The Tesla Legacy

Chapter 15

Vivian checked her phone. She’d been pacing the corridor outside of Mrs. Tesla’s suite for hours. The woman hadn’t come out, although a room-service cart had gone in. Vivian had intercepted it outside the door, searched it, and patted down the bewildered Hispanic waiter.

The elevator dinged, and she tensed, as she had about a hundred times over the course of the evening. So far she’d watched a drunken couple practically have sex in the hall, a bored businessman with a briefcase head straight to his room, four guys in black T-shirts who smelled like pot and couldn’t stop laughing stumble to their room, and a guy lugging what she swore was a monkey in a dog carrier.

Dirk stepped out of the elevator, and she relaxed. He was here to replace her, and she had trusted him with her life for years.

A police officer by day, he sometimes moonlighted for Mr. Rossi’s security company. Mr. Rossi was Tesla’s lawyer. She’d met Tesla when Mr. Rossi had hired her to protect him. But Tesla had given her the slip and disappeared underground — reappearing with the agoraphobia that still plagued him. If she’d kept an eye on him as she should have, he’d be fine today.

“Yo,” Dirk said. The circles under his eyes looked darker than usual, and his jeans and white shirt looked as if he’d slept in them. Not his usual dapper self.

Dirk looked that way only when he had girl trouble, a condition that cropped up about every six months. Dirk had commitment issues.

“Long day?” she asked.

He shrugged and looked around the empty corridor. “Better than yours, by the looks of it.”

She filled him in on the situation, then took the elevator down. This time she didn’t feel so awed by the lobby. The people here weren’t different from anyone else, except they had more money to burn.

She turned up her collar and started walking toward Grand Central in the warm night. Even though it was late, people swarmed around her on the sidewalk, some dressed in formal evening wear, others in grungy torn jeans and covered in piercings. Lucy would look like that if their mother weren’t so strict.

She tapped out a text message to an informant she’d been cultivating at Grand Central. If she didn’t get a response, this was likely a wasted trip. Still, it felt good to be walking and actually getting somewhere instead of just wearing down the carpet.

A few blocks later, she got an answer.

Good. He was sober enough to type, and he hadn’t lost or hocked the phone.

She arranged to meet him in front of Pershing Square restaurant. She was starving, and he likely was, too.

Then she hailed a cab, remembering to ask for a receipt. This was definitely a business expense, and Tesla would have to pay for it.

She climbed out in front of the terminal and jogged across the street. The green Pershing Square sign was turned off, the chairs up on the tables inside. They were always closed this late, something she should have remembered.

A gaunt figure in an Army green jacket emerged from the shadows next to her and grabbed her elbow. She resisted the impulse to smack him because she recognized him from the smell. “Rufus?”

“The same, baby.”

She looked at his thin, leathery cheeks, faded brown eyes, and scraggly black beard. “Not your baby, Roof.”

“You might be, you find out what I have to tell.”

“What you got for me?”

He rubbed his thumb against his fingertips in the universal sign for money.

“Let’s get some food into you first.” She worried about him, even though she knew she shouldn’t.

Once, he’d told her that at night he slept on a bench in Central Park in the summer and next to a warm subway grate in the winter. He slid around the city on his own paths, always one step ahead. At least tonight he looked mostly sober.

A few minutes later they were at an all-night diner, drinking coffee and waiting for two orders of bacon and eggs.

Under the fluorescent lights, Rufus looked even more bedraggled. Grit had settled into the deep lines on his forehead and cheeks, and what was left of his hair didn’t look as if it had been washed or combed since Obama was first elected president.

He’d seen some hard living, had Rufus. But that was why she needed him. He’d been panhandling around Grand Central so long he was practically invisible, and he knew everything that went on there. For a price, he’d share.

“What you got?” She fell into his rhythm of speech.

“Your man was attacked today in the terminal.”

She knew that. “What you know about it?”

“He had moves.” Rufus made a karate-chop motion in the air.

She slid a ten across the table and resisted the urge to ask for a receipt. So far, he hadn’t told her anything she didn’t already know, but it was good to keep him on the payroll so he’d keep trying.

“Word in the station is, he took out two cops and ran off.”

“Has he been around since?” she asked.

“Maybe.” Rufus leaned back so the waitress could set a loaded white plate in front of him.

Vivian gave him another ten.

Rufus scooped up the bill, then cut his bacon in half with his fork and ate it, his movements surprisingly dainty.

Vivian usually ate bacon with her fingers, but she decided she’d better up her table manners if Rufus was more refined than she was.

“Saw a guy go into the tunnels.” Rufus took a long sip of coffee. “Not a homeless guy. He dressed in black, clean-shaven. He went down in the tunnels off Track 42, smooth as you like. Never came back.”

Vivian stifled a curse. This was definitely about Tesla.

Too late to call, but she texted Tesla a warning and told him to be on the lookout for a guy dressed in black, maybe the one who attacked him, in the tunnels.

Tesla didn’t answer, but she didn’t expect him to. He kept his phone in that stupid pouch, and collected his messages whenever he felt like it. Besides, he was probably asleep. Like she should be.

But she still worried.