Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

Once she got through the real estate ads, she found a couple of other news stories. A kitchen fire on the sixth floor that was quickly extinguished, an entertainment feature about a visiting stage director who happened to be staying there.

Half an hour and two-thirds of a bottle of chardonnay later, nothing in particular had jumped out at Barbara. Maybe the answer to her question was there in what she had read, but if it was, she had failed to spot it.

Barbara sighed.

She rubbed her weary eyes and flopped herself onto the couch for several minutes, staring at the ceiling, trying to think of her next step. The only thing she could come up with was to finish off that bottle.

She got back up, emptied the rest of the chardonnay into her glass, and sat back down in front of her laptop. The screen had gone dark. She ran her finger over the mouse pad and brought the computer back to life.

One more building. The Gormley.

Here was another developer who believed you couldn’t go wrong naming a building after yourself. The structure had been started in 1967 and finished in 1969 under the able direction of Wilfred Gormley, who had passed away in 1984. Again, there were real estate listings advertising residences and office space.

Barbara scanned through the names of businesses that occupied the building. An insurance company, a talent agency, accounting services. On the first floor, a barber and a florist.

I am wasting my time.

Barbara put the glass to her lips, tipped it back and emptied it. She folded the screen down and slowly leaned forward until her forehead was touching it. She had to find another angle, another strategy, think of someone new to talk to, check in with her various contacts, make a call to—

I’m an idiot.

She raised her head and reopened the laptop.

If you wanted to find out what was common about the three buildings, she thought, you did a search on all of them at once.

So she typed in the names of the three buildings and hit Enter.

The results loaded in a millisecond. Barbara blinked when she saw what popped up first. She wasn’t quite sure whether to believe it.

It was an itinerary for mayoral candidate Richard Headley.

It covered one week during his election campaign a couple of years earlier. Barbara scrolled through the listing of events, looking for the highlighting of the words she had entered into the search engine.

The Sycamores reference came up first. Headley attended a fundraising party hosted by Margaret Cambridge, who lived in the York Avenue building’s penthouse. Margaret was one of the city’s major, and aging, philanthropists. She’d never be able to go through all her husband’s money, so she liked to give it away, and Headley was someone she wanted to give it to. Of course, there were rules governing large donations, but Margaret had strong-armed enough of her friends to come and give the max.

Barbara went back to the itinerary, looking for the word “Lansing.” The reference turned out not to be about the Lansing Tower, but about Morris Lansing, another major financial backer of Headley’s who’d hosted a campaign rally for Headley. Searching his name and the mayor’s together, Barbara learned that they were longtime friends.

On to “Gormley.”

The day after the Lansing rally, Headley had paid a visit to the Gormley Building because the person who lived in the penthouse was holding yet another fund-raiser for him. That person turned out to be Arnett Steel, president and CEO of Steelways, which was the firm the mayor had been pressing the city to hire for major, multimillion-dollar improvements to the city’s subway switching system.

“Fuck me,” said Barbara.

She looked to see what other stories came up that linked Lansing, the Sycamores, and Gormley.

Nothing else of consequence came up in her search results.

Okay, okay, she told herself. Take a breath.

Just because Richard Headley had something in common with these three buildings — or, at least, with people who had a connection to them — did not mean this was what linked the three elevator incidents.

But damn, it was pretty fucking hard to ignore. Barbara’s pulse was racing.

Suppose this is it, she thought. Suppose Headley is what connects these events.

That would suggest that if someone was sending a message through these horrific acts, the message was for him.

Barbara closed her laptop, stood, grabbed her jacket, and headed out of her apartment.

She wanted to talk to Richard Headley. She wanted to talk to Richard Headley, face-to-face, and she wanted to talk to him right now. She’d make some calls along the way to find out where he was. City Hall? Gracie Mansion? One Police Plaza? Wherever the son of a bitch was, she would find him.

Barbara went to the elevator, pressed the down button, and stood there. Glanced impatiently at her phone.

When the elevator did not immediately show up, she hit the button again.

And then it hit her.

“Jesus Christ, I’m losing my mind,” she said to herself, and headed for the stairs.

It was only Day Two at the new job for Arla Silbert, but wow, the shit that had happened.

Her first day — her first morning — she was off to a grisly disaster scene and ended up having dinner with the mayor’s son. On top of that, he disclosed to her something Arla just knew her mom would be dying to know. Which, if she hadn’t turned into such a bitch on the phone, Arla might have told her.

Anyway, it didn’t much matter that Arla didn’t pass on Glover’s tip that there was something fishy about those elevator accidents. The whole world knew that now. Just as well Arla hadn’t said anything. If she had, and Barbara had posted something on the Manhattan Today site twelve or more hours before Richard Headley held his disastrous news conference, the leak might have been traced back to her.

You don’t exactly want to be found out giving away your employer’s secrets your first day on the job. That’s definitely not going to help you get a good reference at your next place of employment.

So here she was, buried down in the data analysis department on her second day, and what with that Headley presser, and the shutdown of the city’s elevators, there hadn’t been a dull moment. Sure, she wasn’t ducking under police tape today, attending accident scenes with the mayor’s son. But there was plenty to do.

There was a hastily called meeting in one of the conference rooms midafternoon. Arla and her coworkers were tasked with monitoring media coverage of the crisis. Was the city’s messaging getting out there? Were property managers going to the city website to learn everything they could about how an elevator might be tampered with, how to recognize it, and how to stop it from happening?

At one point, Arla raised her hand.

“I saw something yesterday that really made an impression,” she said.

The others looked at her blankly, a kind of collective “Who are you again?”

Arla told them about being at the Sycamores Residences observing as the mayor comforted the boy who’d been in the elevator when the Russian scientist had been killed. Even with no cameras present, Headley took his time with the child, praised him, even invited him to Gracie Mansion for a hot dog.

“That was a side of him I hadn’t seen, that most New Yorkers haven’t seen,” Arla said. “A really human Richard Headley. For anyone who thinks that news conference today didn’t go well, maybe a way to offset that is to get him out on the street, and into those stairwells that everyone’s having to go up and down. Have him deliver some groceries to some elderly person on the fifteenth floor. Only, you know, have someone cover it.”