Mortimer looked as if he’d just been hit with an electric shock. “The one who’s missing?” he asked. “No, I . . .”
“But she’s your friend’s wife, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And yet you never met her?”
“I met her,” Mortimer said. “But I didn’t really know her.”
“So you’re not involved in it,” Stark said. “In her being missing.”
“Me?” Mortimer’s face froze in shock. “How could I be involved?”
“I don’t know, Mortimer,” Stark told him. “Maybe you and the woman are . . . close.”
“Close?” Mortimer yelped. “You mean like . . . close . . . like that?”
“Maybe she’s the woman your wife is worried about.”
“No!” Mortimer blurted out. “Nothing like that. I never really knew the woman. She don’t mean nothing to me.”
Stark let Mortimer squirm for a moment, then said, “All right. Come back around midnight.”
Mortimer looked like a schoolboy suddenly released from the clutches of a disapproving teacher. “Okay,” he said hastily, then turned away and trudged back down the stairs.
Watching him, Stark recalled how emphatically Mortimer had denied any connection to the missing woman it was his job to find. If this were true, he thought with a renewed and steadily sharper sensation of disturbance, then Mortimer was in Lockridge’s position, hired to find a man who could find Marisol for another man, in this case, Mortimer’s “friend.” But who was this friend, Stark wondered, and was he like Henderson had been, a scorned man, bitter and enraged, the missing wife—if she were his wife—now the sole object of his boiling wrath.
CARUSO
As he followed Mortimer westward, Caruso thought of the man at the top of the stairs, and the more he thought of him, the more one thing seemed clear. This guy looked a lot more like Batman than the barkeep he’d seen talking to Mortimer minutes before. For one thing, he’d had a book in his right hand. A very old book, like the ones Caruso had seen in movies about rich people who had huge country estates and whole rooms filled floor-to-ceiling with books you never saw in bookstore windows because they’d probably been made for the people who read them and nobody else. He knew that such people were phonies, that they would shake his hand, then quickly wash. He would always be low and dirty and disreputable to such people.
Okay, so forget about the barkeep, Caruso thought, it was this guy he’d love to waste, this smart and arrogant guy, with the fancy book in his fucking hand. He could put a bullet between his eyes and walk away smiling. He imagined doing just that, getting the word from Mr. Labriola,
The only problem was that even if Labriola gave him the Big Assignment, he couldn’t be sure if this guy was really Batman. Because if he were Batman, then wouldn’t he want to look like he wasn’t instead of like he was?
Mortimer had made it to the Seventh Avenue subway by the time Caruso had run the various permutations through his mind. By that time he no longer felt certain which of the men Mortimer had visited was actually the man Labriola had hired to find his daughter-in-law, and this left Caruso utterly perplexed as he watched Mortimer descend the stairs to the station, then finally disappear.
Nothing was easy, that was the bottom line, Caruso concluded. Everything required more than you thought it would. More investigation, he decided, he needed more investigation before he could tell Labriola who Batman was and be sure that he was right. But how could he check out two different guys at the same time? That was a real mind twister, and as he made his way down the stairs, still vaguely on Mortimer’s trail, he tried to figure out a way to do it. The obvious answer was that he could hire some punk to keep an eye on one of the guys while he kept an eye on the other, but the punk would want money, and Caruso didn’t have any money, and he knew Labriola wouldn’t spring for an extra dime.
A problem, Caruso thought, as he watched Mortimer step onto the uptown number one, a real fucking problem.
SARA
She’d been lucky, and she knew it. She was lucky because she hadn’t brought the gun. If she had, the commanding voice would have been too loud and insistent for her to ignore. In her mind she saw the little bald man stagger backward as the plume of blood spread across his chest, a look of horrified amazement on his face. One more step, and what she now envisioned would have been real.
And so she had to be careful. That was the lesson she had to learn. She had to check everything out. She had to be street smart. She couldn’t allow herself to be cornered again.