Part 2 A Test
A TEST
For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.
– Adam Smith
The helicopter powered down and I stepped out onto the roof of the tower.
Beside me, the co-pilot quickly secured the chopper to studs at the corners of the helipad with four long ratchet-straps.
It was cold up here, much colder than it’d been on the ground at the airport.
The wind was stronger, too.
Scanning the rooftop around me, I found it almost dizzying to be so far above the rest of New York.
I’d been in tall buildings before, but never one this high.
The narrowness of the roof was both disorienting and disconcerting. It made the rooftop feel even higher.
Bill Brewster evidently felt the same.
He pulled his jacket tighter. ‘I dunno. Buildings shouldn’t be this tall and this thin.’
I was about to answer him when the group of FBI agents who had been waiting for us approached . . .
. . . and I saw the female one in the FBI windbreaker up close and froze, recognising her.
‘Hey, Sam,’ she said.
‘Hey, Audrey,’ I said.
My girlfriend was here.
I could tell something was wrong with Audrey right away.
For one thing, she was supposed to be in D.C.
(I know, great detective work there.)
No, it was the awkwardness of her smile that troubled me.
I’d never seen that look on her face before.
She said, ‘When your name came up in all this, the Bureau sent for me in D.C. Flew me up right away. I only got here ten minutes ago—’
‘Mr Speedman? Mr Samuel Speedman, the private detective?’ One of the other agents shoved past Audrey and positioned himself in front of me.
Tall, handsome, with a square jaw, dark eyes and perfectly parted brown hair that seemed impervious to the wind on the rooftop, he could’ve been a model for an FBI recruitment poster.
In his mid-30s, he was easily five inches taller than me.
His suit, I noticed, was fitted and clearly more expensive than the usual budget ensembles worn by FBI agents.
With the deadline fast approaching, he was obviously in a hurry, but the way he’d rudely shoved in front of Audrey had already told me something about him, something that rubbed me the wrong way.
‘That’s me,’ I said.
He looked me up and down, assessing me.
‘You’re the last of the five detectives to arrive and we’re almost at the noon deadline.’ He turned to go. ‘The building’s been evacuated and a perimeter has been set up at street level. The others are all downstairs, so come this way—’
‘Wait a second,’ I said.
He stopped.
And turned.
The glare he gave me burned with a strange mix of emotions: irritation, hostility, haste and . . . something else.
‘What?’ he said crisply.
‘Perhaps you should identify yourself first,’ I said.
He drew himself taller.
‘My name is Special Agent Trey Hooper, chief aide to the Deputy Director of the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch of the FBI and SAIC—Special Agent in Charge—of this operation. I’ve got a law degree from Yale and I’m a sworn law enforcement officer of the United States Government and I don’t like the idea of bringing in two-bit, low-life private detectives to solve a case no matter who asked for them. Now, come this way.’
(Notice the Ivy League thing?)
He stalked off toward an elevator shack beside the helipad.
As Heidi, Bill and I followed him, Audrey fell into step beside me.
‘Sorry I couldn’t warn you I’d be here, Sam,’ she said. ‘They put us all on cell-phone lockdown. No calls or texts. This is big.’
‘Special Agent Hooper is a piece of work,’ I observed.
‘Oh, I know more about that topic than you could possibly imagine,’ Audrey said tightly. ‘Special Agent Hooper is my ex-husband.’
Audrey’s ex.
As we walked toward the elevator on the rooftop, I recalled a conversation I’d had with Audrey during our previous case when she’d talked about her brief marriage.
She’d been 32 when they’d got married.
And her husband had been an FBI agent as well, graduating in the same class as her.
He’d come from a wealthy family, so their wedding had been very large, which Audrey hadn’t liked.
And he’d been unfaithful, including having sex with Audrey’s chief bridesmaid on the morning of their wedding.
Their marriage had lasted less than two years.
Now, having met him, I could see why.
This also explained the ‘something else’ in his glare: I suspected Special Agent Trey Hooper knew about my relationship with his ex-wife.
(I also remembered Bonnie the flight attendant’s experience on the FBI jet with an agent named Hooper.)
We arrived at the elevator.
Audrey said, ‘Brace yourself. FBI is here, NYPD, too. Christ, there’s even a guy from an insurance company. It’s a goddamn circus.’
95th floor
21 December, 1146 hours
It turned out that the actual top three levels of 59West—96, 97 and 98—were blow-through floors filled with mechanical equipment, air-conditioning units, elevator motors and dampers that stopped the building from swaying in high winds.
We descended in the elevator to the 95th floor.
The elevator travelled in almost total silence.
A brass plate above its buttons revealed that it was made by the Otis Elevator Company.
This made me feel reassured.
Otis has been around since the 1850s and is a very reputable elevator company. Indeed, it invented the safety brake for elevators in 1853, an innovation that made travelling up and down tall buildings safe, thus paving the way for the construction of skyscrapers.
Call me overly demanding, but when you’re in a small box at the top of a 98-storey shaft, you want to be in an elevator made by a reputable firm.
‘Does Mr King have his own elevator?’ I asked Agent Hooper.
‘Yeah, he has this express one all to himself. There’s three other elevators. They all run up and down a shaft in the central spine of the building. The poor bastards who only paid thirty million bucks for their condos have to share their elevators but Mr King doesn’t.’
‘Don’t feel too sorry for them,’ Audrey added. ‘Get this, if a resident here receives mail or a package from , the building uses autonomous carts to bring up those packages to their apartments.’
‘Like food-delivery robot carts?’ I said. ‘With wheels and those little round eyes?’
‘Yup, them.’
‘This is a nice place to live.’
The elevator stopped at the 95th floor.
I stepped out into the vestibule of an apartment the likes of which I had never seen.
It was gorgeous.
The marble floors shone.
The ceiling was high, at least fourteen feet.
A broad curved white staircase spiralled elegantly down to the lower levels.
‘Three levels,’ Audrey said. ‘This top level has the master bedroom, kitchen and lounge/living area. Middle level is for entertaining: it’s got a dining room, a guest bedroom and the children’s bedrooms. Bottom level houses the private office, gym, sauna, steam room, golf simulator, and a panic room. ’
Heidi snorted. ‘But is there a golf simulator in the panic room? I mean, why stop at all this insane luxury? Shouldn’t he be able to hit balls while hiding in it?’
‘Of course, we checked the panic room right away. Mr King never made it there,’ Audrey said. ‘Its door is wide open.’
I scanned the level we were on, the top one.
Picassos and other fine art adorned the walls of the entry vestibule.
One large painting depicted a Greek warrior standing in a giant Parthenon-like tomb, facing a crumbling ancient pyramid.
‘Nice painting,’ Bill said.
‘Rare, too,’ I said. ‘It’s called Alexander the Great Visiting the Tomb of Achilles by Robert Hubert. It was painted in the 1700s.’
Incongruously, beside all the fine art, I saw a small frame containing two coloured booklets.
I leaned in close to examine it.
They were comic books.
Very old and very rare comic books, one titled action comics with Superman holding a green car over his head. The other was simply titled bat man.
‘Holy shit,’ I said. ‘Those are Superman No. 1 and Batman No. 1 in the same frame.’
‘They’re what?’ Heidi asked. (Heidi is 25. Physical comic books are entirely alien to her.)
Bill Brewster answered. ‘They’re original editions of the comics that featured the first appearances of Superman and Batman. They’re worth millions individually, but together, I mean, sheesh.’
I thought that given our mutual admiration of Alien and Batman stories, maybe Aristo King and I would get along well.
Seriously, his apartment was awesome.
Every couch, vase and side table matched, all flowing together in a seamless mix of tans and that tone of off-white that Heidi calls ‘rich people’s beige’.
Matching most of all, however, was an entire bookcase filled with hardcover books that all had blank beige spines.
(To be honest, that piece of interior decoration was a bit douchey and not nearly as cool as the framed comic books. I wondered if the blank-spined books were blank on the inside, too.)
All in all, the style of the place was just right.
And that was before you beheld all the fourteen-foot-high floor-to-ceiling windows that framed the astonishing views.
It was like living in the sky, high above the city, above the rest of the population, above the world.
And this was just one floor.
Aristo King owned three.
A small cluster of officials were gathered in the vestibule.
Four cops in blue NYPD uniforms plus a plain-clothed detective; the building’s portly superintendent in pristine white coveralls (bushy moustache, glasses; with ‘59West’ embroidered on his -cover-alls plus the name ‘Lenny’); and three junior FBI agents in (the usual) cheap suits.
All the cops and agents eyed me closely as Special Agent Hooper led me and my team past them.
Their glares were just like Hooper’s: the glares of formal law enforcement officers pissed off that private operators had been brought in.
A petite 30-something Japanese-American woman in a sleek skirt suit, high heels and perfectly done hair met us.
She gripped an iPad in the crook of one arm.
Hooper didn’t stop walking as he introduced her. ‘This is Mia Kimura. Ms Kimura is Mr King’s executive assistant.’
‘Hey.’ She nodded seriously.