My goal here, honestly, was to take the wind out of Thomas’s sails. If our search produced no stories about people being suffocated in windows, I hoped Thomas would mellow out a bit.
And there were no stories about people being suffocated in windows. But some interesting items were returned. I was led to a New York Times site listing all stories that ever mentioned Orchard Street. I read up on a few folks who had died there, and not from natural causes. In May 2003, a man had been run down by someone driving a Mercedes-Benz convertible who’d fled the scene. In the mid-nineties, bad blood between the two owners of a handbag store prompted the son of one of them to hire a hit man to kill the other. Police made an arrest before the murder could take place. Seven years ago, a young banking executive was shot in the chest on Orchard Street between Grand and Broome. Police were investigating competing theories; was the banker shot by someone he knew, or a total stranger?
All of these events had happened before Whirl360 was even in existence. While we didn’t know when the picture of the head in the window was taken, we could safely assume it had been within the last two or three years. There had been nothing in that time about any suspicious deaths on Orchard, at least none that involved someone dying by having a bag put over his or her head. The only story that even remotely caught my interest was a short news item about a thirty-one-year-old waitress named Allison Fitch of Orchard Street (no specific address given) who was reported missing the last week of the previous August. The story had run the first week of September, but I didn’t see any follow-ups, so it seemed likely the matter had resolved itself. Thousands of people went missing every single day across the United States, and within a few hours pretty much all of them reappeared. The stats were there if you wanted to look them up.
I got off the train at Penn Station and headed first down to Canal Street, to Pearl Paint, the huge artist supply store. I lost myself wandering around its several floors for nearly two hours and ended up buying a dozen Paasche airbrush needles and a couple of air caps, as well as a box of fine-point black Sharpie pens, and another box with broad tips. I already had plenty of these back in Burlington, but you could never have too many Sharpies.
Then I grabbed a cab and got dropped off out front of the Waverly. Before going in, I had to see how well Thomas, who had never been here in person, had described it.
There was the vitamin shop, the Duane Reade across the street. He even got the burned-out letter in the sign right.
He was pretty goddamn amazing, no doubt about it.
Jeremy was already in a booth by the front window, looking at the menu with a cup of coffee in front of him, when I came through the door. I slipped in opposite him.
“You won’t believe who I urinated next to,” he said. Jeremy always tried to impress with stories of his brushes with celebrity.
“I can’t imagine,” I said.
“Philip Seymour Hoffman,” he said. “In the men’s room at those theaters up by Lincoln Center.”
“Please tell me you didn’t strike up a conversation.”
He had not. I pointed to the old black-and-white framed photos of celebrities that adorned the walls.
“Pee next to any of them?”
“They’re all dead,” Jeremy said.
I ordered coffee and a grilled cheese with bacon. Jeremy got scrambled eggs and home fries, served right in the skillet. We talked about the declining state of the newspaper and magazine industry and the growth of sites like The Huffington Post, and how this new opportunity was coming at just the right time.
Jeremy said Kathleen Ford wanted one animated drawing a week and was willing to pay fifteen hundred dollars for each one. That might sound like a lot, but it actually meant dozens of drawings to make it work. “I’ll bet there’s a program or something that’d make it easier,” he said.
I knew of a couple that would make the job much less labor intensive. Once I had an idea, I could probably knock one off in a couple of days, which would still leave me time for other freelance jobs.
Jeremy grabbed the bill when it came and then we caught a cab to the hotel. Ford was fifteen minutes late, but she looked like a woman who never had to apologize for her tardiness. People would be grateful to see her whenever she showed up. Five-ten, slim, midfifties, brilliant blond hair, and if I could have seen the tags on her clothes and accessories I’m guessing they would have read Chanel, Gucci, Hermès, and Diane Von Whatserface. She was instantly captivating, said she was a huge fan of my illustrations, once we had repaired—there’s a word I’d never thought to use in that context before—to the bar, talked almost nonstop about all the important New Yorkers she knew who were going to be contributors to her new Web site, including Donald Trump, who, by the way, she knew very well but still couldn’t figure out how he did what he did with his hair, and not once did she ask me any questions except how my father was doing, whom she had heard was not well. Then, just as she whisked off to her next engagement, she said I had the job. The site was to be up and running in three months.
I accepted.
Once she was gone, Jeremy said it felt as though a tornado had just whipped through. Jeremy and I agreed that we’d be talking soon, and I left. Outside the hotel, I hailed a cab.
“Houston and Orchard,” I said. As the driver headed in that direction, I leaned back on the black vinyl seat. That was definitely unlike any other job interview I had had before.
I laughed quietly to myself, then turned my thoughts to what the hell I was going to do next. I thought back to the exchange I’d had with Thomas the night before.
“And when I get to this address on Orchard Street,” I’d said, “what exactly am I supposed to do? I mean, it’s not likely this head is going to still be in the window after all this time.”
“I don’t know,” Thomas said. “You’ll think of something.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
HOWARD Talliman had not been sleeping well.
Howard Talliman had not been sleeping well for nine months. He hadn’t had a good night’s rest since the end of August.
He’d lost weight, too. Sixteen pounds. He’d come in two notches on his belt. If it weren’t for the bags under his eyes and his gray pallor, he’d look pretty good, or at least as good as a guy who’s shaped something like a garden gnome can ever look.
Talliman’s appearance and his short temper, brought about by too little sleep, were sources of embarrassment to him. They sent a signal that something was troubling him, and Howard did not want anyone to think he was worried.
It was not in Howard’s nature to worry. Howard made other people worry. It was not in Howard’s nature to feel anxious. He made others feel anxious.
It was tough, these days, keeping up appearances.
“You look terrible,” Morris Sawchuck had been telling him. “Have you been to a doctor, Howard?”
“I’m fine,” Howard insisted. “You’re the one I worry about, Morris. You’ve always been my number one concern.”
Howard normally thrived on pressure. It was his oxygen. Any election campaign he’d ever worked, it didn’t matter how grim things looked, how far his candidate was behind. He never gave up. He never broke a sweat, even as those around him were saying it was all over. He assessed problems, and solved them. One time, on a city councilman’s reelection bid, the primary challenger was a woman touting her considerable experience as a community volunteer. She’d put in hundreds more hours helping the poor and disadvantaged than Talliman’s self-serving son of a bitch ever had.
“We have to find a way,” Talliman said, “to make her volunteerism a negative.”
To which everyone on the campaign went, “Huh?”
Talliman said if John Kerry’s service in Vietnam could be used against him, anything was possible. Go after the woman’s strength, and find a way to undermine it. Talliman put Lewis Blocker on it. He found evidence that could be used to prop up the suggestion that the woman’s commitment to helping others had been at the expense of her children an
d husband. Her teenage son had been picked up for coke possession, although the case never went to court. Her husband spent a lot of time in neighborhood bars and never saw a waitress’s butt he didn’t want to pinch. Talliman made sure the press found out, even though he never passed on the information directly. If these stories weren’t proof the woman was turning a blind eye to the home front, what was? With only a couple of weeks left in the campaign, Talliman flooded the district with flyers depicting his candidate as a strong family man, implying that his opponent cared more about strangers than her own family.
No one cared if a man put his career ahead of his family. But a woman?
It was slimy and underhanded and a misrepresentation of the truth. Worked, too. “Positively Rovian,” his admirers, and detractors, called it after the woman lost by more than three thousand votes.
It was around then that Howard put Lewis Blocker on permanent payroll.
It couldn’t have come at a better time for Lewis, who needed the money. He’d left the police before qualifying for a pension. He and several other officers had been called to a hostage-taking. A man was holed up in an apartment, threatening to kill his family. Shots were fired from inside the unit. Then the door flew open and someone charged out. Lewis, positioned down the hall, fired.
Too bad it was the shooter’s sixteen-year-old son trying to make a run for it.
No charges were filed, but Lewis Blocker’s career as a cop was finished that day.
Sometimes, Howard Talliman mused, things happened for a reason. If a young man had to die so Lewis Blocker could help advance the political careers of great men, well, who was Howard to argue with God’s plan?
But surely, Howard thought, God couldn’t have wanted things to go the way they had back in August.
The action he’d approved back then, the wheels he had allowed Lewis Blocker to set in motion, with the intention of protecting Morris Sawchuck, had the potential to destroy them all.
Sawchuck was more than a close friend to Howard. He was Talliman’s ticket to the Big Show. Once Sawchuck was governor of New York, it was only a matter of time, Howard knew, before he moved up the ladder from there. Sawchuck had the personality, the showmanship—even the most perfect set of teeth—to make it to the White House.
Howard had believed that Bridget’s lesbian affair with Allison Fitch, and—even more critically—what that woman might know about Morris’s political problems, could derail all that. He’d trusted Lewis’s instincts about what needed to be done. He’d also trusted Lewis’s instincts about who was best suited to get it done.
Not that Howard hadn’t expected there to be some fallout once the job had been executed, as it were. When a young woman is murdered, or goes missing, it’s likely to draw some attention.
There was one story in the Times. Police were trying to track down Allison Fitch’s whereabouts when she failed to show up for work. The article reported that she was originally from Dayton, and there was a line from her mother, who said she had not heard from her.
The New York Post ran something as well, deep inside, just before Sports. And it made NY1 one day. Her smiling face on screen for no more than five seconds.
After that, not so much. A missing person in Manhattan was not news for long. Some girl from Ohio doesn’t come to work one day? Big deal. So maybe she couldn’t hack it in the big city and went home. Unless someone stumbled upon a body, a missing person was barely going to make it through a single news cycle.
No one had stumbled upon a body.
Ordinarily, a body being stumbled upon would have put Howard Talliman at ease. Because even if the rest of the world did not know what had happened to Allison Fitch, he would know what had happened to Allison Fitch.
But he did not.
Lewis didn’t know, either.
No one had known for quite some time.
Shortly after Nicole had been sent to do the job, Lewis placed a call to Howard.
“I heard from her. There’s a problem.”
“What sort of problem?”
Lewis had explained that normally, Allison Fitch, who worked nights, would be home throughout the day, asleep, while her roommate, this Courtney Walmers woman who worked regular hours, would not.
At which point Howard Talliman had started to get a very bad feeling.
But on this particular day, Lewis had explained, there was an unforeseen development.
“The woman in the apartment was not Allison Fitch. The wrong target was taken out.”
Howard, sitting in his office, had struggled to remain calm. But Jesus, the roommate? Dead? Someone who’d never posed a threat in the first place? Someone he didn’t even know? Sure, Howard had caused collateral damage in the past. His political shenanigans had destroyed more than his opponents’ reputations. He’d seen defeated candidates lose their homes to pay off campaign debts. They left their wives, or their wives left them. One became an alcoholic, drove his car into a bridge abutment, and never walked again.
But nothing like this. No one had ever died.
And as unexpected, and bad, as this news was, Howard had still wondered whether this woman Lewis had hired, once she’d realized her mistake, had still managed to get the original job done. What about the intended target?
“What about Fitch?” he had asked Lewis.
“Gone,” Lewis had said. “She walked in on it. Saw what happened. Took off like a bat out of hell.”
In the intervening months, Allison Fitch remained missing. Probably scared shitless, terrified to show herself.
As long as she was out there, somewhere, she was a ticking bomb, just waiting to go off.
Back when Howard had taken that original call from Lewis, he’d exploded with muted rage and sheer terror.
“Jesus Christ, this is one colossal fuckup.”
And Lewis had said, “It gets worse.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
I thought Thomas’s confidence in me might have been misplaced. He’d seemed so certain I’d return from Manhattan with The Mystery of the Head in the Window all solved. I really wasn’t all that keen about heading down to Orchard Street.
I mean, once I was able to see, with my own eyes, the window in question, what was I supposed to do? My hope was that the head would still be there, that it was, in fact, one of those Styrofoam heads used for wig displays, and that seeing it in person would confirm all this.
As I walked south on Orchard, having jumped out of the cab on East Houston, out front of Ray’s Pizza, a couple of doors west of Katz’s Delicatessen, I worried the head would not be there, at which point I’d have no idea what to do.
Turn around and go home, most likely.
This part of the city wasn’t quite the Village, or SoHo, but it had a charm of its own. These old tenement buildings were rich in architectural detail and history. I started off in the two-hundred block, walking past a gift shop and a diner and some buildings that were being extensively renovated. At Stanton I caught a whiff of pizza from Rosario’s.
I continued to stroll south on the west side, past a luggage store that had a display of suitcases that covered half the sidewalk, then by several clothing stores and a guitar shop. None of these storefronts looked like the streetscape in the picture that was folded and tucked into my jacket pocket. I took it out for another quick look and realized that the building Thomas had zeroed in on was in the sixties. It turned out I’d bailed out of my cab too far north. I’d have to cross Delancey before I was down in the right neighborhood.
So I kept on walking.
A couple of minutes later, I thought I was in the general area. Below the third-floor window I was looking for was supposed to be a store that specialized in scarves, and beside it, a smoke shop selling newspapers. The entrance to the apartments was a lobby door between the two businesses. I was to find it on the west side of the street.
I figured it would be easier to scope out the building from the east side. That would give me a better view.
And then, sudden
ly, there it was.
The window.
I looked again at the image Thomas had printed out for me, just to be sure. Studied the arrangements of neighboring windows, where the fire escape came down, the storefront below.
I’d found it.
There was no white head in the window above the air conditioner.
Nuts.
Aside from the air conditioner, there was nothing to look at. Not so much as a flowerpot. The window was shut, and the glass, with no curtain behind it, looked black, reflecting the building across the street.
I got out my phone, set it to camera, and took a shot of the building, centering it on the window.
So, I’d come all the way to New York, found my way here, to the scene of the—what, exactly?—and taken a snapshot that I could show to Thomas to prove I had honored his request.
What an amazing accomplishment.
Would this picture be enough to satisfy him? Doubtful. I had to admit, if I were him, I’d find my effort somewhat halfhearted.
I supposed it wouldn’t kill me to go up there, knock on a door, say hello to whoever lived there. Maybe, if I had a peek into the apartment, that Styrofoam head I was so desperate to see would be sitting on a kitchen table or something.
Another case cracked by Ray Kilbride, illustrator by day, crime fighter by night. Except, okay, it was still daytime.
I studied the window so I’d have a chance of figuring out which apartment it was once I was inside the building, then crossed the street. I entered the lobby, which was really nothing more than an alcove with mailboxes and a directory. I tried the inside door and found it locked. No surprise there.
Judging by the directory, there appeared to be five apartments on the third floor, the last names indicated with thin strips of shiny black tape from one of those Dymo press-and-punch label-making guns. I remember Dad had one of those when we were kids and I labeled everything in my room. “Bookshelf.” “Bed.” “Door.” “Window.”