Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

And, finally, who was the man who’d come to visit him? The one he went out onto the street to talk to?

None of the four claimed to have seen Petrenko talking to the mystery man.

The two employees not on-site were on a call at a twelve-story apartment building on Clermont Avenue in Brooklyn, just south of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Delgado drove. They parked on the street and buzzed the superintendent when they entered the lobby. The building’s two elevators were out of commission during the servicing, and the two technicians from Simpson Elevator were on the twelfth floor.

“Can they get one going?” Bourque asked.

The super said, “I told them, can you do one at a time? But no, they shut them both down at once. Everyone in the building is complaining.”

“No problem,” Delgado said. “We’ll take the stairs.”

A wave of anxiety washed over Bourque.

His lungs felt absolutely fine. He hadn’t taken a hit off his inhaler yet today. Climbing eleven flights of stairs shouldn’t have been a problem for him. A few months ago, he might have taken half those flights two steps at a time.

But that was before.

Could he make it to the twelfth floor? What if his airways started to constrict along the way? And Bourque had been dealing with this issue long enough to know that just worrying about an attack was enough to bring one on.

I’ll be fine, he told himself. I can do this. Just don’t think—

It was like, Bourque realized, when someone told you not to think about an elephant, Dumbo popped into your head.

So when Bourque told himself Don’t think about the drops, he thought about the drops.

“You coming?” Delgado said to her partner.

“Right behind you,” he said.

It hit him by the fourth floor. His windpipe started to shrink down to the size of a straw.

When they were nearly to the fifth, Bourque called up to Delgado, who was half a dozen steps ahead, “I just got a text.”

Delgado glanced back, stopped.

“Just go on, I’ll catch up,” he said, taking the phone from his jacket, looking at the screen and nodding as if to confirm he was right about receiving a message.

“What is it?” Delgado asked.

“I got it,” Bourque said dismissively.

Delgado climbed on.

Once she’d made a turn in the stairwell and was out of sight, Bourque put the phone back into his jacket. He gripped the railing with one hand to steady himself, then dug into his pocket with the other and came out with his inhaler.

But before wrapping his mouth around it, he decided to give his doctor’s advice one more try.

Focus.

What had he suggested? Focus on five things you see. Five things you hear.

I’m in a fucking concrete stairwell. There aren’t five things to see or five things to hear.

That was okay. He could wing it. Like, think of five Paul Newman movies.

There was The Sting. Cool Hand Luke. Harper . That was three. Oh, and The Verdict and that one where he was the pool hustler, what the hell was that one called. Weren’t there actually two? There was the original, that was — fuck, The Hustler . A movie about a pool hustler might just be called The Hustler . But then, twenty-five years later, he reprised the character in a movie with Tom Cruise. Had Color in the title. What the hell was that one—

He was still wheezing.

From a couple of floors above, Delgado’s voice echoed, “You okay down there?”

“Yeah!” he managed to shout. “Coming!”

The hell with it.

He exhaled, put the puffer between his lips, squeezed it, and drew the medicated mist deep into his lungs. Keeping his lips sealed, he did a mental count to ten, then exhaled. He repeated the process, then slipped the inhaler back into his pocket.

Christ, it was all he could do to hold his breath for ten seconds. You watched these movies, where James Bond is rescuing someone underwater for minutes at a time without coming up for air. How the hell was that even possible?

Plenty of takes, that was how.

Bourque felt his windpipe enlarging, his lungs filling with the stale air of the stairwell. Time to move on.

He caught up with his partner at the tenth floor. Even she had stopped to catch her breath, and Bourque took pleasure in overtaking her. “Haven’t got all day,” he said.

“Bite me,” Delgado said.

They came out onto the twelfth floor and at the hallway’s end, directly in front of an open elevator door, were two men on their knees, huddled over a large toolbox. One was white, thin, probably midforties; the other was black, heavyset, late twenties. Even from the end of the hallway, the detectives could tell that there was no elevator car beyond the opening. What they could see was the cinder block back wall of the shaft and various vertical cables.

“Hey,” Bourque said.

The black one turned, then said to his partner, “Cops are here.”

The two men stood. Bourque and Delgado showed their badges and offered hands to shake but the repairmen begged off, displaying oily, greasy palms.

“I’m Walter,” the older man said. “This is Terrence.”

Terrence nodded. “They told us you were coming.”

“So you know what this is about,” Delgado said.

“Can’t believe Otto’s dead,” Walter said. “Jesus. You do what we do for a living, you figure if you’re gonna go, it’ll probably be because you went through an open door by mistake,” at which point he nodded toward the elevator shaft.

“Yeah,” said Terrence, and then, gesturing toward his coworker, “or some moron knocks you in.”

“What happened to him?” Walter asked.

Bourque did the usual dance of not answering and asked the two men the same questions he and Delgado had asked the others. Had they noticed anything odd about Otto in recent weeks?

They had not.

Had they seen the man who’d dropped by to see him at Simpson Elevator?

Again, they both shook their heads.

“Why?” asked Walter. “You think this guy did something to Otto?”

“We’d like to talk to him,” Delgado said.

Terrence said, “Hang on.”

“What?” Delgado asked.

He dug a rag out of his pocket and started to wipe off his hands. “So I’ve been wanting to buy a car. Like, I always liked Mustangs, so I’ve been going through the online ads, you know, seeing if someone has a decent used one, because no way I can afford a new one, and I’m not totally nuts about the latest design, anyway. I kind of like the ones from around 2005, 2006, you know?”

“Okay,” said Bourque.

“So I find one in Queens and I call the guy. It’s a 2005, and he’s asking about thirty-five hundred for it, and I tell him I want to have a look at it, but I’m kinda busy, and he says, where d’ya work, I could run it by, you could check it out. Which makes the guy sound a bit desperate, so I’m thinking he might take a lowball offer, so I say okay. So he comes over, this is like, two weeks ago. Parks it at the curb and I come out to have a look at it.”

Walter said, “Terrence here takes a long time to get to the point.”

“That’s okay,” Bourque said.

His hands cleared of the worst of the grease, he pulled a phone from his pocket and tapped on the photos icon.

“I wanted to take a few pictures of it, from all angles. Told the guy I wasn’t ready to make up my mind but having some shots to refresh my memory later would be a good idea. So, like, here’s the shots.”

He held the camera in front of the detectives and swiped through the pictures. Many of them were close-ups of parts of the blue car, including one of the rear wheel well.

“A lot of rust there. I could probably fix it myself, but if I made a big deal about it he’d probably come down a bit more. Okay, here’s the one I was thinking of.”