The Missing Piece (24 page)

“I plan to,” said Linda.

“Don't plan. Do.”

Linda smiled as if to agree. She circled off to another table, inspected the tiny sweaters without messing their perfect folds, then noticed it was closing time and left the store. She loved the privacy of a big city. Here she was, knowingly pregnant for several days and not telling her husband or her best friend or her immediate staff, yet blathering it to a total stranger at a store ten blocks from her house. As duplicitous as it seemed, getting the news out of her head and into the world relieved her.

*   *   *

“Tell me again,” said Gary. “What put you on to Ivan?”

McQueen took a deep, exasperated breath. He had explained all this when he first got to the apartment, but Gary was at his computer, one hand on the mouse and one eye on the monitor as he connected McQueen's cell phone to his computer with a very short cable. He clicked the mouse, and a program opened.

“I was coming up from the subbasement and found Pinter in a stairwell, leaning hard into the corner like he was sick. Then I saw he was talking to Ivan. The conversation didn't sound pleasant. It wasn't even a conversation. It was all Pinter.”

“You heard what he said?” Square icons appeared on the monitor, like playing cards dealt facedown on a table.

“Heard it, but couldn't get a handle on it. It wasn't English, but the tone was clear. He sounded pissed as hell. I figured I should check out Ivan's background, so I went to the admin office and pulled his personnel file.”

Gary clicked the first icon, which opened to an image of a gray and white cat.

“You took a picture of a cat?” he said.

“It was cute,” said McQueen. “What? I can't like cats?”

Gary shook his head. He clicked the next icon, and a document in a foreign language replaced the cat.

“It's a Hungarian birth certificate,” said McQueen. “The next page is the translation.”

There was the birth certificate, immigration papers, an application for a green card, the green card itself, a marriage certificate, and a letter of recommendation.

“Pinter handled the green card application,” said McQueen.

“Yeah, and he wrote the letter of recommendation for Ivan's job at the courthouse,” said Gary. “So?”

“So, of all the lawyers in New York, Ivan goes to Pinter?”

“All the Hungarian immigrants do,” said Gary.

“But they're both from Polgardi,” said McQueen.

“Hungary is like fuckin' Rhode Island,” said Gary, “so two people from the same region isn't that big a coincidence.”

He closed the program, disconnected the cable, and handed the phone back to McQueen.

“I know you have a history with Ivan,” he said. “You bust his balls, he reacts, you bust his balls some more. You think that's fun, fine. But I don't want that dragging you in the wrong direction. We don't have much time.”

*   *   *

Linda wandered along slowly, her hunger overcome by the reality of sharing her secret with the woman in the maternity shop. Near the intersection of Broadway and Amsterdam, she stopped in front of a Halloween shop. The costumes in the window were amazingly detailed and amazingly expensive, mixing the current vogue of horror and sci-fi movie characters with old standbys like vampires and werewolves. On the sidewalk, several store employees staggered in the latest zombie gear. Lurid body parts littered the pavement.

Linda bent down to look at a corner of the window where tiny costumes were displayed. Next year, she would be shopping here for her baby's first Halloween costume. She already knew what she would choose—a princess for a girl, a pirate for a boy.

She moved on, thinking on whether the Upper West Side was a good place to raise a child. It certainly seemed good enough when they'd bought their brownstone here, but children weren't specifically in their game plan then. She wondered if they were now, at least in Hugh's mind. The real action for families with young children was now in Tribeca. You couldn't walk a block without passing old textile buildings converted into preschools or dance schools or birthday-party venues. Maybe, if they moved down to Tribeca, she would reconsider her plan to leave the bench.

Up a few more blocks and across the last street, Linda turned toward home and found herself alone. It always amazed her how this could happen in New York City. You could turn a corner and go from being a face in the crowd to perfect solitude. There must be some kind of theory that explained this phenomenon, something connected with particle flow or liquid dynamics or Brownian motion. Right now, there were just sensations: the quickly fading traffic noise from the avenue, the deep pools of shadow cast by trees that still held their copper-colored leaves, the lonely scuff of her shoes on the sidewalk.

But she saw she was not quite alone. Across the street, an odd face floated above the roof of a parked car. The face was bright white, artificially white, and very long and thin. For a moment, Linda almost stopped walking as Foxx's warning about the protestors wound back into her head. But this was her neighborhood, she told herself. It was a safe neighborhood, literally miles from the protestors in Foley Square.

Linda cocked her head and focused well enough to see that the bright white face actually was a mask. The mask creeped her out, but at the same time she realized it was the falsest of false alarms, probably a customer from the Halloween shop. Still, she glanced over several times until she passed him. She was three doors away from home, three pools of tree shade ribbed with bands of streetlight. One band lit someone standing at the curb and wearing a black cape and a black conical hat. This person seemed to be talking on a cell phone, though Linda, only one door away from her own, heard no conversation.

The attack came swiftly and from behind. He yanked at her purse, spilled the packages from her hands. Linda immediately went into survival mode.
It's a mugging. Give it up. Nothing is worth getting hurt
.

But he pushed her forward and tripped her up. She crashed painfully to the sidewalk, wrists and knees instantly burning. She started to crawl toward her stoop.

The kick came from the side, to her stomach, so hard that it lifted her into the air and dropped her to the ground. The pain was so intense that she could not scream, could not cry, could do nothing other than breathe,
Oh my God, no. Oh my God, no.

He kicked her twice more in the gut before she tightened herself into a ball. After that, she went numb. Hazily, through her tears, she saw the one who had been across the street drag her attacker away. Then she rolled over and groaned.

No one came because no one saw and no one heard. Linda lay in a fetal position until she was certain they were gone and would not return. She pushed herself up, forced some deep breaths, then lifted herself onto the first step of her stoop. She hung her head between her knees and checked herself. Her wrists ached, her knees burned, her stomach roiled. But when she probed with her hand, she felt nothing wet, nothing bleeding, just the pain and shock and horror of the attack.

She took a few more deep breaths before sitting fully upright. The sidewalk was deserted on both sides in both directions, something that was inconceivable for most of New York, but not on her quiet street. She pulled herself up by the bannister rail, held it until she was sure she could toddle on her own without falling or fainting. Her purse and grocery bags lay on the pavement, scattered but untouched. Two steps and she reached her purse, two more and she snagged her grocery bags. She turned back and reached the stairs as her vision blackened around the edges. She slumped against the bannister until she breathed the light back into her eyes.

She climbed slowly, unlocked the door, and stumbled inside. She lay on the hardwood parquet, panting with exertion and gasping with pain. The front door was still open, the night air rolling in. She kicked it shut, then reached into her purse for her cell phone and hit the speed dial.

“It's me,” she said.

 

CHAPTER 27

Linda answered the door wearing a bathrobe and slippers. She was not visibly bruised, but her face was ashen and she was hunched over as if tortured by a terrible stomach ache.

“Thanks for coming,” she whispered.

Bernadette took one arm, Foxx the other, and they walked her into the nearest room, a den with leather furniture and floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Bernadette sat beside Linda on the sofa. Foxx took a chair. Linda's knees, exposed now, were skinned red.

“What happened?” said Bernadette.

Linda started to speak, then fixed her eyes on Foxx.

“I thought he should be here,” said Bernadette. “So?”

“I got mugged. Right outside. Two of them. They wore Halloween costumes.”

“What kind of costumes?” said Foxx. He got up and circled behind the chair to part the curtains. The sidewalk directly in front was empty. Across the street, a portly man held a leash while a white poodle nosed around a tree well.

“Thin white masks with a black mustache and pointy beard.”

“Hats and capes?” said Foxx.

“How did you know?” said Linda.

“A Guy Fawkes costume.” Foxx turned away from the window. “Go on.”

Linda haltingly recounted the attack.

“Did they take anything?” asked Bernadette.

“No.”

“Did they say anything?”

“No,” said Linda. “The one who actually attacked me kept kicking at me until the other one dragged him away.”

“You didn't call the police?” said Bernadette.

“No.”

“You need to report this.”

“No. No police.”

“Then you need to go to the ER.”

“No. No hospital.”

Bernadette reached her hand toward Linda's stomach, and Linda cringed.

“I think you should step outside,” Bernadette told Foxx.

Foxx went into the hallway, then down onto the stoop, then onto the sidewalk. The portly man with the poodle had gone, and except for the avenue traffic passing at opposite ends of the block, nothing else moved. Foxx circled the tree where Linda said her attacker had waited. No footprints, no cigarette butts, no candy wrappers. He walked partway up the block, crossed the street, and walked back on the other side. He didn't know what he was looking for and did a good job of not finding it.

Back at Linda's stoop, he took out his cell phone to call Bev. Then he thought better. Linda hadn't reported the mugging to the police, hadn't gone to the ER, hadn't done anything to create a blip on Bev's radar screen. Technically the mugging hadn't happened. Yet.

The front door opened, and Bernadette came down the steps.

“She finally agreed to see a doctor,” she said, hugging herself. “Not any doctor. Her doctor.”

“At this hour?” Foxx put a hand on Bernadette's shoulder and rubbed it with his thumb.

“When you're a judge and the wife of Hugh Gavigan, doors open for you.”

They all three took a cab through Central Park and then crosstown to a building in the block between Park Avenue and Lexington Avenue. Bernadette pressed numbers into an intercom, and a voice came over the speaker.

“It's Judge Conover,” said Bernadette.

The door buzzed, and they went into the lobby and rode the elevator until it opened directly into a waiting room with the name of the medical group spelled out in stainless-steel letters on the wall behind the reception desk. This was Foxx's first clue.

The waiting room was deserted until a door opened on one end and a man pushed a wheelchair toward them. He was fiftyish and stocky, dressed in khaki pants and a dark blue polo shirt, his arms roundly muscled and hairy, a gold watch heavy on his wrist. He held the wheelchair steady as Bernadette lowered Linda onto the seat.

*   *   *

While Foxx waited in the reception area, Bernadette wheeled Linda into an exam room. Linda slowly removed her clothes and put on a gown. Then Bernadette helped her climb onto the examination table. The doctor, whose name was Lander, returned wearing a white smock, a white cap, and white latex gloves.

“When did you find out?” he said.

“Last week,” said Linda. “Assuming it's true.”

“I'll double-check, but how far along, assuming?”

“Eight weeks,” said Linda.

“Fine,” said the doctor. “I'm going to examine you, then we'll have the visit you should have arranged the minute you found out.”

Dr. Lander listened to Linda's heart, drew two vials of blood, took her blood pressure, then placed her finger in a plastic clip attached to a machine that monitored the oxygen in her blood. He told her to lie back, placed her legs in the stirrups, and palpated her abdomen before lifting her gown to probe gently inside. Muttering to himself, he rolled another machine next to the table and performed a transvaginal ultrasound to make sure there were no injuries the gross exam missed.

“You are either very strong or very lucky,” Dr. Lander told Linda as he rolled the machine away. Then he turned to Bernadette. “Help her dress. I'll meet you in my office.”

*   *   *

Back at the brownstone, Linda gazed up at the front steps.

“The doctor told her to avoid stairs,” said Bernadette.

Foxx held out his arms, offering to carry Linda up the steps.

“No need,” said Linda. She led them to an iron gate and an incline that sloped down to a door beneath the stoop. Inside, Linda pressed a button, and a machine rumbled.

“An elevator?” said Bernadette.

“I never told you?” said Linda. “It came out of Hugh's first big trial. Horrible wrongful birth case, well-to-do parents, a little girl profoundly retarded because of cerebral palsy. Hugh led the defense team. The jury returned a verdict of sixty million. The defendants appealed, but Hugh convinced both sides to settle for twenty. The parents bought this brownstone and renovated it for complete handicap access. Anyway, they weren't here very long before they suddenly didn't need all this anymore. They offered Hugh the right of first refusal at a discounted price. They were grateful he worked the settlement because it gave them more time with their little girl rather than fighting an appeal.”