We’d set up accordingly. TJ and I were standing in the doorway of a building directly opposite Louise’s, while Leo’s car was parked next to a hydrant on Broadway. If a cop rousted him he’d circle the block, but it wasn’t likely, not at that hour. All he had to do was say he was waiting on a fare.
When Thompson left the building, we’d tag him to Broadway, then All the Flowers Are Dying
91
get in Leo’s car and follow whatever cab he hailed. If he walked down to Eighty-sixth and took the subway, TJ would go down into the tunnel after him. He’d try to stay in touch by cell phone, and we’d try to be there when he and Thompson got off the train.
So Thompson came out the door and down the stoop, looked at his watch, hauled out a cell phone, and made a call. At first no one answered, but then someone did, or voice mail kicked in, because he talked with animation for a moment or two before snapping it shut. He held it out, looked at it, then put it away, got out a cigarette and lit it, blew out a cloud of smoke, and started walking, but not toward Broadway. He headed the other way, toward West End Avenue.
Shit.
“Plan B,” I said, and took off after Thompson, while TJ sprinted to the corner of Broadway and around it to where Leo was waiting with the bulldog edition of the Daily News open on the steering wheel. He had the motor running before TJ was in his seat. New York’s the one place in the country when you can’t make a right turn at a red light, the traffic’s just too chaotic for that to work here, but David Letterman pointed out once that New Yorkers think of traffic laws as guidelines, and Leo figures a grown man ought to be able to use his own judgment.
He slid around the corner and picked me up halfway down the block.
I got in back, and Leo coasted to the corner, where the light was red against us. Thompson, when he reached the corner, could have stepped to the curb to flag a southbound taxi, or he might have crossed Eighty-seventh Street himself, or waited for the light and crossed West End and headed for Riverside Drive.
If he’d done any of those things we could have followed him with no trouble, but instead he turned right on West End and headed uptown.
Leo might have been willing to push his luck and run another red light, but he’d be going the wrong way on a one-way street, and we couldn’t do that.
“Son of a bitch,” he said with feeling.
“Shoot across to Riverside and come back on Eighty-eighth,” I said, opening the door and getting out again. “I’ll try to stay with him.” By the time I got going he had a half-block lead on me, which 92
Lawrence Block
shouldn’t have been a problem, but I lost sight of him when he turned right at Eighty-eighth Street. I increased my pace and got to the corner where he’d turned and he was gone.
Leo, who ran us back to Ninth and Fifty-seventh, wouldn’t take any money. “I thought we was gonna have an adventure,” he said. “ ‘Follow that cab!’ I thought I’d show off my driving skills and tail the bastard through parts of Brooklyn even Pete Hamill’d get lost in. All I did was drive around the fucking block.”
“It’s not your fault I lost him.”
“No, it’s his fault, for turning out to be such an elusive bastard. Put your money back in your pocket, Matt. Call me again sometime, and we’ll have fun, and you can pay me double. But this one’s on the house.” He’d dropped us in front of the Morning Star, but neither of us felt like going there. We crossed the street to the Parc Vendôme and went upstairs. Elaine was on the couch with a novel Monica had recommended as a perfect guilty pleasure. “She called it the prose equivalent of a three-handkerchief movie,” she said, “and I have to say she was right. What’s the matter?”
“The guy walked around the block and lost us,” I said.
“The nerve of the son of a bitch. You want something?”
“I wouldn’t mind starting the night over,” I said, “but that would be tricky. I don’t want more coffee. I don’t think I want anything. TJ?”
“Maybe a Coke,” he said, and went off to fetch it himself.
I joined him in the kitchen and the two of us tried to make sense out of what had happened to us up in the West Eighties. “It’s like he made us,” he said, “but he didn’t exactly act like it.”
“What I can’t figure out,” I said, “is how he disappeared like that.”
“Magician walks down the street and turns into a drugstore.”
“It was something like that, wasn’t it? He wasn’t that far ahead of me when he turned the corner. Maybe a hundred feet? Not much more than that, and I would have cut the distance some, because I walked faster once the corner building blocked my view of him. And then I got there and he was gone.”
All the Flowers Are Dying
93
“Even if he turns the corner and starts bookin’, you’d get a look at him soon as you come round the corner yourself.”
“You would think so.”
“ ’Less he ducked into that building.”
“The apartment house on the corner? I thought of that. The street door’s not locked, anybody can get into the vestibule. Then you’d need a key, or for someone to buzz you in. I looked in and didn’t see him, but I didn’t do that right away, not until I’d spent some time trying to spot him on the street. You know, it seemed strange that he would walk to West End instead of Broadway, but if he lived there—”
“Then he just a man going home.”
“A man who lives around the corner from a woman and tells her he lives a couple of miles away in the East Thirties.”
“Maybe he don’t want her coming over every other day to borrow a cup of sugar.”
“More likely a pack of cigarettes. I can see that, actually. You go fishing for a girlfriend online, hoping she doesn’t live in the outer reaches of Brooklyn or Queens, some bus-and-subway combination away from you, and then you find out she’s right around the corner, and you realize there’s such a thing as too close.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Wouldn’t she recognize him? From seeing him in the neighborhood?”
“You’d think so. New Yorkers may not know our next-door neighbors, but we’re generally able to recognize them by sight. He made a phone call, let’s not forget that part.”
“Right before he lit up a cigarette.”
Elaine had come in to fix herself a cup of tea. “He was phoning his wife,” she said, “to find out if he should pick up a quart of milk on the way home.”
“Or a cup of sugar,” I said. “Or a carton of Marlboros. If he was married, would he get himself a girlfriend around the corner?”
“Not unless he had a well-developed death wish,” she said. “Who was he talking to on the phone, a man or a woman?”
“We couldn’t even hear him,” I said.
94
Lawrence Block
“Couldn’t you tell by his body language? Whether it was a man or a woman on the other end of the call?”
“No.”
“TJ?”
“I had to guess, I’d say a woman.”
“You would?” I said. “Why?”
“Dunno.”
“He was just with a woman,” I said, “and from what Louise said he gave a good account of himself. If he wasn’t calling his wife to say he’d had to stay late at the office—”
“And he wouldn’t,” TJ said, “not if he lived five minutes away. He’d just show up.”
“You’re right. So it wasn’t a wife he called.”
“ ’Less it was somebody else’s wife.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“He could have called his wife,” Elaine said. “In Scarsdale, to say he’d be late, or that he wasn’t going to make it home at all. And then he went to the building around the corner.”