“Donahue.”
“Mike, this is Lowell,” he said. “Is Joe there in the vault?”
“Nobody here but us chickens,” Donahue said.
“You sure he’s not in there?”
“Not unless he’s hiding in one of the lock boxes,” Donahue said.
“Thanks,” Rothstein said, and put the receiver back on its cradle. Frowning, he came around his desk, went out of his office, walked past his secretary, went down the hall past Phelps’s office, and then turned right at the end of the corridor, heading for the vault. Donahue was just coming out, swinging the heavy steel vault door shut.
“That’s okay, leave it,” Rothstein said.
Donahue nodded, and went off down the hallway.
The vault was lined with safety deposit lock boxes in various sizes, each containing securities for the firm’s customers. Two keys were necessary to open any box: the customer’s individual key and the firm’s master key. The customer keys were held by the firm’s individual brokers, to facilitate the clipping of coupons on a quarterly basis. Each of the brokers had a master key as well. Except in its design, this was not like a bank vault, where a box holder had to sign in each time he wanted access. The only people using this vault were people employed by Rothstein-Phelps, all of them carefully screened before they were hired, all of them presumably honest.
There was only one lock box that concerned Rothstein at the moment.
If his partner hadn’t made that comment about hiding the silver...
If his partner hadn’t turned absolutely white when Rothstein told him about Dodge’s visit...
If his partner hadn’t seemed on the thin edge of panic when Rothstein told him about the phone call he’d made after Dodge’s visit...
If his partner wasn’t running so goddamned scared...
Then maybe Rothstein wouldn’t have been so concerned about that particular lock box.
That particular box belonged to a widow named Phyllis Katzman.
It contained close to three and a half million dollars in bearer bonds.
Rothstein went directly to that box.
He took his keys from his pocket, searched for the Katzman key and the master key, and unlocked the box.
The box was empty.
Three million four hundred and eighty thousand dollars in U.S. Treasury bonds, payable on demand to the bearer, were gone.
Rothstein broke out in a cold sweat.
He went immediately to the wall phone and dialed the Park Lane hotel.
In the Plymouth sedan parked outside the apartment building on Sutton Place, Ruiz asked, “What do you think?”
“I don’t know.” Reardon said.
“Does he live here, or is he visiting somebody?”
“Could be either one.”
Ruiz looked at his watch.
“I’m getting hungry,” he said.
Reardon looked at his watch.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Want to check with the doorman, see he’s got a Phelps here?”
“He might call upstairs, blow the tail.”
“Maybe we oughta go upstairs,” Ruiz said.
“Without a warrant?”
“What do we want with this guy. anyway?” Ruiz said.
“I’m not sure.”
“So we just sit here?”
“See where he’s going next,” Reardon said.
“Where do you expect him to go?”
“I don’t know,” Reardon said.
“Your Honor,” Ruiz said, “I beg your pardon, but I never been on a dumb fuckin’ stakeout like this in my life. You don’t know what the fuck you want with the man, you don’t know why we’re sitting here...”
“He ran in one hell of a hurry, Alex. I tell him his partner’s lying, and the next thing you know he’s on his bicycle. Don’t you think that’s interesting, Alex?”
“Yeah, very interesting,” Ruiz said drily.
They kept watching the front of the building.
Ruiz looked at his watch again.
“I know a great Italian joint near here,” he said.
Reardon said nothing.
People walked past the car.
A lady in a mink coat came out of the building and looked up at the sky.
The doorman looked at his watch.
Ruiz looked at his watch.
“You looking forward to Christmas?” he asked Reardon.
“No,” Reardon said.
“Me, neither,” Ruiz said. “I hate Christmas.”
A kid went by on roller skates.
The doorman took off the glove on his right hand and began picking his nose.
“Pick me a winner,” Ruiz said.
“Hey!” Reardon said, and sat bolt upright.
Ruiz followed his glance.
“Well, hello,” he said.
A brown Mercedes-Benz sedan was pulling up in front of the building.
The door of the Mercedes opened. Three dark-skinned men stepped out of the car and began moving swiftly toward the entrance door. Reardon threw open the door on the curb side of the Plymouth, his gun in his hand. “Police!” he shouted. “Stop or I’ll shoot!” Ruiz came around the other side of the car in that instant, running in a low crouch, gun drawn.
The three men stopped dead on the sidewalk, not four feet from where the doorman was holding open the door for them. One look was enough to tell Ruiz they weren’t Latinos. He didn’t know what they were, but you could cross off Puerto Rican, Colombian, Cuban, Mexican, whatever. Reardon didn’t know what they were, either. But Sadie had labeled them Puerto Ricans, and he was willing to go along with her appraisal, especially since two of them had little flamenco-dancer mustaches. Actually, he didn’t care what they were. They had arrived in a brown Mercedes-Benz. They had gotten out of the Benz and had started walking toward a building Joseph Phelps had entered not forty minutes ago. Joseph Phelps. Whose firm had sold silver to a man named Peter Dodge. Who’d been killed by three men who’d been seen in a brown Mercedes-Benz. Three men who were here now. That was all that mattered. They were here. Except—
They were no longer here.
In the three seconds it took for all those scrambled thoughts to rocket through Reardon’s head, the three men were gone. Zip, zap, easy come, easy go, now you see ’em, now you don’t.
The two guys with the mustaches had taken a quick look at Reardon’s gun and a quicker look at Ruiz’s and split for the Fifty-fifth Street corner of Sutton Place. The cleanshaven guy hadn’t looked at anything. He’d ducked his head like a bull charging a red flag and began running uptown toward the Queensboro Bridge, arms and legs pumping.
Reardon took off after him.
Ruiz took off after the ones with the mustaches.
This was not a good day for chasing suspects.
Actually, not very many days were good days for chasing suspects because detectives — except in movies — were normally not in very good physical shape, whereas suspects were guys who’d maybe just got out of prison where they’d been lifting weights when they weren’t buggering cellmates. Ruiz, being a little younger than Reardon, was in better condition, but First Avenue was packed virtually curb to curb with Christmas shoppers and the two guys with the mustaches had a sizable lead on him. It suddenly occurred to Ruiz that the two guys might be Arabs. This was a brilliant deduction, considering the fact that he was pounding along the pavement and trying to keep sight of them, and deductions do not come too easily in the midst of a movie chase. But the guy on the plane had been an Arab, right? It seemed to make sense.
So he concentrated on not losing them.
On East Fifty-ninth Street, Reardon was concentrating on the same thing, but he was considerably more breathless than Ruiz. Reardon didn’t like chasing people. Cop movies were a pain in the ass because they made your average citizen think cops went around chasing people in alleyways and over fences and in subway tunnels and Christ knew where, when what a cop liked to do instead was have a beer and watch some television. Times like this, Reardon wished he could quit smoking. Times like this, Reardon wished he was nineteen again. God, how he could run when he was nineteen! That guy up ahead there, running now in the shadow of the bridge, had to be in his early twenties. Puffing, Reardon pounded along behind him.