“What does he know, kid?”
“He knows all you did to create your new life. You said what you did with Chantal was heroic, and I bet you think of it that way still. You crossed the final line with her, didn’t you? First you decided to whore yourself to Mrs. LeComte. Then you decided to steal your way to a new life and to screw over your friends in the process. But all that wasn’t searing enough. The one act that sealed it all, the one heroic gesture that made it all happen, was Chantal. You killed her, I know you did. The only question was why. Why did you do it?”
Purcell rolled the ball one more time against the bumper, caught it when it bounced back, lifted it quickly and threw it at my head.
It would have dented my skull for sure, if he wasn’t a feeble old man with a paunch. I ducked, the ball slammed into a fancy wooden dartboard, darts went flying as the board tumbled to the ground.
The door sprang open, and both Reggie and Lou burst into the billiards room, Lou with his hands in some sort of martial-arts pose, Reggie with a pistol in his fist. It was meant to inspire fear in me, this grand show of force, except Lou’s toupee had slipped forward to cover his eyes, and Reggie, frankly, seemed more afraid of the gun than was I.
“What do you know about changing your life?” said Theodore Purcell. “Nothing. You’re a punk, adrift in the wind, and you always will be. You’re weak. You’re normal. You end up with nothing because that’s what you deserve.”
“We all end up getting what we deserve,” I said. “You mind, Reggie, pointing the gun in some other direction? The way you’re shaking, the gun is liable to slip out of your hand and fall on my foot.”
“Put the gun away, Reggie,” said Purcell. “Victor here is too small to kill.”
Reggie pointed the gun at me for a moment more before sticking it back into his jacket pocket.
“So what are you going to do now, kid?”
“I’m going back east,” I said. “I’m going to bring Charlie home. I’m going to get out the truth.”
“You don’t know what the hell the truth is.”
“He’ll tell me.”
“Maybe he will,” said Purcell. “If I don’t find him first. You should think about what I offered you. I’m giving you a chance to make something of yourself.”
“To take Reggie’s job, to follow you around like a toady and pull cheap pistols on your enemies?”
“I’m no toady,” said Reggie.
“Sure you are, kid,” said Theodore. “And don’t you forget it.”
“I’m a vice president,” said Reggie.
“A vice president in charge of toadying,” said Purcell. “But you’re still more than Victor here will ever be. Because Victor is a failure, born to it, sinking in it, doomed to end exactly as he started.”
“Let me ask you something, Theodore,” I said. “What’s it like to take that leap to become someone new and then find out the new you is a decrepit old monster?”
“You want to know how it feels, kid? When the wine is old and the food rich and a broad with fake tits has her face in my lap, let me tell you, it feels pretty damn good.”
58
Did it rankle? You bet it did.
What do you know about changing your life? had said Theodore Purcell. Nothing. You’re a punk, adrift in the wind, and you always will be. You’re weak. You’re normal. You end up with nothing because that’s what you deserve. Consider the source, I told myself. What lessons did I want to learn from a pornographer with a homicidal past and a crippled soul? But still it rankled. Why? I’ll tell you why. Because he was right, and I knew it in my gut.
The whole flight home from L.A., while Monica sat silent and morose beside me, I ruminated on the words Theodore Purcell had spit at me. Monica had met me at the airport with a silent nod and a poignant sadness in her moist eyes. What was I to tell her? How do you convince a believer that her faith is misplaced?
“How are you holding up?” I said to her as we waited to board.
“Let’s not talk, okay, Victor?”
“You got the right guy for that, Monica. If you want quiet, that’s what you’ll get. I can be as tight-lipped as the—”
“Ssssh,” she said, and I got the idea.
So we sat together in silence on the plane as Monica stared blankly out the window at the silver wing of the plane and I thought about all I hadn’t yet achieved in my life.
My entire career I had been whining about my lack of opportunity. Clients weren’t paying bills, opponents were judgment-proof, the million-dollar case had not come walking in my door. Boohoo. I had become a sob sister of defeat as my legal practice collapsed, my love life grew ever more pathetic, my apartment lay in ruins. But it wasn’t my fault, I told myself. Boohoo-hoo. Teddy Pravitz had taken control of his life and turned himself into Theodore Purcell, and whatever the results, at least he hadn’t sat back and whined. And the same with Stanford Quick, who had made his move and taken all that to which I had aspired, my job, my house, my dog, my SUV, my pretty blond wife, my life. My life. They had seized their opportunities, I had let mine wallow.
Finally, too angry at myself not to want to hurt someone else, I said to Monica, “It’s not her, you know.”
“I know,” she said.
I was frankly shocked. “When did you figure it out? When she referred to Ronnie as a he?”
“Before then. I knew it right away.”
“How?”
“I just knew.”
“So why did you stay the night?”
“I liked her,” she said. “And I wanted to know why I had been led to her.”
“Because that lying bastard was trying to set you up,” I said.
“No, something else was behind it, I’m certain. Lena asked me to come back and visit. Maybe to stay with her for a while.”
“You’re not thinking of actually taking her up on it?”
“She was nice.”
“It was all an act.”
“Not all of it. Everything has a purpose, Victor. There’s a message here, if I just listen hard enough.”
“The message is to get help.”
“You’re being mean again.”
“The lie didn’t shake your faith?”
“Only the truth can do that.”
“Well, that’s what we’re going to find back in Philly. Are you ready for the truth, Monica?”
“I’ve been ready all my life.”
“We’ll see, won’t we?”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to find your sister,” I said, “and maybe change my life in the process.”
“How?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
And that’s what I tried to figure out the rest of the long trip home. Maybe it was time to take to heart the lessons I had been learning from Teddy and Stanford Quick. Sure, I knew that Purcell was a total creep and Quick was a total corpse, but still, they had known more than I ever would about taking hold of the reins of life and forcing it to do your will. And sure, Nietzsche was an incestuous nut job with acute gynophobia and the mustache of a porn star, but maybe the guy had a point. Leap the abyss or stay on the wrong side of life for all eternity.
Enough with the law of either/or, enough with letting the richest fields lie fallow for matters of decorum or quaint moral qualms. It was time to seize my opportunities. To seize my destiny. To follow the lead of Sammy Glick and create my own damn success. It was time, damn it, to get some cable in my life.
And son of a bitch if I didn’t come up with a plan.
59
“I’m bringing him home, Mrs. Kalakos.”
In the scented darkness, she rose unsteadily from her deathbed, reached her palsied hand to my face. “You good boy,” she said as she brushed my cheek gently with her gnarled finger. “You good boy.” And then, abruptly, she slapped my face. Hard. It rang like a shepherd’s crook snapping over a knee.
“What was that for?” I said.
“A
warning,” she said. “You no play fool and lead them to him like last time. You almost got him skewered like lamb.”
“I thought I had taken precautions.”
“I spit on your precautions. Precautions are for timid men with girls they can’t handle. You, you be certain.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Your best, it better be good enough, Victor.”
“Is that a threat, Mrs. Kalakos?”
“I am Greek, Victor. I don’t threaten. I slice. Thinly, you know? Makes the meat very tender.”
“Are we talking about lamb again?”
“Yes, of course. Thalassa makes very nice lamb, with garlic and coffee. Special recipe. You want see my slicing knife?”
“No thank you, the sight of your gun was enough.”
“That little thing?”
“I will be very careful, Mrs. Kalakos.”
“Good. I choose then to trust you, and also will my son, because I tell him to. You’ll meet him where I say, and you bring him right here, to me.”
“Someplace more neutral might be more secure. I was thinking that it would be best if I met up with the police at—”
“Don’t tell me what is best for my son. His whole life I know what is best for my son. You bring him here, to me.”
“This is the one place they’ll be certain to be waiting, Mrs. Kalakos. It won’t be safe to bring him here.”
“You make it safe. You bring him here. I don’t know how many days I have left, how many hours. I waited long enough. You bring him straight to me.”
“I don’t think that’s a very wise—”
“Are we still discussing this? No more discussion, Victor. You do what I say.”
“Okay,” I said. “My client told me to let you call the shots. But on two conditions. First, this will clean our family’s debt to you. We are even, forever. No more favors.”
“As you say.”
“Speaking of which, I have a question. My grandmother, when you found her with that man, was she happy?”
“What is happy, Victor? Who is happy in this life?”
“Ballplayers,” I said. “Supermodels. Ballplayers married to supermodels. But my grandmother, before you dragged her back, was she happy?”
“You want truth?”
“Yes, I do.”
“She was crying every night in the small apartment of that strange man, your poor grandmother. She saw she made terrible mistake. But she was afraid her husband not accept her back. I didn’t take her home for your grandfather, I take her home because it was what she wanted.”
“And she was grateful?”
“For the rest of her life, my boys they never paid for shoes. ‘Give it to them for free,’ she told your grandfather.”
“I bet he hated that.”
“He was grateful, too. They had good life together. She thought she wanted more and ended up with nothing. Life can turn to tears when you want more, always more.”
“Speaking of more,” I said, “this brings me to the second condition. We need to talk about the final payment for my legal work on behalf of your son.”
“What you mean, final payment?”
“At our first meeting, I told you I needed a retainer. But a retainer is just enough for me to agree to take the case.”
“You want more.”
“Since that meeting I’ve done a significant amount of legal work.”
“Is that what you call it? What kind of legal work have you done, Victor Carl?”
“Meetings, negotiations, investigations. If you want, I can give you an itemized bill showing my work down to the last detail, in six-minute increments, and then you can pay me in cash. If you’re short of cash, I could find you a finance company that would be quite willing to take out another mortgage on the house. Thalassa wouldn’t mind, I’m sure.”
“It’s good you sure, Victor, because that makes one of us.”
“Or maybe, if you choose, we can work something else out.”
“You have idea, of course you do.”
“When you gave me those jewels and chains at our first meeting, I couldn’t help but notice there was more in the drawer.”
“And you want rest, is that it, Victor Carl?”
“That’s it,” I said.
“You would leave me with nothing? You would take the last bauble from an old, dying woman?”
“I’m a lawyer, Mrs. Kalakos.”
“You sure you not Greek?”
“Pretty sure, but to tell you the truth, I seem to be getting more Greek every day.”
“I’M BRINGING him home, Dad,” I said over the phone, “but I’m going to need some help.”
“What can I do?” said my father. “I can barely get up the stairs.”
“Not you. I want you to take a little trip out of town. Maybe down to the shore.”
“I hate the shore.”
“Get a little seaside rental for a week. Hit the beach.”
“I hate the beach.”
“Foot-long hot dogs, barefoot girls in bikinis, frozen custard.”
“Now I know you’re trying to kill me.”
“My treat.”
“Stop it, my heart can’t take the shock.”
“Look, Dad, there’s a man in California who is going to do everything he can to stop me from bringing Charlie home, violence no object. I don’t want him to go after you to go after me.”
“Why me?”
“Because he knows you.”
“Who is this supposedly frightening man?”
“Teddy Pravitz.”
Pause. “I always liked Stone Harbor.”
“I know a Realtor. I’ll let her handle it. She’ll be in touch.”
“Make sure it’s on the first floor.”
“Will do. But there’s something else you have to do for me. To do what I need to do, I’m going to need some help.”
“What kind of help?”
“I’m going to need a driver.”
“I’M BRINGING him home,” I said. “But before I do, I need the deal in writing.”
We were in Slocum’s office, McDeiss, Slocum, Jenna Hathaway, and myself. The three were not happy with me right at that moment. With two murders and a host of questions, they had been trying to reach a material witness for days and were angry as hell that he had left the jurisdiction and couldn’t be reached. One of the great joys in life, I have found, is turning off the cell phone.
“You have the answers you were looking for?” said Hathaway.
“That I do.”
“You found her?”
“Not exactly, but I found him.”
“My God. Where?”
“I’ll let you know after the deal is signed and I bring my client in.”
“And Charlie is ready to testify against him?”
“When I show him the written deal, he’ll talk. And not just Charlie. Joey Pride, whom you’ve been looking for and haven’t been able to find? He’ll talk also, about the Ralph Ciulla killing and the events surrounding the Randolph Trust robbery, so long as you have a deal for him, too.”
“What kind of deal does Joey want?” said Jenna.
“Flat immunity.”
“Do you represent him?”
“By the time you get hold of him, I will.”
“And there is something we can prosecute after all this time?” said Slocum.
“Absolutely. You should be able to bang him away for the rest of his pathetic life. And trust me, Larry, your boss will be quite pleased with all the publicity. Time and Newsweek will be calling, and the bestselling book is being written as we speak.”
“This isn’t about publicity,” said Jenna.
“With politicians it’s always about publicity. And your father, Jenna, will finally be able to close that case.”
She turned her head, thought a moment, and then nodded.
“Sounds good,” said Slocum. “Where should we pick him up?”
“At his mother’s house.”
“It’s not negotiable,” I said. “His mother’s house. I’ll let you know the when. And he has to have the chance to spend some time with his mother, no interference, before you take him away.”
“You’re going to get him killed,” said McDeiss.
“No I won’t, Detective, because you’ll be there to protect him. I have total faith in your abilities.”
“Don’t even try to sweet-talk me,” said McDeiss. “And how are you going to get him there?”
“I’ll figure that out.” I nodded toward Slocum. “And when I do, I’ll call Larry on the cell with the exact time and day. He’ll relay it on.”
“So that’s it?” said Slocum. “Everything’s settled?”
“Well, almost everything,” I said.
“Here it comes,” said McDeiss.
“Why so cynical, Detective?” I said.
“I’ve dealt with you before, and I’m still looking for my wallet.”
“Remember that painting? The Rembrandt? Well, Charlie might have been a little mistaken about the painting. He did have it, once, but he’s not sure that he has it anymore. It might have up and disappeared on him. Bit of a mistake on my part there.”
“No painting,” said Slocum.
“Sorry.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Wish I was, but no. Too bad, really. I always like pictures of guys in funny hats, but it seems bringing up the painting was just Charlie’s way of getting attention.”
“But the Rembrandt was the point of the whole thing from the start,” said Slocum.
“Maybe at the start, but the key to this deal now is Charlie’s testimony about the Warrick gang and the missing girl. Best I can tell, none of you gives a damn about the painting, and neither do I. The Randolph Trust is just going to have to make do with its other five hundred masterworks.”
“You know it is a crime to sell a stolen artwork,” said Slocum.
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