Man of the Hour (25 page)

LeVecque stared at the floor in abject humiliation as Bird Brain completed the diagonal line of
O
s, winning the game.

Judy hummed to herself.

“My mother was a hummer,” LeVecque said, without looking at her.

“Oh yeah?”

“She always used to hum when she was about to do something bad, like drop a pot of boiling water or drive the wrong way down a one-way street.” He turned to face her, the two beers from lunch suddenly hitting him and turning his eyes slightly pink and watery. “Can we go now?”

“Certainly.”

She took his arm as they left the arcade and led him down a trim alley called Mosco Street, taking him back to One Police Plaza the long way.

“So you’re not in the loop,” she said. “Is that it?”

“What?” His voice cracked again.

“I’m just figuring the people actually investigating this case are keeping you out of the loop and not telling you what’s going on.”

“I know what’s going on.”

They were walking through the small public park behind the criminal court building. LeVecque stared at a basketball lying on the asphalt nearby, obviously wanting to pick it up and throw it through the hoop just to show her what he was capable of.

“Out of the loop, my ass,” he sputtered.

“Is that so?”

“We have a couple of suspects we’ve been looking at all along,” he said.

There, that was supposed to show her. She wondered if she should act impressed by his manly certainty, but decided it was too soon.

“So why haven’t you picked them up?” she asked, leaning against him just a little.

“You can’t just go barging in there, lousing things up. We have to gather evidence. We don’t want to alert anyone before there’s a grand jury.”

She turned on him. “So is that why they postponed the awards ceremony with the teacher?”

He froze, realizing he’d said too much. “I don’t know.”

Her eyes bored in on him. “Is he one of the people you’re looking at?”

“I’m not confirming anything.” He shoved his hands deep into his pockets and slowed his stride.

“Off-the-record.”

“No, not off-the-record.”

“Just for background. Not for attribution.”

“No fucking way.”

“Oh, you don’t know anything.” She strode on ahead of him, twitching her butt in her tight little skirt.

All of a sudden, he was a boy chasing after her, bursting with a secret.

“Where’d you get it was the teacher?” he said, catching up.

“Everybody knows.”

In fact, it was only an educated guess. Bill had taught her the value of counterintuitive thinking. If the kids are dead, look at the mother. If the wife is dead, look at the husband. If a school bus blows up, look at the driver. And if the driver’s dead, look at the teacher. Besides, why the hell else would they postpone the awards ceremony indefinitely?

“All right.” LeVecque drew a deep breath. “But you didn’t get it from me.”

“You’re only confirming it.”

“Right.” He looked around anxiously, thrusting his hands deeper into his pockets so his pants got tight. “You could’ve got it from a hundred other places.”

“Of course.”

“It’s typical, you know. A typical situation. He wants everyone to think he’s a big man.”

“He
is
a big man.”

“I mean, he creates a situation where he looks like a hero. Haven’t you seen the way he’s been running around giving interviews to everybody?”

Now it was okay to act impressed, she decided. She parted her lips and smiled.

“So that’s it. Right? This David Fitzgerald is the main suspect.”

The joy she felt at that moment was not like sexual abandon. It was something steadier, more dependable.
She had done her fucking job.
This would be a major story in tomorrow’s paper. She could almost feel Bill Ryan slapping her on the shoulder, instead of patting her on the butt like Nazi would.

LeVecque shrank back a little, realizing the mistake he’d just made.
Oh, the tragedy of male vanity.
She’d rolled him.

“You didn’t get any of it from me,” he said once more.

“‘Police officials say …’”

“Maybe ‘law-enforcement officials’ …” He scrambled for cover. “You could put it like that, if you wanted.”

He glanced at the back of the gray criminal court building, as if he’d suddenly sensed he was in a rifleman’s sights. Pigeons gathered on benches and old Chinese women went through garbage barrels, looking for redeemable soda cans.

“You know, you could get me killed out here,” he said with a nervous laugh. “Maybe we should go back to the office separate ways.”

She felt a momentary twinge of guilt, hoping she wouldn’t get him fired for this. On the other hand, screw him. He was a spokesman for one of the most powerful institutions in the city, maybe even the country. He lied to reporters and covered up horrendous scandals constantly. All she’d done was to get him to tell her the facts for once, which was
only
supposed to be his job.

“So I’ll be seeing you,” he said, bowing and backpedaling, not sure what to do with his hands. “Nice lunch. And, uh, it was interesting, you know, with the chicken.”

“Don’t worry.” She reached after him and grabbed his hand. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

28

DAVID WAS SITTING AT
his desk the day after Nasser slapped him, talking to Kevin Hardison and wondering what to do about the incident in the parking lot.

He’d had problems with students before. In his first couple of years at Coney Island, he’d been spit on, pushed down a flight of stairs, even had a chair thrown at him. But this was a little different. Nasser wasn’t a student anymore and Elizabeth was his prize pupil. If he filed a report about what happened, it might raise a few uncomfortable questions about what he was doing talking to her so intensely in the first place.
“What do you mean, you touched her?”
Maybe he was better off just mentioning it casually to Larry and a couple of the school security officers, in case Nasser showed up again.

“Okay,” he said to Kevin. “I got a book for your paper.”

He took a war-torn secondhand hardback of
The Great Gatsby
out of his new book bag and placed it on the desk in front of the boy.

Kevin leaned over and wrinkled his nose, as if David had just presented him with a dead mackerel. “That? You want me to read that again?”

“Why not?”

“Get the fuck outta here with that shit. It’s about a bunch of fuckin’ rich white people. How’m I supposed to relate to that?” He made a ticking sound and waved disgustedly at the book.

“Did you read it?” David gave him the hairy eyeball.

“Yeah,
I read it
.” Kevin thrust his chin out. “It’s got nothing to do with me. What am I supposed to say about it? Why don’t y’all give me a book by someone I can relate to?”

“Well, I don’t believe everything has to be spoon-fed to you. Sometimes you fight a little bit to bring a book close to you. But I’ll tell you what.” David put his hand over the book cover, blocking out the title and the author’s name. “Suppose I were to give you a different kind of book. About someone you could identify with.”

Kevin rocked in his seat, not wanting to get drawn into David’s game but knowing it was inevitable. “Yeah, all right. What is it?”

David kept his hand over the cover. “Suppose I were to give you a book about a poor kid starting out with nothing in life. A guy who just wants to make some money—okay, a fortune—and get a little rep for himself.”

Kevin, again wearing the Dollar Bill hat and the dollar gold caps, sniffed, mildly interested. “Yeah?”

“So this guy starts to fight his way up out of the gutter and he gets involved in all kinds of rough business. Machine guns, gambling, women, the whole deal. Okay? He becomes like an eighteen-karat original gangster. Right?”

Kevin was hooked. “For real? This is a book you want me to read?”

“Definitely.” David still hadn’t moved his hand. “But then when he finally makes it in society, this guy finds out the people at the top of the heap are just as corrupt and immoral as the people at the bottom.” He snapped his fingers. “So you think you could get into a story like that?”

“Sure.” Kevin nodded. Gassed, stoked, ready to go.

“Then read the book.” David took his hand off the cover and slid
Gatsby
to him. “It’s all in there.”

The phone rang and Kevin smirked down at the novel, acknowledging he’d been tricked into opening his mind.

“David? David Fitzgerald?” Another young woman’s voice on the line, but this one was familiar.

“That’s the name. Don’t wear it out.”

“Hi. It’s Judy Mandel from the
Trib
.”

And here he’d been thinking everyone in the media had forgotten about him. Kevin picked up the book and started to leave the office. “I bet you only assign this ’cause your uncle wrote it or something,” he said, pausing in the doorway and running his finger under F. Scott Fitzgerald’s name on the cover.

“Get outta here.” David laughed and waved him off. “I’m sorry, Julie,” he said into the phone. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

“Um, it’s Judy.”

“Then I’m sorry again.”

There was a long pause on the line and he heard her humming to herself. Through an open doorway on his right, he saw Gene Dorf, the department chairman, sitting in his office reading the
Wall Street Journal
while teachers in the main room worked frantically correcting papers and holding conferences with students.

“So what can I do for you, Judy?”

Phones rang and voices called out on her end. “David, I’m wondering if you could help me with a comment on a story I’m working on for tomorrow.”

“Sure. Shoot.” He picked up a Styrofoam cup and saw it was half full of cold coffee.

“I wish you wouldn’t put it like that.”

She made the humming sound again and for some reason it made him feel as if a fly was crawling over his skin.

“Okay, then just ask.”

“David.” She took a deep breath and shoved the rest of the words out. “I have it from a law enforcement source that you’re a suspect in the school bus bombing.”

“Excuse me?”

“I was wondering if you had any specific response to the allegations that you planted the bomb on the bus … ”

He dropped the cup, and soggy black grounds spilled across Nydia Colone’s paper. He felt like he’d been stabbed.

“What are you talking about?”

He realized he’d spoken too loudly. Henry Rosenthal and Donna were staring at him from across the office. Gene Dorf even looked up from studying the stocks he couldn’t afford to buy.

“Who told you this?” David crouched in his seat, lowering his voice and feeling the center of his chest seizing up.

She kept humming what sounded like “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” “Well, you know I can’t really tell you that, since it was off-the-record,” she said. “But I promise, if you give me a comment, I’ll …”

“I’m sorry. I have to go.”

He put the phone down and just looked at it. Praying it wouldn’t ring again. Then he turned and surveyed the rest of the office. Everyone was pretending to go back to work. They all knew he was in the middle of a divorce. Donna Vitale went back to going over a paper with a Chinese girl named Li. The work crew was still taking down parts of the ceiling. Henry got up to leave and Shirley Farber was talking on the phone. But David couldn’t hear any of them. His ears had shut off, and he was only aware of the sound of his own heartbeat.

He found some napkins to clean up the mess on his desk and saw he had two minutes to hit the bathroom before his next class.
You’re a suspect in the school bus bombing.
Had she really said that?

The school hallways, usually so crowded and noisy, were silent and empty as he stepped out, like the streets of a western ghost town. David heard his own footsteps echoing faintly as if from far away. Where did everyone go?

He found his keys and went into the faculty men’s room to try to collect his thoughts. Henry was already standing at one of the urinals, face turned up in serene meditation as if he were at the foot of a great mountain.

“Henry,” he said.

And then there were no other words. What was he supposed to say? Do you know what’s happened? Is this real? Am I still actually in bed, dreaming under the covers?

But Henry barely acknowledged him as he stood there, taking what seemed to be the longest piss in the history of mankind. David focused on the sound of the sprinkling on porcelain and the sight of condensation on the old chrome fixtures, eerie and conspiratorial.

“David.” Henry zipped up quickly and walked out past him with a curt nod.

Did he know something was up?

David watched the door close as he stood at the sink. Then he stared at his own reflection in the mirror. A tall man with a beard and glasses. Is this really you?

He taught the next period in a daze, and when he stepped out into the hall afterward, Larry Simonetti was waiting. “Excuse me, David. These gentlemen would like a word with you.”

Detective Noonan and a Hispanic man he didn’t know were standing by some lockers a yard away.

“Good morning, Mr. Fitzgerald,” said the vampire detective.

Just the sound of his voice turned David’s stomach into a waiting room full of anxious commuters. He turned to the principal.

“Larry, what’s going on?” he said. “I don’t have time to talk to these guys right now.”

Larry gave him back a waxy, awful smile. “It’s all right, David. Don’t worry about your next period. Gene Dorf is going to cover for you.”

Amal Lincoln and Ray-Za walked by in clothes as baggy as flotation devices. From a glance, they knew what time it was. They’d seen friends and relatives pulled off the streets of their neighborhoods and beaten senseless by cops for no good reason.

“Come on.” Noonan stepped up to him. “We’re old friends here. We just have a couple more questions for you to help us out with.”

Larry Simonetti turned and headed back to his office without saying good-bye.

“I’d like you to meet my new partner,” said Noonan, turning to the Hispanic man, who wore a V-neck sweater, a scraggly beard, and a gold hoop earring. “This is Detective Bobby Gomez. Best undercover in Brooklyn before he came to our squad.”