In This Rain (14 page)

“It would be,” Ann said, “if she were here.”

“You know,” said Beth, “she never confirmed.”

“You mean we don’t even know if she’s coming? I’m starving!” Irene wailed. “We just going to sit here and wait? I don’t think so!” She unholstered her cell phone and hit speed-dial.

Beth sipped her martini. “I haven’t seen Jen in months.”

“She’s got some new guy,” Ann said. “But she won’t tell me who.”

“Not even you?” Shondi asked. “You and Jen go back to, like, kindergarten, don’t you?”

“More or less. They moved a lot, like we did, on the Americans-in-Europe circuit. Our mothers both believed in sticking their daughters in the snottiest school available. So our paths kept crossing.”

Beth grinned. “Oh, I can just see the two of you terrorizing Miss-Nose-In-The-Air.”

“No, wherever did you get that idea?” asked Ann innocently.

Shondi reached for a taco chip. “But she won’t tell you who her new guy is?”

“She’s being discreet.” Ann shrugged. “Maybe he’s married. Or he’s famous.”

“Okay, voice mail.” Irene snapped her phone shut. “I told her to get her diamond-draped micro-butt over here right away.”

“Diamond-draped?” Beth lifted her eyebrows.

“Twenty-four-karat chain.” Irene’s ebony fingers circled her own waist. “Tiny hanging, uh, baubles. No catch,” she added. “Doesn’t come off.”

“Oooh! Well, whoever this new guy is, he’s kinky!”

“Not this one,” said Ann. “That was from a guy three or four back.”

“Tell me it was that geeky deputy mayor!” Shondi’s eyes sparkled with the hope of scandal.

“Who, Don Zalensky? God, no. The whole problem with him was, he was no fun. She’d be ready to go out dancing and he’d be reading a water-quality report.”

“No wonder she dropped him.”

“Actually, he dropped her. She was kind of smitten. She wanted to see if she could loosen his tie.”

“If she couldn’t, it can’t be done.”

“It can’t. Getting Charlie Barr to Albany is his religion. Everything else is just a distraction.”

“Distraction!” Irene stood. “Hunger is driving me to distraction! Come on, girls, let’s eat.”

They wove through the bar to a table in the garden. Sliding her chair in, Ann almost missed her own cell phone’s ring. She dug fast, to grab it before it stopped. “Ann Montgomery.”

“I found it.”

It took Ann a minute. “Joe?” She leaned down to block out more sound. “Joe? Found what?”

“Can you hear me?”

“Hold on. Be right back.” She stood. “A call from work,” she told her friends.

“You should have stayed at the DA’s office, girl,” Irene said. “You remember how no one ever calls us after hours.”

“Liar. Get extra guacamole.”

Sympathetic smiles, a bye-bye wave. Ann zigzagged through the crowd, stepped into the cool of the night. Second Avenue was a comparative zone of silence.

“Joe? You still there? Joe?”

“I’m here.”

A breath of relief. Why? If she lost him, she knew how to reach him.

He said, “I wasn’t sure this cell number would still be good.”

“Why wouldn’t it be? It hasn’t been that long.” For her. For her it had only been time. For him, she suddenly knew, it must have been something else, something so alien she did not understand how to begin to understand it. “Joe? What do you mean, ‘found it’?”

“I looked at your photos. Read the reports. I think you were right. It looks deliberate.”

A bus pulled into the stop in front of her, its engine rumbling. Ann turned away, finger in her open ear. “You did? You looked at them? You saw something?”

“It looks deliberate,” he repeated.

A thrill ran over her skin. “You mean sabotage?”

“Looks that way.”

“Wow. Tell me. And talk loud. I’m on the street.”

He raised his voice. “Nothing I can tell about the fire, though an arson investigator might get something. But I guess they looked?”

“Sorta-kinda. No one’s buying the sabotage angle.”

“Well, there might be nothing on that one, or anyway nothing you could find. I didn’t get to the bricks yet. But the scaffolding, I’m pretty sure.”

“Why?”

“The bolt holes.”

“How?”

He paused. She could almost see him, his eyes’ distant look as he considered what words to use, how best to explain the technical to the untrained. Never, with Joe, impatience; no pained condescension. Just the attempt to be clear, as though translating from his mother tongue.

“When a scaffold collapses,” he said, “especially if it’s overloaded— I mean, say, not from wind— the overloaded bolts shear off from the force of the collapsing sections. Before they shear, they bend. They deform the bolt holes as they’re bending.”

“Okay.”

“The place was littered with sheared bolts, right? Bent and sheared?”

“Right. They’re in the photos.”

“But I can see three bolt holes that aren’t deformed.”

“Meaning?”

“Those had no bolts.”

“The bolts couldn’t have just come loose? Fallen out as the scaffold was collapsing?”

“Unlikely. One, maybe. Not three in the same place. And three is all I can see in the photos. There might have been more.”

“Well, Three Star swears the scaffold was inadequately engineered. Maybe it was installed badly, too. Maybe they just left some bolts out.”

“Scaffold’s inspected before it’s used. The inspector would have seen it.”

“The inspector could have been bought. Just signed off without going up there. To speed up the schedule.”

“The laborers would have seen it as they were laying plank. The masons might even have checked it out as they went up the first time.”

“The first time? Not every time?”

“You do it the first time, you figure it doesn’t change. And once the planks are down, some of the bolts are hard to see. And anyway, you know construction workers. They don’t like to get caught looking nervous. They don’t even wear hardhats when they can get away with it. They’re cowboys.” Like me, Ann thought; and laughed with delight when Joe added, “Like you.”

“How kind of you to notice.”

“Who could miss it? How long was that scaffold up?”

“I don’t know. I could find out.”

“But it wasn’t new? Under a week, say?”

“No, more like six weeks, two months.”

“Then I don’t buy a bad installation. And I don’t buy bad engineering, either. This is the kind of routine design an engineer could do in his sleep.”

“Maybe one did.”

“Then it would have been done right. No, I’m telling you, someone took those bolts out after the scaffold went up.”

“You’re totally sure.”

“I’d stake my reputation on it,” Joe said, and paused. “If I had one.”

Sutton Place

Ann stood on Second Avenue watching the flowing traffic alternate: downtown, across town, down, across. She thought about a hand easing bolts from steel. She saw the scene at night, a shadow slipping along the scaffolding. She watched the shadow pocketing the bolts, heard them jingle as each bolt was added. She saw the five bricklayers coming to work in the bright morning sun, joking with each other, maybe one lighting a cigarette as they climbed onto planking they’d stood and walked on all day yesterday and the day before.

How things can change in an instant.

How she could drive up the river to see Joe, as so many times over the last three years, but now take a different turn and it was just the two of them alone, in a garden surrounded by trees, arched over by sky, no gates clanging, no walls pressing in.

How Joe, though without bars or doors, could still lock her and her world out of his, just by turning his back.

And how her phone could ring and Joe was there, telling her the door was unlocked once more.

She wanted to call him back and ask him why he’d looked at the photos. But she wouldn’t get an answer. When talk around the water cooler had drifted toward the personal, Joe could always be found at his desk, comparing charts, checking printouts. “I’m a boring guy, Ann. I’m an engineer.” Except about his garden. Once he was convinced she was interested— and she was, though not in flowers and soil, but in Joe’s eyes and voice when he talked about them— he’d begun to paint pictures in the air for her with his hands and his words and his smile.

She pulled her phone out of her purse again, but it wasn’t Joe she called. She speed-dialed the cell phone of Luis Perez, her police liaison, whom she’d met briefly first thing that morning. He was a cop from Bronx Homicide; the death of the Winston woman was his case.

“Perez.” He sounded irritated. In the background she could hear a child crying. Perez must be at home. Well, why not? He was a family man, three kids, lived in Brooklyn if her background check was accurate. He was also a smart-ass, a straight arrow, and sometimes sloppy in his paperwork, or so ran the book on Luis Perez.

“It’s Ann Montgomery,” she told him.

“Ah, the Princess! Jesus, you still at the office?”

“No, I’m outside a bar on Second Avenue.”

“Oh, gee, I’d love to but I can’t.”

“I can hear. And you’re not invited, it’s girls’ night out.”

“Oh, man, I always wanted to be in on one of those! You talk about nail polish, nylons, things like that, right?”

“Those things interest you?”

“Is there a good answer to that?”

“No. Luis, listen. What would happen if one of the accidents at Mott Haven were for sure sabotage?”

Perez paused. “Which one?”

“The scaffold collapse.”

“You know who did it?”

“No.”

“You sure it was?”

“I had— I had a forensic engineer look at the reports and the photos. He’s pretty sure.”

“Well, if we were convinced, I guess we’d treat it as property crime resulting in injury.”

“High priority?”

“Property crime?”

“Five men were hurt.”

“Not seriously.”

“Two of those bricklayers will be laid up for weeks!”

“They’ll recover. They’ll probably sue and never have to go to work again. Their wives’ll sue for loss of services. You know what that is?”

“Yes, Luis, I do. And one guy just has a broken ankle.”

“So he can’t take out the garbage. That’s a service. Listen, your engineer— does he have anything to say about the bricks?”

“He’s going to get back to me.”

“Because that would be manslaughter, at least.”

“I’m not sure we can prove that.”

Perez was silent; Ann watched the traffic. “Listen,” the cop finally said. “I’m homicide. You have a suspect on the scaffold, I’ll see if he looks good for the bricks. If you don’t, but you convince us on the scaffold, the squad guys’ll see what they can scare up. Might be able to make first-degree assault— injury in the course of committing a crime. Best I can do.”

“Can’t we call the scaffold attempted murder?”

“It’s a stretch.”

“Not a big one. Those five guys were lucky they weren’t killed.”

“So are you, every time you cross Broadway. And what if we did call it that? I still need a suspect. You gonna bother me at home on a Sunday night, least you can do is give me a suspect.”

“I’ll find you one,” she promised. “And I apologize for calling you at home.”

“Hey, I’m just yankin’ your chain. Do princesses have chains?”

“I don’t.”

“I bet you do and I bet I can find it. Anyway, call me tomorrow, I got that list you wanted in the office. I’d’ve brought it home, I’d known you worked 24/7.”

“I thought everyone knew that, Luis. Okay, thanks. You’ll hear from me.”

“Can’t wait. I want to talk about nail polish and nylons.”

“Pantyhose. These days we call them pantyhose.”

“No kidding? Wait till I tell my wife.”

“I guarantee you, Luis, she knows.”

She clicked off, dropped the phone in her purse, and headed back into the bar to rejoin her friends.

“Did we hear from Jen?” she asked, sitting down.

“Miss Flaky? Girl is lucky she’s rich, or she’d be dead by now.” Irene lifted her margarita. “What I want to know is what you’re so happy about.”

“I’m happy?”

“Oh, come on, girl, you’re lit up like a Christmas tree! Give. Who was on the phone?”

“I told you, it was work.”

The three others exchanged grins as Irene said, “Wish my work made me all shivery, gave me reason to lie to my friends.”

“Now come on, you guys know I’d never lie to you.”

“Yeah, you just don’t tell us nothin’. All right, well, I’m going to drown my sorrows in guacamole.”

Ann scooped some salsa on a chip. She savored in her mind once more the astounding thought that had brought the visible heat to her face.

Joe had looked at her papers.

Harlem: Frederick Douglass Boulevard

Ford Corrington and Ray Holdsclaw swept briskly up the City Hall steps. Yesterday’s winds had died down to gentle June breezes. Here in lower Manhattan, where the island was narrower than uptown, the wind brought the scent of water. Ford had noticed that before.

They identified themselves to the cop at the desk in the cool, echoing lobby. While he phoned upstairs they entered through the metal detector, waited with arms spread while another cop drew their outlines in the air with wands. They both got wanded, even though only Ford’s watch set the beeper off, and even though Ray was wearing his clerical collar.

“You suppose Donald Trump and Walter Glybenhall get security checks like this when they drop in?” Ford asked Ray as the cop pawed through his briefcase.

“Everyone gets the same treatment, sir,” the cop deadpanned, though the sergeant at the desk, who was black, met Ford’s eyes with a brief, eloquent look. Ray grinned his sunny grin.

The cop snapped Ford’s rummaged briefcase shut as Don Zalensky came clipping down the stairs. Sending the deputy mayor to greet them, Ford thought: Charlie Barr’s way of letting them know he was taking them seriously. Or at least, letting them know it was important to him that they think so.

Zalensky shook everyone’s hand and led the way to the elevator. Ford could smell the tobacco smoke on the deputy mayor’s jacket; he could hear his faint wheeze. The man probably used the elevator even to come down, when he was alone, Ford decided. The grand stairs routine had been to impress them.