Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

When Agent Geller and her husband went out to dinner, that was how they did it. One at a time. You didn’t want the waiter to think you’d walked out. You didn’t want to lose your table.

Oh, well, Agent Geller thought. When you have to go, you have to go.

Two minutes went by. Then three. Neither Clement nor his wife returned.

Shit, Agent Geller thought. The Clements knew they were being watched, and had given them the slip. They weren’t coming back to their table. They’d found a back way out of the hotel. How was she going to explain this to her—

And then she heard the scream.

A man’s scream.

“NOOOOO!”

She started running down the hallway toward the washrooms.

A man came charging out of the men’s. Midthirties, scraggly hair. He was tucking something into the back of his jeans. Agent Geller was pretty sure what it was.

She looked at him, raised her weapon, and barked: “Stop! FBI!”

The man looked at her, wide-eyed, then reached for the gun he’d slipped under his belt. Before he could raise it, Agent Geller fired.

The man’s body spun so quickly that the gun flew out of his hand. He hit the hallway floor. Writhing, he looked for the gun, which was some ten feet away. He started crawling toward it, leaving a red, bloody streak on the hotel floor.

But within a second Agent Geller was standing between him and the weapon.

“Do. Not. Move.”

“Oh, shit,” he said. “Shit, shit.”

Blood continued to drain out of him. The bullet had gone into his right shoulder.

“The Clements,” she said. It was a question.

“She shouldn’t... have come into the men’s,” the man said, struggling to get the words out. “You’re... not supposed to do that.”

Mayor Richard Headley was about to come out of the stairwell on the twelfth floor of an East Ninetieth Street apartment building, clutching a takeout bag from Brew Who, a coffee shop on Lexington. Inside the bag were a granola parfait, a butter brioche, and an Americano.

Waiting in the hallway for him was a camera crew from NY1. They were posted outside the apartment door of Dorothy Stinson, eighty-two. Dorothy was standing in the open doorway, waiting for the mayor’s arrival. She looked as excited as a young girl waiting for Santa to come down the chimney.

Valerie Langdon and Chris Vallins were huddled behind the news crews. At the sound of an incoming text, Valerie glanced down at her phone. It was Glover, who was coming up the stairs with the mayor.

One floor away.

“They’re almost here,” Valerie whispered to the cameraman.

The news reporter holding the mike had already done her setup. She’d interviewed Dorothy, who told the story of how every normal morning she took the elevator down to the lobby, then walked to Brew Who for her treat. She’d been doing this daily for five years, ever since her husband had died. He used to make her breakfast every morning, and after his passing, she’d decided she wasn’t going to start doing it for herself.

She might have dared to walk down the twelve flights to the lobby, although this gave her pause, given that she’d had a couple of tripping incidents in the past year. But even if she could get to street level without incident, there was no way she could the climb twelve flights back up to her place. One of Dorothy’s neighbors had written about her situation on the City Hall website, and it was Glover who’d spotted it.

Despite Headley’s renewed reluctance to embrace Glover’s suggestions, he thought this one was worth a shot.

“Let’s do it.”

As Valerie and Chris huddled, waiting for the mayor to appear, Valerie whispered, “Has he seemed a bit... off lately?”

Chris leaned in close to her so as not to be heard by the camera crew. “A little, maybe.”

“I noticed it after Matheson left yesterday,” she said. “He seemed, I don’t know, preoccupied.”

“There is kind of a lot going on,” Vallins said. “Could be—”

He stopped talking when he saw the stairway door open at the end of the hall. Headley emerged, all smiles. He walked briskly to Dorothy, giving her a hug, and then handing her the bag with a Brew Who logo on the side. A few seconds later, Glover entered the hall.

Dorothy giggled. “It’s not every day the mayor pays a visit. Won’t you come in?”

“Love to,” Headley said, following her into the small apartment. The TV crew slipped in after him.

Dorothy didn’t have so much a kitchen as a nook. The apartment, except for a bathroom off to one side, was a studio. A bed on the far wall, a couple of chairs and a television, and just inside the main door, a short counter, hot plate, and cupboards. Dorothy directed the mayor to a small, badly chipped, Formica-topped table and two padded chairs with aluminum framing. They both sat.

“This is so kind of you,” she said.

Valerie and Chris and Glover huddled in the doorway, behind the cameras, watching.

“I wish I could do this for everyone in the city like yourself, Dorothy,” he said. “And I want you to know that we’re going to have everything back to normal very, very soon.”

She reached into the bag and took out the granola parfait, then two cups. A slender string and a tiny label was hanging from under the lid on one.

“Mine’s the tea,” the mayor said.

“This looks delightful,” she said. “How much do I owe you?”

Headley chuckled. “It’s on me.”

She peered down into the bag at the one remaining item. It was the butter brioche, wrapped in wax paper. “My favorite,” she said. “But I usually start with the parfait, while the yogurt is still cold.”

“Makes sense to me,” Headley said. A plastic spoon had been tossed into the bag. He handed it to her.

“So, Dorothy, how have you been managing through the crisis?” he asked. He already knew the answer. Dorothy had been interviewed ahead of time by the staff, and her answers passed along to the mayor.

“My landlord, Janos, is checking out the elevators right now. If he gets them up and running soon, I think I’m going to go out for lunch.”

“Sounds like a good man,” Headley said as Dorothy dug into her parfait. She slid a spoonful of yogurt, strawberry, and granola into her mouth.

The mayor took the lid off his tea, lifted out the bag, and let it drain against the top edge of the cup before setting it on the lid. “We think just about every elevator in the city will be back in service by the afternoon. Everyone’s really pulled together to—”

“Oh my God!” Dorothy said.

She had her spoon back in the yogurt and had unearthed something small and dark that appeared to have tiny legs and a tail attached to it.

It was a dead mouse.

Dorothy started to make gagging sounds, turned away from the table, and vomited onto the floor.

“You can be sure we’re going to be taking this up with Brew Who,” Glover said, trailing after his father as they came out of the apartment building, headed for his limo. “This is outrageous. I’ll call the health department, get the inspectors in there, shut them down.”

Valerie was already in the back of the car, phone in hand. The two TV stations covering the event had posted the video within minutes. By the time the mayor had raced down twelve flights of stairs, it was already trending.

“How bad is it?” Headley asked as he got in the car.

“It’ll blow over,” Valerie said. “You can make a joke about it later. I don’t see that you have any choice.”

“It’ll be on every late-night show,” Headley said.

Glover came around the other side of the car and opened the door.

“No,” his father said, raising a hand.