I made a perfect cast into the gap. I let the lure sink and then started retrieving. I got stuck. It wouldn’t budge. I’d obviously caught on to some submerged branches. So much for a weed-less lure. The hell with it. I didn’t want the damn lure anyway. I pulled back hard on my rod, intending to break the line and call it a weekend. I’d head to Maloy’s Tavern and go into my fall-back spiel about the wonders of fresh air.
When the three-pound largemouth broke the water with my lure flashing in its mouth, I almost fell backwards off my seat.
Ten minutes later, after several magnificent jumps, the beautiful olive green fish, its dark horizontal stripe glistening along its flank, was flopping wildly in my boat. I usually practice catch-and-release, but I decided to eat my trophy. The fact that it was fooled by a can opener indicated that its loss would not endanger the lake’s gene pool. I rowed back to my cabin and cooked the bass on the shore next to the dock the way my friends and I had when we came up to the lake on a Red Line Bus in high school. Cut into chunks, soaked in beer, breaded and pan fried in butter over a fire made from broken branches. Ate it with my fingers, too, washed down with the rest of the beer. I’ve had neater meals, but none better. I felt like Natty Bumpo.
I decided to call it a day. Things could only go downhill. I went back to the cabin and cleaned up, then stopped at Maloy’s on the way home for some coffee and homemade apple pie. I was hoping there would be other fisherman there. There were. By the time I left, my largemouth was the size of the Hindenburg. I got back to Staten Island late Sunday night. It had turned out to be a great weekend.
***
Except for the dream. The one I had my first night at the lake. It had been a long drive and I was beat. The late burger and bourbons did the rest. I fell into a virtual coma. If it hadn’t been for the dream, I probably would have slept until noon.
I don’t dream often, and usually don’t remember much of them. Just as well, since the few I do recall more vividly tend to involve someone trying to kill me and I wake up in a cold sweat. A few years back, the dreams — OK, they were nightmares — featured a lot of thumping helicopters, men with turbans and, for some reason, hissing hand grenades that I couldn’t seem to get away from because my legs weren’t moving fast enough.
I suppose they were tangled in the bed sheets. At least that’s what the shrink at the Veterans Administration suggested. She had heard every kind of Post-Traumatic Stress dream in the book and didn’t think mine rose to the level of disability. That was fine with me, since my occasional heavy drinking and prescription-pill popping seemed to be working as I self-adjusted back to society. The doc was a very attractive woman and I tried to string her along by claiming I had a recurring dream about getting a Dear John letter from a camel, but she wasn’t buying.
My rare bad dream nowadays usually concerns someone trying to carve me up or poisoning me. I don’t need a shrink to tell me where they come from. I’ve had some interesting cases recently. But my legs still never seem to work.
Of course, I occasionally have what you might call an erotic dream. Not the embarrassing teen-age kind where you avoid your mother’s eyes when she does the laundry. Just a run-of-the-mill pleasant dream invariably involving a gorgeous woman, who usually, but not always, looks something like Alice Watts. Or, I’m ashamed to say, Eleni Rahm. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t ever tell a shrink I was dreaming about the daughter of Marat Rahm, the head of the local Russian mob.
But like even the scary dreams, I quickly forget them by my second cup of coffee, and it might be three months before I have another one.
The dream I had on Friday night at the lake wasn’t pleasant. Not exactly a nightmare, because there was an erotic undertone. But neither Alice nor Eleni made an appearance.
Ronnie Frost did.
Clear as a bell. Looking as she did 20 years ago, floating in water with her hand outstretched.
We were swimming in the Silver Lake reservoir on Staten Island. She was sinking and I was trying frantically to reach her. I’m a good swimmer and for once my damn legs were working fine, but she kept drifting just out of reach. Then she disappeared and I woke up.
It’s not unusual for a face from the past to pop up, seemingly unbidden, in a dream. It doesn’t even have to be human. Hell, Scruffy the wonder dog, the best mutt I ever had, once made a brief appearance.
But this was different. There were no grenades involved, but I still woke up in a cold sweat.
CHAPTER 3– LOOSE LIPS
I was sitting in my office on Wednesday when my cell phone buzzed. The caller I.D. said “Narrows Medical.”
“Arman would like to see you.”
It was a voice that sounded like it came from the bottom of a Ukrainian coal mine.
“Is he sick?”
“No. Why? Oh, the phone. I’m calling from the office.”
“What office?”
Maks Kalugin gave me an address in the Dyker Heights section of Brooklyn.
“You have GPS. We’ll be here all day.”
“I’m a little busy, Maks.”
I wasn’t. I was all alone, reading The New York Times on the web. I didn’t have a client. Abby Jones, my office assistant, had taken the day off to bone up for her private investigator’s exam. I didn’t expect her to have a problem with it. She was super-sharp former Army military policewoman who had also worked security in my building before I shanghaied her. When she passed the test, we would have a decision to make about her future.
“It’s about Mrs. Capriati,” Maks said. A pause. “Not on the phone.”
He hung up. I got up.
***
The three-story building was on the corner of Hamilton Parkway and Fourth Avenue and Bay Ridge Avenue. The blue awning said “Narrows Medical Center.” I went through the double glass doors into an empty waiting room. On one wall there was a large poster hanging askew. It showed a burly, coarse-featured woman with a finger to her lips. At first I took it for one of those World War II “Loose Lips Sink Ships” posters that warned people not to discuss maritime matters in port, lest the news found its way to the ears of a Nazi spy, who would pass it on to lurking U-Boats. On closer examination, it turned out to be a Soviet worker in overalls saying “Spletnya Neelza!” with a hammer and sickle in the background. I straightened the poster out, on general principles. The only furniture in the waiting area consisted of a wooden bench under the poster and, in the center of the room, what appeared to be a receptionist desk, with all its drawers opened. There were papers and office supplies strewn about. The whole place looked like it had been tossed.
A broad, flat head stuck out from one of the doors down the hallway.
“In here,” Maks Kalugin growled.
I entered a room that also looked trashed. Judging by the diplomas on the wall, which were askew, it was obviously a doctor’s office. Two women were at a makeshift table in a corner working on laptops. Arman Rahm was sitting behind a large desk, leafing through a stack of papers in his lap. With his slicked-back dark hair and high-cheekboned, chiseled features, he was an extraordinarily handsome man, and as usual, he looked like he’d just stepped out of a high-end catalogue. He was wearing light-brown linen trousers, a two-button check sport coat, a light-blue button-down shirt and a wine-colored cashmere vest. His chair was tilted back and his feet, in white-and-brown leather loafers, were crossed on the desk.
“Gatsby, I presume.”
He looked up at me and smiled, showing a perfect set of white teeth.
“Alton, good of you to come.”
I looked around.
“You need my help redecorating?”
“F.B.I. agents never clean up after themselves. Of course, my people are responsible for some of the mess. We swept the building for bugs. I have a cleaning crew coming in tomorrow. Then I’ll get some painters, carpet guys and furniture people in here. We should be up and running in a week.”
“Up and running what?”
“I haven’t thought of a name yet, but
it will have ‘Medical’ in it.”
“Why not keep the old name?”
Kalugin made a sound that was probably a laugh.
“Because if anyone Googles it, all the indictments will come up. The idiots who ran this armpit are all facing 20 years in Federal prison.”
“Your kind of people, Arman. I take it someone who worked here ignored the poster out front.”
“What poster.”
“The one with Kalugin’s sister saying ‘Spletnya Neelza!’, which I presume doesn’t have anything to do with German U-Boats.”
“I wish my sister looked that good,” Maks said.
“It means ‘Don’t Gossip!”, Rahm said. “And you are correct. Someone didn’t keep their mouth shut. What did you mean about German U-Boats?”
I told him.
“Same idea. But it wasn’t only loose lips. The doctors who ran this Medicare mill were just too greedy. It’s hard to avoid Federal scrutiny when you are billing for more patients than there are people in Brooklyn. They charged more than $30 million for services that weren't necessary. Hell, they were no-show practitioners anyway. They were hardly ever here and only performed a small fraction of the procedures they ordered. The dolts ran patients through here faster than my girls give lap dances in South Beach.”
I walked around to look at the diplomas, which I also straightened.
“Dr. Aleksandr Golovanov?” I leaned closer to read the small print. “Gee, I didn’t know you could get a medical degree online.”
“He ran the place,” Rahm said. “He paid cash kickbacks to Medicare beneficiaries and used the beneficiaries' names to bill Medicare.”
“Forgive me for saying this, Arman, but why all the disapproval?”
“I like a good scheme as well as the next man,” he said, smiling. “But these dog turds give Russians a bad name. They don’t even read the papers. The Government is cracking down on this sort of thing. I own this building, so I started getting the kind of publicity I don’t need or want.”
“Then why keep it going?”
“Public relations. I’ll turn it into a legitimate clinic. I’ll make money. I mean, we’ll still be dealing with the Government, right. I’ll just fold it into my other medical properties.”
“What other medical properties?”
“Nursing homes, mainly. Which brings me to why I asked you to come over. Mrs. Capriati died.”
I was sorry to hear that. She was a nice lady whose son, Billy, was a wannabe gangster who got himself involved in a turf war between the Rahms and the Carlucci crime family. The Rahms needed Capriati dead before he could testify against them and I had been duped into finding him by Arman’s actress sister, Eleni. I managed to locate him, through his invalid mother, hiding in a Federal witness protection program. Maks Kalugin promptly broke his neck in a Florida condo. The entire fiasco was somewhat mitigated by the fact that the Rahms prevented Nando Carlucci from carving me up in my own basement and nursed me back to health. I laid a guilt trip on the Rahms, who promised to look after Mrs. Capriati. The additional fact that I slept with Eleni Rahm and also met Alice Watts during the case did help assuage any lingering bad feeling.
“What happened?”
“Old age. She went peacefully. We took care of the funeral arrangements.”
“All I asked was for you to take care of her when she was alive. Send money every month.” I glanced at the women working the computers and lowered my voice. “After all, you killed her son.”
“They don’t speak English,” Rahm said. “As for her son, it couldn’t be helped. You know that.”
“And it was quick,” Kalugin interjected.
Arman and I both looked at him.
“I’m just saying,” Kalugin shrugged.
“You cut off his finger and sent it to the Carluccis,” I pointed out, “with his college ring still on it.”
“Anyone can send a finger. It was important that they knew who he was. Besides, he was already dead.”
I decided to leave it at that.
“Anyway, we became quite fond of the old woman,” Arman continued. “When we saw how badly the place was run, we bought it. Then a few more. They come in handy for the families of some of our associates, many of whom are getting old. They are not happy about what’s available locally.”
“Medicare clinics and nursing homes. What’s next? Funeral homes?”
“Actually, my friend, I’ve already made an offer on a couple of them in New Jersey.”
CHAPTER 4 - DIARY
The next day, I was in my office on my iPad scrolling through the digital version of The New York Times sports section. Just reading about the various ankle, hip, elbow, knee and tendon woes of the ancient and ailing Bronx Bombers made me feel old. I once commanded a platoon in a combat zone that was less banged up. I was also thinking about dinner. Truth was, I’d been thinking about dinner since shortly after lunch.
Two cops walked in. I knew they were cops by the way they assumed they could go anywhere, like in my office.
The cops didn’t look New York. And they weren’t Feds, because they both had on sports jackets; one brown, the other green. Their pants matched the jackets, but not the ones each was wearing. But it’s not like they could have switched. Brown jacket was a beefy older guy with some small but noticeable striations on his nose. He liked to drink and I made him for a tough hombre in whatever jurisdiction he came from. Blue jacket was rapier-thin, fresh faced and tried to look stern. Still wet behind the ears, he’d be no problem.
“You Rhode?”
It was brown jacket. He was holding a thick manila envelope.
The name “Alton Rhode” is etched on the outside door of my office suite. On the desk I was sitting at there was a nameplate that said “Alton Rhode.” The nameplate was not my idea. One of my clients in the office supply business had one made up for me after I successfully proved that his wife’s orthodontist was drilling more than her bicuspids. I swiveled my feet to the floor and turned the nameplate around and made a point of studying it.
“I’m pretty sure I am,” I said, and then pitched the nameplate in the trash, “because if I’m not, then the three of us don’t belong here.”
He sighed, and the badges came out.
“I’m Detective Broderson,” he said, hooking a thumb toward his thin partner, “and this is Detective Huntley. Worchester Homicide.”
He said “Wooster,” which, of course, is the way it is pronounced.
“Massachusetts,” Huntley said.
“I know where Worchester is,” I said. “Even though you guys say it wrong. It should be “War-chester.”
“What do you mean? We live there, for crissakes.”
I wondered if they knew that I went to Holy Cross, the small Jesuit college located in Worcester. If they didn’t, I wasn’t prepared to tell them just yet. It was unlikely they’d traveled this far to sell tickets to the Worcester Policeman’s Ball. It was more likely somebody had been murdered in their fair city. When talking to homicide cops from anywhere, discretion is always the better part of valor, or candor.
“But I’ll let the pronunciation slide,” I continued, “because you have to love a town named after a good steak sauce. Of course, the common name is Worcestershire sauce, but it was originally concocted in Worcester, England. Lea & Perrins is the best. Though I prefer Peter Lugar’s sauce myself. But there’s no beating Lea & Perrins in a Bloody Mary.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“He’s bustin’ your balls, Dick. They said he thought he was funny. All those Holy Cross boys are a riot.”
Well, that answered that question. If they knew where I went to college, what else did they know. And why?
They sat down without asking and pulled out notepads. Then Broderson got right to it, wanting to see my reaction. I’d used the trick myself.
“Veronica Frost is dead. Murdered.”
Usually when you are told that someone you haven’t seen in almost 20 years has
died, you struggle to sound and look concerned. You might even have trouble remembering what they looked like, or who they were. But not if it’s the first girl you really fell in love with. The one who got away. Or, in Ronnie’s case, ran away. Even after all this time, it hit me like a blow in the solar plexus.
“How?”
“Strangled. Piano wire.”
He said it casually, but was looking at me closely for my reaction. It was another old cop trick. Ronnie had presumably not been strangled. If I was the killer, the false information might have taken me by surprise. My eyes might have given me away. It wouldn’t be proof, but homicide cops don’t only need proof, they need suspicions, someplace to go. I looked over at his partner, who had a curious expression on his face. Broderson hadn’t let him in on the ploy.
“When?”
“A month ago.”
“In Worcester.”
“Yeah.”
So, Ronnie wound up in Worcester, where I went to college. Small world. The irony was palpable. I had been looking forward to her visiting me at Holy Cross when she moved away.
“When was the last time you saw her,” Huntley said.
“Probably 20 years ago.”
“Can you tell us where you were?”
“Twenty years ago!”
“No, pal, on the night she was killed.”
Broderson looked up at the ceiling.
“We haven’t told him when she died, Dick.” He had seen my reaction to the news and filed it away. I was not at the top of his list of suspects. But he was a pro and now tried to rescue the interview from the hole his partner was digging. He gave me the date without looking at his notepad. It wasn’t just another case for him. “The M.E. puts the time of death around 7 P.M.”
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