Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

“I said I didn’t know what she was talking about.” Clement zipped up. “At least Estelle isn’t going to find us talking in here.”

He went back over to the row of sinks, where he washed his hands slowly and methodically. The door opened and another man walked in.

Clement said, “Morning.”

Just loud enough to send a signal to Bucky that their conversation was over.

He held his hands under the dryer, but they were still damp when he returned to the hotel dining room. When he went back to the table, Estelle was not there. He scanned the room for her before sitting down.

She’d gone back to their room, he figured. She was still angry with him. Fuck it, he thought. I’m going to have another cup of coffee.

He spotted the waiter and waved a hand in the air. But then Estelle appeared and sat back down in her seat. She had several flyers in her hand advertising various city attractions.

“Where were you?” he asked.

“Just sorting out what I’m going to do today,” she said. “I got tired of hunting through the guidebook. I got these by the front desk.”

She fanned them out on the table like playing cards, saw one she liked, and picked it up.

“The Guggenheim,” she said.

Clement nodded. “Sure, we can do that.”

Estelle shook her head. “That’s what I’m doing.” She gathered up the other flyers and tossed them to his side of the table. “I’m sure you’ll find something just as interesting.”

Barbara saw a tweet about the exploding taxi on East Forty-Ninth Street. She went to the link but there wasn’t much more detail there than there had been on the Twitter feed.

She was in her kitchen nook, the laptop on her table, sipping on cold coffee, and had been thinking maybe she should get dressed, wishing she had an apartment as nice as Chris Vallins’s, when she saw the news.

“God,” she said, reading about the taxi.

Another ISIS-inspired nutcase, she figured. Once or twice a year, it seemed, New York had to endure some numbnut, would-be terrorist, acting alone, who had put together some half-assed bomb and then tried to detonate it in Penn Station or the Port Authority or Times Square. Sometimes these assholes did real damage, and other times the things went off before they could even get them out of their apartment. The ones that often created the most mayhem didn’t have to build a bomb at all. They just got behind the wheel of a truck and ran people down.

These days, any time anything bad happened, the first thought was: Is it terrorism? But what happened on Forty-Ninth Street might turn out not to be a bombing. Maybe a gas main under the street blew up as the taxi was driving over it. It was possible the cab blew up for reasons unrelated to a bomb. The incident had only happened in the last half hour, and not much was known.

Barbara briefly considered turning on the TV, then decided she’d check later.

She reread the column she had posted late the previous day. There were a few more comments, none remotely helpful. She was going to try again today to get some kind of statement from any governmental body that would talk to her. Homeland, FBI, the NYPD, somebody. She’d call Animal Control if she thought anyone there had a clue. Why, she wanted to ask them, had at least two families connected to these elevator deaths been asked to keep their mouths shut?

Barbara looked through her own contacts in her phone, making a note of those who might be helpful, then went online looking for other possible leads. She made a list of the people she wanted to reach.

She had a source inside the NYPD. Not an actual cop or a detective, but a woman in the city’s public information office. Barbara had her private cell phone number. She brought up the contact on her own phone and tapped it.

Several seconds later, a woman said, “Hey.”

“Yeah, hi. It’s me. Long time no chat.”

“I was starting to feel neglected. And relieved at the same time,” the woman said.

“Look, I’m trying to nail something down and I’m not getting anywhere yet.”

“On what?”

“The elevator accidents on Monday and Tuesday. I’m getting the sense interest in those has gone way up the food chain but I don’t know why. Like maybe Homeland or the FBI is sniffing around. Why the hell would that be happening?”

“If that’s true, I haven’t heard anything. But—”

“They’re like industrial accidents. But some of the families of the victims have been told to keep a low profile on this. Not raise a fuss. So—”

“Shut up and listen.”

Barbara paused. “Okay.”

“It’s not two. It’s three.”

“What?”

“Are you near a TV?”

“No, I live on Neptune. Of course I’m near—”

“Turn it on.”

Barbara got up out of the kitchen chair and strolled into the living area of her apartment, the cell phone still glued to her ear. She picked up the remote with her free hand, fired up the flat screen, and went to one of the twenty-four-hour news channels.

“—in three days,” said a woman with a mike in hand. While Barbara recognized the reporter, Liza Bentley, she did not recognize the building she was standing out front of. But she watched the crawl at the bottom of the screen, which read: Two Dead in 7th Avenue Elevator Disaster .

“This is not happening,” Barbara said under her breath.

“You talking to me?” said her source.

“What’s going on?” Barbara asked. “This can’t be coincidence.”

“Well,” the woman said slowly, as if debating if she should continue, “I did hear something. ”

Barbara muted the TV. “What did you hear?”

“There was nothing on paper, no emails. But a lot of calls have been made to landlords.”

“Landlords?”

“Building owners, property managers, that bunch. The word was to keep it on the down-low.”

“‘Down-low’?”

“I’ve always wanted to say that,” the woman said. “Anyway, the city doesn’t have enough elevator inspectors to do this on their own, so everyone’s been asked to check their buildings.”

“For what?” Barbara asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But whatever’s happening — a defect or whatever — they’re afraid it’s going viral.”

“Can elevators get a virus?”

“I don’t mean it like that.” The woman paused. “Unless, you know, maybe I do. Thing is, there’s more than sixty thousand elevators in the city. It’s going to take a while to get to all of them.”

“Then why not go public?” Barbara asked. “Get the word out? Why haven’t you put out a statement?”

“Hey, I just work here. They want to tell the world something, I’m on it.”

“Panic,” Barbara said.

“What?”

“They don’t want to start a panic.”

“If there’s anything to actually panic about.”

Barbara laughed. “People don’t always need a sound reason to go into panic mode.”

“Look, I gotta go. Let me leave you with one bit of advice.”

“Okay.”

“Take the stairs.”

I don’t think you can wait any longer,” Valerie told the mayor. “You have to say something. A press conference.”

Richard Headley was circling his desk, pacing, running his hand slowly over his head. “Christ,” he muttered. “What the hell am I supposed to tell people? Don’t use the fucking elevators? In this city? Might as well them not to honk their horns.”

Valerie nodded sympathetically. “I know. If we put our heads together, maybe we can come up with something that—”

“And where the hell is Glover?” he asked, stopping and looking at the door, as if expecting his son to walk through it at any second.