“Whoever has my daughter, my Caroline, please don’t hurt her. Give Caroline back to me and nothing will happen to you. I promise. We just want Caroline back.”
Caroline Howell was seventeen years old. She’d been missing for nineteen days. There had been regular press conferences but this was the first time her father had appeared. Howell knew more about missing people than almost anybody. He’d served in the marines and completed tours of duty in every major conflict for the past twenty years. He’d returned a war hero and switched careers to law enforcement. For the last ten years he’d been making a fortune running Howell’s Risk Management. A security firm that offered personal protection, hostage negotiation, hostile territory evaluation, and threat assessment.
Few people in the country knew more about kidnapping, hostage retrieval and negotiation. Now, his daughter was the victim.
I remembered watching him deliver a plea to whoever had taken Caroline – he said all the right things, stuck to his script word for word. He’d repeated her name, over and over, but I could see it in his eyes. I could hear the echo of loss in his voice. Once, I’d sounded exactly the same. My daughter had been taken a few years before. The ordeal had only lasted for two days, but those days still haunted me. I wouldn’t have gotten her back from the Russian mob if I hadn’t had a lot of help.
Every time I saw Howell’s face on TV, or pictures of him in the paper, it sent a burning, hollow feeling into my chest. It was like looking at an old photograph of myself. I’d been that man.
I had to wipe a fine sheen of condensation off my watch face to check the time. Twenty-four minutes since I got the call. A red Volkswagen Sedan pulled up outside a bar called Brews. The driver leant over the passenger seat and eyeballed me. This wasn’t the kind of ride I was expecting. I’d anticipated a Mercedes, or a high-end BMW to come pick me up. Howell wouldn’t have sent something like this.
The guy got out of the VW and put on a white ball cap. He wore a faded red tee which read “Arnac Deliveries” on the chest. From the back seat he picked up a package wrapped in brown paper and set a white envelope on top. He closed the car door and made his way across the street toward me with the package and envelope under one arm and a clipboard in the other.
“Eddie Flynn?” he said.
I tensed up. It was a little late to be making deliveries, and this guy had nothing to do with Lenny Howell. Looking left and right quickly, I saw there were no pedestrians on the street; so this guy didn’t have any buddies backing him up. He was no delivery boy, I knew that for sure. I turned to my right, giving him less of a target in case he had a knife tucked into the back of his jeans.
He was smiling, but not a real smile. It was for show. My hands were loose and ready to fly into this guy’s face if he made a sudden move.
“I’m Eddie Flynn, I’m not expecting any kind of delivery.”
Setting the package and the clipboard on the sidewalk, he picked up the envelope. As soon as he did that I knew exactly who the guy was.
He held out the envelope. I didn’t take it. He came forward slowly, stood just a few inches from my face, planted the envelope on my chest and said, “You’ve been served.”
I took the envelope.
The guy was a process server. People in that line of work spent their days tracking men and women and when they found them, they handed them envelopes that they didn’t want; so they posed as delivery personnel, tourists looking for directions or new customers or clients. I wasn’t expecting any papers. If he wanted to find me he could’ve come at a sociable hour – like most process servers. No, the timing of service had almost certainly been requested by whoever employed this guy. They wanted me to get this late, so it would keep me up all night. As I ran my hands over the blank envelope I thought that it could only be one thing – divorce papers.
I opened the envelope. It wasn’t from my wife, Christine. It was a subpoena for all of the files and paperwork on someone called Julie Rosen. The subpoena required the files to be deposited at the process server’s office within fourteen days. From what little I could glean from the document, it seemed to relate to an appeal in the matter of The People v. Julie Rosen.
It meant nothing to me. I was pretty sure I’d never represented anyone by that name. The subpoena said it had been prepared by counsel for the appellant, but as usual the subpoena didn’t identify the lawyers acting for Rosen.
“Hey, who are Julie Rosen’s lawyers?” I asked.
He said nothing and simply turned his back to me. An unwise thing to do in the circumstances. I put the subpoena in my jacket pocket and paid attention while the process server bent down and picked up the package and the clipboard.
With his back to me he said, “That was a piece of luck, I was going to call at your office and do the whole delivery routine. You saved me a couple of flight of stairs. Sleep well, pal.”
“Who are her lawyers?” I said.
The process server didn’t turn around, he just started walking to his car and said, “That’s confidential. You know I can’t tell you that.”
“Don’t you want your wallet back, Brad?”
He stopped, felt his hip pocket and spun around.
“How did you …”
I held his open wallet in one hand, his driver’s license in the other.
“You should be careful not to turn your back to strangers. Now I know where you live, Brad,” I said, slotting the license back into the wallet. “You want this back you gotta’ tell me who gave you the subpoena; who’s representing Julie Rosen.”
His face folded into a snarl, he threw aside the dummy package and the clipboard. He drew his hands into fists.
“I’m going to beat the shit out of you,” he said, striding toward me.
He raised his hands, wrists held straight and tucked under his chin like a brawler from an old movie. I knew then that Brad wasn’t a trained fighter. First lesson I learned in Mickey Hooley’s gym, twenty-years ago in the ass-end of Hell’s Kitchen, was how to punch someone without breaking your wrist. Mickey taught us to angle our wrist to about 45 degrees, so the index-finger knuckle is in a straight line to your elbow. That angle engages all the little muscles around your wrist, giving you a solid punching base.
I could’ve demonstrated on Brad. Put my fist through his angry face. In a way, I wanted to. Brad probably thought he was tough. I could teach him otherwise. But I didn’t. I figured he would be easier to talk to if he still had all of his teeth. Instead, I stopped him in his tracks with something a lot more powerful than a straight right hand.
I slid his license back into his wallet, swiped a C note from my billfold and held it up in front of my face.
His pace slowed and his hands began to drop. I took advantage and asked him a couple of questions.
“What’s the going rate for time-specific personal service these days? Two hundred dollars? Two-fifty? When you take out your firm’s cut, taxes, gasoline, insurance, what do you get? I’d say eighty dollars. Am I right?”
He stopped a few feet away. Looked me up and down, then stared at the hundred dollar bill in my hand.
“Eight-nine fifty,” said Brad.
As an attorney I’d used process servers all over Manhattan. I knew the cheapest, I knew the best, and I knew exactly what they charged and how it broke down.
“I can do one of two things, Brad. It’s your decision. Either I can make a call to a friendly court clerk I know, first thing in the morning, and she can tell me who issued the subpoena and all it’ll cost me is a box of donuts next time I’m in court or you can save me the trouble and I’ll put this hundred dollar bill in your wallet before I give it back. Your choice,” I said.
Brad wiped his mouth, stared at the money.
“What if it comes back to me? I could get fired,” he said.
“Look, it won’t come from me. I’m not going to tell anyone I got this from you. They’ll assume I charmed a clerk, is all.”
I prised open the sleeve of the wallet which cont
ained Brad’s cash. He kept a neat wallet. It wasn’t bulked out with old receipts or business cards. His driver’s license and a couple of credit cards poked out of individual pockets that were stacked neatly on top of one another. A hundred and forty-seven dollars in cash was arranged in an orderly fashion in the wallet. The hundred dollar bill at the back, followed by a twenty, a ten, three fives, and two ones. I turned the wallet toward Brad, slid the tip of my hundred in between his hundred and the twenty.
“Last chance,” I said.
“Copeland. The lawyer is Max Copeland,” he said.
An electric chill prickled at my back.
I let Brad see me slip my hundred into his wallet, which I then flipped shut and tossed. Brad caught it, put it in his front pocket. He wouldn’t carry his wallet in his hip pocket again. Not until he bought a chain for it. I watched him pick up the dummy package and clipboard, get back into his car and drive away.
Brad didn’t check his wallet before he left because he saw me take a hundred from my pocket and put it right in there with the rest of his cash. I opened my right hand, unfolded Brad’s hundred dollar bill which I’d swept up with my fingers and expertly palmed only moments ago. Brad didn’t see it because I didn’t want him to see it. My hand was in his wallet to put my money in, but he didn’t see me take his money out. I stared at the hundred, and thought about Max Copeland.
Until three years ago, give or take a few months, very few people outside of the legal profession knew anything about Max Copeland. He didn’t advertise, he wasn’t listed in the yellow pages, he didn’t have a website or even a sign outside his office. Lawyers knew him by reputation only. Max Copeland exclusively represented the worst kind of clients imaginable and he did so with a bloodthirsty relish. Only after an article appeared in the Washington Street Journal did any of the public come to know the name.
The article was entitled, “The Devil’s Advocate.” A pretty accurate summary, despite the cliché. Max represented pedophiles, child murderers, serial killers and rapists. He did this with a single goal in mind – get them off and get them back on the street. I’d never met him, and had no desire ever to do so. Guys with his rep didn’t sit well with me.
In the end, it didn’t matter – I’d never represented Julie Rosen, and I was pretty sure I had none of her files.
A set of headlights came around the corner. They were from a custom built, stretched Lincoln; black, beautiful, nineteen-inch chrome alloys and a polish that made the damn thing gleam like the rock on Susan Howell’s finger.
The car pulled up in front of me. I put the subpoena in my jacket pocket and realized, too late, that I would’ve been better off not answering that call from Leonard Howell. Maybe it was the subpoena, maybe hearing Copeland’s name – I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I had a strong urge to ask the driver of the Lincoln to tell Howell that I was sorry, that I’d changed my mind.
The night had started badly and I knew, somehow, it would only get worse.
CHAPTER TWO
The driver’s door opened and a man got out of the car with some difficulty. He wore a black suit that was a little too big for him. Gray hair, and his heavily lined face contrasted with sharp blue eyes. It was hard to discern his age. Either he was well into his fifties, or he had spent a lot of time on the street. The street does that to people. It ages you like nothing else on earth.
I heard a rasp from a hard-soled shoe scraping along the road. He dragged his right leg with what looked like an awkward and painful limp. Coming around the hood of the car, toward me, I could see that his right foot turned inwards, and bent as he dragged it along the blacktop. His left leg then shot out and stood straight to let him bend his torso and shimmy along. His head was bent down and he leaned on the hood to steady himself. While his head was down I glanced at his foot and saw that he wore a leather brace on his ankle. The strapping led to a steel plate that was probably built into the arch of the shoe, right next to the heel.
“Mr Flynn?” he said, in a light, somewhat sing-song voice.
“Thanks for picking me up,” I said and held out a hand.
He hopped forward a little and took my hand in his. The grip was stronger than I’d expected.
“I-I-I’m G-G-George,” he said. “Mr How-How-Howell sent me to …” His lips froze together and quivered as he tried to bust out a word beginning with p.
My grandfather on my mother’s side had a stutter. When I was six or seven years old, I would go to his house and play with him. He always had candy stashed somewhere in the kitchen and we would play a game where I had to hunt for it. He could shake or nod his head while we looked for the candy, to tell me if I was getting close to the hiding place or further away. It was his favorite game because he didn’t have to talk. If we did talk, my mom constantly scolded me for finishing my grandfather’s sentences. Eventually I stopped, and learned to be patient.
I waited for George to finish, still holding his hand. With every passing second his grip became stronger, and it was beginning to hurt. His face turned a deeper shade of pink and a fine spray of spit machine-gunned from his lips as he got closer to delivering the elusive word. Eventually, he wound back his sentence a little and took another run at it.
“… sent me to PICK you up,” he said.
“Thanks, George,” I said.
He released my hand, shuffled and scraped around the car.
“Let me g-g-get the door,” he said.
“Don’t worry about it, George. I’ve been opening car doors on my own since I was twenty-seven,” I said.
George laughed and wagged a finger at me. He turned, awkwardly, and began loping around the car to get back into the driver’s seat.
I got in the back before George even got as far as the driver’s door. George had the AC on full. It was delicious. Like stepping out of a sauna and being wrapped in chilled silk. Leaning in between the front seats I couldn’t help but take a look at the pedals. The accelerator looked normal but the brake pedal had been lowered and specially adapted with a thick rubber block to make it easier for George.
Lenny Howell was still a good guy.
George got into the driver’s seat, started the motor, and reached into his pocket for a handkerchief. He wiped the sweat from his face and said, “It’s one of those ni-ni-nights.”
He sure got that right.
We drove along the north side of Manhattan on the Henry Hudson Parkway, with the AC blasting and the moon on the river to my left. Past Washington Heights, Harlem and then the freeway moved further inland at Inwood while the city boiled. George took the exit for the Cross Country Parkway headed toward New Rochelle. He didn’t speak, other than to ask if I was comfortable. I was glad to be out of the humidity and my hair was almost dry.
I thought about the name Julie Rosen, and nothing came to mind. My former partner, Jack Halloran, and I had worked closely together. If it had been Jack’s case I would’ve recognized the name. The only other explanation was that it was a dead file sitting in storage from a law firm called Ford and Keating. I got into the law because of a chance meeting with the then part-time judge Harry Ford. We’d become friends, and when I hung out my shingle with Halloran and Flynn, Harry got a full-time judicial position and gave up his partnership in Ford and Keating. Harry’s old partner, Arthur Keating, retired around the same time and Jack and I bought their few remaining live cases. With the twenty or thirty live cases we also got their old files to store. Because we were taking the dead wood we got a discount on the cases that could still make money.
Could Julie Rosen have been an old client of Ford and Keating, attorneys at law? I checked my watch. 12:40 a.m. Far too late to call Harry. Even if it was one of his old files, I didn’t want to call him at this hour. It would wait until the morning. Whatever it was, the fact that Copeland was involved made my gut twitchy.
“I-I sure h-hope you can help Mr Howell,” said George.
“I do too. How’s he holding up?”
George simply shook his
head. That was enough.
“And the rest of the family?” I asked.
“Not so bad,” said George, after a pause. “There’s only M-Mrs Howell. And she ain’t the g-g-girl’s blood, you know?”
“I read it in the paper. Mr Howell got remarried.”
When George replied, there was weight in his words, despite the stutter.
“M-Maybe it’s a blessing, you know? The girl’s real mother is in the ground? N-N-No parent should lose a ch-ch-child,” said George.
The Post had mentioned, in one of the first articles, that Caroline Howell’s mother had been deceased for some time.
We came off the freeway and found Main Street quickly. There was little traffic at this hour. We were headed for Premier Point, New Rochelle. A sister community of Premium Point. Whereas Premium Point held fifty of the world’s billionaires in a highly secure, gated community – Premier Point was the poor cousin. It was still a gated living space, with private streets and armed security guards, but you could buy your way onto the bottom rung of the Premier Point property ladder with only seven or eight million dollars. You didn’t get a helicopter pad, or your own private golf course, but Premier Point still had its attractions.
I could tell we were getting close to the entrance by the presence of news channel vans and the assortment of satellite dishes scattered along an open lot opposite the gate. In fine, entrepreneurial tradition a coffee stand and a taco van had decided to pitch on the same open lot to keep the news anchors and reporters wired and fed. Dark figures tossed coffee and scrambled for their cameras. They managed to get a few flashes at the car as we drove into the private lane and pulled up at the gatehouse. A warm glow came from inside the gatehouse, and we sat there waiting for the guard to come out. George put the car in park and folded his arms. I guessed he was used to waiting for the night watch guard to haul his ass away from the TV in the gatehouse. Night watchmen never do anything quickly, that’s why they’re night watchmen.
Eddie Flynn 03-The Liar Page 2