Waiting for Armando (Kate Lawrence Mysteries) (7 page)

In the time it took us to get down to thirty-six, the stairwell behind us filled with employees from the higher floors. There were two flights of stairs between each floor, which put our progress at two down, seventy-two flights to go. I glanced around for
Strutter
and Margo but didn’t see them. Ingrid was nowhere in sight either. In fact, the only familiar person I saw was Harold Karp, clinging to the right handrail just in front of me.

“How are you doing?” I yelled at my young friends over the din. Obviously, they were terrified almost to immobility. “Hey, I’ve got more than twenty years on you, so if I can do it, you can, too,” I goaded them. Wide-eyed, they clung to each other and moved stiffly on.

Ten more flights and we passed the fire door to the thirty-first floor. Then the crowd stopped moving. At first, we all pressed closer to those in front of us, every instinct urging us onward; but as we felt the pressure from behind us, we realized that stopping was our only option.

“Evacuate the building immediately,” screamed the loudspeaker for what had to be the hundredth time, and I fought the hysteria rising in my chest. Instinctively, I knew that if I lost it, everyone else would, too. We would become a mob, trampling each other.

Were the stairs blocked? Was the air on the lower floors already suffused with acrid smoke, sucked in by the building’s intake fans? Was the door at the bottom of them locked? We had no way of knowing. No information filtered up the line of silent, frustrated escapees.
Was this how it had been in the stairwells of the World Trade Center?

The air in the tight quarters grew stale and hot as long seconds ticked by.
One minute … two … five.
We were sheep in a herd, too frightened to bleat, waiting to suffocate in a stairwell. And then we sensed movement ahead of us. Slowly, slowly, we found room for one more step and another. Hardly daring to hope, we kept our eyes on our feet, willing ourselves not to stumble or shove. Then we were on twenty, and a crossover corridor to the remaining fire stairs gave us a welcome chance to move horizontally for a few seconds before re-entering the stairwell. Shaky breaths were drawn all around, and we were back in it.

The klaxons continued to blare unmercifully, but we were past knowing or caring.
Fourteen.
Thirteen.
Twelve.
Eleven.
I wondered dully how many stairs were in seventy-four flights, how many times my thigh muscles were capable of making this repetitive motion before they buckled. And then on the tenth floor, with twenty flights still to go, we experienced the miracle of a breath of fresh air rising from the street-level door below.
The door is passable. The air is breathable.
The adrenaline rush was incredible as we now hurried, scampered down the remaining flights and rushed through the final corridor to the exit. I hit the street door and pushed the two young clerks through it ahead of me, sucking the hot but relatively fresh afternoon air deeply into my lungs.
 
The girls burst into tears, and I patted their shoulders as we crossed Church Street and looked back toward the building.

It’s all over now, all over,” I said as much for my benefit as theirs. “We’re all right.”

Directly across the street
Strutter
and Margo clung to each other as they anxiously scanned the faces of the employees emerging from the fire exit. Grateful tears filled my eyes as I realized they were searching for me.

“
Strutter
!
Margo!” I screamed to them. “I’m here, over here!” Though they couldn’t yet find me in the crowd,
Strutter
recognized my voice and turned toward it, beaming when she saw me waving frantically. She grabbed Margo’s chin and turned her face toward me, too. We all hollered and waved at each other in relief, but I didn’t have the strength to buck the tide of evacuees to get to where they were.

“Where’s Ingrid?” I yelled. Margo heard me and pointed toward Main Street, smiling reassuringly.

As the crowd carried me along, I looked around, stunned. The scene was straight out of a disaster movie. The black smoke glimpsed earlier from the upper floors of the Metro Building continued to billow from the Civic Center. The plastic, yellow tape that I associated with murder scenes roped off Trumbull Street from Church to Asylum, and the intervening two blocks were filled with emergency equipment of every kind. Helmeted firefighters carrying hoses and hatchets swarmed everywhere, as did the police. News crews jostled each other just outside the tape, battling for position with the employees who continued to stumble from the building, looking as dazed as I felt. I still didn’t know what had happened, but I was unable to take one more minute of this.

Unbelievably, I still had my shoulder bag, which even more unbelievably still contained my car keys. I turned my back on the Metro Building and stepped off the curb, smack into a large, black police officer.

“Whoa, there, lady,” he said, not unkindly, steadying me with hands the size of hams on my shoulders. “Are you all right? Do you need medical attention?”

I attempted to clear my throat and quavered, “No, no. I just need to get to my car. It’s in the lot up on the corner of Main Street. I’ll be fine.”

He didn’t look convinced, but he let me continue across Trumbull, watching sharply until I cleared the curb on the other side. His few kind words were almost my undoing, and I
stumbled
the rest of the way to the parking lot, choking back sobs. When I finally fumbled the car door open, I fell into the driver’s seat and let them rip, not caring who saw or heard me.

Half an hour later, I let myself into the condo. Mary met me in the living room, where the television was tuned to Channel 30. Newsreel footage showed the billowing smoke I had just survived. Mary pushed me onto the sofa and put a glass of neat bourbon into my hand. She wrapped my legs, which felt oddly light and numb, in a comforter and put Moses, who was allowed out of the guest room while Mary was in the house, in my lap. Then she sat down next to me and chafed my cold free hand in her two warm ones.

“It was some old transformers in that restaurant that closed a year or so ago,” she said, “the one on the first floor of the Civic Center. They blew up and started a hell of a fire.”

I searched her face. “It wasn’t a bomb, then? We thought it was a bomb.” The last of the stubborn tears trickled down my cheeks. Mary blotted them away gently with the edge of the comforter.

“It was a fire, Katie girl, just a rotten, scary fire.” Then she grinned wickedly. “I could just picture you up in the top of that mother of a building,” she said, starting to giggle. “You must have
peed
your pants!” She howled with glee, and my tears disappeared as I joined in, spilling bourbon on myself helplessly. I caught Moses as he stepped off my lap into thin air and deposited him safely onto the carpet as Mary and I gasped and held our sides.

“For your information,” I said primly, “it was nip and tuck there for a while, but I got through the whole ordeal with my power dry, so to speak. In fact, now that it’s all over, I’m feeling pretty fearless.”

“Do you mean to say you’re going back tomorrow?” Mary blinked at me owlishly without her spectacles as she wiped her eyes. “I thought for sure this fire would put the kibosh on your career as Gal Friday.”

“Not a chance. In fact, having to walk down seventy-four flights of stairs has made riding the
Hellavators
look good by comparison,” I pronounced, and for the next two days it was true. I rode the elevators calmly, able to focus on the closed-circuit TV that offered headline news and weather to passengers. I even took an extra ride down to street level on Tuesday to lunch with Ingrid,
Strutter
and Margo, who were becoming real friends.

When Armando phoned that evening and spent twenty minutes raving between bursts of static about the weather, the scenery, the wonderful time he was having, I tried to summarize the events of the last few days, but the continual interference made it impossible. I gave up and said I was doing fine, just fine.

On Thursday morning, I found Alain
Girouard
dead in his office.

Four

For days afterward people would say, “It must have been terrifying to find him dead like that,” but in all honesty, I’d have to say it really wasn’t.
 
Surreal would be more accurate, the kind of thing where your brain refuses to accept the signals your eyes are sending it.

In retrospect, it wasn’t finding
Girouard
dead that was all that surprising, now that I was up to speed on his romantic capers. God knows there were plenty of people who had good reason to stop his breathing, including a wife who must have reached her tolerance limit several of his girlfriends ago, the discarded paramours themselves, cuckolded husbands and boyfriends.
But finding him dead in his
office
… now that was surprising.

As the chief litigator and a major rainmaker for the firm,
Girouard
was held in the highest esteem, however grudging, by his legal colleagues at BGB. The fact that they benefitted directly from his reputed manipulation of the truth in
moot
situations, skating skillfully on the thin ice of potential disbarment, only enhanced their admiration. The name of the litigation game is conflict, and
Girouard
apparently could litigate the hell out of any conflict in the courtroom you could name, even if he created a few personal conflicts outside of it.

So finding him dead in a hotel room wouldn’t have raised many eyebrows, but discovering his exquisitely barbered head face down in a puddle of cooling, amaretto-flavored decaf was a definite eye-opener on a workday morning.

I was enjoying that peaceful interlude Thursday morning between my arrival at the office and Donatello’s, getting a jump on the day before he steamed in. I had collected the first batch of morning mail, stacked the day’s periodicals in the only clear space on top of his files, and was making a quick swing by
Girouard’s
office to drop off the intake paperwork for a new matter that might go to litigation. It required his signature before it could go up to the data processing department.

As I approached the corner office, I saw that his door was half closed instead of standing wide open as it usually did before his arrival, but if the man wanted to get an early start on his preparation for today’s inevitable court
appearance,
it was none of my business. My only concern was entering quietly so as not to disturb him, as I had been instructed to do during my session on firm protocol. Don’t knock. Just enter and leave paperwork in the in-box on the corner of his vast, teakwood desk. If he’s reading, on the telephone, or using the computer, don’t speak to him. Return at another time. Exit silently like a good little factotum.

As I entered, shuffling through the papers in my hands to be sure they were in order, I glanced up briefly and saw
Girouard
slumped over in his chair, his head on his desk.
Oh dear,
was my first thought.
He wasn’t expecting anyone else to be in this early, and I’ve caught him napping. He’s going to be embarrassed.
Then I saw that not only was his head on his desk, he was face down in a puddle of what looked to be coffee with cream. It smelled faintly of the almond-flavored creamer that he preferred.
Does he know he’s spilled his coffee?
I wondered inanely. Finally, the synapses made contact.
No, you idiot,
thundered the inner voice.
He doesn’t know he’s spilled his coffee. He’s dead.

But dead seemed such an unlikely condition in which to find anyone on a Thursday morning, I continued to gaze calmly at
Girouard
, worried that he might find being discovered in such dishabille a bit awkward and wondering how to allow him to save face. Then shock took over, loosening my knees, and I sat down hard in the visitor’s chair next to the desk.

At this interesting juncture, I heard Ingrid arrive in the corridor, humming cheerfully to
herself
as she plopped her lunch bag on her desk and clicked on her computer. Clearly, she had regained control of her emotions since our encounter of yesterday and felt good about her decision to abandon
Girouard
. Then Ingrid apparently noticed, as I had, that the door to the office of her soon-to-be-ex-boss was half closed, and she stuck her head inside to announce her arrival. From that vantage point all she could see was me, motionless in the chair next to
Girouard’s
desk. For a moment, a small, puzzled frown puckered her perfectly styled eyebrows, but all she said was, “Kate?”