The Gate, The Split, The Broadstreet — Wednesday, February 27, 1991, 5:50 PM

Cherry Hills Village / Lower Downtown / The Broadstreet

Denver, Colorado

The detective was already at the gate when they pulled up the drive.

He stood beside an unmarked sedan at the stone gatehouse, breath coming up white, one hand resting on the post. Not hiding. Not pressing. A man who had been standing there long enough for his shoes to go dark with gutter water and who did not care about the shoes. He raised his hand as the headlights caught him. A wave. Friendly.

Emerson told Windsor to keep the gate closed. The four of them — Flash, Monica, Marcus, Terri — got the smallest gesture from Emerson’s hand: stay. Then he walked the drive alone, hands in his coat pockets. Two hundred feet of crushed white stone. The detective watched him come the whole way.

Flash leaned against the porch column. Forty-seven degrees and the cold went through his jacket and found nothing underneath to argue with. Four nights since the basement and he still couldn’t get used to that — the absence. His body was a house with the heat turned off. The pilot light out.

Emerson stopped a polite distance from the gate. Did not open it.

“Detective.” Not a question. Not a greeting. A label, placed on a shelf.

The detective straightened off the post. Forty, soft through the middle. Wool coat over a suit that hadn’t cost what the coat had. “Mr. Wilkershire. Sorry to bother you at this hour.”

“You are bothering me at this hour.”

“Yes sir.” A nod. His eyes went past Emerson and up the drive — four people on the walk, two vehicles, the lit doorway with Windsor’s silhouette — then back. “Looks like I came at a bad time.”

“It’s eleven o’clock on a Tuesday.”

“I know it. Just — saw the lights coming up the road. Thought I’d catch you before you turned in.”

“You could have telephoned.”

“I tried, sir. Two messages. Your house staff didn’t pass them along, I guess.”

Emerson let the silence work. “I have a houseguest situation this week, Detective. A small party. I’m sure you understand that I’m not available for unscheduled interviews at this hour, on my own property, after a long evening.”

“Of course.” The detective nodded. “Of course, sir.” He did not leave.

Flash could see most of it from the porch — two men in coats, one side of an iron gate, breath fogging in the single post lamp. A hundred feet of white gravel between him and the conversation. He couldn’t hear the words but he could hear the shapes. Emerson’s vowels going clipped. The detective’s going soft.

Terri was beside him. Monica on the second step, arms crossed, watching the gate with the fixed attention of a woman reading a deposition. Marcus had drifted to the edge of the walk, his body angled sideways, half here and half somewhere in a Boulder phone book.

At the gate, the detective was talking. Longer sentences now. Flash caught fragments on the wind — fire, Saturday, a man named Prestor, coroner found three, the count is short. Then Emerson’s posture changed. Shoulders dropping a quarter-inch, chin pulling back to level. Flash knew the look. He’d seen it in sales offices when the buyer found the clause.

The detective produced his notebook, held it without writing in it, nodded through whatever Emerson was telling him. Then he wrote one thing. Closed the notebook and pocketed it and said something short with a small tired smile. He patted the stone post once, turned, walked back to the sedan, got in.

Sat ten seconds longer than necessary. Then headlights. Then gone, east toward the city.

Emerson did not move until the taillights disappeared around the curve.

He came back up the drive slowly. He did not look at any of them. He said, low, to nobody: “Inside.”

Windsor held the door. The house was warm — cut flowers on the hall table, pipe tobacco in the wallpaper, the grandfather clock reading 10:31. Monica waited until the door closed behind Marcus.

“Older woman.”

“Yes.”

“Hadrick’s secretary is twenty-six.”

“I know.”

“You just lied to a homicide detective.”

“Yes, Monica, I did.”

The five of them still in the foyer, coats not off. Flash leaned against the wall by the umbrella stand and watched.

Monica had not taken her coat off. She was still holding her keys. “Twenty-six. Brunette. Master’s in finance from CU. Her name is Karen something, Emerson, I don’t even have to look it up, she called your office four times this month.”

“Andresen.” Emerson hung his coat on the peg. Did not turn. “Karen Andresen.”

“Then why.”

“Because if I had said Karen Andresen, twenty-six, brunette, M.A. CU Boulder, called my office four times, he would have walked back to that car and put her in a chair tomorrow morning and asked her what the meetings were actually about. And she would have told him. Because she is twenty-six and a detective scared her.”

“What were the meetings actually about, Emerson.”

He turned. The foyer light caught him from above and he looked tired in a way Flash had not seen this week — the kind that lives in the meat of the face, around the eyes, in the jaw.

“Joseph Hadrick approached me in January about moving four million dollars into instruments that could not be traced back to him in the event of a federal investigation. The reallocation language is real. The munis are real. They were also a cover for the actual conversation, which was about offshore vehicles. I declined. I declined on the second meeting. He left angry. I told him I would forget the conversation as a professional courtesy.” A breath. “I forgot the conversation. Until I read his name in the file at the bank yesterday and I realized that whoever — whatever Prestor was actually doing in that basement, Joseph Hadrick was tied to it financially. And I had been in the room with him six weeks ago talking about how to hide money.”

Terri, from the doorway: “Hide money for what.”

“I don’t know. He never told me. I assumed at the time it was tax. Now I have other guesses.”

Marcus was looking at the framed hunting print on the wall, not at the conversation. Flash recognized the posture — a man running numbers inside his own skull, using the room for background noise.

Monica: “Brandt is going to call Andresen anyway. He has the appointment book. He’ll find her name in your meeting log within forty-eight hours. The lie buys you the weekend. It also makes the lie itself a fact he can build a case around. Lying to a detective at an unscheduled interview, on your own property, after he has named the victim — that is a consciousness-of-guilt fact. Goldring is going to be livid.”

“I know.”

“You should have said I had business with Mr. Hadrick. My attorney will provide details. And shut up.”

“I know, Monica.”

“Then why did you say older woman.”

“Because I panicked.”

Emerson sat down on the bench by the door — a place Flash had never seen him sit, a piece of furniture that existed for bags and boots, not for the man who owned the house. Elbows on knees. “My father,” he said, to the floor, “would have known what to say at the gate.”

Flash pushed off the umbrella stand and laid it out.

Monica works the police file; her access, nobody else’s. Emerson takes the money trail. Marcus gets the occult end and the Klondike problem. Flash and Terri take the streets and the Broadstreet. Four leads, one night.

Monica, coat already off for the first time since the gate: “Good. Yes. I’ll need to be downtown before seven — Brandt is going to be in my building by eight-thirty looking for a friendly face, and I would rather already be at my desk looking busy than walk in while he’s waiting. I can pull the arson file tonight. The night clerk owes me. I do not want my name on a request log for it, so I will read it standing up and put it back.” She looked at Flash. “Anything you want me to look for specifically, say it now.”

He told her: anything on whether the fire was arson or accident. Any names circled — Duke, Earl, the Count, the blond man. Whether a body near the fire that night had a name attached to it. Anybody’s name.

Monica held his eyes a second longer than the sentence needed. She had been in the basement. She knew he was asking about Hadrick. “I’ll read the whole file. If there is a homicide cross-referenced to the arson, I will know by sunrise. I am not going to write any of it down. Flash — if my name shows up in that file as something other than the prosecutor it is supposed to be, I cannot fix that. Be aware of what you are spending.” She did not wait for an answer. Headlights down the drive, gone.

Marcus at the hall phone, finger in the rotary — a 4, a 4, a 9, Boulder exchange. No goodbye.

Emerson went to the den. The door did not close all the way.

10:51.

Terri drove the Lincoln. Down off the Cherry Hills bluff through neighborhoods where the lots got smaller and the driveways shorter and then there were no driveways at all, only the city, low and bright and cold against the Front Range. Flash watched it through the windshield. The same billboards. The same overpasses. The same steam rising off rooftops into thirty-degree air. He was the part that had changed.

The Broadstreet sat on the edge of a district that didn’t have a name yet — old warehouses half-converted to bars, loading docks and liquor licenses. Terri parked three blocks off on a street of bars that fed the same foot traffic. Wind with a blade in it now, past thirty and falling. His skin didn’t mind. He minded that his skin didn’t mind.

The corner tavern was loud and warm — spilled beer in the floorboards, fryer grease, wet wool. Flash found the gap at the short end of the bar where the regulars stood because it saw the door, and stood in it like he’d always stood in it. The sales position — see everybody come in, nobody sees you leave. Terri ordered two drafts they wouldn’t drink and a basket of something fried so the table would read right.

It took forty minutes. A man named Royce — fifty, drove a forklift at a paper distributor two blocks over, had been drinking on this corner since the district was nothing but warehouses and rats.

“The Broadstreet.” Royce turned his glass a quarter-turn on the bar. “They do a band. House band, plays near every night. These fellas play Tuesday. Wednesday. I’ve stood outside in summer with the door open and heard them at one in the morning on a Wednesday. Seventh Son, they’re called. Fella who owns the place is the guitar player. Williams.”

“You ever been in?” Terri kept it light.

“Once. Two, three years back, a nephew. Wasn’t for me. Too dark. And the band — they’re good. People come from Boulder for them. People come from the airport, I’ve seen the cabs.” Royce set his glass down and looked at it. “But there’s a thing about that place. Williams. I’ve watched that man for — has to be the whole fifteen years he’s owned it. I’ve watched him cross that street under the lights a hundred times. He doesn’t get older. You’re gonna say everybody says that about everybody. I’m telling you I drove past my own first wedding photo this Christmas and I know what fifteen years does to a face. It hasn’t touched his.”

They went.

The Broadstreet announced itself by not — a converted freight warehouse, loading dock bricked into an entrance, a single iron-shaded bulb over a door painted deep green that read black until you were close. No sign. No line. No indication from the street that the building contained anything except dark and cold and whatever the loading dock had been built to hold. But Flash could hear the band from the sidewalk. A bass line he felt in the soles of his feet before he heard it as music. Low, insistent, the pulse of a large animal at rest.

The bouncer on the stool did the arithmetic every bouncer did — size, sobriety, probability of trouble — found nothing that concerned him, moved the rope. The door gave heavy, like a vault.

Inside. Warmth and dark. A warehouse that still admitted what it was — exposed brick, iron columns, a ceiling lost in shadow forty feet up. Maybe seventy people, all oriented toward the low stage at the far end. The air smelled of bodies and old wood and something underneath both that Flash didn’t have a name for. Something animal.

He felt it the moment the door sealed behind them. A pressure. His skin went tight across his shoulders and the back of his neck, a whole-body flinch that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with recognition. Four nights old and he didn’t have words for what his body was telling him. His body didn’t need words. The thing up on the stage was the same kind of thing he was.

The band. A drummer — a woman, eyes shut, sweat she wore rather than produced. A bassist, gangly, young in the face, fingers moving with a looseness that looked careless and wasn’t. A keyboard player half-turned from the crowd. And front and center, lead guitar and the microphone, a man. Not large. Not loud. He played with his eyes mostly closed and when they opened they went across the room without hurry, table by table, taking inventory of his house. The face was wrong. Not monstrous. Unweathered. Royce had it right — a face that fifteen Denver winters had politely declined to touch, the skin unlined, the jaw set in a way that had nothing to do with youth and everything to do with something that had stopped.

His eyes came down the room. Three tables, two, one — and Edward Williams was looking at the door he had not seen open, at the two people standing just inside it who were four nights old and carrying something in their blood that his blood answered.

He did not stop playing. Something in his face changed by a single degree — the set of the mouth, the angle of attention. A man who has looked up from his desk to find that someone has added a name to his calendar without asking.

The song had two minutes left. Flash had less.

He put his hand at the small of Terri’s back and turned her toward the green door. A couple. A man who’s decided this isn’t the place. She read it instantly, leaned into his hand and laughed at nothing — the laugh of a woman being walked out of a bar by a man she liked. The two of them stopped being the wrong thing in the right room and became, again, a man and a woman leaving.

The handle was cold. The vault door gave.

Cold air hit him. And behind him the song ended. It did not trail off. It stopped — all four instruments cutting on the same eighth note — and into the silence one voice, not loud but pitched to carry, the easy amplified warmth of a man with a microphone speaking to his room:

“Leaving so soon.”

Not to Flash. To everyone. A frontman’s between-songs patter — except every person in the Broadstreet knew a band didn’t address the couple going out the door, and now every person in the Broadstreet had turned to look.

Flash was already through. The vault door closing on his heel. The last thing the gap showed him was the stage — Edward Williams, guitar slung low, leaning into the mic with an expression that wanted to be hospitable and was not. His eyes finding Flash’s face in the second before the iron door sealed it away.

Then brick. Then the street. Then the wind.

Terri’s laugh was gone. She had his sleeve. “He made the whole room look at us. He named us. Not our names — he doesn’t have those. But everybody in there has our faces now. The bouncer. Seventy people.”

Flash looked at the green door. It did not open. Nothing came out of it. The bass line started again behind the brick, muffled and huge, the pulse of a thing that had been there for fifteen years and intended to be there for fifteen more.

“Get in the car,” he said.

Terri drove. The Lincoln pulled off the brick and the Broadstreet slid back into the warehouse dark, the band already into something new behind the door nobody was coming out of. She checked the mirror three times in the first mile. Then she stopped checking.

Hampden climbed back toward Cherry Hills. Somewhere in the dark ahead Monica was reading a file standing up, not writing any of it down. Emerson was on a phone with Whitman’s overnight service, following money he had once been asked to hide. Marcus was letting a Boulder line ring.

12:40 a.m. The estate gate closed behind the Lincoln. Flash watched it shut in the mirror — iron, stone, the single post lamp, the empty road where the detective had been standing two hours ago. The wind moved the trees. Nothing else moved.

He went inside. The house was warm and the house was not his and the warmth reached his clothes and stopped there, finding the surface and declining to go further.