The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [42]
Sarah brought him another Irish whiskey, his second or third, or maybe it was his fourth. Stefanovitch glanced at his watch, and he couldn’t believe the time. It was twenty past ten. He’d been at her apartment drinking and talking for almost four hours.
Sarah noticed him checking his wristwatch. It was suddenly too quiet in the living room.
“I did need to talk to somebody tonight,” Stefanovitch said. “You were right about that.”
He lightly fingered his drink, hearing the cubes clink. He was nervous, and he knew Sarah could probably see that. He couldn’t talk about what he was feeling, though. Not yet, not right now. Not tonight especially.
“Sarah, thank you. I have to go home and sleep some,” he said finally. “I have to go home.”
40
Isiah Parker; Harlem
ISIAH PARKER WAS dressed so that he wouldn’t stand out on the street. He had on an old Lee sweater, faded black corduroys, worn high-top sneakers. He was a contemporary version of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
He hadn’t been able to sleep inside his walk-up apartment on 116th Street. There were too many random thoughts speeding through his head. He felt nervous and paranoid. Was he really on the side of the angels? The more he thought about it, the less certain he was.
He could visualize a single face so clearly now, every detail. He could see his brother inside a sleazy SRO hotel on the Bowery—the Edmonds. He remembered everything about that day.
The incident had occurred six months ago. It had been his RDO, his regular day off. When he received the news, Parker had hurried downtown to the Fifth Precinct, an old, traditional station house on Elizabeth Street. From the Fifth, he had gone by squad car to the Bowery.
At least a dozen leather-jacketed policemen were loitering outside the seedy Edmonds Hotel. Up and down Grand Street, vagrants and bums were sleeping it off. They congregated on crumbling doorsteps, on cast-iron grates where minimal heat came up from the subway tunnels.
One mange-haired black man wobbled around at the corner. He was trying to wash the windshields of cars stopped at the traffic light. Somehow, he made the glass grimier than it was before he used his paper towel.
Parker finally lowered his head, and he walked toward the transients’ hotel. What had Marcus been doing at a place like this? How had he wound up here, at the very end of the earth? How could this have happened to his brother?
He had to step over the depleted bodies of two men sleeping on the stairs outside the hotel. He stopped again, on a gritty stairwell inside.
Isiah Parker sat down hard on the stairs. His legs felt like rubber, and he was beginning to choke away tears. His hands started to claw uncontrollably at his jaw. He couldn’t catch his breath… because he knew.
Parker finally tucked his head down low and away from his trousers. The single cup of coffee he’d had that morning began to spill onto the broken tile-and-stone steps… He knew.
His brother, Marcus, was upstairs.
Somehow, his brother had died up these broken stairs—in some mysterious way, the middleweight boxing champion had died inside this transients’ hotel in the Bowery. How could that be? How could it have happened?
Parker struggled to his feet, and he began to slowly climb the last stairs. There were two more flights, but the odor was already indescribable.
At the top of the stairs, a policeman in a gas mask came up to Parker. “You better put one of these on before you go in,” he said.
Isiah Parker was already entering the open door, ignoring the warning. He peered at the soiled, dismal living room. Black grit was on everything, like foul little bug eggs ready to hatch.
He walked inside a soot-covered bathroom. A fingerprint technician and a photographer from Police Plaza were working there. Both policemen wore gas masks and plastic gloves that went to their elbows.
His brother’s naked body, bruised and broken, was slumped faceup in the bathtub. The color of Marcus’s skin was dark in places, purple in others.