Evan Hunter - Candyland

"What does it sound like to you?"

"It sounds like a guy pissed off enough to maybe wait outside and go after Heidi when she comes down."

"Why Heidi?" Emma says.

"He can't take it out on the guy who beat him up, so he goes after a girl looks like a teenager, he doesn't even know why."

They drive across the bridge in silence. Emma is thinking Michael may already be back in Los Angeles telling his wife what a good boy he was here in the Big Apple. She is thinking Stanley may already be on his way to Florida to be an extra in a beach movie. The crosstown traffic creeps across the city streets. Outside the car, people are moving as if through a thick viscous haze. When Morgan at last pulls the car to the curb on Madison, it is almost one-thirty.

"Try your partner again," Emma suggests.

Morgan dials the number. He lets it ring and ring.

"Guess he decided to wait till after lunch, after all," he says. "I'll run back there, hit the computer myself."

"If you get a chance, call that lady at the Guild, too."

"Sure. What's her name again?"

"Hennings. Let me know if you get anything."

"Otherwise I'll see you outside the XS at ten to six. You've got all my numbers, stay in touch."

Emma reaches over the back seat for her jacket. Morgan watches her. She slides out of the car, puts the jacket on, hoists her tote from the floor of the car.

"See you," she says, and closes the door. She watches as Morgan pulls the car from the curb and moves it into the stream of uptown traffic. The sidewalk is crowded with lunch-hour pedestrians. She remembers something Morgan said as they were coming across the bridge.

Most of them were abused one way or another when they were kids, they got bad memories go back half a century, all of them sex-related.

The pedestrians move past her and around her. Any one of them could be a Stanley or a Michael, rushing by on the sidewalk here, haunted by memories he can't fathom, trying to figure out what led him to a point in his life where he ended up killing a young girl on the street.

The thought is chilling.

She hurries into the building.

It's peculiar how Andrew's office now seems such a strange and forbidding place to her. It used to be as intimate to her as her own office on Broadway. A sanctuary. A place to which a person could retreat from the city. Sometimes you needed to hide in this city. But now it is a cold and somewhat sterile fortress on the twenty-seventh floor of the building, its windows facing east, relentlessly cool on this day when the temperature outside is ninety-seven degrees.

Andrew himself looks natty…

Thank you, Dad, she thinks.

… in a blue tropical suit that was hand-tailored at Chipp's, where she went with him to pick out the fabric. He is wearing a paler blue button-down shirt, and a blue silk tie patterned with minuscule ruby-red dots. She knows the tie. She bought it for him on a sudden whim one day.

"It's nice to see you," he says. "How have you been, Em?"

"Fine," she says.

She hates being called Em. And she has not been fine.

She has been missing her daughter terribly. She has been considering defying the court order that gave Andrew's mother temporary custody of their little girl. She has been thinking of taking the train to Westport, Connecticut, and kidnapping Jackie. She has been thinking of shooting Andrew's mother if she has to. Anything to get her daughter back.

"Andrew," she says, "I think it's absurd that I can't see Jackie."

"Honey, I'm not the judge," he says, and lifts his shoulders and opens his palms to her in the classic What Can I Do? body language. She resents him calling her honey when she's no longer his honey, wonders in fact if she ever was his honey now that she knows he was seeing another woman for the last two years of their marriage!

"The court order is predicated on neglect," she says. "I know, and you know — don't deny it, Andrew — that I have never neglected Jackie from the minute she was born. I was a little disoriented when you left, I admit that, but I was in the middle of hiring someone to stay with her full time when your mother pulled her end run…"

"I had nothing to do with my mother's motion to the court."

"You could have said something."

"I could have, yes. But I happen to agree with her."

He looks content and puffy and paunchy sitting in his hand-tailored suit behind his designer desk in his corner office on the twenty-seventh floor, enjoying the fact that his mother prevailed, enjoying the insane notion that she, Emma Boyle Cullen, could possibly in a hundred million years be an unfit mother. I happen to agree with her. You smug little bastard, she thinks, but she clenches her fists in her lap, behind the tote so that he can't see her hands, he knows all her tricks and tics, and she very calmly says, "Andrew, why don't you ask her to let me see Jackie this weekend?"

"Sure," he says.

"You will?"

"Sure. I know what her answer will be, but sure. I'll ask her."

"I would appreciate that."

"No problem."

She is tempted to ask how Jackie is, ask how her own daughter is, when he looks at his watch and says, "Em, I'm really sorry. I've got someone coming in at three, and I haven't even looked at the file."

"I know you're busy," she says, and rises swiftly, and goes to the door without even shaking hands.

She rings the B for Beautiful bell button and when a girl's voice says, "Yes, Miss?" she announces herself as Detective Boyle, Special Victims Squad, and tells the girl to buzz her in, please. She waits for at least three minutes, and is about to press the bell button again, when an answering buzz sounds. She throws open the outside door. The blood stains have been washed off the black-and-white tiles in the entrance foyer. She climbs the steps to the first floor, and knocks on the door with the hanging brass letter on it. The time on her watch is 2:57 p.m.

The black man who answers the door is not the same one they talked to earlier today. By contrast, he is some six-feet two-inches tall, wearing tight blue jeans and a tank top undershirt, with prison-gym muscles bulging everywhere and jailhouse tattoos on the biceps of both arms. He grins amiably, introduces himself as Harry Davis, tells her he hopes the names he gave Detective Morgan proved helpful, and cordially invites her in.

They pass through the foyer with its red light, and through the small room with the couch beyond, and then make an abrupt left turn into a corridor at the end of which is an open door leading to a small office. A small television monitor above Davis's desk shows the sidewalk outside the building's entrance door. Another monitor shows the first-floor corridor and the area immediately outside the door marked with the letter B. He offers her a seat.

"I came in early today," he says. "To tidy up my office. Now I'm glad I did."

She figures he came in early because Cathy Frese was murdered and the police have been snooping around. He smiles, his eyes frankly appraising her. She has made his day, the smile says, the eyes say, this hot and tired thirty-four-year-old woman who has a two-year-old daughter living in Westport, Connecticut, with her grandmother instead of at home in Chelsea. You are young and beautiful and desirable, his shining smile says, his twinkling brown eyes say, and you smell of all the perfumes of Araby instead of the sweat and grime of the nasty city outside. She suddenly wonders how many young girls Harry Davis has conned into believing that fucking strangers for money is a life of romantic adventure. Here you go, girls, short hours and high pay, a no-risk occupation replete with exciting men and snappy dialogue! A thrill a minute! Mr Charm here. Shove it up your ass, she thinks.