The bus monitor turned out to be the school’s remedial reading specialist, Albert Lazar, a short, erectly trim middle-aged man who projected an air of constant alertness, although that just could have been his slightly hyperthyroidic eyes.
“Like I said, I wasn’t on bus detail yesterday, we’re on a rotating schedule for that.”
“I understand,” Billy said, “but were you in the parking lot at all?”
“We all are at release time, it’s required.”
“OK, how about this: just looking around yesterday, did you happen to notice anyone that struck you as unusual?”
“Unusual meaning . . .”
“Maybe someone who looked a little out of place.”
“Like what, a homeless person?”
“Like anybody,” Billy not wanting to lead with a more specific description.
“Well, there were some nuns from the Poor Clares down from Poughkeepsie.”
“Who else.”
“A boy’s divorced parents apparently got their signals crossed and showed up for him at the same time. They started arguing in the lot, then they both left without him. That turned a few heads.”
“Who else.”
“That’s about it.”
“Any men?”
“Men?”
“Man. Maybe some guy, walking around, you’re thinking . . .”
“You know . . .” Lazar hesitated.
“Just say.”
“There was someone I hadn’t seen before, could’ve been some kid’s father, but I don’t think so.”
Billy took a breath and asked for a description.
“I’d say a little taller than me, but not much, heavyset, dark, Hispanic, Italian maybe.”
Billy felt a surge, his exhausted body having trouble handling it. “What was he wearing?”
“A dark suit, nothing fancy, shirt and tie.”
“How about his hair? Curly, straight, dark . . .”
“Dark, I guess,” then: “He could’ve had a mustache, but he looked so Mediterranean I might be putting it on him.”
“Did he speak to anyone?”
“Not that I noticed.”
“Why don’t you think he was a parent coming to pick up his kid?”
“There’s not that many fathers doing the afternoon pickups and I pretty much know them all, at least by sight.”
“All right,” Billy winding down, pulling his card out of his wallet. “Anything else you can tell me about him? Just off the top of your head. Anything . . .”
“Yeah, actually, there is,” Lazar said, taking the offered card but not looking at it. “He struck me like someone in the security business.”
“Meaning?”
“You know, the way he carried himself, very alert and no-nonsense. It’s hard to explain.”
“You just did,” Billy said woodenly. He tapped his card. “Anything else you can remember, night or day.”
He hadn’t identified himself as an NYPD detective, just as a concerned parent whose son might have been approached by a stranger on school grounds, and he saw the teacher’s face darken as he read the new information.
For an instant Lazar looked at Billy searchingly, then shut himself down.
“Something else?” Billy asked mildly.
“No,” his eyes reading, Yes.
Billy lingered, giving Lazar a moment to say what was suddenly so troubling to him, but the teacher stepped into the bus to handle some rowdiness and that was that.
And then the older boys came charging out of the building like their hair was on fire. He refrained from calling out to Declan, allowing him to board with his brother. Not that he didn’t want to take them home, want to keep them close right now, but he was desperate to see the tape, the security officer waiting for Billy in his office.
The system was badly in need of an upgrade, the retrieved footage from the parking lot as grainy as an evaporating dream. Billy was unable to make out anyone’s face, although he could track the progress of bodies across the lot.
“Are you kidding me?” Billy turned to the security man, Wayne Connors, a retired Westchester County state trooper.
“Hey, I tell them every week, I know Chinese take-outs with better surveillance equipment than us. You know what they say to me? We don’t have the money. I say, What if something was to happen out there.”
“Something did happen out there,” Billy said.
On the third viewing he found who he was looking for, the guy built square and low to the ground, his back to the camera as he walked in front of the buses before stopping and bending briefly next to a kid—was it Carlos? who could tell?—so briefly that he could have simply been picking something off the asphalt or tightening a shoelace. Then, as he began to rise, he casually reached out to that kid’s back or shoulder as if for support and calmly walked out of the frame.
“Look,” Connors said after Billy had filled him in, “with the description you gave me plus what I saw just now, I think I have pretty good eyes on this guy. I’ll post one of my people out there starting tomorrow.”
“Great,” Billy said, turning to leave.
Connors could post an army out there, this guy wasn’t coming back. He’d done what he’d done knowing that Carlos’s parents would see it and react, so no way he’d risk a return visit.
The question was, Where would he show up next.
At ten in the evening, Billy entered Whelan’s apartment building and went down to the endless basement, its roughly plastered walls painted the color of dried blood. He walked past the pungent laundry room, past the caged storage bins filled with broken furniture and bust-ass suitcases, past the chained-up snow blowers and shovels and swapped-out radiators, until he reached the super’s apartment, the peephole on its scuffed door dangling by one screw like a gouged eye.
“Who.”
“It’s me, don’t shoot.”
Whelan opened up wearing a towel around his waist and holding a Walther PPK.
His apartment, if you could call it that, was a converted utility room infused with that down-the-hall detergent smell and consisting, at the moment, of a single unmade bed, a mini-fridge, and a two-burner stove. The only other article of furniture was a padded workout bench, the floor around it littered with free weights and a pair of work boots. A clothesline ran on a diagonal from one corner of the room to the sole window, and the walls were bare of decoration except for a framed certificate announcing Whelan’s induction into the NYPD Honor Legion. For a fully functional middle-aged adult, the place was utterly devoid of dignity, yet Jimmy Whelan was the most unconflicted, reasonably happy individual Billy had ever known.
“So what’s going on?” Whelan asked, stuffing the Walther under his mattress and taking a pair of jeans from the clothesline.
“What I told you on the phone,” Billy said, offering him Carlos’s coat, the painted handprint now starting to flake.
“The mark of the Beast,” Whelan said.
The toilet flushed, and a moment later one of the women from the upper apartments came out of the bathroom in her underwear.
On seeing Billy she yipped and retreated, but not before he caught an eyeful of caramel-tinted mommy fat and a generous behind.
“I’ll come back.”
Whelan waved him off, fished her clothes out of the rumple of sheets, and passed them to her through the bathroom door.
“So did you talk to the cops up there?”
“And tell them what, a guy came up to my kid, said, ‘Say hello to your parents,’ and maybe, I can’t swear to it, maybe did this to his jacket?”
“Guy with a gun.”
“I don’t know that for sure.”
“Or better yet, reach out to the Chief of D’s, let him bring in a Threat Assessment Team.”
“Again, based on what.”
“Then I don’t know what to tell you.”
“I know.”
Whelan lit a cigarette and halfheartedly attempted to make the bed with his free hand. “I mean, obviously, if there’s anything I can do personally . . .”
“I appreciate it.”
“If you ever need me to, I can stay with your family,” he said, giving up on the bed.
“Let’s hope it never comes to that, but thank you.”
“Be like old times,” Jimmy said, opening the window and flicking his cigarette upward onto the sidewalk.
Back in ’97, when the news of the double shooting hit the papers and Reverend Hustle from two boroughs to the north took the ferry and set up his camp of demonstrators around Billy’s Staten Island home, Whelan, like all the other WGs, volunteered on a rotating basis to stay with him and his soon-to-be ex-wife every night, until negotiations with the mayor’s office brought the protests to an end, a full month after they had begun.
“So what do you think?” Whelan asked.
“About the guy?”
“About Fort Apache.”
Billy paused, a beat behind the shift in topic. “When Brian Roe was the consultant on Missing Persons NYC they threw him four hundred dollars.”
“A day?”
“That’s what he said.”
“I could live with that.”
“He also said as long as you keep your thoughts to yourself and don’t talk to the actors, they’ll keep you on forever.”
“As a consultant.”
“I’m just telling you what he told me.”
The tenant in the bathroom came out wearing tinted cat’s-eye glasses, jeans, and a blouse, her hair swirled up in a damp white towel like a Mister Softee cone. Whelan walked her the fifteen feet to his door, then kissed her hard on the mouth, her knee reflexively coming up like a quarterback waiting for the snap. She left still wearing the towel.
“I have to be careful,” Jimmy said. “Her husband just got out of Comstock, but I’m pretty sure he’s staying with his other wife.”
Gearing up to leave, Billy took back his son’s jacket. “So how’s your millionaire?”
“Who, Appleyard? All of a sudden he’s got three new girlfriends, two crack hos and a trannie. I’m starting a dead pool: five dollars wins you a hundred if you pick the exact day, fifty if you pick the week.”
“How about the month?”
“He won’t make it a month.”
“Do they even make crack hos anymore?”
“You should get out more.”
“All right, brother,” Billy said, stepping to the door himself.
“Why’d you mention Pavlicek today,” Whelan asked abruptly.
“I told you, it was nothing,” Billy said, turning back to the room. “Why are you so worried about Pavlicek?”
“I’m not.” Whelan lit another cigarette.
Billy took a breath, then: “You said to me, ‘Is there something going on with Pavlicek.’ You said, ‘I need to know.’”
“I said that? I never said that. You were the one that brought him up.”
Billy pondered mentioning Pavlicek’s lying about the hematologist again, then decided against it.
“So everything’s good with him?” he settled for asking.
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
When he was once again passing the laundry room on his way up to the ground floor, Whelan threw open his apartment door. “Hey, I forgot to tell you . . .”
Billy turned.
“This Fort Apache remake? It’s in three-D.”