Silent Kills Read Online Free PDF Page B

Trade Center.
    The concert at Carnegie Hall had been an emotional experience. There was audible sobbing in the audience during the quieter parts, and Lee himself had teared up during the haunting chorus “Wie Lieblich Sind Deine Wohnungen.” He was exhausted and drained and wanted to go home. He looked at Kathy, who had not cried during the concert, though at one point she had grabbed his hand and pressed hard, her strong fingers digging into his palm. He had never known a woman with such powerful hands.
    “I am not always hungry,” she said. “It’s just that you’re hardly ever hungry.”
    “I could use a drink,” he said.
    “There’s McHale’s,” she said as they passed his old hangout on the corner of Forty-sixth Street. The sign’s red neon light cast a warm glow into the foggy night air.
    “Not tonight,” he said.
    They stood on the triangular island at the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, underneath the half-price-tickets booth. Under the Giuliani administration the porn shops and peep shows had been replaced by the far creepier presence of Walt Disney Co. and billboards with naked Calvin Klein children—but the tickets booth remained an enduring icon of Times Square. The enormous red letters were beginning to fade, but you could still read them from three blocks away: TKTS.
    Lee had stood in line there more times than he could remember, shivering or sweating in all kinds of weather alongside tourists from Holland, Belgium, Portugal, and Singapore—people gathered at this great crossroads from just about anywhere you could think of. Sharing the wait with strangers was part of the experience, part of the fun—you never knew who you would meet, what street buskers would be working the crowd, or what flyer for some remote off-Broadway show would be pressed into your hand by an aspiring actor. This was the best of what it was to live in New York, and thinking about it brought new tears to Lee’s eyes.
    Most of the shows were just getting out. People walked arm in arm on their way to after-theater drinks and dinner, cabs careened down the avenues in an impatient sea of yellow, but the usual festivity was missing. It felt different tonight—and yet there was a sense of camaraderie, as there had been at the concert, as there had been in the city ever since that terrible day. He looked at Kathy, her face shiny and eager in the glare of Times Square. He wondered if being from Philadelphia instead of New York made a difference—maybe she felt the sorrow less than he did. He banished the thought as ungenerous; perhaps she was just glad to be with him.
    “I know,” she said. “Let’s go to Sardi’s.”
    “Okay.”
    The idea struck him as oddly fitting—if they had to be anywhere, they might as well spend the rest of the evening at Sardi’s. He liked the bartender on the second floor, a genial Croatian named Jan (pronounced “Yan”) who made a mean Manhattan. Lee hadn’t been to Sardi’s in a long time. He hoped Jan would be working tonight.
    They made their way through the downstairs dining room with its wall-to-wall Hirschfeld caricatures of theatrical luminaries, turning toward the stairs at a toothy portrait of Carol Channing, grinning like the Big Bad Wolf, her eyes alight with the actor’s curse: the insatiable need for attention and adoration.
    Luck was with them—Jan was on duty upstairs, and the place was hopping. Fortified with a few drinks, the upscale clientele gathered around the long bar was looking more relaxed than the people on the street, with their tight, worried-looking faces. Perhaps everyone feared another attack was imminent—but after a couple of Jan’s cocktails, Lee thought, you would forget to worry about it. At the far end of the bar, a plump woman with bleached hair in a pink Chanel suit and matching pillbox hat snuggled happily next to her date, a dignified gentleman in a tuxedo with a pencil mustache. Two theater programs lay on the bar next to them,