Night Secrets (21 page)

At the corner of Madison Avenue and Sixty-fourth Street, he began to close in on her, still carefully keeping his distance. He followed slowly, edging himself around the same corner a minute or so later. He could see her standing at the same shop window she'd stopped at the day before. She was facing the window, but even from a few yards away, Frank could tell that she was not looking at the merchandise behind it. Instead, she was glancing down, peering into her purse as one of her white hands riffled through it. For a moment, Frank supposed that she was preparing for another drop, but almost immediately, her hand drew up from the purse. She was clutching a long black comb. She looked up, staring at her own reflection in the mirror, as if studying it, the same way he'd seen her do it before. She seemed to concentrate upon it, as if trying to figure something out. Then her hand shot back behind her head and released the clasp which held the coiled hair. A blond wave fell over her back and shoulders, and she combed it violently in quick, anxious strokes, then returned the comb to the purse and turned toward the street.

A large black Mercedes limousine drew alongside the curb almost immediately, and she strode directly toward it, opened the door herself, and disappeared inside.

Frank stepped forward quickly, wrote down the license number as it moved away, then hailed a cab and followed the limousine as it made its way up the long avenue, past luxurious boutiques and expensive antique shops until it turned west again, reached Fifth Avenue and turned south. From there, it headed directly to Fifty-seventh Street, turned east, and drove into the parking garage in the basement of Trump Tower.

“Just pull over here,” Frank said.

The driver drew the cab over to the curb. Frank paid him quickly and got out. He walked around the corner, turned left and headed toward the entrance to the building. The usual crush of people filled the lobby of the Tower, gawking wide-eyed at the immense marble walls and interior waterfall that cascaded over them.

Frank took up a position across from the bank of elevators along the opposite wall, watching the floor lights while he waited for each of the elevators to descend to the basement garage, then rise again. Inevitably, the doors opened again once the elevator reached the lobby, and Frank kept a close eye on each one, trying to spot Mrs. Phillips. First one elevator rose, then another, but Mrs. Phillips was never in any of them, and after a time, Frank decided that she must have used some other entrance into the building.

There were several security men in the lobby, all of them easily identified by the small gold-plated lapel pins they wore. The pins were microphones which fed information into a central security headquarters, and according to his own count, at least fifteen men in the lobby were wearing them. He picked the one nearest to him, a tall man in an elegant blue suit, and walked up to him.

“My name's Clemons,” he said. He showed him his identification.

The man nodded. “Is there a problem?” he asked.

“I was following a limousine that went into the Tower's underground garage,” Frank said. “Someone in it, I was wondering if they could get into the building by using anything but the elevators in the lobby.”

“They could take the stairs,” the man said.

Frank thought of Mrs. Phillips's spike-heeled shoes. “I don't think so,” he said. “Any other way?”

“Not unless we're talking about a resident of the building.”

“And what if we are?”

“Well, there are private elevators,” the man said. “But you wouldn't be allowed down there.”

“Private?”

“They go directly to the residences,” the man said.

“Without stopping at the lobby.”

“That's right.”

“Could a visitor use those elevators?”

“Only if they passed a security station.”

“Which would be where?”

“In the garage.”

Frank smiled quietly. “Could I get down there?”

“You could go to the security station,” the man said. He eased himself away from the wall. “Come, I'll show you.”

Frank followed the man through the crowded lobby, then down a flight of stairs to a large office filled with screens and elegantly dressed guards.

One of the guards met Frank and the security man at the door. He was tall and very slender, as if honed down to a sharp angle by too much hard experience.

“What can I do for you, Ray?” he said to the security man.

The security man nodded toward Frank. “This gentleman's interested in the private elevators,” he said.

“Really, why?” the man said. He wore a sterling silver name plate that said “Schaeffer,” but he introduced himself anyway. “Charles Schaeffer,” he said.

Frank nodded. “Like Ray said,” he began, “I was just wondering …”

“Nonsecurity personnel aren't allowed in the central office,” Schaeffer said to the younger man. “Don't you remember that from orientation?”

“Well, yes, sir,” the other man sputtered. “But this man, he's a …”

“I don't care what he is,” Schaeffer snapped. “You don't bring people to the central security office.”

The other man's face paled. “Yes, sir.”

Schaeffer's small blue eyes shifted over to Frank. “What can I do for you?” he said with a surprisingly sudden politeness.

Frank took out his identification.

Schaeffer looked at it very closely, then took out a pad and copied down the private investigator's license number. When he'd finished, he handed it back to Frank and looked at him with eyes that had suddenly gone dead.

“A limo came in here a few minutes ago,” Frank said. “I was wondering who it belonged to.”

“We have a great many limousines in this garage,” Schaeffer told him. He took Frank gently by the arm and began to move him away from the security station.

“It was a black Mercedes,” Frank added. “I got the license plate.”

“Why were you following it?”

“I was following somebody who got into it.”

“I'm afraid I can't help you,” Schaeffer said, once the two of them were alone by the elevators. The politeness had disappeared, and Frank realized that his identification card had fixed him in Schaeffer's mind as nothing but a two-bit shiny-suited gumshoe who was probably poking his nose into things the big guys at the top of the building weren't interested in having brought out.

“I'm afraid you're not allowed down here,” Schaeffer said. “Reynolds shouldn't have brought you down.”

“The woman had long blond hair,” Frank said.”She must have passed the guard station.”

Schaeffer reached around Frank's body and pressed the up arrow of the elevator. “The people in this building are very security-conscious,” he said.

“Do I look like a threat to their security?” Frank asked coldly.

The elevator doors opened behind him, but Frank did not get in.

Schaeffer's jaw tightened. “You are technically trespassing,” he said.

Frank thought of his license, how, with his record, it could easily be revoked. He stepped back and held open the elevator door. “I'm not interested in bothering anybody,” he said. “I was just following a woman.”

“But you lost her, didn't you?”

Frank said nothing.

“So, technically, that's the problem, isn't it? That you lost her.”

Frank could feel the rubber safety door growing warm in his hand. “Did you see her, or not?” he asked sharply.

Schaeffer pressed his hand lightly against Frank's chest, urging him into the elevator. He didn't answer.

“Did she go to a private apartment here?” Frank demanded.

Schaeffer was staring at him silently as the two doors moved smoothly toward each other.

Just as they came together, Frank could see him smile.

He couldn't cover all the entrances to Trump Tower, so he decided to pick the one he'd seen her disappear into, the one that led out of the garage. He waited, pleasurelessly finishing off the bagel he'd stuffed into his jacket earlier in the morning, while his eyes stared at the black square of shadow that penetrated the building's enormous foundation. Schaeffer had been right. There were a great many limousines, and for the next hour, Frank watched them as they came out of the garage—Cadillacs and Lincolns, a single white Rolls Royce, even another black Mercedes, but one with a different license number than the limousine which had picked Mrs. Phillips up on Madison Avenue.

Frank glanced at his watch restlessly, then, fifteen minutes later, glanced at it again. He could feel the evil bubble growing in him, the one that made everything a little emptier than it already was. It had started with Sarah's death, deepened with his divorce, then deepened more as his love for Karen had gone dry and passionless. It drifted toward him from out of nowhere now, as if it no longer needed to be called up by any particular thing, but simply occupied its place as a steadily darkening presence, filling him with hissing accusations about the way he'd lived his life. There were times when he suspected that everyone must have such a specter, but then he'd see a couple laughing in a restaurant or a father playing with his daughter in the park, or even some solitary old woman contentedly reading a newspaper on her bare cement stoop, and they would strike him as people who'd somehow escaped the grasp of a merciless pursuer, had closed the door and thrown the bolt just in time to leave the shadow breathless in the hall.

Another car emerged from the underground garage, but as it broke into the light, Frank saw that it was dark blue, rather than black, another Cadillac rather than a Mercedes. He leaned back against the wall of the building and continued his long vigil. He knew that there was no way he could be sure that Mrs. Phillips was still inside the Tower. She could easily have left it by another entrance, taken a cab and gone to her next destination. Or she could simply have been driven out of it in a different car, one of those Cadillacs which had passed practically under his nose as it made its way back onto the street.

He lit a cigarette, fanning the smoke from his eyes to keep the garage in view. No cars were coming out and a steady stream of pedestrians walked back and forth across the dark entrance. They were mostly business people and office workers who labored in the immense buildings which rose over the avenue and along the surrounding streets, stretching river to river across the granite backbone of Manhattan.

Another hour passed, then another.

Schaeffer had gotten it right. He had lost her. There was no point in waiting any longer. The only thing to do now was return to the Phillips apartment so that he could at least find out when she got home.

He walked back up to the corner of Fifth Avenue, then northward to Sixty-fourth Street and took up his usual position by the wall.

Time continued forward with a maddening slowness, flowing over him like a thick, turbid river, choked and currentless.

He drank a cup of coffee, then another and another, crushing each paper cup in turn, then tossing it listlessly into the wire receptacle a few feet from where he stood.

One by one, he went through his cigarettes.

The bright midmoming air darkened into blue.

He looked at his watch. It was nearly five o'clock. He took out the last of his cigarettes and lit it, then glanced to his left, his eyes half-fogged with boredom, until in a sudden, stunning instant he realized that she was shooting toward him, that she was practically upon him, so close that the sound of her high-heeled shoes as they clicked against the cement sidewalk were as loud as pistol shots.

Reflexively, he pulled his eyes away from her, fixed them on a single seam of mortar in the brick wall which faced him, and let her pass, his breath held tightly in his lungs. A flash of blond hair swept across his field of vision as she whisked by, and he could feel a slight breeze from the air her body displaced as she swept past him. A very subtle sweetness surrounded him in her wake, and as he drew his breath again, his eyes watching as she disappeared behind her door, he realized, with an aching sense of something deeply out of place, that she'd seeded the evening air with her perfume.