Unleashed (A Sydney Rye Novel, # 1) (14 page)

“Would you show me where you saw the woman?”

“Sure.” He used the arms of the chair to push himself into a standing position. As we moved down the hallway, I noticed the limp his bad knee gave him.

“What happened to your knee?” I asked. “If you don’t mind me asking,” I added.

“Not at all,” he smiled. “I played football in high school.” He laughed louder when he saw my expression. “I know, I’m not a big guy. I was the quarterback. And one day I just got hit wrong. Happens all the time.”

“I’m sorry.”

He laughed again. “I’m not. I had some of the best days of my life out there on that field. And it’s not so bad. Gives me an excuse to talk about the old days.”

We walked through a maze of corridors and up a short flight of concrete stairs to a door marked in red “Emergency Exit” with yellow crime-scene tape stretched across it. The bright colors looked alien in the stark white hallway. “Can I open it,” I asked.

“I don’t think so. That’s why they put the tape across it.”

I laughed. George was looking down at me, smiling. “Right. I guess so.”

“You always like this?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“So persistent?”

“Ha, no,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

“I guess I understand.”

“Yeah?”

“When your life is changed in an instant, you want to understand it. You want to pick it apart and find out what happened. How did this all happen so quickly?”

“Yeah, that is it.” I cocked my head. “How did you know?”

“My knee,” he patted the injured joint. “I watched that tape, God, I don’t know how many times. I wanted so badly to know what went wrong. Where was the mistake?”

“Did you figure it out?” I leaned toward him eager for a positive answer, but George just laughed. “What?” I asked confused.

“No, because there is no answer. That’s just how life decided to go that day. You can’t figure out why it decided to do that.”

“But this is different.” I pointed at the door. “Someone killed Joseph Saperstein in that alley. There is an answer to this mystery.”

“Sure there is,” George shrugged. “But it’s not going to change what happened to you. Nothing is going to take back the instant you found that body. It is unchangeable. No matter what you do now, that is over.”

“I know that.”

“I hope so, because the only closure you can find is in yourself.”

“You a Buddhist or something?” I asked smiling at him.

He laughed again. I liked the way it sounded—warm and happy in such a cold and lonely place. “No, I’m not a Buddhist. I’ve just been through enough to know that the only thing you can change is yourself. And that ain’t easy.”

“Alright, philosopher,” George laughed again. “Where were you and where was she?”

“I was coming the way we just came, and when I turned the corner, I saw her back and the door closing. I called out to her.”

“What did you say?”

“I think I said ‘hey’ or something like that. I was real surprised to see her. She was standing right here,” he said as he stood close to the door, his back to me, under a dead light fixture. Looking down the hall, I saw that every other light was out. Conservation can be a bitch, I thought. “When I called out to her she turned like this,” George demonstrated as he turned his head just enough to glance at me. “And then she took off down the hall.” He pointed to where the hall extended for what seemed like an endless distance. The final wall was cloaked in a velvet blackness. “She took a left up there.” George and I walked to where the mysterious woman had turned. Another long and poorly lit hall extended before us. “I chased her, but by the time I got to here she’d ducked into another corridor and was gone.”

“What is down there?”

“Storage rooms and other hallways.”

“Could we explore a little?” George looked down at his watch. “I understand I’ve taken up a lot of your time. I really appreciate the help you’ve given me already, and if you need me to go, I will.”

He shook his head with a smile. “I guess I have a few more minutes.” We walked side by side down the hall. Most of the doors were locked. The others were filled with a mix of boxes and old dusty furniture.

“Most of these locked doors are tenants’ storage,” Chamers told me.

“So tenants have access?”

“Sure, they pick up the elevator key at the front desk.”

“But there is no skeleton for the emergency exit?”

“That’s right.”

“Could she have come from inside the building? I mean who’s to say she was coming in the emergency exit?”

“No one at the front desk saw a woman of her description come in.”

“There must be a woman who lives in the building who would fit the description. Couldn’t she have come down from her apartment?”

“We checked the elevator footage. The woman did not come down it.” George’s cell phone rang. He answered it. “I’ll be right there,” he said, then hung up. “That was the front desk. I’ve got to go.”

George escorted me back through the maze of hallways to the lobby. “Thanks again, George,” I said. “It was really great of you to talk to me.”

George smiled. “Anytime.” I nodded to the woman behind the desk and walked back out into the sunlight. Michael would be getting off work in five minutes, so I hurried over to the Sapersteins building. A ridiculously hot guy stood behind the front desk.

“Hi, are you Michael?”

“Yes, I am.” He smiled a perfect smile at me.

“My name’s Joy. I—”

“I know who you are. Nice bruise. How’d you get it?”

“I fell down.” I felt myself blushing. The makeup must have worn off, I thought, as I reached up to touch my cheek.

He smiled. “That’s what they all say.”

“How did you know who I was?”

“Julen told me all about you. Before he got hauled off to the pen.”

“He’s in jail?”

“You didn’t know?” He started to take off his uniform jacket. Michael was wearing only a white T-shirt underneath. I could see that his body was one that should be sculpted for posterity. Michael must have noticed the look on my face. “Do you mind if I change? I get off work in about two minutes, and I want to get out of here.”

“Sure, change away.” I giggled. He smiled his movie-star smile at me and excused himself into the employee lounge where I had found Julen the day before. I stood by the desk trying to figure out how to recover some dignity. I decided I would ask him if I could buy him a cup of coffee and have a chat. But I wouldn’t say chat. I would say something cool. Before I could come up with a replacement for chat, he came out of the lounge dressed in worn jeans covered in paint stains, his white T-shirt and a leather jacket. “Isn’t it a little warm for leather?” I asked without thinking.

“Not when you’re doing 70 over the bridge.” I giggled again. “Pull yourself together,” I screamed in my head. “So you want to talk to me about Joseph, right?”

“Maybe I could buy you a cup of chat and we could coffee.”

“I know a great place a couple blocks from here.”

“I meant a cup of coffee and a chat.”

“I know.”

He motioned for me to walk ahead out the door, which I did with images of his uniform draped across my floor dancing in my head.

Ten minutes later I was sitting across from him in a Starbucks, his idea of a great little place. I would have lost all attraction for him right then and there if his eyes hadn’t been the same color as sweet green grapes. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told the cops. He left at six for his jog.”

“Was that his normal time?”

“No, he usually left around eight, right as I’m leaving.” Did he say anything?”

“He said, ‘Good morning.’ ”

“Did he look scared?”

“I wasn’t really paying attention to him. I was working on a collage.”

“A collage?”

“Yeah, I’m a mixed-media artist.” He leaned back in his chair, his crotch angled toward me. I sipped my burnt coffee, trying really hard not to imagine him naked.

“Did you notice if he was wearing his wedding ring and watch?”

“Not a clue.” He crunched down on a piece of biscotti. “You want to get out of here?” he asked, his mouth full.

“I have to go to work soon.”

“Blow it off. Let’s take a ride.” He leaned his elbows on the table which tensed his incredible biceps, and winked at me.

“I really can’t.”

He leaned back again and looked around the coffee house. “You got any other questions for me?”

“What was he wearing?”

“A jogging suit.”

“Blue?”

He nodded.

“What about his toupee?”

“Nah, he never wore that jogging.”

“What?” But he was smiling at a woman behind the counter. “Did you say he was not wearing his toupee?”

“That’s right. He never wore his toupee when he jogged.”

“But his toupee was found with the body. Do you think he could have had it in his pocket or something?”

He looked at me and laughed. “You ever heard of anyone keeping a toupee in their jogging suit pocket?”

“But how did it get with the body then?”

“I don’t know.” He sipped his low-fat vanilla latte. It left a small mustache of foam on his lip. He licked it off with an incredible pink tongue. “Are you sure you don’t want to go someplace with me?”

“Maybe some other time. Thanks, though. I need to go.”

“Come see me anytime.” I left him in the Starbucks making the girl behind the counter giggle.

A Walk Uptown

The rest of the day went by without me. I was in my head wondering how a toupee joins a dead body after the fact. I wanted to talk to Jacquelyn. I wondered if she could remember if Joseph wore his toupee jogging. Maybe he went back to the house, and Michael didn’t notice. Or maybe, like this morning, Michael left his post before his replacement arrived. And what about the blond woman in the emergency exit? Was it Jacquelyn? I needed to ask Julen what time they left his house. These questions continued to roam through my head all the way home, through my take-out Chinese and the laugh-tracked sitcoms, right into Blue’s walk.

I found us wandering not to the park but toward the Brooklyn Bridge. The night, sticky from the day’s heat, made me sweat as I walked through Carroll Gardens. The windows of brownstones flickered with the reassuring light of the television. Walking down Brooklyn Bridge Avenue we passed Family Court, a hideous building with a flat facade and barred windows. Across the street an ancient-looking armory sat dark and deserted.

We walked over the Brooklyn Bridge on the wooden pedestrian path that hangs above the roaring traffic. We followed the thick steel cables under the massive granite towers. To my left, glass skyscrapers mixed with turn-of-the-century stone houses perched on the tiniest tip of Manhattan. A gaping hole in the sky where the towers used to be made the island look off- balance. The Statue of Liberty glowed small but still impressively in the distance.

City Hall, white and large-windowed, stood at the end of the bridge. I turned us uptown, and we passed more courthouses. People stood outside fiendishly smoking in doorways, even at this late hour. Most were women who had come to watch their husbands, sons, and boyfriends be arraigned. To cry in the bathroom, to plead with the judge, to yell at the officer behind the bullet-proof glass, to smoke cigarettes outside.

Heading uptown, we passed Canal Street, its storefronts covered in pull-down metal gates in every shade of gray, deserted by pedestrians, at least human ones. The entrance to the Manhattan Bridge was still active with cars honking at each other as they tried to make the turn. A police officer watched from his parked cruiser.

In Soho we passed the flagship stores for Prada and Apple, and galleries with photographs of Bob Dylan and Audrey Hepburn. Above us, giant windows of fabulous lofts glowed. The occasional cobblestone street, the uniquely dressed, the tall, the skinny—here was the center of deciding what we want to be, how we want to live, what will make us belong. Giant billboards of young girls caressing bare-chested, glistening men in expensive jeans loomed over us.

Crossing Houston with its four lanes of traffic into Greenwich Village, we watched drunken coeds pour out of loud, stinking bars. “That’s a really cute dog,” a perky brunette, illegally drunk, told me from between the supporting arms of two friends.

I turned east toward First Avenue to avoid the congestion of Union Square. An ambulance, sirens singing, lights flashing, barreled down First and turned into the emergency entrance of Bellevue Hospital. I watched as two men in jackets that stated “"Paramedic” lowered a person out of the back of the vehicle. Two nurses in light-pink scrubs joined them, and they all hurried toward the florescent white of the emergency entrance. The ambulance, its back doors open and lights revolving, waited in the abandoned drive.

My calves were burning, and my feet ached as we headed through Midtown up into the Upper East, but I just kept going, something urging me forward. Blue kept right at my heels as we passed through the neighborhoods housing the workers of New York City, quiet and calm. At 79th Street, I turned east again until it met with the river and the bottom of East End Avenue.