Her eyebrow raised in a perfect arch. “Do I look sick?”
“Hardly. But you could be a hypochondriac. The rich ones sometimes give money so they’ll have a nice place to stay during their next anxiety attack. I promised Marian I’d explore every avenue.”
“You’re doing just great,” she said. “I feel as though I’d been strip-searched. All my avenues have been thoroughly probed.”
“Are you going to cough up the loot?”
She nodded. “Some. I told you before that if I’m going to live here, I have to establish myself up front as one of the good guys. That makes me eligible for unearned invitations and so on.”
“What made you pick Buffalo?”
She turned the big green eyes on him and looked at him shrewdly. “I like it. Or maybe it’s better to say that I don’t dislike it, which is not true of certain other places. And real estate is cheap, so I can sell my house that’s teetering on a precipice in San Francisco and buy something nicer here. As you may have guessed, my heart and Mr. Haynes’s no longer beat as one. Before that, we spent some time being no longer a fun couple. I used to come through Buffalo when I was in college, and I decided it was the sort of place where I could be happy.”
“Because it’s not on the circuit you’re used to.”
“If you’re tired of humanity, maybe it’s time to meet new specimens. That’s the theory, anyway.” She brightened. “Did I pass my examination?”
“Sure,” he said. “You’re healthy as a young Hereford cow and as sane as Monsignor Schumacher.” He glanced at the tables around him and nodded. “Evening, Monsignor.” He turned back to her. “I think you’ll like it here, at least for a time. It’s smaller than you’d think, and people are clannish. But you’re the sort of person who makes a good impression, and anybody who comes here voluntarily has passed the first test.”
“And you’ve passed yours,” she said. The caterers arrived and dealt out plates of food from a cart, leaning down to mutter into each person’s ear, “Careful, the plate is very hot.”
She tasted the salmon on her plate and said, “You can go unplug the equipment. It’s very good.”
“That’s Marian’s fault. She’s always destroying cherished traditions. Usually after these things we used to spend half the night admitting people, giving upper GIs and so on. I have no idea what we’ll do with ourselves.”
She looked at him, her chin resting on her hands. “That brings me to something I’m a bit concerned about myself.”
“Oh?” he said.
“Well, it’s kind of embarrassing. I leased this big black Mercedes when I got to town, because I figured it would be good on snow and ice. But I’m not very good with it. I managed to steer it to the hospital okay, but about half an hour ago I went out to get my makeup bag from the front seat …”
Carey’s lips slowly, involuntarily curved upward.
“This is nothing to smile about. I backed into an empty parking space and hurried to get inside, so I wouldn’t be late and get stared at by a lot of people who knew each other. There’s a color code and a sign, but I guess I didn’t see it because I backed in. Anyway, I guess it was for some kind of emergency vehicle, and the police towed my car away. Why are you smiling?”
Carey’s smile grew, and he began to chuckle.
“Are you some kind of sadist?”
“No,” said Carey. “I’m very sorry. I saw your car when I got here, and I wondered whether I should say something. That’s all.”
“Then why on earth didn’t you?” she asked. “I would have moved it in a second.”
He looked down at his hands, then forced his eyes to meet her stare. “I didn’t want to seem like a jerk. It was my parking space.”
It took two breaths for her face to register confusion, then shock, then understanding. Her eyes sparkled, and her laugh was clear and musical. It seemed to linger on her lips. “You know where I can get a ride to the impound lot after this thing ends?”
“It’s the least I can do.”
20
Ultimately, it seemed to Seaver, all investigations came down to staring through a pane of glass at some doorway late at night. Sometimes it was sitting in a car that smelled like old cigarettes, and sometimes it was renting a rat’s nest of an office like this one, barring the door, and trying to drink enough coffee out of styrofoam cups to stay awake until something happened.
This time the doorway was on a little storefront with a big sign that said OPEN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, so the surveillance was worse than it had usually been in the old days. And Manhattan presented special problems. You couldn’t sit on a street in a parked car for twelve hours without collecting a stack of tickets, and even if you did, there wasn’t much chance you could use the car to follow anybody. Suspects in Manhattan scuttled underground to slip into subway trains, or stepped into yellow cabs that barely came to a complete stop before they were off again on a long street that looked like a river of identical yellow cabs, each of them blowing its horn and weaving erratically to keep going ten miles an hour faster than the speed limit. Or the suspect veered into a doorway a hundred feet away and vanished into a building that had fourteen elevators and sixty floors. Cars weren’t much use. The quarry had to be stalked on foot and not taken down until he was indoors, away from the hundreds of faces that were always visible on the street.
Seaver had mailed a small package addressed to Valued Cardholder, Box 345, 7902 Elizabeth Street, New York, NY 10003. The outer wrapping was bright orange with iridescent yellow stripes on it, so he would have no trouble spotting it when the mail was picked up. He couldn’t sit here waiting for the dark-haired woman to show up in the flesh. There was a better than even chance that the mail would be picked up by some intermediary, and Seaver would have to follow the package.
If the woman had been hiding fugitives for anything like the eight or nine years since Miranda’s reincarnation, then the woman must have built some high walls between her and people like Stillman. She couldn’t let people like him find her easily. She would know what Seaver had known—that even though some part of a career criminal’s stunted brain believed that some day she might be his last chance of surviving, the reason he would need her at all had a lot to do with his inability to choose a future benefit over an extra pack of cigarettes right now.
Seaver was prepared for the intermediary. Inside the package was an expensive sports watch packed with a photocopy of a typed message explaining to Valued Cardholder that it was a reward from Visa for using a credit card. Inside the watch, and running off its battery, was a small radio transmitter with a range of a thousand yards.
If Seaver got lucky, the dark-haired woman might strap the watch to her wrist. Even if she didn’t like it that much, she would at least see it was too good to throw away, so she would shove it into a drawer in her apartment. It didn’t matter. As soon as she had it, he would have her. When he had her, he would have Hatcher.
Seaver reached over to the desk and pulled the plastic top off the next styrofoam cup of coffee. It was not much warmer than the air around it now, the white powdery substance that symbolized milk already beginning to coagulate in little gooey lumps that floated just under the oily surface. He covered it again and walked to the sink, ran the water until it was steaming hot, stopped the drain, filled the sink a few inches, held the cup in the water, and looked around for something heavy enough to keep the cup from floating up and tipping over.
He could find nothing in the little bathroom to hold it down, so he took the extra ammunition clip out of his pocket and carefully placed it on the lid. Since he had nothing else to do, he used the opportunity to urinate. That was another problem with doing surveillance at this stage of his career. He had not sat around like this drinking quarts of stale coffee in at least ten years, and his kidneys were treating it as a new and unpleasant experience.