“So you’ve got no official interest in this particular matter.”
“None,” he agreed, “which is convenient all around, isn’t it? It means I don’t have to file a report, and neither do you. It also means nobody’s going to ask you where the regulations say you’re supposed to take down a statement and fill out a missing persons report and then conveniently lose it in a file drawer somewhere.” He smiled pleasantly. “Of course,” he said, “if I pick up that phone and call around, you’re likely to get a call back from someone with so much brass on his uniform you won’t be able to spot the blue underneath it. And I guarantee you he’ll have enough official standing to mobilize the National Guard.”
“I take your point,” Herdig said. “Just give me a minute, okay?”
Peter Shevlin was employed by a firm called Fitzmaurice & Liebold, with an address on Sixth Avenue that would put it in or near Rockefeller Center. His supervisor, and the man who’d put Herdig’s mind to rest, not that it was all that troubled to begin with, was one Wallace Weingartner.
Buckram bought a couple of sandwiches at a deli, got a can of Heineken to go with them, and had lunch on a bench in Central Park. The beer made the enterprise technically illegal, in that he was consuming an alcoholic beverage in the park. Striking a blow for freedom, he told himself, and enjoyed his meal.
He was eating al fresco so he could make a phone call, and he’d always felt the use of cell phones in restaurants was an infinitely greater evil than, say, drinking a beer in public. After he’d bagged his trash and dropped it in a litter basket, he returned to his bench and managed to get the number at Fitzmaurice & Liebold, whose offices he was reasonably certain would be closed today, the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. But you never knew what sort of workaholic Wally Winegardner might be, so it seemed worth a try.
The offices were closed, of course, but the voice that answered gave him options; if he knew his party’s extension he could press it, and, if not, he could find it by entering the first three digits of the party’s last name. He pressed 9-4-6, the numeric equivalent of W-I-N, and that gave him a choice of two parties, neither of them Winegardner. He tried to get back to the previous prompt but couldn’t navigate through the system, so he gave up and broke the connection and went through the whole thing again. This time, on a hunch, he pressed 9-3-4, for W-E-I, and learned in short order that Wallace Weingartner’s extension was 161. He pressed that, and after four rings got a voice mail pickup, with a woman’s voice — Weingartner’s secretary, he supposed, or the firm’s official telephone voice — inviting him to leave his message at the tone.
He rang off and put the cell phone away. He could let it go, he thought, but that meant letting it go until Tuesday, because the office would be closed tomorrow and Monday. And Tuesday was the third, and a week from Wednesday was the eleventh.
And he couldn’t help thinking the Carpenter was out there. Well, hell, everybody damn well knew he was out there, but he also felt he was somehow connected to the disappearance of Peter Shevlin.
Made no sense. If he really thought so, he should stop trying to figure out how to track down Weingartner (and wouldn’t you think a cop with a name like Herdig would jot down the German spelling?) and call someone who could hook him up with whoever was heading the Carpenter task force. But he couldn’t do that, because if he had the guy on the phone right this minute he wouldn’t have anything substantive to tell him. He didn’t even have a hunch, for God’s sake. Just a feeling, and one that made increasingly less sense the more he examined it.
He got out the phone again, called 1-212-555-1212, and actually got to talk to a human being, who came back and told him that Wallace Weingartner didn’t have a listed phone in the borough of Manhattan. Not in the 212 listings, anyway. He tried 917, the code for local cell phones, figuring old Wally might have his phone along even if he was up in the mountains or down on the Jersey shore. He could call the poor bastard without even knowing where he was.
No listing.
He put the phone in his pocket and gave up.
Viktor was still on duty, and not happy at the thought of letting him into the Shevlin apartment. When pressed, he explained that he was a Russian Jew from Odessa, in the Ukraine, and that the building’s super and all the other doormen and maintenance personnel were Hispanic. If anything turned up missing from the apartment, who would they say took it?
“My shift is up at four. Then is Marcos. You tell him what you want, he lets you in. No problem.”
“If I have to come back,” he said, “it won’t be at four o’clock, it’ll be twenty minutes from now, and you’ll still be on duty. And I’ll have a couple of uniformed cops with me, and I’ll pick the ones with the loudest voices.”
Viktor turned away, looking unhappy, and found a key in the desk drawer. “Here,” he said. “You go. Anybody asks, you can tell them I never set foot in that apartment.”
No, he thought, instead you gave a total stranger the unattended run of the place. For that they ought to give you a medal.
He went upstairs, let himself in, sniffed the air, and was grateful for what he didn’t smell. Because it was entirely possible Shevlin could have been lying dead somewhere in the apartment, in a closet or under a bed or in the tub with the shower curtain screening him from view. If his death had been close enough in time to the earlier visit, and if the doorman who’d made the last check had just taken a quick look around... well, the poor bastard would be pretty ripe by now.
But in fact the poor bastard wasn’t there at all. Buckram spent the better part of an hour trying to learn something useful, and invading Shevlin’s privacy rather thoroughly in the process. You learned that in police work, learned to search drawers and closets without blinking, to go through papers and correspondence with the enthusiasm of a voyeur and the ardor of a spy.
What he didn’t find was anything to establish Shevlin’s presence in the apartment since Helen Mazarin had decided he was missing. His checkbook didn’t have an entry after that date. There were newspapers stacked beside a chair in the living room, magazines arranged on the coffee table, none of them more recent than the date of his presumed disappearance.
There were pictures, mostly of a woman whom Buckram took to be Mrs. Shevlin. In one she appeared as a bride barely out of her teens, standing beside a slim young man with dark hair and a shy smile, who looked to be wearing a tuxedo for the first time in his life. No pictures of kids, nor did he recall Mazarin mentioning any children. A childless couple, married young, lived for decades until the wife died and left the husband stranded.
Like the Harbingers, he thought, in a West Side apartment building just two blocks from here. Not so grand — the Shevlins were in one of the great Art Deco buildings on Eighty-sixth, with high ceilings and an impressive lobby, the Harbingers in a more modest building on a less desirable street. But then the Harbingers had had children to support.
Both men wound up childless, though.
He picked up the wedding picture, wishing it would tell him something. She dies and you buy a boat, he told the young Shevlin in the picture. You’re seventy-two years old, you could certainly afford to retire, but how much time can you spend putt-putting around New York Harbor? So you go to work every day, and you come home, and on nice evenings you go out on your boat.
Where the hell are you?
He wished he could find a more recent photo of Shevlin. The wedding portrait was useless, you couldn’t show it to people and tell them to add fifty years to the kid in the picture. He’d thought Mazarin might have a snapshot of the man, most likely taken against his wishes, but she’d said she didn’t. She wasn’t much of a photographer, she’d said.