“Tsk, tsk, all that dirty money.”
“Not,” Chip said calmly, “the way we handle it. Taxes and back taxes are paid. Actually the IRS is being remarkably fair about penalties and such. I suspect they prefer this to having everything disappear into the Caymans, Panama and Lichtenstein. Of course,” he said with deep and abiding virtue, “if that was what Sams wanted, we would not be involved.”
“Of course,” I grinned.
“Actually,” he mused, “it’s kind of funny, I guess, just how straight everything is. On the up-and-up. Which reminds me, everything I’ve said is a matter of public record. I have divulged nothing protected by the attorney-client privilege. I am no Edmund Who.”
“Right. You’re a good guy,” I said.
“And I would have beat you if it weren’t for that goddamn new racket.”
Like something shipped up on a riverboat from New Orleans, there is a section of buildings on the south side of Tenth Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenue, connected by an ironwork balcony. The north side of the street, where Christina Wood lived, was all big, impressive, well-cared-for brownstones, with fancy doors, stone and ironwork. All in all, one of the prettiest streets in a city that often lacks for prettiness.
I rang her bell. There was no answer. My watch said 3:03. Well, I had been warned. I leaned against the stoop and opened my Times, passing the time like any well-bred New Yorker.
At 3:08 she showed up. She wore headband, sweatshirt and shorts. She glowed with fresh sweat, youth and health. A tall woman, vibrant with energy and muscle tone.
“Christina Wood?” I inquired.
“Oh, damn, I’m late. I’m sorry, I really am. Come on up.”
She opened the mailbox with a key tied to her running shoe, took the apartment keys from the mailbox and opened the inner door to the building. She lived on top and it was a walk-up. I followed her, watching all the way. Her shorts rose over her cheeks. I gave thanks to sportswear designers and the inventor of stairs.
“I’m really sorry, I just had to go out and run … this is embarrassing. Do you mind if I take a quick shower? Would you like a drink while you wait? Juice? Beer? Anything?”
“Beer,” I said.
I sat down and said beer thinking scotch and there by God
Was my woman just as I had always known she would be
And I went over to her and she said come home with me
Like that …
Climbing the stairs behind her, watching …
Wondering how God could have gotten it all into this little tail …*
There was no reason for resonance, but the chord was struck, and it echoed down the corridors of my life, plucking out the poem that I read to the girl with black hair and blue eyes on the hill above the river when I was nineteen and moonstruck and life was blueberry pie.
I drank my beer and hoped the ringing would die down. She came out of the shower in jeans that were not too tight, with a bra beneath a plain cotton shirt, without makeup, and her hair toweled dry. There was no attempt to be provocative, but the ringing went on.
“Miss Wood,” I said.
She said “Christina,” and there by God was my woman … “Fine,” I said, “I’m Tony” … just as I had always known she would be.
She said my name, and I was glad to hear it in her mouth.
“Your attorney, Mr. Haven, asked me to look into your father’s death.”
“After he was forced into it. Do you know that?”
“How was that?”
“They didn’t want to do it. To them I’m just an hysterical child. I hired another law firm. They claimed that there was a conflict of interest; I knew there was a conflict of interest. They persecuted Daddy, not prosecuted, persecuted. Now they represent the estate and they’re blocking an investigation into who killed him. I still think it’s not right for them to represent the estate, but as long as they do what I want in the important things, then I’m willing to let it go.”
“Legal battles are expensive.”
“They sure are, and until the estate is settled, which could be years and years, I can’t really afford that either,” she said. Her eyes were green, soft green, sea green.
“I’m glad that the estate is paying then; I feel better if my clients can afford me.”
“I’m not sure I am,” she said with real suspicion in her voice. “Who are you working for, them or me?”
“For you.” Forever and always.
“So where do we start?” she asked in a businesslike way. It was only the two of us in that room there, and it was only doing business that could save us. So we did.
“We’ve both seen the police report,” I said. “It’s straightforward; they did their job. Autopsy and forensics are pretty complete, very complete. They questioned who there was to question and came up empty. Now we need a reason to look past that, to look for more.” Just because she had a beautiful bottom was not supposed to be sufficient reason, but sometimes it is.
She asked me if I knew the circumstances that had brought her father to Virginia.
I did, and I said so. “But do you know of any specific reason, any motivation, any place to start?”
“Everyone wanted to be rid of him.”
“Who is everyone?”
“Everyone, dammit, all of them. All those senior partners, at that high-and-mighty stuffed-shirt law firm. Someone had besmirched their sacred name. Sacrilege, sacrilege. Or maybe he didn’t steal all that money by himself. It was a lot of money, it went on a long time without anyone noticing. Could Daddy have done all that alone? Yes, I admit it, it’s part of the record. He was innocent until proven guilty and they did prove it and my father was a thief.” She tried to hold her face rigid. She swallowed. “Poor man. He always, always tried too hard.”
She got up and rushed to the bathroom. I did not hold her while she cried her eyes out. I sipped my beer and waited while she washed her face.
“I’m sorry,” she said when she came back.
“Don’t be, it’s OK,” was all I said. There had to be men in her life to say everything I wanted to say. Had to be.
I had finished my beer. She went into the kitchen and brought out two more, one for me, one for her, and I had had her figured for designer water with a twist of lime.
“I’m ready,” she said after she took a swallow.
“Good, go on.”
“I started to say, maybe he had someone else. I mean, it must be hard to steal eight million dollars all by yourself.” She almost giggled. Her moods were shifting fast. Somewhere between the grief-stricken daughter and the businesslike young lady, waiting behind them both, was the wayward child who could not be located in Ibiza. And she was delicious. “I mean, think about stealing that much money, and all by yourself.”
“Anyone else, besides this unknown party?”
“You don’t think much of the idea, do you?” she said resentfully.
“I think that if there was someone else, he would have traded him in, used him to plea-bargain. I mean this is a guy who tried to save himself by testifying to the SEC.”
“Maybe, but maybe not. He only turned on the people who turned on him.”
If she wanted to preserve a thread of decency in her father, that I didn’t think he was capable of, all I could do was admire her loyalty. “Anyone else?” I asked.
“Goreman,” she said, “Charlie Goreman. Daddy hated him at the end. He owed Daddy a lot. He owed Daddy everything, and he didn’t lift a finger to save him,”
“How’s that?”
“I don’t know the details, but I know that Daddy saved him during the war; he said that Uncle Charlie wouldn’t even be alive today if it weren’t for him.”
“Uncle Charlie?”
“That’s what I called him when I was growing up. He doted on little girls or something. And he was close to the family.”
“That makes it sound like he would be the last person to …”
“I don’t know. If you think about i
t, Charles Goreman went awfully far, awfully fast. Can anyone get that far that fast and be totally legitimate? Maybe Daddy knew something about him. I heard he threatened him at the trial.”
“Were you at the trial?”
“No,” she said, and drank her beer quickly.
“How come?”
She leaned away from the question and said, “And it could have been almost anyone of that top group over at Over & East. Daddy knew almost everything about everybody. Maybe someone else had a big dirty secret that they were afraid my father would talk about. There are so many people it could have been.”
“Maybe you’re just trying to make his death meaningful,” I said.
“I thought about that—I’m so angry, I want to blame somebody or something. I had an uncle who died, and my aunt kept saying it was the doctor’s fault, that the doctor screwed up; and I’ve heard people talk about it was God’s will, but they never sound like they believe that. …
“But if he really was killed on purpose, to keep him quiet, then it would be a smart thing to do to make it look like a mugging. If I were going to kill someone and I don’t think I could and I wanted to be smart about it and not get caught, a good way would be to make it look exactly the way this did, the way this does. Sometimes paranoids have real enemies.”
“The last time I thought there were people out to get me,” I said, “there were.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“But what I still need is a place to start looking for a motive.”
“When he was arrested, and during the trial, and particularly when they sentenced him to that place, he was making statements, threats. …”
“Yeah, I know about that. And a lot of people have said a lot worse about me, and it’s not something to worry about unless the guy who makes the threats has the goods and the guts to back it up. So if someone was worried enough to kill your father, it was because your father had the goods and they believed that he had the will to use it. And nobody seems to know what that could have been.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“By the way,” I asked, “was your father involved in anything in South America? In Colombia?”
“Not that I know of. Why?”
“What about cocaine?”
“Daddy! Cocaine!” She sounded as incredulous as Choate Haven had. “Oh Lord, no way.”
“Not even strictly as a money thing?”
“Why are you asking?”
“Would he?”
“I can’t, I guess I’m not allowed to say no.” Her lovely face broke again and she turned to the bathroom.
“I’m … sorry,” I said to her retreating back.
I heard the splash of water as she rinsed her face. “Why? Why did you say that?” she said when she came out. “Is it to finish, finish destroying what’s left of him?”
“Look, I’m sorry. It was a stab in the dark. A couple of years back I ran into a case, a guy was killed the same way, pretty much, by some Colombians over a coke deal, and they tried to make it look like a mugging and stole the guy’s car.”
“Is that true? Is that really why you asked?”
“Really why I asked? Because I have nothing to go on and that might have been an idea, and until I find something else I’m taking wild shots.”
My business was done. There was no excuse to stay. There was an illusion weaving thick through the air that we had other things to say and do. Sea-green eyes, an emotional vibrato in her throat, long flanks so live they glowed, dark hair livened with sunstreaks and a great ass, I told myself, were shallow things. Not with a structure so solid, so real and so fine as Glenda and Wayne made of my life. It was a foolish time to be foolish. As it always is.
* “He was alone (AS IN REALITY),” Kenneth Patchen, Collected Works. All following quotations, the same source.
9
LIGHTNIN’-STRUCK TREE
THE ONLY TRACE OF Edgar Wood in the Virginia farmhouse was his crystal brandy snifter and the bottle of VSOP with one good shot left. I sat in what had been his chair, swirled his brandy in his glass.
“Tell me, ghost, what was your secret? Was it worth killing for? In your estimation was it worth dying for? Did you tell it to Mel Brodsky? Or were you saving it for last, your ace in the hole? Tell me, Mr. Wood, did you know how beautiful your daughter is? Looking back on it all, if you had to choose between another ten or twenty or something years and eight million dollars, which would it be?”
I sipped at his brandy, giving him plenty of time to answer. But he was, as I had suspected, as silent as the grave.
“I gotta talk to a bunch of people about you, Edgar. I like talking to your daughter best, but I gotta talk to the police, I gotta talk to Brodsky, and I’m not sure where I’ll find the leverage for that; and Charles Goreman, even more leverage. And the Colombians. To tell you the truth, I feel real shy about that. Maybe ’cause I don’t so much want to talk as to hurt them, or maybe I’m scared of them … see, there is a point where you and I, we coincide. Fear and vengeance, that’s a swell meeting of the minds.
“So long, Edgar,” I said, finishing his brandy, “our first and last meeting of the minds. I gotta go to work now.”
I wanted to retrieve my microphone and recording rig, expensive little toys that they are. Everything was intact, the waterproof box had done a hell of a job though the batteries were shot. I was also intensely curious to know if someone else had left something similar about the premises.
I looked in the phones, inside the air conditioner, under the radiator cover, behind the pictures on the wall—not one of which was worth looking at unless you like English hunty-doggy-horsy—and through the largest collection of Reader’s Digest condensed books I had ever seen. I looked through anything that had an underside, an inside or a backside, including all 112 dusty panels of dropped ceiling.
I looked until there was nothing to look at but the walls. I rapped, and the bruising on my knuckles convinced me they were real plaster and solid. The molding was some sort of hard wood under the paint. I could tell because someone had lifted it and I could see where the paint was chipped. … Oh!
A minute or two of gentle prying and there she was. A very nice job too, the transformer clipped directly into an A.C. line and no battery to wear out.
I took mine. I left theirs in place. Then I went to meet Captain Robert E. L. Deltchev at Culpeper County Police Headquarters.
I had visualized the place as a southern courthouse and county jail, reeking of dark cruel secrets, petty power politics, injustices racial and otherwise, lit in 1940s Warner Brothers Neo-Realism. But the station was merely overused, overcrowded, 1950s strictly brick and functional. An Anywhere USA cop house.
The cop at the glassed-in front desk looked to be forty-five minutes past mandatory retirement. The cable-and-jack phone system he was plugged into was twenty years past it. He had a wad in his cheek that he chomped with bovine regularity. Between chaws he told me, “Captain ain’t heyah.”
“When will he be in?” I asked.
“Don’t rightly know,” the cop said, then started answering the phone and plugging the lines into the right, or wrong, extensions. That went on for some time and he ignored me without any apparent effort.
“I have an appointment,” I said. He nodded and blew a bubble. That disappointed me; I had really hoped for tobacco.
“Maybe you could call him. I bet he has a police car, and I bet it has a radio. And remind him that he has an appointment.”
“Don’t righty think so,” he said and went back to the switchboard as lights and bells went off.
I waited. Several other people came and went, cops and civilians. The oddest group was led by a very large man in uniform with pockmarked slabs for a face who blew in like a destroyer on patrol. An intense-looking woman dressed as a New Jersey housewife and what had to be a plainclothes cop bobbed along in his wake. Ten minutes later, they came charging back out.
After they left I asked
the cop at the desk once again, “When and where am I going to find Deltchev?”
“Why didn’t you speak to him while he was here?” he answered, then started on a new piece of gum.
“When was he here?”
“He just left.”
“Either I’ve seen this movie before or I read the book,” I mumbled.
“What book’s that?”
“Is Deltchev coming back?” I growled.
“Mostly he does,” he said, working up to a new bubble.
“I’m going out to get some coffee; can I get you some more gum?” I said.
“That’s right nice. That really is. I like that double-bubble grape flavor,” he replied and even offered me a nickel. I took it.
It was authentic southern coffee, which resembles real coffee only in that they both start with water and are normally served warm. If a New York coffee shop palmed off the stuff on an N.Y.P.D. cop, they would be promptly and rudely busted for fraud. And although there were cows in Virginia— from what I had seen of Culpeper, probably right in town— the white stuff they gave me to put in the warm, tan liquid was a powder built in Ohio. They did not have Danish. They had sweet rolls. I don’t really know what wheat gluten is, but I think that’s what the rolls were made of. And sugar.
Now that I knew what Deltchev looked like—a pockmarked naval destroyer—I waited outside where I could wonder where the scent of magnolia blossom had gone to.
Three hours after I arrived, and three more cups of warm tinted water, Deltchev steamed in again. He was still with the same group, and I tailed along like just another piece of jetsam caught in his wake.
When we all got trapped in a traffic jam trying to enter the door of Deltchev’s office, he became aware of my presence.
“Who are you?”
I introduced myself and reminded him of the appointment that was now three hours late.
“I do not have the time to spare at this time,” he announced.
“Look, Captain, I flew down from New York to talk to you.”
No One Rides for Free Page 6