In This Rain (41 page)

Heart’s Content

Over coffee and cornflakes Joe spelled out for Ann the idea that had come to him during the night, as she slept bruised and exhausted beside him and he watched the moon through the bedroom window.

He began by saying, “This may be crazy.”

But she didn’t think so. “It’s perfect.” Her eyes glowed. “Walter won’t be able to stand it. He’ll have to make a move.”

“You’ll have to convince Ford Corrington to go for it.”

“That’s the only part that might be hard. But he’s in a bad situation. I’m hoping he’s desperate enough.”

“But it can’t be Lowry. In case something goes wrong. Find a way to get Perez.”

“He won’t, Joe. No one will but Lowry.”

He poured more coffee and that argument went on. They spent Sunday refining his plan, going over the angles. Planting the dicentra, weeding the herbs. And having that same argument. Until, finally, he gave in.

*

Monday there was one more argument before they left for New York.

“You’re not coming,” Ann said.

“It has to be me. No one will listen to you. I didn’t want Lowry and it took you all day yesterday to convince me there’s no one else. But you were right and I bought it.”

“And now you’re planning to argue over this all day today?”

“I don’t have to. You know I’m right.”

“If you get caught, Joe,” she hesitated, “they could revoke your parole.”

“Get caught doing what?” He spoke as though that thought hadn’t haunted his night, hadn’t forced him out of bed at dawn and sent him scrabbling up the boulder wall to inspect the cascading trumpet vine. He’d stood up there for a long time, astonished, as always, by the vast, unblocked view.

“Leaving the county,” Ann said.

“I called my case officer,” he told her. “I said I had a chance of a job in Manhattan, told him how I’d be going and that I’d be back Friday at the latest. He gave me his blessing.”

“You did that already?”

“I was up early.”

“It can’t be you.”

“It can’t be anyone else.”

“Irene could do it.”

“Irene’s a lawyer. She has too much to lose.”

“And you don’t?”

“She can get in trouble for acting unethically. I can’t. Just illegally. Which this isn’t. There’s nothing I’ll be doing that’s against parole regs.”

“You’ll be lying.”

He grinned. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I can’t ask you to do this.”

“You’re not. I said I wouldn’t hand you to Lowry and you said it wasn’t my choice. This isn’t yours.”

*

The argument they didn’t have was over whose car to use. After they’d made the phone calls that got things rolling, Joe packed an overnight bag and locked up the cabin, but he didn’t even take the pickup’s keys.

*

With the top down they raced past farm fields and stands of pine, swooped up and over the Tappan Zee, and followed the Thruway until it became the FDR. Ann wove the little red car through traffic and out onto the Manhattan streets. Joe stayed silent as they stopped-and-started past buildings in whose shadows he was raised and others that had not been there when he went away. It was only as they neared Ann’s place that he realized his palms were sweating.

When they turned into the driveway to her garage, Joe saw Ann’s face harden.

“We don’t have to go in here,” he said. “We could put the car in another lot.”

“I’m fine,” she said tersely, and wheeled the Boxster down the ramp.

A few flattened flower petals lay on the oil-stained concrete. Ann didn’t look at them. She parked in the most impassive and precise manner Joe had ever seen, locating the car in the exact center of her space. They crossed the garage to the elevator, Ann striding ahead with her jaw thrust out. Once in the elevator she visibly relaxed, and by the time she unlocked her door the color was back in her cheeks.

She dropped her bag on the foyer table. “Not bad, huh? I told you I bought it for the view.”

Joe crossed to the wall of glass at the end of the living room. Sun gleamed on the East River and a summer haze obscured the horizon.

From behind him, Ann said, “I’m going to change. I couldn’t talk anyone into anything looking like this.”

When she was ready, he left with her.

“Where are you going to go?” she asked.

“Nowhere. But it’s been a while,” he said, in explanation.

She gave him a long look, then turned and peered critically at herself in the mirror.

“You look great,” he said.

“Thanks. I kind of thought the shirt went well with the purple around my eye.”

“What are you going to tell people about that?”

“The truth. That it’s just one more example of why Walter’s got to be stopped.”

At a Cell Hut he bought a throwaway phone and gave her the number. Then she hailed a cab and he started to walk.

He headed uptown randomly, crossing at corners and stopping at lights. He fell right back into the rhythm as though he hadn’t been gone for years. Rumbling traffic punctuated with horn honks and overlayed with passing sirens supplied the soundtrack. Hot dogs and bus exhaust provided the perfume. The visuals were ever-changing and exactly the same: distracted pedestrians, speeding bike messengers, tame city trees; towering straight-walled glass and steel, lower, older brick and stone.

He found himself noticing the changes: a construction site where four walk-ups had been, new windows going into a long-abandoned hotel. That these places had remained so lodged in his memory alarmed him; that he found himself passing judgment, thinking this change good and that one bad, was disconcerting. He no longer cared what happened here. He was gone, somewhere else, started over. Good changes and bad ones had meaning only if you had a vision for a place and they matched it or crossed it. New York was in his past, no vision now, just freeze-frame photos, fading, indistinct.

He jaywalked with a practiced skill, read headlines as he passed newsstands and noted an ailanthus tree reaching for the sunlight from a rubble-littered lot.

You could come back.

The tires’ hiss, the sharp shadows of fire escapes, the scent of salt pretzels from a street cart all seemed to have one thing to say. The pulse of his blood answered the cadence around him. He’d been born here, raised in a walk-up like the one he was passing; he’d played stickball on asphalt streets like these, had his first kiss in a shadowed doorway like that one across the way.

It hasn’t been that long. You could come back.

Sutton Place

“Joe? Corrington went for it.”

“Hey, good work! Was it hard?”

“His board meets next Thursday and he thinks they’re planning to ask him to resign. He called this a ‘Hail Mary pass.’ I said, ‘Hallelujah,’ and that was that. Where are you?”

“Madison and Eighty-third.”

“What are you doing?”

“Walking around.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Why shouldn’t I be?”

“I don’t know. Being back, that’s all.”

“I’m fine, Ann. How about you?”

“Stiff and achey. Or I would be if I weren’t on such an adrenaline high. I’ll call you after I see Greg Lowry.”

*

“Joe? Greg’s in.”

“Holy cow. How did you do that?”

“I told you he was bound to be.”

“I didn’t believe you.”

“Because I’m blonde?”

“No doubt.”

“Where are you?”

“Carl Schurz Park.”

“Over by Gracie Mansion?”

“It has all new plantings.”

“Joe?”

“Yes?”

“Nothing. Two down. I’ll call you again.”

*

“Joe? Don Zalensky said he’ll think about it.”

“Does it look likely?”

“Well, he didn’t throw me out. It was harder than Corrington or Greg, but in the end I think he’ll do it.”

“If he can sell it.”

“He’s not going to try. He’s going to handle it on his own. To keep Hizzoner clean.”

“Can he manage that?”

“He wouldn’t have to do much, just confirm that Charlie’s about to do what we’re saying he is, if anyone asks.”

“You’re amazing.”

“No. I’m right. Where are you?”

“Harlem, 128th Street.”

“What are you doing up there?”

“That jobsite. I thought I’d take a look.”

“What do you think?”

“I think it’s worth fighting for.”

City Hall

The mayor stared at the deputy mayor in disbelief. “You know,” he said, “three weeks ago I was the Mayor of the City of New York. Now we’re down the rabbit hole and I must be the goddamn Mad Hatter. Who are you and what have you done with Don Zalensky?”

“All right, it’s extreme,” Don said. “But if it works, you may get to Albany yet.”

“If Albany’s anything like this I’m not so sure I want to go there anymore. This is the craziest goddamn idea I ever heard.”

“Could work.”

“Only if Walter’s guilty!”

“I hate to point out the obvious, but nothing ever said he wasn’t. He just got too hot to handle.”

“And this could make him radioactive! Setting him up for the murder of a girl we don’t even know he knew— !”

“Of course he knew her. And we’re not setting him up, Charlie. This is a trap only Jen’s killer would fall into. If Glybenhall didn’t do it, he won’t fall for it.”

“It’s nuts. It can’t work.”

“I think it can. And it could prove we were right all along and make our people look really clever. I’ll tell you what part won’t work, though: Joe Cole going to Glybenhall. Glybenhall knows all about him and Ann Montgomery. He wouldn’t let Cole through the door.”

“There, see— ”

“I’m going to suggest they go through Edgar Westermann.”

“Edgar? Jesus, Don, what are you trying to do?”

“Whether or not Westermann believes Glybenhall killed Jen, the rest of it— the part about you and Corrington— will get him upset. He’ll take it straight to Glybenhall.”

Charlie ran his hand over his bald head. “What if this bright idea blows up in our faces?”

“No one will ever know you knew anything about it. I told Ann Montgomery I’d consider it, but that if I agreed, it would just be me. That I wouldn’t tell you anything. This way if it comes back to bite us, it won’t get any farther than me.”

“Are you nuts? I don’t work like that.”

“If things keep going the way they are, I’ll be out of a job soon anyway. You’ll have to throw someone to the wolves.”

“Not you, for chrissakes.”

“Me, or six nonfranchise players. And that might not be enough to get you to the finals.”

“That’s a sports metaphor,” Charlie objected.

“You didn’t think I could do that? I’ve been practicing.”

“In case you get traded to another team?”

“Something like that.” Don eased a cigarette from the pack.

“Give me one of those.”

“Really?”

“No. But give me something. This is insane. This could sink us.” Charlie ran his hand over his head again. “Ah, what the hell. Go ahead. We’re sunk already.”

Heart’s Content

“What can I do for you, Mr. Cole? Please, please, sit down.”

Edgar Westermann reestablished himself behind his massive desk. The collar of his white-on-white shirt sat slightly askew, leading Joe to think he’d tightened his tie and shrugged back into his jacket when his visitor was announced.

Joe sat unhurriedly on a chair as substantial as the desk. Behind him, a wall of photographs showed the Borough President in three-piece-suited splendor performing various official functions. Heavy brocade drapes echoed the patterned Persian carpet. Joe wondered if all the furnishings in this office had been selected for the amount of light and air they were able to displace.

He waited a few extra seconds just to get Westermann off balance, then asked without preamble, “Do you remember me?”

Westermann made a show of frowning and searching his mental database. “Yes, I believe I do,” he said tentatively. But Joe had seen calm familiarity in Westermann’s eyes when he’d walked in the office.

Joe said nothing.

Like most politicians, Westermann was not on good terms with silence, so after a brief time the Borough President went on. “You used to work for the city. DOI, I believe. You were involved in that Dolan Construction disaster.”

“Good,” Joe said. “We don’t have to go through the early chapters, then.”

Westermann raised his eyebrows. “I don’t take your meaning.”

“I spent two and a half years in prison. I’m on parole for the next half-dozen. My wife divorced me and I dig ditches for a living. What happened in Dolan Construction wasn’t my fault but the city needed a scapegoat and I got tagged. I’m pissed off, Mr. Westermann.”

“Well, I can understand you might feel that way, but the law— and the community— saw it different. Now, if you’re here to rehash all that, I’m not sure I see the good that can come of it.”

“I’m not. I’ve come across some information that I think will be valuable to you. I want to make a deal.”

“Deal? What sort of deal?”

“Money, of course.”

Westermann grunted. “General run of things, people don’t come to me much for money. I’m just a public servant.”

“You do all right. And your friend Walter Glybenhall is loaded.”

“This has to do with Mr. Glybenhall?”

“It does.”

“So why come to me?”

“If you remember me, you remember that Ann Montgomery’s a friend of mine. Glybenhall knows that, too. He wouldn’t have let me through his door.”

“No, I don’t suppose he would.”

“What I’m hoping is that you find what I have to say interesting enough to tell Glybenhall about. Because even though it came from Ann, it’s something he’ll want to know.”

“Ann Montgomery is a troubled young woman.”

“Troubled especially by the way the city’s dealt with her.”

“She didn’t want to be heaped with scorn, could be she shouldn’t have treated one of New York’s leading citizens the way she did.”

“I warned her. I told her, whether you’re right or wrong, you can’t go up against Walter Glybenhall, he’ll crush you like a bug. But she had the same problem I had three years ago.”