Night Secrets (6 page)

“I'd like to try.”

Deegan's eyes bore into Frank. “Are you telling me the truth, Clemons?” he asked. “You really didn't get a fee?”

Frank shook his head.

Deegan considered it a moment, his large brown eyes narrowing in concentration. “All right, I'll take you at face value for now,” he said finally. Then he wagged his finger in Frank's face. “But only for now. Tomorrow morning, I'll see if your card checks out, your license, all that shit. If mat's in line, I'll let you talk to her. But if it's not, pal, you're going to disappear from this case, you understand?”

“Yeah,” Frank said. He returned the notebook to his pocket. “I just want to look into it a little,” he added.

Deegan stared at him intently, like someone trying to decipher some arcane, ancient script. Then he nodded crisply, turned and walked away.

Frank watched him go until the round globe of his head had disappeared down the subway stairs a few yards away. Then he turned and walked to the river. He could feel his eyes burning with sleeplessness, and for a moment he yearned to lie down. But it was too late for that, and so he simply stood in the open air, breathing in the morning cool, a single figure, very small, against the city's gray enormity.

T
he glare of sunlight was very bright on the nearly blank page as Frank glanced down at his notebook, matched the address Phillips had given him with the one across the street, then eased himself back against the wall and waited. It was a four-story brownstone in a part of Sixty-fourth Street where such places could go for five or six million, depending upon the condition, and from the look of it, this one was in very good condition. The upper windows were done in stained glass, the lower ones covered by polished wooden shutters. It was easy to imagine what lay behind them—antique furniture, marble fireplaces, crystal chandeliers, all of it sealed off by the elegant facade.

The street was different, open to anyone, and as Frank slumped against the wall, he watched the various people who moved up and down it—delivery boys, museum workers bound for the vast halls that ran up and down Fifth Avenue, people out for a morning stroll, their small dogs trotting along beside them. But they seemed pale and far away compared to the vivid colors and tangible presence with which his mind continued to see and feel the woman in the blue prison dress. It was as if she'd managed to pass something of herself over to him, slip it secretly into his hand like a lock of hair pressed through the slender vines of the beaded curtain.

For a little while, his mind remained with her, as if, in the early-morning hour, he was still lingering in her arms. Then, because he had to, he forced himself to draw his attention back to the brownstone across the way, and he stared determinedly at the black wrought-iron gate that separated it from the street, then at the doors beyond the gate, the first one made of thick glass panels, the second a few feet behind it, dark, wooden, with a shiny brass knocker.

He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. It was the worst time for any case, the time when you didn't know anything, and when only long periods of watching and waiting could get you what you needed to know in order to stop the waiting itself. He knew that he might be here for an hour, two, eight. Until he'd established Mrs. Phillips's routine, he simply couldn't know. She might be a woman who bustled about Manhattan more or less continually. Or she might be reclusive, a woman who rested for long hours in the upstairs bedroom, or stretched out in her private sauna.

He took out the picture Phillips had given him, stared at it closely, as if it might be able to reveal something of her character, an edginess that would mean she'd be on the move, or a tired, withdrawn exhaustion, which meant that she'd stay put. But the face told him nothing. It was a beautiful face, no doubt about it, with blue eyes set against smooth white skin. Her shoulders were raised assertively, like her chin, and she stared directly toward the lens, rather than edging away from it, like other people sometimes did. Only the hands said something, the way the long fingers of one of them wrapped around the slender wrist of the other, squeezing at it forcefully, as if it were a small pink throat.

She came out almost an hour later, and Frank quickly checked his watch, then noted the time in his notebook.

She was wearing a black leather coat with a high collar, and she kept the collar turned up against her throat despite the warm spring air. Her blond hair was pulled back tightly and bound in a silver clasp behind her head. Her skin was very white, almost glistening in the bright morning sunlight.

She seemed somewhat thinner than in the photograph, and in some sense more withdrawn, her blue eyes shielded behind a pair of gold-rimmed dark glasses. She moved slowly, with an oddly broken gait, until she reached Fifth Avenue. Then she straightened herself abruptly, in what appeared as a sudden, bold stiffening of the spine, and turned south, walking briskly until she reached the Pierre Hotel at the comer of Sixty-first Street.

Frank continued behind, waited a moment after she'd disappeared into the hotel, then walked in himself. For a moment, he didn't see her. Then a quick streak of blond passed through the remotest corner of his peripheral vision, and he saw her dart around a single marble column and disappear again, this time into an elevator with two other women. As the doors closed, he could see that one of the women had begun to talk to Mrs. Phillips casually, as if she knew her.

Frank watched the lighted numbers of the elevator, wrote in his notebook that it had stopped at the second floor, then walked over to one of the uniformed bellboys and smiled. “Lot of women going up to the second floor,” he said amiably.

The bellboy nodded.

“What is it, some kind of conference?” Frank asked.

The bellboy nodded.

“On what?”

The bellboy shrugged. “Something about the rain forest,” he said dully. “Friends of the Rain Forest.”

“Rain forest?”

“They're raising money for it or something,” the bellboy said. “They meet every Monday.”

Frank nodded, then stepped away, took a seat in the lobby and waited. He'd only been in his seat for a few minutes when a shadow passed over him, and he looked up to see a large man in a dark-blue double-breasted suit.

“Excuse me, sir,” the man said. “But are you a registered guest of the hotel?”

Frank shook his head.

“Here to visit someone?”

“No.”

The man's eyes darkened. “My name's Mortimer,” he said. He smiled thinly. “Ben Mortimer. Hotel security.”

Frank stared at him coolly. “You rousting me?”

“Well, we can't let the lobby …”

“Start to look like a bus terminal?”

The smile disappeared. “Exactly.”

Frank pulled himself up slightly, drew out his identification, then handed it to Mortimer.

Mortimer glanced at the ID, then returned it to Frank. “It's not the sort of thing we like here at the Pierre,” he said.

“Part of the job,” Frank told him.

“May I ask …?”

Frank shook his head. “Sorry.”

Mortimer nodded. “I understand client privilege and all that, but I hope you can understand my position, too.”

“Sure,” Frank said, “but the fact is, I have to keep an eye on somebody, and that person happens to be in the hotel. As long as that's the case, I have to be here, too.”

“Yes, but …”

“And I can't afford a new suit everytime I step into a fancy hotel.”

Mortimer's body remained tightly drawn. “I'm not looking for a disturbance,” he said.

“I'm not either,” Rank told him.

“So, what's the solution?” Mortimer asked stiffly.

Frank kept his voice a few degrees below freezing. “Maybe you should have a waiting area for private dicks.”

“I don't think so,” Mortimer said humorlessly. “And I don't want this to become a common practice. The people at the Pierre …”

“Don't always trust each other,” Frank interrupted. “That's why some of them hire me.”

Mortimer looked at Frank cautiously. “You mean you're working for one of our guests?”

Frank nodded.

Mortimer looked as if he'd been let off the hook. “I see,” he said, obviously pondering the situation. Then he evidently came to a decision. “Well, I've done my job. I've checked you out.” He smiled politely. “Now I'll leave you to do your work.” As he eased himself away, his eyes drifted toward the floor. “Your job,” he said, “it's rough on the shoes.”

“Yeah,” Frank said. And the feet, he thought, the legs, the eyes, whatever was still kicking in your soul.

But it was mainly his back that was giving him trouble by the time Mrs. Phillips finally walked out of the elevator again. He felt a dull ache near the base of his spine as he rose slowly and followed her out of the hotel. In his notebook, he noted the time: 12:15
P.M.

She stopped briefly under the hotel's elegant gold-and-white awning, nodded politely to the doorman, then headed south again, moving slowly, her shoulders hunched, as if against a cold wind that wasn't really there. At the corner of Fifty-ninth Street, she stepped off the curb and hailed a cab.

Frank waited a few seconds, then did the same. “There's a cab up ahead,” he told the driver. “It has some kind of black bumper sticker. Stay close to it.”

Mrs. Phillips's taxi didn't stop again until it reached the heart of Greenwich Village, a brownstone on West Twelfth Street mat looked only slightly less elegant than the one on Sixty-fourth.

Frank remained in his cab, watching at a safe distance, while Mrs. Phillips paid the fare, then stepped into the building's vestibule.

Then he got out, walked to the building and copied the name on the buzzer into his notebook: Kevin A. Powers.

It was only an hour later when she came out again. From a shadowy corner almost a block away, Frank watched as she hailed a cab, then stepped out and hailed his own. She went directly home, marching up the street and through the black wrought-iron gate.

Frank took up his position once again, his eyes staring blearily at the ornate brass knocker on East Sixty-fourth Street. He opened his notebook and went over the brief details he'd recorded in it. As far as he could tell, she'd done nothing unusual, though he'd check out this Powers person.

Mr. Phillips arrived home at six in the evening, and by that time, Frank was feeling the long day's tedium like an angry man screaming in his face. Still, to do the job right, you had to wait and wait and wait. Farouk called the long hours his “meditation time,” and seemed to withdraw into some remote corner of his mind, find things to engage him there and come out only when a sudden move drew him back into the broader world. But to Frank, it was just waiting.

Farouk laughed as he came through the door of Frank's office.

“You look as you did yesterday,” he said. “Perhaps it is the wrong work. Perhaps you could sell shoes.”

Frank flipped the next page of the magazine. A tall woman stood before a wild tropical setting, a fan of brightly colored birds spread out behind her like a peacock's tail. At first glance, the birds seemed merely part of the background, placed behind the woman like a wall of flowers, but their eyes were intense. As his eyes lingered on the picture, Frank realized that they were watching the woman with that sinister stillness that all birds of prey assume at the instant before they dive. “They're going to tear her apart,” he said softly.

Farouk looked at him. “What?”

Frank shook his head, then turned the page.

Farouk eased himself back in the sofa, his body draped in a soft purple light that came through the window. “Toby,” he said. “She returns soon.”

“Good.”

“Yes,” Farouk said. “It is a good thing, a woman.”

Frank instantly saw the other woman—not Mrs. Phillips, but the other woman—as he'd seen her the night before, moving unhesitatingly toward the waiting police car, its blue light pulsing over her as she walked.