nobody in the whole building who can help me with a computer problem the way he can. But when it comes to advising you on matters like—”
Headley raised a silencing hand and Valerie went quiet.
Chris said, “There’s a bit at the end of the column.”
Headley gave him a pained look, expecting even more bad news.
“No, it’s not about you,” he said. “Someone Matheson knew was killed in that elevator accident.”
The mayor was about to look relieved, but quickly adopted a look of moderate concern. “Sherry D’Agostino, I bet. Everybody knew Sherry.” He managed a wry grin. “I even went out with her a few times, back in the day.”
Valerie looked slightly pained, as though only Headley could boast about dating someone who’d recently died.
“No,” Chris said. “Paula somebody. She’d interned at Manhattan Today.”
“Oh,” Headley said. There didn’t seem to be much else to say. He looked at Valerie, then Chris, then back to Valerie. “Can you give us the room?” he asked her.
She looked momentarily taken aback, but said nothing as she headed for the door and closed it behind her.
“Chris,” he said, “have a seat.”
The man sat.
“Chris, in the time you’ve been with us, you’ve shown yourself to be very valuable. One part bodyguard, one part detective, one part political strategist.” He chuckled. “And whenever Glover isn’t here to fix my printer, you know just what to do.”
Chris smiled. “Thank you, sir.”
“You’re good at finding things out. Turns out not all the great hackers are teenagers living in their parents’ basements. You’ve been very helpful for someone in my position.”
“Of course,” he said.
“I might not be in this office today if it weren’t for you.”
“I’m not so sure about that, Mr. Mayor.”
“Don’t be modest. You found that woman, talked her into coming forward, telling her story to the Daily News. Wouldn’t be sitting here now if she hadn’t told the world how my opponent forced him self on her when she was fourteen and he was forty. Even dug up the emails he wrote to his lawyer where he as much as admitted it.”
Chris only smiled.
Headley grinned. “Thank Christ you weren’t digging into my own history.”
Chris shook his head dismissively. “I guess if someone’s looking hard enough, they’ll find a few skeletons in anyone’s closet.”
“Yeah, well, I might need a walk-in closet for all of mine. But I believe you understand where I’m coming from, that I want to make a difference. I’ve been an asshole for much of my life, Chris, but I hope I’m doing what I can to make up for that now.”
Chris nodded, waiting.
Headley’s face went dark. “I’m worried about a couple of things.”
“Yes, sir?”
“The first is … Glover.”
“He’s eager to please you. He means well. He wants your approval, sir.”
“Yeah, well, that may be. But his instincts … just let me know if you see him doing something particularly stupid, would you?”
“Of course. And the other thing?”
“Barbara.”
Chris nodded slowly.
“Let’s face it. She’s good at what she does. People feed her stuff. She has good sources. Some working right here at City Hall, people who’ve not been loyal to me. She’s a pit bull. If she bites down on your leg you’ve as good as lost it.”
“I understand your frustration,” Chris said.
“If there were some way to get her off my back, some way to neutralize her …”
Chris was silent for a moment. Finally, he said, “I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about here, sir.”
Headley looked at him, puzzled at first, then horrified. “Christ, you didn’t think I meant …”
Chris gave him a blank stare. “Of course not.”
“Jesus, no.” He shook his head. “No, I’m thinking more … about those skeletons in the closet. If there were a way to discredit her somehow.” The mayor put a hand to the back of his neck and tried to squeeze out the tension, like he was wringing a sponge dry.
“Let me nose around,” Chris said.
“Good, that’s good,” the mayor said. “You had me worried there for a minute.”
Chris Vallins tilted his head to one side, as if to say, Yes?
“That you might have thought, even for a second, that I was suggesting we push the woman out a window or something.”
“Forgive me,” Chris said. “I know you’d never hurt a soul.”
Jerry Bourque’s first stop on the way home had been an art supplies place down on Canal Street. Then he’d gone into a grocery store with hot table service and filled a container with a few steamed vegetables, lasagna, a dollop of mashed potatoes, two chicken fingers, and some shrimp chow mein. The fact that some of these items did not typically go together did not bother Bourque. They charged by the weight of the container, so you could throw in a bit of whatever you liked.
As he came through the door of his fifth-floor, two-bedroom apartment in the Lower East Side, he tossed his keys in a bowl on a table in the hall, then went into the kitchen. He took his phone from his jacket pocket and set it, and his food, on the counter. He placed the bag from the art store on the already cluttered kitchen table. He slid out ten sheets of white illustration board, each twenty by thirty inches. He stacked them neatly at one end of the table by several small, screw-top bottles of art paint, a selection of box cutter–type knives, a metal ruler, some brushes and pencils, several three-foot-long strips of balsa wood, a glue gun, and a large, eighteen-inch-square paper cutter with an arm strong enough to slice through the art board. Or his fingers, if he wasn’t careful.
Fingers.
He tossed his sport jacket and the book filled with photos of old New York onto his bed in the bedroom. The other book, about the nearly completed Manhattan skyscraper, he set on the kitchen counter. He took his dinner out of a bag, opened the lid of the rigid cardboard container, and took a fork out of the cutlery drawer. He picked up a remote to turn on a small television that hung from the underside of the cabinetry.
He went through the stations until he landed on a local newscast, took a bottle of beer from the fridge, then leaned up against the counter and ate his dinner while standing. There’d been a truck rollover on the Van Wyck, spilling a load of bananas across two lanes. Four were dead in an elevator accident. The mayor was fighting allegations of giving a big city contract to a friend.
“So what else is new,” Bourque said, his mouth full of chow mein.
Some nut set off a bomb in Boston. England was still being battered by high winds.
Bourque finished his meal, put the food-stained container into a garbage bin under the sink and his fork into the dishwasher, next to three other forks, the only other items in the appliance. He took five minutes and looked at the pictures in the skyscraper book.
“Wow,” he said to himself several times.
Then