Tracking Time

Eight

It turned out that Ben, the four-to-eleven-p.m. doorman last night, was filling in on the back elevator today. April and Woody talked to him as they rode up to the fourteenth floor with a Federal Express driver delivering a package.

"Dr. Atkins came in at seven," Ben told them importantly as the manually operated elevator jerked its way up. "These guys are cops," he told the FedEx driver.

"No kidding," the man replied without interest.

The elevator stopped. Ben heaved the doors open, the driver got out, went through the door out into the main hallway, and disappeared. The elevator bell rang, but Ben didn't close the doors.

"At seven," Woody prompted.

"Yeah, I remember everything. I have a memory for details. Ask me anything. It rained pretty bad in the afternoon. I had to take the mats out to cover the carpets. Thems are new carpets, and it's a big lobby out there, I have to put down two sets. Takes twenty minutes to get them all placed just right. So I place the mats. Then at five, all them damn dogs have to go out. Let me tell you, those dogs make a mess when it rains."

April took out her notebook and began writing in it. She had a lot of things on her mind now and let Woody do the talking.

"How about telling us about Dr. Atkins," he said.

"I was telling you." Ben gave Woody a dirty look, then leaned his shaggy white head April's way. April's nose twitched. The man smelled of sweat and stale beer. She hated beery breath on people who supplied information.

The elevator bell rang. Ben ignored it.

"The rain stopped at five-fifteen. By six-thirty I was thinking about taking the mats up. But I was starving. I thought I better wait to see if we were going to get some more. I went out on break for a sandwich. I go to that deli around the corner on Columbus. There's two, but I don't like the Korean one."

"Stick to the facts. We don't need a novel," Woody grumbled.

The bell rang a third time. The FedEx driver returned minus his package. Ben closed the doors and got the elevator moving again. He was in a bad mood now. "Cops. Who knows what they're after."

April didn't comment. The FedEx driver didn't comment. Ben stopped on ten. Two uniformed maids speaking Spanish got on with four bulging bags of laundry. "Hola," they said to Ben, then continued a lively conversation as the elevator went down to the main floor. There, the FedEx driver took off without looking back.

"Nobody gives a shit," Ben complained.

The maids kept up a heated argument as the elevator continued down to the basement. When the doors opened, they hoisted the bags off the elevator still going at it. April felt a pang of sisterhood. The topic was lying, cheating hombres.

The bell rang a few more times. Several floor numbers popped up. Ben closed the doors.

"All we got here so far is a time frame. Let's finish up," Woody said.

Ben gave him another dirty look and spoke to April. "You take this down. I don't want no trouble later. Here's the fucking time frame. I just came back from my break. I had a cup of coffee. I ate the sandwich. It was bologna on rye, four pickles."

All the people waiting for the elevator upstairs leaned on their bells at once, but April didn't care. After the elevator man started treating her like a secretary, April lost her patience.

"Just take us up to the lobby and leave the door closed until we're finished," she told him.

Ben took the elevator up without a word, then went on as if there had been no interruption. "I ain't had time to drink the coffee when Dr. Atkins comes down the street. If you don't let me get these calls, I'm going to lose my job," he whined.

"What time?" Woody asked.

"Seven, I already told you it was just seven. I opened the front door for him. He went upstairs. I drank my coffee. A few minutes later he came out in shorts and took off."

The bells sounded like a swarm of angry bees.

"Then what?"

Ben shrugged. "That's it."

"What time did Dr. Atkins come back?"

Ben scratched his cheek. "He didn't come back."

"Are you sure?" Woody asked.

"Of course I'm sure. No one gets in here unless I let them in."

The swarm got angrier.

"Can I do something about this?" Ben was getting desperate.

April shook her head. "What about when you go to the bathroom?" she asked.

"The door's locked. They have to wait. Just like now." He licked his lips.

"So Dr. Atkins went out in his shorts. Did you see where he went?" Now Woody.

"Of course I did. I watched him. He went across the street to the park. A girl was waiting for him. They spoke. They went into the park together. He didn't come back."

"What did the girl look like?"

"Real pretty. Black hair. Pink sweater. Tight pants. Looked like she might be a hooker." Ben smiled for the first time. "But you know girls these days. She might have been a debutante." He smirked some more.

April glanced at Woody.

"Did you ever see her before?" he asked.

"Maybe." The phone in the elevator rang. Ben picked up and said, "No problem, I'll be right there."

April shook her head. No, you won't. "Did you ever see this girl go up to Dr. Atkins's apartment?"

"Not that I know of."

"How about a name?"

"Nope."

"Okay, that's it. You can let us out now."

The elevator doors slid open. April and Woody crossed the lobby and went outside. At a little after ten, a full sun beat down. The chilly morning had become a brilliant day, summer all over again.

"The park?" Woody said.

April hesitated. Last night they'd been on a radio run when they'd gone into the park. Now was different. The park was not like any other precinct. It was almost another country. When she'd been in the Two-O, every time a detective or officer from another house stepped foot in the park, they'd had to notify the captain of the Park Precinct that they were working there. It was an ownership thing, a protocol thing.

But, for the second time that day, she strayed off the straight and narrow. She nodded at Woody. He grinned, knowing they were in the wrong as they left their unit in front of Atkins's building and crossed Central Park West, heading to the place where the doorman said he'd last seen Maslow Atkins with a black-haired woman in a pink sweater. Possibly the girl on the phone, April thought.

By all appearances the doctor had gone out to run in the park, met a girl, maybe changed his mind about

Jason-or forgot about him-and gone to her place for the night. That was a nice clean possibility. A nastier one would be, he'd been mugged. The mugger wouldn't have gotten much of anything, though; Maslow had left his wallet at home. April made a quick connection with the 911 she and Woody had responded to last night. She frowned, thinking about it. They had to call the local emergency rooms and the other precincts to see if anybody had anything on it. She and Woody had reached the entrance to the park and went in.

Above April, the sun filtered through the trees, dappling the light and warming her face. The temperature must be up to seventy-eight already, and the heat felt good. Please let Maslow Atkins not be a mystery, she prayed. Anything but a mystery. Cops hated mysteries.

She unbuttoned her light jacket and inhaled. After the rain of yesterday, the park smelled fresh and green. Nannies and mothers wheeled strollers piled high with park toys toward the playground. She prayed some more to the Chinese gods. Please, ghosts and dragons that make so much trouble for humans, back off, let me find Jason's friend alive and well. She and Woody moved deeper into the park. Automatically, their two pairs of feet took them downtown, toward Seventy-seventh Street, where they'd seen the rat. They followed the route that skirted the rowboat lake. At Eightieth Street, they were north of the water. At Seventy-ninth Street a steep hill, almost deep enough to qualify as a ravine, led down to a wide shoreline, swampy and so thick with fallen trees and high grasses that the ground was completely obscured. If someone had been thrown down there, the body might stay hidden until the corpse decomposed and began to stink. That wouldn't take too long in this mild weather. April shivered suddenly in the heat. They could see the water now, skirted east, scanning the base of the boulders and the spaces between rock and bushes.

This was the famous Frederick Law Olmsted triumph, the park he designed more than a hundred years ago that was still so wild in places that if one ignored the skyline at its perimeter, a city person could imagine the country. Just over a mile to the south, Midtown North waited for their return. The park ended at Fifty-ninth Street, where her own precinct boundary began, and the stunning city skyline spread out on the southern horizon. They were looking for signs of a disturbance, but they didn't see any.

They were silent as they retraced their steps to the place near Seventy-seventh Street, where they'd entered the park last night. The tire prints of the 4x4 and hoofprints of the mounted officer's horse were still there, embedded in the grass, telling the story of their convocation. April slid down the bank to the water's edge, wetting her feet in the marshy ground.

"Damn."

"Something?" Woody asked, sticking to dry ground.

Stuck on a branch, the tail of a condom snaked gently with the current. Next to it, nestled in the mud, was a brown beer bottle bottom, showing the jagged edges of a broken neck. Half the label turned out giving the name, New Amsterdam. At a couple of dollars a bottle, it would hardly be the first choice of a vagrant.

"Just my new shoes."

"Whatchu looking for, Detective Woo?"

April was startled by the sound of a gravelly voice. "Who's there?" she called.

A balding man dressed in khaki pants and a blue parka who smelled of human waste crawled out of a space between two boulders. April recognized him immediately from the old days when she'd worked the Two-O.

"Pee Wee, what are you doing here? I thought you'd cleaned up your act and joined the Doe people."

"I tried it, didn't like them blue suits. All those rules."

He looked drunk and dazed, not fit for any kind of structure, certainly not the Doe Fund that put homeless men to work cleaning the streets, gave them food, a salary, and a place to live, but also required them to wear bright blue jumpsuits, not so different from the ones worn by prison inmates.

"And my people out here missed me too much. I help out here, keep the peace, you know that, Detective." Pee Wee tried to focus his swimming eyes. "Ain't seen you around for a while. You been on vacation or something?"

"I've been promoted. I'm a sergeant now, and I don't work in this area."

"Whatchu doin' here, then?"

"Got a 911 call last night, Pee Wee; know anything about it?"

"Yeah, I saw you," he said, nodding.

"You saw me?" She gave him a surprised look.

"Yeah and him, and 'nother cop on a horse, and two in a jeep."

"No kidding." Now Woody was interested.

"Yeah. A guy got whacked. Too bad." Pee Wee shook his head. "One of those running guys. You here about that?"

"Where?" The news was like a punch in the belly. April's blood beat in her temple.

Pee Wee scratched his whiskers. "I'm real hungry," he said.

"I'll get you some breakfast. Where's the dead guy?"

Pee Wee looked down at them from where he stood higher up on the lake bank. He scratched his beard some more. "I don't know. Dincha see him?"

"Where?" Woody demanded. "Where?"

"Right here, I don't know." Pee Wee's voice slurred.

"What kind of bullshit is this?" Woody barked.

Pee Wee looked hurt. "Do I do bullshit, Detective? The detective here knows me. I keep the peace, I'm the one stops the fights, don't I? I tell you what's up, don't I?"

"It's sergeant now," April said automatically. "Why didn't you say something when you saw us here last night?"

He stood there, shaking his head as if he had a palsy.

"Looks like you're an accessory."

"No way." Pee Wee a.k.a. John Jasper James, an ex-sergeant in the U.S. Army and a Vietnam veteran, protested. "I didn't have nothing to do with it. I thought I saw a guy go down. Maybe I'm wrong. Who's gonna believe an old drunk's story anyway?"

April could have called the detective squad commander of the Park Precinct to come and get Pee Wee James and take him in for questioning. She might have been instantly off the hook in the case and gone quietly on with her day. Any sane detective would have done that. But April wanted to clear up the mystery herself. Whatever mishap to Maslow Atkins occurred, it happened on her watch. And the missing man was Jason's student.

This time April swerved off the straight and narrow and sealed her fate in the matter. She decided to take Pee Wee James into her own house for questioning, then make arrangements to get some uniforms and search dogs out to look for a body. She was on another commander's turf. She thought about calling Mike to discuss the matter before she went any further, but she was in a hurry and figured her notifications could wait.