“And that was enough to cuff him and bring him in?” Miller asked, incredulous.

  “No, sir. We arrested him because he drew a gun on me.”

  “Oh. I see.” He seemed confused and first, and then concerned. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “No, sir. We’re fine.”

  “Good. Detective Gold, I fear that if nothing comes out of this interrogation, we’re going to have to remove you and Pawlowski from the case. There’s just not enough justification for keeping it open while everything points to suicide.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  He stood still for a moment, watching her closely as if he was sure she was going to argue. When she said nothing, he gave a curt nod and then turned away, heading back for his office. She’d known this would happen but felt disappointed all the same. They hadn’t even been given until the end of the day—which was only two hours away, but it still stung.

  She entered the interrogation room, walking in just as Pawlowski was finishing up with a question.

  “…two nights ago? Were you anywhere near the Chrysler Building?”

  “What in God’s holy name would I be visiting that place for? An ugly eyesore on the city if you ask me. So…no. No, I was nowhere near the Chrysler Building two nights ago. In fact, I was nowhere near that side of town.”

  “Can you tell us where you were?” Pawlowski asked. Ava remained quiet, letting Pawlowski run with it.

  O’Hare thought about his answer for a while and then shrugged. “Guess it makes no difference now, if I’m already under arrest. If you must know, I was with an old friend of mine down in Harlem, having some drinks.”

  “A speakeasy?” Pawlowski asked.

  “No. At his place. He’d gotten it off of someone else. It was some awful rotgut, that’s for sure, but it did the trick.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “I don’t…Jesus, I don’t recall. The last few days have been a blur. Hell, the last few weeks. I mean…it’s all been such a whirlwind, there are days I forget to even change my damned clothes!”

  “Well, try to remember,” Ava said.

  She could see him thinking hard. Finally, he said, “I think I was there pretty much all day and night. My wife…she’s been insufferable since we had to close the mill and shop down. I’ve been staying with my friend for a while here and there.”

  “We’ll need his name.”

  “No, I don’t think so. No way I’m going to let you go over there under the guise of clearing my story only to bust him for having alcohol.”

  “And what about the gun?”

  “What about it?”

  “Why did you have a gun on you when we came by?” Pawlowski asked. “It almost seems like you were waiting for someone in particular.”

  He let out the same chuckle he’d voiced several times since they’d come into contact with him. “No. Just keeping it on hand in case I ever get the courage to end my life.”

  Ava watched as Pawlowski considered this answer. She took several moments before she spoke again and when she did, Ava wasn’t sure exactly where she was headed with the interrogation.

  “You said you’ve been staying at your friend’s house here and there, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What about clothes? Do you have a change of clothes on you?”

  He laughed once more. It was really starting to get on Ava’s nerves and started to support the idea that maybe this was their man. He certainly wasn’t in his right mind, and he didn’t seem to be taking any of this seriously.

  “You crazy broad. I just told you I have half a mind to kill myself. You think I give a damn about my clothes? I’ve been wearing these same clothes for nearly a week now.”

  Standing behind her partner, Ava could see Pawlowski sigh. She nodded and turned to Ava with a strange look on her face. “Can I speak to you outside, Detective Gold?”

  Ava nodded, and both women left the room to step out into the hallway. Pawlowski closed the door behind them and stepped to the right, not too far away from where Ava and Miller had spoken just moments before.

  “You heard him,” Pawlowski said. “He hasn’t changed his clothes in several days.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, did you see his shoes?”

  “No, I didn’t really pay attention to them.”

  “I know it’s a long shot,” Pawlowski said, “but they look like they could be a match for that print we saw out on that beam at the Chrysler Building.”

  Ava knew it was indeed a long shot, especially because a photographer had never been sent up to document the site. And even if she and Pawlowski could confirm that the shoe matched the print, it wouldn’t be enough.

  “That is a long shot.” As she said this, another thought occurred to Ava. She’d felt the edges of the theory while speaking with O’Hare in the interrogation room, but it only now presented itself as a full-formed thought. “Hear me out, for a second….”

  “What? You don’t think it’s him? The shoes…I know it’s flimsy at best, but…”

  She shrugged, cutting her own self off. Ava wondered if her partner had come to the same conclusions she had just seconds ago.

  “O’Hare is suicidal. He admitted to thinking of killing himself twice already. Why would a man murder someone by shoving them off a building and then approach the brink of killing himself two days later?”

  “Maybe killing someone pushed him even further,” Pawlowski suggested. “Maybe losing everything was the crack in the foundation and then taking another person’s life split it.”

  “That’s a good theory,” Ava said, thinking it over. But even then, something still didn’t feel right. “But why the Chrysler Building? O’Hare has no connection to it, even if Perkins did, in a small way.”

  “When you put the Chrysler Building into it, it all does sort of fall apart, huh?” Pawlowski asked. “So…what do we do now? We’re almost out of time.”

  “Maybe. Even if O’Hare isn’t our killer, he did pull a gun on a cop. We can hold him on that for a while…paint it as if we’re still questioning him about Perkins while he’s here. That might buy us some more time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “To figure out why the Chrysler Building. Through this whole thing, it’s been the big, glaring tower at the center of all of this.”

  Pawlowski gave her a strange look, punctuated with a frown. “Jesus, Gold…you’re talking about the building as if it’s a suspect.”

  A smile touched Ava’s lips, but only briefly.

  The building as a suspect…

  Ava’s eyes widened a bit as she pointed her index finger at Pawlowski. “You might just be on to something there.”

  “What?” Pawlowski asked as Ava was already starting to move to the bullpen and the front doors beyond. “What are you talking about?”

  “The Race to the Sky,” Ava said. “I think we’ll find our answer in that.”

  And though Pawlowski clearly wasn’t quite tracking with her, she followed Ava all the same—back out through the doors and hurrying down the streets in search of answers once again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  By the time they’d managed to catch a cab, Ava still had no clear idea of where they needed to go. She felt they needed to learn more about the so-called Race to the Sky, to get a better understanding of the sort of people that were involved in it. The title itself was almost misleading—it sounded like a fun and friendly competition of sorts among men with far too much ego and money. That’s why her first instinct was to head right back to 40 Wall Street, to see if they could have another conversation with Mr. White.

  This was the address she gave the cab driver and they were headed that way when she started processing everything out loud. She was starting to understand that she and Pawlowski were a bit more similar than either of them wanted to admit and she hoped Pawlowski could add a degree of balance to her ideas.

  “The Race to the Sky,” she said. “Sounds almost like a cute little game, right?”

  “I suppose,” Pawlowski said.

  “I think it might be a little misleading. Just sounds like men measuring their…well, their egos, among other things. But we already know that it was competitive enough to have people from the Chrysler Building trying to get people at 40 Wall Street to divert finds and investments their way. And if that’s the case, it means there was a lot of money tied up in it—during a time when there isn’t much money to go around.”

  “So you think the killer is wrapped up in the Race to the Sky somehow?”

  “I think it’s worth digging into,” Ava said. What she thought but did not say was: And I think it’s a thread we should have pulled a little harder at from the get-go. “White told me that the spire was put on top of the Chrysler Building without any sort of announcements or news beforehand. It was done almost in secret. And that spire made it officially the tallest building in the world. Secrecy like that…yeah, I think it’s pretty competitive.”

  “And the Empire State Building is the other building involved,” Pawlowski said. “We haven’t heard anything about that location yet.”

  “Maybe that’s where we need to look, then. Maybe there’s some link between Perkins and the Empire State Building we simply haven’t seen.”

  “And you know,” Pawlowski said. “There’s something else that occurred to me back at the station when we were talking about O’Hare being suicidal. It made me think about Mrs. Perkins. I don’t remember her specific words, but she mentioned how one of Alfred’s worries was that in this crash, there would be very little left to make sure he could take care of her. Or something like that, right?”

  “Yes, I recall that.”

  “Well I don’t know the laws or the regulations, but I’d assume that a man that takes his own life isn’t going to reap the rewards of whatever life insurance he has lined up, right?”

  “That’s a good point,” Ava said. “And I think it also points to his refusal to work with the folks at the Chrysler Building in terms of sending clients their way. He didn’t want any sort of drama or obstacles. He was wanting to take care of himself and his wife.”

  “Not the sound of a suicidal man at all if you ask me,” Pawlowski pointed out.

  There was a renewed sense of urgency to each of them when the cab stopped in front of the building at 40 Wall Street. When they stepped inside, Ava looked at her watch and saw that it was 4:19. She hoped having O’Hare back at the precinct would buy them some time but as far as she was concerned, she was still counting on five o’ clock being the end of their time limit to prove Alfred Perkins had not died by his own hand.

  They walked into the front door and approached the counter, which was now a very familiar scene to Ava. This would be, after all, the third time she’d come here in the past two days. She stopped by the counter out of impulse and barely even looked at the woman sitting there when she flashed her badge and said, “NYPD. We need to speak with Mr. White.”

  “Oh, hold on a second,” the sheepish woman behind the counter said. “I’m sorry, but Mr. White is gone for the day.”

  Ava halted at the end of the counter and turned around quickly. “Do you know where he’s gone?”

  “I don’t. Something to do with a family appointment. If you’d like to set up a time to speak with him tomorrow, I’d be happy to take a message.”

  “This is time sensitive,” Ava said. “I think we’d be okay without him, actually. I simply need to have another look in Alfred Perkins’s office.”

  “Oh, I see,” the receptionist said. “Well, you’re welcome to, but you should know that most of his things have been cleared out. His wife and some movers took care of most of it today.”

  Ava was discouraged at first but then figured they could just pay a visit to Mrs. Perkins. For all they knew, she may know a bit about any involvement her husband might have had with other individuals taking part in the Race to the Sky.

  “Thank you,” Ava said, already turning back for the doors.

  “I’m not sure what you’re looking for, but there were a few things left behind at the request of Mr. White,” the receptionist said. “Things concerning current projects still in process, and contacts of certain clients. If you’re looking for recent business-related items, it’s likely still here.”

  “Is it still in his office?”

  “Yes,” the receptionist said. She then reached down below the counter and opened up a drawer. Seconds later, she retrieved a key and handed it to Ava.

  Both Ava and Pawlowski gave their thanks and head directly for the stairs. As they climbed then, Pawlowski said, “What do you know? We actually caught a break.”

  “Not only that,” Ava said, “but the bulk of the digging has already been done. Anything recent and related to current projects means that anything related to the Chrysler Building or the Empire State Building is going to be in the things that were left behind.”

  They made their way to the fourth-floor hallway, making a direct course for Perkins’s office. The door had been left open, but everything except the desk and a single bookshelf had been removed. The only exception was a small box sitting on the desk. When Ava looked inside, she found a series of papers that looked to have all been clipped together. Among the papers were a few notebooks and a smaller, leather book.

  Ava’s attention went to the leather book right away, merely because it looked more important and official than anything else. A childish impulse at its core, it proved to pay off almost right away. When she opened it up, she found that it was Alfred Perkins’s planner. When she opened it to the first page, she saw that it started a little over eight months ago, at the start of the year.

  “His planner,” she said, scanning through the pages and coming to a stop when she reached the days from several weeks ago.

  Many of the notes were very brief and written in a way that seemed almost like code but was likely just Perkins’s own shorthand way of saving time and space on the pages. Mtg w Deringer, 2. Bank apt w Herber Bros, 11. She did see two entries from six weeks ago that read: Mtg w Albrecht, 3:30 – CB.

  Albrecht, Ava thought. Albrecht, CB. That clearly stands for Chrysler Building, given Albrecht’s association with it. As she scanned through them, a few dates from three weeks ago caught her eye. There were two entries within the same week and then another listing one week prior to his death.

  The listings read: Lunch – Fairfax – ESB. The third listing was exactly the same, only it ended with an underlined question mark.

  “ESB,” Ava said. “That could be an abbreviation for Empire State Building, right?”

  Pawlowski was thumbing through one of the notebooks that had been left behind. She nodded her agreement, but it was clear that her attention was on whatever she was looking at.

  “Could be,” she said. “But hey, I think this is something sort of like a contacts list. They’re sort of scrawled all over the place. Some of them have little notes that seem to be when he first met them—or when he last met them. I’m not sure.”

  “That’s excellent” Ava said. “See if you can find the name Fairfax. I’ve got an entry in his schedule—several of them actually—where he was supposed to meet someone by the name of Fairfax. And they’re denoted with ESB.”

  Pawlowski did as she was asked and within just a few seconds, she nodded and placed the notebook on the desk. “Right there,” she said. “Henry Fairfax. And beside his name is one interesting word.”

  Ava looked at the listing and saw what Pawlowski was talking about. Written by Fairfax’s name was the word Empire.

  “And there’s the connection to the Empire State Building,” Ava said.

  Pawlowski picked up the notebook with the phone numbers and started for the door. “The way I see it, we have a name and a phone number. I say we call and meet with him now.”

  Ava agreed one hundred percent, reminding herself that they had a man in an interrogation room that, while he had indeed pointed a gun at her, was not at all guilty of the murder they were investigating.

  They made their way back downstairs, back to the receptionist. For the second time in the past two days, Ava asked to borrow the phone. The woman behind the desk handed it over eagerly, her wide and excited eyes indicating that she could sense the urgency behind the call Ava was about to make.

  While Pawlowski thanked the woman, Ava found the number listed for Fairfax and placed the call. It was answered on the third ring by a woman that had a rather rough, haggard voice.

  “Mr. Fairfax’s office.”

  “This is Detective Ava Gold with the NYPD,” she said. “I need to speak with Mr. Fairfax, please.”

  “He’s not in the office right now. Might I ask what this is about?”

  Ava figured there was no sense in tipping a potential suspect off as to why the police might want to speak to him, so she decided to make a cover story on the fly. Not only a story to cover her backside, but to perhaps entice Fairfax to speak with them and to have his secretary make sure she did her best to connect them.

  “I’ve been tasked with looking into a recent suicide at an investment firm,” she said. “It seems that when this man took his own life, he owed many people some money—something to do with construction contracts and investments. The details are quite murky. But we do have a list of people that he owed money to. His employers are adamant that we make sure every penny is paid, but needed the police to sort of look over it to make sure everything was done by the book. And it just so happens that Mr. Fairfax’s name is on that list.”

  “Oh my,” the woman on the other end said. “Well, I’m certainly sorry to hear about the suicide, that’s for sure. But I also know that Mr. Fairfax will want to know this as soon as possible. I’ll be sure to have him call you at the very first chance he gets.”

  “Well, the day is coming to a close,” Ava said. “Do you know where he might be? Maybe I can speak with him face to face.”

 

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