There Fell a Shadow (13 page)

Lansing straightened. Her high white cheeks turned red. “Back off it, Wells,” she said. “It's mine.”

I was taken aback. “Boy, McKay was right about your mood.”

“McKay's an idiot. Just stay off my story.”

Now I began to be a tad peeved. “Your story? The guy got killed right in front of me.”

“That's right,” she snapped, “and the killer saw you.”

“So what?”

“So just keep a goddamned low profile, okay?”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“If you get killed on this, Wells, so help me, I'll be really, really mad.”

We glared at each other for a second. “Get out of here,” I mumbled, turning from her to the paper on my desk. “I'm busy with Corlies Park. Trying to find out what the
Times
did with it, for crying out loud. They're burying this stuff, I swear it. I think they're sleeping with these people over there.”

I continued to mutter to myself until I heard Lansing shift behind me. “Just eat your goddamned bagel, Wells,” she said. When I sneaked a look, she was gone.

I went back to work. It was slow going. There were no big breaks to be had. It would take me all day just to leapfrog over the
News
with a few new details of my own. I took a new tack, running down a few old rumors about Giotto, the mobster who'd gotten the contract for the playground. I was on the phone so long I felt my ear was welded to the receiver.

Around three that afternoon, McKay returned. He thumped a paper bag on my desk.

“What am I, an underprivileged nation? What is this?” I said.

“A BLT,” said McKay. “Lansing says eat it or she'll kill your cat.”

“I don't have a cat.”

“She says she'll buy you a cat and then kill it. She'll name it Scruffy.”

“Man,” I said, “she's tough.”

I exhumed the sandwich, bit into it. Leaned my head back and stared at the ceiling, chewing.

McKay sat on top of the papers on top of my desk. “You look beat,” he said.

“I thought I looked like shit.”

“You look like beat shit.”

I chewed a while. “You ever think about birdcages?” I said.

“What, you mean, like, the lining thereof?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure. You bust your ass, you get it, you write it, you print it. Next day, they use it to line birdcages. Or wrap fish. Who doesn't think about that?”

“Doesn't bother you? Good writer like you? You could write books.”

“I'll write books.”

I nodded. “Sure you will,” I said. I took another bite of the sandwich, closed my eyes. I hardly had the energy to chew. I was beat, like the man said. I opened my eyes. The fluorescents made them ache. “I'll bet Colt would've written books,” I said. “Good books.”

“Hell,” said McKay, “you'll write books, too.”

I laughed. “I don't even read books.”

He pushed off my desk. “Nowadays, that's not a problem.”

When he was gone, I finished the sandwich. I smoked a cigarette. I smoked another. Finally I turned to the papers scattered on the desk before me. With a sigh I gathered my notes on Corlies Park. I began to assemble them into a story. There wasn't much to work with. I'd gotten a guy in Ciccelli's office to give me a little on their investigations into Giotto's construction company. If I led with it, it would look like we'd gotten something new the
News
had missed. I could do to them, in other words, exactly what they'd done to me.

I started writing it. My typewriter clacked loudly in the room filled with quiet keyboards. It was routine stuff. The background was copied straight out of my original story. My mind drifted as I copied it. It drifted to Colt. I thought about him writing books. He would've done it, too. He would've written the books that I would never write. The stuff I wrote would just keep lining birdcages.

My mind drifted on. It drifted to Eleanora. I thought about her moving among her refugees, whispering to them. What was her voice like, I wondered. English, Wexler had said. Did she have one of those sweet, melodic British voices you hear in the movies? Deborah Kerr, that sort of thing. When you saw her—when Colt saw her—walking among the sick and suffering, did he suddenly feel there was something more to life? Something better than lining birdcages?

I finished the story around five o'clock. Around 5:01, all hell broke loose.

I
t started with a shout from the city desk.

“Lansing!”

I had just gotten up to bring my story to the editor. I was in the aisle when Lansing came tearing out of her cubicle across the room. She had her purse strapped over one shoulder, a camera strapped over the other. She was wearing a tight wool dress, dark green, with a skirt that flared. It lifted from her legs as she stepped briskly toward the desk. Reporters, editors, and copyboys stopped in the aisles to watch.

She was halfway to the desk when she called out to Rafferty: “Got him?”

Rafferty's old, bald, bullet-shaped head nodded in imperturbable calm. “Maybe,” he said—quietly, but so it carried to her. “Just heard a call over the scanner. There's a raid on at Thirtieth and Madison, the Hotel Lincoln. Thought I heard Paul's name. We're calling on it.”

Lansing changed directions. She headed toward the glass doors. The reporters, editors, and copyboys watched her green skirt. “I don't want to wait,” she called over her shoulder. “I wanna be there. Get me on the two-way if you get it confirmed.”

I walked up to our medical reporter, a guy named Vaughn. I stuffed my story into his hands.

“Stop drooling and give that to Rafferty,” I said. I left him there staring and ran after Lansing. I caught up with her as she threw the big glass door open. I held it for her, followed her out to the elevators.

We stood next to each other, waiting for the doors to open. Lansing did not turn. She pressed her lips together. She tapped her foot angrily.

The elevator bell rang. The door slid back. The box was empty. We got on, pressed the button. We watched the arrow above the door sweep toward one.

“Why are you doing this?” she said.

“Because I was there, Lansing. And hell, if he wants to find me, I'm in the book.”

She bit her lip. The elevator touched down. “Okay,” she said.

Even before the door fully opened, we were hurrying through the lobby to the street.

Lansing's car was parked in the press section just out front on Vanderbilt. She drove a Honda Accord, a semisnazzy hatchback, all red. She had her keys out of her purse as she came around the driver's side. She let herself in and leaned over to snap open the passenger door for me.

It was rush hour. It was dark. Up in front of us, we could see the glaring lights of the traffic packed tight on Forty-second Street around Grand Central. We could hear the horns as motionless cars fought for space amidst motionless city buses. The cold purple of the evening air seemed to shimmer with the rising exhaust.

On one side of Vanderbilt, the stream of cars flowed slowly but steadily toward the logjam up ahead. On the other side, sparser traffic zipped toward Forty-fifth. Lansing turned the key in the ignition, flicked on the headlights. She hit the gas and made the engine roar. With one fluid motion, she looked over her shoulder, put the car in gear, turned the wheel, and shot out into the street.

The horns went up behind us like flares from a sinking ship.

“Jesus!” I said. I reached for my shoulder harness.

Before I could get it on, I was thrown sharply against the door. The strap flew from my hands. My left elbow hit the edge of the dashboard.

“Yah!” I remarked.

Lansing was making a U-turn.

The disparate flares of car horns united into a single screaming flame. Brakes screeched on the wet pavement. Headlights swiveled this way and that. Lansing's Accord wove and swayed through spaces that were barely there as she shot into the uptown stream. Cursing, I grabbed the shoulder strap again.

The strap flew from my hands as my shoulder slammed into the door. Someone screamed curses in a deep, guttural voice. The tires of the Accord answered with an agonizing squeal as Lansing swung the wheel around to point the front fender down Forty-fifth Street.

The cars around us bucked and stopped and started again. But Lansing kept her heel pressed to the pedal. The Accord wove forward like a fish through the weeds.

“It's shorter this way,” Lansing shouted over the noise.

“Life?” I shouted back. I reached for the shoulder strap.

We made it to the corner of Fifth Avenue. We stopped at the light. To our right, the white headlights stormed at us, heading downtown. To our left, the red taillights swept away from us in a single body toward the Bowery. Above the other sounds of horns, I was dimly aware of the rising howl of a police siren. I yanked the belt across my chest, felt around for the latch.

“Here they come,” said Lansing.

I glanced up as I struggled with the belt. The sea of headlights was parting, shifting to one side of the Avenue and the other. Down the middle came the revolving red and white flashers of an onrushing cop car.

The siren rose to a screaming peak, Dopplered down suddenly as the cruiser went past. The shoulder harness flew out of my hands as Lansing hit the gas. She ran through the red light, spun onto Fifth. The car's rear tires slid to the side on the melted snow, then straightened. Lansing bore down on the gas, edged her front fender up behind the cruiser's tail. The whirling glare of the flashers filled our windshield. Together the cop car and the Accord raced down Fifth Avenue as the traffic around us ducked and dodged for cover.

I reached for the shoulder harness. The cops ahead zig-zagged through sudden spaces in the traffic. Lansing's car clung to the cruiser's rear fender. Christmas decorations rushed by me on every side. The fairies in the window of Altman's gamboled and cavorted a moment and then vanished in a blur. The Empire State Building—lit red and green—towered over us to the right and then was behind us. The flashers swallowed everything as they passed.

The seat belt flew from my hands. This time I was tossed into the corner between the door and the dash. The cop car had made a sharp left turn. Lansing had gone after it. I immediately grabbed the belt again, wrestled it over me, down toward the latch. Ahead of us, the gloaming sparkled with red and white. Police cars were jammed together, flashers spinning, in the center of the street. One cop stood in the middle of Madison Avenue, battling the traffic with his bare hands. Alone, he made way for the oncoming cops, waving the cruisers in to join their brothers.

The cruiser before us dashed across Madison. Lansing dashed after, past the traffic cop, into the wild dance of flasher light. I grunted as the seat belt fastened with a loud snap. The harness held me in place as Lansing pulled roughly to the curb. She braked to a stop.

She was out of the car while I was still unfastening the belt. I tumbled out the passenger door a moment later. Police men and women were rushing by, crouched, their pistols drawn. Some of them carried rifles. All of them were raked by the spinning lights, brought into relief and plunged back into silhouette as the glare caught and released them.

The cops closed in on the building right before me. It was six stories of chipped brick two slots from the corner. The Hotel Lincoln sagged like the shoulders of a man in mourning. The light revolving on the front of it dashed over broken windowpanes covered with cardboard and canvas curtains with blackness showing through the holes. A lighted sign with the hotel's name in brown ringed a skewed metal awning over the crumbling stoop. Under that sign, police officers were coming out of the building into the night. With them were the poor, broken, dispossessed inhabitants of the place. Scrawny black women, old white men, children with long-suffering faces. The police ushered them out one by one into the chaos, evacuating the hotel in case shooting started.

I shivered. I was chilly. I had forgotten to put on my overcoat. I stuffed a cigarette in my mouth. I stuffed my hands in my pockets. I followed Lansing into the confusion of flashers and dusk.

I found her in the middle of the street. She was hovering over a shorter, stockier figure. A man in a camel hair coat. I heard her voice as I approached.

“Is it him? Is it Paul? Just tell me: is it Lester Paul?”

And the answer: “Sheesh, Lansing, would you stop already? Do I call out half the department to catch a litterbug? Move back to the sidewalk so you won't be ashamed I'll have you carried away.”

“Is he armed?” Lansing asked.

I moved up beside her. I nodded a greeting to Gottlieb. The burly cop gestured at my colleague. “Is it me, Wells, or is she giving me a hard time? I got a maybe killer up there, he shot through the door at a cop who tried to question him, almost blew his foot off.” He shook his head, worried. “There could be shooting, there could be killing. It's a terrible situation. Who knows what'll happen? Move back to the sidewalk, Lansing.”