Chapter 36

Kelli Keane got out of a taxi a couple of doors down the street from Stone Barrington’s house, and stood opposite, stamping her feet in her boots and wrapping her long coat around her legs, trying to keep warm. It was seven a.m., and she was just going to wait until the kid went to school.

She was fortunate that Peter left the house only a few minutes later and walked up to Third Avenue, while Kelli kept pace with him on the opposite side of the street. He waited for a bus while she hailed a cab and got in. “Just wait here until the bus comes,” she told the driver, “and when it does, follow it and don’t get ahead of it.”

“Follow a bus?” the driver said. “Whatever happened to follow that car?”

“Times are hard,” Kelli replied. “More people are taking the bus.”

The bus arrived, Peter got aboard, and the two vehicles moved in tandem up Third Avenue. Finally Peter got off and walked toward Second Avenue, and Kelli told the driver to turn right and stop. She watched as Peter ran up the steps of a large building and disappeared inside.

“Go down to that building and stop,” she said to the driver, who did so. “What’s the name of this place?” she asked.

“Knickerbocker Hall,” the driver replied. “It’s chiseled in stone over the front door.”

“Oh, yeah.” She gave him the address of the Post.

“You work at the Post? I thought you were a private eye,” the driver said.

“You’re a romantic, aren’t you?”

“Sure; you want a demonstration?”

“Just drive.”

Peter walked upstairs in the nearly empty building. It was only seven-thirty. As he was about to turn into the film department, he heard piano music coming from the opposite direction. He turned right instead of left, into the music department, and the music got louder. Like a cross between Chopin and Rachmaninoff, he thought, if that was possible. He looked through a window in a door marked “Recital Hall” and saw a very pretty girl seated at a nine-foot grand piano, playing with enthusiasm and precision. He pushed open the door, tiptoed in, and took a seat at the rear of the little hall.

She finished the piece with a flourish and, without looking up from the keyboard, said, “Come on down front; you’re bothering me way back there.”

Peter walked down and took a seat in the front row, only a few feet from where she sat.

She began to play again, this time in a jazz-inflected style. Peter thought he heard the left hand of Errol Garner and, in the right hand, traces of Nat Cole. She finished, and he said, “I don’t recognize that.”

“I’m just improvising,” she said.

“The first piece, too?”