A skinny white cop said on cue: “Yeah, he’s famous.”
After a brief discussion, it was agreed that this situation belonged to the FBI now. The precinct would cover the front and rear of the building through the night but the FBI would take “custody” of Mr. Robertson and watch him as long as they liked. All that was left was to meet their charge. The lieutenant called through the bedroom door, “Mr. Robertson, could you come out, sir? We got the FBI here to see you.”
Through the door: “All right, I’m coming.”
Robertson looked like a weary traveler, thin and stooped, shuffling out from his bedroom in slippers, loose trousers, Chambray shirt and a thin yellow cardigan. He was an old-looking sixty-six. The lines on his face were so deep you could lose a dime in a fold. His skin tones were pure black without a hint of brown except on the palms of his long-fingered hands, which were pale, cafe-au-lait. His hair and beard were close-cropped, more salt than pepper.
He spotted the new faces. “How do you do?” he said to Will and Nancy. “I’m sorry to cause so much fuss.”
Will and Nancy formally introduced themselves.
“Please don’t call me Mr. Robertson,” the man protested. “My friends call me Clive.”
Before long the police cleared out. The sun was low over the Hudson and began deepening and expanding like a fat blood orange. Will closed the curtains in the living room and pulled the blinds in Clive’s bedroom. There hadn’t been a sniper shooting yet but the Doomsday killer was mixing things up. He and Nancy reinspected every inch of the apartment, and while she remained with Clive, Will swept the hallway and stairwell.
The formal interview was straightforward-there wasn’t much to tell. Clive had gotten back into town mid-afternoon from a three-city tour with his quintet. No one had a key to his apartment and to the best of his knowledge nothing had been disturbed in his absence. After an uneventful flight from Chicago, he took a yellow cab directly from the airport to his building, where he found the postcard buried in a week’s accumulation of mail. He immediately recognized it for what it was, called 911, and that was that.
Nancy walked him through the names and addresses of the Doomsday victims but Clive shook his head sadly at each mention. He didn’t know any of them. “Why would this fellow want to harm me?” he lamented in his gravelly drawl. “I’m just a piano player.”
Nancy shut her notebook and Will shrugged. They were done. It was almost eight o’clock. Four hours to go before Doomsday was up.
“My refrigerator’s empty ’cause I been away. Otherwise I’d offer you two somethin’ to eat.”
“We’ll order out,” Will said. “What’s good around here?” Then quickly, “It’s on the government.”
Clive suggested the ribs from Charley’s on Frederick Douglass Boulevard, got on the phone and painstakingly placed a complicated order with five different sides. “Use my name,” Will whispered, writing it out for Clive in block letters.
While they waited, they agreed on a plan. Clive wouldn’t leave their sight till midnight. He wouldn’t answer the phone. While he slept, they would keep vigil in the living room, and come morning they’d reevaluate the threat level and work out a new protection scheme.
Then they sat in silence, Clive fidgeting in his favorite armchair, frowning, scratching at his beard. He wasn’t comfortable with visitors, especially straitlaced FBI agents who might as well have beamed into his living room from another planet.
Nancy craned her neck and studied his paintings until her eyebrows suddenly rose and she exclaimed, “Is that a de Kooning?” She was pointing at a large canvas with abstract bursts and smudges of primary colors.
“Very good, young lady, that’s exactly what that is. You know your art.”
“It’s amazing,” she gushed. “It must be worth a fortune.”
Will squinted at it. To his eye, it looked like the kind of thing a kid brought home to stick on the refrigerator.
“It is very valuable,” Clive said. “Willem gave it to me many years ago. I named a piece of music after him so we were all square, but I think I got the better deal.”
That set the two of them off, jabbering about modern art, a subject about which Nancy seemed quite knowledgeable. Will loosened his tie, checked his watch, and listened to his belly rumbling. It had already been a long day. If not for Mueller’s hole in the heart, he’d be on his sofa now, watching TV, swigging scotch. He hated him more and more.
Knuckles were rapping against the front door. Will drew his Glock. “Take him to the bedroom.” Nancy wrapped her arm around Clive’s waist and hurried him away while Will peeked through the peephole.
It was a police officer holding a huge paper sack. “I got your ribs,” the patrolman called out. “If you don’t want ’em, me and the guys’ll have ’em.”
The ribs were good-no, great. The three of them sat in a civilized circle around Clive’s small dining room table and ate greedily, scooping up sides of mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, sweet corn, rice and beans and collard greens, chewing and swallowing in quiet, the food too delicious to be spoiled by small talk. Clive finished first, then Will, both of them cross-eyed full.
Nancy kept going for another five minutes, keeping the forkfuls coming. Both men watched with a kind of grudging admiration, politely killing some time by tearing open packets of moist towelettes and fussily cleaning barbecue sauce off each finger.
In high school Nancy had been petite and athletic. She played second base on the softball team and was a winger in varsity soccer. During her first year away from home she started gaining weight, succumbing to freshman syndrome. She packed on pounds in college, and more in law school, and became positively dumpy. Midway through her second year at Fordham she decided she wanted to join the FBI, but her career advisor told her she’d have to get in shape first. So, with crazed determination, she blitz-dieted and jogged herself down to 120.
Assignment to the New York Office was a good news/bad news story. The good news: New York. The bad news: New York. Her GS-10 grade carried a base salary of about $38,000 with a Law Enforcement Availability Pay kicker of another $9,500. Where were you going to live in New York making under fifty grand? For her, the answer was back home in White Plains, where she got her old room back bundled with mama’s cooking and special bag lunches. She worked long hours and never saw the inside of a gym. In three years her weight steadily escalated again, padding her small frame.
Will and Clive were watching her like she was a contestant at a hot-dog-eating contest. Mortified, she blushed and laid down her utensils.
They cleared the table and washed up like a little family. It was nearly ten.
Will parted the curtains a few inches with his finger. It was inky dark. Tiptoed, he looked straight down and saw two cruisers at the curb, where they were supposed to be. He let the curtains close and checked the dead bolt on the front door. How determined was this killer? With a police cordon, what would his move be? Would he back off and accept defeat? After all, he’d already murdered an old lady less than twenty-four hours ago. Serial killers weren’t typically high-energy types but this guy was killing in bunches. Would he come crashing through the wall of the adjacent apartment? Rappel down from the roof and blast through a window? Blow up the whole damn building to get his victim? Will didn’t have a feel for the perp but he was an outlier and the lack of predictability made him very uneasy.
Clive was back in his favorite chair trying to convince himself that time was his friend. He was bonding with Nancy, who seemed entranced by the slow precise cadence of his voice. The two of them were talking about music. It sounded to Will like she knew a fair bit about that subject too.
“You’re kidding,” she said. “You played with Miles?”
“Oh yeah, I played with them all. I played with Herbie, I played with Dizzy and Sonny and Ornette. I been blessed.”