Small Town

“Tony Dundalk talked to her then, and more or less sent her on her way. Because it didn’t sound like any cause for alarm.”

“And she came back.”

“She did. I thought, let’s put the lady’s mind at ease, so I took her statement and filled out a report.”

“But you didn’t send it in.”

He shook his head. “Sending it in doesn’t accomplish anything. Nobody’s gonna be running around knocking on doors, looking for an old man who’s minding his own business. All that happens is somebody wants to know why I’m sending in an MP report on a case that doesn’t meet the standards. I made her happy, but I stuck the report in a file.”

“And let it go at that.”

“No,” Herdig said, “I called his place of employment, spoke to the head of the department. No, Shevlin hadn’t been in for whatever it was, a week or so, something like that. And yes, they’d had a call, said he wouldn’t be in. They didn’t seem concerned, and after I talked to them neither was I.”

“Did she tell you about Shevlin’s boat?”

“To tell you the truth,” Herdig said, “I had a little trouble following her on that subject. Did I miss something important?”

“Probably not. Did you take notes when you talked to his employer?”

“His department head. Yes, I took notes.”

“And filed them? I wonder if I could see the file.”

Herdig looked troubled. “Uh, well,” he said. “You know, I’d do anything to help here, Commissioner, but there’s a question of official standing. My understanding, you’re no longer officially connected with the department.”

“Not for a few years now.”

“So you’ve got no official interest in this particular matter.”

“None,” he agreed, “which is convenient all around, isn’t it? It means I don’t have to file a report, and neither do you. It also means nobody’s going to ask you where the regulations say you’re supposed to take down a statement and fill out a missing persons report and then conveniently lose it in a file drawer somewhere.” He smiled pleasantly. “Of course,” he said, “if I pick up that phone and call around, you’re likely to get a call back from someone with so much brass on his uniform you won’t be able to spot the blue underneath it. And I guarantee you he’ll have enough official standing to mobilize the National Guard.”

“I take your point,” Herdig said. “Just give me a minute, okay?”

Peter Shevlin was employed by a firm called Fitzmaurice & Liebold, with an address on Sixth Avenue that would put it in or near Rockefeller Center. His supervisor, and the man who’d put Herdig’s mind to rest, not that it was all that troubled to begin with, was one Wallace Weingartner.

Buckram bought a couple of sandwiches at a deli, got a can of Heineken to go with them, and had lunch on a bench in Central Park. The beer made the enterprise technically illegal, in that he was consuming an alcoholic beverage in the park. Striking a blow for freedom, he told himself, and enjoyed his meal.

He was eating al fresco so he could make a phone call, and he’d always felt the use of cell phones in restaurants was an infinitely greater evil than, say, drinking a beer in public. After he’d bagged his trash and dropped it in a litter basket, he returned to his bench and managed to get the number at Fitzmaurice & Liebold, whose offices he was reasonably certain would be closed today, the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. But you never knew what sort of workaholic Wally Winegardner might be, so it seemed worth a try.

The offices were closed, of course, but the voice that answered gave him options; if he knew his party’s extension he could press it, and, if not, he could find it by entering the first three digits of the party’s last name. He pressed 9-4-6, the numeric equivalent of W-I-N, and that gave him a choice of two parties, neither of them Winegardner. He tried to get back to the previous prompt but couldn’t navigate through the system, so he gave up and broke the connection and went through the whole thing again. This time, on a hunch, he pressed 9-3-4, for W-E-I, and learned in short order that Wallace Weingartner’s extension was 161. He pressed that, and after four rings got a voice mail pickup, with a woman’s voice — Weingartner’s secretary, he supposed, or the firm’s official telephone voice — inviting him to leave his message at the tone.

He rang off and put the cell phone away. He could let it go, he thought, but that meant letting it go until Tuesday, because the office would be closed tomorrow and Monday. And Tuesday was the third, and a week from Wednesday was the eleventh.

And he couldn’t help thinking the Carpenter was out there. Well, hell, everybody damn well knew he was out there, but he also felt he was somehow connected to the disappearance of Peter Shevlin.