Keeper (34 page)

There was no question that the man holding Melanie’s hand was the same one I’d seen outside the clinic, the same one Bridgett and I had chased out of Romero’s building" the previous night.

I handed the picture to Bridgett, asking Francine, “May we keep this?”

She hesitated, then nodded. “Sure.”

“Where’s he live?” Bridgett asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Did he ever go to the clinic?”

“Paul? Why would he?” Francine asked. She was looking bewildered and now just a bit scared. Her fingers tugged at one of her curls. “Do you think he knows something about Melanie’s death?”

I looked at Bridgett, and she looked at the picture, then back to me. Then she said to Francine, “There’s a chance that he may have murdered Melanie, as well as Katie Romero.”

“What? What are you saying?”

“Francine—did Melanie have an abortion?”

“No! She didn’t sleep around, I keep telling you, and besides that she was on the pill. We both were. That’s why we had to go to the clinic, we had to get our prescriptions filled.”

Bridgett stood up and I followed her lead. “Thank you,” she said. “Keep the card. Maybe you’ll remember something and give me a call, all right?”

“Wait, what do you mean he killed her? Why would he do that?”

Bridgett said, “Because he saw her enter the clinic. We know Grant was attending SOS demonstrations there. He saw her go into the clinic to abort his baby.”

Francine shook her head, saying, “No, that’s not right. We went for a Pap smear. She never had an abortion.” Bridgett didn’t say anything.

“It’s not right,” Francine said. “You’re not making sense. It’s not right. That’s crazy.”

Out on the street Bridgett popped another mint. It was dark now. and the sodium lamp over the bodega made her hair shine. “Poor kid,” she said.

“Francine and Melanie both,” I said. “What do you think happened?”

“I think Baechler and Grant slept together, and when he saw her going into the clinic, he jumped to the conclusion that she was there to abort their child.”

“And he killed her for it.”

“And he killed Katie believing that he was balancing the scales, I guess. Romero took his child, so Grant took hers,” she said. “They both died because Melanie Baechler needed a Pap smear.”

We were getting into the car when my pager went off. I got back out and used a pay phone by the bodega.

“We’ve found Barry,” Fowler said. “He’s at your place.”

“My place?”

“Asshole’s threatening to blow the building up.”

“I was making a circuit of the building,” the patrolman said. There were sweat stains under' his armpits, and around his collar. “Came around through the alley on Sullivan into the courtyard here, saw this guy up on the fire escape on the sixth floor. For a moment I thought, I don’t know, I thought it was just some fuck trying a little B and E. He was toting a duffel bag, big blue-and-green thing. So I called backup and we went around, left my partner at the bottom of the fire escape in case he tried to come down that way. We’re halfway up the stairs when my partner calls us back. Says he’d been made, said the shithead swears he has a bomb and is going to blow the place up. I got up to the sixth floor and Barry—and it’s him, he gave his name—said if anyone comes any closer he is going to start shooting. Says he has a gun and a bomb.

“Then the circus came to town.” The patrolman waved his arm around the courtyard, smiled apologetically at me, then asked Lozano if that was all.

“That’s all,” the detective told him.

Lozano, Bridgett, and I stood on the outer perimeter line, at least twenty-five uniforms between us and the inner perimeter, where the commanding officers were assembled. There was no radio traffic, that had been disallowed the moment it was suspected that Barry might have a bomb, but the racket was still considerable, mostly from the crowd that had gathered. The media was still arriving, camera crews and photographers and reporters, and then there were the spectators, a lot of them kids freed for summer, with nothing better to do it seemed than to take bets on whether my home would be going up in a ball of flame.

Floodlights were up and running, bathing the building in halogen light. The courtyard spread in a perfect square at the back of all four buildings, with my apartment on the east side, sixth floor. Barry had pulled the blinds in Rubin’s bedroom, preventing prying eyes from seeing just what he was up to. Facing that window, from the opposite building’s roof, was one ESU sniper, poised and set with his rifle sighted on the bedroom window. Snipers waited on other roofs, covering all the possible angles of attack. There were really only two shots they could take, the first through Rubin’s bedroom window and the second across the alley, and the snipers would take the shot only if Barry started gunning for lives.

Or if Barry was really serious, if he was really going to bum the place down.

And the cop was right. It was a circus.

Bridgett and I had arrived only seconds after the Manhattan North Emergency Service Unit team. Manhattan South had already been there, in position, for five minutes. They used to be called SWAT teams, but the title was changed to something less provocative, I guess, and now there were roughly forty ESU personnel milling about outside and inside the buildings. Only eight of them were snipers, the rest devoted to other tasks I could only guess at.

The Sixth Precinct commander was already on scene when we arrived, but he was quickly replaced by some inspector from One Police Plaza; I don’t know what he did, either, but everybody deferred to him until the Chief of Detectives arrived and started commiserating with SAIC Carter, who showed up at roughly the same time, that is, about three minutes after we got there. Fowler was already there, and joined Carter when he saw him. Scott and I hadn’t had a chance to speak, and I knew we wouldn’t get one. Not now.

Then there was the Bomb Squad supervisor and one of his technicians, and a TARU guy, though nobody seemed to know what exactly he was supposed to do, but he was working closely with the hostage negotiator and all the personnel under the HN’s command. That was just the police, mind: I’m not even talking about the fire units or the EMS units or the press, or all the units that had been evacuating the building. Everybody inside the perimeter wore heavy ballistic vests, the kind that would stop a .44 bullet, and consequently everyone was sweating like pigs. The night had cooled things a bit, but the humidity was rough. At least the snipers were comfortable; they don’t wear the vests—hinders their movement, don’t you know.

The hostage negotiator was on the phone when we arrived, talking carefully, but I couldn’t hear a damn thing he was saying. He was talking to Barry, though, I knew that, because the negotiator kept watching the windows as he spoke.

So that was the circus, all gathered to see a little man from the Appalachians try to blow up my home because I scared him enough to wet his pants.

Lozano had his badge out, hung off his belt, and he wandered around inside the outer perimeter, and then returned to tell Bridgett and me what was going on, tugging at his vest like it pinched him. They wouldn’t let us through; civilians had no place here. Bridgett ate Life Savers and I stood beside her in a comer of the courtyard, in a patch of shade, my hands in my pockets. It was a beautiful night, the sky deep and dark, no clouds, nothing to cut the depth. Every so often Bridgett would lean in and whisper something in my ear.

“They’ve cut the power and the water to the apartment,” she would say.

Or, “See that guy? He’s taking high-res photos. They’ll develop them here and see if they show anything going on inside.”

Or, “Looks like Barry cut the phone, they’re going to have to use bullhorns now.”

Lozano came back, sweat beaded like glass pebbles across his brow. “He wants you to go up,” he told me. “He’s demanding you go up, and then he wants safe passage to La Guardia and a flight to fuck knows where. Or else he blasts the building. He says he’s got fifteen pounds of Semtex and he’s holding the detonator.”

Bridgett said to Lozano, “He’s not going up there.” It took me a second to realize she meant me.

“Of course he isn’t,” Lozano said. “You think we’re nuts?”

“You got a phone I can use?” I asked him.

He pulled a cellular out of his jacket. “He pulled the line to your apartment.”

“Yeah,” I said, and dialed the safe apartment.

Rubin answered on the first ring. “What’s up?” 

“How’s it look there?” I asked him.

“Dale and the doctor are napping, Natalie and me are just hanging loose. Why?”

“You got the television on?”

“Not yet. Hold on. Any channel?”

“Pick one.”

I waited while he turned on the TV, watching the crowd. There was activity inside the perimeter now, the ESU commander having a heated debate with the negotiator. Lozano lit a cigarette.

“Fuck me,” Rubin said.

“Yeah. I’m outside right now.”

“Barry is in there?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, fuck me. Atticus, all of our stuff . . .”

“It’s just stuff,” I said. It came out flat.

“The cocksucking motherfucking pimple-gnawing son of a bitch,” Rubin said softly. “What does he want? The TV isn’t saying what he wants.”

“He wants me to go in there, I think.”

Rubin didn’t ask why. He didn’t need to ask why. Instead he said, “How’s it look?”

“Barry just killed the phone connection, they’ve evacuated the building and the neighboring ones, too, and I have no idea how this is going to jump. He’s nuts. He’s gone around the bend.”

“I’m coming over.”

“Come around on Sullivan. Bridgett and I are in the southwest comer of the courtyard.” I handed the phone back to Lozano in time to see two women who lived across the alley from me get escorted firmly away from the perimeter line by a uniform. One of them saw me and said something to her friend and pointed and they both looked at me like I was Evil Incarnate.

Lozano was asking me what was in my apartment, if there were any weapons or things like that.

“Kitchen stuff, knives. No guns, but there’s about one hundred rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition in the lockbox in my room,” I told him. “There’s a bottle of lighter fluid for my old Zippo, and Rubin’s got some turpentine, paint thinner, you know. That’s about it. Nothing much there.”

He nodded, and tried to readjust his vest.

Up on the roof two ESU guys were setting rappelling lines to jump down onto the fire escape if it came to that.

“We sent a team up there with the fiber-optic camera,” Lozano told us. “He’s lying about the amount of Semtex, apparently, not more than one or two pounds. He’s got some gasoline spilled around, too. He’s pretty much trashed the place.”

“What’s the procedure?” Bridgett asked. She hadn’t said anything in a while.

“We want him alive, if he’s willing, but we’re not too sold on that happening. When he saw the sniper across the alley Barry freaked, that’s when he cut the phone connection.”

“I don’t believe this,” 1 said, and sat down with my back to the wall, looking up at the window. “I just don’t believe this. This just isn’t fucking happening.”

Lozano stepped on his cigarette, then headed back to the command post, and Bridgett knelt beside me. She put a hand on my shoulder, resting it there for only a moment, then withdrawing it.

She didn’t have anything to say, I guess.

/“Clarence, can you hear me?”

The bullhorn’s sound echoed and reverberated off the buildings, and the negotiator’s voice bounced around the courtyard like a Super Ball.

No movement at the window.

“Clarence, can you hear me?” the negotiator called again. “Clarence, we’ve been talking about what you want and we’re working on it, but you’ve got to understand we can’t send a civilian inside, you know that, don’t you?”

Nothing.

“Clarence, I think maybe we should talk about this, try to work something out, okay?”

Just the echoes.

“Clarence? If you don’t talk to me we can’t—”

And from an open window, “Fuck you, you nigger, give me Kodiak, you cocksucking ape, give me Kodiak or I’ll turn the whole block into rubble!”

The negotiator lowered his bullhorn, and even from where I was I could see him struggling for control, for the right words, the words that wouldn’t act like a match to Barry’s anger. He raised the bullhorn back to his lips and said, “We can’t send him inside, Clarence. Why don’t we talk about what we can do?”

All the snipers were motionless.

There was a slight breeze now, smelling of exhaust. “I’m going to fucking do this place, damn you!”

/Rubin showed, working his way through the crowd and then pushing over to me, looking wound up and a little ill. He had changed out of his suit, at least, now in jeans and a T-shirt, both black. He sat beside me on my right, Bridgett on my left. It was almost nine, and some of the crowd had dispersed, but other people had shown up, had heard about it on the news and commuted in from wherever they had been to watch the show.

“Sorry it took me so long,” Rubin said.

“No problem.”

“What’s he said?”

“Nothing for about an hour. He wants me to go in there or he’s going to set off the bomb.”