Man of the Hour (17 page)

“So?” she said, helping herself to a seat before his desk. “When are you guys going to announce it was a bomb?”

LeVecque leaned back from the desk and made a big show of putting down the five-dollar cigar he’d been smoking, obviously recognizing there was a kind of territorial imperative at stake here.

“It’s Murphy, right?”

“Mandel.”

“Why am I talking to you, instead of Lippman?”

Ernie Lippman was the paper’s regular police reporter, working out of the shack on the second floor. A burnout who was more interested in fly-fishing and dating dead cops’ wives than in doing his job. It had been easier than she’d expected to get her editor to wire around him once she’d convinced Nazi she was the girl for the job.

“Lippman’s chasing rainbows and bluefish.” She crossed her legs and swung an ankle. “So should I repeat my question?”

“Yeah, why don’t you?”

She flopped her notebook down into her lap as the fax machine in the corner beeped. “Everyone knows there was a bomb on the school bus. Why are you guys ass-dragging on announcing it?”

“You know, that’s very naive. You don’t know how naive that sounds. I never would have asked a question like that. We can’t just pull results out of a hat. It takes days for the lab tests to come back.”

She tensed her eyelids for just a second. Oh look at him, sitting there with his thinning blond hair, his little cigar, and his puffy I-gotta-start-playing-racquetball-again tummy protruding. An aging preppy thinking he’s such a tough guy. She’d heard about this LeVecque already, that he’d been a complete buff and badge-sniffer when he was a reporter, ready to go into the tank for the police on any story. Word was, he rode around town with a police scanner and a cherry-top in his Volvo. The kind of middle-class guy who’d always wanted to be a cop, but his parents wouldn’t let him.

She had to strategize here, to get around him. Think like a boxer, Bill Ryan once told her. Use what you have. Even if it’s your body instead of gloves. Bob and weave. Feint and jab. Don’t be afraid to get down and dirty. Manipulate the manipulators. God knows, the people you’re writing about won’t hesitate to do the same to you.

“So I heard a rumor that it was actually a fairly small explosive charge that happened to catch the fuel tank,” she said, leaning forward and showing just a little cleavage.

“Could be.” LeVecque lowered his eyes for a second and then raised them.

Brian Wallace, one of the sergeants who took calls in the outer office, walked in and dropped a file on LeVecque’s desk. A big, tall guy with a walrus mustache and his tie askew, he didn’t offer LeVecque so much as a nod, but he gave Judy a long once-over twice, which she tried to accept as her natural due.

For the briefest of seconds, she felt sorry for LeVecque. Quitting his newspaper job and going to work for the cops had left him a man without a country. Reporters certainly didn’t trust him, but there was no way cops would ever fully accept him either. It didn’t matter that the public information job had always been filled by civilians; he hadn’t come up through the ranks.

“So do you have any suspects?” she asked after the sergeant left.

LeVecque put his brown loafers up on his desk, trying to reassert control. “How can there be suspects if we aren’t saying it’s a bomb?”

“Well, are you looking at anybody?”

“We’re not prepared to say at this time.”

Clearly he had no idea. She was going to have to try to embarrass him into finding out what was going on. When she’d approached that weird-looking Detective Noonan on the scene, he’d just given her that dead-eyed stare and the public information office phone number. She was stuck with LeVecque as her conduit, for the moment.

“So when will you know?” she asked.

“When will I know what?” He affected distraction, looking at the bank of televisions along the office wall.

“Whether it was a bomb or not? Whether this is going to be a criminal investigation.”

“Oh.”

She was going to have to keep sparring with him, and that was all there was to it. He had the weight of a huge institution behind him and she just had her imperfect little body and a notebook. She felt like she was facing a thirty-foot-high brick wall. She was either going to have to scale it or try to crash right through it. Otherwise, she was going to have to go back to the office and face Nazi and the Death of Hope empty-handed. And then it would be back to Lotto mania. Somehow she had to get this LeVecque to like her.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said, sitting up straight in his chair. “Why don’t you check back with me in a couple of days?”

“You mean, over the weekend?”

“Whatever.” He let his voice trail off. “I don’t care.”

To his right, the TV screens were showing that one image of the burnt bus in front of the high school over and over, as if it were on a tape loop.

“Just tell me this,” she said. “Are you looking at terrorist groups?”

“We’re looking at everyone,” he sighed, turning back to her. “Give it enough time, we’ll be looking at you. Reporters are behind everything.”

She smiled, more at the concept of the joke than at the joke itself. “So you’re not going to give this to the
Post
or the
News
before you give it to me, are you?”

“Everyone’s going to find out at the same time. We don’t play any favorites here.”

Though even a small child could easily discern that was not true, and, in fact, had never been true of the office. There were always favorites, reporters who got the stories first, because they’d written positively about the department in the past. His own career was proof of that.

“Well, don’t lose my number,” she said, rising and smoothing her skirt.

“Oh, I won’t. And by the way …” He mustered up his nerve. “What about your, uh, tampon?”

“I don’t think I need it anymore.” She paused in the doorway, the convulsive racket of the outer office going on behind her. “By the way, how is it that the teacher knew enough to keep the kids off the bus for the extra thirty seconds or whatever it was until the thing went off?”

“How should I know?” He lowered his eyes and tried to look busy moving pens and paper clips around his desk top. “Dumb luck. Isn’t that always the answer?”

“Is it?”

17

“CAN I OFFER YOU
gentlemen some coffee?” Elizabeth Hamdy said.

“It’s half-past four, but what the hell,” said Detective Noonan. “We got a few more hours’ work ahead of us. Might as well be awake for it.”

“It’s Turkish coffee, it’s sweet,” said Elizabeth, heading for the kitchen. “We put cardamom in it. I hope you don’t mind. My father and I are always arguing about the best way to make it. Whether it’s better to let it foam up once or twice.”

Noonan shrugged at his newest partner, Tom Kelly. They’d just stepped into the living room of the house on Avenue Z. A regular working-family home, Noonan noted. A beige slip-covered Jennifer Convertible couch, an Oriental rug, an oak china cabinet, pictures of old relatives on the wall. In the corner, two little girls were playing a Nintendo video game on the big TV. The only unusual things were the plate-sized plaque with Arabic writing on it above the kitchen doorway and the picture of the mosque above the couch.

Even with twelve other detectives running around interviewing former and current students, teachers from the school, and witnesses from Surf Avenue, Noonan was still the primary on the case. It was just a matter of time, though, until the feds came barging in, trying to elbow him out of the way.

The girl came back with two espresso-sized cups and saucers and set them down for the detectives on the coffee table, next to a diary with a paisley cover. She was lovely, Noonan thought to himself. Not just her bright smile and her long, flowing hair. She had a lovely way about her. Reminded him of his daughter, sixteen, at home, and doing God knows what with boys up in her room. She didn’t seem Arab at all to him, but what did he know? Anybody could be anything.

“Thanks for making the time for us,” he began. “I know you weren’t at school Tuesday, but like I said on the phone, we’re talking to everybody from your class, gathering all the information we can get so we can figure out what happened out there. Okay?”

“Of course.” She gave just a small smile, but somehow it changed the rest of the room, made it seem bigger. “Anything I can do to help. I really liked Sam.”

“Terrific. I was wondering if you might have heard anybody say anything unusual at school in the days before this thing went off.”

The smile retreated and her face turned somber, still lovely but taking the light a different way. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“I mean, was anybody acting strange, or angry. You know? Boys fighting over girls. Girls fighting over boys. Disputes about money. Did you hear anybody say they were going to get somebody else?”

She looked down at her diary and then at her feet, resting in thick white tube socks under the glass coffee table. “There are fights and arguments all the time, but nobody said they were going to do anything like this.”

“How about the governor’s visit? Anybody say anything about that? You know, he’s a Republican, but he’s got some views on abortion that aren’t too popular with some of the Right-to-Life people.”

“No, I didn’t hear anything like that. But then I don’t get involved talking about politics.”

“Yeah, right,” Kelly interrupted. “Just cut to the chase and ask her if she knows about any of the usual bomb-throwers. She’s an Arab, isn’t she?”

Oh, there he goes. Noonan frowned. The man had been a burden since this case began, slipping off for drinks throughout the day and getting wobbly and dull-headed by the end of the shift. They’d be packing him off to go dry out with the God Squad upstate any day now. And then there’d be a new partner Noonan would have to fill in from scratch on the case.

“No,” Elizabeth said, overlooking the insult with carefully measured patience. “I don’t know anybody like that.”

“I see.” Noonan scratched his temple and noticed Kelly yawning. “You know, we’re just looking for anything out of the ordinary. Like one of your classmates was telling us something your teacher said in class a couple of days ago about wanting to be a hero.”

“Is that unusual?”

“Well …” He sipped the coffee and shifted around in his seat a little, trying to find the right angle to come at this. “Didn’t he say something about how he’d always wanted to save somebody’s life?”

“Well, he talked about being a lifeguard. But that’s what he’s teaching this term, ‘Heroism in Literature.’” She sat up straight with perfect posture, but Noonan noticed the white socks moving under the coffee table a little, like bunnies in the grass. “Why do you ask about that?”

Noonan glanced at Kelly but got no reaction from him. Was he asleep, sitting there with his head thrown back and his mouth half open?

“It’s just, you know, you wonder if a remark like that puts ideas in somebody’s head.”

She paused for a moment to ponder that, putting her hand over her mouth. “So you think somebody from our school put a bomb on the bus?”

“At this point, we don’t know anything. We’re just looking at every possibility.”

“God.”

“You sure you don’t know anybody who’d do something like that? Somebody who’s really been upset about something lately.”

She lowered her hand to her chin and flecks of gold showed up in her brown eyes. “Um, no. I can’t think of anyone like that.” She smiled shyly.

Kelly yawned again and stretched his arms, looking at the watch on his hair-blackened wrist. “We gonna spend the night here or what?” he asked Noonan. “We got seven more interviews. The department says no more overtime for the rest of the year.”

Noonan bared his teeth at him for just a second before he turned back to Elizabeth Hamdy. “We won’t take up too much more of your time,” he said. “I was just curious, though. Why was it that you were absent Tuesday, anyway?”

He noticed she was looking at a pair of Rollerblades by the video-game-playing little sisters in the corner. Under the glass coffee table, her toes were curling and uncurling like they couldn’t wait to get inside the skates.

“I had a really bad headache,” she said. “I stayed home.”

“Probably too much Arab coffee,” Kelly said, rising and stretching again. “You ask her about the bag?” He blinked at Noonan.

Noonan shook his bald head and looked up at the ceiling. It was the third time today Kelly had revealed too much with his questions. It was inevitable; he had to get another new partner.

“Right,” he said, his hand forced and his rhythm thrown. “We just wanted to check. Does Mr. Fitzgerald have a Jansport book bag?”

“I think so. Almost everyone does.” The feet stopped moving under the table. “Was there a bomb in a book bag?”

“We gotta go.” Noonan stood and dropped his card on the coffee table. “Give us a call if you think of anything you want to tell us.”

18

THE PUBLICITY ONSLAUGHT
had continued all through Thursday afternoon and into the early evening.

First, the mayor’s office called, asking David to come to City Hall on Wednesday morning to get a special award presented by the mayor and the governor. Then Diane Sawyer’s people called, asking if he’d be available for an interview that same afternoon. Oprah Winfrey’s people wanted him in Chicago the next Friday for a panel on “Profiles in Courage”;
“Grace Live!”
in L.A. wanted him for the next Thursday; an agent named Mark Feinberg called from International Creative Management, asking if David already had representation for book and movie deals. And finally,
Nightline
wanted him for Monday, not to talk about the explosion itself, but to talk about why the story was attracting so much attention. A
meta
story.

He stopped answering the calls just before eight so he could race off to Sam Hall’s memorial service at Christ the Redeemer Baptist Church in Harlem. The governor, the mayor, and the police commissioner had already paid their respects and left by the time he arrived. He walked quickly past the two remaining camera crews on the sidewalk out side, not wishing to take part in the grief-as-public-spectacle phenomenon.