Unleashed (12 page)

"I was very impressed by the park," the mayor stated. "I love to dive—the adventure, the freedom to breathe underwater. And not only do I think it's great to be introducing more people to the sport of scuba diving, but this park is also providing protection for the artifacts resting at the bottom of Fort Pond Bay. People I've spoken to joke that everyone with a boat and a wet suit has some part of her history." His face turned serious. "And that has got to stop. We can't have people looting our history. I am overjoyed by Albany's decision to fund this park."

John Schoop appeared again. "The Culloden sank in 1781 while in pursuit of French vessels assisting the American colonists. Betty."

Betty was laughing when the camera cut back to her. "Mayor Jessup does love to dive."

"Do you think he's running for governor?" James asked.

"I don't know."

"I wouldn't want to face him. Scary." Kurt Jessup won the mayoral election three years earlier after his opponent, the incumbent, lost his mind. He ended up in an upstate facility so drugged up that all he does is drool. After Jessup's landslide, rumors of poisoning spread. But most people agree the guy just snapped, that Jessup got a lucky break.

Mrs. Saperstein's mug shot filled the screen. She looked exhausted and dumbstruck. "A new development in the Upper East Side slaying of Joseph Saperstein," Schoop told us. The screen cut to footage of Mrs. Saperstein being led out of her apartment building. "A doorman at the victim's building claims to have spent the morning with the accused widow on the day of the murder." Jackie was shown stepping into an unmarked black car. "Police say that his claim is unsubstantiated, and they have witnesses who saw Jacquelyn Saperstein leaving the scene of the crime."

Back to Betty Tong. "Action News Live Alert: Now Channel 7 has learned that the doorman was having an affair with the widow, and this is one of the reasons the police find his story suspect."

Mulberry, in front of a bunch of microphones, said, "I believe that Julen Valquez would say anything to help Mrs. Saperstein, and therefore I am not taking his statements seriously." Mulberry turned to leave as the crowd of reporters yelled unintelligible questions at him.

"We will have more on this story as it progresses," Betty said. I turned off my TV.

"Joy, I have to admit. She looks really guilty," James said.

"I don't know. I just don't think she did it."

"Then who?"

"I don't know yet." I chewed on my lip and stared at the blank TV screen.

"Joy, you there?"

"Yeah, yeah, just thinking."

"You're not going to faint are you?" James asked with a note of fear in his voice.

"No. I'm fine. I just, I need to figure this out."

We didn't say anything for a while, but I could hear James breathing on the other end.

"I'll figure it out," I said.

"I bet you will," James said.

I
woke up early the next day. There was a bruise on my cheek from where I'd hit the marble. It was sore and slightly puffy but not too colorful. I applied some concealer and headed uptown. If I hurried, I would have time to see both Michael, the mysterious man without a phone, and George Chamers, the man Philip at Ten House said I should talk to.

I usually avoided the hours when the majority of humanity squeezed onto the subway. It's hot, it's too tight, and it makes me feel like a sheep, like one of them. I don't like being "one of them."

As I stood holding onto the bar, there was a man wearing a suit with a bluetooth in his ear on the one side, and a pregnant woman with sweat dripping into her eyes on the other. I thought about what Hugh said. Directly across from me, her hand gripping less than an inch below mine on the center pole, was a woman in her fifties dressed in a business suit. I looked directly into her face. She wore a glazed expression, and, though I stared into her eyes, she did not react.

I shook my head, whipping my ponytail against the bluetooth-wearing male and the pregnant female. They both gave me more space, but neither of them looked my way. I took a breath of humid air and sighed. Could Hugh be right? Did humans just see what they wanted? Were we really blind? "FUCK!" I yelled.

The woman across from me jumped a little but did not glance in my direction. "Excuse me," I said to her. She did not respond. I touched her arm, and she just backed away. "Excuse me, can you see me right now?" I asked. She squeezed back into the crowd behind her—a mass of people who I didn't really see, just the colors of their shirts and the difference in their heights.

I gave up and spent the rest of the subway ride looking at my shoes.

At Eighty-Eight East End Avenue, a heavyset woman with a unibrow had replaced the white-haired man from the day before. She phoned Chamers for me, and several minutes later, the freight elevator arrived carrying a good-looking man in his late forties.

"I'm George," he said offering a calloused hand.

"I'm Joy. Philip suggested I talk to you. Is there anywhere we can speak in private?"

"Yes, Philip said you'd be stopping by. It's your friend Charlene who is missing. I don't know if I can help you but I'm happy to try." I didn't bother correcting him. If Charlene being my friend helped him talk to me, then so be it. George led the way to the freight elevator. It was quilted in blue fabric meant to protect the walls. George inserted a key, and the doors closed with a well-oiled swoosh.

"Philip said that you saw something the morning Joseph Saperstein was killed."

The elevator carried us past the basement to the sub-basement. George sighed. "Yes. I did."

The doors opened onto a clean, white hallway lit by fluorescent lights. Our steps echoed around us as we followed the hall to where it ended in a T and took a left, followed by a right and then another left, which brought us to an unmarked door that George opened with a key that hung on a ring with about a hundred others. He motioned me inside and pointed out a chair facing an old wooden desk. He sat behind the desk and ran a large hand through his dark hair. "Why do you want to know about this?" he asked.

"I'll be honest," I said, and then bit my lip. "I found his body, my friend is missing, and I don't know what else to do but try and figure out what happened."

"Really?" He frowned. "I guess this is kind of a mess, and maybe you should just leave it alone."

"What do you know about it?"

He looked up quickly, "Nothing. I just know what I saw, and I barely know that."

"Will you please tell me?"

He sighed again then studied me with deep brown eyes set in a lean and handsome face. "It was around 7:30 in the morning," he started. "I was in here when I heard the emergency exit alarm go off. I hurried to hallway N11. It's a bit of a hike, and it probably took me five or seven minutes. I was very surprised to see a woman standing in the exit. I called out to her, and she ran down the hall. I followed, but she was quicker than me. I've got a bad knee." He reached under the desk and rubbed the knee, his eyes unfocused. "She could have gone in so many different directions."

"Where does the emergency exit lead to? The one you saw her standing in."

George shook his head. "It's where the body was."

"You didn't look out the door?"

"No." He shook his head again. "I called the police. They took my statement over the phone."

I wondered for just a flash how different my life would be if George had opened that door. If someone else had found him lying there in his own blood, missing his face. "What did the woman look like?" I asked.

"Blond hair under a blue baseball cap. She was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt."

"Do you think her hair was dyed or natural?"

He smiled and cast his eyes to the floor. "I'd say it was bleached."

"Did you see her face?"

"Only for a second, and it was dark. Because of the energy crisis, we've only been keeping every third light on in certain sectors."

"Was she carrying a gun?"

"Not that I saw."

I thought about how Joseph's face was obliterated. It must have been a big fucking gun. "Do you think it was Jacquelyn Saperstein?" I asked.

He didn't look at me but instead concentrated on a spot above my head. "I've spent many hours trying to reconstruct her face in my mind. It was only a flash you understand?" He looked at me, and I nodded. "I can't for sure say it wasn't, but I'm not going to testify in court that I saw her there. I told the police that."

"Did they try to pressure you?"

He laughed. "Not in so many words. Of course, they want it to be all buttoned up, but I just can't say I saw someone I didn't. She had a similar build, and the hair was about the same I guess. But she got away from me, and I'll never know without her confession that it was Mrs. Saperstein."

"How big is this place?" I asked.

He smiled again. His teeth were crooked in a charming way. "It's the biggest place I've ever worked. I mean, these passages lead all over the place—to the parking garage, other exits to the street, deeper sub-basements. Before the Second World War, this place extended straight to the river. It had a yacht club. People used to sail right off the back of the building."

"Wow."

"Sure. Before the East River Drive was built, these buildings went right up to the water. There are so many different hallways around here, and because of all the construction and changes over the years it's not easy to find your way around. I even heard rumors there are secret passages leading to the park." He laughed easily. "William Franklin is probably the only man in this city who knows the whole building."

"William Franklin?"

"He's the manager here at Eighty-Eight East End Avenue, has been for 30-some-odd years."

I made a mental note of the man's name and thought I'd try to get ahold of him later. "How do you think the woman got in through the emergency exit?" I asked. "Would she need a key?"

"She would, and I don't know how she got it. I've got a copy, Franklin's got one, and there is one kept at the front desk."

"What about a skeleton key?"

"There is one, but it wouldn't work for that door. The skeleton is only for the apartments and the tenants' storage rooms."

"Would you show me where you saw the woman?"

"Sure." He used the arms of the chair to push himself into a standing position. As we moved down the hallway, I noticed the limp his bad knee gave him.

"What happened to your knee?" I asked. "If you don't mind me asking," I added.

"Not at all," he smiled. "I played football in high school." He laughed louder when he saw my expression. "I know, I'm not a big guy. I was the quarterback. And one day I just got hit wrong. Happens all the time."

"I'm sorry."

He laughed again. "I'm not. I had some of the best days of my life out there on that field. And it's not so bad. Gives me an excuse to talk about the old days."

We walked through a maze of corridors and up a short flight of concrete stairs to a door marked in red "Emergency Exit" with yellow crime-scene tape stretched across it. The bright colors looked alien in the stark white hallway. "Can I open it," I asked.

"I don't think so. That's why they put the tape across it."

I laughed. George was looking down at me, smiling. "Right. I guess so."

"You always like this?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"So persistent?"

"Ha, no," I said. "I don't think so."

"I guess I understand."

"Yeah?"

"When your life is changed in an instant, you want to understand it. You want to pick it apart and find out what happened. How did this all happen so quickly?"

"Yeah, that is it." I cocked my head. "How did you know?"

"My knee," he patted the injured joint. "I watched that tape, God, I don't know how many times. I wanted so badly to know what went wrong. Where was the mistake?"

"Did you figure it out?" I leaned toward him eager for a positive answer, but George just laughed. "What?" I asked confused.

"No, because there is no answer. That's just how life decided to go that day. You can't figure out why it decided to do that."

"But this is different." I pointed at the door. "Someone killed Joseph Saperstein in that alley. There is an answer to this mystery."

"Sure there is," George shrugged. "But it's not going to change what happened to you. Nothing is going to take back the instant you found that body. It is unchangeable. No matter what you do now, that is over."

"I know that."

"I hope so, because the only closure you can find is in yourself."

"You a Buddhist or something?" I asked smiling at him.

He laughed again. I liked the way it sounded—warm and happy in such a cold and lonely place. "No, I'm not a Buddhist. I've just been through enough to know that the only thing you can change is yourself. And that ain't easy."

"All right, philosopher," I said. George laughed again. "Where were you and where was she?"

"I was coming the way we just came, and when I turned the corner, I saw her back and the door closing. I called out to her."

"What did you say?"

"I think I said 'hey' or something like that. I was real surprised to see her. She was standing right here," he said as he stood close to the door, his back to me, under a dead light fixture. Looking down the hall, I saw that every third florescent light was out. Conservation can be a bitch, I thought. "When I called out to her she turned like this," George demonstrated as he turned his head just enough to glance at me. "And then she took off down the hall." He pointed to where the hall extended for what seemed like an endless distance. The final wall was cloaked in a velvet blackness. "She took a left up there." George and I walked to where the mysterious woman had turned. Another long and poorly lit hall extended before us. "I chased her, but by the time I got to here she'd ducked into another corridor and was gone."

"What is down there?"

"Storage rooms and other hallways."

"Could we explore a little?" George looked down at his watch. "I understand I've taken up a lot of your time. I really appreciate the help you've given me already, and if you need me to go, I will."