Whatever it was, he had a feeling he wouldn’t be doing it anymore.
First, though, he spent the better part of an hour on the phone, doing what he should have thought to do yesterday. He called area hospitals, trying to find one that had Peter Shevlin for a patient. He didn’t think Shevlin was in a hospital, didn’t think he was alive, but he had to make the calls to rule out the possibility.
Hadn’t the Carpenter done this before? In Brooklyn, in Boerum Hill. Hadn’t he called Evelyn Crispin’s office, said she’d been called out of town?
So that no one would come looking for her.
So that he could live in her apartment, water her plants, feed her goddamn cat. Live there in perfect comfort, at least until the smell got too bad and drove him out.
He might have moved on by now. Might have holed up on Shevlin’s houseboat for a few days or a week. But he’d have killed Shevlin somewhere else, not on the boat, so he wouldn’t have the same problem he’d had with Crispin.
Unless his visit yesterday had spooked him somehow, in which case he was in the wind. So long, see you later.
But he didn’t think so. He’d had a feeling about this one right from the start, from the minute Susan started telling him an apparently pointless story about someone neither of them knew. Right away he’d thought of the Carpenter. That was the only thing he thought of, the only thing that could have made him take even a cursory interest in the business, let alone get off his ass and get involved.
Something occurred to him, and he went looking for the photocopies Herdig had made for him at the Two-Oh. He read Shevlin’s description — height, weight, age, complexion, color of hair, color of eyes.
At seventy-two, Peter Shevlin was ten years older than the Carpenter, but everything else was pretty much on target. If you put the two men in a lineup they probably looked entirely different, but that was the point; you could put them in a lineup, because they were close enough in physical type.
Close enough to fool the big galoot with the black beard? Popeye’s worst nightmare?
Yeah, maybe.
If he’d been working the case with a partner they’d toss ideas back and forth, batting them around, throwing verbal spaghetti on the wall to see what stuck. He was running a solitaire version of the same game, tossing his own ideas in the air and taking a swing at them.
Maybe he needed a partner. Maybe he should call Galvin, let him try for another brass ring.
Maybe he should call whoever was heading up the Carpenter task force. Odds were good it was someone he knew, and a hundred percent certain it was someone who knew him.
And if the Carpenter was hanging out, keeping an eye on things?
No way they could infiltrate an area like the Boat Basin in force without making their presence obvious. If he was on the boat, well, fine, they’d have him sewn up tight. But if he wasn’t?
And if he had never been there in the first place, if Peter Shevlin was having a hot time with somebody else’s wife and didn’t want the world to know about it, then what? And wouldn’t the word get around that a certain former police commissioner was just a little bit past it?
You couldn’t go in without backup, he thought. Not unless you were out of your mind. Not even if you were out of your mind.
But you could take a look first. You could do that much. Hang out, sneak a peek, make sure the wild goose was there for the chasing. You could do that, couldn’t you?
He took his cell phone, his holstered .38. Found a set of handcuffs, dropped them in a jacket pocket. And, feeling a little foolish, and wishing the day were cooler, he stripped to the waist and dressed again, this time with the Kevlar vest underneath his shirt.
thirty-eight
The Nancy Dee was still in its slip.
Buckram had figured it would be. The Carpenter would use darkness. He was, from all accounts, a man who shrank from the limelight and sought out the shadows. He’d almost certainly board the ship after the sun had set, when there was less light to be seen by and fewer eyes to see him. If he was going to take the boat out, he’d do so then. Or he’d keep his hands off the tiller and catch a few hours of sleep, leaving well before daybreak.
What was the best way to do this?
He could board the boat now. He’d had a glance at the lock on the cabin door earlier, and it hadn’t looked terribly challenging. And why should it be? Out on the water you worried about pirates, not burglars. He’d added a handcuff key to his key ring before he left the apartment, and while he was at it he included the flat strip of flexible steel that had opened more than a few doors for him over the years. He’d be inside the Nancy Dee’s cabin almost as quickly as if he had the key.
And then he’d be waiting there when the Carpenter showed up. He’d hear the man coming, feel the boat shift when he came on board, and have a gun in his hand when the man came through the cabin door. With the advantage of surprise, he’d have the son of a bitch collared and cuffed before he knew what was happening.
And if it was Shevlin?
Well, hell. He’d tell him he was under arrest for making everybody crazy, and then he’d relent and send him home to Helen Mazarin, which would be punishment enough.
But it wouldn’t be Shevlin. Shevlin was dead, he was sure of it, and the man who came into the cabin would be the man who’d killed him.
There were other approaches he could make. He could stake out the Boat Basin and grab the Carpenter as soon as he showed up. He might be hard to spot in a crowd, but he wouldn’t be in a crowd, he’d be by himself, heading for the pier.
Mr. Harbinger? No, don’t move, and keep your hands in plain sight. Down on the ground, hands behind your back...
Easier with two people, easier still with three or four. Hard to corner a man when you were by yourself. You could run at him full speed, tackle him without warning, but you ran the risk of bystanders misreading the situation and interfering — plus a whole lot of egg on your face if you tackled some visiting fireman from Waukegan.
And if the tackle wasn’t perfect, and if the Carpenter made a break for it, then where were you? Even if you were willing to shoot at him, against regulations for cops, flat-out illegal for a private citizen, you risked missing him and hitting somebody else.
No, the best thing was to lay in wait and take him by surprise.
Now?
Now the sun was still high in the sky, and hot enough to make him question the wisdom of the Kevlar vest. Riverside Park was a human beehive, swarming with joggers and skaters and parents pushing strollers and people walking dogs. Everybody on the Upper West Side who hadn’t escaped for the holiday weekend had apparently decided to come to the park for a breath of fresh air. There wasn’t any, not at the moment, but if some happened to blow down from Ontario, they were ready to grab their share of it.
Hard to spot anybody in that sea of people. He looked for a place to sit, passed up a bench he could have shared with a woman who was feeding pigeons, shared another with an Asian man who was reading a copy of El Diario.
He sat back, relaxed. But kept his eyes open.
The movies were better during the week.
The films, of course, were essentially the same, irrespective of the day or time they were shown. But the theaters served better as refuge and dormitory on weekday afternoons, when even the most popular films drew tiny audiences. Saturdays and Sundays attendance increased dramatically, which was good for the theater owners and the film studios, but not as good for the Carpenter.