Cat & Mouse

Christine surprised me again. She wanted to come to New York. She laughed and said she could do some early Christmas shopping in July, but I had to promise to make time for her.

I promised.

I must have slept some finally, because I woke in a strange bed, in a stranger town, wrapped in my bedsheets as if I were trapped in a straitjacket.

I had a strange, discomforting thought. Gary Soneji is tracking me. It’s not the other way round.

Chapter 45

HE WAS the Angel of Death. He had known that since he was eleven or twelve years old. He had killed someone back then, just to see if he could do it. The police had never found the body. Not to this day. Only he knew where all the bodies were buried, and he wasn’t telling.

Suddenly, Gary Soneji drifted back to reality, to the present moment in New York City.

Christ, I’m snickering and laughing to myself inside this bar on the East Side. I might have even been talking to myself.

The bartender at Dowd & McGoey’s had already spotted him, talking to himself, nearly in a trance. The sneaky, red-haired Irish prick was pretending to polish beer glasses, but all the time he was watching out of the corner of his eye. When Irish eyes are spying.

Soneji immediately beckoned the barmon over with a wave and a shy smile. “Don’t worry. I’m cutting myself off. Starting to get a little out of control here. What do I owe you. Michael?” The name was emblazoned on the barmon’s shirt tag.

The phony, apologetic act seemed to work okay, so he settled his bill and left. He walked south for several blocks on First Avenue, then west on East Fiftieth Street.

He saw a crowded spot called Tatou. It looked promising. He remembered his mission: He needed a place to stay the night in New York, someplace safe. The Plaza hadn’t really been such a good idea.

Tatou was filled to the rafters with a lively crowd come to talk, rubberneck, eat and drink. The first floor was a supper club; the second floor was set up for dancing. What was the scene here about? he wondered. He needed to understand. Attitude was the answer he came up with. Stylish businessmen and professional women in their thirties and forties came to Tatou, probably straight from work in midtown. It was a Thursday night. Most of them were trying to set up something interesting for the weekend.

Soneji ordered a white wine and he began to eye the men and women lined up along the bar. They looked so perfectly in tune with times, so desperately cool. Pick me, choose me, somebody please notice me, they seemed to plead.

He chatted up a pair of lady lawyers who, unfortunately, were joined at the hip. They reminded him of the strange girls in the French movie La Ceremonie. He learned that Theresa and Jessie had been roommates for the past eleven years. Jesus! They were both thirty-six. Their clocks were ticking very loudly. They worked out religiously at the Vertical Club on Sixty-first Street. Summered in Bridgehampton, a mile from the water. They were all wrong for him and, apparently, for everyone else at the bar.

Soneji moved on. He was starting to feel a little pressure. The police knew he was using disguises. Only not what he might look like on a given day. Yesterday, he was a dark-haired Spanish-looking man in his mid-forties. Today, he was blond, bearded, and fit right in at Tatou. Tomorrow, who knew? He could make a dumb mistake, though. He could be picked up and everything would end.

He met an advertising art director, creative director in a large ad factory on Lexington Avenue. Jean Summerhill was originally from Atlanta, she told him. She was small and very slim, with blond hair, lots of it. She wore a single trendy braid down one side, and he could tell she was full of herself. In an odd way, she reminded him of his Meredith, his Missy. Jean Summerhill had her own place, a condo. She lived alone, in the Seventies.

She was too pretty to be in here alone, looking for company in all the wrong places, Soneji understood why once they’d talked: Jean Summerhill was too smart, too strong and individualistic for most men. She scared men off without meaning to, or even knowing that she had.

She didn’t scare him, though. They talked easily, the way strangers sometimes do at a bar. Nothing to lose, nothing to risk. She was very down-to-earth. A woman with a need to be seen as “nice”; unlucky in love, though. He told her that and, since it was what she wanted to hear, Jean Summerhill seemed to believe him.

“You’re easy to talk to,” she said over their third or fourth drink. “You’re very calm. Centered, right?”

“Yeah, I am a little boring,” Soneji said. He knew he was anything but that. “Maybe that’s why my wife left me. Missy fell for a rich man, her boss on Wall Street. We both cried the night that she told me. Now she lives in a big apartment over on Beekman Place. Real fancy digs.” He smiled. “We’re still friends. I just saw Missy recently.”

Jean looked into his eyes. There was something sad about the look. “You know what I like about you.” she said, “it’s that you’re not afraid of me.”

Gary Soneji smiled. “No, I guess I’m not.”

“And I’m not afraid of you either,” Jean Summerhill whispered.

“That’s the way it should be,” Soneji said. “Just don’t lose your head over me. Promise?”

“I’ll do my best.”

The two of them left Tatou and went to her condo together.

Chapter 46

I STOOD all alone on Forty-second Street in Manhattan, anxiously waiting for Carmine Groza to show. The homicide detective finally picked me up at the front entrance of the Marriott. I jumped into his car and we headed to Brooklyn. Something good had finally happened on the case, something promising.

Shareef Thomas had been spotted at a crackhouse in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. Did Gary Soneji know where Thomas was, too? How much, if anything, had he learned from Ma

At seven on Saturday morning, traffic in the city was a joy to behold. We raced west to east across Manhattan in less than ten minutes. We crossed the East River on the Brooklyn Bridge. The sun was just coming up over a group of tall apartment buildings. It was a blinding yellow fireball that gave me an instant headache.

We arrived in Bed-Stuy a little before seven-thirty. I’d heard of the Brooklyn neighborhood and its tough reputation. It was mostly deserted at that time of the morning. Racist cops in D.C. have a nasty way of describing this kind of i

The local bodega had a handpainted sign scrawled in red letters on yellow: FIRST STREET DELI AND TOBACCO, OPEN 24 HOURS. The store was closed. So much for the sign.

Parked in front of the deserted deli was a maroon-and-tan van. The vehicle had silver-tinted windows and a “moonlight over Miami ” scene painted on the side panels. A lone female addict slogged along in a knock-kneed swaying walk. She was the only person on the street when we arrived.

The building that Shareef Thomas was in turned out to be two-storied, with faded gray shingles and some broken windows. It looked as if it had been condemned a long time ago. Thomas was still inside the crackhouse. Groza and I settled in to wait. We were hoping Gary Soneji might show up.

I slid down into a corner of the front seat. In the distance, I could see a peeling billboard high above a red-brick building: COP SHOT $10,000 REWARD. Not a good omen, but a fair warning.

The neighborhood began to wake up and show its character around nine or so. A couple of elderly women in blousy white dresses walked hand in hand toward the Pentecostal church up the street. They made me think of Nana and her buddies back in D.C. Made me miss being home for the weekend, too.