Authors: Richard Hawke
“Somebody’s lying,” Margo said. “If Tracy Jacobs called the police and told them about Marshall Fox and Cynthia Blair, then clearly she knew. Maybe she overheard Fox saying something to his driver.”
“No. Lyles swears that didn’t happen. He says she was threatening to call the cops, but only to give them a heads-up about Marshall Fox’s penchant for violence. That’s when Alan Ross contacted her and ended up offering her the role in his TV show. According to Lyles, Tracy supposedly called both Fox and Zachary Riddick sometime later and said she knew that Cynthia Blair was pregnant with Fox’s kid and that if Fox didn’t come clean to the police, she’d tell them.”
“Was she trying to get money? Was it an extortion thing?”
“Lyles didn’t say it was. But maybe. He was out of the loop by then.”
“So what do you do next? Take your taxi up to Seventy-first Street and mull it all over with your one and only while the gorgeous snowfall continues?”
“Can I take a rain check?”
She laughed. “In this weather?”
“I’M HERE TO SEE Alan Ross.”
The woman at the security desk picked up her phone and slid a ledger toward me. “Sign here. Your name, please, and—Oh. There he is.” She pointed in the direction of the front doors. “See the man standing there?”
Through the revolving doors was a figure in a gray coat, wearing a hat.
“Thanks.” As I turned for the doors, a silver car pulled up. The driver got out and Ross climbed in behind the wheel. I was spinning through the doors as he pulled away from the curb. The cab I’d just taken was still idling at the curb. The driver was busy jotting down something in a notebook. I yanked open the rear door and hopped back in.
“See that silver car? I want you to stay with it.”
The driver turned around in the seat. “Hey. It’s you.”
“Silver car.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Go!”
Ross followed Sixty-sixth across the park. At Lexington, he cut over to Fifty-ninth then went east toward the river. At Second Avenue, he took a right. I didn’t need to instruct the driver to hang too far back. Who in New York City sees a yellow taxicab in their mirror and thinks they’re being tailed? We were as ubiquitous as the snow.
“Looks like he’s heading for the tunnel,” my driver said. I’d just had the same thought—the Queens Midtown Tunnel. And just like that, I knew where Alan Ross was headed. Before we went into the tunnel, I tried Megan’s number. As the signal began to break up, I got her voice mail.
“Rosemary Fox’s rough boy is a guy named Danny Lyles. Lyles was Fox’s driver. It’s a cozy bunch, these people. But forget about Lyles. Alan Ross. You want to start shaking every tree with Alan Ross’s name on it and see what starts falling.” I added, “And answer your goddamn phone, would you?”
The mouth of the tunnel loomed. I’ve got a thing about tunnels, particularly the ones that go underwater. Not a good thing. Dark, closed-in places. I took a deep breath as we plunged into the hole.
ROSS PULLED INTO short-term parking. I had the cabbie pull over at the parking gate. The lot wasn’t terribly full, and I was able to keep an eye on Ross’s car. I paid off the cabbie and tracked Ross at a parallel, several hundred feet from him. As soon as he entered the terminal, I raced over to the door he’d used and followed him.
I found him standing at a bank of monitors. I moved off to a nearby electronic check-in kiosk and mimed the securing of a boarding pass. Ross remained staring at the monitors a long while, then broke away and turned in my direction. I leaned in to the kiosk screen. The image of a woman in her crisp flight attendant’s uniform came up.
What can I do for you today
? Ross passed me. I took a ten-count then went over to the monitors. Air France Flight 8830 from Paris. Like most of the others on the screen, the Air France flight was delayed. It wasn’t due to land for another forty minutes. Gate C3. Even as I looked at the monitor, several more flights were being shifted to delayed. Low groans sounded from the people around me.
Because Tracy’s flight was coming from overseas, all the passengers would be funneled through customs, which I knew was on the level below. Ross apparently knew this, too. I took the escalator down and spotted him taking up position in front of the retractable barriers where all the passengers would be emerging. He had removed his overcoat and folded it over his arm. He stood there a few minutes, consulted his watch, crossed his coat to his other arm, went over to a row of black chairs and took a seat.
I had a decision to make. My impulse was to lay back and wait for the Air France passengers to begin streaming out from customs and baggage claim. I was more than a little curious to witness the reunion of Ross and Tracy Jacobs. A lot can be drawn from whether two people greet each other with a handshake or a pat on the shoulders, or whether they bury their tongues halfway down each other’s throats. My curiosity was far from cursory. If the lovely Jane was to be believed—and who would doubt the lovely Jane?—the crossing of Alan Ross’s and Tracy Jacobs’s stars suggested something less than a natural and readily explained trajectory. A no-talent nobody lands a continuing role in a popular television series mere days after threatening to blow the whistle on one of the network’s top talents. From where I sit, a plum TV role and an invitation to join the roster of a prestigious talent agency sound like pretty enticing hush money. I knew about Ross and his money. Had giving Tracy Jacobs the
Century City
role been Alan Ross’s way of taking extreme measures to protect his boy Marshall, or did Ross know more about the murders of Cynthia Blair and Nicole Rossman than he’d been willing to share with the authorities? When I’d met him in his office, Ross claimed he’d wanted me to go out there and dig up information for him. It seemed the network executive had a few interesting items in his pocket already. I considered briefly the old trick of waiting until the passengers were emerging, then having Alan Ross paged to a different part of the terminal so I could be the one to greet Tracy Jacobs and see if I could pull a few answers out of her. But I realized that I didn’t even know what she looked like. That’s what I get for not watching more television.
My phone went off. It was Megan. I stepped behind a rack of paperbacks, where I could still keep an eye on Ross.
“I thought maybe you’d decided to take the rest of the day off,” I said.
“I got caught up in some stuff. The Spicer investigation was a bust. The top brass has been reading us the riot act. I’m sorry. Where are you now?”
“I’m at Kennedy. Alan Ross is waiting for Tracy Jacobs.”
“I got your message. What’s the story with Alan Ross?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. You know who Tracy Jacobs is, don’t you?”
“Tracy Jacobs the actress? What does she have to do with anything?”
“She’s the person who called Fox and Riddick and put the squeeze on for Fox to fess up to his affair with Cynthia. She was sleeping with Fox’s driver. Except the thing is, he swears the information about Cynthia didn’t come from him. I believe him.”
“Why is Alan Ross meeting Tracy Jacobs at the airport?”
“I don’t know. Would you like me to go over and ask him?”
“No. Where’s she coming from?”
“Paris. She’s been catching up on her culture.”
“What do you think’s going on?”
“I don’t know. Except that Alan Ross called me into his office two days ago and gave me an envelope full of money. He wanted me to look into the Burrell and Riddick murders. In fact, he wanted me to tell him how
you
were faring on them.”
“Me?”
“The police. He wanted progress reports.”
The line was silent for a few seconds. “Listen. When she shows up, I want you to keep a tail on them. Call me as they’re heading back to the city.”
“What if they don’t go back to the city? There are plenty of no-tell motels between here and there.”
“You think they’re lovers?”
“It was suggested to me that this might be the case. I don’t know what they are. Except that Mr. Ross seems to have set Ms. Jacobs up pretty nicely. He’s the one who got her the
Century City
gig. I think we’d like to find out why he did that.”
“Shit. Okay. Wherever they go, stay with them. Let me know what’s going on.”
I broke the connection. Ross was still seated in the plastic chair. I checked my watch. Plenty of time. Going back outside, I waited a few minutes in the taxi line and caught a cab. When I told him I only wanted to go over to the car-rental lot, he tried to dump me. I pulled enough bills from my wallet to convince him not to. There was a longer line than I’d anticipated at the rental desk, and by the time I got my car and was driving into the short-term lot, Tracy Jacobs’s flight was—unless things had changed—on the ground. I located Alan Ross’s car and pulled into a nearby slot. The wait was shorter than I’d expected, maybe fifteen minutes. Ross appeared, rolling a small suitcase behind him. Next to him was a woman who was not dressed for a snowstorm. She was holding a magazine over her head. They reached Ross’s car, and he opened the passenger door. The woman got in. Ross moved around to the trunk and put the suitcase in. Before closing the trunk, he removed his overcoat. Reaching into the trunk, he pulled out something that I couldn’t see. It went into the folds of his coat. Before he yanked open the driver’s door, he paused and looked around. His eyes moved right past where I was parked. I was too far away to get a true read of his expression. He got into the car, started it and backed up. This brought the car closer to mine. Just as the car shuddered into forward, the trunk rose slowly and the brake lights came on. Ross got back out and came around to shut the trunk, this time making certain it was secure. He looked around again. This time I could see the look on his face. Let’s just say this: I was glad I would be on the man’s tail.
THE CONDITIONS ON the Long Island Expressway degenerated the farther east Alan Ross traveled. By the time he was approaching Melville, they were near whiteout. Tractor trailers were pulled over and parked along the sides of the highway, as were dozens of passenger cars and SUVs. Every few miles, a vehicle had run off into the median strip and remained there, the taillights blinking an anemic pink. From the swirling white haze in Ross’s rearview mirror, the occasional snowplow materialized. Pellets of salt rattled against the side of his car as the plows overtook and passed him.
Ross was perspiring like a man in the desert. His head was aching from the strain of squinting into the white wall in front of him. What he wanted was silence, some time to think. But this wasn’t likely, not with the hyperactive actress seated next to him. You’d have thought the woman had invented Paris. She wouldn’t shut up about it. Ross couldn’t count how many times he had been to Paris. Dozens? By the time this ride was finished, Tracy Jacobs might well have managed to ruin the city for him forever.
Ross was maintaining an achingly slow speed. He was not going to run the risk of either being pulled over by the police or sliding off the road like the half-dozen or so cars he had already passed. If there was one thing to be said for doing all this in a snowstorm, it was that the snow rendered Ross’s car virtually invisible. That part’s good, he thought. In a way, you really couldn’t ask for better. Not only here on the damnable LIE, but later, once they’d arrived at their destination, invisibility would be a wonderful advantage. Ross smiled to himself. It spoke to his sense of perfection. All he wanted at this point, his single goal, was to make all his problems and headaches disappear. Like a polar bear in a snowstorm. It’s there and it’s not there all at the same time. Now you see it, now you don’t.
He glanced over at Tracy Jacobs. She was in the middle of telling him everything he didn’t need to hear about the Musée d’Orsay, but noticing him looking at her, she came up for air. Would wonders never cease?
“You look happy all of a sudden. What are you smiling about?”
“I love hearing your stories,” Ross said suavely. “It’s nice to see a girl who can get all excited like that. It’s so nice you’re not jaded.”
Tracy flashed her huge smile. “Do you know what I thought when I was looking at the
Mona Lisa
? I mean
the Mona Lisa
.”
“Tell me.”
“I was thinking, and I’m serious about this, I said to myself, ‘Alan Ross is the man responsible for this.’”
Ross demurred. “Don’t you mean Leonardo da Vinci?”
Tracy laughed. God, that laugh. Try as they might, the vocal coaches for
Century City
hadn’t made a whole lot of progress on that horrific laugh.
“Alan, you know what I mean. Not just Paris. The whole thing. Everything. It’s true. I owe you my entire life.”
Alan Ross turned his attention back to the slick roadway. Yes, you do, dear, he thought. That’s exactly right.
MEGAN GOT THE CALL from Fritz as she was clearing the snow off her windshield.
“They’re heading out onto the Island. I remember Robin telling me that Ross and his wife have a place out in the Hamptons somewhere. That’s my guess.”
“The
Hamptons
? In this weather?”
Megan looked up and saw Brian McKinney coming out of the precinct house. She turned her back on him. The interrogation of Bruce Spicer had been a fiasco. If Spicer bellowed “Whore!” at Megan once, he’d bellowed it a dozen times. McKinney and a few of the others had found the whole Bruce Spicer show vastly amusing, crowding around the one-way window outside the box to watch Spicer heap his verbal abuses on Megan. The interrogation had gone nowhere, except round and round. Megan knew she might have handled Spicer better, but her mind had been elsewhere.
Malone was asking her a question, but the connection was breaking up.
“Say it again, Fritz. I couldn’t hear you.”
“…get the address…Hamptons. That way…follow him.”
“What?”
“Ross’s address.”
“You want me to get Ross’s address? The Hamptons?” Malone’s answer was unintelligible. “What do you think he’s doing out there?”