David Morrell - Desperate Measures

“Goddamn it,” a slurred voice said. “Git away from him. He’s mine. I foun’ him. He’s rentin’ my bench.”

The figures glared at the man in Pittman’s overcoat, who was coming back with a bottle in a paper bag.

“Din’t you hear me? Git.” The man fumbled in his grimy pants and pulled out a church key-style bottle opener. He jabbed its point at them. “Move yur asses away from my bench. ’S mine. Mine and his.”

The sullen figures hesitated, then shifted back toward the shadows from which they had risen.

“Bastards.” The man slumped onto the bench. “They’da taken my bench in a minute. Gotta keep watchin’.”

“That’s the truth.”

The man drank from his bottle. “Lie down.”

“What?” Pittman asked suspiciously.

“Git some sleep. You look beat.”

Pittman didn’t move.

“I won’t let those bastards git to you. I always stay up, guardin’ my bench.”

Pittman woke with a start. The shadows were gone. The air was pale, the sun not yet risen over the city’s buildings. Traffic was sporadic.

As he became fully alert, his memories from the previous night made him flinch. He sat upright. The man to whom he’d given his trench coat was no longer on the bench.

But someone else was-a well-dressed, slender, gray-haired man who wore spectacles. Pittman had the sense that the man, who seemed to be in his fifties, had nudged his knee.

“Did you sleep well?”

Skin prickling, Pittman had no idea if this was a policeman or a pervert. He debated what to answer. “No, not really.”

“That’s understandable. When I slept on a bench like this, I always woke up with back trouble.”

“When you did?”

“Before I reformed. You look like you’re recently down on your luck. Fairly good clothes. But that overcoat. Where on earth did you get that overcoat?”

Pittman realized that the grungy blue coat was draped across his lap. The man to whom he’d given his own coat must have covered Pittman when, despite all his effort not to, he drifted off to sleep. That would have been about 3:00 A.M.

“I got it from a friend.”

“Certainly. Well, no doubt you wonder what I’m doing here.”

Pittman didn’t respond.

“My name is Reverend Thomas Watley. I come here every morning to see if the park has any new occupants. The other residents are quite familiar with me. In fact, at the moment, they’ve gone to my church. Every morning at six, a free, although modest, breakfast is available. There’s also a place to shower, shave, and relieve oneself. Would you care to join us?”

Pittman still didn’t respond.

“I do conduct a religious service, but your attendance is not required, if that’s what worries you.”

Pittman kept staring.

“Well, then.” The man shrugged. “I must get back to my guests.” He held out his hand.

At first Pittman thought that the man wanted to shake hands, but then he realized that the man was trying to give him something.

“In case you decide not to join us, here’s five dollars. I know it isn’t much, but sometimes it takes only a little boost to raise a person back to where he was. Remember, whatever caused your downfall, it’s not irremediable. The problem can be solved.”

“Reverend, I very much doubt that,” Pittman said bitterly.

“Oh?”

“Unless you can raise the dead.”

“You lost your…?”

“Son.”

“Ah.” The reverend shook his head. “You have my sincerest condolences. There is no greater burden.”

“Then what makes you think my problem can be solved?”

This time, it was the reverend who didn’t respond.

“Thank you for the money, Reverend. I can use it.”

Wearing the grungy blue coat, Pittman stooped his shoulders and tried to look as defeated as he felt, making himself walk unsteadily up Lexington Avenue. The sun rose above buildings. Traffic increased. Horns blared.

Pittman wanted it to seem that he was oblivious to anything but objects along the sidewalk. Trying to appear off balance, he turned from Lexington onto Twenty-sixth Street. He stooped and pretended to pick up a coin, looked at his palm with satisfaction, then put the pretend coin into his dingy coat.

He risked a glance ahead of him and saw some slight commotion in the next block between Park Avenue and Madison, near Madison Square Park. The dome lights on a stationary police car were flashing. The bodies would have been removed by now. The investigation of the crime scene would be concluding.

Burt. Sickened by what had happened last night, Pittman continued to waver along Twenty-sixth Street. When he came to some garbage cans, he lifted their lids and snooped inside. He moved on. He came to other garbage cans and inspected them as well, ignoring the smell. Then he came to a Dumpster. Trying to look awkward, he struggled up the side of the bin, poked around in it, clutched his gym bag, lurched down, and reversed his direction, heading back toward Lexington. He was far enough away that the police would not have noticed him, especially as disheveled as he looked. After all, he thought caustically, the homeless are invisible.

About the only thing in his favor, Pittman decided, was that it was Saturday. The man he needed to contact would more likely be at home than at work. The trouble was that when Pittman looked in a Manhattan telephone directory, he didn’t find any listing for the name of the man he was looking for: Brian Botulfson. He called information and asked an operator to see if Brian Botulfson was listed in any of the other boroughs.

In Brooklyn. The operator wouldn’t give Pittman the address, though, forcing him to walk to the New York Public Library, where he looked in the directory for Brooklyn and found the address he wanted. He could have phoned Brian, but one of the things he’d learned early as a reporter was that while phone contact had the merit of efficiency, it couldn’t compare to an in-person interview. The subject could get rid of you on the phone merely by hanging up, but a face-to-face meeting was often so intimidating that a subject would agree to talk.

Pittman had met Brian only a couple of times, mostly in connection with Brian’s arrest for using his computer to access top secret Defense Department files. The last occasion had been seven years ago when Brian had done Pittman a favor, obtaining Jonathan Millgate’s unlisted telephone numbers. Now Pittman needed another favor, but there was a chance that Brian either wouldn’t remember their previous conversations or wouldn’t care-at least on the phone. The contact had to be one-on-one.

Pittman dumped his grungy coat in a waste can. After using some of Reverend Watley’s five dollars to buy orange juice and a Danish from a sidewalk vendor, he boarded a subway train for Brooklyn, took his electric razor from his gym bag, made himself look as presentable as he could, stared out the window, and brooded.

The last time Pittman had seen him, Brian Botulfson lived in a run-down apartment building on the Lower East Side. Surrounded by expensive computer components that hid the cockroaches on the dingy walls, Botulfson had obviously enjoyed the glamorized image of an impoverished student. But now his apartment building was quite respectable-clean, made of brick, with large, glinting windows, in an attractive neighborhood, the Park Slope section of Brooklyn.

Pittman nodded to a man coming out of the well-maintained building. Then he climbed steps, paused in the vestibule, studied the names on the buzzer directory, and pressed the button for 4 B.

When he didn’t get an answer, he pressed again.