Abrams looked across the street, then scanned the park behind him. He slipped his .38 “police special” out of his shoulder holster and dropped it into his coat pocket. “He probably thinks I’m gunning for him. Christ, he’s probably called the cops. That’s all I need, to get busted for harassment—”
“We’ll represent you. No charge.”
He started to reply, then laughed.
Unexpectedly, she laughed too, a genuine laugh, light and almost girlish, and it surprised him. “Be careful,” she said. “Stay with it. All right, Mr. Abrams?”
He lit a cigarette. “All right, Miss Kimberly. But listen, I’ve decided to skip this thing tonight.”
She snapped, “You’ve got to be there,” then softened her tone. “I’m afraid that it’s a command performance.”
Abrams drew on his cigarette and stared through the rain toward the hotel. “My tux is at the cleaners. Can’t get it while I’m doing this.”
“I’ll have it picked up and delivered to you.”
“Good. I’ll change in a phone booth.”
“Listen to me. Colonel Carbury is going where we are going tonight, so he also has to dress. Eventually he must go to his hotel—”
“You should have told me that, too. It makes a difference.”
“Now you know. So stay with him until then.”
“Do you know I live in Brooklyn?”
“Yes, and I sympathize. So you will go to the firm’s town house at 184 East Thirty-sixth Street, where your dinner jacket will be delivered. You can dress there, unless you’d prefer a telephone booth. What cleaner do you use?”
He hesitated, then mentioned a formal-wear rental shop, cursing her silently for making him reveal the fact that his wardrobe didn’t include such a thing.
She made him repeat the name of the place, and he wondered if she was enjoying herself. She said, “I’ve called the Burke Agency, and they’ve got two detectives with a radio car ready to assist you. Can they rendezvous with you now?”
“They could have if you’d mentioned it sooner. Unfortunately, Carbury has just left the hotel. I’ll call Burke’s office later.”
“Call me, too. I’ll be here until five fifteen. Then I’ll be at the Lombardy Hotel. Ask for the Thorpe suite.”
He hung up and crossed the street. Carbury headed south on Sixth Avenue. It was after 5:00 P.M. now, and rush hour traffic was getting heavier. Shop windows cast oblongs of light onto the wet sidewalks. Carbury was barely visible crossing 58th Street.
Abrams hurried to catch up. The telephone conversation had somehow taken the edge off his bad mood. He was interested again. The Lombardy Hotel. Only it wasn’t actually a hotel. Every suite above the lobby was owned by somebody who paid more money for it than it would cost to buy the entire block in his old Brooklyn neighborhood. “You travel in the right circles, Ice Queen.” The Thorpe suite. Peter Thorpe — Abrams had been introduced to him once in the office. He’d check that out too, though it was none of his business.
Carbury turned abruptly into 54th Street. Abrams followed. Carbury was moving quickly beside the long garden wall of the Museum of Modern Art. Abrams kept well behind on the opposite side of the street. Ahead, at the intersection of Fifth Avenue, he saw Carbury cross to his side of the street, look up and down the crowded block, then mount the steps of a stately old granite building with a long gray awning. The University Club.
Abrams waited, giving it fifteen minutes, then proceeded to the intersection and entered a telephone booth. He called his contact at the Nineteenth Precinct. “Phil, what do you have?”
The detective told him, “Your man checked through customs at Kennedy two days ago. Gave the St. Moritz as his address, but he’s not registered there. It’s going to take time to phone every hotel in town. Besides, he could be using an alias or be staying in an apartment, a private club, or a place that isn’t required to keep registration records. If it’s urgent—”
“No. Thanks, Phil.”
“You owe me one. I want you to follow my wife.”
“She asked me to follow you.”
The man laughed. “How’s life treating you, Abrams? Got your Esquire yet?”
“Not yet.”
“What’s this all about?”
“Nothing criminal”—Abrams kept his eye on the doors of the building that Carbury had entered—“matrimonial… horseshit.”
“Well, you catch that sucker with his pants off and squeeze his nuts. Who’d travel across the Atlantic for a piece of ass these days? Christ, I wouldn’t cross the street for it.”
“Sure you would.”
“Why don’t you come around anymore? Never see you at P.J.’s.”
“Buy you one.”
“Not tonight. The President is going to be at the Seventh Armory. Secret Service and Bureau all over the fucking place. They got me on a goddamned roof. Jesus. Have to go.”
“Right. Look, don’t bother with the calls. I think I’ve got him.”
Abrams hung up and called Katherine Kimberly. He was told by her secretary that she was not available but that she expected him to call her later at the Lombardy. He called the Burke Detective Agency and told them to send the car to the northeast corner of 54th and Fifth.
Abrams crossed Fifth Avenue and stood at the appointed corner, where he had a good view of the building across the street. It had been a job well done, and he congratulated himself. He supposed that mounted police on punishment duty also congratulated themselves when they did a good job of shoveling the shit out of the stables.
He leaned against a lamppost and turned up his collar. He realized that Katherine Kimberly, if she was walking tonight, would most probably pass this way to get to the Lombardy. Why, he wondered, would he think of that?
Rush hour traffic flowed around him. He looked through the lighted windows in the building across the street. Someone may want to harm him. Very heavy stuff. Carbury thought so too. Yet apparently no one had notified the police, which was suggestive of all sorts of things.
Patrick O’Brien, Katherine Kimberly, tuxedos and town houses, tax write-offs and investment tax credits. Money, power, and status. He had discovered that lawyers almost never took the law too seriously. There was hardly a law on the books, including first-degree murder, that wasn’t open to interpretation. They understood the complex society in which they lived and manipulated it from every seat of power in the land. The rest of the nation had to get by as best they could. Or, as a police captain once said to him, “A single lawyer is a shyster, two lawyers are a law firm, three or more are a legislative body.”
Abrams’ father, a great egalitarian — a Communist, actually — used to instruct him, “We are all pilgrims on the same journey.” True, thought Abrams, but some pilgrims have better road maps.
10
Katherine Kimberly walked down a deserted corridor on the forty-fourth floor, some distance from her office. The corridor ended at a steel door marked DEAD FILES.
She pressed a buzzer. A peephole cover slid open, then the door itself opened slowly on squeaking hinges. She entered a room that was badly lit and musty.
The room was stacked high with oak file cabinets of a type not seen in many years. At the end of an aisle of cabinets there was a single window, which was grimy, as windows tend to become when they are crisscrossed with steel bars. Raindrops beat against the window of the overheated room. She heard the door close behind her and turned.
“Hello, miss.”
“Good afternoon, Arnold.” She regarded the elderly Englishman as her eyes became accustomed to the bad light.
“Just making tea, miss.”
“Fine.” Not to accept tea was to get off on the wrong foot with Arnold, as she had discovered.