The Manhattan Hunt Club

CHAPTER 26

Mary Converse looked at the old woman staring back at her from the mirror. Mary was only forty-one, but the woman she was looking at couldn't have been a day under fifty-five. Gray was showing in her hair-hair that seemed to have become thinner overnight. Her eyes were puffy from lack of sleep, and a cobweb of wrinkles spread out from their corners. Her complexion looked distinctly unhealthy, like that of a heavy smoker, even though she'd smoked her last cigarette the day she found out she was pregnant with Jeff.

Jeff.

The vision in the mirror shimmered as her eyes filled with tears.

How was she going to do it? How was she going to get through this day? How was she going to sit in St. Patrick's Cathedral and say good-bye to her only child?

Be strong, she told herself. The Lord will never give you a load too heavy for you to bear. But she'd already been on her knees most of the night, praying for Jeff's immortal soul, begging every saint she could think of to intervene with God on her son's behalf. Her fingers were stiff from counting the decades of the rosary, and her knees were so sore that she wasn't even sure she'd be able to genuflect as she entered the cathedral.

But still she'd kept praying, begging for a sign that Jeff's sins had been forgiven and that he'd died in a state of grace.

None had come.

Taking a deep breath, Mary turned on the tap, soaked a washcloth in cold water, and wiped away her tears. God helps those who help themselves, she reminded herself. Stripping off her bathrobe and nightgown, she turned the shower on full force-and ice cold-then took a deep breath and stepped in. The freezing spray made her gasp, but she resisted the temptation of hot water and began scrubbing away the exhaustion of her sleepless night. After two minutes she could stand it no longer. Shivering, she shut off the water, stepped out of the stall, and wrapped herself in a bath towel.

The face that looked back at her from the mirror looked a little better: at least her complexion wasn't quite as sallow. Half an hour later, her hair dried and arranged into a tight French twist, dressed in the same black suit she'd worn to her mother's funeral five years ago, she surveyed herself one last time. Maybe-with the help of God-she'd get through the day.

And then the phone rang.

The sound so startled her that she almost dropped her cup, barely avoiding having coffee splash down the front of her suit. She set the cup on the counter as the phone rang again, and as she reached for the receiver, glanced at the little screen displaying the caller's identification.

The number on the display meant nothing to her.

She glanced at the clock: not even seven-thirty yet. Why would someone she didn't know be calling her at this hour?

The phone rang a third time. She knew she shouldn't answer it-she'd gotten the phone with caller ID to combat a stream of crank calls during the trial.

The phone rang again, and then the answering machine picked it up. After she heard her own voice inform the caller that she couldn't come to the phone, another voice, badly garbled, began to speak.

A frantic voice, shouting into the machine.

"… Mo-are you… it's me, Mo-"

Mary's hand jerked away from the phone as if she'd been stung. But as the words sank in, an incoherent cry rose in her throat and she snatched up the receiver.

"Who is this?" she asked. Her voice rose. "Who are you?"

The phone at the other end crackled, cutting in and out, but between the gaps of silence, she heard a voice: "Mom, it… me… I… dead…"

"Jeff?" Mary breathed. "Jeff? Is that you?"

The other phone crackled a couple of more times, and she thought she heard the voice again. Then there was nothing but silence.

For almost a minute Mary kept the phone pressed to her ear, willing the voice at the other end to speak again, but the silence only dragged on, and finally she put the receiver back on the cradle. As the impossibility of what she'd heard slowly sank in, she tried to tell herself that it hadn't happened, that she'd only imagined she heard the words, only imagined she recognized the voice.

Almost against her own will, she picked up the receiver again and dialed *69. She pressed the phone against her ear, listening.

There was a click at the other end, and then a voice spoke.

An automated voice.

"This is your last call return service…" She listened to the recorded message, then pressed 1 to have the calling number dialed.

Another automated voice came on the line. "The cellular subscriber you are calling is either out of range or-"

Cutting the call short, she tried calling the number twice more; twice more the same message was repeated.

At eight o'clock, when she could no longer put off leaving for the city, Mary tried the number one last time.

Nothing.

It wasn't him, she told herself as she left the apartment. It couldn't have been.

But even as she silently repeated the words, she recalled the sound of Jeff's voice.

Carolyn Randall woke earlier than usual that morning, and her first impulse was to roll over and go back to sleep. She and Perry had been to a party the night before-a party where she had met three movie stars as well as her favorite fashion designer-and her head was pounding with a hangover that was far worse than she deserved. All right, maybe she had one extra drink last night, or even two, but she hadn't been drunk, no matter what Perry said. Through the headache that felt like a jackhammer pounding at her skull, she could still remember Perry's words when they'd finally tumbled into bed at two-thirty: "I have no use for a wife who gets a reputation as a drunk, Carolyn. I can survive another divorce-but if your drinking costs me the nomination when Morgenthau finally retires, I'll not only get rid of you, but see to it that you don't get a nickel. So make up your mind-go along for the ride without the booze, or take the money and get out now." She'd felt like spitting in his eye. He sure hadn't talked like that five years ago when he found out what sex with someone like her was like instead of that old society prune he'd been married to at the time. But she also wasn't about to take a hike right now. So she hadn't argued-instead she'd given him the kind of blow job that could fix any argument they might have, and insisted that she wasn't drunk. Which meant that this morning, no matter how much she wanted to, she couldn't go back to sleep. Since Perry hadn't awakened yet, she'd get up now, make sure the useless maid had his breakfast ready when he got up, and pretend she felt fine, just as she had pretended to enjoy having sex with him all this time. So instead of rolling over, she rolled out of bed, padded into her bathroom, and turned on the shower. Before stepping in, she peered into the mirror.

And didn't like what she saw.

The first hint of wrinkles was starting to show around her eyes, and she thought she could even see some of those terrible little lines women who smoke get on their lips. She'd better start talking to the wives of some of Perry's old friends-God knew, they'd all had enough work done that they would know the best plastic surgeons in Manhattan. Fifteen minutes later, just as Perry was starting to snort himself awake in that way she considered disgusting, she headed for the kitchen and the coffeemaker. She decided that as soon as she heard Perry cough up the load of phlegm that always accumulated in his throat overnight, she'd bring him a cup. He'd be so happy she'd thought about him that he'd forget all about last night.

She was passing the door to the library when she saw the blinking light on the answering machine on Perry's desk. She hesitated, frowning. The light hadn't been blinking last night when they came home, which meant that whoever called must have called very late, or very early this morning. Since nobody ever called her or Heather this early, she knew the message must be for Perry, and it must be urgent. If she picked up an important message and passed it on to him right away, he really would forget about last night's little tiff. She went to the machine and pressed the Replay button, not noticing that it was Heather's voice-mail light that was blinking, not Perry's.

The voice she heard cleared the last of the alcohol from her bloodstream and made her headache vanish. "Heather?" Jeff Converse's voice asked through a crackling of static. "It's m-"

Then there was a series of broken fragments of his voice:

"It's Je-, -Heather, list-, -cell phone-about to run out-, -under the streets-, -hunting for me. I can't get out, and-"

There was a long silence, then she heard three more words: "I love you."

The message ended with the machine's impersonal voice announcing the time it had been received: 7:18 a.m.

For a moment Carolyn hesitated, uncertain whether she should even tell Perry about the message-he had an absolute thing about listening to other people's messages. And besides, it couldn't possibly be from Jeff Converse. He was dead-she'd heard it on the news and even read it in the paper. It had to be some kind of cruel prank someone was playing on Heather.

She knew Heather would be upset by it, and if Heather got upset, then Perry would, too. And if he got upset, he might remember he was already mad at her about last night. Better to tell him and let him decide what to do.

Five minutes later Perry was standing beside her in the long Charvet robe she'd given him for Christmas last year, listening to the message. She watched his eyes narrow as the voice spoke his daughter's name. As the message went on, his complexion-never the kind of George Hamilton tan that Carolyn found really sexy on a man-turned deathly white. Then the color came back into his face, and the vein that always stood out on his forehead when he got angry started throbbing.

He was even angrier than Carolyn had thought he would be, and she braced herself for the tirade she was certain was about to crash down on her. But when the recording was over, he said nothing at all. Instead, he hit the Replay button and listened to it again, and then again.

"Well?" Carolyn finally asked, unable to control her anxiety any longer. "Do you think it really could be him?"

"Of course not," Perry snapped, his voice cold with fury. "Converse is dead, so obviously it's not him. It's just someone's idea of a sick joke. The question is, who did it? Because when I find out-"

"Well, if it's not Jeff, it doesn't matter, does it?" Carolyn cut in, hoping to find a quick way to soothe her husband before he turned on her. "Why don't we just erase it? There's no reason why Heather should even have to hear it!"

Perry didn't even glance at her. "Just fix me some coffee," he said. "I'll take care of this-and I'll find out who did it."

Carolyn wasn't tempted to argue with him, having long ago learned that even when Perry was wrong about something, he wasn't willing to lose an argument.

"It's what makes me a good D.A.," he'd once told her. "I don't give a damn whether the bastards are innocent or guilty. My job is to win my cases, and I nearly always do."

"But what if the person didn't do anything?" Carolyn had asked.

The contempt in Perry's eyes when he answered her had made her feel ashamed of even asking the question. "If they didn't do anything, they wouldn't have been arrested," he told her. "The police aren't fools, you know." And that had been the end of it. So now, as Perry continued glowering at the answering machine, Carolyn scuttled out of the room, closing the door behind her, anxious to be out of the line of fire.

As soon as she was gone, Perry Randall picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory.

"We've got a problem," he said. "And we need to solve it today."

Hanging up the phone, he erased the message for his daughter.

The endless night was over, but Keith felt as if he'd hardly slept. After Heather left, he'd alternated between sprawling on Jeff's Murphy bed and standing at the window, peering out into the not-quite-dark of New York City. The traffic thinned as the hour grew late, but there were always a few taxis still cruising along Broadway, and a scattering of bar-hopping night owls meandering down the sidewalk.

Twice, when the walls of the apartment seemed about to close in on him and suffocate him, he'd almost gone out himself.

Sometime around four-thirty he'd finally fallen into a fitful sleep, and now, as he rose four hours later, he knew he would get no more sleep that night.

And he knew what he was going to do.

First he rummaged around the apartment and found a phone book. He leafed through it until he found the heading for thrift shops and scribbled down the addresses of three of them that looked like they weren't far from the apartment. Then he picked up the phone and dialed Vic DiMarco.

"It's me," he said. "I need a big favor, and I don't need any questions."

"You don't even have to ask," DiMarco replied.

"I want you to go over to my house. There's a locked cabinet in my office-the key's in my desk, in the second drawer on the right, in a little box way in the back."

"Gotcha," DiMarco said. "What's in the cabinet?"

"A gun," Keith Converse said. "It's a.38 automatic. I want you to bring it to me."