by R.J. Ellory
‘And?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think she wanted me to come,’ Harper said. ‘I think she believed it was what my mother would have wanted . . . for me to find out that I had a father before he died.’
Duchaunak sighed, glanced towards the door as an orderly came in and walked to the counter. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You think what you want to think, Mr Harper, but I have to tell you something, and whether you want to go with me on this or not I still have to give you some kind of an idea of what’s going here or I’m going to feel bad about myself. I got enough things to feel bad about without adding myself to the list, okay?’
Harper felt cold and loose within, like something was unravelling inside him.
‘Ben Marcus and Sol Neumann are dangerous people. Very, very dangerous people. Your father and Walt Freiberg were, maybe still are, involved with these people. These are not the sort of people you want to have in your life, Mr Harper. You’ve come here to New York, you’ve found out something that I’m sure has been very difficult to deal with . . . you’ve got a new suit, a great looking watch there—’ Duchaunak stopped mid-sentence, leaned forward, and then he spoke again with a hushed and urgent voice. ‘You have to leave, Mr Harper. I’m telling you for your own welfare . . . you’ve got to leave New York. Go home, go back to Miami. I’ll keep you posted on what happens with your father.’
Harper didn’t reply.
‘You hear me, Mr Harper?’
Harper nodded. ‘I hear what you’ve said, but you sure as shit haven’t told me a great deal.’
‘I can’t,’ Duchaunak said. ‘I have to make a judgement call on this, and right now my instinct tells me that the less you know the better. I tell you some of the things that are going down here and you’re going to act strange with these people. You act strange with them they’ll know it in a heartbeat, and then—’
‘What?’ Harper asked. ‘Then what?’
Duchaunak shook his head. ‘Go home, Mr Harper. Please. Would you just go home?’
‘I’ll think it over.’
‘Okay, you think it over.’ Duchaunak started to rise from his chair.
‘You can lead a horse to water, right, Detective?’
Duchaunak smiled. ‘Right, Mr Harper.’ He buttoned his overcoat and reached out his hand.
Harper took it without rising.
‘Good luck.’
‘Thank you, Detective.’
Duchaunak started towards the door.
‘Hey!’ Harper called after him.
Duchaunak turned.
‘So what was the deal with baseball? You didn’t pay five thousand dollars for a baseball?’
Duchaunak shook his head. He reached for the door and pushed it open. ‘No, Mr Harper, I did not pay five thousand dollars for a baseball . . . I paid six.’
Duchaunak pushed the door wide and walked out into the corridor. He was gone before Harper had a chance to reply.
TWENTY-THREE
Harper stayed a while and drank his coffee. Didn’t think about the conversation with Duchaunak. Didn’t believe his mind flexible enough to take such inferences and innuendoes on board. Looked at the watch Walt had bought him, at the suit he was wearing. Felt like he was pretending to be something he wasn’t. At least here there were emotions. At least here he felt a little excitement, a little nervousness. What the hell was the point of such emotions if you didn’t experience them once in a while?
Took a cab from the front of the hospital back to the Regent. Driver talked all the way, interspersed with the radio, DJ hammering on about Dizzee Rascal and Social Distortion challenging Franz Ferdinand for the number one spot in the chart.
Harper seated in the back, scanning the streets for anything he recalled of his childhood. New York had changed, it had grown up and become an adult.
‘You from New York?’ the driver asked.
‘Originally, yes.’
‘Where you from now?’
‘Miami.’
‘Miami? Hell, I been to Miami. Miami’s a helluva place.’
Harper didn’t respond.
‘You here on holiday?’
‘No, some business I have to see to.’
‘You going to be here Christmas Eve, buddy?’
‘I don’t know,’ Harper said. He wondered how far they were from the hotel.
‘If you’re here, if you stay until Christmas Eve, then you have to take a taxi ride somewhere, okay?’
‘A taxi ride?’
‘Sure.’
‘For what reason?’
‘’Cause we’re collecting money.’
Harper frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Christmas Eve you take a yellow cab anywhere in the city, anyplace to anyplace else you like, and the money you pay is going to charity. The mayor’s even looking at taking all the private cars off the road for three hours in the afternoon so we can raise as much money as possible. You figure you can do that?’
‘I can do that,’ Harper said.
‘If you’re here . . . ain’t going to be no good you takin’ a cab in Miami, right?’
‘Right. If I’m here on Christmas Eve I’ll take a cab. You have my word.’
‘Good man. Good man indeed.’
And then they were drawing to a stop outside the Regent, and from the money that Walt had given him Harper paid the driver, and then he stood on the sidewalk for some minutes after the cab had pulled away and asked himself what he would do now.
He didn’t know. He didn’t have a clue. He turned and walked up the steps.
Ben Marcus, seated in his warehouse office, takes a call at his desk.
‘Ben?’ Freiberg says at the other end of the line.
‘Walter,’ Marcus replies.
‘Got a meeting place for tomorrow,’ Freiberg says. ‘Restaurant with a basement, place called Trattoria St Angelo. Other side of Gramercy Park, corner of East Twenty-fourth and Third. Noon is good for you and your people?’
‘Noon is fine Walt . . . we’ll see you then.’
‘Sure thing Ben.’
The call ended.
Worn-out looking duplex on Vandam Street.
Day is closing down; streetlights contribute their sodium-yellow glow to the proceedings and give the early evening a bruised and exhausted feeling.
House was easy enough to break into, nothing more than two deadbolts and a chain, and Albert Reiff and Ray Dietz sat in the back kitchen waiting. They waited for more than an hour – smoking, saying little or nothing, patience of this kind never in short supply. A great deal of their lives required such a type of patience, and after a while time took on a different aspect for these people. This kind of waiting was easy.
Dietz heard footsteps on the sidewalk out front of the building and rose from the table. He nodded to Reiff, and when Reiff heard the key in the front door, when he knew that it was indeed this house that was being entered, he rose too. They stood each side of the kitchen door, listened as the owner came into the front hallway, as he set something down on the floor, switched on a light, took off his coat perhaps. It was no more than thirty or forty seconds from the point Darryl McCaffrey put his key in the lock to the moment he entered the darkened kitchen, but as he reached out his hand to flick the switch he sensed something was wrong.
Perhaps it was the smell of cigarettes. Darryl McCaffrey didn’t smoke. Whatever raised the alarm didn’t matter, for even had he identified the specific source of his disquiet he would not have had any time to act upon it. Dietz had a hold on his right arm, gripped it like a vice, and as Dietz pulled him through the doorway Albert Reiff grabbed the back of his neck and pushed him across the room and into the table.
Darryl McCaffrey, thirty-five years old, a social worker for the New York Metropolitan Borough, caught the side of his head on the edge of the kitchen table and went down.
He did not come round for a good eight or nine minutes, and when he did he was not only gagged, he was also duct-taped to a chair, his a
nkles bound with something, and facing him were two of the ugliest men he’d ever had the misfortune to see up close.
‘Mr McCaffrey,’ the man on the right said. ‘My name is Raymond. This is my friend Albert. Nod if you understand me.’
McCaffrey nodded furiously, his eyes wide, already his bladder ready to release onto the linoleum or explode upwards into the base of his gut.
‘Good, so now we’re introduced we can get down to the matter at hand. We need to find your brother.’
McCaffrey frowned, eyes wide, started shaking his head.
‘Thomas, right? We need to find Thomas . . . and if you co-operate everything will be fine. You don’t . . . well . . . if you don’t, we’re going to kill you.’
Darryl McCaffrey’s eyes widened even further. For a second he wondered if it wasn’t some sick practical joke.
Then Ray Dietz drove a fist into his chest and he knew no-one was kidding.
TWENTY-FOUR
No-one called. Not Walt, not Cathy, not Frank Duchaunak. Left Harper alone at the American Regent for the entirety of Wednesday evening. He’d eaten alone, right there in the hotel restaurant, and then he’d sat in his room watching TV until he fell asleep. Early hours of Thursday morning he’d woken, still fully dressed but for his jacket and shoes. Shed his clothes, left them where they fell, and crawled beneath the bed-covers. He remembered the sound of rain against the window, little else, and only for a handful of moments before exhaustion folded his thoughts quietly, neatly, and stowed them somewhere beneath consciousness. One day closed, another opened, and he slept through the space in between.
Perhaps the most disturbing moment occurred when he stood in the bathroom a little before nine. For seconds, perhaps as many as ten or fifteen, he had no awareness of his own name. Had he attempted to describe the sensation to someone it would have seemed utterly impossible. But it took place, and took place with such clarity and definition it left him unnerved and disturbed for much of the morning. He wondered if his real identity was being submerged.
He called room service. They told him a number of items had been left at the desk for him; they would bring them up. He ordered some eggs and toast, a jug of coffee. A bellhop came with the trolley, carried the travel-cases and boxes within which his other clothes had been stored. Cathy must have driven them over. Why hadn’t she called? Why hadn’t she sent a message up, even brought them up herself? Of everyone in New York she was the only one he wanted to see. Couldn’t get the girl out of his mind. She’d invaded his head and established camp. Harper asked what time they’d been delivered, the bellhop was unsure. Harper thanked him, gave him ten bucks.
He ate in the chair by the window. Looking down from ten floors up, New York seemed like something from a movie. He was detached from it, separate and distinct. He was not part of the city, at least not all of him, and very little of the city was part of him. To let go of that belief was to consider the possibility that Miami was not his home. To consider such a thing meant that he had nowhere to return to. Such a thought worried him. He felt in limbo.
He sorted through the clothes; three suits, a half dozen shirts, two pairs of shoes, four ties, two pairs of silver cufflinks, some silk handkerchiefs, a cashmere double-breasted overcoat and an arran scarf. Tucked at the bottom of one of the boxes was a pair of calfskin gloves, as soft as cotton.
Harper dressed in a navy suit, white shirt, didn’t wear a tie. Ties were for business people and gangsters. He felt a little out of character, but the feeling was not unpleasant. He wished he could have called Cathy, was acutely aware that he had no means by which to contact either her or Walt.
It was gone eleven by the time he left. He took his overcoat, the scarf and gloves, and as he left the Regent the commissionaire raised his hand and touched the peak of his cap. Harper acknowledged the man’s gesture, remembered that there had been no such greeting when he’d left the previous day. Now he looked like a man with a reason for being, a man with sufficient wherewithal to walk into New York dressed in a couple of thousand bucks’ worth of clothes. Judgements were made on how things appeared, not how they were. Harper was reminded that he had, until now, chosen to see exactly what he wanted to see and nothing more. He did not feel equipped, either mentally or emotionally, to go digging beneath the surface. Not today. Not until he acquired some bearings. He turned right onto Hudson, looked up at the Western Union building, and then kept on walking. He possessed no clear purpose or direction, and for the time being that seemed the safest option. The sound of his footsteps seemed to match his heartbeat.
‘So what the fuck we got?’
‘What we got is a whole load of nothing dressed up as something.’
Duchaunak rubbed his eyes with his clenched fists. He hadn’t slept. The conversation with Harper had travelled around and around in his mind like a yellow cab on an open meter. The kid – thirty-six years old but a kid nevertheless – seemed to have no idea who these people were. Five minutes caught up in the lives of people such as Edward Bernstein, Walt Freiberg, Sol Neumann and Ben Marcus, and Harper would willingly have run back to Miami barefoot. And Evelyn Sawyer? Woman seemed to have more secrets than a pyramid.
‘So tell me.’
‘Well,’ Faulkner said. ‘There was nothing in the autopsy of either Anne Harper or Garrett Sawyer that indicated they were anything other than suicides. Garrett had a sheet behind him, nothing to get a hard-on about, and aside from the fact that he married Evelyn Harper, sister of Anne, mother to our Junior Bernstein, and was therefore the boy’s uncle, there is no other apparent connection to Edward Bernstein.’
‘Except we know there must have been.’
Faulkner nodded. ‘Saying prayers to intuition and hunch, yes, there must have been.’
‘You have no question about that?’
Faulkner shrugged. ‘Who doesn’t have questions? Course I got questions. Hell, most of this stuff runs on what you think, what you feel, right? What do I reckon? I reckon Garrett was a cog in the machine someplace, maybe even hooked up with Evelyn and was the indirect connection between Lenny and Anne Harper. Makes sense that Bernstein didn’t marry the woman, and seems from what Evelyn said that there was no love lost between them.’
‘She said that Bernstein pretty much packed his gear when he found out Anne was pregnant.’
‘No wonder she wished him dead.’
Duchaunak frowned. ‘She never said she wished him dead.’
‘You tell some kid their father is dead for thirty years then you have to wish it was true, right?’
Duchaunak nodded. ‘Yeah, I suppose so.’
‘So we got this kid playing footloose and fancy-free in the middle of all of this,’ Faulkner said matter-of-factly. ‘He plays by their rules or they’re going to do one of two things.’
‘Send him on the first plane back to Miami—’
‘Or shoot the dumb asshole in the head.’
‘He isn’t dumb.’
‘I know,’ Faulkner said. ‘I read his book.’
‘And?’
‘Not my kind of thing.’
‘But evidence that he isn’t dumb.’
Faulkner laughed. ‘He sees what he sees Frank. What’s the deal with the clothes, eh? You tell me he’s gotten himself all kitted out like his father. Where did they take him? Benedict’s place?’
Duchaunak shook his head. ‘I guess so.’
‘He’s selectively dumb. He sees what he wants to see, hears what he wants to hear. When things get uncomfortable he’s going to go with them or he’s going to run. Freiberg starts dealing with Marcus, Marcus gets the idea that Bernstein’s son is nothing more than a newspaper hack from Miami, and I guarantee we’ll find him and Walt Freiberg in half a dozen pieces floating in the river.’
‘I don’t get that he’s on their side,’ Duchaunak said. He leaned forward and picked up a can of Dr Pepper from the desk.
‘There’s no sides any more,’ Faulkner said. ‘The line that separated the good guys from the bad gu
ys got blurred a long time back . . . blurred by the number of people that walk back and forth across it every day of their lives. There is no distinction any more. You show me a guy, any guy anywhere in this city, who didn’t take some stolen gear off of his neighbor, didn’t buy a carton of smokes at work and pay no mind to the absent duty sticker, eh? You show me one guy who’s clean and clear and I’ll pay my taxes in full this year.’
Duchaunak smiled. ‘The Diogenes routine.’
Faulkner frowned.
‘Diogenes. Walked around in daylight with a lantern looking for one honest man.’
‘So we can pretty much guarantee that whatever they’re planning is going to happen before Christmas. It has to. Bernstein is in the hospital, but Bernstein was never the action hero, not for the last twenty years. Bernstein was always the money man, the arranger for contacts and backhanders. Freiberg is going to run this show, I guarantee you, and I think it’s going to be big, and there’s going to be a lot of noise, and some people are going to get hurt.’
‘And if Harper gets in the way?’ Duchaunak asked.
Faulkner shook his head, turned his mouth down at the edges. ‘He gets in the way that’s his own fucking problem. He should’ve been wise enough to see what was in front of him and not persuaded himself it was something else.’
‘Agreed,’ Duchaunak said. ‘The tail goes on Freiberg. I have to know, Don, I have to know what the fuck these people are doing. This shit fucking eats me alive.’
Don Faulkner smiled, the smile of a weatherworn and veteran cynic. ‘Whatever puts wind in your sails Frank. I’ll see what I can do about a tail.’
Duchaunak rose to his feet. ‘This time, Don, this time I’m going to get ’em so help me God.’
Faulkner nodded understandingly. ‘They got a make on Lenny’s bullet by the way . . . not that it makes a great deal of difference to anything.’
‘What they got?’
‘A very old case . . . armed robbery, 7–11 back in January ’74. Gun was fired, no-one was hit. Bullet lodged in the wall. The bullet recovered from Lenny Bernstein’s chest had the same land and groove marks as the 7–11 bullet.’