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  “Peg knew what you had in mind,” Freddie said, infuriatingly calm. “She saw you get that key, she knew you were gonna try to attack her again.”

  Saw him get the key? Impossible, she was two rooms away in the van. Did she follow him? Was that possible? But how did that fire start? Did she start it? Did he brush by it without seeing it, and that’s how it got his shirt? It couldn’t have happened that way. “No,” Josh said, meaning no to just about everything in the world.

  Freddie said, “Josh, you and me, we’ve always had a good professional business relationship.”

  “S.”

  “And I want us to go on having that good professional business relationship, Josh.”

  “S.”

  “But, you know, I figure I’m gonna be laid up a while longer, so it’s Peg you’re gonna be dealing with, and she and me, we don’t want her to have any more trouble with you.”

  She’s having trouble with me? Josh gritted his teeth, but kept silent.

  “Josh? You hear me?”

  “S.”

  “When Peg comes over there, she’s gonna have the same good professional business relationship with you that I do. Right? Right, Josh?”

  Josh’s fantasies lay in crumbled ruins around his feet. Nearby, a Doberman flung himself yet again at the secret door. “S,” Josh said, and hung up.

  15

  So this is what tobacco money buys when it’s blowing the stink off, Mordon Leethe thought, as he got out of the taxi at the Loomis-Heimhocker Research Facility on East Forty-ninth Street. The taxi, driven by a recent immigrant from Alpha Centauri, zipped away, rattling, and Mordon climbed the slate steps in late-morning sunshine toward the well-polished old wood front door with beveled lights, his hand stroking the smooth thick paint on the rail. Thursday, the fifteenth of June, beautiful weather, three days since Mordon’s meeting with Jack Fullerton the Fourth, and at last it looked as though some progress was about to be made. But first, ID.

  Mordon reached the landing at the front door, saw the bell button beside the door, saw the small sign above it—PLEASE RING BELL—and rang it.

  In the oriel to his right, a young black woman sat typing on a very new word processor atop a very old mahogany desk. When Mordon pressed the bell button, she paused in her typing, turned her head just enough to give him a look as flat and impersonal as the gaze of a parakeet, and then, having apparently decided he looked like the sort of person who was permitted onto these premises, she reached under her desk. A faint buzzing sound came from the direction of the door; Mordon pushed on it, the door swung open, and he entered.

  The immediate interior impression was of the entry to an Edith Wharton novel. Emotionally constipated people should now come down those carpeted stairs into this flocked-wallpaper entryway, not telling one another the important things. Instead, the slender black girl, having risen from her desk, appeared in the doorway to the right, hands clasped at her waist as she said, “Yes?”

  “I’m Mr. Leethe, I phoned earlier.”

  “Oh, yes, the doctors are expecting you. I’ll tell them you’re here.”

  She receded back into her room, and he followed into the doorway, where he gazed around at the neatly efficient office while she murmured briefly into the phone. When she hung up, he said, “You had a robbery.”

  “Yes, we did,” she agreed, with a wry little smile; someone she would not have approved of had gained entry.

  “All the equipment is new,” he explained, displaying his powers of observation.

  “I’m still not used to it all yet.” Her fleeting smile came and went. “I thought technological obsolescence was fast. Robbery’s faster.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “The doctors are one flight up. You’ll see them, just at the top of the stairs.”

  “Thank you.”

  Mordon climbed the stairs, thinking that in fact he would not be revealing any emotional privacies in this coming meeting, nor could he expect—or want—any from the doctors Loomis and Heimhocker, so the Wharton setting would be honored, after all.

  Dr. David Loomis, the blond one with the baby fat, stood at the head of the stairs, smiling nervously and offering a hand, which trembled when Mordon shook it. “It’s good to see you, Mr. Leethe.”

  “And you,” Mordon lied.

  Loomis gestured with his spastic hand. “We can talk in the conference room.”

  “Of course.”

  Loomis led him down the hall, and the conference room turned out to be Edith Wharton’s parlor, without the ferns and plant stands. Two red Victorian sofas set at a welcoming angle flanked the fireplace with its polished brass andirons and tools. Tall windows overlooking Forty-ninth Street were discreetly curtained. Garden prints hung on the dark-papered walls.

  Dr. Heimhocker, the skinny one with the Afro, rose from one of the sofas as Loomis and Mordon entered. “You have news, I guess,” he suggested, coming forward to offer a firmer handshake.

  “Possibly,” Mordon said. “A start, anyway, or we think so.”

  “Tea?” asked the skittish Loomis. “Perrier?”

  “No, thank you.” Mordon had no desire to elongate this meeting into a social call, Edith Wharton be damned.

  Heimhocker, who seemed to have better antennae than his partner, said, “Sit down, Mr. Leethe. What kind of start?”

  Mordon took the sofa on the right. Heimhocker (relaxed) and Loomis (tense) sat across from him. An elaborate low Oriental table with inlaid teak filled much of the space between the sofas. Taking a small manila envelope from his inner jacket pocket, Mordon said, “We think we’ve identified your burglar.” He shook out the mug shots onto the Oriental table, slid them across to the others. “He told you his name was Freddie, and that much was true.”

  There were two sets of the mug shots, front and side views, about five years old, courtesy of the Kings County (Brooklyn) District Attorney’s office. Each doctor picked up a set. Loomis gasped, “That’s him! Peter, that’s him!”

  “ ‘Fredric Urban Noon,’ ” read Heimhocker, and raised an eyebrow at Mordon. “Urban?”

  “I believe that was a pope. Perhaps more than one.”

  “That explains it,” Heimhocker agreed, and looked at the pictures some more. “He wasn’t happy when these were taken, was he?”

  “He was going to jail.”

  “Of course.” Heimhocker placed the mug shots before him on the table. “When do we go talk to Mr. Noon?”

  Mordon looked blank. “We?”

  “David and I are his doctors,” Heimhocker said.

  “Oh, come now.”

  “We gave him the injection, that makes—”

  “One moment, Doctor,” Mordon said. Reaching across the table, he picked up the one set of mug shots from its surface and plucked the other from Loomis’s trembling hand. “You met this fellow once,” he pointed out, “as he was robbing your offices. You gave him one injection, one unethical and probably illegal injection. You can’t—”

  “The patient left our care without our approval,” Heimhocker interrupted. It seemed he could be as steely cold as Mordon himself. Mordon waited, alert, and Heimhocker went on, “It was never our intention to leave him without proper medical care, without thorough medical observation. We brought the problem of his disappearance to you, which makes you our agent in this matter. You now say—”

  “Hardly, Doctor, hardly your agent. I’m employed by—”

  “You were talking, a minute ago, about ethics?”

  A slippery slope here. Mordon asked himself, Do I want to make enemies of these people? What’s the profit in it? On the other hand, what do they want? He said, “Dr. Heimhocker, I don’t believe we have a disparity of interest here. You want to see the result of your experiment, naturally, and NAABOR wants to see if the result of your experiment is useful in any other way.”

  Heimhocker’s reaction was to display even greater hostility and suspicion. “What other way?”

  Mordon’s irritation broke the s
urface of his professional calm. “Nothing to do with you,” he snapped. “We’re not talking vivisection here, for God’s sake.”

  “What are you talking?”

  “I don’t see in what way that matters to you. The fellow’s a thief, he robbed you, he stole all your office equipment, what are you trying to protect him for?”

  “All we’re trying to protect,” Heimhocker said, while beside him Loomis’s head bobbed in frantic agreement, “is the integrity of our experiment. What we are thinking about, quite frankly, Mr. Leethe, David and I, what we are thinking about is the judgment of our peers, our peers, when we publish. We made a mistake, I grant you that, but the mistake wasn’t using whatsisname, Fredric Noon, Fredric Urban Noon, using him for our experimental subject. The mistake was in letting him get away. You say you know where he is, and we say, we’re not going to let—”

  “No, I didn’t say that.”

  “—him get away again. What do you mean? Of course that’s what you said.”

  “I did not.”

  “We heard you,” Loomis chimed in. “We both heard you.”

  “What I said,” Mordon carefully explained, “was that we know who he is. He left fingerprints in your guest room, our expert lifted them—”

  “And left a mess behind.”

  “Irrelevant, David.”

  “Still.”

  Mordon said, “May I go on?”

  “I’m sorry,” Loomis said. “Yes, please do. You know who he is, but you don’t know where he is? That’s silly.”

  “Is it? The man is not on parole, not wanted for any crime—”

  “Except the burglary here,” Heimhocker interrupted.

  “Well, no,” Mordon said. “In the first place, it was a robbery, not a burglary, and in—”

  Loomis said, “What’s the difference? It’s the same thing.”

  “A burglary is a theft in unoccupied premises,” Mordon explained. “If the premises are occupied, it’s robbery, a more serious crime. Whether or not the occupants and the criminal interact.”

  “Then he’s wanted for robbery,” Heimhocker said.

  “The robbery was reported, by you,” Mordon told him, “but there’s been no official report linking Fredric Noon to the crime.”

  “For God’s sake, why not?”

  “Well, just from your point of view,” Mordon said, “how much do you want Fredric Noon in jail from now on, for the rest of his life, absolutely unavailable to you for observation and experimentation?”

  “We’ve done the experiment.”

  “And the observation?”

  Loomis said, “Peter, he’s right.” Turning to Mordon, he said, “But the fingerprint man was from the police.”

  “Moonlighting,” Mordon explained. “A few members of the New York Police Department are unofficially helping NAABOR in this matter. I’m going to see one of them next, on the question of how we make contact with Mr. Noon.” Tucking the mug shots away again in their envelope, and returning the envelope to his jacket pocket, he said, “Before seeing him, I needed a positive identification that we were on the track of the right man.” Rising, he said, “Now I know we are, I can proceed.”

  The two doctors got to their feet, Heimhocker fixing Mordon with a stern eye as he said, “You’ll keep us informed of progress, of course.”

  “Of course,” Mordon said, and thought, I’m lying. He knows I’m lying. I know he knows I’m lying. But does he know I know he knows I’m lying? And does it make any difference? Well, time would tell. “I can find my own way out, thank you,” he said, and departed.

  16

  A restaurant can be a very satisfying business. Barney Beuler found that so, certainly. It had so many advantages. For instance, it always gave you a place to go if you wanted a meal, but you it didn’t cost an arm and a leg. It gave you, as well, a loyal—or at least fearful—kitchen staff of illegals, always available for some extra little chore like repainting the apartment or standing on line at the Motor Vehicle or breaking some fucking wisenheimer’s leg. It also made a nice supplement to your NYPD sergeant’s salary (acting lieutenant, Organized Crime Detail) in your piece of the legit profit, of course, but more importantly in the skim. And it helped to make your personal and financial affairs so complex and fuzzy that the shooflys could never quite get enough of a handle on you to drag you before the corruption board.

  The downside was that, in the six years Barney Beuler had been a minor partner—one of five—in Comaldo Ristorante on West Fifty-sixth Street, he’d gained eighty-five pounds, all of it cholesterol. It was true he’d die happy; it was also true it would be soon.

  Another advantage of Barney’s relationship with Comaldo was that it made a perfect place to meet someone like the attorney Mordon Leethe. The NYPD frowned on its cops using department time and department equipment and department clout on nondepartment matters, but what did Barney Beuler have to sell to a big multinational corporation like NAABOR except his NYPD access? I mean, get real. A man with three ex-wives, a current wife, a current girlfriend, a very small drug habit (strictly strictly recreational), two bloodsuckers he’s paying off to keep their mouths shut and himself out of jail, a condo on Saint Thomas, a house and a boat on the north shore of Long Island, and a six-room apartment on Riverside Drive overlooking the Hudson from eleven stories up needs these little extra sources of income to make ends meet, as any sensible person realizes.

  Barney was having lunch at “his” table near the front (it was his and the rest of the partners’ table every midday till 12:45, when, if none of them had showed up, it would be given away as needed, Comaldo always doing a brisk lunchtime trade) when he saw Mordon Leethe come in with a tall skinny young guy who looked like Ichabod Crane. Ich would be one of the recent law school graduate employees of Leethe’s firm and would not know he was the beard in this meeting between Leethe and Barney; the sap would think he was being earmarked for the big time. Well, maybe he was; stranger things have happened. Every day.

  Barney, who was lunching with one copartner and two Long Island boating friends, gave Leethe the smiling nod of a restaurateur spying a good customer, and Leethe responded with the dignified nod of that good customer. He and Ich were shown to a table near the rear, one selected earlier by Barney because the acoustics at that back-corner location were particularly good if you didn’t want your conversation overheard.

  Barney kept his attention on his own table and food and companions, but nevertheless was also aware when Leethe and Ich ordered their lunches, and when they were given their bread, their water, and their olive oil. Only then, “Be right back,” Barney told his pals, filled his mouth with gnocchi, and got to his feet.

  Every year, it seemed, it was a little harder to squeeze between the tables. Seemed like the customers sat with their chairs farther back than they used to. Maybe everybody was getting fat.

  Still, Barney eventually forced his way through the clientele to that rear table, where he did his complete boniface number, smiling broadly, extending his hand out across the table, bowing from the general vicinity of his waist as he said, “How are ya, Mr. Leethe? Been a while.”

  “I’ve missed the place, Barney,” Leethe said, showing one of his own false smiles as he laid a dead bird into Barney’s hand.

  Barney shook the dead bird, returned it, and said, “How you been keepin, Mr. Leethe?”

  “Just fine, Barney. That tip you gave me on the brandy was perfect, thank you for it.”

  The “brandy,” of course, was the minor punk and thief called Fredric Urban Noon, who had turned out to be the perp Leethe was looking for. Barney grinned and said, “My pleasure, Mr. Leethe, I’m glad it worked out. Speaking of brandy and suchlike, you and your companion having some wine this lunchtime?”

  “No, Barney, not today, we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us back at the shop.” The false smile took in Ich Crane: “Right, Jeff?”

  “Right,” Ich said, and sat at attention. He was mostly Adam’s apple, over a yellow tie.
Who’d told him yellow ties were still in?

  “Nevertheless, Mr. Leethe,” Barney said, “I’d like you to just cast an eye over our new wine list. I’m not trying to tempt you—”

  “You couldn’t, Barney,” Leethe said, chuckling at his underling, who chuckled back.

  “I’m sure I couldn’t. But for your future reference, I’d just like you to see some of the Italians we got in. Okay?”

  “Be happy to look at it, Barney,” Leethe agreed.

  “Be right back.”

  Barney went into the kitchen, took the sheet of paper he’d earlier worked up on the restaurant’s computer—the same computer that did the menus, the billing, and the inventory—slipped it into the middle of one of the restaurant’s large wine books, and went back to Leethe’s table, where he presented the book with a flourish and said, “Just take a look at that.”

  Leethe found the insert right away, of course, and Barney watched him study it with just as much pleasure as if it had actually been a list of fine Italian wines. What the insert was, though, was a letter. Printed in three colors and four different typefaces, it looked like an expensive print job, and what it said was:

  NEW YORK STATE GAMING AUTHORITY

  WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER #2

  NEW YORK, NY 10001

  212-555-1995

  June 16, 1995

   

  Mr. Fredric U. Noon

  124-87 130th Crescent

  Ozone Park, NY 11333

   

  Dear Mr. Noon:

   

  CONGRATULATIONS!

   

  As you may know, the New York State Gaming Authority, in response to a consent order from the New York State Supreme Court, dated September 25, 1989, has been required to make a reimbursement of a certain percentage of the “tote” in the various gaming operations under the Authority’s control, due to a computer malfunction between February 9, 1982, and October 1, 1986. The class-action suit brought against the Gaming Authority was completely satisfied by that court action.