19 Purchase Street (2 page)

Yellow chalk was used to outline the position of Wilson, his severed leg and the delivery bike. Then Wilson and the leg were put into a bloodproof body bag and the bike was moved to the side of the road.

When the ambulance went off with the dead, nothing that remained was interesting enough to hold the spectators. Traffic began to pass at nearly normal speed. The state troopers left, and so did all but two of the local police.

Officers Lyle and McCatty.

They were to wait for the wrecker. They were also to make up the report.

McCatty, who was in his forties, had a stripe. He'd been on the Harrison force for five years, which was not enough seniority to take him out of range of any deep cutback. Lyle was new and much younger, had in less than a year's duty and, if all went as he hoped, no more than a year to go. He never let anyone, not even McCatty, know what he really wanted and had been saving for was a ski and tennis equipment shop.

Lyle took measurements and diagrammed the accident in the proper space on a report sheet. McCatty, meanwhile, nosed around the Chrysler. He knew they had taken Mary Beth's purse along with her. As though she'd need it. He tried the glove compartment, removed the key from the ignition to get into it. There was nothing in there worth having, and the only thing in the trunk was a wool blanket that appeared good but when McCatty held it up, he saw it had several moth holes. He tossed it back in and shut the trunk lid hard. Seemed there'd be no dividends this time.

The delivery bike.

It was so badly smashed it looked like a John Chamberlain sculpting at the Whitney. That would have been his wife's thought, not his. The frame of it was split, nearly folded in two, and all three of its wheels were bent lopsided oval. However, its metal compartment was intact. That thirty-inch-deep carrying box was dented and more scarred than before but its seams had held.

McCatty examined the compartment and its formidable padlock. He got a steel T-bar from the patrol car.

He worked on the hasp, jammed the T-bar in along the edge where the hasp was attached and got under enough to pry. He applied steady pressure with all his might. Finally the hasp snapped away.

McCatty opened the lid and saw the compartment contained two cardboard cartons of groceries. There wasn't a customer's name or an address on them. The cartons were so well packed only a few of the items on the very top had been knocked about by the collision. McCatty noticed the stamped price sticker on a small package of wild rice that said $4.95 and a jar of Tiptree peach preserves imported from England for $3.80. Anyway, not just Wonder bread and Ivory Snow. He transferred the cartons to the back seat of the patrol car. No one would ever know or ask. Besides, the bike could just as well have been returning from a delivery rather than making one.

The wrecker arrived.

The Chrysler was pulled to the road and hoisted into position. The delivery bike was thrown like a piece of junk onto the bed of the truck where it was secured to the hoist.

That part of it done, McCatty and Lyle drove off in the patrol car. It wasn't much out of their way to stop and leave one carton of groceries at McCatty's, the other at Lyle's. When they got to headquarters they went right to work on the official paperwork. McCatty disliked typing and Lyle wasn't good at it, an unsure, pecking typist who misspelled, X'd out too much and often omitted details important enough to get hell for later. With Lyle at the keys the report would take at least an hour.

They were ten minutes into it when McCatty's wife Connie called. She'd just gotten home. McCatty told her he was off duty but had the report to do. She wanted him home now, insisted. That wasn't like her, McCatty thought. Ordinarily she just lived with his hours. Also, there seemed to be something else to her tone, as though just below her words was something exciting that she couldn't come straight out with. It occurred to McCatty that it might be some sexual thing, a little specialty she'd decided to open up to and was impatient about. They'd enjoyed some of that not too long ago, and, he thought, this had the same ring to it. She kept insisting.

McCatty pulled the unfinished report from the typewriter and signed it in advance.

When he arrived home, the back door was locked. Connie had to let him in. She was in her stocking feet and her dark and gray hair looked as though her hands had been running through it. Her lipstick was nearly chewed away. Not a sexy sight. McCatty was disappointed enough to get grouchy.

The kitchen shades were drawn for some reason, so a light was on over the island counter. It shined down on the carton of groceries McCatty had placed there earlier.

Connie asked if the groceries were theirs.

Yes.

From where?

He told her.

She had unpacked and packed the carton a half dozen times since she'd come home. Now she had him do it.

Even before he had everything out and on the counter he realized the false bottom. Not elaborate, merely a piece of similar brown cardboard cut to size and dropped in. He removed it.

Hundred dollar bills.

Bound by wide rubber bands into packets, about two inches thick.

Twenty such packets layered the entire bottom of the carton.

Connie had hardly touched the money, only enough to prove her eyes weren't lying.

McCatty didn't react to it. He removed one of the packets, sort of weighed it in his hand and riffled through it.

Connie asked how much.

A million was his estimate.

“It's ours,” Connie said

McCatty put the packet of hundreds back into place in the carton.

“It's ours,” Connie repeated emphatically.

McCatty looked away as though to get her out of mind. After a long, thoughtful moment, he covered the money with the piece of cardboard and began repacking the groceries neatly.

“What are you going to do?”

McCatty didn't reply. He picked up the carton and went out to the car. Connie followed. She called him an asshole, a straight stupid cop asshole and she made a couple of tries for the carton.

He drove away with it, left Connie standing there yelling.

It wasn't far to Lyle's place. McCatty figured he had time, Lyle would still be at headquarters making out the report. There was no one else to be concerned about because Lyle lived alone.

McCatty broke in. Wrapped his fist in a rag and put it through a pane of Lyle's back door. The other carton of groceries was just inside. McCatty nearly stumbled over it. Rather than unpack it, he ran his hand flat down the inner side of the carton, felt it too had a false bottom. In under that layer of cardboard he fingered the unmistakable texture of paper that was money. He took the carton with him, placed it in the rear seat next to the first.

For a long while he just drove anywhere with the two million dollars. Killing time until night. Then he was on Purchase Street. Twice he went by the place, checking it out. He slowed to let two cars pass. When there were no cars coming in either direction he pulled into the drive of Number 19 and stopped before its huge outer gate.

He placed the two cartons in the shrubs to the left of the gate, where, from the gatehouse, they'd surely be noticed and taken in.

CHAPTER TWO

N
ORMA
Gainer was also in Harrison on that last of July.

She came down the drive of Number 19 and the heavy iron gates anticipated her, opened automatically one after another. Norma took it as a minor but important demonstration of acceptance that usually she could leave the place without even having to hesitate at the gates. It wasn't known, of course, that she was affected by such reassurances.

This time the man on gate duty signaled her to a stop. He informed her there was an accident down the way on Purchase Street.

“Bad?” Norma asked.

“From what I hear.”

Norma didn't realize, of course, that she was circumstantially linked to the accident, that she and one of the victims, the dead grocery boy, had so much in common. Norma had never met another carrier. At least not that she knew of. And as far as the way Number 19 worked such things, she'd taken her brother Drew's advice and stifled her curiosity long ago.

She continued on out through the gates to Purchase Street, turned right. After a quarter mile she got onto Route 684 and its wide lanes that were like an undeniable chute to the Hutchinson River Parkway city bound. She had the top down on the Fiat 2000 Spyder, creating her own breeze. Strands of her hair, like tiny whips, snapped her cheeks and forehead.

There was hardly any traffic, however she kept to the far right lane with the speedometer at fifty-five, exactly the posted limit. Westchester County police patrolled in unmarked cars and used radar guns. Norma didn't want to get stopped. The piece of luggage was right there on the seat beside her.

She wouldn't think about it, passed the time with trying to put out of her mind all else except what she considered her blessings. Before long, there was the George Washington Bridge, its blue lines softened by unclear air, and in less than a quarter hour Norma turned onto East Forty-ninth Street, parked in the garage across from the United Nations Plaza. She took the suitcase up to her apartment in that building.

All the apartments that faced south had unobstructed downstream views of the East River. The United Nations building was practically in their front yard. Naturally, they were choice, most expensive. Norma's apartment had north and east exposures, nearly no skyline and only an oblique, somewhat restricted view of the river. Still it was in the four hundred thousand class. Being on the twenty-seventh floor gave it premium, that much out of range of the city's true surface.

Five rooms. Done mainly with furniture and accessories she'd found in Europe. Almost every trip over she had something sent back. Such as the calling card tray on the table in the foyer. A bronze of a girl in
dishabillé
, her arms extended to support an oversized scallop shell. Norma had come upon it five trips ago in Paris at the
Marche aux Puces
. She'd paid the very first asking price for it because she liked it so much, and after the transaction the stallkeeper, in a rare moment of candor, had told her she should have bargained. The foyer table itself she'd found in Amsterdam at an unlikely out-of-the-way shop that bought piece by piece from elderly people in its neighborhood. Norma believed that table with its graceful tapered legs and marquetry top had been most reluctantly exchanged by someone for mere subsistence.

In such manner she enjoyed personal connections to those things around her. It helped take some of the edge off living alone.

Now in her kitchen she poured a Perrier over ice, added a bit of Rose's lime juice and watched the swirl of the lime until she stirred it away with a long sterling silver spoon that could also be sipped through. She drew some into her mouth on her way to the bedroom.

There she sat in the chair she most often sat in, settled and let out a breath that was inadvertently a sigh. Everything here was in place, she thought, even every magazine. It would be exciting if someone, a certain someone, would suddenly appear and cause disarray. Wasn't it strange when she was with that person she could even let her clothes drop off just anywhere and not be bothered by it?

Her thought went to tomorrow and then the day after tomorrow, her birthday. Thursday she'd be thirty-eight, which on the chronological see-saw between thirty-five and forty was an altogether different balance. Norma, thirty-eight. It seemed the older she got the more she felt the name Norma suited her, as though time was on a convergent course with a predestined image. Futile to hope the two would never merge, she thought.

To her rescue came the desire to be elsewhere. At first anywhere else and then a particular place, because at that moment she needed to be kissed. Not just the light pressing of lips but rather her mouth crowded by another tongue in it, an identical part stroking, becoming resolute and extended within her to its limit, wanting to surpass that, stretching inward until the little ligaments beneath the tongue ached, stabbing as though furious at the impossibility of filling her, and taking persistent licks at the tiny sideways crotches of her lips, left and right.

Norma's eyes had closed involuntarily. She opened them but required movement to come almost all the way out of it. She took up a hand mirror from the side table, a silver art nouveau one etched with dragonflies and lily spears. Not intending serious self-appraisal. She glanced at her reflection only long enough to verify it.

She was a handsome woman, strikingly close to beautiful. Her features were definite and pleasingly related, although her mouth had a way of normally being a little too set and at times when the situation warranted her eyes could be so steady it seemed they might never blink. The pupils of her eyes were an extraordinary green, with black outlining circumferences. Her hair was dark brown, healthy, heavy hair that was naturally straight. She often wore it pulled back taut without a part, playing right into the impression of composure.

The drink in her hand felt colder than it should have. Rivulets of condensation ran down to her fingers. Using the back of the newest issue of
Geo
magazine for a coaster, she placed the glass on the table and took up the phone. All day it had been on her mind to call Drew but she hadn't wanted to call from Number 19. She suspected every phone conversation to or from there was somehow recorded, and although anything said to Drew would be personal, who knew what might be made of it. Her own phone was swept weekly by the Number 19 people. A requirement rather than a favor.

She dialed Drew's number.

After four rings his service answered. Norma knew that didn't necessarily mean Drew wasn't home. She left word she'd called, no other message.

Might as well pack.

She got two bags from the spare bedroom closet. An overnighter and another of medium size. Both matched the larger bag, the thirty-incher she'd brought down from Harrison. The thirty-incher looked as though it had endured equal travel. Norma wondered how they achieved that. Actually it got only half the wear, because two years ago when she'd bought this set of luggage she'd done as instructed, as she knew to do from times previous: bought an extra bag in the thirty-inch size. That allowed alternately one bag to be left at Number 19 and made ready while its counterpart was away being carried.