Murder Superior(68)

It wasn’t locked. Sarabess pushed her way into the foyer. She stopped at the little desk that blocked the way to the elevator and looked around. There was supposed to be a security guard or somebody. There was a clipboard on the desk with a signup sheet on it and people’s names and floors written in little squares in pencil. Sarabess looked around and saw no sign of a uniformed man or a gun-toting woman or anyone else. Whoever it is has probably gone to the bathroom, she thought. It wouldn’t be fair to just go on up. She went on up anyway. She went around the desk and to the elevators and jabbed at the buttons. The elevator doors opened immediately and she stepped inside.

This was the point at which things might have gotten sticky. Sarabess had never been in the WXVE building before, but since it was such a large building she was sure it wouldn’t be just for WXVE. There would be other businesses with offices on these floors, architecture firms and certified public accountants, and she had absolutely no idea who was where. If there was a directory in the lobby, she hadn’t seen it. Even if she had seen it, she wouldn’t have taken the time to read it. If she had, the security guard might have come back, and then God only knew what would have happened. Now she pushed a button at random—“fourteen” because it was really “thirteen” and Sarabess liked to be counterphobic—and prayed for rain. If it wasn’t the right floor, it could at least be a neutral one. It could be one where the security guard wasn’t roaming around looking for trouble.

The fourteenth was a floor belonging to Martin, Debraham, Carter, and Allenkoski, attorneys at law. The elevator opened onto a darkened foyer with a large oak desk in it. The desk had a rose pink felt blotter in the middle of it and a brass nameplate next to the phone that said, “Tiffany Moscowitz.” Sarabess pressed the button for twenty-two and held her breath.

On “twenty-two” she had a little luck. It didn’t belong to WXVE, but it wasn’t deserted, either. It belonged to a magazine called Greek World, and they must have been meeting a printer’s deadline for an issue. Sarabess knew all about printer’s deadlines. She had worked for an underground newspaper in college, and what she had come away from it with was the conviction that some members of the working class were worse than the capitalist class, and among those members were all printers. It was disgusting. If you went so much as a half hour over deadline they charged you all kinds of penalties, and then they made you pay time and a half on top of it. Sarabess was sure that every printer drove a Cadillac and smoked thick cigars, conspicuously consuming the environment.

Greek World had a logo that looked like a whirling dervish dancing on the top of the Parthenon. It was tacked to the back wall of their foyer in the form of an enormous oakboard poster painted in acrylic primary-colored paints. When the elevator doors opened, a young man was running by with a huge stack of mechanicals badly balanced in his arms. Sarabess hated to stop him. She knew the look on his face. It said he’d lost any control he’d ever had over his panic hours ago.

She had to stop him. She had no choice. She stepped out of the elevator, grabbed at the sleeve of his shirt and said, “Excuse me?”

The man with the mechanicals stopped. He looked around the foyer as if he had never seen it before. He looked at Sarabess as if he had never seen her before. In the second instance, he was right.

“Excuse me,” Sarabess said again. “I seem to be lost. I’m supposed to be going to WXVE—”

“That’s downstairs,” the young man said promptly.

“Downstairs where?”

“Depends what part of them you want Reception’s downstairs on ‘twelve.’ ”

“Good. I’ll go to reception.”

“Except nobody’s there. Only nine to five. Broadcast is on ten.”

“Fine,” Sara said desperately, “I’ll go—”

“They’ll never let you in there,” the young man said. “You don’t have one of those passes on your shirt.”

“But—” Sarabess said.

“You’d better go to ‘nine,’ ” the young man said. “Nobody knows that’s part of WXVE at all. The elevator opens on a little dinky foyer and the foyer leads to all the office warrens and nobody ever wants to go there if they don’t have business. Try ‘nine.’ ”

“Yes.” Sarabess stepped back into the elevator.

“Greeks are crazy,” the young man told her. “I thought I knew that because my mother is Greek, but I never really knew that until I got here.”

“Yes,” Sarabess said again.