Man of the Hour Read online

  “So that’s it. Right? This David Fitzgerald is the main suspect.”

  The joy she felt at that moment was not like sexual abandon. It was something steadier, more dependable. She had done her fucking job. This would be a major story in tomorrow’s paper. She could almost feel Bill Ryan slapping her on the shoulder, instead of patting her on the butt like Nazi would.

  LeVecque shrank back a little, realizing the mistake he’d just made. Oh, the tragedy of male vanity. She’d rolled him.

  “You didn’t get any of it from me,” he said once more.

  “‘Police officials say …’”

  “Maybe ‘law-enforcement officials’ …” He scrambled for cover. “You could put it like that, if you wanted.”

  He glanced at the back of the gray criminal court building, as if he’d suddenly sensed he was in a rifleman’s sights. Pigeons gathered on benches and old Chinese women went through garbage barrels, looking for redeemable soda cans.

  “You know, you could get me killed out here,” he said with a nervous laugh. “Maybe we should go back to the office separate ways.”

  She felt a momentary twinge of guilt, hoping she wouldn’t get him fired for this. On the other hand, screw him. He was a spokesman for one of the most powerful institutions in the city, maybe even the country. He lied to reporters and covered up horrendous scandals constantly. All she’d done was to get him to tell her the facts for once, which was only supposed to be his job.

  “So I’ll be seeing you,” he said, bowing and backpedaling, not sure what to do with his hands. “Nice lunch. And, uh, it was interesting, you know, with the chicken.”

  “Don’t worry.” She reached after him and grabbed his hand. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

  28

  DAVID WAS SITTING AT his desk the day after Nasser slapped him, talking to Kevin Hardison and wondering what to do about the incident in the parking lot.

  He’d had problems with students before. In his first couple of years at Coney Island, he’d been spit on, pushed down a flight of stairs, even had a chair thrown at him. But this was a little different. Nasser wasn’t a student anymore and Elizabeth was his prize pupil. If he filed a report about what happened, it might raise a few uncomfortable questions about what he was doing talking to her so intensely in the first place. “What do you mean, you touched her?” Maybe he was better off just mentioning it casually to Larry and a couple of the school security officers, in case Nasser showed up again.

  “Okay,” he said to Kevin. “I got a book for your paper.”

  He took a war-torn secondhand hardback of The Great Gatsby out of his new book bag and placed it on the desk in front of the boy.

  Kevin leaned over and wrinkled his nose, as if David had just presented him with a dead mackerel. “That? You want me to read that again?”

  “Why not?”

  “Get the fuck outta here with that shit. It’s about a bunch of fuckin’ rich white people. How’m I supposed to relate to that?” He made a ticking sound and waved disgustedly at the book.

  “Did you read it?” David gave him the hairy eyeball.

  “Yeah, I read it.” Kevin thrust his chin out. “It’s got nothing to do with me. What am I supposed to say about it? Why don’t y’all give me a book by someone I can relate to?”

  “Well, I don’t believe everything has to be spoon-fed to you. Sometimes you fight a little bit to bring a book close to you. But I’ll tell you what.” David put his hand over the book cover, blocking out the title and the author’s name. “Suppose I were to give you a different kind of book. About someone you could identify with.”

  Kevin rocked in his seat, not wanting to get drawn into David’s game but knowing it was inevitable. “Yeah, all right. What is it?”

  David kept his hand over the cover. “Suppose I were to give you a book about a poor kid starting out with nothing in life. A guy who just wants to make some money—okay, a fortune—and get a little rep for himself.”

  Kevin, again wearing the Dollar Bill hat and the dollar gold caps, sniffed, mildly interested. “Yeah?”

  “So this guy starts to fight his way up out of the gutter and he gets involved in all kinds of rough business. Machine guns, gambling, women, the whole deal. Okay? He becomes like an eighteen-karat original gangster. Right?”

  Kevin was hooked. “For real? This is a book you want me to read?”

  “Definitely.” David still hadn’t moved his hand. “But then when he finally makes it in society, this guy finds out the people at the top of the heap are just as corrupt and immoral as the people at the bottom.” He snapped his fingers. “So you think you could get into a story like that?”

  “Sure.” Kevin nodded. Gassed, stoked, ready to go.

  “Then read the book.” David took his hand off the cover and slid Gatsby to him. “It’s all in there.”

  The phone rang and Kevin smirked down at the novel, acknowledging he’d been tricked into opening his mind.

  “David? David Fitzgerald?” Another young woman’s voice on the line, but this one was familiar.

  “That’s the name. Don’t wear it out.”

  “Hi. It’s Judy Mandel from the Trib.”

  And here he’d been thinking everyone in the media had forgotten about him. Kevin picked up the book and started to leave the office. “I bet you only assign this ’cause your uncle wrote it or something,” he said, pausing in the doorway and running his finger under F. Scott Fitzgerald’s name on the cover.

  “Get outta here.” David laughed and waved him off. “I’m sorry, Julie,” he said into the phone. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

  “Um, it’s Judy.”

  “Then I’m sorry again.”

  There was a long pause on the line and he heard her humming to herself. Through an open doorway on his right, he saw Gene Dorf, the department chairman, sitting in his office reading the Wall Street Journal while teachers in the main room worked frantically correcting papers and holding conferences with students.

  “So what can I do for you, Judy?”

  Phones rang and voices called out on her end. “David, I’m wondering if you could help me with a comment on a story I’m working on for tomorrow.”

  “Sure. Shoot.” He picked up a Styrofoam cup and saw it was half full of cold coffee.

  “I wish you wouldn’t put it like that.”

  She made the humming sound again and for some reason it made him feel as if a fly was crawling over his skin.

  “Okay, then just ask.”

  “David.” She took a deep breath and shoved the rest of the words out. “I have it from a law enforcement source that you’re a suspect in the school bus bombing.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I was wondering if you had any specific response to the allegations that you planted the bomb on the bus … ”

  He dropped the cup, and soggy black grounds spilled across Nydia Colone’s paper. He felt like he’d been stabbed.

  “What are you talking about?”

  He realized he’d spoken too loudly. Henry Rosenthal and Donna were staring at him from across the office. Gene Dorf even looked up from studying the stocks he couldn’t afford to buy.

  “Who told you this?” David crouched in his seat, lowering his voice and feeling the center of his chest seizing up.

  She kept humming what sounded like “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” “Well, you know I can’t really tell you that, since it was off-the-record,” she said. “But I promise, if you give me a comment, I’ll …”

  “I’m sorry. I have to go.”

  He put the phone down and just looked at it. Praying it wouldn’t ring again. Then he turned and surveyed the rest of the office. Everyone was pretending to go back to work. They all knew he was in the middle of a divorce. Donna Vitale went back to going over a paper with a Chinese girl named Li. The work crew was still taking down parts of the ceiling. Henry got up to leave and Shirley Farber was talking on the phone. But David couldn’t hear any of them. His
ears had shut off, and he was only aware of the sound of his own heartbeat.

  He found some napkins to clean up the mess on his desk and saw he had two minutes to hit the bathroom before his next class. You’re a suspect in the school bus bombing. Had she really said that?

  The school hallways, usually so crowded and noisy, were silent and empty as he stepped out, like the streets of a western ghost town. David heard his own footsteps echoing faintly as if from far away. Where did everyone go?

  He found his keys and went into the faculty men’s room to try to collect his thoughts. Henry was already standing at one of the urinals, face turned up in serene meditation as if he were at the foot of a great mountain.

  “Henry,” he said.

  And then there were no other words. What was he supposed to say? Do you know what’s happened? Is this real? Am I still actually in bed, dreaming under the covers?

  But Henry barely acknowledged him as he stood there, taking what seemed to be the longest piss in the history of mankind. David focused on the sound of the sprinkling on porcelain and the sight of condensation on the old chrome fixtures, eerie and conspiratorial.

  “David.” Henry zipped up quickly and walked out past him with a curt nod.

  Did he know something was up?

  David watched the door close as he stood at the sink. Then he stared at his own reflection in the mirror. A tall man with a beard and glasses. Is this really you?

  He taught the next period in a daze, and when he stepped out into the hall afterward, Larry Simonetti was waiting. “Excuse me, David. These gentlemen would like a word with you.”

  Detective Noonan and a Hispanic man he didn’t know were standing by some lockers a yard away.

  “Good morning, Mr. Fitzgerald,” said the vampire detective.

  Just the sound of his voice turned David’s stomach into a waiting room full of anxious commuters. He turned to the principal.

  “Larry, what’s going on?” he said. “I don’t have time to talk to these guys right now.”

  Larry gave him back a waxy, awful smile. “It’s all right, David. Don’t worry about your next period. Gene Dorf is going to cover for you.”

  Amal Lincoln and Ray-Za walked by in clothes as baggy as flotation devices. From a glance, they knew what time it was. They’d seen friends and relatives pulled off the streets of their neighborhoods and beaten senseless by cops for no good reason.

  “Come on.” Noonan stepped up to him. “We’re old friends here. We just have a couple more questions for you to help us out with.”

  Larry Simonetti turned and headed back to his office without saying good-bye.

  “I’d like you to meet my new partner,” said Noonan, turning to the Hispanic man, who wore a V-neck sweater, a scraggly beard, and a gold hoop earring. “This is Detective Bobby Gomez. Best undercover in Brooklyn before he came to our squad.”

  Gomez smiled disarmingly, but David wasn’t fooled. “I know what’s going on here,” he said, struggling to keep his voice steady. “The girl from the newspaper just called.”

  “Oh?” Noonan looked at Gomez, obviously not ready for this.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Whooa-ho-ho-ho.” Gomez made himself laugh. “Where’d you get that idea? Nobody said nothin’ like that.”

  “No, nobody said that.” Noonan looked perplexed.

  The game was getting away from them. Clearly they’d had another rhythm in mind for this afternoon.

  “I don’t think I want to talk to you guys.”

  David saw both detectives register surprise and then suspicion. He was feeling a little surprised himself. Where did he get the nerve to say no to them?

  “Come on,” said Noonan. “You’re not a suspect. Let’s just get this cleared up as quickly as we can. Maybe if you could just answer a few more questions.”

  “Yeah.” Gomez wagged his scraggly chin. “You don’t want us to think you have anything to hide, do you?”

  “Well, I …” David saw Seniqua Rollins and Elizabeth Hamdy walk by slowly, almost as if they were under water, staring at him. Figures in a nightmare.

  “Yeah, come on, really,” Noonan prompted. “Let’s just step into one of these little offices a minute. You don’t want to embarrass all the kids standing out here, do you? There must be someplace to talk.”

  David felt his scrotum tightening. If he just tried to walk away now, they might throw him facedown in the hall in front of all his students. If he insisted on calling a lawyer, though, they’d surely find it suspicious and leak the information to the media, perhaps damaging his chances of getting custody of Arthur. Everything was happening too fast; he needed a chance to figure out all the ramifications.

  Trying not to panic, he led them down the hall, through the fire doors, and past the work crews on the stairway to the second floor. Think critically, he told himself. That’s how he’d tell a student to handle this. Don’t just accept the scenario. Consider alternative interpretations. Kids he passed along the way avoided meeting his eyes, somehow sensing he was in trouble and not wanting to embarrass him. He could hear his heart beating in his head, a bass thump rattling his skull. He wondered, would Arthur see this story on the front page of tomorrow morning’s paper or hear about it on TV?

  They found an empty office next to the science lab and went in. Noonan pulled over a steel-and-ripped-vinyl chair and turned it around so he could straddle it. David felt the ache in the middle of his chest radiating back to his shoulder blades.

  “So,” said the detective. “I don’t know what’s going on either. You gotta understand none of us ever talk to the media. I hate the fuckin’ press. And I’m still the primary on this case. So if they write anything without talking to me, it’s bullshit.”

  David noticed the way the detective’s pant cuffs rode up on his legs, revealing droopy mismatched black socks and pale hairless shins. Irish Catholic shins. The veins on the backs of Noonan’s hands stood out like worms among faded grass and it occurred to David that these men might be at least as nervous as he was today. And for some reason, that knowledge allowed him to step back a little and consider his situation in a different light.

  He remembered being arrested when he was seventeen. Being thrown in a pissy gray cell after a Nassau County cop named McNally got done barking at him and trying to scare the wits out of him. Keep your nerve. Remember who you are. That’s what David had learned from that little encounter. Don’t lose your nerve.

  “So why is this happening?” he asked. “All I’ve done is try to help.” He glanced at the clock above the door.

  “I know,” said Noonan. “You’ve been very cooperative.”

  “So why am I a suspect? I didn’t have anything to do with the bombing.” David sat with his hands folded in his lap, measuring his words carefully. Think critically. Why do they have you here?

  “We know you’re all right.” Gomez stood up straight with his arms hugging his chest.

  “Yeah, yeah, we know you’re the good guy.” Noonan smiled his Nosferatu smile, which just made him look old and mournful. “We just wanted you to answer three or four more questions so we could narrow down the list of suspects.”

  “You must think I’m a moron,” David said, remembering Detective McNally’s gray crew cut and the way he switched moods, playing good cop–bad cop all by himself.

  “What?” Noonan’s smile disappeared.

  “Nothing. I think I’d like to talk to a lawyer.” Something else he’d learned when he was seventeen.

  “Well, just bear with us a second.” Noonan quickly took out his slim notebook and began flipping through its tattered pages. “So what time was it that you said you started getting the kids ready for the field trip?”

  “I believe I said it was just after lunchtime.”

  “And what time was that?”

  “I think around one-thirty. Let me ask you again. Am I going to need a lawyer here?”

  “Why do you need a lawyer?” Gomez leaned against a radi
ator. “We haven’t charged you with anything.”

  David looked toward the door, considering the alternatives, recalculating the actual obstacles that would keep him from walking out right now. He was bigger than both of them. But then again, they could slap some cuffs on him and charge him with resisting arrest.

  “So why didn’t you tell me you left something with the driver on the bus the first time I talked to you?” Noonan asked.

  “I don’t know. It just slipped my mind. It was pretty confusing out there.”

  “Right.” Noonan scratched his hairless shin.

  “Look, I think I’d like to go now.” David felt a little damp spot growing on the back of his collar.

  “Just a … just a minute.” Noonan turned to another page in his notebook. “Tell me again, how it is you knew enough to keep those kids off the bus?”

  “I don’t know,” David said tersely, deciding he needed to parcel out his words carefully. “I just had a feeling.”

  Noonan gave Gomez a meaningful look. “A feeling,” he said.

  “Yeah, I told you before. I just had a feeling everything wasn’t right.” Two separate rivulets of sweat raced each other down his back.

  “So what time did you go on your break?”

  “My what?”

  “Your break, your break. Everybody says you disappeared for about twenty minutes just before the class went downstairs for the bus.”

  “Yeah, I was in the bathroom.”

  The divorce anxiety and hangover giving him an upset stomach and diarrhea. He felt his intestines going end over end again here. He was falling into their rhythm, dancing to their tune. But he wasn’t sure how to get up and walk out without seeming totally guilty.

  “Twenty minutes,” said Noonan. “It takes you that long?”

  “It takes whatever it takes.”

  The door opened and a wan, parchment-skinned little man in dark clothes walked in with a power drill. He was like a character out of a Buñuel movie. Without a word, he plugged in the drill and began boring holes in the wall.

  “Excuse me,” said Noonan. “What do you think you’re doing?”