“Want a line?” she asked.
I shook my head and held up my glass. “My downfall. But you go ahead into never-never land.”
Her gaze took my measure. She seemed undecided.
“What else do you do?” I asked.
“Whatever my shrink says I can do,” she said with a tight smile, “and whatever he says I can’t do.”
She made up her mind. Abruptly she reached over, opened a drawer in the table and put the coke away. “Maybe I can convince you later, you know, when you’re more mellow.”
“Why do you go to a psychiatrist?”
“Why not? Who do you know that doesn’t go to a psychiatrist?”
“Did Alicia know you went to one?”
“Know?” she chuckled. “Hell, I sent her to my lovely, little sexy shrink.”
I shook my head. “Alicia never would’ve gone to a shrink when I knew her. She despised them. Said they were worse than useless.”
“Well, then either you were wrong or she changed her mind, because she became like a devout analysand. You know, the three-times-a-week kind.”
“And why did she go to your shrink?”
Rachel spread her hands. “Because either the world was fucked-up or she was fucked-up and she wanted to know which one it was.”
“How was Alicia fucked-up?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure she was. You’ll have to ask our cute little Dr. Pasternak.”
Yes. In due course I would do that.
CHAPTER XIII
It was four-thirty Monday afternoon, but not too late to get Stallings if he was still in his office. I’d called his office before I headed down to Wall Street and given a name I knew he’d recognize. His secretary told me he was in a meeting that would probably run past six.
His office building was on William Street in one of those Art Deco structures that had been renovated when the real estate boys convinced themselves that Art Deco wasn’t such a bad style after all. The building had turquoise and aqua highlights to show it was trendy again.
I planted myself across the street next to a construction site. It had just begun to rain, so I stepped back under an overhang and pulled up my raincoat collar. There was a clear view of the entrance to his building. I opened a copy of the Journal and paged through it, keeping an eye on the people exiting. When the downpour started, the street emptied quickly. The sky was slate gray and it didn’t give promise of clearing anytime soon.
It took forty-five minutes. Stallings came out of the building with another man. They talked for a minute, then split up. Stallings opened his umbrella and headed toward Wall Street and then turned onto Broadway. He went down the stairs to the uptown Lex and I followed not too far behind. There were enough people on the platform to give me cover.
In a couple of minutes, the express pulled in. I got into the next car where I had a clear view of Stallings through the glass window in the door. He didn’t read anything. Just stared straight ahead with a glazed end-of- the-day New York look. Behind me, two bums were arguing over who was going to finish off a bottle of John Daniels. The riders cleared a space around them to give them room to curse each other but otherwise didn’t seem to pay too much attention.
When we stopped at Grand Central, Stallings got off. He cut across the main waiting room, walking briskly, and went through one of the passageways where a man was playing All Day All Night With Maryanne on steel drums with a sound that reverberated like it was in an echo chamber. I was fifteen paces behind him on the other side. It was seven-fifteen and the terminal was still crowded with commuters.
Without a glance behind him, Stallings left Grand Central and headed west on Forty-third. His posture was shameful and he would’ve gotten an F for standing up straight if he were still in grade school.
Halfway between Ninth and Tenth, he ducked into a decrepit six-story building. There was a hand-painted sign next to the doorway with a stylized picture of a naked girl and the name “Pussy Cat.” I went in half a minute later and saw the elevator stop at three.
I knew where the sonofabitch was going but I didn’t know why. It just didn’t suit him. Stallings was a wealthy guy. His balance sheet put his net worth at five to six million. And here he was patronizing a low-class cat house. He’d pay fifty bucks for a bang instead of a couple of hundred for a decent hooker that guys like him usually took advantage of to ease the stresses of the workaday world.
Was he going here just to save a few lousy bucks?
Hard to tell, difficult to say.
It wasn’t necessary to follow him upstairs. I waited across the street in the doorway of a boarded-up storefront. The street was empty except for an occasional well-dressed couple huddled under an umbrella hurrying east toward Broadway and a can man with a large plastic bag rooting around in the garbage for a day’s income. I knew I wouldn’t have to wait long. A man of Stalling’s age and temperament wasn’t going to spend a lot of time engaging in pleasant chit-chat with the staff.
Stallings came out a little more than a half hour later. The rain had changed into an intermittent drizzle. He opened his umbrella, stopped by the curb and looked both ways before cutting across the street.
I let him walk half a block before I came up behind him and slammed him into the entrance of a shuttered store. He just stood there with his mouth wide open in disbelief.
That was all I needed. I shoved the muzzle of the nine millimeter into his gaping maw. Nobody likes the taste of hard polymer, especially a man who’s just been at heaven’s gate.
He sputtered and blinked wildly, coughing and trying to control his coughing at the same time.
“All right, my friend,” I said. “Now talk to me.”
I took the gun out of his mouth and placed the side of the barrel against his cheek.
“What…what…what…” he managed.
It’s relatively interesting to note how quickly a man’s spunk disappears when he’s just spent his load. The guy in front of me wasn’t the arrogant son of a bitch at the cemetery. Instead he was just a soft sniveling gelatinous mess.
“What was the problem?” I said.
“Why? What problem?”
I figured there was always a problem somewhere, human nature being what it was.
“The problem with Alicia,” I said.
He gulped and nodded. “Wait,” he said, trying to stand straight.
I wasn’t going anywhere.
“Her work wasn’t good. She…”
“What was wrong with it?”
He nodded again. “I had just fired her. Just a week before she…”
“Before she was killed?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you fire her?”
“I don’t…” he said, flapping his hands helplessly. “She lost interest. She was making bad calls, bad judgments. Her stocks were down. Her earnings projections were off.”
“Why was that?”
“I tried to talk to her like a father. But she…she wasn’t working the way she used to. She antagonized a lot of people. She didn’t seem to care…” His voice trailed off.
“Why was she doing that?”
“I can’t tell you. I just don’t know. Please don’t hurt me. I promise. I swear.” He looked like he was going to come apart like a cheap suit.
“Who did she talk to at work?”
He thought for a minute. “I guess McCormack…Robert McCormack.”
“Who is he?”
“Our REIT analyst. He was her closest confidant. At least, she spent the most time with him.”
In the dim light he looked like he was about to cry. I let him go and holstered my gun. Stallings started to rock back and forth against the metal shutter and made it rattle in the night.
“Why would someone want to kill her like that?” he asked me. “Nothing like this ever happened to one of my employees before.”
“You just haven’t been in business long enough,” I informed him.
CHAPTER XIV
Laura came back into the room with two mugs of coffee and handed one to me. On the mug was some kind of logo and the name of Stallings’ brokerage house in an antique script. She sat down in an armchair and managed to give me a sad little smile.