I thumbed through the front section of my paper, and came upon, once again, the story I’d been reading at breakfast, about the computer nerd who shot and killed his classmates. I tossed it aside and looked at the Arts section.
I read a review of some new George Clooney movie, not really taking any of it in, and a short write-up on a $1 million advance that was being paid to some unknown writer for his science fiction thriller, which had already been optioned for a movie even before the book had hit stores. I tried to wash down my envy with the coffee, but it didn’t work. And I realized another ten minutes had gone by.
Lawrence was generally pretty punctual, but I decided to give him another five minutes before doing anything about it. I read the editorials, a few letters to the editor. My coffee cup was empty and my muffin was history.
Lawrence was still a no-show.
I dug out his business card again and phoned him. This time, I tried his cell phone first.
It rang five times, then the message kicked in. “Hi. I can’t take your call right now. Leave a message.” Typically cagey Lawrence. Didn’t even give his name.
“Hey, it’s Zack, it’s coming up on eleven, and I’m waiting for you at the doughnut shop. Call me.” And I gave him my cell number, even though I knew he already had it.
I waited another minute. I tried the office number on his business card, which I seemed to recall him mentioning once was also his home number. He lived in a second-story apartment above a shop someplace. His card gave a Montgomery Road address.
Another five rings, and a similar message.
“Hey. Zack here. I already left a message on your cell. I’m here, waiting to go get the bad guys, and get your report on Trevor. I’ve got some news of my own in that department.”
I considered the possibilities. Lawrence had run into some sort of delay, couldn’t answer his phone. Maybe he was in a bad area, under a bridge, where his cell couldn’t receive a signal.
I tried the cell again. “Hi. I can’t take your call right now. Leave a message.”
I phoned home. Paul picked up, sounding a bit groggy. “Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Let me talk to your mom.”
“She’s not here. She’s gone to that thing. Remember?”
With all that had happened in the last hour or so, I’d completely forgotten about the retreat. “Okay,” I said. “Have there been any calls?”
“I guess. I’ve had a couple.”
“I mean for me.”
“Uh,” Paul said dozily, “I don’t think so.” Paul’s words seemed to be running together, ever so slightly.
“Were you asleep?” I asked.
“Nope.”
I paused. “Lawrence Jones didn’t call there by any chance, say he was going to be late?”
“Lawrence who?”
“The detective? The one I’ve been seeing every night this week? The one who took me to the car auction? The one who called earlier, and you took a message? Paul, what’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing. I am perfectly fine.” He worked hard to say “perfectly” perfectly. And the “I am” instead of “I’m” was a bit weird and Data-like. “Where are you?”
“At the doughnut place, a couple of blocks from Garvin. Listen, if Lawrence calls, have him call my cell.”
“Okay.” Sleepylike. Like maybe he’d had a few beers.
“Paul,” I said, “did you find what Trevor left for you out back?”
“Huh?” More awake now. “The what?”
“The six-pack. Sounds like you found it.”
“I don’t know—what?”
“He get your booze for you all the time?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Did Angie tell you—” And then he cut himself off, still sober enough to know that he was letting the cat out of the bag.
“We’re going to have a talk when I get home.”
Paul paused at the other end of the line. “Do you have any idea when that might be?”
“Probably not for a few hours. I’m sort of working right now.”
“Because I’m really tired, and going to bed, so if you’re going to ream me out, could you do it in the morning instead of when you get home?”
“Fine. We’ll talk in the morning.”
“Okay. See ya, Dad.” And he hung up.
I shook my head as I hit the button to end my call. It was after eleven now. I tried Lawrence’s cell a third time, without success.
Maybe he was already in position, down the street from the men’s store. Maybe he’d gotten to the doughnut shop on time, waited a few minutes for me, and when I was a no-show, he’d left. After all, his responsibility was to Mr. Brentwood, the owner of the men’s shop, not me. He was doing me a favor letting me hang out with him; he didn’t owe me any consideration.
So I walked out of the doughnut shop and headed in the direction of Brentwood’s. I decided to leave the Virtue in the parking lot. Pulling up behind Lawrence’s Buick might attract unwanted attention on the street. There was a hint of autumn chill in the air, and I pulled my shoulders up, as if that would somehow keep me warm.
I came around the corner onto Garvin, half a block down from the men’s shop, and looked for Lawrence’s aging Buick with the brand-new rear window, not that a brand-new window was something that stood out. A quick scan of both sides of Garvin turned up nothing. The street was lined with several parked cars, but there was almost no traffic, and there was a slight drizzle starting to come down. Within a couple of minutes the street was damp and shiny.
As I walked up the street, nearly to Brentwood’s, I tried to think of other scenarios that could have delayed Lawrence. What if he wasn’t planning to come at all? What if there’d been some arrest in the case, just in the last couple of hours, and Lawrence had gotten a call about it from his contacts in the police, so there was no point in staking out Brentwood’s tonight?
Just then, a massive black SUV appeared at the top of the block. Its headlights, resting high atop the huge grill, cast a wide beam down the street.
“Jesus,” I whispered.
I sidled up against an unlit storefront, beneath an awning, as the SUV began to move slowly down the street. Then, inching along, I rolled myself around a corner and found myself in a three-foot-wide alley directly across the street from Brentwood’s. The SUV glided past, as if moving through a tall, narrow frame. I poked my head out, watched as it went up the street, turned right at the next corner, and disappeared.
I got out my cell and tried Lawrence’s cell again. Even before he’d finished his short message, I was shouting, but in a whispering kind of way, into my phone: “Man, you gotta get here! It’s going down! The bad guys are here! They’ve just gone by once and I think they’re coming around again! I’m in an alley right across the street! Where the hell are you?”
I hit the button to end my call. Even in the cool night air, I felt myself breaking into a sweat.
The cops, I thought, maybe I should call the cops. Get them out here fast, because I had a feeling, I just had a feeling that the next time these guys came around in that Annihilator they’d—
I heard the roar of the engine for only a second, then a huge crash. The sound of shattering glass and crumbling brick and twisting metal.
I looked across the street and saw the tail end of the Annihilator. The front of it was, literally, in Brentwood’s. The two back doors of the SUV flung open and two men dressed entirely in black, with black hoods or ski masks pulled down over their heads, were leaping out and charging through the destroyed storefront. The Annihilator was already backing out, then screeching to a halt, turning around and backing up to the shattered window. The rear tailgate rose automatically, and in the time it had taken for the driver to conduct this maneuver, the two guys inside had evidently cleared several racks of suits and were throwing them into the back of the SUV, then leaping back into the still-open rear doors, and now the Annihila
tor was back in gear and screeching up Garvin.
In another few seconds, the only sound was the alarm system, wailing irrelevantly, from inside Brentwood’s.
“Lawrence,” I said softly under my breath, “where the fuck are you, man?”
17
I got out my cell and called 911 first.
“I’m calling to report a robbery,” I said.
“You’ve been robbed, sir?”
“No, I’ve witnessed a robbery.” I told her the name of the store, its location, and that a huge black SUV with at least three guys in it was screaming away from the scene. “A black Annihilator, couldn’t make out the plate, but it’s heading east.”
“What is your name, sir?”
I ended the call. I knew they’d have my name sooner or later. Their call display system would have my number, and a check with my cell service would turn up my name. I’d be happy to talk to them—later.
I began running back, through the light rain, in the direction of the doughnut shop, to pick up my car and figure out what I should do next. What I didn’t want to do, right now, was hang around at the scene, and be kept there all night by cops asking a lot of questions.
Not one to give up, I tried Lawrence’s numbers again. As long as I’d had cell phones, I’d never figured out how to program in my most frequently called numbers. And I was learning right now that it was impossible to tap in numbers on a tiny keypad while jogging, so I stopped long enough, under the shelter of another store awning, to call. Still no answer at either number.
I decided, once I was back to the car, that I would go to Lawrence’s apartment and try to find him there.
As I approached the doughnut shop, winded and damp, I could see that there was still no Buick there, but a taxi had pulled in next to my Virtue. I got out my key, slipped into the car, and turned the ignition.
Whir. And that was it. Nothing more.
“Shitfuckdamn!” I shouted, banging my fist into the steering wheel. I tried it again, then again, without success.
I went into the shop. There were customers at only three tables. A man and two boys in soccer jerseys, evidently coming home from a late game or practice, sat at one, a young man and woman whispering to one another were at another, and at the third, a fat, unshaven guy in a Celtics sweatshirt. He was drinking coffee from a paper cup, hovered, pencil in hand, over the crossword puzzle from The Metropolitan. He took a bite of his apple fritter.
“That your cab?” I asked.
He chewed slowly on his fritter, barely looking up from his paper. “Yeah.”
“I need you to take me someplace.”
“I’ll just be a couple of minutes.”
I breathed in and out twice. “It’s kind of an emergency.”
“I tell ya what,” he said. “Answer me this. Five-letter word, last letter ‘h,’ and the clue is ‘Luke’s pa.’ You tell me what that is, we leave right now.”
“Darth,” I said.
The cabby cocked his head, pursed his lips in surprise. He studied the puzzle. “Shit, I think that’s it. Oh yeah, right, Luke Skywalker’s daddy. I shoulda been able to get that, but you know, sometimes, it’s just not there.” He penciled in the answer I’d given him.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, where you headed?”
I told him, and he snapped the plastic lid back onto his coffee, then folded back the opening that would allow him to drink it while he drove. It was about a ten-minute ride, and my driver tried to engage me in conversation about some trades in the NHL, but my mind was elsewhere, and he quickly gave up.
We pulled up in front of the address from Lawrence’s card, which turned out to be a single door fronting onto a sidewalk in a business district, sandwiched between a hairstyling place and a cheese store. Lawrence’s apartment had to be over one of the shops.
“Stay here,” I said, handing the cabby a twenty.
“No problem,” he said. “I’ll work on my puzzle, save the hard ones for you when you get back.”
I got out of the back of the cab and rang the buzzer next to the door. I leaned on it for several seconds and then, after getting no answer, tried to open it myself. It was locked. I went back to the cabby and said, “Don’t go anywhere. I’m going round back, see if his car’s here.”
I ran to the corner and down the cross street until I had reached the lane and parking lots behind the row of shops. When I figured I was behind the cheese store and beauty parlor, I looked for some familiar vehicles and spotted them right away. There was Lawrence’s Jaguar and, parked next to it, his old Buick, rear window replaced. Both cars were locked and no one was inside either one of them, at least as far as I could tell. I couldn’t exactly open the trunks.
That gives you an idea of how my mind was working. I was expecting to find something bad. There are times when you just know.
There was a fire escape at the back of the shops, and I mounted it as quickly as I could, which wasn’t very fast. It was steep, and narrow, and the metal steps were slippery from the drizzle that continued to come down. I gripped the metal handrail to steady myself on the way up to the second floor, where there was a small landing outside a door. The window in the door was covered with a blind that kept me from seeing inside.
I knocked. I waited about ten seconds, then tried the door. It was unlocked.
I eased the door open, ran my hand up alongside the wall just inside, hunting for a light switch. I found one and flicked it up. “Lawrence?” I was pretty sure I was in the apartment that also connected to the door that led in off the street. “Hey, Lawrence! It’s Zack. You home?”
I eased the door open wider, stepped in, and closed it behind me. The door to the fire escape was off the kitchen, which was compact and immaculate. The appliances appeared to date back to the late fifties, but looked as though they’d been delivered yesterday. There were new but retro gadgets tucked back on the counter, under the cabinets. A gleaming metal toaster, a Hamilton Beach mixer, a waffle iron that showed no signs of ever having any batter in it. The clutter-free countertop had a small stack of mail on it, a Visa bill, a phone bill, a couple of flyers.
There was a small corkboard next to a wall-mounted phone, with a few business cards pinned there, including mine, and a color photo, taken at the beach, of Lawrence and a male friend, arms looped around each other’s necks playfully, grinning into the camera. White guy, brown hair, brown eyes. I wondered whether this might be his friend Kent, the restaurateur.
In the sink I saw a rinsed cup and a couple of spoons and an empty beer bottle, and atop the adjoining counter was a bowl filled with apples and bright yellow bananas. I reached over and touched one of the perfect-looking bananas, wondering whether it was wax. It was not.
Enough light spilled out from the kitchen to allow me a view of the living area, which included a small dining room table, couch, big TV in the corner, and four small silver speakers on stands placed strategically around the room. Surround sound. Part of an entertainment system. On a set of shelves were hundreds of CDs—Erroll Garner, Stan Getz, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, every other great jazz artist who ever lived—and dozens of DVD cases.
“Lawrence?”
I crossed the room to the main door, the one that must open onto a set of stairs that led down to the door on the sidewalk. I flipped back the deadbolt and opened the door, confirming for myself that it did indeed open onto the flight of stairs leading downward.
There was a short hallway leading off to the right away from the main door. I flipped on a light switch, and now I could see there were three doors leading off it. The first was a bathroom. I flicked on the light, eased my head in, peered around the back of the door into an empty bathtub. Shampoos and soaps were perfectly arranged in a device that hung from the shower head. The shower curtain was as clean as the day it came out of the package, the tiled corners free of mildew. Lawrence was one mean neat freak.
The next room had to be Lawrence’s study. It was not nearly so neat.
 
; Filing drawers had been pulled out, papers tossed across the floor, books thrown off shelves. It didn’t look as though someone had just searched this room. They’d torn through it in a fit of rage.
I felt my unease move up a notch. Especially when I glanced down and saw drops of blood in the blue carpeting that appeared to start near the study door and lead toward the third door in the hallway.
The blotches on the carpet grew larger as I neared the door. Whoever had lost blood was losing more of it as he moved along.
There was an inch of light between the door and the frame, and I pressed my palm up against the door and eased it open.
I went very cold. I had found Lawrence.
He was on the bed, stretched out from one corner to the other, on top of the covers, fully dressed in a sports jacket, slacks, and black dress shoes. He was on his stomach, and his right arm was down by his side, his left stretched out awkwardly above his head.
The powder blue duvet was soaked red with blood.
He was not moving.
I stepped into the room. “Lawrence,” I whispered. “Oh man, Lawrence, what the hell did they do to you?”
I placed my hands, tentatively, on his back, not knowing what else to do. I knew I couldn’t roll him over. I’d only been playing amateur private eye for a few hours, and hadn’t expected to run into anything like this, but I knew enough from watching TV that I wasn’t supposed to move the body.
Except I was sure I felt the body move, ever so slightly, under my hand.
Lawrence was breathing, just.
He was alive.
18
I put my weight gently on the bed, careful not to jostle Lawrence, and leaned in close to his ear. “Hang in, man, I’m getting help.” I had no way to know whether he understood what I saw saying or could even hear me.
There was a phone on his bedside table and I was about to snatch the receiver off its cradle when I thought, “Don’t touch anything.”
So I got out my cell and punched in the three emergency digits. Before the operator had a chance to get in a word, I barked out the address, then told her there was a man here, very seriously injured, who’d lost a lot of blood. I couldn’t pry my eyes off Lawrence as I spoke. Looking at him, I couldn’t see any signs that he was still alive. His breathing was too shallow to make his back rise and fall.