Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

“Why don’t we talk about it at breakfast?” he said. “I’m trying to watch this.”

She hadn’t started texting yet. She was glaring at her husband.

“Eugene,” she said.

“Hmm?”

“Look at me.”

He sighed, turned and said, “What?”

She asked, “Who was that man?”

“What man?”

“The man sitting in the car, after the interview, when you were getting the cab. The one you talked to with your back to him.”

Clement’s face grew concerned. “I’m not sure I’m following you.”

“He put down his window and he said something to you. You had a conversation.”

“He was probably telling me to stop leaning on his car,” Clement said.

“Do you know him?” she asked.

“Of course not,” he said.

“Because I think I’ve seen him before.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I only had a quick look at him. But at home, I thought I saw you talking to him once. On the street. And I even thought I saw him in the lobby.”

“I’d never seen him before in my life.”

“So you did see him? Today you had your back to him when you talked to him.”

Clement was briefly flustered. “I didn’t see him. I didn’t see anybody. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Estelle was quiet for a moment before she asked, “Why did we do this trip?”

“What? It’s our anniversary, for Christ’s sake.”

“I was surprised when you proposed it.”

He tossed the remote onto the bed and rolled his eyes. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because it’s the first really nice thing you’ve done in a long time.”

“This is what I get. I plan a trip, I fly us to New York, and now I’ve done something wrong. What do you want from me, Estelle?”

She considered the question. “Well, for starters, to love me again, if that’s not asking too much.”

He looked at her, said nothing.

She sat back down on the bed. “You don’t even... I know I’m not twenty-one anymore, that the years take their toll, but... I’d like to think you still found me even a little... attractive.”

“Of course I do,” he said without conviction, glancing for half a second back at the television.

“The prescription... worked, but you still don’t seem to want—”

“I really don’t want to have this conversation again, Estelle.”

“You never want to have this conversation.”

“Maybe because we don’t need to have this conversation.”

“If you would just talk to—”

“I don’t need to talk to anyone.”

Estelle said nothing for several seconds. Then, “It’s a myth that it’s always women who lose interest.”

Clement briefly closed his eyes and sighed. “This has been a very stressful year for me. Getting the organization up and running. Getting the word out. Dealing with all these baseless accusations. It’s taking a toll. Surely to God you can see that. Maybe you need to stop thinking about yourself all the time and try to imagine what I’m going through.”

That cut deep. She eyed him scornfully. Her voice was cold and even when she said, “Everything I do is for you.”

He waved his hands in the air, let them fall to his sides. “Fine, okay, you do.”

“I think the reason we came here has nothing to do with our anniversary.”

“That’s ridiculous,” he said.

She got up from the bed, went to the bathroom, and closed the door. When Clement heard her turn the lock, he grabbed the remote.

Maybe, he thought, he could catch the rest of that elevator report on a different newscast.

Barbara, as was her routine at night before turning off the lights, was sitting cross-legged on her bed, MacBook in her lap. She was jumping from website to website, reading the latest from the New York Times, Politico , the Hill , The Huffington Post, CNN, BuzzFeed.

She’d taken some more painkillers for her elbow, which still hurt like hell. Despite Chris Vallins’s plea, she had not sought medical attention. She fell. No big deal. People fell all the time. And her elbow still worked. She knew this for a fact because she had used her right arm to empty a bottle of chardonnay into a wineglass when she’d come home.

She’d had a hard time getting Chris Vallins out of her head the rest of the day. She was feeling things for him she did not want to feel.

Get over it, she told herself.

Barbara had made some calls when she returned home. She wanted to reach family members of the others who had died in Monday’s elevator crash and ask if any spooky officials in black SUVs had come to see them, too, to tell them to keep their questions to themselves, to not speak to the media. She figured that was a better place to start, since she was going to run into more problems — especially considering she did not speak Russian — trying to find relatives of the woman who’d died in today’s elevator incident.

She had no luck getting any of Sherry D’Agostino’s relatives to call back. Ditto for the family of Barton Fieldgate.

But she did get through to Stuart Bland’s mother.

Stuart, as it turned out, had still lived at home.

“I told him to leave that lady alone,” she said tearfully once Barbara had identified herself. “He went to her house and nearly got in trouble. He wouldn’t have been in that elevator if he’d listened to me.”

It took several more questions for Barbara to get the full picture, that Stuart was trying to get a producer to look at a script he had written. That was what had taken him to the Lansing Tower.

“At first, they thought he had something to do with it,” Bland’s mother said. “Because he was using a phony ID. For FedEx. So that made them suspicious. But he couldn’t have had anything to do with it. That’s just crazy. He could barely get his bicycle chain back on. I think I convinced them. But I shouldn’t even be telling you this.”

“Why?”

“The man said.”

“What man?”

“The man who came to see me. From the government.”

“Did he say which department?”

“He didn’t say. But I could tell.”

“What was his name?”

“I’m not sure he told me. He didn’t leave a card. I have to go.”

And she hung up.

Barbara wrote a piece for Manhattan Today , but it didn’t take long and she wasn’t very happy with it. Recounting her conversations with Bland’s mother and Paula’s parents, she asked her readers, “Who is this mystery man?” Why would someone want the families of the victims to keep a low profile while the elevator accident was being investigated? Why would they be pressured not to ask questions? Barbara did not speculate in her piece. She did not mention the FBI or CIA or Homeland Security. She didn’t have anything solid enough to do that.

And Vallins hadn’t been any help when she’d asked him about it. If he knew anything, he wasn’t saying.

And he never did answer the bald question, the bastard. Okay, so maybe that was too personal. Just as well she’d resisted the urge to run her hand over his head.

Looking again at the story she posted, she fretted at how light it was on facts. But maybe someone who did know something would read it and get in touch. That was often how it worked. A story that was incomplete could produce more leads than a story that didn’t run at all.

It had produced a few responses already, not that they were in any way useful. Just comments from, as Barbara’s father once referred to those who call in to radio talk shows, a “cavalcade of nincompoops.” There was spicydragon, who said, “Anybody that old who still lives with his mommy deserves to die.” And there were these words of wisdom from DeepStateHarry: “We r all being watched. There r black vans everyware.”