The Patriots Club Page 8

  Guilfoyle stared at him, not saying anything. Finally, he nodded.

  “All right, then,” said Pendleton. “It’s decided.” He banged on the desk, then stood and walked toward the model battleship. “See this?”

  Guilfoyle joined him alongside the glass case. “Very sharp.”

  “Take a closer look. She’s perfect. Made by a Dutchman in Curaçao. A real master. Cost me ten thousand dollars.” Pendleton raised a hand toward the model, as if wanting not only to reach into the case but into the very past itself. “Went down with two hundred fifty souls. They were good boys: well-trained, enthusiastic, ready to fight. They gave their lives so America could take her place on the world stage. Hawaii, Panama, the Philippines, Haiti. Five years after she went to the bottom, they were ours. Sometimes, the only way to get something done is to spill a little blood. Damned shame, really.”

  Guilfoyle bent lower to read the name off the battleship’s bow. “Remember the Maine!” he whispered.

  11

  Yoda was waiting on the kitchen counter when Bolden stepped through the door. “Awake, are you? Did you not sleep?”

  The giant orange tabby stared at him and yawned. Bolden walked past him, into the small kitchen, and turned on the light. “Want milk, do you?”

  Yoda raised his paw and kept it there.

  Bolden set a saucer on the floor and poured in some milk. “May the Force be with you, too.”

  There were eleven messages on his answering machine. The tenth said, “Thomas, um, hi. It’s three-thirty. I’ve checked all the hospitals for you, but you’re not there. I’m at home. Call me as soon as you get this. Love you.”

  Bolden dialed Jenny’s house. She answered on the first ring. “Thomas? Where are you?”

  “Hi, it’s me,” he said. “I’m at home. I’m okay.”

  “Where have you been? I was worried.”

  “It’s a long story, but I’m fine. Sorry I didn’t call sooner.”

  “It’s okay. I got your last message. Where’d you go, anyway? I waited on the street for twenty minutes, then the police officer insisted I go to the hospital.”

  “I got your watch back.”

  Silence. Bolden heard a sob, then a muted laugh. He sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. He wanted her there with him, instead of at her place.

  “Let’s have lunch,” he suggested. “We can talk about it then.”

  “I can come over now.”

  “I’ve got to be at work by eight. There’s that Jefferson deal I told you about.”

  “Don’t go,” Jenny said. “I’ll take a day, too. Come over to my place.”

  “Can’t do it,” he said, hating how he sounded like an uptight jerk.

  “I need you,” she said, and her voice had dropped into another tone altogether. “Come over. Now.”

  “Jen, it’s a big deal. People are coming in from D.C. There’s no way I can miss it.”

  Jenny sighed. “Okay, lunch then,” she said, too soberly. “I’ve got something to tell you, too.”

  “Hint?”

  “Never. But I’m warning you. I may hijack you afterward.”

  “If things go well with Jefferson, I may let you. Lunch. Twelve sharp.”

  “Regular place?”

  “Regular place,” he confirmed. “And you? Your arm? Only ten stitches.”

  “How did you know?”

  Bolden turned on the television. It was tuned to CNBC, the sound muted, and for a minute, he just sat there and stared at the numbers scrolling across the bottom of the screen. The long bond was up. North Sea crude down a dollar. The Nikkei had closed up fifty.

  His vision blurred.

  Crown. Bobby Stillman.

  Bolden closed his eyes, forcing the words from his mind, turning the volume on Guilfoyle’s lifeless voice down to zero. The fact that five hours ago a man had aimed a pistol squarely at his face and fired a bullet that missed him by a few inches, the fact that he had been made to stand on a naked girder seventy stories above the ground, the fact that he had attacked a man on that girder and toppled into a net sixty feet below it that in all honesty he hadn’t been sure was there—all of this seemed impossible and distant. It couldn’t really have happened. Not during the same day that had begun with him eating breakfast with clients at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston and continued right through his donning a tuxedo for the gala dinner and giving Jenny her anniversary present on the steps of Federal Hall.

  He opened his eyes and stared at the numbers scrolling on the TV screen. If gold cost $460 an ounce in London, he could be sure it was the truth. If the long bond was trading at five and three teenies, he could believe that, too. The numbers were real. He could trust them. But it didn’t make sense that someone would try to kill him because they believed he knew something that, in fact, he did not. He couldn’t trust what he couldn’t understand, so he had to forget it. To wipe the events from his mind. Bolden knew how to forget.

  After a while, he decided he had better try and eat something. It was going to be a busy day, and an important one. Responsibility tugged at him like an undertow, something he couldn’t see but was powerless to overcome. He shuffled to the refrigerator and took out some eggs, pepper jack cheese, diced ham, and a half-gallon of orange juice. From the pantry, he doled out five thousand milligrams of vitamin C and four Advils.

  After preparing his breakfast, he sat down on his piano bench and shoveled the eggs into his mouth. Yoda jumped up next to him and he fed the cat a sliver of ham. Finished, he set the plate on the floor. Yoda was on it in a flash. A cat who liked eggs and pepper jack cheese. Maybe that explained why he weighed twelve pounds.

  Crown. Bobby Stillman. Forget it. Forget it all.

  Twisting on the bench, he hit a note with his index finger. The piano was a beaut, an antique Chickering upright. Above it hung an original poster of Yankee Doodle Dandy, Jimmy Cagney winking at him from the haze of seventy years. He ran his hand along the ivory keyboard. “Chopsticks” was as far as his talent went. Once he’d made his bundle, though, he’d take some lessons. He wanted to be good enough to play three songs well: that music from Charlie Brown, the “Maple Leaf Rag,” by Scott Joplin, and the Moonlight Sonata. Tommy Bolden playing Beethoven. Even now, half exhausted, the idea made him smile.

  The clock on the oven read 6:10 as he deposited the plate in the sink and ran some hot water over it. He walked into the living room and collapsed onto the couch, staring out the window at the East River. Beyond it, the concrete flats of Queens huddled like a cell block beneath the gray sky. He looked around the apartment that he’d moved into four years ago. At the time, all his possessions had fit into three suitcases and a half dozen moving boxes, not including his Naugahyde La-Z-Boy recliner, his Lava lamp, and his framed poster of Zeppelin jamming at Madison Square Garden.

  That stuff was long gone.

  Jenny’s first crusade was to give him taste. Taste was not innate, it was learned. Taste was a burgundy sofa and an art deco wall mirror. Taste was an original Eames recliner and a seven-foot Kentia palm. Taste was the Cagney poster, which had once hung in the lobby of the Biograph Theater in Times Square. Taste was afternoons trawling Greenwich Village’s countless antique shops and furniture dealers in search of . . . the right thing. Taste, he had learned, was spending lots of money to make it look like you hadn’t spent lots of money at all.

  One soggy fall Saturday, after a visit to an antique store he was sure they’d visited the week before, Bolden rebelled. It was his turn, he said. That day taste was a Macintosh receiver with two hundred watts per channel, a pair of JBL studio monitors to blow them back to the Stone Age, and the Stones cranking out “Midnight Rambler” (live) at eighty decibels. Taste was a bottle of cheap Chianti, spaghetti with Ragú tomato sauce, a loaf of hot garlic bread dripping with butter, and his old college comforter spread across the living-room floor on which to enjoy it all. Taste was making love as the lights of Manhattan came to life around them, and crowding into
a steaming-hot bathtub afterward.

  Bolden’s eyes walked the floor where they had lain curled up under his frayed all-purpose comforter, and came to rest on the candle she had made for him out of the Chianti bottle, the kind with straw wrapped around the bottom and wax drippings down the sides.

  “Terrible taste. Terrific memory,” Jenny had said.

  He missed her.

  Thinking of the kiss that had accompanied the candle, he closed his eyes and laid his head on the cushion. He needed to rest. Just for a few minutes. Ten or fifteen . . .

  Bolden dreamed. He stood in the center of a large room, surrounded by a circle of boys, teenagers really. He knew them all. Gritsch, Skudlarek, Feely, Danis, Richens, and the rest of them from the Dungeon. They were stamping their feet on the wooden floor, chanting his name. He looked down and saw the body on the floor in front of him. He bent down and turned it over. It was Coyle. He was dead, his neck grotesquely twisted, his eyes and mouth open. “It was an accident,” a sixteen-year-old Bolden shouted. “An accident!”

  The circle of boys closed in on him, chanting his name. All were holding pistols. The same gun that Guilfoyle had pointed at his head. They raised their arms. Bolden felt the barrel pressed to his forehead. They fired.

  The gun!

  Bolden woke with a start. It was then that the image came to him. A memory from the night just past. He rushed across the living room to his desk, a nineteenth-century secretary. A legal pad sat on top of it. He found a pen and began to sketch the tattoo he had seen on the chest of the man who had wanted him dead. The first drawing was terrible and looked like a misshapen dog bone. He tore off the paper, wadded it up, and chucked it into the wastebasket. He started again, working slower. A sturdy stock led into a long, tapered barrel. Finished with the outline, he colored it in. Still terrible, but he had captured the idea more or less. He held up the drawing for examination.

  An old-fashioned rifle, circa 1800. Something Daniel Boone would carry. A frontiersman’s rife. No, not a rifle, he corrected himself.

  A musket.

  12

  Detective First Grade John Franciscus couldn’t believe his eyes. About ten yards away, a tall black guy, maybe forty, nicely dressed, was standing with his johnson in his hand taking a leak on the side of St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church. The sight incensed him. Here it was, barely eight in the morning, and this guy’s letting go on a house of worship like he’s watering the roses.

  Slamming on the brakes, Franciscus pulled his unmarked police cruiser to the sidewalk and threw open the door. “You!” he shouted. “Stay!”

  “Whatchyou—” The man didn’t have time to finish his sentence before Franciscus ran up and slugged him in the mouth. The man tumbled backward off his feet, his right hand still firmly clamped to his exhaust pipe, the pee flying all over him. “Shit,” he moaned, his eyes fluttering.

  Franciscus winced at the smell of the booze wafting up at him. “That, sir, was a lesson in attitude adjustment. This is your neighborhood. Take better care of it.”

  Shaking his head, Franciscus headed back to his car before the guy could get a better look at him. The kind of behavior that Franciscus called preemptive action, or an attitude adjustment, was strictly frowned upon these days. Some called it excessive force, or police brutality. Even so, it was too effective a policy tool to be discarded entirely. The way Franciscus saw it, he was just doing his duty as a resident.

  Harlem was his neighborhood, too. Coming up on thirty-five years, he’d been policing out of the Three-Four and Manhattan North Homicide. He’d watched Harlem pull itself up by its bootstraps and turn from an urban war zone where no man was safe after dark—white, black, or any shade in between—to a respectable, bustling community with clean sidewalks and proud citizens.

  You let the small things slide and people get the idea that no one gives a darn. No sir. You have to bust the homeless guys who spit on your window and want a dollar to clean it off; the winos who demand tips as doormen at ATMs; corner crack dealers; fare breakers; graffiti artists. Anybody and everybody who made the streets an ugly, difficult place. He was not about to stand for some knucklehead peeing in public, and on a church, to boot.

  It was policing this kind of low-grade delinquency that had reclaimed Harlem from the thugs and the thieves, and made greater New York the safest big city in the world.

  A mile down the road, Franciscus pulled his car over and slipped the “Police Business” card onto the dash. Craning his neck, he stared up at the high-rise. Hamilton Tower, after Alexander Hamilton, who’d built his “country” house, the Grange, just up the road. What someone was thinking building a luxury office tower around here was beyond him. The building looked to be about twenty percent finished. He surveyed the building site. The only vehicle on the premises was a Ford F-150 pickup. He looked around for some hard hats, checked if the crane up top was moving. The site was as quiet as a morgue. Franciscus knew what that meant. No dinero. Just what Harlem needed. Another white elephant, excuse the pun.

  Franciscus checked both ways, waiting for a hole in traffic. Strictly speaking, he was off duty, but he had a few things he needed to clear up, or he’d never get to sleep. Home was not a place he cared to be when his mind was jumping through hoops. It was a nice enough place, four thousand square feet, two stories, white picket fence, and a lawn out back up in Orange County. But it was lonely as hell. His wife had passed away three years earlier. His sons were living the life of Riley out in San Diego, both of them sheriffs, God bless ’em. These days it was just him and the radiator, each of them ticking away, waiting to see who was going to give out first.

  A car passed and he jogged across the street. Five strides, and he could feel the sweat begin to pour, his heart doing the Riverdance—and this with the mercury barely clawing its way above zero. He slowed to a walk, and wiped his forehead.

  At the supervisor’s shack, Franciscus knocked once, then stuck his head in the door. “Anyone here?”

  “Enter,” answered a gruff voice.

  Franciscus stepped inside and flashed his identification, keeping it there good and long so there wouldn’t be any questions afterward. The badge wasn’t good enough anymore. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry had a fake. “I’d like to take a look around. You mind?”

  “Not if you’re interested in building a new precinct station here. We got plenty of floors open. One through eighty. Take your pick.”

  The construction manager was an older guy with a beer belly and a beet red face. He had a copy of the Post in his lap, a cigarette burning in the ashtray next to a supersize mug of coffee, and a bag of Krispy Kremes in arm’s reach. Franciscus took a look at him, wondering how this guy’s heart was holding up.

  “I need to get up to the foreman’s shack,” he said.

  “Go ahead. Gate’s open. Elevator’s running. Not much to see up there. Don’t get too near the edges, ya hear?”

  “Don’t worry about me. I don’t feel like taking a dive anytime soon.” Franciscus nodded toward the work site. “Mind me saying, I don’t see many guys around.”

  “You and me both. The suits are waiting to see if anyone’s actually gonna move in, before they plunk down any more dough. If you need anything, just holler. Loud!”

  Franciscus chuckled. It was weak, but at least the guy was trying. “You said the gate’s unlocked. You keep this place open all night?”

  “Tell me you’re kidding and you’ll restore my faith in city government.”

  “Who has the keys?”

  “Me. And about twenty other assholes. Don’t tell me you want their names.”

  “Naw. Just yours. You look familiar. Ever carry a badge?” It was a line. Something to puff the guy up a little. Win him over.

  “No sir. Did a year in ‘Nam, though. That was enough time in a uniform for me.”

  “Same here. Nice memories.” Franciscus rolled his eyes.

  “Alvin J. Gustafson at your service.” He reached into his pocket and found a business card. “
Call me Gus. I guess I better ask what this is about. What exactly are you looking for?”

  “Anyone asks, Gus, I’m just checking the view.”

  Franciscus found the foreman’s shack as Bolden had described it. He strolled to the door and opened it. The view faced north toward the Bronx, just like Bolden had said. No question this was the place.

  Franciscus stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned against the wall. He didn’t have much on his mind, no suspicions, no ideas, really. He’d come up to run Bolden’s story through and imagine what had happened here.

  It was the man he had under watch at the hospital who bothered him. He had no doubt he was a veteran, but so far his prints had come back negative. He hadn’t been carrying any identification and refused to give his name. In fact, he didn’t even want to use his phone call. He just sat there quiet as a lamb. He was, Franciscus concluded, a serious player, and Franciscus had every intention of learning who had sent him uptown to do bodily harm to Thomas Bolden.

  Franciscus looked at the doorway and the chairs, trying to figure out where Bolden had been standing, where he hit the floor. As his eyes skimmed the carpet, he spotted a sterling-silver collar stay lying near the base of the desk. He picked it up. From Tiffany, no less. Isn’t Bolden the big muckety-muck? he mused, dropping the metal sliver into his pocket. A little physical evidence never hurt.

  After a few minutes, he headed back to the elevator. On the trip to the ground floor, he reviewed the facts as he knew them. Unbeknownst to him, Mr. Thomas Bolden is followed from his office to lunch at Balthazar yesterday at one o’clock. The suspect steals a cell phone that he can use anonymously later in the day. That night, Bolden’s girlfriend is mugged by two men in their mid to late twenties. Her watch (an anniversary gift valued at six thousand dollars) is stolen, along with a large sterling-silver plate. Bolden gives pursuit and is forced at gunpoint into the rear of a limousine. The watch is returned. During the ride uptown, one of the assailants hints at having served as a Ranger in the army. The limousine deposits Bolden and the two assailants at a deserted building site in Harlem sometime around 12:30 A.M. The gate’s open. The foreman’s shack has been prepared, right down to ripping the construction plans off the wall. Everything has been arranged beforehand with care and precision. He is interrogated by a man named Guilfoyle about something called Crown, and whether or not he was acquainted with an individual named Bobby Stillman. Bolden says no, whereupon Guilfoyle forces him outside, onto a platform seventy stories up and about the size of a postage stamp. When Bolden still refuses to play ball, he fires a gun next to his cheek to make sure he’s not lying.