Icarus w-2, page 32
part #2 of Westwood Series
Someone had been in his apartment. But how? It was impossible to break into this building.
And even if someone could break in, why?
Why would anyone…
And then he knew.
His eyes went to the space on the wall where the painting had hung. In its place, in very small letters, two words had been carefully written. It looked like crayon, Jack thought. No. As he peered closer, more like red Magic Marker.
Jack ran back into the kitchen. Checked the walls and the cabinets. Everything was undisturbed. Then into his office. Normal. Next, he ran into his bedroom and what he saw there stopped him cold. There were three words, also in red Magic Marker, scrawled on the wall above his bed. The writing was neat, the lettering precise.
Jack realized he was breathing hard. And he was trembling. He went back to the living room, where the words were now all he could see. They dominated the room.
Stop looking is what they said.
He didn't have to go back into the bedroom to check the words there. The message was similar. The first two words were the same. But there was a third word added. And it was the third word that made Jack shiver and wonder what the hell he'd gotten himself into. And how he'd possibly get out of it.
He closed his eyes and could perfectly picture the message above his bed. In thick, precise, bloodred letters.
Stop looking now.
– "-"-"THE FIRST THING Jack did was call down to the doorman on duty.
"Carlos," he said into the phone that connected directly to the front door of the building, "did anyone come up to my apartment tonight?"
"No. Who?"
"I don't know. Anyone."
"No, sir."
"Can someone get into the apartment?"
"Not unless Frankie or I let 'em up."
"Tell me how you do that."
"What do you mean?"
"I know it sounds crazy, but tell me exactly how someone gets into my apartment."
"Are you kiddin'? You know how."
"Just humor me. How does someone get up here?"
"They come into the building, give their name, we call up for your okay, and whoever's at the door releases the elevator for your floor."
"There's a device at the door."
"Yeah, sure. Right under the stand, you know, when you come in."
"What if I'm not home?"
"If you're not here, we don't let anybody up. Unless you give us a written note with a name on it. Otherwise, ain't no way."
"Is someone always at the door? Could anyone get by you and release the elevator on his own?"
"Did someone get into your apartment, Mr. Keller? You want me to call-"
"No. Do me a favor and just answer the question."
"There's always two of us. Three or four shifts, always two at a time. Pretty hard to get by. I'd say impossible. And they'd have to know exactly how to release-"
"How about if you don't release it? Can someone get by you and just use the elevator?"
"No, sir. Well, they could, but they'd have to have a key."
"Like the one I use to come in through the garage?"
"Yes, sir. Same, exact key. You just insert it in the lock next to the button for your floor."
"And it only works for my floor?"
"Your key works for your floor, Mr. Babbitch's key works for the fifth floor, every tenant's got a key that works for them and them only."
"So my key won't work for Mr. Babbitch's floor?"
"That's right. What's goin' on, Mr. K?"
"How about the stairs?"
"To get up to you? Long climb."
"I know. But how do you do it?"
"Ain't you never climbed the stairs to your apartment?"
"No," Jack said, and he realized that after all these years he didn't even know exactly where the stairway entry was in the lobby. "How do you do it?"
"Gotta have a key for that, too. A key to get into the stairway from the lobby and a key to let you out when you get to your floor. Each floor has a different lock."
Jack hesitated. He didn't know what else to ask.
"You sure everything's okay, Mr. Keller?"
"Yeah, thanks, Carlos. Everything's fine."
He hung up and immediately called down to the garage. He went through a similar routine. No one there had seen anyone come in and use the elevator. No one who didn't belong, anyway. Pablo, the main guy at the garage, wouldn't swear that no one could get in without being seen but it was unlikely. And anyway, he said, nobody could get up to the apartments without having a key. It was impossible.
Jack tried to think who had keys to get into the place. He had one, of course, plus a duplicate set. As a reflex, he stuck his hand in his pocket to feel the key. It was right where it should be. He then went into the kitchen, to the small hook that hung by the refrigerator where the spare was kept. It was there, too. In fact, two spares were there, which puzzled him for a moment, then he realized he had a third set. Caroline's keys had been returned to him, along with her other possessions from Virginia.
Who else? Dom had one and his name had also been left downstairs as someone who could be let in anytime. If anyone was above suspicion, it was Dom. Mattie had had a key and her name had also been left downstairs. But poor Mattie was dead and, even if she were alive, could never have done anything remotely like Jack realized now that there was some kind of commotion out on the street. Strange. Usually you couldn't hear the traffic up this high, but there was frantic honking. Must be some kind of an accident. Jack instinctively turned toward the balcony, at the same time felt a small blast of hot, summer air, and that's when he realized the sliding door was open. No, not just open…
Someone had broken it.
A small section of the large glass pane had been shattered. Right by the handle. And the door had been left open. Maybe six inches.
Jack walked slowly over to it. He stared down at the shards that were gleaming in the carpet. Looked back up at the jagged hole. Then he looked out across the balcony, at the wall that stretched over to the next building.
No one had needed a key to get into his apartment.
Someone had walked across the wall. The ten-foot-long, one-foot-wide wall. Eighteen stories above the street.
Jack remembered Kid, not long before his death, leaping up onto the retaining wall and walking.
Hey, do you know you could actually walk to the next building from here?
Jack remembered his stomach tightening.
Seriously. The buildings are connected.
He remembered his mouth going dry. He remembered getting dizzy…
Someone could walk along this ledge and get to that rooftop. You'd have to be kind of nuts but…
Jack slid the balcony door shut, hard enough so more glass cracked and showered to the floor. He stood there, sagging a bit, holding on to the handle for support, still staring out at the nearby rooftop. No longer just wondering who had killed Kid. No longer wondering who had killed Leslee.
Now wondering if that same person was going to try to kill him.
Jack took one step toward the phone. He was going to call McCoy. Get her over here, let her see this, make her understand what was going on and let her protect him. Then he thought: No. She still won't understand. And cops don't protect, they react. She'll tell me to get a new door. And an alarm. She'll ask me if I did all this myself just to make her think I was right.
Fuck McCoy, he thought.
And fuck whoever did this.
I'm not going to stop looking. I'm going to find her. And I'm going to find her now.
FORTY-TWO
By three o'clock the next afternoon, the glass door had been replaced, an alarm system installed – the installer muttering, over and over again, "Who'd be crazy enough to try to break in from here?" – and a painter was at work on the living room and bedroom wall.
And Jack had spent just over three hours sitting in front of his computer, trying to find the Rookie.
She was the logical one to go after, partly because Jack suspected she had, over time, metamorphosed into the Destination, and partly because he had remembered back to winter, about two weeks into January. He remembered so specifically because it was the first day Kid had seen the Hopper painting. After checking the day he'd gotten the painting, then using his calendar to pinpoint his first session with Kid after that, it was not difficult to specify the exact day – January 17.
Jack could recall the conversation as if it were yesterday.
I regard Edward Hopper as the depressive's Norman Rockwell.
What!
Jack, I don't know shit about art. I'm just quoting.
A member of your fucking team?
The Rookie. She has very strong feelings about art.
Do me a favor and tell her to go fuck herself.
You don't want to mess with her, Jack. Not with what I've learned about her.
Your goddamn team. I don't think they even exist.
They exist, all right. Hey, the Rookie was even written up in yesterday's Times. She's famous.
He was annoyed as hell at the time, even hurt, but the words had still been mere banter then. Now they seemed so much more. The Rookie has very strong feelings about art. And clearly did not like Hopper. If the Rookie had been the one to break into his apartment the night before, was that why the Hopper had been removed from the wall? You don't want to mess with her, Jack. Not with what I've learned about her. Because she was so dangerous? Because she was capable of killing? And best of all: The Rookie was even written up in yesterday's Times. She's famous.
A starting point.
Using AOL, he went to nytimes.com. At the web site, he registered, typed in a password – "jacks" – and as various choices came up, he elected to go back into their selected archives. He typed in "January 16" and, suddenly, there was that day's newspaper of record up on the screen. He decided there was only one way to do this and that was thoroughly, so he began reading the paper from cover to cover. As he read, he took notes, keeping track of any woman being written about who conceivably could have had a connection to Kid or who could, in any stretch of the imagination, have been on the Team. After a few minutes of reading, he realized he should keep track of every single woman mentioned, just in case he needed to backtrack. So on a yellow legal pad, as he went through each section – front page, Metro, The Arts, Sports, Business Day and Dining In – he started dividing the names into three columns labeled Likely, Less Likely, and Unlikely. With each name, he jotted down any relevant information – a brief description, a job title, a company name or the name of an agent, anything that might help him locate her.
The first story he came to where the woman seemed "Likely" was about a young, dynamic assistant DA who was prosecuting the killer of a high school principal. The next was a hotshot Wall Street executive who was handling a large merger. He put a star by the name of a young professional tennis player who lost in the quarterfinals of a tournament. Others on that list were a policewoman who had been fired for posing nude in a magazine and the daughter of a real estate developer who was now in Paris modeling. Margaret Thatcher, who was lecturing on global economics at Harvard, was placed in the Unlikely column, as was a fifty-two-year-old lesbian colonel in the air force, a very overweight black woman who was the voice of a service that gave movie times, and Kathie Lee Gifford. Tipper Gore also went into Unlikely, although Jack's pen lingered over Less Likely for just a moment.
By midafternoon, he had twenty-two Likelys, twenty-seven Less Likelys, and a long string of Unlikelys. As he ran his finger over the final list, staring at the information he'd written down, one line popped out at him. It was when he came to the name of an up-and-coming young art dealer. She was getting attention for an avant-garde show she had put together at a gallery in SoHo. But it was the address of the gallery that got his attention: 137 Greene Street. It seemed familiar. He recognized it from somewhere. His mind drifted, trying to picture the street, imagining the last time he'd been in that neighborhood…
Bingo. One-three-seven Greene – the address of the Hanson Fitness Center, where he'd met Bryan and where Kid had worked. On the ground floor was an art gallery, the one with tons of sand in the window. It wasn't out of business, Jack thought. That was art.
The coincidence was too great. It had to be. He glanced down at her name again. Grace Childress. Yes, Grace had to be the third member of the Team.
She was the Rookie.
– "-"-"THE WINDOW OF the Waggoner Gallery was still filled with sand. Jack spent a moment studying it, realized he could stand there the rest of his life without figuring out what it was meant to say, so opened the gallery's front door and stepped inside.
The artist being displayed was named Pinkney Wallace. Jack learned from browsing through the catalog that his medium was the earth: sand, dirt, mud, grass. His artwork was scattered throughout the spacious ground floor. There were perhaps twenty large glass boxes that looked like fish tanks. Inside each box was a wave of sand or a mountain of mud. One was divided perfectly in half; one half of the box was completely empty, the other was jammed full of cut grass. He was staring at the grass when he heard a woman's voice from behind.
"Like it?"
He turned and Jack knew he had come to the right place. The woman who spoke to him was absolutely stunning. She was not tall, maybe five-foot-four, but somehow she seemed tall; her perfect posture and angular body seemed to add inches to her height. Her hair was hennaed a sparkly copper color, which was the only color on her entire body except for her bright blue eyes and thick, coppery-red glasses surrounding them. Everything else was black: a black tank-top T-shirt, covered by a sheer black blouse, a short black skirt, black tights, and mid-calf-high black boots. Her lips were thin and the tight smile they formed managed to convey an air of both confidence and vulnerability. Jack was dazzled.
"I don't understand it," he said, gesturing toward the glass box and the grass.
"It's postmodern," the woman said. "There is no understanding. Only confusion."
"Ah. Now that's something I'm familiar with." Jack stuck his hand out. "You're Grace Childress, aren't you?"
She nodded, put her hand in his, and they shook. Her grip was hard and firm and Jack felt the same electric shock he'd felt when he'd met the Mortician and the Entertainer. Although this woman was much more appealing. She had the sensual aura that the others had but she did not radiate the same air of danger, of walking too close to the edge.
"I'm Jack Keller," he continued. The name obviously meant nothing to her so he took a shot in the dark. "The Butcher," he said, and this obviously registered, he could see it in her eyes, as they narrowed, and in the curious cock of her head.
"What can I do for you?" she asked.
"I'm a friend of Kid Demeter's. I'm trying to find out what happened to him."
"He's dead."
"Yes, I know," Jack said. "I mean, I'm trying to find out how. And why."
"We know how, don't we?"
"Do we?"
"Yes," she said. "Somebody killed him."
Jack stared at her a moment, startled, then he couldn't help himself. A smile of relief spread over his face.
"Would you mind saying that again?"
"Somebody killed him. I think that's pretty obvious, don't you?"
"Yes," he said, "I do."
– "-"-"THEY WERE EATING in Jerry's, a casual place specializing in simple grilled food on Prince Street.
"The Rookie, huh?" Grace was saying. "Certainly not very descriptive."
"I think it changed. I think you got another nickname as time went on."
"Well, whatever it is, it's got to be better than the Rookie."
"It is," Jack said. "It's possible he started calling you the Destination."
Grace's eyes flickered, and she tilted her head down. "No," she told him. "That wasn't me. Kid told me about the Destination. It was someone from his past. Someone… well, let's just say he told me about her. I don't really feel comfortable sharing his secrets. Even now."
"He told me about her, too," Jack said. "But he also told me that he'd met someone he thought could be a second Destination. I think that could be you."
"Why do you think that?" Grace asked.
"Just a hunch. He told me a few things… and you seem to fit the description." Jack raised his hand and when the waiter came over, he ordered a second beer. He looked at Grace, who shook her head. She was still working on her first. "Do you know why he came up with the nickname 'Destination'?" Jack asked her.
"No."
"Topeka's a place, Cleveland's a town… Rome is a destination."
She smiled, a sad smile, and shook her head. "I don't know if that's me or not," she told him. "But he did always have this idealized, dewy-eyed fantasy about me."
"Maybe it was more accurate than you give him credit for."
"No. Believe me. I throw things, I bite my nails, I've done my share of things I shouldn't have done. Hell, I still do. I make a lot of mistakes."
"Maybe he just didn't care about them."
"No, he didn't see them. He didn't want to see them."
"How'd you get to know him?"
"He picked me up on the street. I was going into the gallery, he was heading up to the gym. I brushed him off – I'm not big on street pickups – but Kid was extremely persistent. He started coming into the gallery, we talked, and then one night I was out at a club with a girlfriend and he was there. He was by himself, it was late, maybe two or three in the morning, and he looked kind of rattled. I asked him what the matter was and he said he'd just had a fight with someone, an argument. He wouldn't tell me what it was about, not then, but he looked so vulnerable he was hard to resist. We wound up talking almost all night. And then… you know how these things happen."
"Did he ever tell you what the argument was about? Or who it was with?"
She hesitated. "I told you. I'm not completely comfortable sharing his secrets."
"Are there a lot of secrets to know about him?"
