Peril

Mortimer reached Fifth Avenue, then headed uptown again. It was a clear, cool night, but as far as Caruso was concerned, the air’s crisp clarity did nothing to recommend a long nocturnal stroll up the blue spine of Manhattan. What if Mortimer were a drunk? Caruso asked himself. What if the poor hopeless bastard was one of those guys who spent his nights going from bar to bar but always managed to appear sober the next morning. Caruso considered this possibility, then instantly believed that Mortimer was precisely this kind of guy. From that unappetizing conclusion, he imagined himself tailing his black-hatted quarry from one gin mill to the next as the hours dropped dead one by one, and dawn at last broke over the bleary face of the city.

But as Mortimer continued north, he seemed hardly to notice the taverns he passed. Instead, he appeared entirely lost to the world around him, hardly noticing the speeding traffic or his fellow pedestrians. When an old woman’s small white dog leaped at him, snarling and straining at the leash, he seemed barely aware of it. He didn’t flinch away or alter the pace of his forward momentum but only sailed onward, holding to his course like a battered old steamer churning its way home.

At Nineteenth Street, Mortimer turned westward, his gait now so weary and unsteady he seemed perpetually jostled by a rude, invisible crowd. The signs from the bars did not beckon to him. He passed them like strangers, wobbling on through the nearly deserted street until he reached a building whose address Caruso could clearly read: 445 West 19 Street.

It was a five-story brownstone that looked carefully maintained. Two black wrought-iron railings led up seven cement steps to a polished wooden door. Four windows faced the street, and there were terra-cotta flower boxes in each of them. Some kind of greenery rose from the boxes, but there were no flowers. There was a large brass knocker on the door, but Caruso noted that Mortimer pressed a small buzzer instead, then waited until the door opened.

STARK

Mortimer stood at the door, the same oddly morose look on his face that Stark had noticed at their last meeting. “I hope it’s enough,” he said as he drew the envelope from his jacket pocket.

Stark looked at Mortimer pointedly, took in the drawn, desolate face, the sense of something frayed beyond mending. If something were wrong with the deal, he thought, and Mortimer knew it was wrong, then what desperation would have compelled him to go through with it? He thought of the years they’d worked together and decided, just this once, to offer an out.

“Do I need to know anything else, Mortimer?” he asked. “Anything else before I go to work on this?”

“You mean about the—”

“About anything,” Stark interrupted.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

Mortimer looked unnerved by the question but said only, “Yeah.”

All right, Stark thought, what’s done is done. He took the envelope from his hand. “I’ll get back to you.”

With that, Stark expected Mortimer to retreat down the corridor, but he remained in place, staring at the envelope.

“What’s the matter?” Stark asked.

“I thought I’d wait.”

“For what?”

“For you to see if you got enough to do the job.”

“What’s the hurry?”

“No hurry,” Mortimer said quickly, nervously, like a guy covering his tracks. “It’s just that my friend, he’s anxious to get moving on this thing, so if you can’t do it, he needs to know.”

“I can’t read it now,” Stark told him. “I have an appointment.”

“Okay,” Mortimer said weakly. He stepped away from the door. “So, you’ll let me know when . . .”

“I’ll be back here at midnight,” Stark said. “You can call me then.”

“How about if I just come by,” Mortimer asked.

“You’re not going home now?”

“Dottie’s on the warpath. I’m giving her a little time to cool.”

Stark looked at Mortimer doubtfully. “Why is she on the warpath, Mortimer?”

Mortimer looked like a guy caught with his hand in the till. “This other broad,” he sputtered. “She thinks I got this other broad.”

Of all the answers Mortimer could have given, Stark thought, this was the most ludicrous, and because of that, he knew that it had been yanked from a mind unaccustomed to deceit.

“I see,” Stark said coolly.

“She’s real hot about it,” Mortimer added with a sideward glance.

“No doubt,” Stark said, though he knew that this, too, was ridiculous, since everything Mortimer had ever said about his wife suggested that she was a woman who asked little and demanded nothing, a dull, moonless planet that revolved around Mortimer in an orbit that never varied in its shape or speed.

And so the question was why had Mortimer bothered to concoct such a shallow, pointless, and transparently absurd lie. The only possible answer was that he’d done so in order to conceal some deeper and more dreadful falsehood.

Stark hated both the question and the answer. He looked at the envelope Mortimer had just given him and felt sure that something was seriously wrong in this whole matter of the missing wife.

“The woman,” he said. “Did you know her?”