“What’s up, Sym?” she said when the call went through.
“We’re on the TV. Pruitt snatched Lanin from her office, and he drove away in a car. Then she got the gun away or something and shot him. Blew his head off.”
A wave of adrenaline. Marlene’s palms and forehead popped with sweat. “Where’s Harry?”
“He’s at the precinct. The One-Oh. With her.”
“They’re not holding her for it?”
“I don’t know about that,” said Sym. “He shot two people in her office. Maybe they going to give her a medal. Anyway, Harry said call, tell you what was going down.”
“Okay, right. She’ll probably call me from the precinct, and I want to be paged when she does. Where’s Tranh?”
“In the back. Cooking something.”
Cooking? “Put him on,” she ordered, and when Tranh came on, she asked, “What happened, Vinh?”
“The man arrived at the office building,” said Tranh in French, speaking staccato, a military report. “He came out of the office holding Madame Lanin. He took her into a car. I supposed he had a weapon under his coat, so I could do nothing. Then I followed them-”
“How? How did you follow them?”
“In a cab,” said Tranh. “It was”-he seemed to search for a word-“cinématique, you know? Follow that car! So, they parked. I approached cautiously. There were shots. I ran and found them. He was dead. I went to a phone and called the police, without giving my name. This was correct, yes?”
“Yes. Then what?”
“The police, many cars. They took her in charge. I returned here. I am preparing noodles with scallions and cod, and hot peppers.”
“How was she?”
“Frightened, of course, but well. And free now, naturally. Of him, I mean. I suppose it is a satisfactory denouement.”
Marlene was about to press Tranh for more details, but decided she did not want to know any more details. No, definitely not.
She hung up and looked around the small, pretty space, feeling mildly disoriented. The bronze statue of Beethoven looked down at her, offering no inspiration. The crowd had thinned. She followed the last of the concertgoers through the doors of the little hall.
The stage was brightly lit, furnished with four straight chairs and a black Steinway for the first piece, the Mozart quintet. As she watched, a man in a dinner suit came out and made a pitch for the New York Chamber Music Society, and boosted the present concert, and then the lights dimmed and the quintet of musicians walked on, the string players holding their instruments. As they took their seats in the hushed hall, Marlene walked down the side aisle and through the door that led to backstage. Wolfe was standing at the entrance to the corridor that led from the stage to the dressing room.
“Anything up?” she asked him.
“No one who looks wrong so far,” he said. “Not that we’d know.”
“No. Okay, I’m going to hang out at the stairway end of this hall. I spotted that guy we saw in her building, the sister’s boyfriend, the blond. You get anything on him yet?”
“Sorry, no. Working on it. He still wearing the leather jacket?”
“No, a suit and tie. Okay, we’ll watch for him. Anyway, anyone who wants to get to the dressing room has to pass one of us.” Wolfe nodded. He had his eyes fixed on the musicians, who were making tuning noises. Marlene went down the hall, and as she approached the dressing room door, she saw the stairwell door slowly swinging closed. Through the safety glass window she saw the shadow of a man.
She stopped, backtracked, and threw open the dressing room door. One look sufficed. She shouted over the Mozart, “Wolfe, he’s here!” and took off toward the stairwell. There were sounds above her on the stairs, but they also seemed to come from below. She yelled, “Wolfe, check downstairs! I’m going up.”
So she did and found herself on a floor of the music school, lined with practice rooms. The wide corridor stretched before her, quite empty. She ran to one of the glass-windowed soundproof doors. Empty. To another. A girl was sitting alone playing a French horn. All the rest of the practice rooms were empty, except for one in which a slender black youth was pounding away on a grand piano. Marlene had her hand on the door and was about to push through when she stopped herself. What would she say to him? She hadn’t seen the intruder; thus, no identification was possible. It could have been the pianist or the horn player, but it could have as easily been someone else, who had slipped down some other corridor. The building was one of the most complex in Lincoln Center, containing not only Alice Tully but two theaters, dozens of studios, practice rooms, and offices, and a warren of hallways connecting these in odd ways, not to mention the unusually large number of exits such a facility naturally required. She thought again of the boyfriend, the blondie. He had seen her in the lobby; he had known she was out of position. He could have just lost himself in the crowd, gone out, entered again through the school proper, and approached the dressing room from the stairway side.
She sighed and walked back to the Tully. She wasn’t a cop; she couldn’t walk up to people and demand that they identify themselves; she couldn’t call for squads of boys in blue to scour a building. She felt like a fool, and she was going to have to appear a fool before Edie Wooten and her family and colleagues. Sheepdog indeed!
“What did he do?” asked Karp later when she was telling the tale, lying in the crook of his arm on the red couch, with the television muted and a commercial making colored patterns designed to hypnotize and confuse.
“Oh, he neatly snipped the heads off all the flowers in the room, and left his own bouquet, with a note. Same fancy paper. Roses. They always leave roses, you know that? Nuts, I mean. I would expect mums, lilies, sometimes, but no, it’s always roses. It’s probably genetic.”
“What did the note say?”
“It said, ‘Darling, you’re not listening. I may have to get angry with you.’ ”
“Sounds like my kind of guy,” said Karp. “Ow!”
“It’s not funny,” said Marlene. “This guy is smart, and I’m starting to think that he could be dangerous.”
“You like the sister’s squeeze for it?”
“He was there, and not only there, I saw him again, after, and he gave me a look.”
“A look?”
“Yeah, a look, a grin. He knew who I was. But what was I supposed to do, pat him down? See if he had scissors? Roses on his breath? Edie was wiped out when she came back at the intermission. It was incredible that she was able to finish the concert. I am not in good cess with her family and friends.”
“That was quite a pinch, dear,” said Karp, rubbing the inside of his thigh. “I think I’m bleeding.”
“You should bleed, a crack like that! Oh, stop pouting! You look just like Zak. Here, I’ll rub it and make it better.”
“Maybe kissing would make it get better faster.”
She gave him an appraising look. “I thought you had a big day tomorrow.”
“I do, but the night is long,” said Karp. He pulled her closer and began to knead the back of her neck.
“Wait,” she said, attracted by a change in the light from the TV. “I want to watch the news first. Goose the sound.”
The screen filled with the image of a dark car, and the driver’s door open, the driver’s window shattered and covered with blood. Yellow crime-scene tape marked off the scene, and there was the usual crowd of cop cars and cops wandering about.
“What’s this?” Karp asked.
“Sssh!” said Marlene as the camera focused on a well-groomed black man in a tan parka, holding a mike. He spoke for the required twenty seconds, explaining that after a daring daylight kidnapping in the garment district that had left one person dead and one gravely wounded, the victim, Carrie Lanin, had wrested his weapon away from Robert Pruitt, her abductor, and turned it on him, shooting him dead. The anchorman thanked the reporter. The scene shifted to the interior of an office, the camera dwelling lovingly on bloodstains on the wall and floor. A weeping Hispanic woman gave eight seconds about how quickly it had happened, how horrible. Then a still photograph of R. Pruitt from some official file, looking blank and ordinary-message: even guys who look like this can go nuts. Then, finally, a quick shot of Carrie Lanin, frail-seeming with that disaster-survivor stare on her face, being escorted into a building by a uniformed cop and a female detective.