I turned around and immediately flinched. Behind me was an enforcer type, big, solid-necked, arms like legs, a real bruiser with curly black hair and a weightlifter’s pinched nose. He wore a hat, a gangster’s fedora raffishly cocked forward. He held a little leather briefcase in his right hand. It was another Raffaello summons and that briefcase, I thought, was a nice touch in the hotel. “What now?” I asked.
“Is there a problem?”
“I’m sick of it, is all. I’m sick of being dragged into cars for little chats with big-time mobsters. I’m sick of being whipsawed in your boss’s little fights with Moore and the feds.” Maybe I had drunk too much, or maybe my renewed resentment was getting the best of me, but it felt fine sounding off against this lug. “Tell your boss I’m busy, that tonight’s not a good night, that if he wants to talk to me he can just call me on the phone like everyone else. Tell him that.”
“I don’t understand, Mr. Carl.”
“Just tell him what I told you to tell him. You don’t need to understand. That’s not what you’re made for, understanding, is it? Brawny boys like you are made for something else. Just tell him.”
“Maybe some other night would be better.”
“Yeah, sure. Tell him to have his girl get in touch with my girl and we’ll set something up. We’ll do lunch. I know an Indian place.”
“I’ll tell him, Mr. Carl, but my father won’t be too happy about it.”
“Your father, huh? Funny,” I said. “I thought you were dead.”
“Not yet. I’ll give Morris the message.”
“So you’re little Sheldon,” I said. I looked him up and down. “Tell me, Sheldon.” It was the first thing that popped into my mind. “Your mother, Rosalie. I don’t mean to be rude, but your mother is she by any chance a big woman?”
“She can be imposing.”
“I bet. I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else. Sit down. Can I get you a drink?”
“A ginger ale.”
I waved down the bartender. “A ginger ale and another beer.”
“Make that two ginger ales,” said not-so-little Sheldon Kapustin. When the sodas came he took his and led me to a booth in the rear, where we sat across from each other.
“Are you drunk, Mr. Carl? I’ll be frank, I’m not going up with you if you’re drunk.”
“I’m not drunk at all,” I said.
“You sounded drunk back there at the bar.”
“Fortified is what I am.”
“Let me see your floor plan.”
I pulled out the sheet of paper on which I had sketched the hallways and offices, as best I could remember, of the fifty-fifth floor of One Liberty Place. In the corner, as big as I remembered it, was Prescott’s office. I had drawn in the couch, the desk, the oblong table. He looked at it for a while.
“Which way is north?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you remember the view out the window?”
I closed my eyes and saw the rivers of row-housed streets leading to Veterans Stadium, and catercorner to it the Schuylkill and Franklin Field. “I think this was south and this was west.”
Sheldon nodded and stared for a long time at my little map. The band was playing the theme from Beverly Hills Cop. A waitress came to give us a wooden bowl of tiny pretzel fishes and asked if we were all right and Sheldon said we were. When she left he reached into his briefcase and pulled out what looked to be a road map, but when he unfolded it, one sheaf at a time, it turned out to be a detailed schematic of the fifty-fifth floor.
“How did you get that?”
“My father has friends everywhere. You’d be surprised.”
“I don’t think I’d be surprised by anything about Morris anymore.”
He spun the schematic around. “All right, based on what you are telling me, this is Prescott’s office.”
“That looks right.”
“And this then would be the closest freight elevator.”
“If you say so. I can’t tell.”
“And this here is probably the custodian’s closet. See how it abuts the HVAC system, so they can change filters and do any needed repairs.”
“Okay,” I said, willing to go along.
“And fortunately,” said Sheldon, “the custodian’s closet isn’t but ten yards from the entrance to Prescott’s office.”
The custodian’s closet was small and dank, with the hum from the floor’s HVAC unit pushing vast quantities of air in and out like a giant lung. There wasn’t really enough room for the two of us, but as long as we staggered our breathing we were all right. We were both in overalls, with caps that read “Robinson Cleaners,” all supplied by Sheldon.
It was Sheldon who had picked the lock to the freight elevator and gotten us onto the fifty-fifth floor. I had thought the offices would be quiet, as dead as my office after five o’clock, but it wasn’t dead at all. There were associates still working, secretaries still typing, copy machines still whirring in the distance. This Talbott, Kittredge and Chase was a billable-hour machine and I guess, like the best-oiled machines in the world, there was no reason to shut it down for a silly thing like nightfall. For a moment I wondered if Prescott was still there, hard at work, but Sheldon had called him before we left the Doubletree Hotel bar and he was gone for the day, not at meetings or out to dinner, but gone. Just to be sure the coast was clear, we followed the hallway past Prescott’s closed door and into the custodian’s closet. On the way I had seen light coming from associates’ offices and I feared that maybe one of those hard successes would recognize me. The first office I passed I instinctively glanced into, spying at a desk a woman whom I had fortunately never seen before. “Don’t look,” whispered Sheldon, and thereafter, for the rest of the walk to the closet, though my hackles were raised, I successfully fought not to glance into those productive little offices. When we reached the custodian’s closet beside the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system on the fifty-fifth floor, Sheldon opened the door and entered and then yanked me inside.
“His door was closed,” I said.
“That’s good. Hopefully it’s locked.”
“Hopefully?”
“So long as it’s locked we know he’s not expecting anyone to use it. If he leaves it unlocked, one of his people might be planning to step in and pick something up.”
He reached into his briefcase, took out a stethoscope, and proceeded to listen through the door.
“Giving it a checkup?” I asked.
He put his finger to his lips and I shut up.
After a long moment he said, “All right, Mr. Carl, you ready?”
“Sure.”
“You just follow me and keep quiet if anyone sees us.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t go wandering around without me.”
“Don’t worry.”
“And take that with you,” he said, pointing to a bucket with a dirty rag laying over the edge.
After a final moment of listening through the stethoscope, he stuffed it in his briefcase and pulled out a clipboard. One deep breath and he was out the door. Bucket and rag in hand, I followed.
Slowly, calmly, we walked down the hall to the office and made our way around the desk used by Prescott’s secretary, Janice. Sheldon tried the knob and it turned. He opened the door. I looked around quickly, saw no one, and scooted inside. Sheldon closed the door behind me and immediately turned on the light. It was as I remembered, the wall of photographs, the gilded desk with piles of papers, the conference table in the middle covered with files, the wraparound couch and grotesque boxing painting and coffee table with papers atop in a neat pile. Behind the desk was the low and long wooden credenza.
“Go to it,” he said.
“Where do I begin?”
“This is your gig, Mr. Carl. Just be quick about it. I don’t like that the door was unlocked.”
The first place I hit was the long conference table in the middle of the room, covered with thick maroon folders packed with documents. There were titles on the folder dividers that let me know these were indeed Moore and Concannon files, but the system was based on numbers with which I wasn’t familiar, so I was forced to search through them one by one. There were transcripts, there was correspondence, which I went through carefully, there were documents from the councilman’s files. Much of this stuff I had seen, on many of the letters I had been copied, but there was also much I had never seen before. I especially concentrated on correspondence between Prescott and Bruce Pierpont, the jury expert. I had hoped a copy of Pierpont’s report would be in the correspondence file, attached to the cover letter, but though the cover letter was there, the report was not. As I searched, Sheldon glanced around Prescott’s desk.