Either he was trying to calm her or he believed this, she didn’t know which. She told him about having asked Tommy Ling to watch the system for Tony’s use of his access card.
“That’s good thinking,” Lou said. “You must be married to a cop.”
“You’ll send somebody?”
“I’m on it.” He paused and then said, “That’s what you wanted all along, wasn’t it, me to send a unit over there?”
Her breath caught. Busted, she thought. She said, “I’m getting Miles and Sarah, don’t forget.”
“Don’t change the subject on me. You just worked me.”
“Thanks for this.” She hung up before giving him a chance to vent.
At 9:55 A.M. her office phone sounded the intercom tone and she picked up.
Tommy Ling said frantically, “Main entrance!”
“Tony’s here?”
“He’s had a heart attack or something. You’d better get down there.”
There were times Liz marveled at the speed and ease of elevators, but this was not one of them. She arrived on the ground floor to a sea of security shirts bent over a pair of legs she assumed to be Tony’s, a throng of employees lined up trying to get in, and chaotic shouting of nearly everyone involved.
She pushed her way through the attendants, enough to first identify and then get a better look at Tony LaRossa. His face was a pale color she’d never seen before, his lips a faint blue. He was either unconscious or dead. He’d made it through one of the two metal detectors, and had collapsed. A black nylon webbed briefcase lay unzipped and opened on the security inspection table. It was common practice for security to search every bag. It appeared that Tony had collapsed in the middle of just such a search.
She established that an ambulance had been called, verified by the sudden distant whine of a siren that grew progressively louder. One of the attendants got Tony’s feet elevated as a woman began CPR on his chest. A male guard pinched off Tony’s nose and administered mouth-to-mouth, a handkerchief placed over Tony’s lips. A low, steady voice counted, “One-two-three-four… ” and Liz felt her chest swell and her eyes challenged by tears as this team of trained people tried to save him. Tony’s life seemed to be passing before her eyes, and she silently whispered prayers that Tony not be harmed. She removed all fear, all claims that the images before her could in any way harm him. She fought this her way, while they fought theirs, giving no thought to calling Lou or to anything outside the sphere of this immediate need.
The EMTs swarmed inside with their equipment and wheeled stretcher, and took over the CPR without missing a beat. It looked to Liz so rehearsed and choreographed, and she realized that there were people in this world who did nothing but save other people. Or try to. She marveled at how strange it must be to rise every morning and put on a gray-striped shirt and know you will see death and injury before the sun sets.
“What happened, Dilly?” she managed to ask the guard she knew only by his first name. She saw him twice a day, every day. Dilly was middle-forties and beer-bellied, with an easy disposition.
“Mr. LaRossa. Same as always: got the green light, stepped up to be checked, but tripped the mag going through.” He indicated the metal detector. “And, I don’t know, just something came over him, like. He pulls out his cell phone. No big deal, but something hammered him. He just stared at it, tried to pass it off, and keeled over. Dropped like a stone. Three of us here, not one of us got to him in time to catch him. Went down hard. Thunked his head pretty good.”
“That’s the cell phone?” she asked, stepping so easily into the role of inquisitor, understanding the rush that Lou felt doing this. A blue Nokia sat on the scratched vinyl-topped table that security used for searches. Liz stepped up to the open briefcase. Papers. Pens. Several small computer disks. A laptop. A Palm Pilot device. A second cell phone: a small Motorola flip.
Liz glanced back and forth between the two cell phones. Two, not one. Before she even placed the call to Lou, she knew this addition to be of significance to Tony’s heart attack. She knew it all had to do with David and his determination to get at this money. Tony LaRossa? she thought in stunned disbelief.
She caught Lou on his way back to work. He’d followed the Foreman crime scene with a meeting at the bank looking over safe-deposit logs. Speaking to Lou over the phone, she said, “We have to find Beth and the kids. Something terrible has happened.”
NINE
LIZ CAME THROUGH THE LAROSSAS’ front door timidly, knowing she was on Lou’s turf, and feeling strange about it. Her job, her “assignment,” was to get Beth to talk. Lou had offered to drive Beth to the hospital, but all she would say was that Tony had told her to stay here.
In all their years together, Liz and Lou had never crossed over like this-Lou investigating the bank; Liz walking into one of his crime scenes. That was how it felt to her: a crime scene; not Beth and Tony’s house, where she and Lou had attended a christening reception only a few months earlier. She thought of this living room the way it had been then: loud voices, laughter, beer and the smell of cigarettes on a passing suit. Kids running around in their Sunday best. Elton John on the stereo. Beth’s tight dresses that reminded Liz of Sophia Loren in an old film-much too low at the neck, tailored at the waist to cling to her swaying hips, too retro to qualify as retro, as if she shopped the Salvation Army. But Tony wasn’t much for fashion either, so that visiting them left Liz feeling as if she’d stepped into an old black-and-white television show. The LaRossas had never left the late sixties.
Beth and Lou occupied the room’s love seat, a plush white, fuzzy carpet spongy beneath Liz’s shoes. She saw several patrolmen gathered in the kitchen. The twins were not in sight, though a distant crying pulled Liz’s attention toward the second floor. “Who’s with the twins?” Liz asked.
“They’re upstairs with Mary,” Beth said to Liz. Judging by Lou’s relieved expression, Liz had extricated the first words of significance.
“They’re both okay?” Liz asked.
“Fine,” Beth said. Dazed, she told Liz, “Tony said to stay right here.”
Beth had been run over by the events. Her reddish, shoulder-length hair, usually worn with a severe flip and needing gobs of hairspray, hung lifeless and tangled. Her large brown eyes that typically animated her speech dimmed in a squinted, gloomy sadness. Her high cheekbones looked sunken, and her plucked eyebrows, always arched too high, lay flat behind a scowl. But nothing limited the beauty of her Italian skin. It possessed an almost artificial luminescence that knocked ten years off her thirty-eight.
Liz couldn’t tell how long she’d been in her clothes-a white turtleneck and casual black pants with an elastic waist. It might have been all night. She had that weary look about her.
On a nod from Lou, Liz said, “You understand that Tony collapsed, Beth? At the bank. We’d like to get you to the hospital.”
“They said not to go anywhere. That they’d call when it was okay to leave.”
“Who?” Boldt asked.
“There were two of them,” Beth said in a tight whisper, her eyes locked in a stare as she relived events. “Stayed with us all night. Tony was supposed to do something at the bank for them. They said they were staying with us until it was done. Then, later, one of them got a call on his cell phone, and they just up and left. In a hurry. Told me not to leave the house, not to use the phone until Tony came home.”
Liz asked, “What was Tony asked to do for them, Beth?”
She shook her head back and forth, a child not supposed to reveal a secret. “They gave him a phone and a disk. That’s all I know about it.”