Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

Arla smiled. “Like with you, sometimes.”

“Like with me most of the time,” he said. “It’s kind of an open secret.” He sighed. “There’s even a ‘poor Glover’ hashtag on Twitter where people post times when my father humiliates me.”

“That’s awful.”

“Yeah, well, I guess it balances out, considering there’s like half a dozen other Twitter accounts devoted to making fun of him .”

Arla gave him a sly look. “Which one of them is yours?”

That made him laugh again. “I’ll never tell. The thing is, I get what he’s trying to do. His dad was tough with him, and that turned him into someone with drive and ambition. He figures, if he’s tough with me, he’ll get the same result. He’ll turn me into the kind of man he is.” He paused. “I don’t know that I want to become the kind of man he is.”

“Sure,” Arla said. “I get that. We all have to be, you know, our authentic selves.” She rolled her eyes self-deprecatingly. “Or some new age bullshit like that.”

Glover nodded. “God, I can’t believe I’m telling you all this.” He ran his hand over his head. “Well, look, I don’t want to keep you from anything. I wanted to buy you a drink and make sure that you survived.”

Arla paused a moment before asking, “You wanna get something to eat? I mean, we’re just sitting here and it’s dinnertime and all. But you totally don’t have to. You probably have to go help the mayor do something.”

“I don’t.”

“Great,” Arla said, smiling. “And listen, I’ll get this because you’ve been so—”

“No, that’s nuts.” He grinned. “I can bill the city for this one. I’ll write if off as employee training.”

“Well, you strike me as a very good trainer,” Arla said.

As soon as she said it, she thought, what the hell was that? You strike me as a very good trainer. Why did she say something like that? As soon as the words left her lips she realized it sounded like some Fifty Shades come-on, which it was not.

Unless it was.

No, it was not . She had to come back with something else.

“The whole department,” she said, “seems very equipped to bring new people up to speed, to train them in the latest data analysis.”

Okay, she thought. Not a bad recovery. She couldn’t tell, from Glover’s expression, whether he’d interpreted her previous comment as sexual. That was probably a good sign.

But then Glover leaned in even closer.

“You know, we have to be very careful these days. I don’t want my sitting here with you, having a drink, having dinner, to be seen in any way as inappropriate. You’re not under any pressure to stay. We’re living in a post-Weinstein world now.”

“Dinner was my idea, remember?” she said.

Glover smiled. “It’s nice talking to you.”

“Yeah,” Arla said slowly.

Glover sat back in his chair and raised his palms. “You know, about work. It’s good, talking about all the things that need to get done.”

“Of course, right,” she said.

He turned his head, scanned the room. “If you see a waiter, let me know and I can score us some menus.”

“So,” Arla said, signaling a change in the conversation’s direction, “what did your dad want?”

“Hmm?”

“When we were at the accident, and he texted you to come upstairs?”

“Oh, yeah, we had to walk all the way to the top.” He stopped looking for someone to bring him a menu and leaned in conspiratorially. “I don’t even know if I should tell you about it.”

“Why? What?”

Glover rubbed his chin, trying to decide how much to share with Arla. “You have to promise not to tell anyone.”

Arla felt her pulse quicken. “Yeah, sure, of course.”

“There was this guy from the building department, and this other guy from Homeland Security or something.”

“You’re kidding. Why would someone from Homeland be there?”

His voice went even quieter. “They think the elevator was sabotaged.”

Her mouth dropped open and her voice rose. “Seriously?”

Heads turned at a nearby table.

Through gritted teeth, he said, “Shh. I can’t tell you this if you’re going to look like I just told you I’m gay or something.” A pause. “Which I’m not.”

“Okay,” she whispered.

“Anyway, it looks like the ‘accident’ was deliberate. Yesterday’s, too.” His face grew grim, yet he also looked excited to be able to share privileged information. “Looks like, by the same person.”

“Oh my God. So, it’s terrorism?”

“Could be,” he said. “It would have to be someone very smart to be able to pull it off. Lots of technical know-how required.” Glover smiled, as if in admiration of whoever had done it. “And this is kind of curious, although I haven’t mentioned it to my dad because he’s been such a prick lately — pardon my French — but people who supported my father lived in both of those buildings.”

“You think that means anything?”

Glover shrugged. “Probably not. I mean, there’s probably people in every skyscraper in Manhattan who supported him.” A pause. “Hard as that is to believe at times.”

“So what are they doing about it?” she asked.

“Last I heard, they’re quietly putting out the word to every landlord in the city to check the elevators. Not giving the real reason why. They’re making up some excuse. Maybe to do with the cameras that were installed.”

“Cameras?”

He filled her in about what had been found on top of the elevator cars. “If that’s all that it was, it might just be a Peeping Tom thing. But it’s way worse than that.”

“But if it’s happened twice, it could happen again. Don’t people need to be warned?”

Glover shook his head. “They don’t want to start a panic. Listen, I’m gonna go find us some menus.”

He got up from the table in search of a waiter.

Arla watched him walk away, thinking, Oh my God, my mom so needs to know this .

My feet are dead,” Estelle Clement said to her husband, Eugene, as she sat on the edge of the bed in their hotel room. She had kicked off her shoes and was massaging her right foot with both hands. “What an idiot I was, wearing heels to the show tonight.”

“I told you,” Eugene said.

“I thought we’d be able to get a cab after. I never dreamed we’d have to walk all the way back. We should have gotten one of those Ubers.”

“I never take those,” he said. “There’s a record. Where you were, where you went, when you took the trip.”

“You don’t want the world to know we went to a show and came back to the hotel?” she asked.

“I just... don’t like being tracked,” he said.

“You’ve been on edge ever since that TV thing,” she said.

The mention of TV prompted Clement to pick up the remote. He pointed it at the television and turned it on. He flipped through channels until he found news.

“Did we come all the way from Denver so you could watch TV?” she asked.

He ignored her.

Estelle said, “Fine.” Having massaged her feet enough that she felt she could walk, she strolled over to the window. “There’s not much of a view. You should have booked us on a higher floor.”

“This was all they had,” Clement snapped. On the screen was a reporter, standing out front of a high-rise building. The chyron across the bottom read: Second Elevator Disaster in Two Days . He had the volume set too low to make out what she was saying.

His wife reached across the bed for her purse and dug out her cell phone. “I’m gonna text the kids.”

“Do that.”

“We’ve got two more days,” she said, with what sounded like a hint of resignation in her voice. “What about tomorrow?”