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“The envelope fell off.”
Something about the way she said that made Sam stop and turn.
Mrs. Novotny was holding a square envelope in her hand. “I was planning to send this upstairs to Mrs. Manning with a volunteer, but they’ve been busy all morning. Almost all the beds here are filled because of the blizzard. Lots of folks fell, or got in car wrecks, or had heart attacks from shoveling snow.”
Sam thanked her profusely, took the envelope, and continued across the lobby. She opened the envelope, not because she expected to discover anything meaningful inside it, but because she’d already embarrassed herself with Shrader and upset Mrs. Manning over the basket of fruit that it should have been attached to. She removed a small folded sheet of engraved stationery from the envelope and read the handwritten message on it. Then she stopped in midstride. And read it twice more.
Shrader had gotten their car out of the lot and it was at the curb just outside the main doors. Puffs of exhaust were pumping out of the tailpipe and a hard, thin coat of frost had already built up on the windshield. He was scraping it off with his credit card—an entertaining procedure with the windshield wipers running at top speed and his knuckles bare. She waited in the car until he got in and began blowing on his cold hands and rubbing them together; then she offered him the folded note. “What’s that?” he asked between puffs on his fingers.
“The note that came with Mrs. Manning’s pears.”
“Why are you giving it to me?”
“Because you’re cold,” she said, “and I think this will . . . electrify you.”
Shrader clearly thought that was unlikely, and he demonstrated that opinion by ignoring the note and continuing to rub his hands together. When he finished, he put the Ford into gear, looked in the rearview mirror, and pulled away from the curb. Finally, he reached for the note, casually flipped it open with his thumb, and as they neared a stop sign at the pedestrian crosswalk, Shrader finally allotted it a sideways glance.
“Holy shit!” He slammed down on the brake so hard that Sam’s seat belt locked and the rear end of the car fishtailed on the icy drive. He read it again, then he slowly lifted his big dark head and gazed at her, his brown eyes bright with wonder and anticipation—a very happy rottweiler who’d just been given a juicy sirloin. He shook his head as if to clear it. “We’ve got to call Captain Holland,” he said, pulling the Ford over to the curb. Chuckling silently, he punched numbers on his cellular phone. “What a coup, Littleton! If Logan Manning doesn’t show up soon—healthy and hale—you’ve just handed NYPD a case that’s going to make you a heroine and Holland the next police commissioner. Commissioner Trumanti will be able to die a happy man.” Into the phone he barked, “This is Shrader. I need to talk to the captain.” He listened for a moment, then said, “Tell him it’s an emergency. I’ll hold on.”
He took the phone away from his ear long enough to press the mute button; then he announced, “If you weren’t already Holland’s fair-haired angel, you’d be that from now on.”
Sam suppressed a jolt of alarm. “What do you mean, I’m his ‘angel’?”
Shrader gave her an abject, hangdog look. “Forget I said that. Whatever is between you and Holland is none of my business. It’s real clear now, though, that you’ve got more going for you than just your looks. You’ve got tremendous instincts, you’ve got tenacity, you’ve got ability! That’s what matters.”
“What matters to me at this moment is that you implied Captain Holland has some sort of partiality for me, and I want to know why you think that.”
“Hell, everybody at the Eighteen thinks that!”
“Oh, gee, that makes me feel much better,” she said sarcastically. “Now answer my question or I’ll show you ‘tenacity’ like you have never—”
The person on the other end of the phone said something, and Shrader held up his hand to silence Sam’s outburst. “I’ll hold on,” he said; then he looked at Sam, gauging the degree of determination in her facial expression, and decided he believed her threat. “Consider the evidence,” he said, after pressing the mute button again. “You’re a rookie detective, but you wanted Homicide at the Eighteen and you got Homicide. We’ve got cases coming out the wazoo, but Holland doesn’t want to give you any of those cases; he wants a nice clean case to start you out on. You need a permanent partner, but Holland won’t assign you to just anybody. He wants to pick your partner personally—”
Sam grasped at the only lame explanation she could come up with at the moment. “Holland is handling assignments for everyone right now, since Lieutenant Unger’s position is still open.”
“Yeah, but Holland hasn’t assigned you to a partner, because he wants to make sure your partner is someone real nice, someone you’re ‘compatible’ with.”
“Then how could he have picked you?”
Shrader grinned at her gibe. “Because he knows I’ll ‘look out for you.’?”
“He told you to look out for me?” Sam gaped at him in shocked disgust.
“In exactly those words.”
She digested that for a moment; then she shrugged in pretended disinterest. “Well, if that’s all it takes to make everyone think there’s something odd going on, then you’re all a bunch of gossipy old women.”
“Give us a break, Littleton. Take a look at yourself—you’re not exactly the typical female cop. You don’t swear, you don’t get mad, you’re too proper and ladylike, and you don’t look like a cop.”
“You haven’t heard me swear,” Sam corrected him, “and you haven’t seen me get angry yet, and what’s wrong with the way I look?”
“Nothing. Just ask Holland and some of the other guys at the Eighteen—they think you look real fine. Of course, the only other female detectives at the Eighteen are a lot older than you and fifty pounds heavier, so they don’t have a lot to compare you with.”
Sam shook her head in disgust and hid her relief, but his next statement jarred her and ended that momentary respite. “Since you want to know the whole truth,” he said, “according to the grapevine over at headquarters, you’ve got some sort of clout—friends in high places—something like that.”
“That’s just typical,” Sam said, managing to look scornfully amused. “Whenever a woman starts succeeding in a male-dominated profession, you guys would rather attribute her success to anything, anything, except ability.”
“Well, you got plenty of that,” Shrader shocked her by saying; then he broke off abruptly as Holland finally took his call and evidently began by chewing Shrader out for holding on and running up his cellular phone bill.
“Yes, sir, Captain, I know—probably five minutes. Yes, sir, Captain, but Detective Littleton discovered something I felt you’d want to know about immediately.”
Since Shrader was the senior det
ective on the case, and also “in charge of her,” Sam expected him to take some sort of credit for her discovery, or at least to claim the satisfaction of telling Holland about it himself, but to Sam’s surprise, Shrader handed the phone to her with a wink. “Holland says this had better be good.”
By the time Sam disconnected the call, she had no doubt that Captain Thomas Holland thought her information justified an expensive phone call.
In fact, he thought it warranted the full and immediate use of all of the NYPD’s available personnel and resources.
“Well?” Shrader said with a knowing grin. “What did Holland say?”
Sam handed his phone back to him and summarized the conversation. “Basically, he said that Mrs. Manning is going to get more help from the NYPD in the search for her husband than she ever imagined.”
“Or wanted,” Shrader said flatly. He glanced up at the hospital in the general direction of the third floor and shook his head. “That woman is one hell of an actress! She fooled me completely.”
Sam automatically followed his gaze. “Me, too,” she admitted, frowning.
“Cheer up,” he advised her as they pulled away from the curb. “You’ve made Holland a happy man, and by now, he’s on the phone with Trumanti, making the Commissioner a happy man. By tonight, Trumanti will make the mayor a happy man. The biggest problem for all of us,” he said as he put the car into gear, “will be keeping what we’ve got a secret. If the Feds get wind of it, they’ll try to find some way to muscle in on the case. They’ve been trying to nail Valente on a dozen charges for years, but they can never make them stick. They aren’t going to be happy when the NYPD succeeds where they’ve failed.”
“Isn’t it a little too early for all this ecstasy?” Sam said. “If Logan Manning turns up alive and well, there is no ‘case.’?”
