In This Rain (46 page)

Joe’s own surging anger receded at the look in the cop’s eyes. “I told you that already,” he said quietly. “If you want, I’ll tell you something different, but it won’t bring your friend back.”

“Goddamn! I ought to arrest you, Cole.”

“If you think that would help.”

Underhill’s hands rose and fell uselessly. He looked around him, and Joe followed his eyes: rotating red and white lights, the ordered chaos of people with jobs to do, the impersonal rain. “I don’t know,” the cop muttered, “what would fucking help.”

“Talking to Glybenhall,” Joe said.

“Based on what?”

“Blowfish was planting that chain— ”

“Oh, Christ! You tell Edgar Westermann a story, Blowfish shows up in Ford’s garden, and you want me to talk to Glybenhall? Do you even have any proof that chain wasn’t there when Blowfish got there? That he actually brought it with him?”

“You know he did.”

“Can you prove it?”

“No,” Joe admitted. “But— ”

“Shut up! Just shut the fuck up.” Underhill wiped rain from his face. “I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but I hope Blowfish didn’t die.” He dialed his precinct, asked them to reach the officer at the hospital and have him call. They waited, watching the EMTs zip Lowry’s body into a rubber bag. When Underhill’s phone finally rang he spoke briefly, then thumbed it off. “They think he’ll pull through, but he’s not conscious yet,” he told Joe, his grudging tone a sort of apology. “Montgomery’s not there, by the way.”

“She’s not? When did she leave?”

“She was never there.”

“She went in the ambulance.”

“Not according to the EMT. Montgomery told him she’d take her own car. But she never showed.”

Looking at Underhill, Joe saw not the detective but Ann’s shining eyes as she left the garden. “Shit!” He pulled his phone out, pressed the only number in it.

“What?”

“She went to Glybenhall’s!”

“Don’t say that.”

“She doesn’t answer. That’s where she is. I’m sure of it. She’d have wanted to hold him until law enforcement came. I’m going up there.”

“The hell you are.”

“I’m a private citizen. You can’t stop me.”

“I can arrest you.”

“Or you can come with me.”

“To Walter Glybenhall’s? Are you crazy?”

“Then get out of my way.”

“Damn!” muttered Underhill.

The rain had stopped by the time they pulled up to Glybenhall’s Park Avenue building. They were in Underhill’s unmarked car, but any Crown Victoria in New York that wasn’t a taxi was NYPD and everyone knew it. The doorman’s dismay was all over his face.

“Police.” Underhill showed his badge. “We’re looking for a woman who came to see Walter Glybenhall last night.”

“I just came on.”

“You, too?”

The concierge nodded.

“We need to talk to Mr. Glybenhall.”

The concierge eyed him, then phoned upstairs. “Mr. Glybenhall is out,” he reported.

“It’s early to be out.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Who did you talk to?”

“The housekeeper.”

“Let me speak to her. What’s her name?”

The concierge pursed his lips, but he handed Underhill the phone. “Mrs. Apfel,” he said. “Gerda.”

“This is the police, Mrs. Apfel,” Underhill said. “I need to speak to Mr. Glybenhall. Where did he go? Then I’ll need to see you. Yes, now.” He handed the phone back to the concierge and waited pointedly.

“Penthouse,” the man said.

Stocky and red-faced, the housekeeper was waiting at the door. She ran a glance over their wet clothes and muddy shoes and unenthusiastically let them in.

Underhill said, “Where’s Mr. Glybenhall?”

“I don’t know.” She spoke with a hard German accent.

“We’re looking for a young woman who might have come here last night.”

“I saw no one.”

“It was very late. You might have gone to bed.”

“That is possible.”

“You saw no one,” Joe said. “Did you hear anything?”

She threw him a resentful look as though he’d caught her at something, but didn’t answer.

“Mrs. Apfel,” said Underhill, “Mr. Glybenhall may be in danger from this woman. If you know anything, I think you should tell us.”

Glybenhall in danger from Ann? But Joe kept his face blank.

The housekeeper’s eyes widened. “Is it that crazy woman? Who arrested Mr. Glybenhall?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

After a brief silence, she said, “The concierge’s buzzer woke me, but Mr. Glybenhall answered it himself. If he let anyone in, I don’t know. The doorbell didn’t ring, but he might have been waiting. As I was for you.”

“When was that?”

“Not quite five. But before that— ”

“Yes?”

She paused, clearly uncertain whether to go on.

“Mrs. Apfel, your loyalty is commendable,” Underhill said. “But— ”

“Yes, of course. Someone came up in the service elevator. That is next to the kitchen and I hear it from my room. I thought it must be one of Mr. Glybenhall’s young ladies. He often brings them up that way.” She flushed. “It’s private, you see. But this was a man. I heard his voice because they argued. Mr. Glybenhall was very angry. He called him ‘Greg.’ ”

Joe’s adrenaline surged. “Was he here, this Greg, when the doorbell rang?” Underhill could have silenced him, but he just nodded to the housekeeper: answer the question.

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you see him?”

“No, sir. But later I heard his voice again. They went down that way. The service elevator.”

“All of them? The woman, too?”

“I don’t know if a woman was with them. But there’s no one here now.”

A quick pass through the penthouse’s over furnished rooms: all empty. Gerda Apfel opened Glybenhall’s service elevator for them, took them down to the service yard, where they saw nothing; to the garage, where Glybenhall’s Mercedes was parked but his town car gone. Underhill called Glybenhall’s chauffeur to ask if he’d taken his boss somewhere during the night, then made other phone calls, looking for the night doorman, launching a hunt for Ann’s car. Through all of it, Joe was beside him but felt as though he were drifting a long way off. The sights and sounds around him drowned in the roar of the creek in his head.

Until through the rush of water, a strange electronic beep.

Suddenly the creek was gone, everything clear and sharp. He yanked the new phone from his pocket.

No one but Ann had this number.

“Joe?” He’d never heard her voice so small, so still. “Joe? Can you come home?”

City Hall

The mayor let his gaze rest on each person, one by one. Mark Shapiro, from DOI, here alone; the Police Commissioner, John Finn; Tom Underhill and Luis Perez, the detectives on the case; Underhill’s captain, a guy named Freeman, and Perez’s captain, Epstein or Einstein or something, here only because their men were here and it would have been hierarchically infeasible to exclude them. Hierarchically infeasible— Jesus, what a phrase. Charlie looked at Don, fidgeting at the end of the table, and at Lena, poised beside him with her pad. They were all waiting for something. Oh, right, it must be him: mayoral permission to get this meeting started.

Did they have to have this meeting? Couldn’t they go straight to recess?

Don shifted in his chair. Yes, yes, all right. Charlie stifled a sigh and turned to Finn. “What’ve you got?”

Finn looked at Epstein, who nodded to Perez. Christ! said the mayor, but only to himself.

“We spent the last two days interviewing, reinterviewing witnesses,” Perez began. “Picked up the gangbanger who attacked Montgomery. He confirmed it was Lowry that hired him. He also swears, by the way, he was only gonna scare her, he wasn’t gonna hurt her.”

“Glad to hear it,” Charlie said. “What else?”

“Long story short: Montgomery seems to have been right.”

Charlie could swear he saw Perez smile when he said that, but if so the smile vanished right away and the detective went on.

“Looks like Glybenhall, with Lowry’s help, cooked up this scheme to get arrested, so he could turn right around and sue. The money was a draw, but the real point seems to have been to make Glybenhall pretty much unstoppable in New York.”

“He was close to unstoppable already! What the hell did he need to do this for?”

“Seems he thought you were planning all along to double-cross him, hand the Block A site over to Corrington.”

“He thought that? Why would he think that?”

“I don’t know, sir. That’s what his architect said.”

But we had a deal, Charlie thought. A fair-and-square under-the-table dirty deal. He thought I’d do that?

“You can prove this?”

“With Glybenhall and Lowry both dead,” Perez answered, “no, not a hundred percent. But when you put everything together, that’s the picture that emerges.”

Charlie’s mind flashed to a picture emerging: a long-ago Polaroid of Louise on the deck of a cruise ship. Maybe that’s where she was now, a cruise ship. Her note had only said she needed some time alone, and she was sure he felt the same. He didn’t feel the same, and he was sure she knew it.

“All right,” Charlie said, “take me over it. What do we have on Lowry?”

“He’d wanted my job,” Shapiro said. “I’m sure you knew that, Mayor.” His face was flushed as though he were confessing something. He slipped an envelope from his jacket. “I have my resignation here.”

“What are you talking about?”

“He was my man. He did this on my watch.”

“Oh, knock off the theatrics, Mark. That can’t be anyone’s motivation for shit like this: that he didn’t get a damn job.”

Shapiro’s face darkened; his hand hovered over the envelope he’d pushed along the tabletop.

Take it back? Push it farther? Come on, Mark, make up your mind, I’m getting fed up with this meeting.

Shapiro lifted his hand, leaving the envelope lying there. “It wasn’t,” he said, tight-jawed.

“What wasn’t what?”

“Lowry’s whole motivation. His anger probably made him vulnerable to Glybenhall’s proposition. But his motivation was money. He was a shareholder in Three Star.”

“No kidding? On an IG’s salary? Wait, don’t tell me— he didn’t buy the shares, Walter gave them to him.”

“Yes, sir.” Yes, sir? Come on, that was worth a “Bingo.” “He appears to have done that. The shares are worth a fair amount already, and they’d have soared once the Block A development started.”

“Walter, Walter, Walter.” The mayor shook his head.

Shapiro eyed him oddly, then went on. “It was Lowry’s gun that killed Kong.”

“What’s our theory?”

“That they were prepared to go on having those gangbangers, Kong and Tilden, create accidents at Mott Haven until Montgomery started looking at Glybenhall like they wanted her to. But the Winston woman’s death upped the stakes. Lowry and Glybenhall were afraid they’d get ratted out now that it was homicide. They had Kong kill Tilden, and then Lowry killed Kong.”

“But Montgomery caught on?”

“They set her up to catch on. What they hadn’t counted on was her catching on to being set up.”

“And her story checks out? The kidnapping? How Walter died?”

Perez looked at his boss again, who nodded. Come on, knock off the bobblehead stuff! Charlie wanted to shout. But that would have been hierarchically infeasible.

“Yes, sir,” Perez said. “Bullets from his gun in the woods at Cole’s place, forensic evidence that she was in the back seat and never in front, the crack on her head, Glybenhall’s housekeeper’s story. The night doorman and concierge, once they got over the b.s. they started with.”

“Great.” Charlie sighed. “Just great. And we think Glybenhall killed the Eliot woman, the way Montgomery says?”

Don sat up, sat back, said nothing. Charlie frowned. Usually he could read Don; was it a sign of how sick he was of all this, that he had no idea what Don meant?

“Well,” Perez said, “we do, but it’s a good thing we don’t have to prove it.”

“Because?”

“Because it’s all circumstantial. No one ever saw them together or heard them talk about each other. And the gangbanger, Blowfish.”

“What about him?”

“Well,” Underhill said, “Lowry shot Blowfish. Meant to kill him, obviously, but his bad luck, Blowfish was still breathing when Montgomery, Cole, and Corrington got to them. So Lowry had to get clear, in case Blowfish lived. He faked the nine-one-one call to give himself time. And to give Blowfish time to die. But Blowfish didn’t. He admits to breaking into the garden to plant Jen Eliot’s chain to frame Corrington, he says Lowry shot him, but he also swears he got the chain from Edgar Westermann. He won’t budge on that.”

“And Edgar denies that, of course.”

“Yes, sir, he does.”

“What’s our theory?” the mayor said, aware that he was repeating himself.

“Well, it could be true,” Underhill said. “Westermann could have gone to Glybenhall with the cock-and-bull story Cole told him. About you giving the Block A site to Corrington’s group, and about Corrington having an affair with Jen Eliot.”

“Was that true, by the way?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. Go on.”

“So maybe Glybenhall gave Westermann the chain to pass on to someone who’d actually do the dirty work.”

“I don’t see Walter admitting to Edgar he’d killed anyone.”

“To make the frame work, he wouldn’t have to. Just that he’d slept with her.”

Don was fidgeting again. Maybe he just needed a cigarette; after all, they were discussing the murder of a woman he used to date. “Open the window and light up if you want,” Charlie said.

Don shook his head and shoved his hands in his pockets.

“Suit yourself,” Charlie told him. To Underhill: “What does Edgar say?”

“That Blowfish’s story is complete bushwah. That he was insulted by what Joe Cole was suggesting and he’d have thrown him out of his office except he thought the man was so unstable he’d better just hear him out. That he forgot the whole thing as soon as Cole left.”

“He says he didn’t call Walter about Cole’s suggestion?”

“That’s what he says.”

“Do we believe him?”

“It’s possible,” the Police Commissioner said. “It certainly would be better if it were true.”