A Falling Knife: An Evan Adair Mystery

Part I

1

Thursday, August 25

Three months didn’t matter a damn. Evan Adair still couldn’t close his eyes without seeing the blood.

The thought of sleep, the need for it, made his hand fly to his mouth as though he were a girl with the vapors. He was too proud to short-circuit the process with drink or drugs, so he stayed awake, night after night, until his body collapsed. Sometimes he awoke with his cheek stuck to the papers on the desk in his study, sometimes with his head lolling over the back of the sofa, his limbs splayed out gracelessly, as though he, too, were dead.

As bad as it was, the worst part wasn’t the time before falling asleep: it was the instant just after waking, before he remembered. There was always a split second of normality before the crash of memory, before the chasm dropped away again that separated him from everyone. There were some he had known who would recognize that sensation — parents of victims, spouses of victims, children of victims — but he had known them only glancingly, in the line of work. He thought of those people often now, of the blithe way he had trampled through the wreckage of their lives, and the memory of his tactful serving up of explanations for their catastrophes — and of his unfailing self-congratulation, at both the solutions and the tact — made him feel as though a fist had taken hold of his small intestine.

At the funeral, all the meaningful glances and helpless smiles and hands pressed warmly to his upper arms had made him want to hurt people. He’d peered through the glaze at the stream of guests and wanted to slap them. It had comforted him to imagine it: each guest in turn receiving the blow, staggering, and then looking back at him with fear and dislike. He’d absolved them at a stroke of the need to commiserate, and they’d all stopped pretending they still occupied the same universe that he did.

In reality, of course, he had done no such thing. He’d simply stood and borne it, as he had stood and borne everything.

In the moments before dawn, when Adair would cross briefly into sleep, he dreamed sometimes that he was committing crimes he had investigated: that he was stabbing a fat man in an argyle sweater at the back of a cigar bar on Christmas Eve, that he was throttling a tall woman on the floor of a kitchen on Beekman Place, that he was pushing a man in a Navy uniform off the roof of an office building on 58th and Lex. But he never shot anyone.

When the doorbell rang, Adair was lying on the hardwood floor of the study in his underwear, counting the dentils in the plaster molding on the wall behind the bookcase. He’d counted thirty-seven so far. The ringing was preternaturally loud in the morning stillness; he frowned at the disturbance. He had no idea what time it was, only that it was very early.

The bell rang again. I’m coming, Adair shouted. He heaved himself up from the floor, wincing as the skin of his shoulders and back peeled stickily off the walnut floorboards. He grabbed a cotton robe from the back of his desk chair and padded barefoot into the hall.

He had an arm in one sleeve and was yanking the rest of the robe onto his body when he opened the door.

Jesus, said Ben Fabrikant. This is how you greet people?

Adair stepped aside. He tied the robe closed and, with a hand on Fabrikant’s shoulder, directed him toward the study.

Fabrikant dropped into the easy chair by the bay window. Get some clothes on, he said. Let me take you out for breakfast. You look like hell.

It’s good to see you, Adair said. He reclined on the sofa, slung one arm behind his head and looked at Fabrikant expectantly. They had worked beside one another for twenty-three years, and they knew each other’s habits as well as an old married couple. Fabrikant knew perfectly well that Adair didn’t eat breakfast.

Adair watched Fabrikant take in the state of the room: the stack of unopened mail on the desk; the film of dust on the piles of books on the windowsill; the charcoal screen of the blank computer; the Bechstein upright piano, silent against the wall, its lid closed; the heap of still-folded newspapers on the floor in the corner. Fabrikant’s eyes rested briefly on the photograph of Sean on the desk — taken just after Sean had graduated high school, before he’d decided to forgo Williams and join the Marines — and then moved on.

What’s that? Fabrikant said, pointing at a book bound in faded gray suede that rested on the desk blotter. He reached forward, the leather of the easy chair creaking with his bulk, picked up the book and opened to the title page. He glanced at Adair.

My father’s Bible, Adair said. I gave it to Sean before he left for his first tour. I found it.

There was more contained in those last three words than either man cared to excavate. Fabrikant replaced the Bible on the desk.

You’ve dropped off the earth, he said. It’d kill you to pick up a phone? I’m worried about you.

Adair smiled. He knew Fabrikant was there on a mission of mercy, but he also knew he wouldn’t waste Adair’s time unless he had something important on his mind.

Tell me about it, Adair said.

Fabrikant sat forward and rested his elbows on his knees. I see you’re not reading the papers, he said. You catch anything about this Nickerson thing?

Nickerson?

Scott Nickerson. Some Wall Street wunderkind. Took a swan dive from a balcony at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday night. Witnesses all vouch for each other, so nobody pushed him. A couple of sound bites from Allingham’s press conference made the news. You’re not watching TV either?

Adair’s eyebrows rose. Press conferences coming that cheap these days?

He was a hotshot. Young, handsome, successful, dead.

Famous?

Locally. On the Street.

Adair pushed his fingertips into his hair and rubbed his scalp. So?

So somebody asked Allingham a question, Fabrikant said. Something he wasn’t expecting. About some deal the victim was involved in before he died.

Allingham flub it?

Nah. What was interesting was who asked the question. Some bright-eyed young kid writing a finance blog, or that’s what it looked like.

You’re issuing press credentials to bloggers now?

We can’t really bar anybody. And it’s not a bad thing. They’re gossipy as hell, finance blogs. They’re like celebrity tabloids for the NASDAQ set.

Okay, Adair said. What was so interesting about the kid?

Turns out he was a proxy.

For who?

Solly Pinsk, Fabrikant said. "He’s keeping a site now, something called Alpha Road. He writes under a pseudonym. He’s afraid of scaring off readers if they know they’re getting financial advice from a guy in a shtreimel and white knee socks in Borough Park."

The ghost of a smile lit Adair’s face. Solly? he said. "Solly’s blogging?"

Fabrikant chuckled. It’s cute, isn’t it?

So who was that at the press conference?

His intern.

Intern? I thought bloggers wrote alone in their pajamas.

Solly crunches the numbers and does the analysis. The kid does the research, transcribes him company conference calls, digests press releases. And he keeps the site ticking over on Friday nights and Saturdays. Solly does the writing.

And feeds the kid questions to ask the Commissioner at press conferences.

That probably wasn’t in the job description, but sure.

Adair pulled himself up a few inches and laced his fingers behind his head. He and Fabrikant had met Solomon Pinsk nine years earlier, when Pinsk had been falsely accused of involvement in a money-laundering scheme. After they’d sorted out the mess, he had become a resource for the D.A.’s office. He’d appeared a few times on the stand as an expert witness in fraud and other finance cases, but he didn’t like the exposure. Blogging suited him.

What was Solly’s question?

Nickerson worked for a fund with a big stake in Metropolitan Properties. It’s up for sale.

Yeah, that goes back a while.

Nickerson reversed on it right before he died. Solly wanted to know why.

Reversed which way?

He started out in favor of the breakup; then he changed his mind. Or not. There’s no confirmation that any of this is legit. Solly might have just been winging it.

That doesn’t sound like him. Adair scratched the salt-and-pepper shadow on his jaw. Does any of this matter, though? It isn’t a case. From what you said, the victim committed suicide.

Fabrikant’s eyes held Adair’s for a second; both of them registered the false bravado in the way Adair had tossed off the phrase.

I’m being pressed to close it, Fabrikant said. But I don’t like it.

Who’s pressing you? Singh?

Of course.

Why?

Because one of the witnesses was Alan Rubicoff.

Ah. Rubicoff was one of the mayor’s prime benefactors. The mayor’s office wouldn’t hesitate to lean on the Chief of Manhattan Detectives, and Singh didn’t hesitate to lean on anybody.

You’re not comfortable just because Singh’s on your back to close the case? Adair said. That’s enough of a reason?

Scott Nickerson fell out of the Grand Tier, Fabrikant said.

Adair looked at him quizzically. Okay, he said.

You’ve been to the Met. It’s not that far from the Grand Tier to orchestra level.

Far enough to die if you land wrong.

But he didn’t. That’s the thing. None of the injuries the victim sustained on impact were sufficient to kill him.

Adair felt a tingling in his abdomen, a familiar, gentle fluttering somewhere around the pancreas.

Oh? he said.

Joy thought it was weird too, Fabrikant said. So she kept going. She checked his blood for traces of cocaine, considering what he did for a living. Nothing. She ran every tox scan she’s got on his blood and urine, and in the meantime she kept working on the body.

Beyond the standard?

Yeah. She didn’t find any blunt trauma to the head, so she turned him over, did a — what’d she call it — a posterior neck dissection.

Nothing?

Zip.

Fat in the bloodstream?

From a broken bone? I thought of that too. Joy said one of the fractures could have released an embolism, but it probably wouldn’t have resulted in instant death. It can take days for a fat embolism to be trapped.

And in any case, she didn’t find one.

Right.

And he didn’t break his neck or fracture his skull, Adair said. There was a silence. Joy check for steroids?

Nothing. Not that I was expecting anything on that front. He wasn’t bulked up. Very fit, though. He looked like a runner.

Maybe his fitness did him in, then, Adair said. Athletes are always keeling over. Remember that Russian skater?

But then Joy would have found something. Coronary blockage, heart disease, damage, something. But he was in great shape.

Then it has to have been the fall. You seem to be saying it couldn’t have been anything else.

Fabrikant ran a hand down his face. Maybe, he said. But that still doesn’t tell me if taking the dive was his idea. And I hate drawing conclusions based on negative evidence. I got that from you.

Adair swung his legs to the floor and sat up. I can see why Singh hates this, he said. He’s probably right, you know. What’s your hunch?

I think the victim started to die before the fall. I think that’s why he went over the railing.

He was impaired in some way that Joy didn’t spot?

Had to be.

Adair considered. Joy Novotny was the best medical examiner he’d ever come across; she was unlikely to make a mistake. But judging from all her extra work, she wasn’t satisfied either.

Fabrikant let out a chesty rattle of a sigh. "I can’t make a move, because it looks too much like a suicide to justify my going mano-a-mano with Singh, he said. He’ll have my head."

The request was on the table. I’m a civilian now, Adair said. I can’t help you, Ben.

Fabrikant sat forward. So you’re a civilian, he said. Your brain’s still working. Just poke around for me a little. Talk to Solly; see if he’s onto something. Get me something I can work with.

No. I’m sorry. I’m done.

Fabrikant held Adair’s gaze a second longer; then he nodded and stood up. All right, he said. Forget I mentioned it. He walked to the open study door.

I’ve got to skate, he said. Do me a favor, would you? Stay in touch. Don’t make it always be me who makes the move.

Adair sat motionless until he heard the front door close. From his vantage point on the sofa, he was able to see Fabrikant through the lattice window as he walked south, his head bowed. It was still early enough that the sidewalk was draped in shade.

Adair rose slowly and walked into the kitchen. Moving on autopilot, he unscrewed a glass canister containing gravel-shaped tea leaves and put two teaspoonfuls into a cast iron teapot. He checked the state of a small saucepan, decided it was clean enough, half-filled it with water, and set it on the stove.

Ten minutes later, he had not yet turned on the flame. He stood with his hands on the counter, staring into the teapot at the dry leaves. Then he closed his eyes.

Goddammit, he said softly. He walked back to the study and picked up his cell phone, which lay half-hidden under the computer monitor.

He sat down at the desk and scrolled through the phone’s address book until he reached a name. He sat for a few seconds staring at it, his thumb moving gently across the green dial key. His gaze strayed out to the street, then back to the phone, then settled on the photo of Sean. When he looked away again, the sidewalk outside was dappled with sunlight.

He dialed the phone and put it to his ear. Solly? he said after a moment. It’s Evan. Evan Adair.

2

Two weeks earlier: Thursday, August 11

Gordon Leitner walked north on Third Avenue, eyes cast down about thirty degrees, weaving with the neat, practiced glide and proprietary air of the long-time New Yorker. The cast of his narrow shoulders, tilted slightly as if into a headwind, projected vague impatience. He accelerated just enough to bypass a clot of tourists, four-wide, moving in a sluggish phalanx down the sidewalk, then eased back into his natural pace.

It was hot. The overbaked stone sidewalk cast a blinding glare. In the street, oblong patches of asphalt oozed. A street vendor had forgotten what season it was and was selling chestnuts, and the aroma shot Leitner into a memory of a long-lost girlfriend. She was an endocrinologist now. She’d told him once — it was winter, and they’d been trudging up Park Avenue South — that when she sat on the crosstown bus to Lenox Hill, she couldn’t help but notice people’s thyroids. She’d glanced up once, she told him, from a few moments’ study of a middle-aged man’s incipient goiter to see him grinning at her. He’d thought she was flirting, but she was just a woman who loved her work.

Gordon smiled. What was her name? She was funny and sexy, in a short, freckled, crooked-glasses, bed-head kind of way, but she was a little crazy. Gordon was invisible to women now, he knew: he’d spent so long in the lab that he’d grown irredeemably pasty and stooped and slope-bellied. He did not repel; he was simply overlooked.

The truth was, it didn’t make him very sad. He really did prefer cell cultures to most human company. But he thought about women occasionally, often when he felt he was on the verge of something big at work: distant pleasing memories across an ocean of time. He knew how he was perceived now, when anyone thought about him at all: at best a blank, at worst an obsessive. He didn’t mind.

Leitner crossed 41st against the light. He had allowed himself a rare mental foray into sexual territory: he was revisiting a memory of Dr. Thyroid, when she was still a medical student, suggesting that he smack her tuchus as hard as he could while they were in flagrante. He smiled again, not so much at the memory of the encounter as at the thought of her embarrassed shriek after she’d made the suggestion. She’d flushed so deeply, he recalled, that the freckles on her cheekbones seemed to disappear.

Leitner adjusted the gray backpack slung over his right shoulder. In his left hand he held a cardboard coffee cup with a plastic lid. The backpack contained his laptop, a heavy 17-inch, in a black neoprene cover; lunch in a brown bag (every day the same exchange at Burger Heaven: "You want bialy, mister? Mantequilla? Yeah, and a regular coffee"); and a beat-up lab notebook. The edges of the pages were transparent, greasy from leaky lunches. Leitner walked with a slight tilt leftward to compensate for the weight of the computer.

Everyone was shouting as he stood at the corner of 46th and Third, waiting for traffic to clear. A couple of people were pointing behind him. He didn’t notice. His mind had drifted away from Dr. Thyroid, back to nearer terrain: was the next batch of samples ready? Brierson was on it, and he was very good; just not quite fast enough for Leitner. He had nearly enough material to start writing the paper, and he was getting antsy.

Leitner didn’t hear the man screaming at him, didn’t hear the footsteps pounding down the sidewalk as the man bore down on him. A big hand clapped his shoulder and wrenched him around. The right hook came so fast he did not register that a blow was coming. He was down on the ground; a foot was kicking him in the stomach. Something was being bellowed at him (something something Genedox, something something motherfucker) but he was too stunned to register it. Instinctively he flailed for the backpack, clutched it to his chest, tried to roll forward onto it to protect it.

As suddenly as the assault began, it was over. The man (Jesus, he’s huge, but a suit and tie? What the hell?) was being dragged off him by three teenaged boys in boardshorts and Mets caps. Leitner gingerly touched his mouth with the back of his hand; it was shiny with blood. A small crowd of police descended: one pounced on the attacker; another squatted down by Leitner and mouthed something at him. He couldn’t hear the words.

Leitner sat up. A paramedic appeared from nowhere. Nothing was broken: his ribs were sore, but the worst he had, surprisingly, was a split lip. Suddenly it seemed funny: a minute ago he was walking to work; now he was sitting on the sidewalk in the middle of midtown. A semicircle of people stared at him with patient, slack-faced interest, as though he were a penguin at the zoo.

Genedox. The flash of crazy mirth passed and Leitner registered a sick feeling in his stomach, a queasiness that had nothing to do with the beating. He’d been dressed down by the Institute; he’d had to make a public retraction; at the lab he had to endure eye-rolling behind his back from his own assistants. His funding was intact, but vulnerable. Mort Brierson had morphed from a reliable second-in-command into a colonel contemplating a coup d’état, and now total strangers were kicking him in the shins. Leitner knew he’d been right — he’d never experienced a moment’s doubt, not through the whole ordeal — but that didn’t do him a whole hell of a lot of good.

He sat there, slouched forward and sullen, feeling small and achy and humiliated. Dr. Thyroid was long gone. Leitner sat with one arm wrapped around the backpack and waited for the paramedic to finish entering data onto a clipboard. One of the cops asked him, in a toneless voice as if speaking by rote, whether he knew the assailant, a Calvin Buckholtz. Leitner glanced up quickly at the man — he was afraid to make direct eye contact — and shook his head. He heard the words take him into custody and file charges, but the thought of prolonging this ordeal sent another sickly surge through his midsection.

Forget it, Leitner said. He started to ease himself to his feet, and the cop reached out a steadying hand.

Buckholtz, whoever he was, was standing a few yards away, composedly smoothing down his tie while two policemen talked across him about who the Yankees should trade for a new top-of-the-rotation reliever. The cop on victim duty gave Leitner’s upper arm a squeeze. You sure? he said. Don’t you even want to know what he socked you for?

Leitner slung his backpack over his shoulder and winced at a sharp pain in his right side. It doesn’t matter, he said.

The cop spread out his hands. Up to you, pal, he said. Less work for us. But I’m thinking this guy at least owes you an apology.

A flood of shame washed over Leitner. Thanks anyway, he said, turning away. I’ve got to get to work.

Holy crap, said Nadine Lowenstein. She was an accomplished technician, but her appearance still gave Mort Brierson a jolt every morning: she had scraped-back black hair, small steel bolts on either side of the bridge of her nose, a carefully cultivated ghostly pallor, and a tattoo of barbed wire around her neck.

She pulled out her headphones and pointed with a stubby, black-glossed fingernail at her fake-retro transistor radio, which was tuned to 1010 WINS. It’s Steve, she said. Somebody just kicked the shit out of him on 46th Street.

Brierson looked up sharply. Steve was the lab’s private nickname for Gordon Leitner. The wits on Leitner’s staff claimed his hero had to be Steven Nissen, the two-fisted Vioxx-buster at the Cleveland Clinic. The prevailing opinion of Leitner at his own lab was that he was a real loss to the FDA.

What happened? Brierson asked.

Not sure exactly, Nadine said, dumping a third packet of demerara sugar into her coffee mug. She stopped just before the last few grains fell in, upended the packet carefully, and set it on the desk. Some guy jumped him in broad daylight. Doesn’t sound like he’s hurt too bad.

Some guy?

A trader, they said. From the Dolce Fund. Can you believe it? She smiled. Brierson suddenly realized with crystal clarity that he couldn’t stand her.

The room got back to business, but there was subtext in the air. If traders were barreling down on Leitner, fists flying, it had to be about Genedox. Unless the guy was just some random nutjob, of course. But Gordon Leitner had made a career out of pissing people off, and nobody was more pissed off than somebody who’d just lost a lot of money.

Professor Dermot Cane had never gotten used to his office at the Dolce Fund. The lobby downstairs with the massive Lichtenstein looming over new arrivals made him feel diminished rather than uplifted. The onyx elevator doors disconcerted him, as though they might open onto empty space. Emerging from them onto the 42nd floor, he was faced with a floor-to-ceiling plate glass window that always frightened him a little with its freefall view of neighboring skyscrapers. His battered wingtips were silenced by the carpet underfoot. It was altogether too polished, too seemly, for the commission of mathematics, as he liked to put it. Mathematics required a pencil and paper, not luminous flat-screen computer panels and forbiddingly beautiful receptionists. He was an academic, and all this frippery felt petty.

Of course, he’d known grubby academics. Grubbing for money, things, titles, status. That was worse. At the Dolce, no one denied his reason for being; no one pretended he was serving a higher calling. It was refreshing. If Cane had to choose, he’d take the traders. They were many things, but they weren’t pretentious.

Cane passed his ID card through the reader fixed to the Dolce’s glass doors, went inside and padded down the hall. He nodded to his secretary, Theresa, tossed his jacket onto the low leather couch just inside his office, and sat down at the desk. He was just reaching down to turn on his hard drive when something crashed against a wall a few offices down. Then, to his horror, he heard a woman scream.

He ran into the corridor and stood helplessly. He looked at Theresa and wondered if he had imagined both the crash and the scream: she was calmly sorting mail as though nothing had happened.

How you doing there, Doc? she said. He was charmed, as always, by her Flatbush cadence. She looked up at him, her round face framed by impossibly lush black hair. Good weekend?

Cane blinked. He pointed down the hall. Did you hear that?

Theresa laughed. Cal clocked some guy on the street this morning, she said. He almost got arrested. Meredith heard about it when some reporter called. Theresa smiled wickedly. "She loves that."

Cal hit somebody? Cane put it together quickly — Cal Buckholtz, head trader, buzz cut, tall, built like a rugby lock.

Long story, Theresa said. Actually, not so much. Cal lost a boatload for the fund on bad information about a drug company. Who does he see walking to work this morning but the guy who screwed him over. So he hit him.

Cane reflected. There were a few disputes at the university that might have been better settled with this Neanderthal approach. He reached across and took the small pile of mail Theresa was holding out to him.

Don’t you worry, she said. Meredith’s a screamer. Happens sometimes. She smiled. You need anything, hon? Coffee?

Oh she was lovely. That’s all right, dear, Cane said. Let me get you one.

There was another small crash as the remains of whatever had been thrown against the wall were dumped into a trash can. Cane hustled into his office, Theresa’s coffee forgotten, and settled himself at his desk. Scott must have heard the commotion, Cane thought, but he hadn’t put his head outside his door. He was used to this madhouse.

Cal Buckholtz walked onto the Dolce trading floor to a round of applause. Fuckin’ psycho, said Larry Holt, his number two. Cal laughed.

"Wudja, lie in fuckin’ wait? said another trader. You do some fuckin’ recon on this guy?"

Cal shrugged. Saw him, he said. Just got lucky, I guess.

Holt was scanning his screens and punching numbers into his desk phone. Asshole had it coming, he said. Then, in an undertone: Twelve-o’clock, ace. Look out.

Cal looked straight ahead. Meredith Calder, the fund’s founder and manager, was standing in the doorway staring at him. She waited for him to register her presence, then stalked across the floor.

"What the fuck? she said, reverting to the local argot. You think this is fucking kindergarten?"

Cal put his palms together and bowed his head slightly in an impromptu parody of some kind of yoga send-off. Won’t happen again, he said.

Meredith leaned forward and splayed her knuckles outward on his desk. A lock of golden hair had come free from the knot at the nape of her neck and rested against her cheek, softening her austere, patrician features. She let it lie. The floor was silent, and Meredith loved an audience.

You better fucking believe it won’t happen again, she said, her voice pulled down a couple of ticks. The voice still had a little Levittown in it, a counterpoint to the aristocratic bones. "I just spent the last half hour talking this guy’s boss down from suing us. And why the hell shouldn’t they? The Times is calling me. The Journal is calling me. Two fucking bloggers called me about you. Oh, you think that’s funny?" Cal shrugged again, knowing it would make her nuts.

Meredith straightened up and smoothed her skirt. You think you’re indispensable, you cocky piece of shit, she said. "You know what? Any of these other fuckers could do your job blindfolded. I waste one more minute on you—one more minute—and you’ll be cold-calling grandmothers in Sheboygan at some midtown bucket shop before happy hour. I’ll see to it."

Cal and the other traders watched her walk off the floor in her vertiginous heels. She wasn’t a full-sized adult even with the spikes on, so the shoes had the counterproductive effect of accentuating her tiny frame. Larry shook his head and chuckled. There was a chorus of small chair squeaks as the men turned back to their Bloombergs.

The trading floor resumed its hum. Cal’s eyes held on