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“Well, obviously it would. I was there.” He gave a breathy laugh. “You even saw me. But you don’t remember.”
“No, I do.”
Tamblyn tilted his head slightly. “What evidence exactly? I’m curious.”
“Trace evidence.” Give your subjects something that keeps them talking, Sachs thought, but never anything they can use.
He frowned more wrinkles into a wrinkled face. “Ah. You vacuumed up, or whatever you do, dirt outside my car. No,allthe big developer’s cars. Who else, I wonder. Liebermann? Frost? Bahrani? And assumed one of us hired a hit man with a hacksaw to tip cranes over for fun and profit. A cruiser spotted this.” A nod at the Mercedes. “And called it in. Do you say, ‘Calling it in’?” He nodded broadly. “I know. It was the acid! In the news. That’s the trace. Bad stuff. I steered clear.”
She wishedshehad, though the lungs were clearly on the mend.
“Okay, sure I was at the collapse on Eighty-Ninth Street. And the hospital.” A nod north. “Andthe Bingham construction site where the elevator dropped sixty feet and broke a workman’s back. I was at the Richard Henderson development on the Hudson. The big glass tower? Construction waste wasn’t secured. A ton of scrap lumber was blown over the side. It fell six hundred feet and hit three workers at a hundred miles an hour. One was killed. Another lost an arm.”
He nodded to his cell phone, which she’d removed from his overcoat and placed on the hood of his car. “I video the sites, then I write reports on how the accidents could’ve been prevented. Laborers’ International, Brotherhood of Carpenters, Plumbing and Pipefitting, Sheet Metal, Painters and Allied Trades … All the unions report incidents to me. I play detective.” He cut his gaze toward the shield on her belt, almost as if he wished he had one.
“You’re a crusading developer, saving workers’ lives.”
He liked the phrase.
“I meet regularly with the mayor and the director of safety at Structures and Engineering.”
Explaining why he’d logged in there.
The man had removed the odd hat and overcoat. They appeared grimy, but that was all part of the stage acting, it seemed. The dirt and grease were spray paint. While she’d originally expected an unpleasant odor, all she detected was a faint lavender scent. Maybe shampoo, though Tamblyn seemed like a cologne kind of guy.
“Why the disguise?”
“I’m like a restaurant reviewer. The companies and developers know me. If they were to see me and there’s unsafe conditions, they’d cover them up. Or manhandle me off the site. Sometimes I’m a tourist, sometimes a street musician. Homeless is best. I’m invisible.” He scoffed. “I got right behind you, didn’t I? If I’d been the man behind the collapse, you’d be dead.”
Couldn’t argue with him there.
“And when you act insane, they just want you to go away.” He told her an officer had just detained him at the hospital scene. But once he started to ramble, she got tired of him pretty fast and sent him along.
“Frederick,” he said, looking to his driver. “Water, towels.” He turned back to her and she nodded okay.
The driver walked to the back of the vehicle and removed the requested items from the trunk, which Sachs and ESU had already cleared. He handed his boss the bottle and the cloth towels—which looked sumptuous. She’d never seen towels that thick.
Tamblyn rinsed the dirt off his hands. The water splashed and flew. He didn’t care who or what got wet. Sachs stepped back. When he was done, he dried, and then began removing the crudfrom beneath his nails with a file portion of a pair of clippers. “Dirty nails. You want somebody to think you’re an unfortunate soul, if you ever go undercover, you need dirty nails.”
She didn’t respond, but decided it was not bad advice.
He studiously cleaned each fingertip, rolling the residue into tiny balls and dropping them on the sidewalk. “Are you believing me? Ah, your face says not exactly … All right. Call this number.”
He recited one and she dialed. The line rang once and was picked up. “Hello?” A man’s impatient voice.
Sachs asked, “Who is this?”
“The fuck. Who isthisand how did you get this number?”
“Detective Amelia Sachs, NYPD. I’m with Willis Tamblyn. Who am I speaking to?”
“Tony Harrison.”
The mayor of New York.
“Is Willis all right?”
“Yes. Let me call you on the City Hall line,” she said.
