by R.J. Ellory
Harper reached out to steady her but she brushed his hand aside and stepped back even further.
‘We can’t do this,’ she said, and in her eyes was such an expression of loss and hurt that Harper believed he had truly offended her.
He opened his mouth to speak, to say something that would make sense.
‘Don’t say anything,’ Cathy said. She walked towards the window and sat down in the chair.
Harper rose and took a step towards her. ‘I’m sorry—’
‘Don’t be . . . please don’t be sorry . . .’
Harper shook his head. ‘It’s my fault. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. Just let it go, okay? I really don’t want you to think that—’
She laughed. ‘I’ve let it go,’ she said. ‘Okay? We’re okay on that? It never happened, alright?’
Harper nodded, felt he had to agree. Didn’t want to. Agreeing with her was the last thing in the world he wanted to do.
‘It’s gone,’ she said. She brushed her hair away from her face. ‘We’re going to go see Walt,’ she added. ‘Right now. We go see Walt, okay?’
‘Okay,’ Harper said.
‘Everything’s just as it was,’ Cathy said.
Harper smiled, reached for his jacket, and knew that everything was not just as it was; knew that it would never be the same again.
Not a word passed between them as they left the room.
FORTY
Four minutes after noon.
Duchaunak opened his eyes. He could not remember if he had slept during the previous hour, but he vaguely recalled a sense of dreaming.
He lay there for a little while, and then he sat up, his legs over the edge of the mattress, the pillow in his lap.
He looked around the room: the TV and VCR in the corner, the shelving unit holding a stack of tapes, the titles of which he could read from where he sat: The Misfits, Monkey Business, Niagara, Some Like it Hot, Bus Stop, How to Marry a Millionaire, The Prince and the Showgirl. He had every one of them, and how many times he’d watched them he could never hope to recall.
Not a life really, is it? he thought. Not really, officially, what one would call ‘a life’.
Frank Duchaunak lay back again. He looked at the ceiling. He wondered, just for a moment, what would become of him.
‘I need to go back,’ Harper said as they reached the end of the corridor.
Cathy frowned.
‘I need to get a tie.’
‘You what?’
Harper raised his hand, sort of pulled his unbuttoned shirt collar tight around his throat. ‘A tie,’ he said. ‘I want to get a tie.’
‘Okay,’ Cathy said. ‘I’ll wait here.’
Harper returned the way they’d come, unlocked and entered the room, walked to the chair near the window and from the back of it took a dark blue silk tie. He paused a moment to knot it, watching his hands do their work in the mirror beside the wardrobe.
He looked at himself. White shirt, cuff-links, a tailored suit, a tie, a watch, clean shoes. He nodded. He tried to smile. He didn’t know what to think, and thus he tried to think nothing at all.
He left the room, walked back to where Cathy Hollander stood by the elevators.
‘You look good,’ she said. ‘You scrub up well.’
Harper shook his head, hesitated as if in thought, and then turned and looked at Cathy. The expression on his face was almost vacant. ‘Let’s go,’ he said quietly.
‘Right,’ she said, and took his arm.
‘He said nothing? Nothing at all?’
‘Right.’
‘Nothing at all is no fucking use to me, Sol.’
Neumann nodded. He sat facing Marcus. How many years he’s worked for the man, the number of times they’ve been faced with such situations, never once the faintest suggestion Marcus would direct his anger at him, but still Neumann was unnerved. Ben Marcus was unquestionably the most intense man he had ever known.
‘Who spoke to Mouse?’
‘Dietz and Reiff,’ Neumann replied.
‘You didn’t go down there?’
Neumann shook his head. ‘I couldn’t Ben, I had that other thing to handle.’
‘What thing?’
‘The thing with the cars . . . I had to make sure everything was ready with the cars.’
‘I should’ve sent Dietz to handle that and you should’ve seen Mouse.’ Marcus rose from the chair behind his desk and started pacing back and forth between the window and the door. He was silent for a minute or two, his brow furrowed, and then he paused and turned towards Neumann. ‘They killed him, right?’
Neumann nodded.
‘And you trust them for this . . . they wouldn’t get riled and kill the guy because he upset them?’
‘Hell Ben, they’re as good as they come. Remember that thing with the cop’s brother a while back? Ray and Albert handled that better than I could’ve done. They would’ve given Mouse every opportunity to tell them whatever he knew.’
‘So are we of the opinion that Mouse knew something and evaded them, or that Mouse knew nothing?’
Neumann shook his head. ‘I can’t guarantee anything, but I’d say the latter.’
Marcus walked back to his chair and sat down.
‘But hey, Mouse Jackson isn’t exactly at the top of the fucking totem pole in Lenny Bernstein’s crew, know what I mean?’
Marcus nodded. ‘I know, Sol, I know . . . but it seems strange that something as big as this wouldn’t have already filtered its way right through the ranks.’
‘Bigger it is the less people know, right? Something like this you have to keep under wraps right until the very moment it goes loose . . . otherwise, hell, who the fuck knows who’s got who on whose payroll?’
Ben Marcus sighed and leaned back against the chair. ‘So, we’re none the wiser; we really don’t have a clue who this guy is, this Sonny Bernstein. We get words that mean nothing. He’s this, he’s that, he’s the other, but nothing specific. If this guy’s the player that Freiberg says he is then he’s done one hell of a job of disappearing.’
Neumann shrugged his shoulders. ‘Heard of a guy one time . . . Cuban guy I think, worked for the Mafia for some fifty odd years. Name was Pereira . . . no, Perez, Ernesto Perez. Fifty years working for the Mafia, and when they finally got him there was no fucking record anywhere . . . no passport, no driving license, no Social Security number, nothing.’
‘What you saying, Sol, that this Sonny Bernstein works for the Mafia?’
‘I’m not saying anything, Ben, ’cept that people can exist without being on any official record.’
‘Official records I’m not concerned about. I just want to know if there’s some reliable word on this guy in Florida, anything that will tell me whether I’m up against an army or a fucking ghost.’
Neumann shook his head. ‘These things seem good, Ben. Victor’s done some good work. We got weapons, we got the vehicles being arranged. He’s got names of managers in each branch, the people with access codes. He’s done his usual straight-up job. The practice runs have gone well. People from our crew and Bernstein’s lot seem to be working together. Hey, Sonny Bernstein is here, whoever the fuck he might be . . . seems to me everything’s going to roll forward just like you agreed with Lenny. Fact that we never intended to go through with the agreement is beside the fucking point now . . . way it seems, we could come out the other end of this thing with a great deal more than when we went in.’
‘I can’t deal with what seems to be, Sol. I need to know the facts; I need to know exactly what these people are going to do now Lenny’s in St Vincent’s.’
‘I think you’ve hit the problem right there, Ben,’ Neumann said. ‘I get the idea even they don’t know what they’re going to do.’
Marcus said nothing.
Neumann sat motionless.
‘And McCaffrey?’ Marcus finally asked.
Neumann hesitated, and then he shook his head.
Marcus closed his eyes. He inhaled
slowly, exhaled again. ‘Nothing?’
‘We found the sister, the brother as well. We got nothing from either of them. Rumor has it McCaffrey’s dead.’
Marcus opened his eyes and looked at Neumann. ‘Rumor?’
‘Well—’
‘I want his head, Sol. I want McCaffrey’s head in a bag by the end of the day. I don’t know how many times this has to be ordered. Get me it now. I am ordering that McCaffrey be found.’
Neumann did not respond.
‘Go,’ Marcus said.
Neumann didn’t move.
‘Now, Sol . . . go now, and bring me this nigger’s head.’
FORTY-ONE
‘Frank Duchaunak,’ Walt Freiberg said, ‘is basically a good man. Fact of the matter is that his heart is in the right place . . . difficulty is that his mind isn’t.’
Cathy smiled, glanced across the table at Harper, and seeing that he too had smiled she seemed to relax. They’d shared no more than a dozen words in the cab. Cathy had called Freiberg on his cellphone, arranged to meet him in a restaurant on West Third near the Judson Memorial Church. It was no longer snowing, but the drifts from an earlier fall had banked against the storefronts and curbs. ‘Feels like Christmas,’ Harper had said, and then turned and looked at her, his tiredness evident, his emotions frayed, his mind stretched at the seams, and she had reached out and touched his hand, and they seemed, perhaps, to be conspiratorial, to be on some similar wavelength, communicating with no words. She had nodded, half-smiled, glanced away and out through the window, and Harper had looked down, closed his eyes, and then silently exhaled. They were pretending. He knew that. Was aware that she knew it too. They had almost coincided for a moment in the hotel room, and then the moment had gone. Everything from this point forward would be varnished with a gloss of pretense.
Cathy paid the cab, and once through the doorway of the restaurant they had waited no more than five or six minutes before Freiberg arrived.
He seemed in good spirits, shedding his overcoat, laughing with the maître d’ joining them at the table towards the rear of the room.
It was Cathy who mentioned Duchaunak’s name, commented on the fact that Harper had encountered the man on more than one occasion, that the detective had been telling Harper all manner of things, that Walt should perhaps clarify the facts, take away the uncertainties, put everything right.
It was then that he’d said the thing about Duchaunak, that the man’s heart was in the right place, that his mind wasn’t.
‘Addiction,’ he went on. ‘The power of an addiction is always greater than the addict’s loyalties. So it is with Frank Duchaunak.’
Harper frowned. ‘He’s on drugs?’
Freiberg laughed. ‘No, John, he’s not on drugs. I was about to give you an analogy.’
Harper leaned back in his chair just as the waiter arrived.
Freiberg ordered – hot chicken salads, fresh granary rolls with Normandy butter, other things – and once the waiter had stepped away he edged his chair backwards, crossed his legs and lit a cigarette.
‘Frank Duchaunak carries an obsession—’
‘I spoke to Duchaunak,’ Harper interjected. ‘He told me a great deal of things. He told me that I should go and see Evelyn and clarify things about my mother . . . and at the same time he told me to leave New York.’
‘For any particular reason?’
‘Because there was going to be a war.’
‘A war?’
‘Between my father, or at least you . . . a war between you and a man called Ben Marcus.’
Freiberg smiled, looked like he was going to laugh but didn’t. ‘And when did he tell you this?’
Harper thought for a moment. ‘Thursday.’
‘And he came to see you at your hotel?’
‘No, I met him at the hospital, and then we went to a coffee shop.’
‘Right, right,’ Freiberg said quietly. ‘And what else did Frank Duchaunak tell you?’
‘He told me about Mr Benedict, said he traded in stolen clothing, and that he runs a chain of illegal bookmakers from the Lower East Side to Eighth Avenue. He said that he worked for my father.’
‘He did, did he? And what did Evelyn say?’
Harper shook his head. ‘This hasn’t been easy Walt . . . this has been one helluva couple of days.’
‘I know, Sonny, I know . . . tell me what Evelyn said.’
‘She told me about my mother . . . that she didn’t die of pneumonia, that she took an overdose. Duchaunak knew about it, he knew the truth about her.’
‘What makes you think that?’ Freiberg asked.
‘Because he was the one who told me to go over and see her. He told me to go and ask Evelyn how my mother was like Marilyn Monroe.’
‘Jesus Christ, this guy has a nerve. I can’t see how he can say this shit and get away with it.’ Walt looked angry. His fists clenched and unclenched. He suddenly stopped and took his cellphone from his jacket pocket.
‘What’re you doing?’ Cathy asked.
‘I’m going to call Charlie.’
Cathy shook her head. She put her hand on the phone even as Walt was punching in the number. ‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing that Charlie’s going to do that isn’t going to cause more grievance.’
Walt Freiberg looked at her. Cathy looked right back at him, didn’t look away.
Harper watched Freiberg’s profile, could see the knot of muscle beneath his ear that swelled and relaxed as he gritted his teeth.
‘Okay,’ Freiberg said, almost a whisper, and then he turned back to Harper.
‘Seems everyone has had a go at telling you a story,’ he said. ‘Don’t know about you, but seems to me one of the oldest rules in the game applies here.’
Harper shook his head. ‘Oldest rules? What oldest rule?’
‘Thirty minutes,’ Freiberg said. He sort of smiled knowingly. ‘Thirty minutes into the play, if you haven’t figured out who the fall guy is then maybe it’s you.’
Duchaunak glanced at his watch. ‘Just before one,’ he said.
The telephone receiver was tucked beneath his chin and against his shoulder. He was seated on the edge of the bed trying to tie his shoelace while he spoke.
‘Don’t go over there,’ Faulkner said. ‘Leave it be.’
‘I don’t want to leave it, Don, I want to go see the guy now.’
Duchaunak took the receiver in his hand and stood up. With his free hand he pressed his temples between thumb and middle finger. Everything about his body language spoke of exhaustion, frustration, irritability. He paced back and forth as he listened.
‘What’re you going to tell him? That you’re there officially?’
‘Of course I’m not going to go over there officially,’ he said, interrupting Faulkner. Silence for a moment.
‘I can’t have you fuck this up any more than it’s already fucked up, Frank—’
‘For Christ’s sake, Don, give me some credit. I can go and speak to the guy. Jesus, he’s on his own in the hotel . . . as far as I know he’s on his own. I can go over and speak to him, one human being to another. I’m perfectly capable of going over there and holding a civil conversation with him.’
‘McLuhan called me in and put me on something else you know.’
‘You what? He took you off suspension?’
‘No, he didn’t take me off suspension . . . he pulled me in to help Sampson on this double murder thing. He put me on a desk, taking calls you know? Following up the cranks, the usual kind of crap that goes along with such a thing.’
‘What double murder?’ Duchaunak asked.
‘You remember, the one with this brother and sister . . . Darryl and Jessica McCaffrey?’
‘He didn’t call me, Don . . . McLuhan didn’t call me.’
‘I know Frank, I know . . . and he told me to dissuade you from any attempt to harass Bernstein or Harper, anyone at all.’
‘I am going to go over there, Don. I’m going to go to the Regent and
see Harper.’
‘I know you are Frank . . . be careful for fuck’s sake, will you?’
‘Okay . . . okay, Don. Tonight. I’m going to go over there tonight.’
‘Call me . . . okay? Let me know what the hell you’re doing.’
‘I will, Don, I’ll call you tomorrow.’
‘Okay, Frank. You take care now.’
‘I will.’ Duchaunak stepped back, set the receiver in its cradle, sat down on the edge of the bed and put his head in his hands.
‘Never figured it would be this hard,’ he said to himself. ‘Never figured it would be this fucking hard.’
*
‘Tell you something about your father,’ Walt Freiberg said. He took a warm roll from a basket in the center of the table and broke it in half. He spoke as he buttered it thickly.
‘Couple of years back, when exactly doesn’t matter, Frank Duchaunak came and found Edward in a restaurant not far from here. I was there with him. Me, Edward, another couple of guys just having some dinner, minding our own business.’
Freiberg tore a section from the roll, put it in his mouth, raised his serviette and wiped his lips.
‘So Frank comes over, right to the edge of the table, and he says hello to us, he shakes Edward’s hand. He knows the guys around the table. There’s no strangers there, right?’
Harper nodded, aware of little else but Cathy Hollander beside him.
‘So Frank is standing there. Edward asks him if he’d like to sit down, perhaps have something to eat. Frank smiles, he shakes his head. “I’m not hungry,” he says. “Shame,” Edward replies. “Food here is really good.” It kind of goes back and forth like this for a minute or so, and I look at Edward and I can see that he doesn’t really get why Frank is standing there. So eventually Edward asks him. He says, “What d’you want, Detective? Why are you here? You come over and speak with us, you don’t want to eat. What’s the deal here?”’
Freiberg smiled, reached for his glass and took a sip of wine.
‘So we’re all waiting for what Frank has to say. He hesitates for a moment, like for some kind of dramatic effect, and then he says, “You know a man was killed today?” “A man was killed today?” Edward asks him. “Yeah, a man was killed. Don’t worry Edward, he wasn’t an important man. He was just a guy in a jewelry store on West Houston. Hell, I don’t think he would’ve lasted much longer anyway. He was pretty old, getting on in years, you know?” “No, as a matter of fact I don’t know,” Edward says to him, and Frank says, “Sure you do, Edward . . . little jewelry hit your people pulled on West Houston. Security guy there, got himself hit in the head real fucking hard . . . Well . . . I figured it wouldn’t have been polite not to let you know what happened to him.”’