Chapter Fourteen: RESULTS MAY VARY

It was four o’clock. I called Paul Windmann to tell him that I was coming to return his stolen iPod. He said it wasn’t a good time, that he’d come to my office later and get it.

I said I’d see him in ten minutes and hung up.

I put his four orange 50 Euro notes in my pocket in case he wanted a refund. And I took my gun, if the money wasn’t enough.

Outside my building, the blond kid, FL!P, was loitering, seated on the brass-covered Siamese standpipe. He was holding his skateboard with two hands, scraping one edge against the concrete. Engrossed in what he was doing, he didn’t see me until I was flagging down a cab. He ran over shouting, “Hey, dude, wait. I got something to give you.”

He reached into a pocket of his baggy pants and tugged out a square cream-colored envelope and handed it to me.

The envelope was blank except for the embossed return address: The Peer Group, on West 21st Street in Chelsea. Peer. I remembered the call I’d answered in Owl’s hotel room, the message that Michael Cassidy should call the pier office. Not pier, Peer.

The P.R. firm Tigger had mentioned, run by the un-French Coy d’Loy. West 21st Street in Chelsea. It was the same block as on those sales handbills I’d found in Owl’s pocket.

The envelope’s flap was unsealed. Inside was an invitation to a film festival screening that evening and the afterparty being held at The Wiggle Room on Rivington.

I folded it into my pocket.

“You’ll go, right?” he asked. “I’m supposed to find out.”

“Find out for whom? Your sugar mama?”

“Look, you goin’ or not? It’ll be worth it to you.”

A cab pulled to the curb. I got in, but before I shut the door, I asked the kid, “You sic those three heavies on me? The Russians looking for Michael Cassidy?”

“You know where she is?” he asked eagerly, his eyes lighting up.

I slammed the door and gave the driver the address for the Crystalview, leaving the kid standing there.

I leaned back, reread the invitation. It was for a screening of Reneg, the new film by Ethan Ore.

The Peer Group. Chelsea. Michael Cassidy’s ex-husband.

Yeh, I’d be going to the movies tonight.

The cabbie let me off right in front of Windmann’s building, just below the Holland Tunnel entrance, on Washington Street between Vestry and Debrosses. I’d never seen it before, but I’d read about its construction. One of the luxury condo high-rises that had gone up in recent years on a newly redeveloped waterfront, an area so beautiful it made you think you’d stumbled upon a completely different city.

The Crystalview had been open for business for over a year, but a postman friend of mine told me that so far they only had a twenty percent occupancy, or what only amounted to four full floors of the twenty-story stovepipe-shaped monstrosity.

Security cameras in the lobby, but no doorman and no one behind the obsidian-topped maplewood front desk. If eighty percent of their units were empty, they probably didn’t have enough to cover the expense of a full staff yet.

To let people in, there was a fancy, high-tech house-phone system by the front door, with a keypad and a directory showing apartment numbers with spaces beside them for names, most of which were blank. I found Windmann’s name and entered the corresponding number on the pad. No answer. I tried again, but still no response. I guessed he didn’t want to see me. Well, too bad, I was going to see him.

I entered the numbers of a few other units with names showing, but no one else answered me either. Maybe the place was a Marie Celeste.

An elevator door opened and a Chinese deliveryman stepped into the lobby. He left a stack of menus at the front desk, then held the door open for me on his way out.

I considered taking the stairs up to Windmann’s, but his apartment was on the nineteenth floor. I’d never make it. I hadn’t eaten anything since Wednesday dinner. I’d been operating solely on stored fats and the buzz of the hunt.

My lonely elevator ride up to nineteen was uninterrupted. I felt the oppression of all those empty units around me as I rose by and above them. Unhaunted spaces. It gave me the willies, that vacancy, that vacuum, like a potent sample of the nothingness that may attend us all after death. Then my ears popped and I yawned some to clear them. I hated elevators.

Ding. At the nineteenth floor, I walked down the hall past five closed doors until I got to Windmann’s and stopped.

His door was ajar.

As a kid, I never got that pun, the door is a jar, whenever I came across it in one of the jokes-and-riddles books I used to pore over, trying to figure out the answers. At first I didn’t understand it, but even once I did “get it,” I never thought it very funny.

I didn’t think so now either.

I’d been encountering too many partially open doors today. Normally in New York City that didn’t happen so often, especially not with a pneumatic-hinged door like this, which should’ve closed silently of its own weight.

I could see why it hadn’t: a corner of the inside front mat stuck out and blocked it. I couldn’t tell if it had been placed that way intentionally or was just something that happened to happen.

After all, accidents happened.

I took out my gun and, keeping to one side, eased the door open with my fingertips before poking my head in. Nothing, no movement, no sound. A tall urn with three umbrellas in it stood under a hall mirror.

I entered crabwise, letting the door shut behind me, re-straightening the floor mat so it closed completely this time.

I inhaled through my nose and smelled it. An acrid odor wafting on the climate-controlled air. Sulfurous, it prickled my nostrils. The residue of a certain kind of burning. Cordite. Gunsmoke.

I lifted my gun and, very carefully, slid a live one into the chamber, trying to be quiet about it. But within that silent apartment it was like chiseling my name in stone.

I looked, I listened, I waited. More silence, more stillness, not even a reassuring gurgle from the pipes in the walls, everything was triple-insulated.

I walked forward, my sneakers whispering softly. There was a dusty outline on the parquet floor as if a narrow rug used to lie there.

At the end of the hallway, I came to a perfectly ordinary, empty room, lit a caustic orange by late-afternoon sunshine.

I stayed in the mouth of the hallway and helloed a few times, listening after each hello like I was measuring the depths and outer reaches with sonar. I got no response.

After a while, I felt a little silly, but only a little. I’d have felt a lot sillier getting shot. That stink in the air wasn’t Etruscan Musk, a gun had gone off recently. So I waited some more before finally going in.

No one home. I walked around. No one in the kitchen or bedroom, or bedroom closet or bathroom. I returned to the living room, at a loss for what to do. Wait with folded hands? Start poking around? Raid the fridge?

I was drawn to the south-facing floor-to-ceiling window of high-stress glass. It overlooked the skyline of lower Manhattan and, at this height, provided a view of Ground Zero.

Prophetically named. Seven years later, still nothing more than ground, a zero. Just two days before, the first steel beam of the memorial museum had finally been put in place. Great, I thought, now if only they can agree on the curtains. What really should’ve been done was transform it into a memorial park. At least now it would be something, instead of a pit, an unfilled hole, an open grave. Not an idle allusion: the people who died that day were crushed and their remains remained, now permanently a part of the island itself.

I’d won $50 on a scratch ticket the night before and cashed it that morning. How lucky can you get? Saw the first tower hit on TV, thought it had to be a hoax. Tigger was already up on the roof standing against the maddeningly clear blue sky. Not one single fiber of cloud to obscure the southern view. No hoax, it was all really happening. Then it happened again. Later, when I had binoculars to my eyes and Tigger asked, “Are those ribbons? What are those swatches of color falling from the south tower?” I put the binoculars down, and with the naked eye they did look like bright ribbons or banners fluttering in descent, and the falling glass and tumbling metal shards only a tinsel and confetti cascade. Tigger wept. I couldn’t. Nothing surprised me after a while, until the next morning when the sun came up—I’d have taken odds that that was no longer a sure thing. I went out for the paper at dawn. Had to go to Grand Central for it, walking thirty blocks up a vacant First Avenue empty of traffic but teeming with ghosts, an invisible legion of thousands marching shoulder-to-shoulder toward their common commute. Along the way, every available surface—bus kiosk, plywood construction wall, payphone window—was papered with MISSING posters. Once upon a time, a missing poster would’ve quickened my pulse with the hint of a case, the scent of a chase. But no one was missing, they just weren’t coming home.

I felt dizzy, had to steady myself, my palm on the window glass. I felt the choppy throb of a news copter going by. I turned away. Get a grip, Payton, work, work it out, work is the answer. I asked myself, What would Blue’s Clues do?

I went over and looked behind the couch, a big mahogany affair with fluffed-up cushions upholstered in wine-dark brocade.

And there he was.

Paul Windmann lay on the ground collapsed in the shape of a backward dollar sign. His body on a long narrow rug, the sort found in entryway halls. One corner of the rug was still bunched up where someone had grasped it to drag it and its load out of sight behind the couch. Done quickly before he bled out, since no marks of it showed on the floor. On the rug however, a wide blot of blood now surrounded him like a crimson moat.

In the fleshy hollow just below his chin was a raw bullet hole, an entry wound. Another corresponding hole was at the top of his forehead below the hairline. A not very big exit wound, a small caliber, I guessed.

Only I didn’t have to guess, the gun glinted between his thighs. A square, silver-plated .22 neat as an Art Deco ashtray, exactly like the one I’d seen in Sayre Rauth’s hands.

I sighed and shook my head. I had no interest in tampering with evidence. But that wasn’t going to stop me.

I straddled Windmann’s body, careful not to step in his blood. It was like playing a twisted game of Twister, trying not to put right foot down on red.

Tucking my hand inside my sleeve, I picked up the pistol. Its snub barrel was warm, and reeked. I flicked its safety on before sliding it into my back pocket.

I was disturbing a scene that a moment before might’ve passed for suicide. Now it was nothing but murder. The angle of the shot told me something, though. There’d been a struggle over the gun and Windmann had lost. Everything.

I left the place without searching further. This time I skipped the elevator and headed for the stairs. And walked directly into the view of a security cam mounted in a corner of the facing hallway.

I was in a cold sweat about it for a second, except there was nothing to do but tuck my chin in and pray.

Walking underneath, I saw its cables hung loose in their factory-sealed plastic. It hadn’t been hooked up yet.

A block away from the Crystalview, I found a pay-phone and dialed Paul Windmann’s number, let it ring twice and hung up, just so my office phone wouldn’t be his last incoming call in case anyone dialed *69.

Then I caught a cab, because my legs were feeling wobbly.

There was a small television screen fitted into the back of the driver’s seat displaying a Channel 7 newsfeed. It ran an update on the death of Craig Wales, providing the latest tidbit: the police, it said, were searching for a woman suspected of providing Wales with the fatal dose. I switched off the TV and rode in silence.

The driver took an unexpected turn, swinging us crosstown on Twelfth Street between Seventh and Greenwich Avenues. It was a narrow ancient lane of unpaved cobblestones, picturesque but bumpy as hell. Maybe the cabbie thought I was a tourist.

With every swerve and hard bounce, I felt the gun in my rear waistband and the other in my back pocket pressing against me, two loaded guns shoved in my back. I fought the urge to take them out and recheck their safeties.

I had the driver drop me a block from my building. I’d become wary of my street door. No one was waiting outside it for me though.

I checked the opposite side of the street as I got closer, watchful for any sudden movement. But it was the end of a workday in Manhattan—there was nothing but sudden movements. People running to make buses or to beat that other guy to a disgorging cab. I gave up.

At the Siamese standpipe where FL!P had been seated waiting for me before, I saw curved white scratches on the sidewalk made by his whetting the edge of his skateboard like honing a tool.

I unlocked my street door and stepped in. Nobody jumped me in the vestibule. It was a good start. How I meant to go on.

The stairwell was empty. I climbed up. Eye-level with the upper floor, I peered through the railing, but no one was there either. I went the rest of the way up. My office door was locked. I opened it, looked in. There was no one inside. I entered and—

Jumped a foot as the downstairs doorbuzzer buzzed.

Shit. Couldn’t even sit down.