Rough Justice (16 page)

“City room.”

“Ray. This is Wells.”

“Wells! Sorry to hear your career is finished and your life is ruined.”

“Thanks.”

“What else is new?”

“I'm looking for Howard Baumgarten's home number. You got it lying around someplace?”

“Yeah, it's probably in the computer.”

“Well, can you open the computer and take it out in some recognizable form, because …”

“Here it is. You want his I'm-a-good-citizen number in the city or the place in Westchester where he lives?”

“Gimme Westchester.”

He read it off to me.

“Give me his address, too.”

“He won't talk to you from there, you know. He won't admit it exists. I once called him and he pretended to be a machine.”

“It's a step up from a cog.”

“Right.”

There was a pause. I rubbed my eyes. “So how's the weather in there?”

“Cold, my friend, with a chance of suspension by tomorrow. They were upstairs Friday afternoon chewing you over but good. Bush all but called you a murderer. ‘This squalid little killing,' he called it. So the new girl—Walsh—she's in there like Joe Louis. Bim. Bam. She's telling him: I'm in charge of the city-room operations and if you wanted someone you could push around, you hired the wrong woman, this and that, blah, blah, blah.”

“To Bush?”

“Yeah.”

I laughed. “To Bush?”

Ray giggled wildly. “Not bad for her first week. And Sandier is saying, ‘I think if we take another look at this …' And Hodgekiss is going, ‘Now, Emma. Now, Emma.' And finally …”

“Wait a minute. Where do you get this stuff?”

“I got a source up in Accounting.”

“Who, her? You lucky son of a bitch.”

“Good ears, too.”

“Damn. So what happened?”

“Well, Bush said he'd take another look at the thing, but from the way it sounded, he just wanted to get Walsh out of there so he could dump you without the noise. He may not get a chance like this again.”

“Especially if they hang me.”

“Right.”

“Thanks, Ray.”

“'Bye.”

I hung up. Went into the bathroom. Washed up, showered. Stood over the toilet, feeling sick, trying not to puke. I went back to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed again. I took long, even breaths, hoping to get steady, hoping I would get by.

I was weary of it by now, of feeling sick, of drinking. Weary of the badgering of voices. Weary of the guilt. Man, but I wished Thad Reich was alive again. In fact, I sat there wishing it for several moments. He went on being dead.

I gave up. Went back to the desk. Back to the phone. I dialed Baumgarten. His wife answered. I tried to sound friendly.

“Mrs. Baumgarten?”

“Yes?”

“Hi. Is Howard there?”

“Who's calling, please?”

“This is Mikki Snow.”

“Just a moment.”

I waited, smoking. Looked out the window. The sky had cleared. It was a light, crystal blue. Small clouds were blowing across it. The quiet of a spring Sunday drifted up to me.

“Listen, Miss Snow.” It was the deep, curt, gravelly voice of the city's comptroller. “If you have business to conduct with me, you'll have to do it in my office.” I waited, to see if he'd go on. “Hello?”

“This is John Wells, Howard.”

There was a pause. “You son of a bitch. Where are you calling from?”

“My voting address.”

“You have the wrong number.”

“I want to know about Mikki Snow.”

“Damn it!” He breathed fiercely a moment. Then: “Meet me downtown in an hour and a half.”

I pulled my ear away from the slam of the phone.

I spent the next ninety minutes or so at the Greek diner with coffee and the Sunday papers. A melee at a rock concert had the front page. There was nothing new on the Thad Reich story. Both the
Star
and the
News
kept the investigation close to the front. If the
Times
ran something, I couldn't find it.

Around noon, I took the subway down to Brooklyn Bridge. I came out into the silence of Sunday at City Hall Park. The place was deserted. Only a beggar or two shuffled through the common across the street. All around, the monumental marble buildings rose, and hardly a car went by them. Hardly a person passed. The breeze whipped through the colonnades, under the pediments and arches, up and down the sweeping stairs. The air smelled of honeysuckle.

I walked the few steps to the Municipal Building. An impressive old skyscraper, a massive arcade on the street, then a long winged tower up to columned spires against the sky. “Civic Fame” stands at the very top of it. I've never known her to go in.

Neither did I. As I walked under the arcade, heading toward the doors, a long black limousine pulled up to the curb behind me. I turned, waited, in shadow, flanked by enormous pillars, overhung by the vaulted ceiling. The rear door of the car swung open. Howard Baumgarten stepped out.

He was a big, burly man, a head taller than me and broad across. He seemed to stretch the limits of his tailored gray suit. He was bald and sharp-featured and deep-eyed like an eagle. He had a cigar clenched in his teeth.

He strode up to me. “You son of a bitch,” he croaked. “You don't know squat.”

“Let's talk about Mikki Snow,” I said.

“You don't know squat about Mikki Snow. You don't know squat about anything.”

“Why did you lobby for Cooper House?”

“And I'll tell you something else, you two-bit shark, you're going down for murder, and soon, too. And that means you're going to come up before a judge. And that means someone who owes the party a favor. And that means your ass. You and your cheap tricks and your … cheap suit.”

“You son of a bitch. This is a great suit.”

He stuck his cigar at my chest. “You know,” he said, “I've never liked you, Wells. You think just because you're honest you're some kind of hero. You oughta try working for the City sometime. A lot of people in this town are gonna dance the day you're indicted. You don't have friends. You know that? You don't have any friends.” Suddenly, he seemed to grow thoughtful. He narrowed his eyes as if he were sizing me up. He leaned back on his heels, still pointing with a kind of sleepy rhythm. “I could fix that for you, you know. Fix you up with people. A good PR firm somewhere. Lot of money in that. Lot of contracts I could send your way. Big contracts, glamour stuff. Double your salary, I'd bet. Triple it, if you play it right.”

“Come on, Howard, what the hell is it with you and this place? Why did you lobby for Celia Cooper? The fix was in.”

“Ah!” He waved me off. “You don't know anything. You're cheap and you're stupid and you don't know anything.” He spun around and started walking away. His hulking body was framed in the arching entranceway, set against the grass of the park, the blue sky, the scuds of clouds merrily passing. He walked to the very edge of the arcade, until he became a silhouette.

“Where's Mikki Snow?” I said.

He spun around again and came stomping back to me. He replanted his cigar in my chest. “I don't like that. I don't like you asking me that. How the hell should I know where she is?”

“She came to see you.”

“You don't know that.”

“But she did, didn't she?”

He put the cigar in his mouth for a moment. Chewed the soggy end, thinking. Then he growled: “Yeah. Okay. Say she did.”

“What did she want?”

“How the hell should I know? She was a bookkeeper. She wanted to double-check the amount of a grant or something.”

“With the comptroller?”

“With my staff. She came to see my staff.”

“What are we, making this up as we go along?”

“I came out of the office, that's all. I came out and said hello. I shook her hand. I'm never too busy to help the homeless.” Even he couldn't keep a straight face. He laughed. “Heh heh heh.” He leaned back, stuck his gray vest out at me, chomped on his cigar again. “Heh heh heh.”

I shook my head. “Now she's gone.”

“Don't know anything about it.”

“Haven't seen her?”

“Don't know anything about it.” He stuck a thumb under the vest's armholes. He tilted his bald head back, peered over the top of mine.

“You still under investigation for that kickback scheme? How many jobs do you control, anyway? A thousand?”

It sounded desperate to me, too. And Baumgarten just broke into a big grin. He laid his scaly hand on my shoulder. He spoke around his cigar. “You make life so hard on yourself, Wells. Everything could be so easy. You got a little problem with Tommy Watts? We can smooth it over. You need a little breathing space from the D.A.? It can be done. This is New York, John. It's a city of possibilities. I meant what I said about that PR job.”

I gazed up at his eagle face. I gazed down at his scaly hand. He let go of me.

He plucked the cigar from his mouth and pointed it at me one last time.

“I meant what I said about that judge, too. That's a cardinal rule in politics, you know: never get tried by a stranger.” When I didn't say anything, he cocked his head regretfully, sighed. “Too bad. I always knew you were an asshole.”

Once again, he moved toward the street, toward the shiny black limo parked at the curb. His footsteps echoed up and down the arcade.

At his car, he paused. He adjusted his jacket, staring off at the blue sky over City Hall Park. He glanced back at me again. “Arrivederci, Wells,” he said.

“This is a great suit,” I called after him.

“Ah …” He waved me off. He slid into the car. The door shut softly. It glided away.

For another moment, I stood there, under the towering ceiling. Then I lit a cigarette, moved toward the arch as well. When I stepped out into the light, I glanced up just as Baumgarten had. I saw the square of grass, the trees reaching up, laying a lacework of branches in front of City Hall's dome. I saw the statue of Horace Greeley, a rumpled bronze seated out in front of the old Tweed Courthouse.

And just beyond Greeley, I saw a flash of motion. I watched and saw a man swerve out from behind the statue. He was hurrying away.

He was small, slim. Wore jeans and a windbreaker. He jogged toward the weathered gray marble courthouse. The sun gleamed on his blond hair.

I waited. I watched him go, waiting for him to look back. But he never did. A second more and he vanished behind the building. He was gone.

I hadn't had a good look at him. I hadn't seen his face at all. I couldn't be positive from that distance.

But I thought—I was almost certain—that it had been Mark Herd.

17

“Give me Sam Scar.”

“Who's calling, please?”

“His brother: Ugly.”

I held the line while she went to find him. I put my finger in my ear. I was standing in a booth in a Chinese restaurant off Mott Street. The voices and clattering plates of the Sunday dim sum crowd made it tough to hear.

Scar came on. “Who's this?”

“It's Wells. Can you talk?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead.”

“I need to get into the Cooper House offices.”

“They're not open now. This is the upstairs.”

“Yeah, I figured that. That's what I need.”

“Uh oh. How come?”

“Because …” A waiter with a tray went by, screaming out the name of a dish.

“Yo,” said Scar. “Get me some of that.”

“Because something's down in the cellar. That's why Herd's been getting all your jobs. You can work on the stove 'cause that's upstairs, but the compactor and the boiler …”

“The circuit breakers, yeah …”

“Ever since Mikki Snow's been gone, you've been kept from going downstairs.”

“Shit, I never thought of that.”

“Neither did I, till a few minutes ago. I think maybe Mikki Snow found something down there or hid something … I don't know. Maybe if we find it—I get what I want, you get what you want. Like I said, I don't know.”

I listened while Sam Scar thought it over on the other end. Then he started speaking—but a clattering tower of dishes rolled past.

“What?”

“I say it's hot. Here,” he said. “Today. The man's been around.”

“Watts?”

“Yeah. He was in there with her.”

“With Celia.”

“Yeah. She usually stays home on Sunday, but she came in special today and they talked in the office. He's gone now, though.”

“What about her?”

“She's getting ready to leave.”

“Can you get me in?”

“Shit, man.” He thought again. “It'd have to be soon. Come dinner, they open for the tickets. At night, they got a guard in the hall. Three to five's the best time.”

“How about in an hour?”