“Look, I have to get home.”
He removed Linus’s briefcase from the Hermann Bros. safe. Pepper told him to leave the safe open. “So they wouldn’t bust it open if they came back.” Carney took the cash—Freddie needed it now that fencing the necklace was no longer on the table.
He had a quick look at the papers inside the briefcase. Blueprints for a big office complex on Greenwich Street downtown—important, perhaps, but hardly irreplaceable. Beneath the blueprints were legal documents, real estate stuff with Linus’s name on them and the family corporation. One of them granted Mr. Van Wyck power of attorney over his son. Was that what it was all about? Later, Carney could figure out what had the Van Wycks so uptight. Now he had to check on his family.
As Carney locked up, Pepper asked if he still had his father’s truck. It would come in handy, he said. They got the truck out of the lot and beat it to Riverside Drive.
It hit Carney anew: The necklace was gone. He had handed it over, like that. And they didn’t even care about it. He honked the horn at the red light. Elizabeth and the kids. “They’re okay,” Carney said.
“Maybe.”
“Freddie.” The way Carney used to say it when they were kids and he’d put them in line for an ass-whipping. Freddie.
“I’ll sit on your house tonight in the truck,” Pepper said. “Tomorrow I’ll bring on another guy to watch your family.”
A big pothole rocked the truck, one of those craters with its own zip code, and Pepper winced. He laid his palm on his belly, below his heart.
“They work you over?” Carney told him he looked like crap.
Pepper mumbled something about spacemen.
When they got to the apartment, Elizabeth was lying on the couch and the kids were pinching each other. “Pepper,” she said.
“Helping me move some furniture,” Carney said, “since Rusty is out.” He’d explained the closure of the store by telling her that Marie and Rusty deserved a break after last week, plus people were too unsettled to think about home furnishings.
Elizabeth made a joke about being his secretary, too, since Marie was off.
“What do you mean?”
She got the message pad. “You got a call from Ed Bench. He said he gave you his card?”
Carney called the lawyer from the phone booth around the corner.
They had Freddie.
EIGHT
He took Park down. It made sense to him, to trace the line of soot-streaked uptown tenements to where they terminated abruptly at Ninety-Sixth and became the world-famous regiments of grand residential buildings, which in turn gave way to the corporate behemoths in the Fifties and below. Park Avenue was like a chart in one of his economics textbooks illustrating a case study of a successful business, Manhattan street numbers on the x axis and money on the y. This is an example of exponential growth.
“It’s Fifty-First,” Carney said.
“That’s what you said,” Pepper said.
Carney still wasn’t used to seeing the Pan Am Building looming at Forty-Fifth Street, cutting off the sky. They keep going up—the buildings, the piles of money.
The orange safety cones were where Ed Bench promised, halfway between Fifty-First and Fiftieth on the west side of the ave. Pepper moved them and Carney parked.
Across the street was 319 Park, behind a plywood fence festooned with posters for the new Frank Sinatra record with Count Basie. The building was more than thirty stories high, clad in light blue metallic panels. The panels stopped halfway up; construction was still ongoing. Far enough along that the elevator worked and the fifteenth floor had a floor in place, according to the lawyer’s instructions.
When Carney had stepped out of the phone booth, he recounted the conversation to Pepper. The bloodless voice, the calm declaration of facts. They had nabbed Freddie outside his mother’s house.
“I told you he’d fuck it up,” Pepper had said.
“Yes,” Carney said. Knowing his cousin, he wanted a glimpse of Aunt Millie to tide him over. If Moskowitz had been quick with the necklace money, Freddie would have beat it on a bus without seeing her.
Ed Bench told him to bring “Mr. Van Wyck’s property” to a certain Park Avenue address at ten p.m. His cousin would be returned in exchange. Ed Bench handed over the phone to Freddie, who had time to croak “It’s me” before the lawyer took the receiver back.
“On their turf,” Pepper declared. “They control the scene.”
“Will they do it?”
Pepper grunted. What were they capable of? They had ransacked Aunt Millie’s, vandalized Sterling Gold & Gem, come to his place of business with guns. They had not killed Linus—Linus would have given up the location of the briefcase if they’d braced him. From Pierce’s account, they’d murdered the witness in a criminal suit before he could testify. If Pierce was to be believed. The question remained: What would they do to Freddie, and would they return him?