Page 50 of Take the Fall
Quarter to four, and Ryan was gone.
He grabbed the coat off his chair, Reid already at the side door with his keys out.Don’t wait for me.Reid said something and Ryan laughed. The short one. The one I’d have done a lot to be on the end of.
The door shut. The room got bigger the way it does when his chair is empty.
Home was three blocks. I could have gone. But that meant sitting in the apartment alone, waiting up for a man who’d told me not to. So I stayed. Told myself it was the case. There’s always the case.
The work goes better in an empty room. I killed half the lights and pulled up the corporate registry, a tab at a time.
Paragon Capital Holdings. Incorporated 2008, a Financial District address. The board was a row of stand-ins, a Bay Street firm and a numbered company and two more shells behind those. The money reached Paragon through a Delaware shellthat owned nothing and existed only as a name on a page. Before that, a numbered company in Etobicoke, a mailbox in a strip plaza, no office. I’d been sitting on that address for weeks.
I worked the director names down the list and cross-checked them. Nothing under them, same as every other night. Widened the search. Narrowed it. Ran the Delaware number against the Canadian side and hit the wall I always hit. Four names that weren’t names.
I closed the window. Opened it again. Same four.
I got a coffee from the machine in the corner. It was bad. I drank half of it at the window, the lot below empty and wet under the one lamp that worked. The rest went cold by the keyboard.
Half seven, the phone lit on the desk.
Reid’s buying me dinner. Allegedly there’s beer. Eat without me.
Reid. I turned the phone face down. Then I turned it back and read it again. I set it down and went back to the registry. The jealousy turned over once and settled. I’d been trying to starve it all day and it hadn’t gone.
The cleaner came through near eight, cart wheels and music leaking from her earbuds. She wiped the far desks, swapped the liner in the corner bin, nodded at me going past. I nodded back.
Then she was gone and I realized I didn’t know her name. All this time here, fifty nods, and I’d never asked. It bothered me tonight. I put it down with everything else.
Murphy came out from behind the glass at quarter to nine, coat already on his arm.
“Go home, Hawley.”
“Soon.”
“You said soon an hour back.” He fed an arm into the coat. “It’ll be the same wall in the morning. That’s the whole point of a wall.” He worked the second sleeve, did the top button, looked atmy screen and let whatever he thought stay off his face. “You’ve been on that since he walked out.”
“I had the time.”
He held the look a beat longer than he needed to. “Night,” he said.
“Night, Inspector.”
The building emptied out around him. A phone ringing somewhere and giving up. The vents. I ran the four names one more time. Still nothing under them.
Half nine. I locked the shorthand in the drawer and lifted my coat off the hook.
Three blocks. Parliament down to Carlton, the left, the stairs. A hundred times in the dark, more than a hundred. I could have done it with my eyes shut.
Which was the trouble. So could anyone who’d stood across the street and watched me do it.
Outside it had gone cold and wet, the road throwing the streetlights back at me in long yellow runs down the block. Slow night. A couple ahead of me peeled off at the first corner. A streetcar slid past on Carlton with its windows lit and not one face turned to the glass.
The street had the late sound to it, traffic thin enough you could hear the holes in it. Wind in the gaps between buildings. My coat. A door pulling shut down some side street I’d already passed.
I walked.
A man with a dog crossed at the intersection, the lead gone tight. A car went through with one indicator blinking and the other dead.
A van sat wrong against the curb a block on.
