Westlake, Donald E - Novel 32 (6 page)

 
          
The
squeal was at a junior high school; they’d found a missing teacher, dead.

 
          
It
was about eleven in the morning, a cloudy day that promised rain for later on.
Ed and I drove over in the Ford and parked in the school zone out front. It was
one of the old gray stone school buildings, three stories high* looking more
like a fortress than a place for kids. A concrete-covered play yard was on the
right, surrounded by eight-foot-high chain link fence. Nobody was in it.

 
          
A
recent fad among the kids has been to write nicknames on walls and subways and
all over the damn place in either spray paint or felt-tip pen, both of which
are very tough to get rid of, particularly from a porous surface like stone.
The fad is for a kid to write his name or his nickname or some magic name he’s
worked out for himself, and then under it write the number of the street he
lives on.
“JUAN 135,” for instance, or “BOSS ZOOM 92,” that
kind of thing.

 
          
The
fad hit the school building. As high as a child’s arm could reach, the names
and numbers were scrawled everywhere on the walls, in black and red and blue
and green and yellow. Some of the signatures were like little paintings,
carefully and lovingly done, and some of them were just splashed and scrawled
on, with runlets of paint dripping down from the bottoms of the letters, but
most of them were simply reports of name and number, without flair or
imagination: “Andy 87,” “Beth 81,” “Moro 103.”

 
          
At
first, all of that paintwork looked like vandalism and nothing more. But as I
got used to it, to seeing it around, I realized it gave a brightly colored hem
to the gray stone skirt of a building like this, that it had a very sunny Latin
American flavor to it, and that once you got past the prejudice against marking
up public property it wasn’t that bad at all. Of course, I never said this to
anybody.

 
          
Inside,
we went to the principal’s office, and he said he’d show us where the body was.
Walking down the corridor with us, he said, “The room
was
a girl’s lavatory, but all of the plumbing is out of it now.
That’s as far as they got with the modernizing plan.” He was balding, about
forty, with a moustache and hom-rim glasses and a slightly prissy manner, as
though he were more sinned against than sinning.

 
          
We
got curious stares from the teen-agers we passed, so apparently the news wasn’t
general yet about the discovery of the teacher’s body.

 
          
Ed
said, “Why didn’t you report her missing?”

 
          
“So
many of these younger teachers,” the principal said, “they’re apt to take two
or three days off without warning, we didn’t think a thing of it. Another
teacher noticed the smell this morning, that’s why she happened to look.”

 
          
I
said, “We’ll want to talk to her.
The other teacher.”

 
          
“Of
course,” he said. “She’s in the building at the moment. With Miss Evans, what
we think happened, a group of them must have decided to rape her, and took her
in there. At some point she must have fought back. I don’t think they brought
her in there with the intention of killing her.”

 
          
Intentions
didn’t matter, if she was dead. None of us said any more, until the principal
stopped and pointed at a door and said, “She’s in there.”

 
          
I
went to the door as Ed said to the principal, “What about her family? You try
calling her at home?”

 
          
I
opened the door and took a step in, and the smell hit me in the face. Then, in
the dim light through the dirty translucent windows, I saw her lying on the
floor over against the green wall. Plaster showed white where they’d pulled the
sinks out She’d been there for a week, and there were rats in the building.
“God,” I said, and backed out, and slammed the door.

 
          
The
principal was answering Ed’s question, saying, “She lived alone in—” Then he
noticed, and said, “Oh, Fm terribly sorry! I should have warned you, I
suppose.”

 
          
Ed
took a step toward me, looking worried. ‘You okay, Tom?”

 
          
I
waved my hand at him, to keep back away from the room. “Leave it for the
ambulance.” I could feel the blood draining out of my head, a sensation of
coldness in my arms and feet.

 
          
The
principal, still prissy but bewildered, said, “I’m really very sorry. I took it
for granted you were hardened to that sort of thing.”

 
          
I
pushed past the two of them, needing to get outdoors.
Hardened
to that sort of thing.
Jesus H. Christ!

           
They had the midnight-to-eight shift
that week. It's the quietest of the three shifts, but at
eight o’clock
in the morning, driving home eastward into
the rising sun, a man’s eyes feel covered with sand and he thinks his stomach
will never be comfortable again.

 
          
Joe
left the station first and got the
Plymouth
out of the lot and drove down the block to
double-park across the street from the precinct house. He had to wait ten
minutes before Tom came
out,
looking disgusted, and
slid into the passenger seat.

 
          
Joe
said, “What’s the problem?”

 
          
“Little
talk from the Lieutenant,” Tom said. “Some damn thing about narcotics.”

 
          
“What
about it?”

 
          
Tom
yawned, fighting it, and gave an angry shrug. “Anything you pick
up,
be sure you turn it in.
The usual
noise.”

 
          
Joe
put the
Plymouth
in gear and started through the maze
crosstown and downtown to the Midtown Tunnel. “I wonder who they caught,” he
said.

 
          
“Nobody
from this house,” Tom said. He yawned again, giving in to it this time, and
rubbed his face with both hands. “
Boy,
am I ready for
sleep.”

 
          
“I
got me an idea,” Joe said.

 
          
Tom
knew at once what he meant. Looking at him, interested, he said, “You do?
What?”

 
          
“Paintings from a museum.”

 
          
Tom
frowned. “I don’t follow.”

 
          
“Listen,”
Joe said. “They got paintings in those
museums,
they’re worth a million dollars each. We take ten, we Bell them back for four
million. That’s two million for each of us.”

 
          
Tom’s
frown deepened. He scratched the side of his jaw, making a sound like
sandpaper. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Ten paintings.
They’d be as tough to hide as my Russian ambassador.”

 
          
“I
could put them in my garage,” Joe said. “Who's gonna look in a garage?”

 
          
“Your
kids would wreck them in a day.”

 
          
Joe
didn’t want to give this up, it was the only idea he’d managed to come up with.
“Five paintings,” he said.
“One million apiece.”

 
          
Tom
didn’t answer right away. He chewed the inside of his cheek and brooded out at
the traffic and tried to figure out not only what was specifically wrong with
the paintings idea, but also a general rule to live by, to guide his thinking
on the subject of the robbery. It was a way of taking it seriously and yet not
taking it seriously at the same time. Finally he said, “We don't want something
we have to give back. Nothing we have to keep around us or hide for a while. We
want something with fast turnover.”

 
          
Reluctantly,
Joe nodded. “Yeah, I guess you're right,” he said, admitting it. “We’re not in
a position for that kind of thing.”

 
          
“That’s
right.”

 
          
“But
we don’t want cash. We talked about that.”

 
          
Tom
nodded. “I know. Everybody keeps serial numbers.”

 
          
Joe
said, “So it isn’t that easy.”

 
          
“I
never said it was.”

 
          
They
were both quiet for a while, thinking it over. They were practically to the
tunnel when Tom spoke up again, restating the rule he’d worked out earlier;
narrowing the range of it, refining it. Gazing out the windshield, he said,
“What we want is something we can unload fast, for big money.”

 
          
“Right,”
Joe said.
“And
a
buyer.
Some rich person with a lot of cash.”

 
          
They
were about to enter the tunnel. “Rich people,” Tom said. He was thinking very
hard. They both were.

 
          
There
were camera crews from two of the television news programs that showed up to cover
it. The way we handled that, Paul and I
were
the first
car that reacnea tne scene after the call came in, so Paul got interviewed by
the one crew and I got interviewed by the other.

 
          
I
wasn’t nervous at all. I’d never been interviewed personally on television
before, but of course I’d watched the news sometimes when other guys did it, at
the scene of an explosion or a big water-main break or something like that.
Three times I’d seen guys I actually knew in real life being interviewed. Also,
sometimes while taking a shower I’d run a fantasy kind of interview in my head,
the questions and the answers and all, and how I’d hold my face. So you might
say I was pretty well rehearsed.

 
          
The
way they set things up for the interview, they put the camera so it was facing
the building, so the building would show behind me and the interviewer while we
were doing our thing. It was one of those huge office buildings being
constructed there, and the hardhats kept steady working away at it all through
the interview. One of their
number
had got himself
killed, but that had only held their interest for maybe five minutes. Where
money is concerned, you keep your mind on the job, you get it done.

 
          
These
buildings are going up all over town, big glass and stone boxes full of office
space. Practically none of them have apartments in them, because who wants to
live in
Manhattan
?
Manhattan
is a place you work in, that’s all.

 
          
The
buildings have been going up ever since the end of the Second World War. Good
times, bad times, boom, recession, it doesn’t matter, they just keep going up.
For the last ten years or so, most of them have been on the east side of
midtown,
Third Avenue
and
Lexington Avenue
, around there. The first thing you know,
they’ll give Third Avenue a classier name, the way they did with Fourth Avenue
when the big office buildings went up on it and it was turned into Park Avenue
South.

 
          
Anyway,
that’s the section where most of the new buildings are concentrated, but
there’s others going up all over the place.
The
World
Trade
Center
way downtown*
Sixth Avenue
across from
Rockefeller
Center
.
And a couple up in my precinct, including
this one where they’d just had the death and where I was going to get myself
interviewed.

 
          
A
guy I was talking to in a bar a couple of years ago said it was his opinion
that the main characteristic of
New York
is that it’s going through all the phases
of the phoenix at once. You remember reading about the phoenix in high school?
That’s what he said
New York
was; but all at once.
New York
is living, and it’s on fire, and it’s
dying, and
it’s
ashes, and it’s being reborn, all at
the same time and all the time. And boy, those buildings look it, coming up out
of brick rubble where yesterday’s buildings were knocked down, coming up new and
clean and pretty, and every once in a while killing somebody along the way.

 
          
The
interviewer was a light-colored spade, with a moustache. You could see he
thought he was the hottest thing in Bigtown. He and the director and the sound
man and a couple other people fussed around a while, getting everything set,
and then they started the interview. Somebody had written a little lead-in
paragraph for the interviewer to say, and he had it on a clipboard he held in
his other hand. The hand without the microphone, I mean. He had it on the
clipboard, but he’d memorized it, because once he started talking he never
looked at the clipboard at all.

 
          
Here’s
how it went: ‘Tragedy struck today at the site of the new Transcontinental
Airlines Building on Columbus Avenue when a worker fell thirty-seven stories
within the uncompleted building to his death. Patrolman Joseph Loomis was among
the first at the scene.” Then he turned to me and said, “Officer Loomis, could
you describe what happened?”

 
          
I
said, "The decedent was a full-blooded Mohawk Indian employed in putting
the steel framework of the building up. What they call working the high iron.
His name was George Brook. He was forty-three years of age.”

 
          
The
interviewer had been looking me straight in the eye the whole time I talked, as
though I was hypnotizing him. As soon as I stopped, he whipped the microphone
from my mouth back to his and said, “What apparently went wrong, Officer
Loomis?”

 
          
I
said, “Apparently his foot slipped. He was on the fifty-second story, which is
as high as they have so far reached, and he fell thirty-seven stories and
landed on the concrete floor at the fifteenth. He fell through the interior of
the building, and the fifteenth is the highest story that they have a floor
finished and put down.”

 
          
Zip,
the microphone went back over to him, and he said, “He found death thirty-seven
stories down.”
Zip,
the microphone
came back to me.

           
I said, “No, he was probably dead
from about the fortieth story on down. He kept hitting different metal beams on
the way. They knocked some parts off him.”

 
          
A
spade can’t turn white, but he tried. His eyes looked panicky, and very fast he
said, “There are many full- blooded Mohawk Indians working the high iron,
aren’t there, Officer Loomis?”

 
          
He
wanted to change the subject? I didn’t give a damn. I said, “That’s right.
There’s a couple tribes of them live over in
Brooklyn
, they’re all steelworkers.”

 
          
Zip.
“That’s because they have a special
affinity for heights, isn’t it?”
Zip.

 
          
I
said, “I don’t think so. They come down pretty often.
About
as often as anybody else.”

 
          
You
could see I’d suddenly caught his attention. He was interested in spite of
himself. He said, “Then why do they do it?”

 
          
I
shrugged. I said, “I suppose they have to make a living.”

 
          
Not
on television. His eyes filmed over, and in the furriest of brush-off voices he
said, “Thank you very much, Officer Loomis,” and turned away from me, ready to
go into a close-out spiel.

 
          
Screw
him. Just to louse up his timing, I said, “My pleasure,” as he was opening his
mouth again. TTien I turned around and walked off.

 
          
I
watched it that
night,
and all they used was the very
first part of what I’d said. The rest was something the interviewer did on his
own after I’d left; he stood in the same spot, with the construction going on
behind him, and told you what happened. He said, among other things, “He found
death thirty-seven stories down.”
So much for accuracy, the
bastards.

 
          
I
don’t know what Paul said, but he didn’t get on the tube at all. He claimed
afterwards it was anti-Semitism.