“Where’s my brother-in-law?”
A shrug. “Gone.”
“Gone?”
“He worked a couple days drivin’ people. Then called in. Said he missed Arkansas. Was goin’ home.”
“Stu?”
“Yeah?”
“New York is a city with apartments by the hundreds of thousands. What made you pick this particular one to relocate to while your place in Great Neck was being redone? How is it that you happened to pick this very apartment, just a couple weeks after I started working on the Park Avenue air rights deal?”
Stu looked at me for a long moment. Then he walked back in his apartment and closed the door.
“Shithouse mouse,” I said to the closed door.
I went to my apartment, got out Katy’s address book, and tried every phone number she had for Hiram. No answer at any of them.
By this time my head was seriously spinning. I sat in my living room and looked out the window at a lowering sky that promised yet another winter storm before the night was out. I sat there for a long time, thinking.
It was full dark when I grabbed my overcoat and headed downstairs again.
On my way through the lobby the doorman called to me, a little sheepish. “Oh, Mr. Carson?”
“Yeah?”
“Thought you’d want to know, sir. A couple of detectives were in here before, asking me to look at a sketch of a man. He looked just like the man who stayed with you and your wife a couple weeks ago.”
I nodded. “Great. Thanks.”
Katy is awake when I get back to her hospital room. I pull a chair next to her bed, and brush her hair off her forehead and kiss her. “Hey, babe. How you doing?”
I get back a weak smile. “I’m feeling okay.”
“Honey? I need to ask you something.”
“Okay.”
“Where’s Hiram?”
Her face grows serious. “Sweetheart, I have no idea. I haven’t seen or heard from him since he moved out.”
“I talked to Stu today. He said Hiram went back to Arkansas.”
“Oh.”
“The police say a man who looks like him picked up Diane Martin the night she disappeared.”
“She’s not the Hell Bitch anymore?”
“Katy. I need you to tell me what’s going on here.”
She looks away. When she turns back she has tears in her eyes. “Stu heard me talking with Carmen about her. How awful she is — how crazy and paranoid and how she keeps you down. How you’re really a better lawyer than she is. A more reasonable person to deal with.”
“God Almighty.”
“Carmen said it was a shame and Stu said not to worry — that so much worry would only make me sick and there was no point in it. He said that this is New York, and people come and go all the time — to new jobs or new careers, or sometimes they, you know, get hit by a bus. Something like that. I didn’t argue with him.”
“You didn’t argue with him?”
Now she’s crying in earnest. “I said that would make me happy. Oh, babe, I was half kidding, but, my God, she treated you so badly. I just wanted her out of our lives.”
“Christ, Katy. Where did Hiram fit in?”
“I’d told Carmen about him. She said I should invite him to come to town. She said Stu might be able to find something for him. Something that would let Hiram make a little money, so he wouldn’t have it so bad back home.”
“Stu found something for him to do all right.”
“Oh God, Billy. I had no idea what she was talking about. Really and truly.”
“I gotta go to the cops with this, Katy.”
“Do you have to?”
“Katy. The cops are gonna think I brought Hiram to town to cap Diane. And you know why they’re gonna think that? Because Stu set it up to look just that way.”
I sit listening to her cry, knowing I need to go.
Knowing I need to go now.
Knowing I need to say goodbye to my wife and go dime out one of the most dangerous men in New York along with my asshole brother-in-law.
I stand and say, “I’m sorry, darling.”
Two minutes later I’m walking out of my wife’s room, the back of my hand still wet from her tears. The sound of her voice as she pleaded with me still in my head. The taste of her skin still on my lips.
I speak to the cabbie but he makes no move to pull away from the curb. And as I watch the guy in the overcoat walk toward me, I think about my wife lying in her hospital bed and hope that Carmen will see to it that Stu does right by Katy, maybe with some of the money his family will make off the Gerstens’ condo deal.
And I suddenly realize that the City That Never Shuts Up is completely silent, that there is no sound to be heard at all, no chattering cabbie, no radio traffic report, no jackhammers in the street, no sirens, no blaring horns, no drunken laughter, and the guy keeps coming with his hand in his coat and now he pulls out his hand and there’s something in it that’s dark and heavy and he makes straight for the cab window and what I next hear in this first ever moment of total silence in this town is glass exploding and the quiet deadly cough of a silenced gunshot.
The consultant
by Peter Blauner
1313 Avenue of the Americas
As soon as she wedged her way off the crowded elevator on the forty-fifth floor, pregnant belly swathed in a navy Anne Klein duffel coat, with a sticker from the security desk on the lapel, she noticed the charge in the atmosphere. A mood of muffled tension and high-wire efficiency pervaded the reception area with its Oriental carpet, copies of Billboard and Variety arrayed on the coffee tables, and works of contemporary art hanging on the mahogany-paneled walls.
“Can I help you?” A receptionist with honey highlights in her hair and a small gold stud in her nose spoke to her from behind glass.
“I’m Nancy Arthur. I’m here to see Scott Locasio.”
“Have a seat, please.”
She went over and sank into a black leather sofa, her feet aching, her eyes drawn to a painting of a seated screaming man surrounded by a cage of lines. She studied it carefully, telling herself it couldn’t possibly be the original version of the Francis Bacon she’d written a paper on back when she was an art history major.
“He’ll see you now.” An assistant in stilettoes as thin as ice picks came striding up the hall, carrying herself with a kind of daunting confidence meant to convey a sense of both her own importance and the visitor’s provisional status.
Nancy struggled to her feet and followed her past a row of mounted platinum records and movie posters, feeling that familiar hummingbird flutter in her gut. Come on, you can do this. Don’t be such a girl. A great oak door opened onto a sweeping godlike view of northern Manhattan, a perspective that made the trees of Central Park look like the current occupant’s private garden and filled her with an uncomfortable mixture of envy and awe. Its majesty was only slightly undercut by the presence of a Styrofoam backboard in the corner and the brutal thump of hip-hop coming from a pair of four-foot-high Altec Lansing speakers.
“So you’re supposed to be the new coach, huh?” He spoke without taking his eyes off his computer monitor. A stocky, thick-necked young man in charcoal double-breasted pinstripes, with a pair of black suede Bruno Magli loafers insouciantly up on his desk. “No disrespect,” he said. “But if it was up to me, you wouldn’t even be here.”
“And why’s that?” She sat down before him without being asked, trying to stake a claim and accommodate herself to the deliberate thuggishness in his manner. A lot of them were like that these days. The new breed, who wore flashy jewelry to the office, listened to misogynist rap, and left copies of Maxim on their desks, in full view of their pregnant guests.