Stay (6 page)

I dreamt of the woman I had found on patrol nine years ago drowned in her tub, eyes turning to glue, the water so still I knew her heart hadn’t beaten in days. Once again I felt the slow, inevitable realization that the air in my lungs was still and stale, that I was dead, too. I woke at three in the morning and thought of how Julia had shaken me fiercely from the same dream six months ago and put her hand on my beating heart and my hand on hers, and told me I was alive, alive.

I had breakfast in my room, then called information. They had no Tammy Foster listed, no Geordie Karp. No Tammy Karp or Geordie Foster. Not in Greenwich Village or anywhere else in Manhattan. It would have been convenient to call ahead and make sure she was there.

At nine in the morning, the concession shops were deserted but none of them sold underwear. Guests might forget toothbrushes, they might forget a pen, their vitamins, a comb, but they didn’t usually forget underwear. I had remembered the perfect change of clothes, down to jewelry, brought credit card and money and socks and shoes, but had not thought of a coat or underpants. We only recognize we have an autopilot when it goes horribly wrong.

Even in dirty clothes it was a pleasant walk to Saks in the kind of sunlight New York specializes in at the beginning of autumn: too warm in the sun, too cold in the shade without a coat. There was never quite enough space on the sidewalk to stride, and after I bought underwear and toiletries I walked back along Fifth all the way to East Fifty-seventh, just so that I could swing my arms. St. Patrick’s Cathedral, St. Thomas’s Church, the Fifth Avenue Church: a similar concentration of churches per square mile as the poor Baptist South, though probably not as well attended. Central Park beckoned briefly, but I resolutely turned left and kept walking. Move, don’t think.

After I’d changed I didn’t pause to talk to the concierge or to get a map but walked back out again, to the subway at Fifth and Fifty-third, and down into the stink of diesel fume and stale urine to catch the F train. If I could get to Washington Square Park, all I had to do was walk west to find Seventh Avenue. On the platform I tried to shut down my senses, close out the noise, the carbon-slippery air, the three middle-aged businessmen in expensive coats talking in tight voices about some deal that had gone south. A redheaded boy on crutches who couldn’t have been more than fifteen stood next to the men, whose discussion had now escalated to the kind of argument people have when they’re looking for someone else to blame. The boy stood too close. Any of those men could lash out in frustration and the boy would tumble off the platform onto enough electricity to hard-boil his eyes in four seconds. Anyone could push any of us off. I looked behind me. No one. I stepped back several feet and tried to breathe normally. There could have been someone there. I should not have had to look. I should have known. Be present, stay alert: the first rule of self-defense. But then I wouldn’t be able to shut out the noise and stink and tension around me.

The train was not full. No one paid attention to anyone else as we racketed past signs for Rockefeller Center, Forty-second Street, Herald Square. The same tunnels, different signs. It could have been an episode of
The Twilight Zone
: dead people traveling in Charon’s twenty-first-century barge. When I got off at Fourth Street, the steps were too steep, and the higher I climbed the less oxygen I seemed able to pull into my lungs, but at the top, outside, the sun still shone. Again, I had that brief sense of vertigo. I walked without thinking, without direction, just to be walking, to be not trapped among the women with cross-slung purses and men with messenger bags who radiated aggression and fear, and eventually the press thinned and I could breathe, I could begin to separate out different packets of information—a smell from a shout from a flash of color—and I found I was heading south on La Guardia Place. At the next cross street, Bleecker, I turned right and headed west.

I passed the Bitter End, “New York’s Oldest Rock Club,” and two or three blocks later the Greenwich Village Funeral Home. Old rock stars never die. Right again, north on Sixth, because it was wider, and there was less information per square foot, but before I could head north and west on West Fourth I was caught by the flash and thud of a ball and the slip and play of tree shadow on the sweat-sheened arms of two men rising to the basket, and I had to stop because the information made no sense: taxi honk, thump of ball, back-and-forth flash of green, then white, as money and drugs change hands, fence around a paved court, crunch of fallen leaves, screech of tire on asphalt. And then it was clear: pickup basketball on an urban court around which rip-off-the-tourist drug deals met gentrified neighborhood in early autumn sunshine. I leaned on the wire fence around the court, let it dig into my back, breathed until my heart slowed. I knew where I was. I started to walk. I knew why I was there. I swang my arms. I knew where I was going. My arms would not swing properly. The tension in my shoulders would not let go.

The last time I had had to consciously relax as I walked a city street was nearly eleven years ago, during my first weeks on patrol with the Atlanta PD. Then, I had reared at every shadow, flooded with adrenaline at every human voice, wondering if this was the situation that would get away from me, if that might be the man who would be bigger or faster or stronger. I had learned after a while to recalibrate my sense settings, to distinguish the shout from a bar doorway that meant I am about to shove this shank in your kidney from the one that said Damn, I feel good today!, to differentiate the flash of movement on a sunlit downtown street that signaled the sudden attack from the one that meant someone had just realized he was late for his meeting and had to run. You had to trust your unconscious mind to understand the whole picture; it can process faster than thought. It will let you know if the charging man has bared teeth and mismatched socks, or whether he is wearing a silk and cashmere suit. It will add that information to whether he is growling or merely cursing his own idiocy under his breath, and whether his smell is Mogen David or something by Calvin Klein, and then flash a red or green light to your adrenal glands, all between one heartbeat and the next. If you adjust your conscious filters to the appropriate setting, you can relax and let your subconscious take care of things. It’s something I used to be good at.

I kept walking north and west on West Fourth, swinging my arms, telling myself I was relaxed. If you walk as though your mind is easy, your mind believes your body and becomes easy. If your mind is easy, your body believes it and becomes easy: a basic feedback loop. I half closed my eyes, ignored the noise around me, imagined my wrists loose and my fingers relaxed. Breathe, stride, swing. By the time I turned north on Seventh I didn’t have to think about it anymore.

The ground floor of 95 Seventh Avenue South turned out to be a pizzeria, but there was a doorway to the left, and three neat black bell pushes and an intercom grille. No mailboxes. I took thin leather gloves from my jacket pocket and put them on.

I tried the door: locked. None of the buttons were identified by apartment number, but two of them had names, Jhaing and Donato. I pushed each button in turn. The grille crackled.

“Yeah?” A man’s voice, young.

“Package,” I said.

“Uh, so you could put it in the mailbox.”

“Won’t fit the mailbox.”

“Then leave it in the lobby. Jeez…”

New York, I reminded myself. “I can’t get in to get to the lobby, asshole, because I’m not from the goddamn post office, okay? If you don’t want the package, then fuck you and have a nice day.”

“Whoa! Okay, okay. Jeez. You’d think—” Whatever I was supposed to think was drowned out by the buzzer and I pushed the door open. The mailboxes were on the right, three of them, and all were labeled: Apt. A: Jhiang, Apt. B: Dutourd, Apt. C: Donato, Karp, Foster. They were locked.

The stairs were made of a glittery stone composite and didn’t creak. I stopped halfway up the first flight and sniffed: something summery and old-fashioned. Lavender. My face tightened as adrenaline nudged up my blood pressure: this was not the kind of place I would expect to find Tammy, or the darling of retail sales, Mr. Karp.

The first floor was carpeted in neutral beige. The green-painted door said it was Apt. A. The second floor was a well-finished hardwood, with a cheerful rag rug and a vase of dried flowers on a Chippendale hall table. Probably the source of the lavender scent. I kept going, and hadn’t quite reached the third floor when a door banged open above me and a slightly built man hurried along the hallway to the stairs. I went perfectly still.

He literally jumped when he saw me.

“Who the fuck are you?”

Early twenties, black hair, black eyes, left ear pierced twice, and the kind of clothes that didn’t fit with the probable rent of his apartment.

“I said, who the—”

My heart was pumping smoothly. “I’m looking for Tammy Foster.”

“She doesn’t live here.”

“I’m still looking for her.”

He tensed and backed up. “You the police?”

“No.”

“My mom send you?”

“No.” Oxygen-rich blood coursed through dilated blood vessels. “Where is Tammy?”

He frowned but his shoulders came down a fraction. “Why do you care?”

My muscles were relaxed and my voice, when I spoke, sounded almost gentle. “I don’t care, particularly, but you will tell me—”

“I don’t—”

“—where she is and why her name is on your mailbox.”

“There’s no law against that. Is there?”

“We’ll talk about it inside, Mr. Donat0.” I mounted another step, lightly, easily, walking right at him, and he blinked, then gave in.

The hall smelled of old dishwater and uncleaned toilet and there were boot marks on the paintwork. He led me into the living room, where he hurriedly cleared takeout cartons, and a stack of what appeared to be bad charcoal sketches, from a love seat, looking embarrassed and about seventeen years old. I ignored the couch and stepped back into the hallway, stuck my head in the kitchen, then the filthy bathroom and the mess and disorder of the bedroom. A nice apartment, clearly beyond this boy’s apparent means, both economic and psychological. It was also clear that only one person lived here. “Give me her forwarding address.”

“What?”

“Tammy Foster’s forwarding address.”

“I don’t have that!” He sounded genuinely surprised.

“Tell me where you send her mail.”

“But I don’t.”

He began to shift from foot to foot. He wasn’t lying. “Explain.”

“It’s like, you know, an arrangement.” I waited. “They pay me. This is Mom’s apartment. I mean she pays the rent but I live here. She doesn’t pay for, you know, food or clothes because she says if I want to waste my time on— Right, okay. So this dude pays me a few bucks a week to collect their mail, and that’s about, you know, it.” He shrugged with his thin arms, inarticulately.

“Does Karp or Foster come and get it?”

“No. I just toss it in the garbage.”

“You throw their mail in the garbage.”

“Well, yeah.”

It would be so easy—my right hand on his right wrist, pull and step, left arm across his throat, whirl and spread my arms, like a dance, and he would drop spine-down over my thigh, snap: less than three seconds, start to finish—but a broken boy would help nothing. The adrenaline ebbed.

“Do you have any mail addressed to them that you haven’t thrown away yet?”

“Yeah.”

“Give it to me.” In the absence of adrenaline I felt mounting irritation.

“Uh, isn’t opening other people’s mail like a federal offense?”

“It’s exactly like a federal offense. So is aggravated assault.”

I reached slowly into my inside pocket, giving him time to register the fact that I wore gloves.

“Whoa! I was just—”

“Bring me the mail.” He scuttled off into the kitchen and came back with five envelopes and two catalogues, all obviously junk apart from one white envelope with a familiar blue logo. “Give me the one from American Express.” It was addressed to George G. Karp. I opened it. A bill. Not a solicitation, but a regular bill. I scanned the list of charges. It seemed genuine. I put it in my pocket. “What else do they get?”

“Stuff. I don’t keep track, you know?”

“Visa? Utility bills?”

“Yeah, like that.”

Why would someone go to the trouble of setting up a mail drop and getting bills and other correspondence mailed to it, only to have those bills thrown away? “How much does he pay?”

“It used to be twenty-five a week, but when he added the Foster chick’s name, I told him, man, I can’t do it for less than forty.”

“Cash?”

“Well, duh. Every other Thursday, in the mail. Paid last week.”

I reached into my jacket again. Before he had backed up more than two steps I pulled out my wallet. He bobbed his head: a combination of relief and greed. I extracted five crisp twenties. “I want to know everything you know about Karp and Foster.”

I put my gloves in my pocket and walked around the Village for a while. Donato had not been able to remember what bills had come or what the cycle was, and he couldn’t describe Karp except that he had, you know, maybe sort of blondish hair? He’d only met him, like, once. Tammy he had never seen. I had taken back four of the twenties.

Tammy had to be here. She’d told Dornan this was where she was going after Naples. Her credit card confirmed it. I had followed the money and it led nowhere except back to Tammy's Atlanta apartment and to a mail drop. But if she hadn't lied to Dornan, then she was here with Karp. Find Karp, find Tammy. I knew Karp was somewhere close: his American Express showed dozens of charges to Manhattan restaurants, mainly in midtown, SoHo, and the Village, with a few in Brooklyn.

I wandered past endless coffeehouses on MacDougal Street. It was only eleven o’clock, not yet lunchtime, but the crowds were growing, the air starting to feel used. A double-decker bus stuffed with tourists rumbled past.

Inside the café there was one spare table and a line at the counter. Most of the people sitting and sipping were talking— half to friends, the other half to their phones. One woman tapped diligently on her tiny keypad and frowned at the display. The web. Of course. You had to have an official billing address for a credit card or utility, but you could pay by phone or online.

Somewhere, Karp would have an e-mail address, maybe even a business website. I didn’t have my laptop and my phone screen was tiny, its processing power more suited to instant text than a web search.

A hard-eyed young thing behind the counter asked me what she could get me. I ordered latte, and dropped two ones in the tip jar. “Where’s the nearest library?” I asked.

“Library? Public library?”

“Yes. Where is it?”

“Hold on.” She called back over her shoulder to the man behind the espresso machine. “Hal, the library’s at Sixth and Tenth, right?”

“Around there, yeah.”

She turned back to the counter and spoke to the customer behind me. “Get you something?”