Run for Your Life - James Patterson [71]
The butler had announced that Mr. and Mrs. Blanchette were unable to be present owing to a family emergency but wanted the guests to enjoy themselves. They took him at his word. Glamorously and barely dressed teenage socialites were bumping and grinding in the now dark and strobing party room. I passed a living statue, a transvestite Bettie Page impersonator, a woman in a Vegas showgirl costume, a guy dressed like a bird. I shook my head as he flapped past. Was he the endangered species they were trying to save? No, this event was for a different charity, but I couldn’t remember what.
“Who is your dermatologist?” someone yelled near my ear as I pushed my way through the crush. “These white truffles are so complex yet so simple,” somebody else announced.
I turned as someone clapped me on the shoulder. It was a middle-aged man in a black suit with traces of a suspicious white powder under his nose.
“Hey, I haven’t seen you since the open,” he said. “How was Majorca?”
“Great,” I said, backing away toward the kitchen.
I even spotted one of the New York Times editors who I’d almost arrested, talking with some men in suits out by the pool. Probably deciding what tomorrow’s news would be.
When I finally made it back to my kitchen command corner, I sat for a moment with my forehead pressed against the cool, soothing granite of the counter.
The newest revelation, still ringing through my aching skull, didn’t make sense. How could Thomas Gladstone not be the man we were looking for?
No matter how I put it together, I couldn’t get it to add up. Gladstone gets divorced and loses his job, and then someone else kills his family? And what about the little fact that our eyewitness, the Air France stewardess, ID’d him from a photo lineup? Was she lying? If so, why? Did we need to reinterview her?
I took a break from being baffled to call in to the security detail. Everything seemed normal. No activity on the street. All of the building’s ground-level doors and windows had been checked and rechecked.
“We’ve got it all wired tight,” Steve Reno radioed up from the lobby.
“Like my nerves,” I radioed back.
“Go ahead and have a glass of Cristal, Mikey,” the SWAT lieutenant said. “Or maybe krunk with some of those debutantes. We won’t tell. You gotta do something to relax.”
“Busting a move is tempting,” I called in to my radio. “But fortunately, Steve, all I gotta do is retire.”
Chapter 77
AT A DIFFERENT luxury apartment building, the Teacher knelt over the sidewalk grate and started working on it with a crowbar. There were no cops staking out this place, he’d made good and sure of that.
Within five minutes, he was able to swing the grate open. He hopped down inside and silently closed it back over his head. This was a filthy, squalid way of doing things, but if you wanted to get into one of Manhattan’s Fort Knox–like, prewar buildings, you had to make some sacrifices.
The beam of his penlight, held in his mouth, played over the concrete where he squatted. The filth came up to the ankles of his three-hundred-dollar socks—mounds of cigarette butts and gum wrappers; sodden, unrecognizable garbage; an empty crack vial.
He shrugged off his jacket, wadded it up, and held it against the dust-caked basement window beneath the grate. He hit the window with a single sharp punch, breaking out the glass. He stilled, listening for an alarm or outcry. There was nothing. He reached in, found the window latch, and squirmed his way into the darkened basement.
He walked quickly down a corridor lined with dusty storage bins piled with beat-up luggage, old wooden skis, stationary bikes, eight-track tapes. High society kept the same crapola as most other idiots, he thought. He slowed as he approached a doorway with the sound of Spanish music behind it—no doubt the super’s apartment. But the door stayed closed as he silently moved along.
Past it, on the right, he came to an old-fashioned manual elevator. Inside that, he let the outer door slide quietly closed before easing