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“Yeah. The desk clerk should have a photocopy of it upstairs. Anyone who pays in cash has to show valid ID in case a room gets trashed or what have you.”
Yoon was standing but suddenly sat back down.
“Wait a second,” he said. He clicked the security video again and hit Fast-forward. “I think this guy, Mitchell, might be the guy who yakked in the men’s room. Look at this.”
Yoon brought up the shot of the lobby hall, and I watched as Mitchell headed into what I assumed to be the men’s room. A moment later, two other men appeared in the hall, one of them entering while the other waited. Some time passed, and the other guy in the hall went into the restroom and then Mitchell reappeared.
“See the kind of nervous look on his face and how he hurries away?”
I nodded. “Where does he go? Can you see?” I asked.
Yoon clicked on another screen, and we watched as Mitchell pulled open another door at the end of the hall.
“That leads to the B stairwell. There are no cameras in there. Maybe he went back to his room? I’ll look at the camera on seven.”
Yoon changed screens and clicked the mouse several times.
“That’s funny,” he said. “The camera on seven is broken or something. It’s not showing anything.”
I looked at Yoon.
“Does the stairwell go all the way up to the roof?” I said.
Yoon looked back at me.
“It does go all the way,” he said.
“That’s when he did it,” I said. “He went all the way up the stairs and jumped off.”
Chapter 5
I finally arrived back at my apartment that night around five.
A message on the fridge said Mary Catherine was out to get the twins from cheerleading practice and Ricky from soccer, and instructed me to put the lasagnas in the fridge into the oven at 5:30. Bennett situation normal, I thought as I cracked open a can of Corona Light and took a gulp. Busier than the control tower at LaGuardia.
Mary Catherine is my kids’ nanny, and also my girlfriend. I’m a widower, so it isn’t as sleazy as it sounds. Or maybe it is; I’m not an expert on these things. At least that’s what I tell myself whenever my Catholic guilt taps me on the shoulder.
“Dad! Look, look! It came! It came!” My daughter Shawna rushed at me with a large tan envelope as I walked into the living room. It was from the Schenectady Chamber of Commerce. There were half a dozen pamphlets inside, as well as the Daily Gazette newspaper.
“Mary Catherine said after dinner I can cut out some of the pictures for the poster board.”
“Hey, that’s awesome, Shawna.”
“No, it’s not, Dad,” said Trent, coming in behind her with his arms crossed. “It’s not fair that Miss Goody Two-shoes got all this great stuff for the project and I didn’t get anything. Mine’s filled with just stupid printouts off the internet.”
Oh, no. Here we go again, I thought, sharing a smile with Eddie, who was on the couch simultaneously reading a paperback and watching ESPN with the sound off.
With ten adopted kids, drama on the home front is to be expected. The latest brouhaha concerned two of my youngest, Shawna and Trent, who were in the same fourth grade class and were both doing projects about New York State.
Competitively, of course. Shawna was assigned the city of Schenectady, a metropolis whose factoids we had been regaled with for the last two weeks.
Trent had nearby Rome, New York, which—in addition to being the place where the country’s first cheese factory was founded—was the nation’s current 140th largest city.
Who knew? We did. That was who. Whether we wanted to or not. No one was in a more rabid New York state of mind than the Bennetts.
“Hey, look, guys. Quick. On TV. Look there,” Eddie said, pointing quickly at some news footage of a car on fire. “This is just in. Schenectady and Rome, New York, just both suddenly exploded. They’re both gone, and now your projects are gonna really totally stink. Darn. I’m so sorry.”
“D-A-A-D!!!” Shawna and Trent yelled in unison.
