Tick Tock (21 page)

I smiled, thinking,
You’re a joke
.

“Anyway, a few days after I heard the bad news about my heart, Carl said he had a surprise for me. The best gift
anyone ever gave anyone. He laid out his plan to take out my enemies and to entertain me at the same time. I was intrigued. I didn’t know if he was just kidding. You get to be my size, stuck in bed all day, you get bored. But then I saw an article in the paper about the bomb in the library, and I knew he was actually doing it! Carl did everything he said he’d do and then some.”

I glanced at the mirror, where Emily was watching. What Berger said made some sense. It certainly explained why we had had trouble putting things together. It had never been just one motive from one perpetrator, but an odd mix of several odd motives.

“You didn’t think to come forward?”

Berger shrugged. He looked away and began examining his fingernails.

“Must have slipped my mind,” he mumbled.

“And you readily admit everything?” I said, staring down at Berger. “You freely admit your involvement?”

“Proudly so,” Berger said. “Write it up, Mike, and get me a pen. I’ll be more than happy to sign on the dotted line.”

It was odd as I turned on my heel to leave, but I suddenly wasn’t angry anymore. I refused to let Berger’s evil and his twisted ridiculous pathetic feelings affect me. I was suddenly able to see him for what he was, a pile of human wreckage. I was just a garbage man trying to get through the rest of my shift.

“Be back in five, Lawrence,” I said, my smile not forced now.

I actually felt happy. Happy that I would soon be out of here and back with my family. This mistake of a man forgotten by the time I finished my shower.

“Thanks for being so forthcoming. I’ll be right back with that statement and that pen.”

IN THE DUSTY BACK ROOM of the precinct house, Lawrence Berger lay sideways on a steel-reinforced hospital cot that had been loaned to the NYPD by the Brookhaven Obesity Clinic in Queens.

The chamber’s fluorescent glare glistened off the layer of sweat on his pale face. He gazed with unfocused eyes at the wall beside him in a kind of rapture.

At first, when he’d been rolled into the pen, the strangeness of his new surroundings, the unclean taste of the stuffy air, and the stench of burnt coffee and old sweat and urine had been so overwhelming that he’d thrown up all over himself. The officers who were in charge of the holding pen let him lie in his vomit for over an hour before getting him some napkins and a new sheet.

Berger endured the humiliation by remembering the fate of the great throughout history who suffered at the hands of their inferiors. From his near-photographic
memory, he conjured up Jacques-Louis David’s
The Death of Socrates.

He thought about Detective Michael Bennett. He’d actually been following Bennett’s career ever since the St. Patrick’s Cathedral hostage situation. For some time, he’d felt a kind of psychic link with the man, an almost metaphysical twinning. Confessing to him of all people had been like a dream come true, the icing on a long-and painstakingly planned birthday cake.

But now the party was coming to a close, wasn’t it? he thought with a sigh.

And yet, through all his suffering and ponderings, he kept coming back to one thing. The only thing. What it always came down to in the end.

His family. His granddad and dad and brother. His beloved flesh and blood.

His grandfather, Jason Berger, had been a great man. World War I hero, brilliant civil engineer, businessman, and politician, he’d been essential not only in the development of the United States interstate highway system but also in the designing of many of New York City’s bridges and parkways.

His father, Samuel J. Berger, had continued the familial tradition of greatness by being one of the first visionary businessmen of the computer age. The company he started, Berger Applications, had been one of the first venture capital firms in Silicon Valley and had, as billionaires so modestly put it, “done quite well.”

Then came David. David was Berger’s older brother, and if anything, he was the most talented Berger of them all. By the age of nine, his talent for musical composition had gained him an unheard-of admission to Julliard. By the time he was forty-five, his legendary career as a Hollywood composer paled perhaps only to the iconic John Williams’s.

David easily would have earned more than the one Oscar he had but for his vocal disdain for the movie industry. All he wanted to do, and all he did, was make beautiful music. Sometimes in his La Jolla mountainside home. Sometimes in his villa in Burgundy. Lawrence had never been invited to either one, but he had seen pictures in an
Architectural Digest
article, and they were very nice.

David truly was a simple and gracious man. As simple and gracious as their father and his father before him. They were all examples of human potential fulfilled. They were Bergers, after all. All except for him, of course. Lawrence. Poor, sad, slow, embarrassing Lawrence.

Berger smiled up at the ceiling of his jail cell.

It had taken a century for all of the Berger family’s amazing societal and global accomplishments.

If all went as planned, and it seemed like it would, he would successfully undo every last Berger triumph in a week.

Sorry, Grandpap. Sorry, Dad. Sorry, Bro, Berger thought with a shrug of his shoulders.
Look on the bright side. The Berger name will be remembered. Just not the way you wanted.

Lawrence’s last gift would eventually be delivered to his saintly, talented brother. It was the film footage of all of Lawrence’s meticulously plotted crimes. It wasn’t complete yet; there were a few choice scenes that needed to be added, but he was confident in its success. He couldn’t have left his final wishes in more competent hands.

The film was for David to ponder over, to wonder about, and, hopefully, to eventually score.

Lawrence knew he was no Spielberg, no Scorsese or Coppola, but perhaps when all was said and done, his brother might one day come to understand that he, Lawrence, had a little talent, too.

Was that too much to ask?

BERGER SNAPPED OUT of his reverie when his longtime lawyer, Allen Duques, opened the door to the holding cage.

Duques, a partner in a global 100 Lexington Avenue corporate firm, handled all of his dealings. The stocky, aristocratic-looking, middle-aged lawyer looked positively lost when he spotted Berger behind the mesh. The attorney screeched a folding chair over in front of the cage’s wire and hesitated before sitting, as if reluctant to muss his immaculate blue serge suit.

“Tell me it isn’t true what the authorities are saying, Lawrence,” the preppy gray-haired attorney said, thumbing off his BlackBerry. “These killings and the Grand Central bombing—you’ve admitted your involvement? I don’t understand.”

Berger’s basset-hound jowls jiggled as he shook his head.

“I’ll try to explain in a moment, Allen, but first, did you bring it? The caviar?” Berger asked hopefully.

He’d been devouring tin after tin of Iranian Special Reserve in bed right before he’d been arrested. The thought of lighting into one last can of black gold had been girding his spirits.

“Of course, Lawrence, but unfortunately they searched my attaché when I came in. It was confiscated, I’m sorry to say. I’d say it had to do with that policeman who lost his life in the Grand Central bombing. You’ll find no friends here, I’m afraid.”

Berger immediately began to cry. In his mind, he pictured Dali’s
Christ of St. John of the Cross,
Jesus on the cross as seen from above in a darkened sky, hovering over a body of water.

“Lawrence, are you okay?” Duques said. “I think we should seriously consider an insanity defense. I’m quite… worried about you.”

“Can we talk about it tomorrow at the arraignment, Allen?” Berger said when he finally managed to pull himself together. “I’d really like to be alone now, please.”

Berger rolled back toward the wall after his lawyer promptly left. As he grimly perused the primitively sketched genitalia and plethora of four-letter words scratched into the plaster, he heard a sudden clapping. From somewhere beyond the closed metal door, a television was playing a sporting event. He could hear a crowd cheering, an announcer’s excited voice, more clapping and euphoria.

A sudden cold pierced the center of his chest like a bayonet. He thought about his life. What he had done to himself. What he had done to others.

He put his right thumb and index finger into his mouth like he was going to whistle. Instead, he thumbed off the cap of one of his molars, the third in on the top left, and carefully slipped out something from the hollow of it.

Up to the light, he held what looked like a small red jelly bean. It was a special gel sac with liquid inside it. It was actually a poison pill, an extremely lethal cocktail of cyanide and codeine.

It was time for his contingency plan. The one that even Carl didn’t know about.

It was over for him, Berger thought, looking at the pill. In the sanctity of his citadel, he’d imagined that he could stare society coldly in the eye and laugh. Faced with actually doing it, he knew there was no way.

He thought about how disappointed Carl would be in him. Because the plan they’d agreed on wasn’t actually over. All that had happened so far was supposed to be only phase one.

Once Berger was dead, his will would immediately be contested by his sister in Minnesota. All of his assets, including the murder slush fund he’d given Carl access to, would immediately be frozen. Carl, perhaps the only real friend he’d ever had, would be hung out to dry.

It couldn’t be helped, Berger thought, quickly putting the pill into his mouth.

Berger surprised himself. Instead of his usual waffling, he bit down and swallowed readily. He thought he might throw up again at the sudden bitterness, but he breathed slowly and carefully until he felt better and the room began to dim.

EVERYONE WAS ASLEEP when I came home after midnight, and they were still snoozing when I came out of my bedroom dressed for work at the ungodly hour of five a.m.

Well, almost everyone, I thought, spotting a light coming from the living room. I went in and saw the lamp on by the empty reading chair in the corner. I was about to click it off when I heard some giggling from behind the chair.

I leaned over. It was Bridget. In her
Phineas and Ferb
pajamas she was sitting Indian-style on her pillow with the latest
39 Clues
book open in her lap.

“Hey,” I whispered.

“Hey, Dad,” she said without looking up.

“Um, what are you doing out of bed so early?”

“Reading,” my daughter said, a tacit “duh” hanging in the air.

“Don’t you want to sit in the chair?”

“I can’t,” Bridget said, turning the page. “I have to read
in secret because of Fiona. MC is sponsoring a contest to see who can read the most books by the end of the summer, and I think I’m one ahead of Fi-Fi. If she sees me reading, she’ll try to catch up. I want to lull her into a sense of complacency.”

I blinked and nodded. Of course. Even reading was competitive in a family of ten. Well, at least in a family of ten as crazy as mine.

“What do you get if you win?” I asked.

“Dinner and a movie with Mary Catherine. Just the two of us.”

Sounded good, I thought. I made a mental note to swing by the library on the way home.

“Well, carry on with your lulling,” I said as I smooched the top of her head and headed for the front door. “Good luck. I think.”

It was still dark when I climbed into the car and drove away from the house. Somewhere around the Brooklyn-Queens border, I pulled off the expressway and got some takeout from a diner. Back outside, surrounded by rumbling semis in the darkened parking lot, I checked in to the squad from my car.

There was no news, which in my high-profile case was actually bad news, since it meant Berger’s buddy, Carl Apt, was still missing. There still wasn’t sign one of Apt or of the Mercedes convertible Berger kept in a garage around the corner from his apartment.

Worst of all, there were no records of a Carl Apt in any
of the city and state databases, no last-known address, no Social Security number, no driver’s license. Nada. Maybe I should start reading the
39 Clues,
I thought as I restarted the Chevy’s engine, because no matter what we did, this ugly, baffling case just didn’t want to die.

I was up on the elevated expressway with the sun finally coming up over the decrepit Queens skyline on my right when I got a call. It was from Steve Makem, the desk sergeant at the Nineteenth Precinct.

“What’s up, Sarge?”

“You’re the primary on Berger, right? Well, heads-up. They just went in to take him to his arraignment and found him in the holding tank, unresponsive.”

I was having trouble absorbing what I was being told. Remembering my recent near-death driving-while-phoning experience, I lowered my cell as I pulled over onto the right-hand shoulder.

“Hit me again there, Steve,” I said.

“EMTs are inbound, but I saw him, Mike. Humpty had a great fall out of his stretcher. His face is a bright strawberry red like I’ve never seen before. I don’t know what, but something happened. Something bad.”

SOMETHING BAD HAD HAPPENED, indeed, I thought, twenty siren-blaring minutes later as I burst into Berger’s holding cell in the back of the precinct.

Berger had fallen out of the bed. Also, his butt had fallen out of his sheet again, I couldn’t help but notice, to my horror.

The EMTs were long gone, replaced by the thin, birdlike female Medical Examiner I’d worked with before named Alejandra Robles.

As Alejandra went through her routine, I stared down at the massive dead man. He’d had everything—education, wealth, the coolest apartment in Manhattan—and decided on this? Setting off plastic explosives? Killing children? Committing suicide? He was the most inadequate person I’d ever come across, and that was saying a lot.