The guard snorts. ‘The less they can sing, the bigger the set. You know what? When we had Tony Bennett here last September, it was just him. Didn’t even have a band. The City Symphony backed him up. That was a show. No screaming kids. Actual music. What a concept, huh?’
‘I don’t suppose I could go over for a peek. Maybe snap a picture with my cell phone?’
‘Nope.’ The guard is looking him over too closely. Brady doesn’t like that. ‘In fact, you’re not supposed to be here at all. So …’
‘Gotcha, gotcha,’ Brady says, widening his smile. Time to go. There’s nothing here for him, anyway; if they have two guys on duty now, there’s apt to be half a dozen on Thursday night. ‘Thanks for taking the time to talk to me.’
‘No problem.’
Brady gives him a thumbs-up. The security goon returns it, but stands in the doorway of the security booth, watching him walk away.
He strolls along the edge of a vast and nearly empty parking lot that will be filled to capacity on the night of the ’Round Here show. His smile is gone. He’s musing on the numbfuck ragheads who ran a pair of jetliners into the World Trade Center nine years before. He thinks (without the slightest trace of irony), They spoiled it for the rest of us.
A five-minute trudge takes him to the bank of doors where concertgoers will enter on Thursday night. He has to pay a five-dollar ‘suggested donation fee’ to get in. The lobby is an echoing vault currently filled with art-lovers and student groups. Straight ahead is the gift shop. To the left is the corridor leading to the Mingo Auditorium. It’s as wide as a two-lane highway. In the middle of it is a chrome stand with a sign reading NO BAGS NO BOXES NO BACKPACKS.
Also no metal detectors. It’s possible they haven’t been set up yet, but Brady’s pretty sure they won’t be used at all. There are going to be over four thousand concertgoers pushing to get in, and metal detectors booping and beeping all over the place would create a nightmarish traffic jam. There will be mucho security guards, though, all of them just as suspicious and officious as the sunglasses-wearing ass-munch out back. A man in a quilted vest on a warm June evening would attract their attention at once. In fact, any man without a pigtailed teenybop daughter in tow would be apt to attract attention.
Would you step over here for a minute, sir?
Of course he could blow the vest right then and there and scrag a hundred or more, but that isn’t what he wants. What he wants is to go home, search the Web, find out the name of ’Round Here’s biggest song, and flick the switch halfway through it, when the little chickie-boos are screaming their very loudest and going out of their little chickie-boo minds.
But the obstacles are formidable.
Standing there in the lobby amid the guidebook-toting retirees and junior high school mouth-breathers, Brady thinks, I wish Frankie was alive. If he was, I’d take him to the show. He’d be just stupid enough to like it. I’d even let him bring Sammy the Fire Truck. The thought fills him with the deep and completely authentic sadness that often comes to him when he thinks about Frankie.
Maybe I ought to just kill the fat ex-cop, and myself, and then call it a career.
Rubbing at his temples, where one of his headaches has begun to gather (and now there’s no Mom to ease it), Brady wanders across the lobby and into the Harlow Floyd Art Gallery, where a large hanging banner announces that JUNE IS MANET MONTH!
He doesn’t know exactly who Manet was, probably another old frog painter like van Gogh, but some of the pictures are great. He doesn’t care much for the still-lifes (why in God’s name would you want to spend time painting a melon?), but some of the other ones are possessed of an almost feral violence. One shows a dead matador. Brady looks at it for nearly five minutes with his hands clasped behind him, ignoring the people who jostle by or peer over his shoulder for a look. The matador isn’t mangled or anything, but the blood oozing from beneath his left shoulder looks more real than the blood in all the violent movies Brady has ever seen, and he’s seen plenty. It calms him and clears him and when he finally walks on, he thinks: There has to be a way to do this.
On the spur of the moment he hooks into the gift shop and buys a bunch of ’Round Here shit. When he comes out ten minutes later, carrying a bag with I HAD A MAC ATTACK printed on the side, he again glances down the hallway leading to the Mingo. Just two nights from now, that hallway will become a cattle-chute filled with laughing, pushing, crazily excited girls, most accompanied by longsuffering parents. From this angle he can see that the far righthand side of the corridor has been sectioned off from the rest by velvet ropes. At the head of this sequestered mini-corridor is another sign on another chrome stand.
Brady reads it and thinks, Oh my God.
Oh … my … God!
13
In the apartment that used to belong to Elizabeth Wharton, Janey kicks off her heels and plunks down on the couch. ‘Thank God that’s over. Did it last a thousand years, or two?’
‘Two,’ Hodges says. ‘You look like a woman who could use a nap.’
‘I slept until eight,’ she protests, but to Hodges it sounds feeble.
‘Still might be a good idea.’
‘Considering the fact that I’m having dinner with my relatives tonight in Sugar Heights, you could have something there, shamus. You’re off the hook on dinner, by the way. I think they want to talk about everyone’s favorite musical comedy, Janey’s Millions.’
‘Wouldn’t surprise me.’
‘I’m going to split Ollie’s loot with them. Straight down the middle.’
Hodges starts to laugh. He stops when he realizes she’s serious.
Janey hoists her eyebrows. ‘Got a problem with that? Maybe think a paltry three and a half mil won’t be enough to see me through to my old age?’
‘I guess it would, but … it’s yours. Olivia willed it to you.’
‘Yes, and the will’s unbreakable, Lawyer Schron assures me of that, but that still doesn’t mean Ollie was in her right mind when she made it. You know that. You saw her, talked to her.’ She’s massaging her feet through her stockings. ‘Besides, if I give them half, I get to watch how they divvy it up. Think of the amusement value.’
‘Sure you don’t want me to come with you tonight?’
‘Not tonight but definitely tomorrow. That I can’t do alone.’
‘I’ll pick you up at quarter past nine. Unless you want to spend another night at my place, that is.’
‘Tempting, but no. Tonight is strictly earmarked for family fun. There’s one other thing before you take off. Very important.’ She rummages in her purse for a notepad and a pen. She writes, then tears off a page and holds it out to him. Hodges sees two groups of numbers.
Janey says, ‘The first one opens the gates to the house in Sugar Hill. The second kills the burglar alarm. When you and your friend Jerome are working on Ollie’s computer Thursday morning, I’ll be taking Aunt Charlotte, Holly, and Uncle Henry to the airport. If the guy rigged her computer the way you think he did … and the program’s still there … I don’t think I could stand it.’ She’s looking at him pleadingly. ‘Do you get that? Say you do.’
‘I get it,’ Hodges says. He kneels beside her like a man getting ready to propose in one of the romantic novels his ex-wife used to like. Part of him feels absurd. Mostly he doesn’t.
‘Janey,’ he says.
She looks at him, trying to smile, not quite making it.
‘I’m sorry. For everything. So, so sorry.’ It isn’t just her he’s thinking of, or her late sister, who was so troubled and troublesome. He’s thinking of the ones who were lost at City Center, especially the woman and her baby.
When he was promoted to detective, his mentor was a guy named Frank Sledge. Hodges thought of him as an old guy, but back then Sledge was fifteen years younger than Hodges is now. Don’t you ever let me hear you call them the vics, Sledge told him. That shit’s strictly for assholes and burnouts. Remember their names. Call them by their names.