Revenant Rising (65 page)
On the long crosstown block over to Fifth, he explores less stimulating avenues of thought, recalling her consistent delight in the nonsense verses he makes up for Simon, the undisguised pleasure she derives from nature, the single-minded conviction she brings to the righting of a wrong.
At Nate’s building, nothing’s familiar except the actual doors. The doorman’s a stranger and the lobby’s been refitted and redecorated. The private lift—once he’s figured out how to code open the doors—is new since he owned space in the building and works twice as fast as the one it replaced. On fifteen, he steps into a grandly appointed foyer, where he taps in a second entry code and gains access to the middle of the three-level floor-through flat.
The only thing familiar here is the layout, and he can’t be dead certain a few doorways and windows haven’t been repositioned. He glimpses artwork he’s only ever heard about and resists temptation to stop and register awe. The furniture is museum quality as well, and the monumental piano at the far end of the lounge can only be the vintage Bosendorfer concert grand Nate punned about picking up for a song at a distress sale.
He cuts through the former library on the way to the kitchen and the stairs to the lower floor. Here, he’s helpless not to stop and admire the fabled Klimts. With their Byzantine overtones and mosaic-inspired decoration, they’re far more beautiful than expected. Staggeringly beautiful. Wondrous, to use Laurel’s word, and that starts him imagining her reaction to these erotically charged examples of the artist’s golden phase—the exact wrong thing to envision when so many sensations are hitting him at once.
He drops into the nearest chair to acknowledge these sensations—these other reasons he’s shunned this place for so long. None are as clear-cut as the attempt to avoid Nate’s smothering attentions, but they exist if only in shadow form.
Although she never lived here and never so much as popped by in her determination to occupy a landmark building on the opposite side of the park, there’s Aurora’s specter to deal with because of the time frame. By the same reasoning, the stream of nameless, faceless accommodators and enablers who moved through here in varying numbers and combinations are brought to mind. As are the recreational substances dispensed with reckless abandon when this place was a monument to wretched excess. Given free rein and direct sunlight, how much power would these beclouded memories have? Given similar access, how overwhelming might the deeper, more heavily shrouded memories be? Is he going to find out by sitting here?
He enters the one spot that is familiar—the kitchen that’s a near-duplicate of the one he has at home, which is no big surprise because Nate was in charge of both renovations. Recalling that Laurel especially admired this feature when recounting her evening here, he pastes on a lovesick grin and heads for the stairs.
On the lower level, the home gym Nate’s boasted of for months is tricked out with more equipment than is found in most commercial versions. Adjoining space includes a changing area, a stall shower, a sauna, and a massage table. A quick inspection establishes that the remaining space is given to servants’ quarters, laundry and utilities rooms, walk-in temperature-controlled wine vault, and fireproof records storage.
Lacking proper workout attire, Colin strips down to his underwear and makes do with the beat-up trainers that have seen him through since Los Angeles. He’s a bit surprised to find mail scattered in the changing area as though someone’s reading was interrupted. A few pieces have slipped to the floor, others are in haphazard piles on one of the benches. Substandard behavior for Nate and inviting of more sloppiness. Colin drops his street clothes to the floor helter-skelter rather than hang them on the provided hooks.
The treadmill’s the obvious place to begin and there, he encounters a long length of accordion-fold fax paper—the kind with the perforated margins—hanging over the control panel and trailing onto the floor. He flings it aside, adjusts incline and speed to an ambitious level and pushes off. Within fifteen minutes, he’s pouring sweat and feeling improvement in his legs. At the half-hour mark, his heart rate and respiration level off, and his legs feel loose enough for specialized activity.
He hops off the treadmill onto a section of slippery thermal paper and damn near takes a header. In the course of cursing the homeowner and kicking the offending paper aside, a name leaps up at him that more effectively ends the workout than would have a nasty tumble. He drops down on the floor and reads through the entire length of fax, word by damning word. Then it’s a tossup whether the chill he feels is from his cooling sweat or is given off by what amounts to Nate Isaacs’s resignation.
How long he sits there—head in hands, elbows on knees, offending fax folded back onto itself—is hard to say, but his sweat has dried, and his legs have tightened up when he gets to his feet. He’s pulling on his jeans when his new-and-improved vision takes in a detail on a piece of mail marked personal and confidential. This envelope is segregated from the others on the bench and marked with the return address of the American Institute of Creative and Performing Arts—the Icon award blokes. A quick once-over of the letter inside is enough to identify it as appropriate coda to the fax.
Colin finishes dressing. With great care and deliberation he puts everything back the way it was—including the treadmill settings. Keep the blighter guessing. Keep the shit-for-brains wondering if he’s been found out. Then when the fuckwit knows he has, keep him stewing in his own juice the way Anthony’s made to suffer when he trips himself up; keep the arsewipe on his toes till the time’s right for hanging him out to dry.
Colin leaves the flat the way he came in, tapping in newly memorized security codes before and after using the lift. He waves off the doorman’s offer to hail a cab and takes his chances on the avenue. He runs the twenty blocks back to The Plaza against the considered advice of orthopedists everywhere. And Dr. Nate, of course.
The mind-numbing board meeting ends sooner than expected and the car is pointed in the general direction of the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel after he ransoms it from an hourly-rate parking garage in the Financial District. Given time and opportunity, with no cabby or chauffeur to bear witness, why not scope out little Ms. Amanda Hobbs’s neighborhood in a semi-industrial section of Brooklyn?
Inside of an hour, Nate is satisfied that Amanda’s humble abode is the main reason she dragged her feet about accepting his invitation to the bash for Rayce. And he’s willing to bet the secondary reason had something to do with wardrobe. What he’s not sure of is whether or not Laurel Chandler filled both lacks, and if by offering to share her hotel room, she was doing herself or Amanda the favor.
On the return trip through the tunnel, he shifts to the thornier subject of what to do about Colin’s near-irrational crusade for independence. The recent clash over the missing address card is an excellent barometer of pressure levels. But so are the recent murders of the two bottom-feeders with links to Colin—make that three bottom-feeders if Cliff Grant is included in the tally. The ongoing attempt to tie those three slayings together and forecast what, if any, meaning they have for Colin is becoming an albatross of gigantic proportions.
Nate obeys the second impulse of the afternoon—this one he can blame on the albatross—and veers off the northbound avenue at Christopher Street and from there, moves into the unfamiliar territory where the late Gibby Lester conducted his filthy business.
He has more to go on here than he did in Brooklyn. The intern who gave up Amanda’s home address didn’t provide landmarks, only a street name and a set of numbers. For this search, he can rely on details recalled from Brownie Yates’s original survey of the territory back in ’84, when both private and public agencies were putting the squeeze on Lester.
Tapped into that recollection, Nate watches for a substantial stone building—a bank building—said to dominate the corner it straddles. To one side of it should be a lesser brick building with black awnings said, in Brownie’s effusive way, to resemble the half-lowered eyelids of a career seducer. According to Brownie, he should also see the name of the emporium spelled out in florescent-pink lettering—a name he doesn’t immediately recall, either from Brownie’s long-ago report or from recent mention in the tabloid press.
But that shouldn’t matter. That’s not what interests him. What does interest him as he vectors in on the 4
th
street location is the potential for the sort of clandestine investigation he pulled off in California. And it might be worthwhile to cozy up to a few locals, counterparts to the stoners who freelanced opinions on the Venice Beach Boardwalk. It might be interesting to learn if there are any corollaries, if any Hispanics were seen in the vicinity of this crime scene, as went the story of a Venice burnout who, for a nickel bag, described Cliff Grant’s presumed yardman—allegedly seen carting away trash the day of the beheading—as Hispanic. What would that prove, though? Who isn’t blaming Hispanics for damn near everything these days? Hasn’t that become a standard profile on both coasts?
Alert now for anything recognizable, he spots the outline of the bank building a block away. And from a block away, he can see that the bank is no longer a bank. It’s been converted into pub—a poor parody of a pub except for the sign displayed high above the entrance. Flat against the building and catty-corner to the intersection, the sign is painted in a primitive style and depicts a life-size female figure of another era carrying her severed head by the hair.
“Jesus . . . Jesus . . .
Jesus
.”
He stops the car halfway down the block. What are the odds? What are the actual chances of encountering a symbol of such relevance? What kind of a nutjob would ignore this degree of relevance? He wants to laugh and he will as soon as he stops shaking.
At the urging of the motorist behind him, he moves forward into the intersection, then angles past the Gibby Lester establishment. He takes only a fleeting impression, just enough to see that it’s as Brownie described, with the addition of crime scene tape, and that it appears impregnable if he were still inclined to have a look inside.
Any thoughts of scoping out the hospital where Sid Kaplan was slain evaporate as he negotiates his way back to the avenue and heads north.