Peter Spiegelman - Red Cat

Mike’s smile was guileless and his eyes were opened wide. “Of course you don’t,” he said. “And there’s no reason why you should.” And we were all quiet for a while.

It was Vickers who broke the silence. “Is that a threat, Michael?” he asked, though he didn’t seem much threatened.

“More of a proposal.”

“Proposing what, exactly?”

“That you tell us what your client wanted with Cassandra, and we go away and pursue the more productive things that you mentioned.”

Vickers smoothed his tie some more. “I don’t think so,” he said. “If the police have questions, so be it. We can’t help them, but if we have to waste time explaining that, then I guess that’s the way it is.”

Mike nodded. “Talking to the police, dealing with the press, questions about the business…all of that takes time.” His tone was sympathetic, even regretful.

“I don’t think the press-” Vickers began, but I cut him off.

“Your client is in a select group, Tommy: he’s the only guy in one of Cassandra’s videos to ever come looking for her, much less to find her. That alone makes for some elaborate explaining…especially given the timing.”

Vickers drummed his fingers on the tabletop for a while. Then he shook his head slowly. “You’re making things more complicated than they are, son- more complicated than they have to be- and you’re wasting your own time and your client’s money doing it. I spoke to this girl a month ago, and not again, and my client hasn’t seen or spoken to her in years.” He looked at Mike. “I’m asking you to trust me on this, Michael.”

Mike’s smile was small and bland. “That might be easier to do if we knew why you were looking for Holly in the first place.”

Vickers drank off whatever was in his cup, and sighed. “A girl like that- there must be a dozen other people you could talk to, more maybe. You really-”

“A girl like what?” I interrupted, and the anger in my voice surprised even me.

Vickers pursed his lips and looked at Mike. “He really can’t keep it in his pants, can he? That must cause you problems.”

Mike shrugged. “It’s the cross I bear,” he said coolly. Then he looked at me and twitched an eyebrow.

“I’ll meet you out front,” I said, and I left the room. Vickers didn’t say goodbye, and neither did I.

I paused by the corner office again, on my way back to the waiting room. The door was still shut and I thought about opening it and looking in on the dark-haired man, but I didn’t. Instead, I rode the elevator down and waited for Mike in a corner of the lobby. He was buttoning his coat as he approached.

“I’d forgotten what an arrogant bastard that guy is,” he said. “And those theatrics- either he’s lost his touch, or my standards are higher now than when I was twenty-five.” He smiled and ran a hand through his hair. “Your performance was far superior, by the way: no one does ‘volatile’ better.”

“It wasn’t entirely an act,” I said.

“The best performances never are.”

“Did Vickers say anything useful?”

Mike pulled out his BlackBerry and thumbed through messages while he spoke. “Not really. A vague offer to swap client names- a ‘You show me yours, I’ll show you mine’ sort of thing- but nothing sincere. He was never going to tell us shit.”

“Then what was the point of his invitation?”

“A calculated risk on Tommy’s part, I suppose- a chance to size you up, to dazzle you and befuddle you and maybe find something out. Best case, a chance to sell you on his story and get you to leave his client alone. All of which would’ve been worth the risk of stirring the pot a little, especially given that you already knew he’d been looking for Cassandra. I suspect he gave up on most of it when you brought me along.”

Over Mike’s shoulder, I watched the elevators empty. Ranks of dark-coated figures flowed past, girding themselves for the cold. “You buy any of his story?”

“I don’t know,” Mike said. “Tommy wasn’t particularly circumspect when he went looking for Cassandra, which is not what you’d expect if he or his client had meant her harm.”

“Maybe they meant no harm when they were just looking; maybe that changed when they actually found her. Or maybe your pal doesn’t know everything his client was up to.”

Mike looked at me. “Has it occurred to you that maybe we’re in the same boat?”

I was about to say something- to concede the point, perhaps, or to ask just how worried he was about David- when an elevator door opened. A fat man emerged, followed by a small blond woman, followed by a stocky, dark-haired man. He swaggered off, and he rolled his shoulders as he went, and he was suddenly more than familiar. I stepped back, into the shadow of a column, and watched him cross the lobby, turning up the collar of his big camel coat as he went. Mike turned to look and I caught his arm.

“What?” he asked.

“That guy- in the tan coat- he was in Vickers’s office.”

“Yeah, I saw him when we came in. So what?”

“I think he’s Vickers’s client.” The stocky man pushed through the revolving doors and into the crowd on Broadway. He turned right, north.

“His Cassandra client?” Mike asked. “How do you know?”

But I was already past him when the questions came, headed for the doors. I glanced back and answered. “He’s Bluto,” I said.

It was nearly dark outside, and it took me a few minutes to pick out the swagger and the wide, brown shoulders from the hurrying crowd. I hung back while he waited for the light at Exchange Place, and my cell phone burred. It was Mike.

“You’re just following him, right?” he asked.

“What does that mean?”

“It means I know you were pissed at Tommy, and I know how you felt about those videos, and I don’t want you getting jammed up with something stupid like an assault charge when you’re in the middle of a case. It won’t do you or your brother any good.” The light changed and Bluto was moving.

“Nothing stupid,” I said, and I turned off my phone and followed him across Broadway. He headed west, through Exchange Alley, and north again on Trinity Place. Half a block later he went into an office building.

It was an older structure, circa 1950, built of brown brick and squatter than its neighbors. It was currently incarnated as Trinity Parc Tower, its aging, undistinguished bones only partially hidden beneath a recent veneer of marble and frosted glass. I was grateful that the lobby was shallow, so that I could see the elevators from the street. It also helped that the building directory was up to date, and that the security guards were dullards.

Through the lobby glass, I watched Bluto board an elevator by himself, and watched the floor display climb to 11 and stop. Then I scanned the directory and went inside. I scrawled the name of a twelfth-floor law firm in the sign-in book, and showed my driver’s license to the guards, who waved me through with barely a glance.

According to the building directory, three firms shared the eleventh floor: Fenn Partners LLC; MF Securities LLC; and Trading Pit LLC, and apparently they shared the same office too. I stepped off the elevator directly into a reception area, and the three names were spelled out in blue plastic letters on a sign above an unmanned receptionist’s desk. There was an arrangement of angular leather chairs and glass coffee tables to the right- the waiting area, also vacant. Behind that, beyond a waist-high partition, was a drab expanse of gray carpet, fluorescent lighting, and cubicles.

The cubicles were low-walled and tiny, and the ones I could see were equipped with narrow desks, swivel chairs, and banks of flat-screen monitors. The monitors glowed and flickered with charts and graphs and numbers, though just then they were playing to mostly empty seats. The few men left in the cubes- and there were only men in them- were stuffing briefcases and donning coats. They paid little attention to one another at the elevators, and none at all to me, and in a few moments I was alone in the waiting room.