“See what I mean?” he said. I nodded sympathetically and pulled out a photo of Danes.
“You know him?”
Christopher looked at the picture and looked at me. His small eyes got smaller. “Danes, right?”
I nodded. “Seen him around?”
He shook his head slowly. “Not for a while- I don’t remember when the last time was. I told this to the other guys.”
I looked at Christopher and took a deep breath. I slipped the photo back into my pocket. “What other guys?” I asked quietly.
Christopher shuffled his feet and looked away from me. His eyes were nervous when they finally came back to mine. “I guess you’re not with them, huh?” he said.
“What other guys, Christopher?”
“The two guys who asked about Danes before.”
“When before?”
He shrugged. “Ten days ago, maybe.”
“What did they ask?”
Christopher ran his eyes around the lobby. “The same as you. They showed me a picture, asked if I’d seen him around and when I’d seen him last. Asked if I knew his friends in the building.”
“And you told them…?”
“Same as I told you. I haven’t seen the guy, and I don’t know shit about the tenants.”
I nodded. “Who were they?” Christopher shook his head and looked confused. “Were they cops? Were they lawyers?”
“Not lawyers… not cops, either. They were private, like you.”
“These guys have names?”
Another headshake. “Not that I remember.” I stared at him, and he ran a stained hand over the back of his neck and said nothing.
“You remember what they looked like?” I asked.
“They just looked like… two guys.”
I sighed. “Were they short, tall, black, white?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. They were… medium. They were white, the both of them, and I think they had brown hair. They were about the same height- maybe six feet, maybe a little shorter.”
I shook my head. “Did they say anything about calling if you happened to see Danes?” I asked. “Did they give you a phone number?”
Christopher tugged at his ear and rubbed the back of his neck again and looked around the lobby. “No, bro, they didn’t say anything about that. They just asked their questions and split.”
I looked at him some more. I was fairly sure that Christopher was not being entirely truthful with me. I was fairly sure, in fact, that he was lying through his teeth. But I still needed him, and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it. “And you haven’t heard from them since?” I asked.
“Nope,” Christopher said, and looked at his watch. He craned his neck to check the sidewalk, east and west. “Not to rush you or anything, but that prick’ll be back soon.”
“Sure,” I said. “We’re just about done. Anybody working here who knows the tenants well?”
“The guy I’m subbing for today: Paul Gargosian. He’s been here since they opened the place, and he knows everybody. He’s an okay guy, too- you grease him and he’ll talk to you.”
“When’s he back?”
“Couple weeks.”
“Know his number, or where he lives?”
“In the Bronx someplace- I don’t know.” Christopher looked at his watch again, more nervous now. “I don’t want to rush you, but… ”
I nodded. “No problem, Christopher, you’ve been a big help. How much to get into Danes’s apartment?”
Christopher looked at me and winced. “Shit, bro, you don’t want much, do you?” He shook his head and tugged on an ear. “That could be my job, for chrissakes.” I nodded and let him keep talking and thinking about it. “Oh, Christ, what the fuck are you going to do in there?”
“I’m just trying to find the guy, Christopher. I’m not interested in taking his stuff.”
“Shit… it’d need to be at least a hundred- no, two hundred.” I nodded.
“Two hundred’s fine,” I said. “When?” Christopher was looking paler.
“It’s got to be next week- Monday afternoon. Super-Prick will be out then.” I wasn’t happy with a six-day wait, but I didn’t have a lot of options. I nodded. Christopher checked the sidewalk again. “You’ve got to split.”
“Just one more question,” I said. “Where do the tenants garage their cars?”
“I know two places people use,” he said, and gave me their names. “Now get out of here, man.” I went.
The parking garages Christopher told me about were each within four blocks of the building, but in opposite directions. I went north and got lucky.
It was off Third Avenue, tucked between two worn apartment buildings, and its entrance was a narrow oil-stained ramp leading down. I found a small quiet man named Rafe in a glass booth at the bottom of the ramp. His hair was black and wavy and his dark eyes were set deeply in a weathered intelligent face. He recognized Danes’s picture and identified him as “black ’04 BMW Seven-fifty.” He told me the car wasn’t in and hadn’t been for a while, and for twenty bucks he looked through a stack of wrinkled papers and gave me its plate number and the date and time it had last gone out. It was five weeks ago, the day after Nina Sachs had last spoken with Danes, at nine-twenty in the morning. I asked Rafe where the nearest gas stations were. He told me, and I thanked him. I turned to leave and then turned back.
“Has anyone else come asking about this?” I said.
A look of calculation passed quickly across Rafe’s face and he nodded at me. “One guy, a week and a half back.”
“What did he ask about?”
“About the car and the customer- like you- and I told him the same things. I got twenty-five out of him, though.”
I fished a ten from my pocket. “You remember what he looked like?”
Rafe tucked the bill away. “White guy, in his thirties maybe, skinny, about five-ten, with dark hair and a mustache.”
“He give you a name or show some ID?” He shook his head. “He give you a number to call, in case Danes showed up?”
“He tried to. I told him no thanks. It’s one thing taking cash and answering questions, but being a spy is something else.”
I nodded. “Has he been back since?”
“Nope,” Rafe said, and then the phone rang in the glass booth and he picked it up and started talking. I made my way back up the ramp.
The closest of the gas stations was north, near an on-ramp to the FDR Drive. I was still feeling loose from my run and the rain was still soft, and I walked uptown and wondered all the way about who else was searching for Gregory Danes.
The station was on the corner, and a steady stream of cars pulled in and out, veering dangerously across many lanes of traffic as they did. It was not quiet. Besides the pumps there were two greasy repair bays with car lifts and a cramped store that sold cigarettes, lottery tickets, and soda. Jammed between the bays and the store was a filthy glassed-in office. It smelled of gasoline and cigars and dirty socks. I waited at a chest-high plywood counter for Frank to get off the phone.
Frank was black, about sixty and mostly bald, and he looked like he’d spent much of his life moving heavy things around. He was just under six feet, with a massive chest and shoulders and no neck to speak of. He wore a gray uniform shirt with an open collar, his name on the pocket, and the sleeves rolled up over beefy forearms. He hung up the phone and ran a hand over his broad, tired face.
“Let me see that again,” he said. I gave him the picture of Danes, and he fished a pair of half-glasses out of his pocket and peered at it. After a while he shrugged.
“He drives a black BMW Seven-fifty, if that helps,” I said. “An ’04.”
“I don’t know… maybe. He’s not one of my regulars- not one of my weekly guys- but I’ve seen him before.”