BM03 - Crazy Little Thing Called Dead (14 page)

“She’s telling people we’re going under! Of course everyone and their mother are calling to cancel ads. I swear if she shows her face in this office I’m going to take it clean off her.” Meg was vibrating with anger.

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

“What
you
are going to do is design an online edition for us. What
I
am going to do is call all our advertisers and offer them two free months of ads online if they’ll keep their ad in the print edition.” She looked at the ceiling. “How long will it take you to get that done? A week, two weeks? I’ll pay you to do that and find someone else to write the articles.”

“Not Lucy.”

“Of course not Lucy. Lucy is dead to me. Lucy had better watch her sneaky little back.” Meg glowered at me and turned back to her computer.

“It’ll take me a day to get it all set up,” I said. “Then it will just be putting ads in - we should link them to our advertiser’s web sites - and dropping in articles. Only I had something I was going to do today, can it wait for tomorrow?”

“That depends, if you start tomorrow can you get it online tomorrow? I want us up and running as fast as possible.” She had the ad book open in front of her and her hand on the phone.

“Never mind, I’ll do it before I go.”

The first thing I did was to register
TheRoyaltonStar.com
as a domain name. I was figuring out hosting when Deirdre stuck her head in the door. She motioned me out the door.

“I’ll be right back,” I got up and strolled to the door.

“What?” I asked Deirdre as I closed the door behind me.

“Is Meg still in there? She was ranting and raving earlier, she threw a book across the room.”

“She still there, but she’s calmed down some. She’s having me work on an online edition.”
And still muttering under her breath, but at least she isn’t throwing things.
“How’s the paper coming, is there much work left to do?”

“It’s done. We’re leaving all the ads in rather than rework the whole thing. Meg says it’s an act of good faith, but I think it’s desperation. I’d never be able to get all that work on done time, and where would we find the filler?”

“If I get the online template done, can you lay in the content? I’m trying to get somewhere, but I can’t go until this is handled.” I’d sneaked a peak at the GPS tracking site. Hambecker was on the move, heading south.

“I’ll do you one better, get the domain and whatnot set up, and I’ll design the template. Shouldn’t take too long, and we can release the online edition tonight and the print paper will be in circulation tomorrow.” Deirdre’s face was a mask of concentration. Her brow furrowed. “We can make this work.”

“And yet again you save my bacon. But the payoff is that if I’m right, the next article is going to be a doozy—not just “the dead guy is a Bulgarian assassin and we don’t know what he was doing in the states,” like this week.” I was excited thinking about it. There were a lot of possibilities and I just needed to find out more of what Hambecker knew.

“Let’s get her done, then.” Deirdre squared her shoulders and walked into the office with me behind. Meg was on the phone, but this time it seemed that the conversation was rational, and possibly preventative instead of reactionary.

I spent about thirty minutes doing what I needed to do and passed the mess over to Deirdre to tame into submission. Then I wondered how to get out of the office without Meg thinking I was deserting her. When she hung up the next phone call I interrupted her.

“The online edition is coming together, and Deirdre is taking over the final stages. I’m going to go now, okay? I’m not bugging out.” Well I was, but I didn’t was Meg to feel that way.

“Yeah, fine.” She looked up at me. “About a quarter of the businesses I’ve talked to think Lucy’s off her rocker. A quarter of them hadn’t heard anything, and the other half believed her.”

“Better than all of them believing her,” I said, surreptitiously gathering my stuff.

“Seventy-five percent are jumping on the online free advertising opportunity. We’ll need to drop an announcement in the print edition, but that shouldn’t be too difficult. Go. Find me something else to up the ante.” She waved me away.

I didn’t dawdle. I got the heck out of there and on the road. Hambecker was already passing Springfield. He was at least an hour and a half ahead of me. Maybe more.

***

I hit the freeway and set the cruise control at seventy-five and crossed my fingers that I didn’t pass a traffic control cop. I figured Hambecker would be doing at least seventy and I wanted to make up time if I could.

For the first half hour or so, I was buzzing with impatience. I figured we were headed for New York City, a good five-hour drive, and I was impatient - and worried about losing Hambecker. But my phone had bars, and the website showed me the location of the GPS. I was kind of surprised there weren’t any glitches in my plan.

I left Vermont behind and settled into the drive. I checked to see where Hambecker was, and set my phone to randomly play music. I was bored, but anxious. Not a happy combination on a long drive. I pulled into a rest stop and downloaded an audio book from the Internet.

That helped. I lost myself in the story and didn’t think to check on Hambecker again until I reached New Haven. He was still headed into the city. I stopped at a Service Plaza, pulled my bag out from behind the seat and went in to use the facilities. I came out with a piece of pizza, a bag of chocolate and a milkshake.

I balanced the food on the roof, unlocked the truck and got in. My phone wasn’t where I left it.

I got out, felt in all my pockets, then leaned into the cab of the truck and scanned the floor. Not there. I let out a big sigh, climbed off the seat of the truck, grabbed the keys and trudged back into the plaza. A search of all the places I’d been produced nothing. My phone was gone.

Back out at the truck I formulated a plan that factored in a quick trip to a city library to use the computers. I was about to pull back out onto the road when I noticed a guy waving and pointing at my roof.

“What?” I asked palms up.

He pointed to the roof again and it dawned on me. My pizza, milkshake and chocolate were still on the roof. I waved my thanks and retrieved my food. Jeez, I couldn’t believe I almost lost my milkshake.

The worst part of losing my phone was that I didn’t have my story to listen to. I turned on the radio, but it wasn’t nearly as satisfying as losing myself in a novel. I took a sip of my milkshake and slid pizza out of its box. At least I wasn’t going to starve to death.

The rest of the trip into the city was nerve-wracking. I just wasn’t used to driving in traffic and there were cars everywhere. It took every nerve in my body not to turn around and go home. I pulled off the freeway in Brooklyn, looking for a place to ask directions and in the five seconds it took me to decide which way to turn three cars honked at me.

I found a gas station attendant, who directed me to a librarian (in a library) who showed me the computers. I marked down the address of the GPS, searched MapQuest for directions and scribbled them down on a tiny piece of paper with an even smaller pencil. I thanked the librarian on the way out and drove deeper into the city.

The farther I got into Manhattan, the less I liked driving. Cars stopped short in front of me, turned without signaling and honked non-stop. Which just confirmed my suspicions that I was not cut out to live in a city, and especially not
this
city.

I found parking in a high-rise lot a couple of blocks from where Hambecker had parked and made my way to the street. The sidewalk was crowded with people. They jostled by and I stepped back into a doorway. My plan had been to make my way to the parking lot where Hambecker was parked and see if I could figure out the most logical direction. Now that I was here I realized that was optimistic at best. I was surrounded by people and cars and buildings and there was no way I was going to figure out where he went.

I threaded my way into the stream of pedestrians skirting past the tables outside the restaurants. Passing Pellegrino’s, I nearly stepped into traffic. Ledroit was sitting at a table with a man. At least, I thought it was Ledroit. Her face was different, hard. No sign of the grief she’d displayed at the office. I turned quickly and walked away, my heart beating. I crossed to the other side of the street and stopped behind an umbrella at Il Palazzo.

I watched them talk from across the street, Ledroit watchful, relaxed but ready. The man was talking fast, leaned forward, his hands moving in sync with his mouth.

He’s afraid
.

I shifted so I could see better, moving out from behind the umbrella just half a step, and I was grabbed at the bicep and dragged back toward a building and through a door. I brought my knee up as I turned, ready to attack, and stopped. I’d found Hambecker.

***

He was livid. The veins standing out at his temples face red, hands fisted.

“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” His voice was quiet, even and deadly.

“I was just—”

“Sticking your nose in things you don’t understand.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened them, he looked as angry as ever.

I began to feel afraid. Not that he’d hurt me, but that he might pop a gasket.

“That woman,” I said, “is Michèle Ledroit,” as he said, “Margaret LeDonne.”

“What? Who did you say she is?” I asked.

“Margaret LeDonne. Very bad woman.”

“But she told me her name is Michèle Ledroit. Her boyfriend Victor was in the white car.” I wasn’t thinking well. How could tearful Michèle Ledroit be ruthless Margaret LeDonne? “Who is the guy with her? Is that Victor Puccini?”

“He may be Victor Puccini here in New York, but he’s Ronnie’s brother, Hugh.”

“You’ve seen him up close?” I asked. Hambecker couldn’t be wrong, could he?

“Close enough. That’s him.” Hambecker looked out the glass front of the door.

I took a look around; we were in a narrow hall, mailboxes on the wall across from us, stairs to upper floors. A door labeled “office” was next to the mailboxes across from me.

Hambecker pulled his head back in the door. “They’re still there. I don’t want to risk LeDonne seeing you here, so we’re going out the back.

“There doesn’t appear to be a back. Just stairs up.” I pointed to the dingy carpeted stairway. Not exactly welcoming.

“Then we’ll go up.” Hambecker grabbed my hand and towed me up the stairs.

I was distracted. In the past he’d grabbed my wrist or my arm. I couldn’t remember him ever taking my hand before. I liked it. His hand was reassuring. Strong, dry and he wasn’t holding me too tight.
A good hand
. Good Lord, I had to be losing my mind.

There was a window on the first landing and Hambecker dropped my hand to shove it open and stick his head out. He looked around and pulled it back in.

“We have to go up to the next floor and down to the other end,” he said. He took my hand and we jogged up together. He pushed through the landing door and we turned left and headed to the end of the hall past a line of closed doors. It ended at a window, but Hambecker shook his head when he pulled it back inside.

“Can’t get there from here either.” He took my hand, and we jogged back down the hall to the stairs.

“Wait!” I said as he pulled open the door and started to send me through it. “Look, an elevator.” We’d missed it before. It was recessed into the wall and we’d gone the other way.

We took the elevator to the roof. I didn’t particularly
want
to go to the roof, but Hambecker insisted. He headed to the front of the building first, looking to see that LeDonne or Ledroit or whatever the heck her name turned out to be, was still there. She was speaking now, not that we could hear what she was saying but she was right in Victor’s face and he didn’t look happy.

He got up and started to back away from the table and I had a sudden and terrible vision of Ledroit pulling a gun and shooting him on the street. But she didn’t. He moved away.

“Stay here,” Hambecker said, moving fast across the roof. “I’ll be right back.”

I watched Victor move through the crowd and glanced back at Ledroit. She was talking to the waiter, not looking like she was going anywhere. I scanned for Victor. He’d moved further down the block than I’d anticipated, but he was still visible. Hambecker burst out onto the sidewalk and jogged in Victor’s direction dodging people on the sidewalk. He must have got fed up because he left the sidewalk and was running against traffic in the street.

I held my breath as he weaved through the cars like he was in some action flick until he was on the other side of the road, approaching Victor. Then he had him and was pushing him through the crowd and down an alley. I lost sight of them and looked back to Ledroit. She had a take-out bag in her hand and was paying the waiter. Should I run down the stairs and follow her?

What had Hambecker said? Stay here? That was almost like a challenge for me to follow her. I got up and hurtled down the stairs. It was a lot of flights, I lost count at fourteen. Then I got a stitch in my side and had to slow down.

When I made street level and came out the door still holding my side, Ledroit was gone. I’d only seen the general direction she’d started out in. I dragged a chair from the restaurant out on the sidewalk and climbed on it, trying to catch sight of her. But a waiter ran out yelling at me in Italian so I had to get down. I hadn’t seen her.

The question was, do I wait for Hambecker or just go back home? I hadn’t even been in the city for an hour and I was already tired of it. I’d seen Victor, I’d seen Ledroit, and I’d seen them together. Which was dang interesting when I thought about it. Maybe I should go home before Hambecker found me and gave me another lecture.

***

I was sound asleep when I felt someone next to me on the bed and sat straight up and reached for the light.

“Easy, it’s just me.” He was a solid weight on the edge of my bed.