The Hungry Dreaming, page 2
part #3 of Ghosts of Gotham Series
She checked the time and dialed a long-distance number. The phone rang in her ear, an electronic purr kissed with static.
“Houston comptroller’s office, how may I direct your call?”
“Nell Bluth, from the Brooklyn Standard. May I speak to Boris Meyer, please? He’s expecting my call.”
There was a pause on the other end, just long enough for a hitch of breath.
“I’m sorry, he’s not going to be in today, maybe—maybe not for a little while. He’s had an accident.”
Nell’s chair was an old wooden swivel model, hard as a prison bunk. She’d turned down offers to upgrade her to something ergonomic with a cushion; the last thing a reporter should ever be, she felt, was comfortable sitting behind a desk. She scooted closer to the chair’s lacquered rim and her toes dug against the floor.
“An accident? I’m sorry, is he all right?”
“He’ll be fine,” the receptionist said, a southern twang in her voice. “It was raining this morning, and his car went off a muddy embankment. They rushed him to Houston Methodist and he’s banged up, but he’s already awake and talking. We just don’t know if he’ll be back soon or if we’ll need to bring someone in to cover his desk for a few days. It’s all kind of touch-and-go right now.”
“Of course,” Nell said. “Could someone give me a call back when you know for certain?”
She could. The receptionist took down Nell’s information and promised her a follow-up tomorrow. She hung up at the same time Tyler did.
“Unbelievable,” he said.
“They still dancing around the FOIA request?”
“Not that. I mean, yes, they are, but not that.” He gestured to the desk phone. “You know that leaky spot in my bathroom ceiling?”
“Wasn’t your landlord going to fix that?”
“Was. Thanks to the new Loom Upgrade Act, all renovations past a certain dollar amount have to be accompanied by a ‘Loom-readiness inspection’ to get the building ready for fiber-optic wiring. So sorry, his hands are tied, but he can’t possibly bring the repair crew in until…whenever that happens.”
“It’s your ceiling,” Nell said. “You’re on the top floor. I’m not an expert, but I don’t think that’s where they put the cable.”
“So sorry, hands tied. How’d the presser go?”
“They gave away branded swag.”
“Called it,” he said.
“You did. It wasn’t all hot air and wasted time. I got a NYCEM rep going on the record to confirm the bid-approval date.”
“And your mystery man on the inside?” he asked.
“Coming with the receipts.”
He wasn’t much of a mystery man, at least not after Nell dug her claws in. Arthur Wendt, forty-six, wed twice but mostly married to his job in Barron’s accounting division. His company had barely escaped getting nailed to the wall when the Buffalo Billion scandals broke, and his finely developed sense of self-preservation made him turn whistleblower.
“You think he can deliver?” Tyler asked.
“I can’t lock it down, not yet, but all the evidence says Barron Equity got in bed with the Weaver Group and started making disbursements a week before the mayor’s office blessed the deal. There never was a bid process. The fix was in from day one. Wendt’s our best shot at figuring out exactly who got bribed, how much they took, and who made the payoffs to open New York’s doors for business.”
Tyler’s chair slid closer to hers. He held out his knuckles.
“City desk wonder-twin powers—”
“—activate,” she said, gliding over on the chair’s casters and meeting him with a fist-bump.
“Hear from your guy in Houston?”
Her good mood faded, just a little. The comptroller had been a lone holdout amid the city’s decision-makers, digging his heels deep in the way of the Weaver Group’s arrival. In the end, Houston got the Loom, and he got frozen out. He had been stirring up trouble and kicking stray bits of dirty laundry her way ever since.
“Car accident,” she said, scooting her chair back over. “He’s okay.”
“You sure it was just an accident?”
She flashed a lopsided smile. “You’re starting to sound like Wendt.”
“He’s a whistleblower. Can’t be too careful.”
“Like I told him,” she said, “this is real life, not the movies. Scumbag corporations don’t send hit men to silence the opposition. They send lawyers.”
Speaking of Arthur Wendt, it was time to check in. She didn’t use the desk phone for that. They had a protocol. Her personal cell, his burner, one he’d bought with cash. No in-person contact, ever.
It had been two days since he had last returned her calls, with nothing but a terse “I’m working on it.” She was getting close to breaking the no-personal-contact rule and showing up on his doorstep. Still, there was an art to handling an informant. You had to be a little pushy, ride them to get results, but never too hard or you’d lose them completely. Nell was still figuring out Arthur’s pressure points.
While she dialed and listened to the robotic voicemail message, a commotion was breaking out at the front of the newsroom. Loud voices, people in motion. She figured it was the sports desk guys having a conniption over today’s Yankees game. Then Tyler snapped his fingers and drew her eye.
“Uh, Nell?”
A wall of a woman steamed her way through the bullpen, cutting down the middle aisle like a battleship. She had a shovel-flat face and a strangler’s hands. Nell couldn’t quite place her, not at first, not until she came to a dead stop on the far side of her desk.
“You murdering bitch.”
Noah Sellers’s wife, then. Widow. Whatever. Nell hung up the phone, folded her hands, and tried for a conciliatory tone.
“I’m very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Sellers.”
“He named you. In the suicide note. Did you know that?”
She knew. Everybody knew. The morning Noah Sellers was found hanging from a knotted bedsheet, Nell ended up behind closed doors with the Standard’s editor-in-chief, the owner, and a trio of stone-faced lawyers for a two-hour interrogation.
“I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“You were the reason he couldn’t get a fair trial. You, that story you wrote, those lies.”
“I reported the truth,” Nell said. “Every line, every word, all backed up by verified facts. I’m sorry if you—”
The widow’s hand was a blur. She grabbed Nell’s cardboard cup from the desk and flung it in her face. Ice-cold coffee splashed in Nell’s eyes, ran down her cheeks, soaking her blouse in wet rivulets. Nowak, a high school fullback turned sports reporter, was just a second too late. He clamped down on her arm, the empty cup tumbling to the floor, and dragged her backward as the big woman started to scream. Nothing to it, just a word salad of pure outrage, every slur she could think of and threats of lawsuits, threats of car bombs, threats breaking down in a guttural howl of grief as two more staffers jumped in. They wrestled her toward the exit with tears streaming down her ruddy cheeks.
“You okay?” Tyler asked.
Nell flicked her fingertips, sending droplets of coffee flying.
“Fine,” she said. “It was cold. Wasn’t going to drink it anyway.”
3.
Later that night, in the heart of Manhattan, Seelie Rose stared at her ghost in the darkened glass.
A light summer rain came down, drizzling against the floor-to-ceiling window, turning her reflection into a phantom smear. The hard angles of her face lingered, unanchored and drifting with the night wind. Beyond her ghost sprawled the canyon of Fifth Avenue and the curated, tamed wilderness of Central Park.
It was a little after one in the morning. She couldn’t sleep. Five floors below the window ledge, brake lights flared wet and scarlet. Restless insomniacs, taxi drivers, night crawlers on their way to work, punching the third-shift clock. Anonymous in the dark, just like her. There were eight million people in this city. A number big enough to swallow you whole.
Seelie’s bare toes curled against the grainy plank flooring. She’d slipped out of bed a while ago, slithering from under the weight of Arthur’s arm. He snored, sprawled across half the king-sized mattress, draped in silk sheets the color of spilled burgundy. She always wondered if those were his usual sheets, or if he changed them just for her, the same way he changed his hairstyle and his cologne every time his wife went out of town.
She was on business in Singapore, chasing the cash to pay for their fifty-million-dollar condo. He only talked about her when he was looking to expiate his sins. “She’s sleeping with her assistant,” he told Seelie once. “Has been for years. She knows that I know. We just work around it. We can pretend we’re faithful as long as we don’t force the subject.”
“Does she know about me?”
The guilty shift in his eyes told her the truth.
“I’m sure she does. More or less. She doesn’t know my, you know. My…tastes.”
Seelie had arched a groomed eyebrow at that. “Tastes?”
His gaze dove like a burning plane, crash-landing somewhere around the toes of her ratty sneakers. Seelie understood what his awkward silence meant. He only had a few possible responses to that question, and she didn’t think teenage runaways from Buffalo or girls with freckles, dark bangs, and chunky black glasses were the specific “tastes” he was talking about.
He always slipped her some cash on her way out the door. Never a payment for services rendered, just a friendly gesture from a friendly guy. That time there had been an extra fifty dollars cushioned on a bed of twenties. She wasn’t too proud to take his guilt money; she had bills to pay.
Now he slept, filling the kidney-shaped curve of the bedroom with the residue of his dreams. Bookshelves lined one of the walls, stocked from floor to ceiling. Perfect hardcovers, unbroken spines. Crazy, to have all those books and not read them.
Everything Seelie owned sat in the tortoise-green hiker’s backpack at the foot of the bed. Clothes, toiletries, survival gear. She always made room for a single book. Some she had read once, some until they fell apart, and she would swap them with the people she couch-surfed with. Friends called her “the librarian.” She floated between different worlds, different tastes, and she was the vector that brought unfamiliar stories to new homes.
Last week she’d borrowed a shower and a cot at an artists’ co-op in SoHo and swapped a Jack Kerouac for a book of essays by Joan Didion. She had paid for a friend of a friend’s couch with a little company and traded the Didion for a vintage Stephen King potboiler. King had found a new home on a bookshelf in a Brooklyn basement, and she’d walked out with a fresh bruise on her hip, another on her belly, and a well-read copy of Das Kapital.
“What are you reading that junk for?” Arthur had asked her. She wanted to say that she was trying to understand how the book’s former owner could talk for three hours straight about equality and egalitarianism and the need for all people to stand together as one, and then paint bruises on her pale skin once the lights went out. She wanted to say that, but Arthur liked to pretend he was the only man she knew.
“Learning things makes me happy,” she said. Still the truth.
“Communism’s bullshit.” He waved, taking in his world, his condo, his capital-S Stuff. “You don’t get a place like this by going commie. I can tell you that for damn sure.”
“‘To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day.’” She tilted her head at the blank look on his face. “Lao Tzu? The Tao Te Ching?”
“Huh,” Arthur had said. Then he wanted to take her to bed, and she let him. Arthur never left bruises. He was apologetic in bed, treating her like she was made of spun glass, like he was terrified of his own weight and his clumsy hands but still couldn’t help touching her. He called her princess, the word like a mumbled mantra. Princess, princess, princess. Naming her, defining her, just the way he wanted her to be. She played her part until he fell asleep.
She should sleep, too, she knew. Arthur’s wife was coming home tomorrow night and Seelie’s eviction from paradise was imminent. She thought about taking a shower alone, luxuriating under Arthur’s stainless-steel Kohler fixtures, bathing in the warmth and steam until the last of her muscles unclenched. Maybe then she’d—
A knock sounded at the door.
The bedside clock read 1:12, glowing green numbers hovering in shadow. Arthur stirred with a whiny little groan, fighting to stay asleep.
Another knock, louder this time. Now Arthur was awake. More awake than she had ever seen him. It was like someone flicked a switch in his head. He sat up, burgundy silk sheets slithering down his hairy gut, his eyes wide. He jumped out of bed and yanked a cashmere robe over his shoulders as he padded to the door and checked the peephole.
Seelie hovered near him, uncertain. This was weird behavior. Then again, her life was a sliding scale of weird behavior.
“Arthur?”
“Shh,” he hissed. He waved at her. “Get dressed.”
He was already halfway across the room, heading for his office. Seelie pulled on her concert T-shirt and wriggled into artfully ripped black jeans. He clicked the office light on. The knock sounded a third time. Whoever it was, they weren’t going away.
Seelie scooped up her backpack and followed Arthur. This was his man cave, a small den with a million-dollar view of the park, appointed with the bric-a-brac of Arthur’s favorite hobby. Miniature redcoat and patriot soldiers clashed across two tables of hand-painted terrain, tiny puffs of stained cotton representing the smoke of a Revolutionary War battlefield. Along one wall, a frayed and flame-seared flag hung securely under a pane of glass, faded with the passage of decades.
It was an American flag, but different, All red vertical stripes and no stars. She’d asked him about it once. “The Sons of Liberty,” he told her. “Here in New York, they were the first leaders of the revolution. Washington came through in ’76 and took Manhattan—for a little while, anyway—but they laid the groundwork.”
She’d put it out of her mind ever since. But now he was pulling the flag back, bracing the frame with one hand and digging behind it with the other, rummaging in a cubbyhole concealed midway up the wall.
“Is it your wife?” Seelie asked. “Is she home early?”
That didn’t seem likely, but it was an explanation she could accept. A little normality. Arthur shook his head.
He showed her his prize from the cubbyhole. A phone, slim, no case, on the cheap side. The kind you could buy for a little cash down and then pay for minutes as you went along. One of her friends was a small-time dope dealer; he had at least three phones just like it. Arthur shoved it at her.
“Hold on to this.”
“You’re scaring me,” she said. But she took the phone.
“It’s probably nothing. It’s just—”
Three more knocks, slow and loud.
“It’s probably nothing, but just in case, hang on to that for me. Stay here and stay quiet. Keep the door shut.”
She did everything but the last part, leaving the lights out and the door cracked so she could see. She tugged on her socks, black with Halloween-orange stripes, and her old tennis shoes as she watched. Arthur’s free hand dipped into the bedside table drawer.
It came out holding a gun.
Seelie didn’t even know Arthur had a gun. He never seemed like the type. But there it was, dull metal with a rough grip and a snub nose. He held it behind his back as he approached the front door.
He hesitated, just for a moment, then opened it wide.
The man on the other side, cast under the stark hallway lights, was cadaver thin. Skin like wax paper stretched across high cheekbones. His bloodless lips were a razor-thin line. He wore a black raincoat, slick from the drizzle outside, and beads of water pooled on the broad dark brim of his hat. A string tie adorned the emaciated hollow of his throat. His outfit reminded Seelie of an old-time preacher. A missionary maybe.
“Can I help you?” Arthur asked.
Behind his back, his grip tightened on the revolver. The missionary spoke with a German accent. Maybe Dutch, his refined lilt tinged with a burr of pleasure.
“Hello, Four-Nineteen.”
“I think you’ve got the wrong door, pal.”
Seelie watched through the crack in the doorway. Arthur’s thumb slowly, carefully drew back the revolver’s hammer. Her mouth went dry.
“You were sloppy in Philadelphia, Four-Nineteen.”
The hammer went click. Arthur brought his arm around and the missionary grabbed him by the other shoulder and yanked him close, hugging him like a long-lost brother.
When someone died in the movies, it was operatic. The gun went off with a peal of thunder and the victim flew back, propelled like a cannonball, spinning and trailing arcs of blood before crashing down to earth.
This wasn’t like the movies at all.
There was a sound. A polite but gruff cough. Arthur said, “Oh.” Then he stumbled back a couple of steps and sat down. His hand clutched his abdomen like he had a stomachache. Scarlet trails leaked between his fingers as the missionary stepped into the condo, closing the door behind him. A discreet pistol with a long gray tube screwed to the muzzle nestled in his other hand.
“Very sloppy,” the missionary murmured. Talking to himself now. Arthur was dead.
Huddled in the office, peering out through the crack in the doorway, Seelie tried to make herself very, very small.
The man rolled Arthur onto his back and patted him down. Now the cell phone, so innocuous, felt like a burning coal in Seelie’s pocket. Coming up empty, the killer grunted. He stepped back into the hallway and returned with an alligator-skin case, a vintage doctor’s bag. The bag plopped down next to Arthur’s body. Brass hasps flipped open under the man’s delicate thumbs.
Seelie looked to the front door. He hadn’t locked it. It was fifteen feet from her hiding place to the door, with a killer and a gun in between. Fifteen feet looked like a mile from here. Even lugging her backpack, Seelie was fast. Was she that fast?
