Authors: Peter Leonard
Cobb watched Sculley get out of a taxi and move quickly to the apartment building entrance.
“Let's go,” Ruben said.
“What about the doorman?”
Ruben frowned. “You worried about that guy in the clown outfit?”
That was the one thing about Ruben he liked; the dude had confidence. Cobb got out and waited for traffic to clear. Ruben came around the car and moved up next to him, the two of them walking side by side to the building. Cobb went in first. The doorman, wearing a green double-breasted coat with gold trim, gave him a concerned look, checking out Cobb, then Ruben.
“Can I help you gentlemen?”
“We're visiting our friend, Joe Sculley,” Cobb said in a friendly, down-home voice.
“I'll give Mr. Sculley a call. Can I have your names, please?”
Ruben said, “Hey, where you get that outfit at? You going to a costume party, or you like looking like a clown?”
The doorman gave him a nervous smile. His name tag said Pat. What kind of pussy name was that?
“I'll tell Mr. Sculley you're here.”
“We want to surprise him,” Ruben said.
“I have to announce you. It's a rule.”
Ruben took a step toward him. “Go take a leak, you never saw us. That's the rule I'd follow I was you. What apartment's he in?”
“Four D.” Pat the doorman looked like he was going to be sick.
“Why don't you come up and show us where it's at,” Cobb said. Put him to work, put Sculley at ease.
In the elevator, Cobb said, “Like being a doorman?” He imagined himself standing in the lobby in that outfit all day, opening the door and having to be nice, walking tenants out to a taxi under an umbrella on rainy days and helping them with their groceries, but mostly taking a lot of shit.
“It's not too bad.”
“Yeah, what do you like about it?”
“It pays pretty good, but sometimes people will ask you to do things that aren't part of your job description.”
“Like what?”
“Like washing their windows and walking their dog. One time, a woman asked me to do her dishes.”
“Any of the ladies ever ask you to come upstairs and take care of their personal needs?” Cobb winked and punched his open palm with a fist a couple times, one guy to another.
Pat the doorman shrugged and said, “No sir, nothing like that.”
The bell sounded and the elevator doors opened.
“It's this way,” Pat the doorman said, directing them to the left. “Last one at the end of the hall.”
Now, standing in front of Sculley's door, Cobb said, “Knock, say you have a package for him, but don't mention us. It's a surprise, remember?”
Pat did as he was told, and the door opened. Sculley saw them and backed away into the living room. Ruben went after him.
“If that's all, I have to get back to work.”
“We'd like the pleasure of your company a while longer. People can open their own fucking door.” Cobb grabbed the doorman's collar, pulled him into the apartment.
Ruben had Sculley on the couch in the living room, standing over him, the skyline of Lower Manhattan minus the Trade Center in the background. Cobb took the doorman into a bedroom, opened the closet. “Take off your clothes and get in there.”
“Why? I did what you asked. I have a job to do.”
Cobb drew the Ruger. “'Cause I have this. I'm your new boss, and I'm telling you to.”
Pat undressed. His body was pale and thin, looked like he'd never been in the sun in his life. Pat walked in the closet. Cobb closed the door and locked it. He went into the living room. Sculley glanced at him. There was a deep purple bruise along his jawline. Cobb slapped the side of Sculley's swollen face with an open hand.
“Ahh, Jesus.” Sculley ducked and put his arms up to protect himself.
Cobb said, “You gonna call security?”
“I don't know where Jack is. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you, but I don't believe you,” Cobb said.
“What do you want me to do, make something up?”
Cobb said, “I believe that's what you're doing.” He aimed the Ruger, held it six inches from Sculley's face and cocked the hammer. “What do you think's gonna happen here? You think we're just gonna go away, forget about you?”
“Eventually,” Sculley said.
“You trying to be funny? Let me tell you, this is no fucking joke.”
“Well, it is a little absurd, don't you agree? You're threatening to shoot me but you can't 'cause you believe I know where Jack is. Does that about sum it up?”
Ruben bent down and pulled Sculley up off the couch and hit him in the gut. Sculley grunted and fell back on the cushions, holding his stomach.
“Last time I talked to him, he was in Florida, a town called Pompano Beach,” Sculley said, breathing hard.
Cobb said, “What's the address?”
“It was a post office box.”
“Where's he staying?”
Sculley answered the question just as Dominic “Dapper Dom” Benigno walked into the room pointing a silenced semiautomatic at them.
Diane sat in the car, watching people walk by. She was across the street from Cobb's apartment building. She wouldn't have guessed Duane Cobb lived in Chelsea, but then he was something of an enigma.
Midafternoon, Cobb came out of the building and walked down 21st Street past his car. Diane crossed the street and followed him. She wondered what she'd say if he saw her. He was seventy to a hundred feet ahead of her on the crowded sidewalk, Diane trying to keep an eye on Cobb, and then she lost him.
She walked half a block, stopped, moved close to a building, and waited a few minutes. The street was lined with cars, the sidewalk packed with people. She looked again and saw him coming toward her, carrying dry cleaning wrapped in plastic draped over his arm. Diane ducked into a cluttered indie bookstore, saw Cobb walk past the window, gave him thirty seconds, and went after him.
Cobb disappeared in his building and Diane went back to her car. The hard part was waiting, not knowing what he was going to do.
It was getting dark when someone tapped on the side window. A homeless man was saying something she couldn't understand. There was a shopping cart filled with plastic bags, his meager possessions on the sidewalk next to him. Lights were on in the shop behind him.
She lowered the window a couple inches and now caught a whiff of the man and had to breathe through her mouth. He mumbled something unintelligible. She had to get rid of him. As she reached for her purse on the passenger seat, Cobb appeared again in front of the building.
Diane took out her wallet, grabbed a ten-dollar bill, and fed it through the opening at the top of the window. She climbed over the center console onto the passenger seat, opened the door, and saw Cobb walk past his car still parked where he'd left it hours earlier. She waited for traffic to clear, and ran across the street and down the sidewalk dodging pedestrians.
She didn't see Cobb again till he was ten yards ahead of her. She followed him into a restaurant and saw him sit at the bar. Diane ran back to his apartment building, stepped into the vestibule, and pressed the button for the super, Z. Korab.
“Yes? Hello.” He had an Eastern European accent.
“I'm sorry to bother you. I'm Diane, Duane Cobb's girlfriend. Duane was supposed to leave a key to his apartment in my mailbox, and I guess he forgot.”
“He say nothing about this.”
“I just need you to let me in his apartment.”
The super didn't respond, and in the silence, she thought he had cut her off, disconnected, but then the door buzzed. She slipped inside and saw a man coming out of a ground-floor apartment to meet her. “You have identification?” He was bald down the middle of his head and suspicious and smelled of BO, garlic, and sharp spices like paprika and cumin.
Diane opened her wallet and showed him her Connecticut driver's license, now glad she hadn't given him a fake name. He stared at the license and then at her. “Live in Connecticut,” he nodded, “very nice.” She put her wallet away and the super pressed the button for the elevator. The doors opened and he swung his right arm toward the open car like an impresario.
Riding up to the third floor, he said, “I never see you here before.”
“That's because I've never been here.”
“You don't mind my saying, I don't see you and Mr. Cobb together.”
“Sometimes opposites attract.”
He gave her a look that said he didn't believe it. They walked down the hall to 312. The super unlocked the door. “You need anything else, pretty lady, come see Zoltan Korab.”
She went in and closed the door. She was able to hide her nervousness with the super and now felt relieved to be alone. She had no idea when Duane Cobb would come back or what he would do if he found her in his apartment.
There was a cheap blue leather couch facing a Sony Trinitron on an end table, and a coffee table cluttered with newspapers and copies of
Playboy
and
Penthouse
and a paperback titled
The Seven Stages of Grief
.
Across the room there was a PC and a printer on a desk. Diane walked over and booted up the computer. She checked Cobb's e-mails but didn't see any familiar names. She checked the drawers and found a manila envelope full of photographs. There were shots of Jack taken at various locations in the city, close-ups and long shots. Jack getting out of a cab; Jack crossing the Trade Center Plaza; Jack getting off the train in Darien and pulling into the driveway at home.
There were shots of Jack and Vicki laughing, hugging, holding hands, kissingâthe man she married and thought she knew, captured on film in the arms of another woman. The images seemed surreal. This wasn't really Jack; it was someone who looked like him.
There were also shots of the funeral procession and shots taken at the rainy gravesite, everyone huddled under umbrellas. The last one was a close-up of Ruben Diaz scowling at the camera or, more likely, Cobb. She put the photographs back in the envelope and left it on top of the desk. She would take it with her, show Detective Brown. He wanted proof, well, here it was. Maybe now he would believe her.
In another drawer, she found a notebook that had Jack's contact information, e-mail address, home address, and phone numbers, including Diane's cell, and there was a piece of note paper with an address in Florida: 300 Briny Avenue, Pompano Beach.
Diane and Jack had gone to Pompano before they were married and stayed in a motel on Briny Avenue. Was it a coincidence? She didn't think so. She put the notebook back and closed the drawer. In the printer next to the computer was a piece of paper that Cobb had probably forgotten about. It was from the Delta Airlines website, a morning flight from LaGuardia to Fort Lauderdale scheduled to leave the next day at nine thirty. For weeks she'd been grief-stricken, thinking Jack was dead, and now she believed he might be alive.
Cobb ordered a
7 and 7 and sipped it sitting at the bar, eating pretzels, studying the profile of a blonde in a gray business suit, sitting next to him. “How was your day?” Cobb said, trying to be friendly.
She turned and glanced at him. “What're you taking a poll?”
Her body looked okay; it was her face that needed help. She'd look better after a couple more drinks. “What're you having, let me buy you one.”
She sat there frozen, pretending he didn't exist. Cobb finished the 7 and 7 and signaled the bartender. “A refill for me, and get my stressed-out friend one.” She was drinking white wine in a stemmed glass.
“I'm not stressed out and I'm not your friend,” she said with the same angry tone.
“I was gonna invite you back to my place, offer to give you a back rub, but not now.”
The girl gave him a nervous grin. “You've got to be kidding. Does that lame come-on really work? Women fall for that, I can't imagine. How gullible do you think I am?”
Cobb had her full attention now. “You want to be cranky and unpleasant, go right ahead, be my guest.” He turned and looked away.
The bartender came with the drinks, put a 7 and 7 on the bar top in front of Cobb and a glass of white in front of the girl.
“You're right,” Cobb said. “This is out of character for me. I was being a little forward, a little bold. Usually when I see a girl as
good-looking as you, I freeze up.” She picked up her wine glass, and he noticed the engagement ring on her finger. “Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were betrothed.”
“What're you talking about?” she said in a softer voice.
“Engaged. Someone's fiancée.”
The girl frowned. “I'm not. This is my mother's ring.”
“Well, it wouldn't have surprised me.”
The girl smiled.
“I think we got off on the wrong foot. Let's start over, what do you say? I'm Duane.” He offered his hand.
“Mara.”
“No kidding? That's a great name. Mara, what do you do?”
Diane walked through
the apartment looking at things: a framed photo of a little boy dressed as a cowboy, and another of a teenager driving a tractor. There were four yearbooks from Carbondale Community High School. She took out the one from 1984 and found Cobb's senior picture. He was named Class Flirt and had been a member of the band and choir club. She closed the book, put it back on the shelf, and went into the bedroom.
Duane Cobb was neat, she had to give him that. The apartment, although weak in decor, was immaculate. He even made his bed, a queen with a green comforter. There was a small suitcase on one side of the bed that he had started to pack with shorts and golf shirts for the trip to Florida.
She checked the closet, looking at Western shirts on hangers lined up next to oxford-cloth button-downs, cowboy boots sharing the floor with penny loafers, cowboy hats next to sport caps. In the top drawer of the dresser, she found a matte black semiautomatic. It was a Ruger Lc9. Diane ejected the magazine, removed the cartridges, flushed them down the toilet, and put the gun back.
Cobb unlocked the
building door and held it open for Mara, the editorial assistant who seemed like she had a stick up her ass when he first met her, but after two glasses of wine had mellowed, turned into a different person. “I've never done this before,” she said as they waited for the elevator. Yeah, Cobb was thinking. Next she'd tell him she was saving herself for Mr. Right. Jesus. His plan was to take Mara upstairs, skip the foreplay, bang her, and say good night.
Mr. K., the super, came up behind them, glanced at Cobb, and said, “I let girl in apartment.”
Cobb had no idea what this crazy Hungarian was talking about. “What're you saying?”
“Girl come to see you, I open door for her.”
“What girl?”
“Diane from Connecticut.”
“How do you know her name's Diane?”
“I see driving license.”
He knew only one Diane from Connecticut. How in the hell'd she find him? She must've followed them and he hadn't noticed, wasn't paying attention. That seemed hard to believe. Now Mara made a face, gave him a dirty look. “You have a girlfriend? I knew this was a bad idea.” She moved past him and walked out the door.
He fixed his attention on Mr. K. “You're saying you let her in my apartment?” Cobb couldn't believe it. “What's she look like?”
Mr. K. made a curvy female shape with his hands and grinned, something Cobb had never seen him do, not that Cobb saw him that often.
“What color hair?”
“Blonde.”
“You think she's still up there?”
Diane was conscious
of the time and felt she had been in the apartment too long already. She picked the envelope full of photos off the desk
and moved to the door, opening it a couple inches, glancing right down the empty hall to the elevator.
She was about to walk out, go left to the stairs, when she heard something and hesitated. The elevator bell sounded and the doors opened and Duane Cobb charged down the hall. Diane ran into the bedroom, went in the closet, and closed the door but left it open a crack.
She heard him come in and move through the main room, shoes clicking on the hardwood, and then he stood in the doorway to the bedroom, three feet away, looking in the room. She moved deeper into the closet and got on her knees behind a row of jeans on hangers.
Cobb thought he smelled perfume when he came in, a hint of it still in the air. Who'd this bitch think she was, coming to his place, fucking with him? He went through the apartment, looked in the bedroom, checked under the bed, looked in the closet. He went in the bathroom, pulled the shower curtain back. She wasn't there, and there was no other place to hide.
After the drinks, he had to piss so bad his eyes were yellow, his teeth were floatingâthings his father used to say when Duane was a kid and had to go. He stood in front of the toilet and let fly, and Jesus if he wasn't there a good three minutes.
Cobb went back in the bedroom, opened the top drawer of the dresser, and grabbed the Ruger. He knew guns and could tell something wasn't right and ejected the magazine. It was empty. He had a strange feeling he was being watched, moved to the closet, swung the door open, and smelled perfume. Cobb grabbed the softball bat leaning against the wall and brought it to his shoulder, took a beat, and swung through his Western shirts on hangers, sending them sideways. Now he parted a row of Levis on hangers with the barrel of the bat, looking behind them. She wasn't there.
He went back through the apartment to the front door. It wasn't closed all the way. Did he do that, or was Diane McCann in the apartment when he came home? He took the stairs to the lobby and went
outside, looking down the sidewalk in both directions and at the cars on both sides of the street and saw a silver BMW pull out of a parking space. Didn't Jack have a car like that?
Back in the apartment, Cobb closed the door and locked it. He sat at the desk, opened the top drawer, and noticed the photographs were missing. He'd have sworn he left the envelope right there. He went through the other drawers but didn't see it. He was tense till he reasoned that the photos, without the negatives and the camera, didn't prove anything, didn't implicate him or Ruben.
There was a piece of paper in the printer he'd forgotten about. Cobb pulled it out, looking at the flight information, wondering if Diane had seen it. What if she had, it wasn't gonna help her. She didn't know where they were going.