The Face of Fear (9 page)

Beginning today, she was on a week’s leave from the Rhinestone Palace
_;
and she was glad that she hadn’t tried to squeeze in one more night’s work before catching the flight to Vegas tomorrow morning. She’d had only two hours’ sleep after returning from Edna’s place, and those two hours had been plagued by nightmares. She would need to rest well tonight if she was going to be at the top of her form for Ernie.

As she packed, she wondered if there was something missing from her. Heart? Normal emotions? She had cried last night, had been deeply affected by Edna’s death. But already her spirits were high again. She was excited, pleased to be getting away from New York. Introspection didn’t give rise to any guilt. She had seen too much of the world—too much violence, desperation, selfishness and grubbiness—to chastise herself for being unable to sustain her grief. That was the way people were built: forgetfulness was the hub of the wheel, the core of the mind, the thing that kept you sane. Maybe that was not pleasant to contemplate, but it was true.

At three o’clock, as she was locking the third suitcase, a man called. He wanted to set up a date for that evening. She didn’t know him, but he claimed to have gotten her name from one of her regular clients. Although he sounded quite nice—a genuine Southern gentleman with a mellow accent—she had to turn him down.

“If you’ve got something else going,” he said, “I can make it worth your while to drop him for tonight.”

“There’s no one else. But I’m going to Vegas in the morning, and I need my rest.”

“What’s your usual rate?” he asked.

“Two hundred. But—”

“I’ll give you three hundred.”

She hesitated.

“Four hundred.”

“I’ll give you the names of a couple of girls—”

“I want to spend the evening with you. I hear you’re the loveliest woman in Manhattan.”

She laughed. “You’d be in for a big disappointment.”

“I’ve made up my mind. When I’ve made up my mind, nothing on God’s earth can change it. Five hundred dollars.”

“That’s too much. If you—”

“Young lady, five hundred is peanuts. I’ve made millions in the oil business. Five hundred—and I won’t tie you up all evening. I’ll be there around six o’clock. We’ll relax together—then go out to dinner. You’ll be home by ten, plenty of time to rest up for Vegas.”

“You don’t give up easily, do you?”

“That’s my trademark. I’m blessed with perseverance. Down home they call it pure mule-headed stubbornness.”

Smiling, she said, “All right. You win. Five hundred. But you promise we’ll be back by ten?”

“Word of honor,” he said.

“You haven’t told me your name.”

“Plover,” he said. “Billy James Plover.”

“Do I call you Billy James?”

“Just Billy.”

“Who recommended me?”

“I’d rather not use his name on the phone.”

“Okay. Six o’clock it is.”

“Don’t you forget.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” she said.

“So am I,” Billy said.

Although Connie Davis had slept late and hadn’t opened the antique shop until after lunch, and although she’d had only one customer, it was a good day for business. She had sold six perfectly matched seventeenth-century Spanish chairs. Each piece was of dark oak with bowed legs and claw feet. The arms ended in snarling demon heads, elaborately carved gargoyles the size of oranges. The woman who purchased the chairs had a fourteen-room apartment overlooking Fifth Avenue and Central Park
_;
she wanted them for the room in which she sometimes held séances.

Later, when she was alone in the shop, Connie went to her alcove office at the rear of the main room. She opened a can of fresh coffee, prepared the percolator.

At the front of the room the big windows rattled noisily. Connie looked up from the percolator to see who had come in. No one was there. The windows were trembling from the sudden violence of the winter weather
_;
the wind had picked up and was gusting fiercely.

She sat down at a neatly kept Sheraton desk from the late 1780s and dialed the number of Graham’s private office phone, bypassing his secretary. When he answered she said, “Hello, Nick.”

“Hi, Nora.”

“If you’ve made any headway with your work, let me take you to dinner tonight. I just sold the Spanish chairs, and I feel a need to celebrate.”

“Can’t do, I’m afraid. I’m going to have to work most of the night to finish here.”

“Can’t the staff work a bit of overtime?” she asked.

“They’ve done their job. But you know how I am. I have to double-check and triple-check everything.”

“I’ll come help.”

“There’s nothing you can help with.”

“Then I’ll sit in the corner and read.”

“Really, Connie, you’d be bored. You go home and relax. I’ll show up sometime around one or two in the morning.”

“Nothing doing. I won’t get in your way, and I’ll be perfectly comfortable reading in an office chair. Nora needs her Nick tonight. I’ll bring supper.”

“Well ... okay. Who am I kidding? I knew you’d come. ”

“A large pizza and a bottle of wine. How’s that?”

“Sounds good.”

“When?” she asked.

“I’ve been dozing over my typewriter. If I’m to get this work done tonight, I’d better take a nap. As soon as the staff clears out for the day, I’ll lie down. Why don’t you bring the pizza at seven-thirty?”

“Count on it.”

“We’ll have company at eight-thirty.”

“Who?”

“A police detective. He wants to discuss some new evidence in the Butcher case.”

“Preduski?” she asked.

“No. One of Preduski’s lieutenants. A guy named Bollinger. He called a few minutes ago and wanted to come to the house this evening. I told him that you and I would be working here until late.”

“Well, at least he’s coming after we eat,” she said. “Talking about the Butcher
before
dinner would spoil my appetite.”

“See you at seven-thirty.”

“Sleep tight, Nicky.”

When the percolator shut off, she poured steaming coffee into a mug, added cream, went to the front of the store and sat in a chair near one of the mullioned show windows. She could look over and between the antiques for a many-paned view of a windswept section of Tenth Street.

A few people hurried past, dressed in heavy coats, their hands in their pockets, heads tucked down.

Scattered snowflakes followed the air currents down between the buildings and ricocheted along the pavement.

She sipped her coffee and almost purred as the warmth spread through her.

She thought about Graham and felt warmer still. Nothing could chill her when Graham was on her mind. Not wind. Not snow. Not the Butcher. She felt safe with Graham—even with just the thought of him. Safe and protected. She knew that, in spite of the fear that had grown in him since his fall, he would lay down his life for her if that was ever required of him. Just as she would give her life to save his. It wasn’t likely that either of them would be presented with such a dramatic choice
_;
but she was convinced that Graham would find his courage gradually in the weeks and months ahead, would find it without the help of a crisis.

Suddenly the wind exploded against the window, howled and moaned and pasted snow, like specks of froth and spittle, to the cold glass.

The room was long and narrow with a brown tile floor, beige walls, a high ceiling and fluorescent lights. Two metal desks stood just inside the door
_;
they held typewriters, letter trays, vases full of artificial flowers, and the detritus of a day’s work. The two well-dressed matronly women behind the desks were cheerful in spite of the drab institutional atmosphere. There were five cafeteria tables lined up, short end to short end, so that whoever sat at them would always be sideways to the desks. The ten metal chairs were all on the same side of the table row. Except for the relationship of the tables to the desks, it might have been a schoolroom, a study hall monitored by two teachers.

Frank Bollinger identified himself as Ben Frank and said he was an employee of a major New York City firm of architects. He asked for the complete file on the Bowerton Building, took off his coat and sat at the first table.

The two women, as efficient as they appeared to be, quickly brought him the Bowerton material from an adjacent storage room: original blueprints, amendments to the blueprints, cost estimates, applications for dozens of different building permits, final cost sheets, re-modeling plans, photographs, letters ... Every form—and everything else required by law—that was related to the Bowerton highrise and that had passed officially through a city bureau or department was in that file. It was a formidable mound of paper, even though each piece was carefully labeled and both categorically and sequentially arranged.

The forty-two-story Bowerton Building, facing a busy block of Lexington Avenue, had been completed in 1929 and stood essentially unchanged. It was one of Manhattan’s art deco masterpieces, even more effectively designed than the justly acclaimed art deco Chanin Building which was only a few blocks away. More than a year ago a group of concerned citizens had launched a campaign to have the building declared a landmark in order to keep its most spectacular art deco features from being wiped away during sporadic flurries of “modernization.” But the most important fact, so far as Bollinger was concerned, was that Graham Harris had his offices on the fortieth floor of the Bowerton Building.

For an hour and ten minutes, Bollinger studied the paper image of the structure. Main entrances. Service entrances. One-way emergency exits. The placement and operation of the bank of sixteen elevators. The placement of the two stairwells. A minimal electronic security system, primarily a closed-circuit television guard station, had been installed in 1969
_;
and he went over and over the paper on that until he was certain that he had overlooked no detail of it.

At four forty-five he stood up, yawned and stretched. Smiling, humming softly, he put on his overcoat.

Two blocks from City Hall he stepped into a telephone booth and called Billy. “I’ve checked it out.”

“Bowerton?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think?” Billy asked anxiously.

“It can be done.”

“My God. You’re sure?”

“As sure as I can be until I start it.”

“Maybe I should be more help. I could—”

“No,” Bollinger said. “If anything goes wrong, I can flash my badge and say I showed up to investigate a complaint. Then I can slip quietly away. But if we were both there, how could we explain our way out of it?”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“We’ll stick to the original plan.”

“All right.”

“You be in that alleyway at ten o’clock.”

Billy said, “What if you get there and discover it won’t work? I don’t want to be waiting—”

“If I have to give it up,” Bollinger said, “I’ll call you well before ten. But if you don’t get the call,
be in that alley.
”

“Of course. What else? But I won’t wait past ten-thirty. I
can’t
wait longer than that.”

“That’ll be long enough.”

Billy sighed happily. “Are we going to stand this city on its ear?”

“Nobody will sleep tomorrow night.”

“Have you decided what lines you’ll write on the wall?”

Bollinger waited until a city bus rumbled past the booth. His choice of quotations was clever
_;
and he wanted Billy to appreciate them. “Yeah. I’ve got a long one from Nietzsche.‘I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is Superman, the lightning out of the dark cloud man.’”

“Oh, that’s excellent,” Billy said. “I couldn’t have chosen better myself.”

“Thank you.”

“And Blake?”

“Just a fragment from the alternate seventh night of
The Four Zoas.
‘Hearts laid open to the light ...’”

Billy laughed.

“I knew you’d like it.”

“I suppose you do intend to lay their hearts open?”

“Naturally,” Bollinger said. “Their hearts and everything else, from throat to crotch.”

Promptly at six o’clock, the doorbell rang.

Sarah Piper answered it. Her professional smile slipped when she saw who was standing in the hall. “What are you doing here?” she asked, surprised.

“May I come in?”

“Well ...”

“You look beautiful tonight. Absolutely stunning.”

She was wearing a tight burnt-orange pantsuit, flimsy, with a low neckline that revealed too much of her creamy breasts. Self-consciously she put one hand over her cleavage. “I’m sorry, but I can’t ask you in. I’m expecting someone.”

“You’re expecting me,” he said. “Billy James Plover.”

“What? That’s not your name.”

“It surely is. It’s the name I was born with. I changed it years ago, of course.”

“Why didn’t you give me your real name on the phone?”

“I’ve got to protect my reputation.”

Still confused, she stepped back to let him pass. She closed the door and locked it. Aware that she was being rude but unable to control herself, she stared openly at him. She couldn’t think what to say.

“You seem shocked, Sarah.” “Yeah,” she said. “I guess I am. It’s just that you don’t seem like the sort of man who would come to a woman—to someone like me.”

He had been smiling from the moment she’d opened the door. Now his face broke into a broad grin. “What’s wrong with someone like you? You’re gorgeous.”

This is crazy, she thought.

She said, “Your voice.”

“The Southern accent?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s also part of my youth, just like the name. Would you prefer I dropped it?”