Linwood Barclay - Elevator Pitch

“Give me the gist,” Headley said.

Chris said, “She tells about the offer. To write your bio. That she’d get mid–six figures to do it. That she’d have to take a break from Manhattan Today . Implying this was your way of getting her to stop writing critical stories of your administration. That you were buying her off. Bribing her, essentially.”

Headley said, “We deny the whole thing. It’s a total fabrication.”

Chris slowly shook his head. “She quotes everything that was said in the car so perfectly I’m betting she recorded it.”

“Shit,” Valerie said. “I remember her doing something with her phone just before she got into the car. I thought she was just turning it off.”

Headley slumped further into the couch. “Glover,” he said under his breath.

Neither Chris nor Valerie said a word.

Headley, feigning a cheerful tone, said, “Bring her into the loop, Glover says. Get her on our side. Throw enough money at her that she’ll jump at the chance.” Headley shook his head, then managed a wry smile. “I guess this means she’s not taking the job.”

“Nothing against Glover,” Valerie said, “but you know I advised against this from the beginning.”

“I know,” Headley said, grimacing.

“Matheson’s piece also raises the question of why you want to do a book. It encourages speculation that you’re giving serious consideration to running for something besides reelection for mayor, before you’re ready to tip your hand. That was the other reason why I didn’t want to pursue this matter with Matheson.”

“I shouldn’t have listened to him,” Headley said. “I should have known better.”

“At the risk of stepping over the line, sir,” Valerie said tentatively, “I’m not sure Glover has enough experience to be advising you on these sorts of matters. He understands you better than any of us, of course, but where he’s most valuable is in the data mining end of things. Analyzing trends, surveying.” She shrugged. “There’s nobody in the whole building who can help me with a computer problem the way he can. But when it comes to advising you on matters like—”

Headley raised a silencing hand and Valerie went quiet.

Chris said, “There’s a bit at the end of the column.”

Headley gave him a pained look, expecting even more bad news.

“No, it’s not about you,” he said. “Someone Matheson knew was killed in that elevator accident.”

The mayor was about to look relieved, but quickly adopted a look of moderate concern. “Sherry D’Agostino, I bet. Everybody knew Sherry.” He managed a wry grin. “I even went out with her a few times, back in the day.”

Valerie looked slightly pained, as though only Headley could boast about dating someone who’d recently died.

“No,” Chris said. “Paula somebody. She’d interned at Manhattan Today .”

“Oh,” Headley said. There didn’t seem to be much else to say. He looked at Valerie, then Chris, then back to Valerie. “Can you give us the room?” he asked her.

She looked momentarily taken aback, but said nothing as she headed for the door and closed it behind her.

“Chris,” he said, “have a seat.”

The man sat.

“Chris, in the time you’ve been with us, you’ve shown yourself to be very valuable. One part bodyguard, one part detective, one part political strategist.” He chuckled. “And whenever Glover isn’t here to fix my printer, you know just what to do.”

Chris smiled. “Thank you, sir.”

“You’re good at finding things out. Turns out not all the great hackers are teenagers living in their parents’ basements. You’ve been very helpful for someone in my position.”

“Of course,” he said.

“I might not be in this office today if it weren’t for you.”

“I’m not so sure about that, Mr. Mayor.”

“Don’t be modest. You found that woman, talked her into coming forward, telling her story to the Daily News . Wouldn’t be sitting here now if she hadn’t told the world how my opponent forced him self on her when she was fourteen and he was forty. Even dug up the emails he wrote to his lawyer where he as much as admitted it.”

Chris only smiled.

Headley grinned. “Thank Christ you weren’t digging into my own history.”

Chris shook his head dismissively. “I guess if someone’s looking hard enough, they’ll find a few skeletons in anyone’s closet.”

“Yeah, well, I might need a walk-in closet for all of mine. But I believe you understand where I’m coming from, that I want to make a difference. I’ve been an asshole for much of my life, Chris, but I hope I’m doing what I can to make up for that now.”

Chris nodded, waiting.

Headley’s face went dark. “I’m worried about a couple of things.”

“Yes, sir?”

“The first is … Glover.”

“He’s eager to please you. He means well. He wants your approval, sir.”

“Yeah, well, that may be. But his instincts … just let me know if you see him doing something particularly stupid, would you?”

“Of course. And the other thing?”

“Barbara.”

Chris nodded slowly.

“Let’s face it. She’s good at what she does. People feed her stuff. She has good sources. Some working right here at City Hall, people who’ve not been loyal to me. She’s a pit bull. If she bites down on your leg you’ve as good as lost it.”

“I understand your frustration,” Chris said.

“If there were some way to get her off my back, some way to neutralize her …”

Chris was silent for a moment. Finally, he said, “I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about here, sir.”

Headley looked at him, puzzled at first, then horrified. “Christ, you didn’t think I meant …”

Chris gave him a blank stare. “Of course not.”

“Jesus, no.” He shook his head. “No, I’m thinking more … about those skeletons in the closet. If there were a way to discredit her somehow.” The mayor put a hand to the back of his neck and tried to squeeze out the tension, like he was wringing a sponge dry.

“Let me nose around,” Chris said.

“Good, that’s good,” the mayor said. “You had me worried there for a minute.”

Chris Vallins tilted his head to one side, as if to say, Yes?

“That you might have thought, even for a second, that I was suggesting we push the woman out a window or something.”

“Forgive me,” Chris said. “I know you’d never hurt a soul.”

Jerry Bourque’s first stop on the way home had been an art supplies place down on Canal Street. Then he’d gone into a grocery store with hot table service and filled a container with a few steamed vegetables, lasagna, a dollop of mashed potatoes, two chicken fingers, and some shrimp chow mein. The fact that some of these items did not typically go together did not bother Bourque. They charged by the weight of the container, so you could throw in a bit of whatever you liked.

As he came through the door of his fifth-floor, two-bedroom apartment in the Lower East Side, he tossed his keys in a bowl on a table in the hall, then went into the kitchen. He took his phone from his jacket pocket and set it, and his food, on the counter. He placed the bag from the art store on the already cluttered kitchen table. He slid out ten sheets of white illustration board, each twenty by thirty inches. He stacked them neatly at one end of the table by several small, screw-top bottles of art paint, a selection of box cutter–type knives, a metal ruler, some brushes and pencils, several three-foot-long strips of balsa wood, a glue gun, and a large, eighteen-inch-square paper cutter with an arm strong enough to slice through the art board. Or his fingers, if he wasn’t careful.