Elevator Pitch. Linwood Barclay
shirt and suit pants. He tossed the shirt into a bag that would be dropped off at the dry cleaner at week’s end. The pants he lay carefully on the bed, then took a gripper hanger from the closet, clamped it to the cuffs, and hung them up. He stripped off his socks and tossed them in a laundry basket. Come Sunday morning, he’d fill his pocket with quarters, head to the basement laundry room, and do a wash.
Now, dressed only in boxers and a T-shirt, he went back into the kitchen and sat at the table. Next to the paints was a twelve-inch metal ruler, which Bourque used to draw several long, straight lines on the cardboard sheets, then several small boxes in a grid formation.
Standing, he sliced off some of the cardboard sheets with the oversized paper cutter, then with the box cutter lightly scored the art board along some of the pencil lines, allowing him to bend the cardboard to a right angle without separating the pieces. Sitting back down, he cut some strips of the balsa wood to match the length of the scored lines, applied some hot, drippy adhesive from the glue gun, and used them to brace the corners. The tip of his index finger touched some of the hot glue.
“Shit!” he said. He peeled the set glue off and sucked briefly on the finger.
He spent the next hour making three rectangular boxes of different sizes, painting them various shades of gray, then detailing the perfectly arranged boxes on the sides, making them look like windows. At the bottom edge, he drew detailed entrances and oversized windows. He did all of this without drawings or plans or blueprints of any kind. What he saw in his head he turned into three dimensions.
One of the purposes of this exercise, beyond the fact that he just liked doing it, was to push out of his head the events of the day. Some evenings it worked, some evenings it did not.
This was one of those nights when it did not.
Bourque’s mind kept coming back to the body with the smashed-in face on the High Line. After his appointment with Bert, he and Delgado had paid a visit to the coroner’s office. The naked body, minus fingertips, yielded at least one clue that might lead to an identification. On the dead man’s right shoulder was a two-inch-long tattoo of a coiled cobra.
A DNA sample had been taken. A search of his clothes yielded nothing helpful. No credit card or time-stamped gas bar receipts had been found in the dead man’s pockets. His jeans and top were cheap off-the-rack items from Old Navy.
Bourque had taken another look at the socks. They looked relatively new; the area around the big toes did not show signs of an imminent hole. And the corpse’s toenails had been due for a trim. Bourque had heard back from the bookstore and been told the shark socks were made somewhere overseas, sold online and in countless stores across the city, but if he still cared, they had sold twelve pairs in the last month. Six were put on credit, six were paid for with cash. Bourque took down the credit card information.
His one pleasant memory of the visit to the coroner’s office had been standing close enough to Delgado to smell her hair. Whatever shampoo she used had a scent—mango?—that was strong enough to overrule the lab’s stench of bleach and antiseptic.
Bourque forced the investigation from the front of his mind as he held out at arm’s length the first completed building of the evening. He turned it around and admired it. If he noticed a spot where the paint was thin, he gave it a touch-up.
“Okay,” he said to himself. “Installation time.”
He got up from the kitchen table and opened the door to the second bedroom. But there was no bed, or dresser, or even a chair. There were four metal card tables, arranged into a large square roughly six by six feet, and almost entirely covered in boxes similar to the ones Bourque had just made. They were arranged in a grid, with space between to replicate streets.
Bourque placed that evening’s effort onto one of the tables. He moved some of the existing ones to make way for the new one. He viewed his work from various angles. Some of the boxes soared as tall as four feet, others only a foot or so. Many were recognizable. There were crude interpretations of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Flatiron Building, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.
The model city was in no way exact. The landmark structures he was re-creating were, in his version, within steps of each other, rather than scattered across the city. This was more an appreciation of the city, not a replica.
Bourque leaned up against one wall and crossed his arms, admiring his handiwork. At first, his gaze took in the project as a whole, but then his focus narrowed on one spot near the edge.
He stepped away from the wall, knelt down so that his eye was at the model’s street level. He studied the street in front of his recreation of the Waldorf Astoria.
His airway began to constrict.
If only I hadn’t moved. If only I hadn’t dived out of the way.
The drops.
He breathed in, then out, heard the wheeze.
He wasn’t expecting it to happen now. Here, at home, working on his project. Away from people with bashed-in faces and missing fingertips. But then he had to look at the sidewalk in front of the Waldorf Astoria.
Bourque immediately thought of grabbing the inhaler from his sport jacket in the other room, but then remembered what his doctor had suggested.
“Okay, Bert, we’ll give it a try.” He closed his eyes and concentrated.
Find a category.
Got it. The city’s tallest structures, starting with the highest.
Aloud, he said, “One World Trade Center. Top of the Park. 432 Park Avenue. 30 Hudson Yards. Empire State Building.” He stopped himself.
Could he include Top of the Park? The luxury apartment building on Central Park North, the subject of his new book, didn’t officially open until later this week. Erected between Malcolm X Boulevard, otherwise known as Lenox Avenue, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, or Seventh Avenue, the building came in at ninety-eight stories, making it two floors taller than the astonishing, and relatively recent, 432 Park Avenue, which towered over Central Park looking like some monolithic, vertical heat grate.
Did it really matter for the purposes of this exercise? He was still wheezing. He continued with his list.
“Uh, Bank of America Tower. 3 World Trade Center, uh, 53 West Fifty-Third. New York Times. No, wait. Chrysler Building, then the New York Times Building.”
The tightening in his chest was not easing off.
“Fuck it,” he said.
He went into the other bedroom, picked up his jacket, and reached into the left inside pocket.
The inhaler was not there.
“What the …”
He always tucked it into the left pocket. But maybe, just once …
The inhaler was not in the right pocket, either. Nor was it in either of the outside pockets.
Bourque felt his lungs struggling harder for air. The wheezing became more pronounced.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he whispered.
Had he taken the inhaler out of his jacket when he first got home? He went back to the kitchen to check. It wasn’t on the kitchen table or on the counter by the sink. Bourque returned to the bedroom, wondering if the inhaler had slipped out of his coat when he had thrown it onto the bed.
He got down on his hands and knees, patting beneath the bed where he could not see.
“Come on,” he wheezed.
He found nothing.
In his head, he had an image of a snake coiling itself around his windpipe. Like that cobra tattoo on the deceased.
It was becoming increasingly difficult to breathe. If he didn’t find his inhaler soon, he was going to have to use his last breaths talking to a 911 operator.
And