Art was a fashion plate in the medical world, had all the nurses running after him, which was how he’d met his wife. A good guy. One of the best, and a dedicated medic. He wanted so badly to see him, tell him hi, one last time. . . .

No. It couldn’t be the last time. He had to get out of here. Zelda was in danger, they would kill her too—and Riley. He had to find Zelda. Protect them. . . .

Dr. Jacobs straightened up. He patted his old friend’s arm. “Doing good, old buddy,” he said. “It’s all you can expect with wounds like yours.” He took a step back, startled, as Ed’s eyes flew open. They stared maniacally into his.

Dr. Jacobs leaned over him again. “What is it, Ed? I can tell you need to say something. Look, if I put pressure here, on the tube in your throat, you can speak. Try to tell me, buddy. Tell us who did this to you.”

“Zelda.”
Ed’s voice was a throaty gurgle.

“Zelda did it? Zelda who?” Art kept his finger on the tracheotomy tube, but it was no good.

Ed groaned in frustration and despair as he felt himself retreating again.
Oh, God, not the tunnel.
Not now.
It was almost funny—when he wanted to leave this world, he couldn’t. When he didn’t want to, it seemed they came looking for him. Dammit, he wasn’t going down that tunnel now, though he could see that light shining. . . .

“Quick, he needs a shot of dobutamine.” Dr. Jacobs was all business as he injected the stimulant directly into Ed’s heart. “Jesus, Ed,” he muttered, “I’m not gonna lose you now, not after all this.” But he knew it was touch and go.