The horns went up behind us like flares from a sinking ship.
“Jesus!” I said. I reached for my shoulder harness.
Before I could get it on, I was thrown sharply against the door. The strap flew from my hands. My left elbow hit the edge of the dashboard.
“Yah!” I remarked.
Lansing was making a U-turn.
The disparate flares of car horns united into a single screaming flame. Brakes screeched on the wet pavement. Headlights swiveled this way and that. Lansing’s Accord wove and swayed through spaces that were barely there as she shot into the uptown stream. Cursing, I grabbed the shoulder strap again.
The strap flew from my hands as my shoulder slammed into the door. Someone screamed curses in a deep, guttural voice. The tires of the Accord answered with an agonizing squeal as Lansing swung the wheel around to point the front fender down Forty-fifth Street.
The cars around us bucked and stopped and started again. But Lansing kept her heel pressed to the pedal. The Accord wove forward like a fish through the weeds.
“It’s shorter this way,” Lansing shouted over the noise.
“Life?” I shouted back. I reached for the shoulder strap.
We made it to the corner of Fifth Avenue. We stopped at the light. To our right, the white headlights stormed at us, heading downtown. To our left, the red taillights swept away from us in a single body toward the Bowery. Above the other sounds of horns, I was dimly aware of the rising howl of a police siren. I yanked the belt across my chest, felt around for the latch.
“Here they come,” said Lansing.
I glanced up as I struggled with the belt. The sea of headlights was parting, shifting to one side of the Avenue and the other. Down the middle came the revolving red and white flashers of an onrushing cop car.
The siren rose to a screaming peak, Dopplered down suddenly as the cruiser went past. The shoulder harness flew out of my hands as Lansing hit the gas. She ran through the red light, spun onto Fifth. The car’s rear tires slid to the side on the melted snow, then straightened. Lansing bore down on the gas, edged her front fender up behind the cruiser’s tail. The whirling glare of the flashers filled our windshield. Together the cop car and the Accord raced down Fifth Avenue as the traffic around us ducked and dodged for cover.
I reached for the shoulder harness. The cops ahead zig-zagged through sudden spaces in the traffic. Lansing’s car clung to the cruiser’s rear fender. Christmas decorations rushed by me on every side. The fairies in the window of Altman’s gamboled and cavorted a moment and then vanished in a blur. The Empire State Building—lit red and green—towered over us to the right and then was behind us. The flashers swallowed everything as they passed.
The seat belt flew from my hands. This time I was tossed into the corner between the door and the dash. The cop car had made a sharp left turn. Lansing had gone after it. I immediately grabbed the belt again, wrestled it over me, down toward the latch. Ahead of us, the gloaming sparkled with red and white. Police cars were jammed together, flashers spinning, in the center of the street. One cop stood in the middle of Madison Avenue, battling the traffic with his bare hands. Alone, he made way for the oncoming cops, waving the cruisers in to join their brothers.
The cruiser before us dashed across Madison. Lansing dashed after, past the traffic cop, into the wild dance of flasher light. I grunted as the seat belt fastened with a loud snap. The harness held me in place as Lansing pulled roughly to the curb. She braked to a stop.
She was out of the car while I was still unfastening the belt. I tumbled out the passenger door a moment later. Police men and women were rushing by, crouched, their pistols drawn. Some of them carried rifles. All of them were raked by the spinning lights, brought into relief and plunged back into silhouette as the glare caught and released them.
The cops closed in on the building right before me. It was six stories of chipped brick two slots from the corner. The Hotel Lincoln sagged like the shoulders of a man in mourning. The light revolving on the front of it dashed over broken windowpanes covered with cardboard and canvas curtains with blackness showing through the holes. A lighted sign with the hotel’s name in brown ringed a skewed metal awning over the crumbling stoop. Under that sign, police officers were coming out of the building into the night. With them were the poor, broken, dispossessed inhabitants of the place. Scrawny black women, old white men, children with long-suffering faces. The police ushered them out one by one into the chaos, evacuating the hotel in case shooting started.
I shivered. I was chilly. I had forgotten to put on my overcoat. I stuffed a cigarette in my mouth. I stuffed my hands in my pockets. I followed Lansing into the confusion of flashers and dusk.
I found her in the middle of the street. She was hovering over a shorter, stockier figure. A man in a camel hair coat. I heard her voice as I approached.
“Is it him? Is it Paul? Just tell me: is it Lester Paul?”
And the answer: “Sheesh, Lansing, would you stop already? Do I call out half the department to catch a litterbug? Move back to the sidewalk so you won’t be ashamed I’ll have you carried away.”
“Is he armed?” Lansing asked.
I moved up beside her. I nodded a greeting to Gottlieb. The burly cop gestured at my colleague. “Is it me, Wells, or is she giving me a hard time? I got a maybe killer up there, he shot through the door at a cop who tried to question him, almost blew his foot off.” He shook his head, worried. “There could be shooting, there could be killing. It’s a terrible situation. Who knows what’ll happen? Move back to the sidewalk, Lansing.”
I took her by the arm. “He’s right.”
She shook me off. “Okay,” she said. “Just—which room is he in?”
Gottlieb sighed, wiped the sweat from his high round forehead with one heavy palm. “Right there, fourth floor, corner window, see it? Soon as I finish the evacuation, we’ll move in, we’ll arrest him, we’ll see what’s what.”
I took Lansing by the elbow. I drew her back.
“Are there cops stationed in the hall up there?” she called out.
“No, an escort to the bus station it should be easy he escapes,” said Gottlieb. “Wells, marry her she won’t be out on the street where they shoot people.”
Raising his hands, he turned away from us. He faced the building as a few more cops brought a few more lost-looking souls out into the night.
Other cops ran and crouched and raised their guns around us. I kept tugging on Lansing’s elbow, bringing her back from the front of it. Finally I got her up onto the sidewalk. A low wall of cruisers, flashers, and armed police stood between us and the hotel. No one was coming out under the awning anymore.
Lansing and I stood side by side. She unstrapped the camera from her shoulder, brought it to her eyes, and started firing. I watched the corner window on the fourth floor. I could see a light on in there behind the canvas curtain. It seemed a harsh light, like a bare bulb burning. For a moment, as I stood and watched, the street seemed to fall silent. There was only the crackle of police radios and the buzz of Lansing’s camera.
It was just then that I heard a sound behind me.
I glanced over my shoulder. There, in the doorway of the building at my back, I saw the small shadow of a man. I almost turned away again before I recognized him.
“Holloway?” I said. “Solomon?”
He stepped forward. White light flashed on his bald, chocolate-colored dome. He let out a rough laugh.
“I didn’t notice you,” he said.
He came up beside me. The three of us faced the building. I saw Gottlieb talking to a uniformed officer. They were getting ready to go in. Lansing took pictures.
“Since when does the wire send its bureau chiefs out to cover busts?” I asked.
Holloway chuckled. “I heard it on my car scanner as I was heading home,” he said. “I’m curious.”
But as we waited, as the seconds went by, I took a sidelong glance at his face. It was tight, intense. His
eyes were focused grimly on the building.
We heard a shout from inside.
“Come on out, Paul! Come on out now!”
I felt Holloway tense beside me. Another second passed. Lansing’s camera clicked and whirred. Then Holloway started. We heard a crash from inside. The light behind the fourth-floor window swung crazily. Shadows and silhouettes swarmed over the curtain. Someone shouted: “Paul!” I heard Holloway stop breathing.
The curtain on the fourth floor was pulled back. We saw a lean, red-haired cop wrestle the window up. He stuck his head out into the chilly December night.
“Lieutenant?”
Gottlieb trundled forward until he stood in plain sight. “Right here,” he called.
The cop shook his head slowly. “He’s gone, Lieutenant.”
Lansing’s camera stopped. She lowered it. She stared.
Gottlieb lifted his two hands. The flashers played on his camel hair coat. “How is he gone? You’re standing outside the door. I’m standing outside the window. Where is he?”
The cop tucked his head inside. He conferred with the others around him. He returned.
“He’s just … gone,” he said.
Beside me, Holloway started to breathe again. He began with a long sigh of relief.
We had to rush to make the bulldog. I wrote the lead under both our bylines while Lansing worked up what she had on Paul. It went well together: an escape artist works his art on New York’s finest. It was good stuff. By the late editions, we had it polished to a reasonable facsimile of perfection.
It was nearly ten-thirty when I bought Lansing a drink over at Flanagan’s. It’s a good solid sports bar next to the terminal. Pictures of ballplayers on the wall. Semicircular bar around a couple of TVs. Baskets of popcorn on the tables. We sat in the back and hoisted a couple of scotches.
We were tired. We stared into our booze a lot. After a while, Lansing smiled. Brushed the long blond hair back over her shoulder.
“What?” I said.
She waved me off. Then she answered. “I was just thinking: we haven’t worked together on a story like that for a while.”
“The drug den fire, wasn’t it?”
She nodded fondly. “Yeah. I didn’t think you’d ever pair with me again after I ran in the doorway for that picture.”
I laughed. “It wasn’t that. It was the drive to the scene.”
Her mouth opened in surprise. “Oh, come on!” she said. “I’m a great driver.”
I plugged in a cigarette. It kept my mouth shut. Somehow I’d known she would say that.
I lit a match. Behind the flame, Lansing’s expression grew serious.
“Listen,” she said. “I got this job because of you.”
“You got this job because you’re good.”
“And you backed off a story once to let me prove it.”
I shrugged, blew smoke at her.
Lansing looked at me hard with her blue eyes. There’s something about those eyes. They can flash at you like polished steel. But behind that, just behind it, there’s something else. Something fearful, maybe. I’m not sure. Something it would be very easy to hurt.
She said: “If you want this one—Colt, Paul, the whole thing—if you want it, it’s yours.”
“I don’t want it.”
“I’m just saying …”
“It’s your story, Lansing. There’s just some angles I want to cover. Maybe I’ll do some sidebars on it….” My voice trailed off.
She lowered her face, stared into her drink. I looked at the part in the center of her hair. The thin show of white scalp. I thought of her sitting in front of a mirror in the morning, making that part with a brush.
She looked up. “It got to you, didn’t it?” she said. “Colt? He got to you.”
I jabbed out my cigarette quickly. “Come on, Lansing,” I told her. “Let’s get out of here.”
She drove me home, up Park Avenue. Mostly the cabbies owned it now. They whizzed by quickly, fighting each other for inches and dimes. Lansing made her way uptown slowly, clinging to the right lane. When she wasn’t on her way to cover a story, she drove like an eighty-year-old dowager trying to outlive her kids.
We didn’t talk much on the way. When we got to Eighty-sixth Street, we didn’t talk much some more. She parked outside my building, and we sat together silently in the dark of the car. All around us, Yorkville was bright with movie marquees and streetlamps. Lansing gazed through the windshield for a long moment.
“What was it?” she said. “About Colt, I mean.”
“Forget it, Lancer. Thanks for the lift.”
“Come on, Wells, I can be curious, too. Think of it as a favor.”
“Forget it,” I said.
“I mean, you’ve seen people die before.”
I sighed. “I guess. But Colt seemed … I don’t know.”
“Too much alive to die,” said Lansing sadly.
“Yeah. Like he had something he lived for, anyway. Something he gave a damn about. Maybe it just seems a waste, somehow.” I reached for the door handle. “Or maybe I’m just getting old.”
“You’re not so old,” Lansing said. She turned toward me. Her face caught the streetlight’s glow. There was no trace of steel in her blue eyes now. “And I’m not so young, either.”
I had my hand wrapped around the handle when she spoke. I was about to pop the door. I stopped. I tried to look out the windshield, not at her. I saw the neighborhood’s young lawyers and stockbrokers in their long overcoats hurrying home with tomorrow’s Times. They scurried past the drug dealers. The drug dealers jerked up and down on their toes at the comers, their hands clasping their stashes in the pockets of their army jackets. Overweight women were out strolling their sleeping kids around. Overweight husbands in Giants sweatshirts followed, headed toward the newsstand for the News or the Star. The bulldog was out already. Tomorrow’s birdcage lining today.
Lansing kept looking at me with her easy-to-hurt eyes. She was beautiful. She even smelled beautiful. She was twenty years younger than I was. I felt like an idiot.
“Chandler’s coming down tomorrow evening,” I said to the windshield. “Coming down for the weekend.”
“Is she?” Lansing turned to the windshield, too. “That’s nice. I’d like to meet Chandler sometime.”
I nodded. “Yeah, that’d be great.”
I popped the door open.
“Nice working with you tonight,” said Lansing. She sounded a little hoarse.
“Yeah,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”
I didn’t watch her drive away. I headed straight for my front door. I heard her engine rev behind me. When I glanced up, I saw the Accord swiveling under the green traffic light onto Lexington. I went inside.
I heard the phone ringing as I came down the hall to my apartment. I hurried to get the key in the door. I pushed into the darkness, hit the light switch. I moved straight through to the desk by the window.
I grabbed the phone, looking down at the triplex marquee. There was no line outside the theater. That big Christmas sci-fi picture must have bombed, I thought. Then I heard the deep, measured voice on the other end of the wire say:
“John Wells. This is Lester Paul.”
He waited for me to answer. “You’ve got my attention,” I said. I pulled open the desk drawer fast. I rooted through the mess for a notepad, flipped it onto the desk, flipped it open. I pulled a pen from my pocket.
“I want to tell someone my side of the story,” the voice went on. He had a trace of an accent. I couldn’t place it. “I want to tell you.”
“On the record?” I said.
“Yes, you can print it all.”
“Okay, when?”
“Tomorrow evening. Ten o’clock. Are you familiar with the American Museum of Natural History?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Walk by it on the park side. Across the street, you understand?”
“Yeah. Ten o’clock.” I scribbled it on the page in front of me.<
br />
“I’ll drive by and pick you up in a blue Chevrolet.”
“You got it.”
“And Wells …”
“Yeah.”
“If there are any police, I’ll drive by and blow your brains out.”
I went and watched them bury Colt. I was one of many. They turned out in number to see him lowered into the snow-covered earth. There were reporters and editors I knew, some foreign correspondents I’d only heard of, others I didn’t even recognize. It was hard to tell who was covering the affair and who was attending it.
Solomon Holloway was there, and Donald Wexler. Lansing was there, on the outskirts of the small crowd, taking pictures, taking notes. Valerie Colt stood close to the graveside. A little boy stood on one side of her, a little girl on the other. The boy sucked his thumb as he looked down into the hole at the box with his father in it. The girl stared at nothing. Mrs. Colt began to weep into a lace handkerchief. Her red hair bowed to the frosty air. The workers covered the coffin with earth. I looked around and saw other women weeping, too.
The crowd began to disperse. The snow crunched under us as we moved to the street. Lansing hung back, getting quotes from some of the famous journalists there. I walked alone. Holloway and Wexler were just in front of me. They leaned their heads together and spoke quietly. They kept their hands clasped behind their backs.
The two moved apart as they reached the street. Wexler went toward a maroon Mercedes. I expected a chauffeur to jump out and open the door for him, but he got in and drove it off himself. Holloway had a long brown Lincoln. I moved up beside him as he opened the door.
“Can I get a lift home?” I said.
He turned. His eyes, normally wide and merry, narrowed at me a moment. I saw his tongue move between his lips.
“I’d ask Lansing,” I said, “but she’s working the crowd.”
He still hesitated—then said: “Sure. Get in.”