Small Town

thirty-four

The doorman’s name was Viktor, and his English pronunciation was careful and deliberate. Yes, Peter Shevlin lived in the building, and it had been a while since he’d seen him. But he understood one of the other men checked his apartment, and everything was all right.

“I think maybe he goes away for vacation,” Viktor said.

“That’s possible,” Buckram allowed. “I understand one of the tenants was asking about him. A woman, I believe her name is McGann.”

“I don’t know this name,” Viktor said, and asked him to spell it. He looked at the list of tenants, moved his forefinger down the page as he scanned the names, looked up, shook his head.

Buckram took the list from him, checking for first names. No Kates, but one Katherine, a Mrs. Mabee. If Kate McGann had kept her husband’s name after the divorce, and if it had been Mabee, well, then there she was. A definite Mabee, he thought, and grinned.

“Mrs. Mabee,” he said. “Was she asking about Mr. Shevlin?”

“She does not ask me. This woman asks.” And he pointed to Mazarin, Mrs. Helen. “Every day she asks. You want I call her?”

“Let me start with Mrs. Mabee,” he said.

Kate Mabee, Née McGann, was a small woman, barely over five feet tall. The first thing she did, even before she asked to see some identification, was tell him she used to be taller. “I’m shrinking,” she said indignantly. “I’m down three or four inches already, and it’s not like I’ve got them to spare. I swear it’s not fair. I got a sister-in-law, I should say an ex-sister-in-law, but I stayed friends with her after I threw him out. You would say she’s statuesque. Three years older than me, and she hasn’t lost an inch. She can still pick apples off the trees.”

“While all you can do,” he said, “is charm the birds out of them.”

“Oh, Jesus, an Irishman,” she said. “Now that I’ve let you in the door, why don’t you show me something that says you’re you?” He showed her some membership cards — the Detectives’ Endowment Association, the International Narcotics Enforcement Officers Association, the National Association of Police Chiefs. And his driver’s license, with his picture on it.

“I know who you are,” she said. “You were the commissioner.”

“For a few years, yes.”

“And now you want to ask me about Peter Shevlin? Jesus, what has he done? If he took money and ran, I hope it was at least a million. Less than that and it’s not worth it, is what my father used to say.”

“My father said the same thing.”

“I suppose it’s too early to offer you a drink?”

He said it was, but she should feel free to have one herself. Oh, but it was hours too early for her, she said with a laugh. A small drink before dinner, she said, was her limit, and she’d give that up soon if she kept on shrinking. Not that the two were related, it was calcium fleeing from her bones that caused her to shrink, but the shorter she got the quicker the drink seemed to go to her head, and she was beginning to suspect she’d do better without it.

She was good company, but she didn’t have much to tell him about Peter Shevlin, just that he seemed to have gone missing and that her friend, Helen Mazarin, was up in arms about it. She’d been to the police, and once they’d established that she was no kin of Shevlin’s, that she was not even his lady friend (“though that’s not to say she wouldn’t like to be”), that a search of the apartment had shown no signs of foul play, or of Shevlin himself, and that he was not suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or any other form of senile dementia, they told her there was nothing they could do. It was a free country, they told her, and a man could pick up and go away for a while if he got the urge.

She went back a second time, explaining about his boat, the Nancy Dee, how sometimes it was there and sometimes it was not. It was a different policeman she talked to the second time, and he agreed to take a statement and file a missing persons report, but she had the feeling he just did it to get rid of her.

“You know about the boat? How it’s there one minute and gone the next?”

Like so many things, he thought, but he said yes, he’d heard about the boat.

“You should talk to her yourself. Helen Mazarin, she’s got a good heart, but I’m afraid she’s a bit more interested in Peter than he is in her, though I’d not be the one to tell her as much. She’s right here in the building, you know, and just two flights up, so you can take the stairs if you don’t feel like waiting for the elevator. Would you like me to call her and tell her you’re coming?”

Helen Mazarin was a strawberry blonde, though he had the feeling she hadn’t started out that way. Time had thickened her at the waist and widened her hips, but she remained an attractive woman for her years, and the way she sized him up confirmed that she had not lost interest in the game.

I’m too young for you, he thought. At the very least, you need a man old enough to grow pubic hair.

She took him into her kitchen, sat him down at a table with an enameled tin top not unlike the one in his own mother’s kitchen, and poured him a cup of coffee. “I’m glad they’re taking this seriously,” she said. “I got the impression the officer I spoke with was going to throw my report in the trash the minute I walked out of there, but here you are.”

He explained that he was a retired policeman, that this was an unofficial inquiry. “A friend of Mrs. Mabee’s thought I could help,” he said, and she nodded, impatient to begin, not really caring whose ear she had as long as she could pour her story into it.

There wasn’t much he hadn’t already heard. Peter Shevlin had disappeared, or perhaps more accurately he had ceased to appear. And it wasn’t like him to go off like that without a word to anyone, not that he was a man given to a great deal of conversation, but to walk off and not come back? It had been a couple of weeks now since she had seen him last, and she ordinarily saw him every few days.

And the boat, that was the great mystery. How he loved that boat! The Nancy Dee, that was its name, named for his wife, a lovely woman, Nancy Delia Shevlin, and what a cruel lingering death she’d had. She’d gone to the Boat Basin, thinking he might be there, and the boat was gone. And she’d gone another time, and it was back in its slip, and yes, she was quite certain it was his boat, for didn’t it have the name painted on it for anyone to see? The Nancy Dee, and it came and went, yet she never saw it actually coming in or going out. In fact the last several times she’d gone it had been there, with no signs of activity aboard, but she swore it had been gone on at least two occasions that she’d seen with her own eyes.

Maybe he’d left on an unannounced vacation, he suggested, and gave the use of the boat to a friend. But no, she was sure this wasn’t the case, and he’d realize as much if he knew Peter at all, because the man was very possessive about that boat. She’d hinted a time or two that she wouldn’t mind keeping him company on a cruise of the harbor, and one time she’d more than hinted, she’d outright asked, and he’d merely smiled and changed the subject. He’d made it quite clear that the Nancy Dee was for himself and himself alone, and if he wouldn’t even allow a friend aboard for an hour, how likely was it that he’d turn the boat over to a stranger to use in his absence?

He said, “The policeman you talked to, the one who took your statement and filed a report. Do you happen to remember his name?”

She’d written it down, she said, and went off to look for it. He was beginning to wonder why this had seemed like a good idea when he woke up this morning. Because it didn’t seem that remarkable to him that Shevlin (or anyone else) would just as soon not welcome Helen Mazarin at the dock and pipe her aboard. Nor did it seem out of the ordinary that the man, probably driven half mad by Mazarin on a daily basis, had slipped out of town without letting her know about it.

For this he’d gotten up early, put on a suit and tie and, for the first time in longer than he could recall, included a shoulder holster in which his service revolver, a .38-caliber five-shot Smith & Wesson, had long reposed. The cops all carried more powerful guns, 45 and 9-mm autos, a necessary response to the heavier weaponry that the bad guys had. He’d signed the order allowing the change but had never upgraded himself, because what did the commissioner really need with a gun in the first place? So why not stick with the one he was used to?

He’d felt silly donning the holster, sufficiently so that he took it off and returned it to the drawer where he kept it. He locked the drawer, put the key in another drawer, put his jacket back on, and was out the door before he changed his mind once again and went back for the gun after all. He hadn’t been able to shake the odd feeling that he was going to need it.

While he was at it, he grabbed his cell phone. He never bothered to carry it, never got calls on it because he’d never given out the number. But it would be handy if he needed to make a call. It saved you the trouble of finding a pay phone that worked.

It made more sense than the gun, anyway. Weighed a lot less, and he was more likely to use it.

He had a Kevlar vest, too, and had made a big thing about that, as part of a campaign to get cops to wear them all the time, not only when they expected to be shot at. Because how often did a cop expect to be the target of hostile gunfire? If you actually expected it, you’d stay home and call in sick. But it was a funny thing, the bullets were just as deadly whether or not you saw them coming, so he insisted his cops wear their vests while on duty. Not all of them did, of course, but he made a point of setting a good example, at least if there was likely to be an opportunity to display it to the news cameras.

It actually occurred to him to wear the vest today, but it was summer, for God’s sake, and you could sweat to death inside the damn thing, and it weighed a ton, too. And he was just going to talk to people, and so he did not expect to get shot at. And if by some incredible fluke, if by some crazy quirk of fate, if his wild-ass wholly irrational hunch paid off and the Carpenter was somewhere in all of this, well, there was no reason to believe that William Boyce Harbinger had ever owned a gun, or had one in his possession, or even knew for sure which end the bullet came out of. A Kevlar vest wouldn’t do you any good if somebody came at you with a hammer and a chisel, and only slowed you down if you were trying to outrun a Molotov cocktail.

So it was home in his closet, and that was fine, because he felt silly enough carrying the gun.

She came back with two names written on a slip of paper, and was reaching to pour him another cup of coffee. He stopped her, took the slip from her. The top name had an asterisk next to it, and she explained that was the man who’d taken her statement for the missing persons report. The other man was the one she’d talked to the first time, just in case he needed to talk with him as well.

And he’d let her know as soon as he found out something? He told her she could count on it.

Shevlin’s Apartment building was on the north side of Eighty-sixth Street, between Columbus and Amsterdam. That put it in the Twenty-fourth Precinct, Eighty-sixth Street being the dividing line, but Helen Mazarin had not gone to the Two-Four station house, three-quarters of a mile away on West One Hundredth. Instead she’d reasonably enough walked four blocks to the Two-Oh on West Eighty-second, and Buckram did the same.

The desk sergeant, Bert Herdig, had a big round red face and not much hair, and what he had left was cropped close to his skull. He recognized Buckram right away, called him Commissioner before he could introduce himself, said it was an honor to have him there, and what could he do for him? Did some fool of a patrol officer hang a ticket on the commissioner’s windshield? If so just hand it over, and it would go no further.

“A woman came in a few days ago, filled out a missing persons report,” he said. “Her name’s Mazarin, and the missing man’s Peter Shevlin.”

“Of Eighty-sixth Street,” Herdig said, and stroked his chin. “Don’t tell me something’s happened to the poor man.”

“Well, that’s the question. He hasn’t turned up yet.”

“He might not, if he’s playing golf in the Poconos.”

“Is that where you think he went?”

“It’s where I’d go,” Herdig said, “if I had the time and the money. Could I ask the nature of your interest, Commissioner?”

“A favor for a friend.”

“Ah, right,” Herdig said. “Everybody has friends and sooner or later they all want favors. Mrs. Mazarin’s the friend?”

He shook his head. “The friend of a friend.”

“Ah. You’ve met the lady?”

“Just this morning.”

“She’d come in once before I saw her,” Herdig said. “Did she mention that?”

“She did.”

“Tony Dundalk talked to her then, and more or less sent her on her way. Because it didn’t sound like any cause for alarm.”

“And she came back.”

“She did. I thought, let’s put the lady’s mind at ease, so I took her statement and filled out a report.”

“But you didn’t send it in.”

He shook his head. “Sending it in doesn’t accomplish anything. Nobody’s gonna be running around knocking on doors, looking for an old man who’s minding his own business. All that happens is somebody wants to know why I’m sending in an MP report on a case that doesn’t meet the standards. I made her happy, but I stuck the report in a file.”

“And let it go at that.”

“No,” Herdig said, “I called his place of employment, spoke to the head of the department. No, Shevlin hadn’t been in for whatever it was, a week or so, something like that. And yes, they’d had a call, said he wouldn’t be in. They didn’t seem concerned, and after I talked to them neither was I.”

“Did she tell you about Shevlin’s boat?”

“To tell you the truth,” Herdig said, “I had a little trouble following her on that subject. Did I miss something important?”

“Probably not. Did you take notes when you talked to his employer?”

“His department head. Yes, I took notes.”

“And filed them? I wonder if I could see the file.”

Herdig looked troubled. “Uh, well,” he said. “You know, I’d do anything to help here, Commissioner, but there’s a question of official standing. My understanding, you’re no longer officially connected with the department.”

“Not for a few years now.”

“So you’ve got no official interest in this particular matter.”

“None,” he agreed, “which is convenient all around, isn’t it? It means I don’t have to file a report, and neither do you. It also means nobody’s going to ask you where the regulations say you’re supposed to take down a statement and fill out a missing persons report and then conveniently lose it in a file drawer somewhere.” He smiled pleasantly. “Of course,” he said, “if I pick up that phone and call around, you’re likely to get a call back from someone with so much brass on his uniform you won’t be able to spot the blue underneath it. And I guarantee you he’ll have enough official standing to mobilize the National Guard.”

“I take your point,” Herdig said. “Just give me a minute, okay?”

Peter Shevlin was employed by a firm called Fitzmaurice & Liebold, with an address on Sixth Avenue that would put it in or near Rockefeller Center. His supervisor, and the man who’d put Herdig’s mind to rest, not that it was all that troubled to begin with, was one Wallace Weingartner.

Buckram bought a couple of sandwiches at a deli, got a can of Heineken to go with them, and had lunch on a bench in Central Park. The beer made the enterprise technically illegal, in that he was consuming an alcoholic beverage in the park. Striking a blow for freedom, he told himself, and enjoyed his meal.

He was eating al fresco so he could make a phone call, and he’d always felt the use of cell phones in restaurants was an infinitely greater evil than, say, drinking a beer in public. After he’d bagged his trash and dropped it in a litter basket, he returned to his bench and managed to get the number at Fitzmaurice & Liebold, whose offices he was reasonably certain would be closed today, the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. But you never knew what sort of workaholic Wally Winegardner might be, so it seemed worth a try.

The offices were closed, of course, but the voice that answered gave him options; if he knew his party’s extension he could press it, and, if not, he could find it by entering the first three digits of the party’s last name. He pressed 9-4-6, the numeric equivalent of W-I-N, and that gave him a choice of two parties, neither of them Winegardner. He tried to get back to the previous prompt but couldn’t navigate through the system, so he gave up and broke the connection and went through the whole thing again. This time, on a hunch, he pressed 9-3-4, for W-E-I, and learned in short order that Wallace Weingartner’s extension was 161. He pressed that, and after four rings got a voice mail pickup, with a woman’s voice — Weingartner’s secretary, he supposed, or the firm’s official telephone voice — inviting him to leave his message at the tone.

He rang off and put the cell phone away. He could let it go, he thought, but that meant letting it go until Tuesday, because the office would be closed tomorrow and Monday. And Tuesday was the third, and a week from Wednesday was the eleventh.

And he couldn’t help thinking the Carpenter was out there. Well, hell, everybody damn well knew he was out there, but he also felt he was somehow connected to the disappearance of Peter Shevlin.

Made no sense. If he really thought so, he should stop trying to figure out how to track down Weingartner (and wouldn’t you think a cop with a name like Herdig would jot down the German spelling?) and call someone who could hook him up with whoever was heading the Carpenter task force. But he couldn’t do that, because if he had the guy on the phone right this minute he wouldn’t have anything substantive to tell him. He didn’t even have a hunch, for God’s sake. Just a feeling, and one that made increasingly less sense the more he examined it.

He got out the phone again, called 1-212-555-1212, and actually got to talk to a human being, who came back and told him that Wallace Weingartner didn’t have a listed phone in the borough of Manhattan. Not in the 212 listings, anyway. He tried 917, the code for local cell phones, figuring old Wally might have his phone along even if he was up in the mountains or down on the Jersey shore. He could call the poor bastard without even knowing where he was.

No listing.

He put the phone in his pocket and gave up.

Viktor was still on duty, and not happy at the thought of letting him into the Shevlin apartment. When pressed, he explained that he was a Russian Jew from Odessa, in the Ukraine, and that the building’s super and all the other doormen and maintenance personnel were Hispanic. If anything turned up missing from the apartment, who would they say took it?

“My shift is up at four. Then is Marcos. You tell him what you want, he lets you in. No problem.”

“If I have to come back,” he said, “it won’t be at four o’clock, it’ll be twenty minutes from now, and you’ll still be on duty. And I’ll have a couple of uniformed cops with me, and I’ll pick the ones with the loudest voices.”

Viktor turned away, looking unhappy, and found a key in the desk drawer. “Here,” he said. “You go. Anybody asks, you can tell them I never set foot in that apartment.”

No, he thought, instead you gave a total stranger the unattended run of the place. For that they ought to give you a medal.

He went upstairs, let himself in, sniffed the air, and was grateful for what he didn’t smell. Because it was entirely possible Shevlin could have been lying dead somewhere in the apartment, in a closet or under a bed or in the tub with the shower curtain screening him from view. If his death had been close enough in time to the earlier visit, and if the doorman who’d made the last check had just taken a quick look around... well, the poor bastard would be pretty ripe by now.

But in fact the poor bastard wasn’t there at all. Buckram spent the better part of an hour trying to learn something useful, and invading Shevlin’s privacy rather thoroughly in the process. You learned that in police work, learned to search drawers and closets without blinking, to go through papers and correspondence with the enthusiasm of a voyeur and the ardor of a spy.

What he didn’t find was anything to establish Shevlin’s presence in the apartment since Helen Mazarin had decided he was missing. His checkbook didn’t have an entry after that date. There were newspapers stacked beside a chair in the living room, magazines arranged on the coffee table, none of them more recent than the date of his presumed disappearance.

There were pictures, mostly of a woman whom Buckram took to be Mrs. Shevlin. In one she appeared as a bride barely out of her teens, standing beside a slim young man with dark hair and a shy smile, who looked to be wearing a tuxedo for the first time in his life. No pictures of kids, nor did he recall Mazarin mentioning any children. A childless couple, married young, lived for decades until the wife died and left the husband stranded.

Like the Harbingers, he thought, in a West Side apartment building just two blocks from here. Not so grand — the Shevlins were in one of the great Art Deco buildings on Eighty-sixth, with high ceilings and an impressive lobby, the Harbingers in a more modest building on a less desirable street. But then the Harbingers had had children to support.

Both men wound up childless, though.

He picked up the wedding picture, wishing it would tell him something. She dies and you buy a boat, he told the young Shevlin in the picture. You’re seventy-two years old, you could certainly afford to retire, but how much time can you spend putt-putting around New York Harbor? So you go to work every day, and you come home, and on nice evenings you go out on your boat.

Where the hell are you?

He wished he could find a more recent photo of Shevlin. The wedding portrait was useless, you couldn’t show it to people and tell them to add fifty years to the kid in the picture. He’d thought Mazarin might have a snapshot of the man, most likely taken against his wishes, but she’d said she didn’t. She wasn’t much of a photographer, she’d said.

When he first entered the apartment he’d wished he’d thought to bring a pair of Pliofilm gloves. He was careful not to touch anything until he’d established with his eyes as well as his nose that there wasn’t a dead body in the place, or any signs of a struggle. In their absence, there was no reason anyone should presume the place to be a crime scene, so he didn’t worry unduly about breaching its integrity with his fingerprints. He kept them to a minimum, though, and put the things he touched back where he found them.

When he couldn’t think of anything else to do he went over to the phone, looked at it for a few minutes, then picked it up and dialed. If there was ever an investigation, and if they ever pulled the LUDS, there’d be a record of the calls he made, calls placed from Shevlin’s apartment after the man had disappeared. But it probably wouldn’t come to that, and yes, he could have used his cell phone, but the fact was he hated the damn thing.

He started calling the Information number for different regional area codes, asking for Wallace Weingartner. 718 for Brooklyn and Queens, 516 and 631 for Long Island, 914 for Westchester County. There was a W. Weingartner in Manhasset and a W. B. Weingartner in Bedford Hills, and he called those numbers, and the first turned out to be Wanda and the second answered to Bill. Both claimed to know quite a few Weingartners — he didn’t ask if they knew each other — but neither knew a Wallace.

The 202 operator found a W. Weingartner right across the river in Hoboken, so he tried that. And got a computer-generated voice mail response inviting him to leave a message. No indication what the W stood for, and no reason he could think of to leave a message.

He locked up and went downstairs. Four o’clock had come and gone, and Viktor had gone with it. A younger man, presumably Hispanic, presumably Marcos, was on the door. He couldn’t think how to give him the key without confusing him, or getting Viktor in trouble, or both. And why should anybody else need to get into the apartment? If he remembered, he’d return the key to Viktor in the morning. Or find it on top of his dresser in six months and have no idea what it was or where it had come from.

He was half a block away when he remembered he’d promised Helen Mazarin a report. He had taken down her number, and he called her now on his cell phone. He reported essentially that there was nothing to report, but that he didn’t see any real cause for alarm. He’d look into it a little further, though.

The boat, she said. Had he seen the boat? He told her he’d have a look at it on his way home. Would he like her to come with him? It would be no problem, she could be out the door in half a minute.

He said he didn’t think he’d have any trouble finding it. The Boat Basin wasn’t that large, and how many boats was he likely to encounter named the Nancy Dee? It was nice of her to offer, but he figured he’d know Shevlin’s boat when he saw it.

But if it wasn’t there?

Well, he said patiently, then there’d be nothing to see, would there? She was still thinking about that one when he rang off.

The boat was there, and he didn’t have any trouble finding it.

There were three ramps leading across the water to the floating docks where the boats were moored, and each had a locked gate restricting access to boaters. The locks looked easy to get through, and even easier to get around. All you had to do was step over the thigh-high railing to the side of the gate, take a few careful steps along the concrete ledge and one big step over the water to the ramp, and you’d finessed the whole business. If you did this furtively, anyone watching would spot you for an intruder. If you acted with the casual nonchalance that was the birthright of every policeman, an observer would figure you’d left your key home.

He walked down the ramp, made his way through the maze of floating docks, found the Nancy Dee, and climbed aboard. It struck him as comfortable enough, and probably seaworthy. Nothing you’d want to cross the ocean in, or sail around the Horn, but it looked as though you could take it on the water if you had to, which was more than you could say about a lot of the moldering old wrecks tied up at the piers.

The entrance to the cabin — he didn’t suppose you called it a door — was locked. He squinted through the glass — he didn’t suppose you called it a window — and couldn’t see any signs of life. He knocked, listened, knocked again.

Behind him, and not all that far behind him, a man asked him what he wanted.

He turned, saw a heavyset man about forty, with untrimmed dark hair and an untrimmed full beard. He could have played heavies in pirate movies. The man’s question was reasonable enough, but for the first time Buckram was just as glad he’d brought the gun along.

“I’m trying to find Peter Shevlin,” he said. “You know him?”

“I know there’s nobody home on that boat.”

“So do I, now that I knocked. Do you know Shevlin?”

“Don’t pay much mind to names,” the man said. “So I won’t even ask you yours.”

And don’t ask me mine, seemed implicit in the statement.

“You know the man who owns this boat?”

“You some kind of a cop?”

“I’m trying to get in touch with Mr. Shevlin,” he said.

“You didn’t exactly answer the question, did you?”

“Why should I? You haven’t answered any of mine.”

“People around here mostly got better things to do than answer questions, especially when they don’t know who’s asking ’em. One thing we do know, we know you don’t go on a man’s boat without an invitation. You’re standing on his deck.”

The son of a bitch had a point. He got back onto the pier, and the man yawned, showing Buckram what he’d obviously not shown a dentist in ages.

He said, “Answer a question, and save us both some trouble. Have you seen Shevlin in the past two weeks?”

“I don’t keep much track of time. Or of who I seen and when I seen ’em.”

“Has anybody taken the boat out recently?”

“What’s it matter?”

What he wanted to do was kick the big son of a bitch in the knee. Knock his leg out from under him, then shove him off the pier and into the water. The water was no pure mountain stream, but he’d come out of it cleaner than when he went in.

But then, grudgingly, the dipshit answered the question. Sometimes the old man boarded the boat at night. Took it out for a couple of hours, then brought it in.

That was all he was going to get, and as much as he’d expected. Nor did he figure to get much more from anybody else. He’d do better going into some dark holler in the Ozarks and asking if there were any illegal stills operating nearby. He understood those folks really knew how to make you feel welcome.