Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

“Yes.”

“Keep your eyes open. The world knows I’m here. There’s probably a heightened alert already.”

“Got it.”

“We’re good to go.”

Clement heard the window power up as a yellow cab swerved across the street and came to a stop in front of him. Clement opened the back door and called out to his wife.

“Madam,” he said, “your chariot has arrived.”

Barbara had been in the funeral home for the better part of half an hour.

Chris Vallins was getting tired of waiting across the street for her to come out. It wasn’t hard to figure out why she might be here, given that in her column she’d written about losing a friend in the Monday elevator accident. The dead woman’s name had been Paula Chatsworth.

To confirm, he had looked up this funeral home on his phone and called to ask if the Chatsworth service would be held there. And if so, when? Asking for a friend, he said. The woman who answered said that while the home had been involved, the service for the Chatsworth woman was going to be held up in Montpelier.

Ah, well, thank you very much, he said.

Chris believed he was going to have to do more than just follow Barbara Matheson around and make a few online inquiries. If you really wanted to find the dirt on someone, you broke into their place. You got on their computer and read their emails. You looked into the bottom bedroom dresser drawer and checked out the sex toys.

But one thing had come out of today’s efforts that had piqued his curiosity. Who was the woman Barbara had met with at the Morning Star? They hadn’t talked long. The other woman hadn’t even ordered breakfast. Was she a source? Was she someone passing along information to Barbara? Vallins could not recall seeing the woman in the time he had been working for the mayor’s office, but the city employed a lot of people who could be privy to the kind of information Barbara would like to have. Even though Chris had seen her from across the street, he was confident he’d recognize the woman if he saw her again. And he had her picture.

Vallins started hearing music and glanced to the north. A shabbily dressed man was coming his way, pushing a rickety shopping cart with nothing in it but an ’80s-style boom box that was playing at full volume.

“You can’t always get what you want...”

Wasn’t that the truth, Vallins thought, giving the man a nod as he wheeled his cart past him. The man was bobbing his head to the music and took one hand off the cart’s handle long enough to give Vallins a thumbs-up.

Vallins couldn’t help but smile.

Finally, Barbara emerged from the funeral home and started walking back toward Second Avenue.

Vallins was on the move again.

When the Manhattan Today writer got to the corner, she crossed Twenty-Seventh, looking down at the phone in her hand the entire time. A cab shot past, the driver giving her the horn. Without even looking up, Barbara sent her free hand skyward and gave the cabbie the finger.

She went into the Duane Reade on the corner.

Chris followed her in, still keeping his distance, and found that Barbara had gone down the feminine hygiene products aisle. He knew he was going to look especially conspicuous hanging around that part of the store, so he decided to go back outside and wait for her to emerge. He found a spot a few yards down the sidewalk where he could watch the door of the drug store.

While he waited, his own phone rang. He dug it out of his jacket, saw Valerie on the screen.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Where the hell are you?” Valerie asked.

“I’m running an errand for the mayor.”

“What kind of errand?”

“If he wanted you to know I’m guessing he would have told you.”

A sigh at the other end. Then, “There’s been another elevator plunge.”

“You’re shittin’ me.”

“No.”

“Where?”

“On York, just south of Rockefeller University. Some big-deal Russian scientist got killed.”

“Jesus,” Chris said. “Are you there?”

“Yeah. Homeland Security’s here, too.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Maybe because of who it was who got killed. You ever heard of Fanya Petrov?”

“No. Should I?”

“Beats me.”

Barbara, a small Duane Reade bag in hand, came out of the store. She glanced into the bag, as if checking that she remembered everything.

“I gotta go,” Chris told Valerie. Without waiting for a response, he ended the call and slipped the phone back into his jacket.

Barbara was heading north, holding the bag in her left hand, her phone in her right. As she crossed Twenty-Eighth Street, she put the phone to her ear, spoke to someone. The call lasted little more than thirty seconds, which led Chris to think maybe she’d only left a voice mail.

As she continued on, she appeared to be searching for something on her phone. Maybe another number, someone else she wanted to get in touch with. Or maybe she was on some site, thumbing through headlines.

She did write a column, after all, Chris thought, making an allowance for how she never put the phone away. She probably read through several dozen news sites every day. And then she’d be calling people and interviewing them and turning the shit they said into a piece for Manhattan Today . But right now, in the wake of what she had written lately about the mayor, it would be nice to know exactly what she was reading and who she might be getting in touch with. And why had she gone to the funeral home, anyway? Was it simply to offer condolences, or was there more to it than that?

Chris found himself closing the distance between himself and Barbara, fooling himself into thinking that if he got near enough, he’d be able to see what was on her phone before she put it away, or to her ear. Chris had an astounding number of talents, skills that no one even knew about, but there were limits to what he could do.

Between Thirtieth and Thirty-First, Barbara nearly walked into an elderly woman coming in the other direction. Her bat-like radar had her dodging out of the way just in time.

As they neared Thirty-Second Street, Chris started to worry.

If Barbara had been looking up as she approached the intersection on the west side of Second, she might have noticed the Don’t Walk warning blazing from the traffic signal on the other side. But Barbara, oblivious, kept on walking.

Coming from the left, a once-white van nearly eaten away by rust was approaching at high speed. It careened around a taxi that had pulled over to pick up a fare. The driver was flooring it, hoping to make it across Second before the light turned red. The engine roared hoarsely, as if suffering from automotive emphysema.

Barbara stepped off the sidewalk and into the intersection.

Everything happened in milliseconds. Chris expected Barbara’s seemingly innate sense of where she was and what was going on around her to kick in.

As the truck bore down on her, Chris realized with startling clarity that was not going to happen.

Fuck, he thought.

When Jerry Bourque and Lois Delgado finished talking to Gunther Willem, manager of Simpson Elevator, they went into the back shop to talk to the other employees. The company, counting Willem and the woman in the office, had nine. Eight, now that Petrenko was going to be removed from the payroll. Four more were on the premises, two were out on a call together.

Bourque and Delgado split them up, each interviewing two men. All four were asked further questions about the dead man, whether they had noticed anything out of the ordinary with him in recent weeks, whether he seemed on edge, worried about anything. Did Petrenko have any vices he kept secret from his wife? Did he gamble? Did he use drugs? Was he seeing anyone on the side? Did he frequent prostitutes?