Trust Your Eyes (21 page)

“How you getting there?”

“I’m going to walk.” He paused. “I know the way.”

“That’s going to take a while,” I said.

“It’s 192.3 miles,” he said. “If I walk twenty miles a day, I’ll be there in—”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said.

TWENTY-SIX

IF
the traffic’s not bad, you can drive from Promise Falls to New York in about three and a half hours. But that’s a big
if
certainly where the latter part of the drive is concerned. You can be clipping along just great, the Manhattan skyline looking close enough that you could stick your hand out the window and touch it. Then some idiot in a delivery van cuts off a cabbie, sets off a chain reaction crash, and you’re bumper to bumper for two hours.

So I opted for the train. The plan was to catch it early in the morning, do what I’d promised to do, and catch one home the same day, so I wouldn’t be leaving Thomas alone overnight. Maybe, another time, I would have trusted him to be on his own from one day to the next, but ever since the FBI incident, I didn’t like to let him out of my sight for any longer than I had to.

He’d promised he wouldn’t do anything that would upset me while I was gone, so long as I kept my part of the bargain.

If Thomas wanted to think I was making this trip into New York just for him, he was welcome to. But the moment he started
pushing for me to go into the city, I thought of the woman Jeremy wanted me to meet. This was something I really needed to deal with. It meant future money for me, and from the sound of it, quite a bit. As soon as I left Thomas’s room I called Jeremy and asked whether he could set something up for the following day, and he said he’d get back to me. An hour later he reported that while Kathleen Ford already had a luncheon engagement, she could meet us for a drink afterward at the Tribeca Grand Hotel.

I said I’d be there.

Jeremy said we should grab lunch beforehand, and we arranged to meet at the Waverly Restaurant, on Sixth Avenue between Waverly Place and Eighth Street, which would be handy enough to get to the hotel, and to run my little errand for Thomas.

When I told Thomas where I was having lunch, he closed his eyes and said, “At Avenue of the Americas, or Sixth Avenue, as I believe it is more commonly called, and Waverly Place. There’s a neon sign hanging over the door, ‘Waverly’ in green letters and ‘Restaurant’ in red, right across the avenue from a Duane Reade drugstore, and to the south, across Waverly Place, there’s a store that sells vitamins. The ‘t’ in ‘Restaurant,’ the first one, isn’t lighting up when you look at the sign if you’re coming down Waverly from the west.”

I was up before the sun, drove into Albany, caught the train at Rensselaer, and managed to get some more sleep during the two-and-a-half-hour trip. While I was awake, looking out the window at the scenery flying by, I had time to think about whether agreeing to go by the Orchard Street address, where Thomas had seen the smothered head in the window, was a stupid thing to do—whether it would just encourage him.

But if it kept Thomas from sending another message to a federal agency and attracting any more unwanted attention, it was a smart thing to do. Short of straitjacketing him, there really wasn’t any way to keep Thomas from getting in touch with the outside
world. I wasn’t about to unplug his computer again, and even if I’d been willing to deal with the fallout from doing so, Thomas could always pick up the phone and just call someone. He could write a goddamn letter and put it in the mail. And while Thomas chose to stay in the house, I didn’t want him to feel as though he was some kind of prisoner whose access to others was strictly controlled.

The problem with giving in to Thomas on this particular occasion was, what if he saw something else, in another window, in another city, tomorrow, and that city just happened to be Istanbul? Would he expect me to check that out, too?

I figured I’d deal with Thomas on a case-by-case basis. If he did come across something else on one of his virtual travels that he wanted me to investigate, I’d be able to point out that the last time I’d indulged him it had cost me an entire day, not to mention a train ticket. Whether that would persuade my brother to let something go was anyone’s guess.

I’d been able to dissuade him from doing anything rash when he’d gotten himself in a lather about that possible minor traffic mishap in Boston. So it was possible to discourage him from pursuing frivolous matters. But there was something about this covered face in the window that had gotten to him.

“People don’t look up enough,” he said to me.

Once on the train, I was grateful for the time to myself, to think. My thoughts kept returning to my father. Perhaps I was making too much of those two words he’d entered into the search field.

He saw something on child prostitution on the news.

He was appalled.

He decided to learn more.

End of story.

I chided myself for allowing my mind to go places it should never have gone.

I’d left home with a printout of the scene in the window, and took it out of my pocket as the train ran down alongside the Hudson. I had to admit, there was something intriguing about the image. I wasn’t inclined to buy Thomas’s theory that the passing Whirl360 camera car, while on its mission to video all the streets in Manhattan, had caught an actual murder in progress. That was pretty far-fetched. But the longer I looked at the image, I had to concede Thomas’s interpretation was not entirely off the wall. It did kind of look like a person being suffocated, as though someone had come up behind and slipped a bag over his or her head and drawn it tight.

But I also knew it could be any number of other things. For example, it looked like one of those white Styrofoam heads that are used to display wigs. Maybe one was sitting on top of that A/C unit. Or someone, at the moment the image was snapped, passed by the window with one.

It was a very grainy image.

Before embarking on this mission, I suggested to Thomas we do some online research. Thomas was very good at what he did on the computer, but when it came to searching the Net for specific information, I was better. So I got Dad’s history-cleared laptop and entered into the search field “Orchard Street New York” and then, before hitting the button to start the search, added the word “murder.”

My goal here, honestly, was to take the wind out of Thomas’s sails. If our search produced no stories about people being suffocated in windows, I hoped Thomas would mellow out a bit.

And there were no stories about people being suffocated in windows. But some interesting items were returned. I was led to a
New York Times
site listing all stories that ever mentioned Orchard Street. I read up on a few folks who had died there, and not from natural causes. In May 2003, a man had been run down by someone driving a Mercedes-Benz convertible who’d fled the
scene. In the mid-nineties, bad blood between the two owners of a handbag store prompted the son of one of them to hire a hit man to kill the other. Police made an arrest before the murder could take place. Seven years ago, a young banking executive was shot in the chest on Orchard Street between Grand and Broome. Police were investigating competing theories; was the banker shot by someone he knew, or a total stranger?

All of these events had happened before Whirl360 was even in existence. While we didn’t know when the picture of the head in the window was taken, we could safely assume it had been within the last two or three years. There had been nothing in that time about any suspicious deaths on Orchard, at least none that involved someone dying by having a bag put over his or her head. The only story that even remotely caught my interest was a short news item about a thirty-one-year-old waitress named Allison Fitch of Orchard Street (no specific address given) who was reported missing the last week of the previous August. The story had run the first week of September, but I didn’t see any follow-ups, so it seemed likely the matter had resolved itself. Thousands of people went missing every single day across the United States, and within a few hours pretty much all of them reappeared. The stats were there if you wanted to look them up.

I got off the train at Penn Station and headed first down to Canal Street, to Pearl Paint, the huge artist supply store. I lost myself wandering around its several floors for nearly two hours and ended up buying a dozen Paasche airbrush needles and a couple of air caps, as well as a box of fine-point black Sharpie pens, and another box with broad tips. I already had plenty of these back in Burlington, but you could never have too many Sharpies.

Then I grabbed a cab and got dropped off out front of the Waverly. Before going in, I had to see how well Thomas, who had never been here in person, had described it.

There was the vitamin shop, the Duane Reade across the street. He even got the burned-out letter in the sign right.

He was pretty goddamn amazing, no doubt about it.

Jeremy was already in a booth by the front window, looking at the menu with a cup of coffee in front of him, when I came through the door. I slipped in opposite him.

“You won’t believe who I urinated next to,” he said. Jeremy always tried to impress with stories of his brushes with celebrity.

“I can’t imagine,” I said.

“Philip Seymour Hoffman,” he said. “In the men’s room at those theaters up by Lincoln Center.”

“Please tell me you didn’t strike up a conversation.”

He had not. I pointed to the old black-and-white framed photos of celebrities that adorned the walls.

“Pee next to any of them?”

“They’re all dead,” Jeremy said.

I ordered coffee and a grilled cheese with bacon. Jeremy got scrambled eggs and home fries, served right in the skillet. We talked about the declining state of the newspaper and magazine industry and the growth of sites like The Huffington Post, and how this new opportunity was coming at just the right time.

Jeremy said Kathleen Ford wanted one animated drawing a week and was willing to pay fifteen hundred dollars for each one. That might sound like a lot, but it actually meant dozens of drawings to make it work. “I’ll bet there’s a program or something that’d make it easier,” he said.

I knew of a couple that would make the job much less labor intensive. Once I had an idea, I could probably knock one off in a couple of days, which would still leave me time for other freelance jobs.

Jeremy grabbed the bill when it came and then we caught a cab to the hotel. Ford was fifteen minutes late, but she looked like a woman who never had to apologize for her tardiness. People
would be grateful to see her whenever she showed up. Five-ten, slim, midfifties, brilliant blond hair, and if I could have seen the tags on her clothes and accessories I’m guessing they would have read Chanel, Gucci, Hermès, and Diane Von Whatserface. She was instantly captivating, said she was a huge fan of my illustrations, once we had
repaired
—there’s a word I’d never thought to use in that context before—to the bar, talked almost nonstop about all the important New Yorkers she knew who were going to be contributors to her new Web site, including Donald Trump, who, by the way, she knew very well but still couldn’t figure out how he did what he did with his hair, and not once did she ask me any questions except how my father was doing, whom she had heard was not well. Then, just as she whisked off to her next engagement, she said I had the job. The site was to be up and running in three months.

I accepted.

Once she was gone, Jeremy said it felt as though a tornado had just whipped through. Jeremy and I agreed that we’d be talking soon, and I left. Outside the hotel, I hailed a cab.

“Houston and Orchard,” I said. As the driver headed in that direction, I leaned back on the black vinyl seat. That was definitely unlike any other job interview I had had before.

I laughed quietly to myself, then turned my thoughts to what the hell I was going to do next. I thought back to the exchange I’d had with Thomas the night before.

“And when I get to this address on Orchard Street,” I’d said, “what exactly am I supposed to do? I mean, it’s not likely this head is going to still be in the window after all this time.”

“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “You’ll think of something.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

HOWARD
Talliman had not been sleeping well.

Howard Talliman had not been sleeping well for nine months. He hadn’t had a good night’s rest since the end of August.

He’d lost weight, too. Sixteen pounds. He’d come in two notches on his belt. If it weren’t for the bags under his eyes and his gray pallor, he’d look pretty good, or at least as good as a guy who’s shaped something like a garden gnome can ever look.

Talliman’s appearance and his short temper, brought about by too little sleep, were sources of embarrassment to him. They sent a signal that something was troubling him, and Howard did not want anyone to think he was worried.

It was not in Howard’s nature to worry. Howard made other people worry. It was not in Howard’s nature to feel anxious. He made others feel anxious.

It was tough, these days, keeping up appearances.

“You look terrible,” Morris Sawchuck had been telling him. “Have you been to a doctor, Howard?”

“I’m fine,” Howard insisted. “You’re the one I worry about, Morris. You’ve always been my number one concern.”

Howard normally thrived on pressure. It was his oxygen. Any election campaign he’d ever worked, it didn’t matter how grim things looked, how far his candidate was behind. He never gave up. He never broke a sweat, even as those around him were saying it was all over. He assessed problems, and solved them. One time, on a city councilman’s reelection bid, the primary challenger was a woman touting her considerable experience as a community volunteer. She’d put in hundreds more hours helping the poor and disadvantaged than Talliman’s self-serving son of a bitch ever had.

“We have to find a way,” Talliman said, “to make her volunteerism a negative.”

To which everyone on the campaign went, “Huh?”