Carol leaves and heads toward the kitchen, when she returns she holds a clear, plastic package in her hand.
“The Chinese place that delivers always throws a pair of chopsticks in the bag, I’ve got a drawer full of these in the kitchen.”
“Chopsticks? I’m pretty sure she’s not Chinese.”
“Be quiet Davey, what does it hurt to try?”
Carol places the chopsticks in front of Mouse. Mouse looks at the chopsticks and smiles up at Carol happily, she then picks up the chopsticks and starts using them like a pro.
“I’ll be damned. How did you know?”
“I didn’t know, it was just a lucky guess.”
“And all this time I’ve been giving her forks. But how does an obviously Caucasian girl in New York City learn to eat exclusively with chopsticks?”
“Maybe you should take her to Chinatown when you get back to the city and see if anyone recognizes her.” Carol says.
“Maybe I should.” David muses, as he watches Mouse deftly eat rice with the sticks.
Carol stares at Mouse. “You know, ever since she walked in the door I’ve had the feeling that I’ve seen her somewhere before.”
“You might have seen her on the streets, you come to the city now and then.”
“No, I mean recently, I’ve seen that face recently and you know how I am with faces. I don’t forget them. I know all my patients on sight.”
“I hope you remember soon. I’m not looking forward to traipsing all over Chinatown with Mouse in tow while hoping that someone recognizes her.”
“Don’t get your hopes up, my memory’s not infallible, and maybe she just looks a lot like someone I know.”
David gets up. “Well, if you two will excuse me, nature calls.”
Mouse looks anxious, but when David tells her he’ll be right back she relaxes and continues eating.
Once he’s in the bathroom, David grabs a stack of periodicals that are sitting on the back of the toilet.
As he searches through the pile hoping to find a sports magazine, he comes across a year-old copy of a regional publication titled Westchester County Today.
He moves the magazine to the bottom of the stack and then freezes.
Nah, it can’t be.
David slowly slides the magazine back out from the bottom and places it on top. Looking back at him from the cover are the smiling faces of two beautiful young women, the two are obviously identical twins and they are the spitting image of his Miss Mouse.
“I’ll be damned.” David says, and flushes the toilet.
4
Little Italy, New York
In the study of a three-story townhouse on Mulberry Street, Al takes another furtive glance at his watch and then smiles across the desk at his uncle, Gino Salvatori.
Gino is sixty-nine-years-old and despite his diminutive height of five-foot-three, he commands the respect of his “Family.”
Gino wags his finger and smiles back at Al. “Don’t worry Albertino, your flight to Denver doesn’t leave until 8:20. I promise not to keep you here all night, but your Aunt Rosa insisted you have Thanksgiving dinner with us.”
“Thanks Uncle Gino, I’m really looking forward to a few days off.”
Al’s cousin, Marco, seated to his right, turns to glare at him.
“What’s the matter Al? The girls in New York don’t want you? You gotta fly halfway across the country just to get laid?”
“Marco,”
“What?
“Bite me.”
“Fuck you Al,”
“Marco, Albertino, be quiet, I have something I want to talk to you about, it concerns the business.”
“On Thanksgiving poppa? It must be important.” Marco says. Unlike his father, Marco Salvatori stands six foot two and weighs just under two hundred pounds.
“Dinner can wait a moment,” Gino says. “This concerns the future, I’m not going to live forever and one of you boys will have to step up and lead the family.”
“What do you mean ‘One of you boys?’ Poppa I’m your son. Al’s nothing but a paper pusher. Thanks to him we barely have a presence on the streets. I was even forced to use an outside crew to heist that shipment of computers last week.”
“Being my son doesn’t make you my successor Marco, remember that. It’s true we’re not as big as we once were, but thanks to Al our profits have doubled in the last three years, and profit is why we’re in business.”
“I got nothing against profit, but we’re also about power, that’s something that Al doesn’t understand. The ‘Family’ means power! The more legit we are the less power and juice we have.”
“Marco, the most legit man in the world is also the most powerful: The President of the United States.” Al says.
“Oh, you’re going to be the fuckin’ President someday?”
“No, but the world is changing, La Cosa ostra, Fratellanza, ‘This thing of ours’, is nearing its end. It’s time to build a new thing.”
“Enough!” Gino shouts. “Let me say what I have to say and then we’ll go eat, Rosa made her stuffed shells and I’m hungry.”
Marco nods toward his father. “Say what you have to say poppa.”
Gino leans back in his chair and sighs, he then runs a wrinkled hand through sparse white hair. “One year, one year from today whoever’s earned the most will lead the family when I’m gone.”
Marco slams a hand down against the arm of his chair. “This isn’t right! I’m your son. I shouldn’t have to prove myself.”
Gino rises from his seat behind the desk to walk around and stand before Marco. Marco squirms uncomfortably as his father glares at him.
Despite Gino’s age and lack of physical stature there is still something formidable, something fearsome living behind those eyes.
“Everybody has to prove themselves Marco, everybody!” Gino then heads toward the door. “That’s it. Now let’s go eat that damn turkey.”
David and Mouse sit on the sofa in Carol’s living room with Carol seated between them. Carol holds the copy of Westchester County Today and alternately looks at it, and then at Mouse seated to her left. She lays the magazine on her lap and turns to David.
“It’s her Davey. I mean, one of them is.” Carol says.
David looks at Mouse, when he’s sure he has her attention he takes the magazine from Carol’s lap and shows it to Mouse. A look of surprise comes over Mouse’s face and she smiles.
“Mouse, do the names April or May Davenport sound familiar to you?”
Mouse shakes her head no, as she points at the picture and then at herself.
“Yeah I know Mouse, they look just like you.”
“April and May Davenport? Is that their names?” Carol asks.
“Yeah, why have you heard of them before?”
“No, but I know a Blake Davenport. He and I do charity work for the same clinic.”
“Is he a Doctor?”
“No, he’s a finance guy, he set-up the clinic’s funding and takes care of the finances, I gather he’s well known on Wall Street. I guess it’s possible that April and May could be his daughters.”
“And Mouse too? The resemblance is uncanny, Mouse must be either April or May.”
“Why are they on the cover?”
“Another charity actually, April and May helped to raise over a million dollars for an AIDS charity. If Mouse were April or May Davenport there would be a missing person’s report on file and there is none. This is very strange.”
Carol brightens in a smile as an idea occurs to her. “I know someone who could tell us anything we’d want to know about the Davenports or anyone else in Westchester County for that matter.”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Wallingford,”
“You don’t mean old lady Wallingford? The woman next door? My God she’s still alive? She must be over a hundred years old.”
“She’s only ninety-three actually and my favorite patient.”
“Oh excuse me, she’s only nine
ty-three.”
“Don’t let her age fool you, she still gets around on her own and she’s the biggest gossip in town.”
“I know it’s Thanksgiving and all Carol, but could you give her a call? I’ve got to learn more about April and May.”
“I can do better than that little brother, I’ll go see her in person. She’s always ready to gossip. You and Mouse stay here and wait, it could take a while, she can talk your ear off.”
“OK I’ll be patient, but please hurry.” David says.
Carol rises off the sofa and Mouse immediately moves over to be closer to David.
Carol sees how anxious David is and takes his hand.
“Don’t worry, whoever Mouse is you won’t lose her. I don’t think she’d let anyone separate you from her.”
David puts his arm around Mouse’s shoulders. “Neither would I,”
Carol is gone for over an hour, when she returns she wears a troubled look. David has just finished building a fire, he places the screen back in front of the fireplace and then sits beside Mouse, who is watching TV, a rerun of Barnaby Jones.
Carol settles across from them. “Mrs. Wallingford should write a book about Westchester County, she told me everything we needed to know. To begin with, Mouse is not April or May Davenport.”
“Do you know that for sure? Has Mrs. Wallingford seen them recently?”
“Yes, she saw them just last week at someone’s wedding, but Davey, April and May are identical, they’re two-thirds of a set of triplets.”
“Then Mouse must be the other sister, how long has she been missing?”
“The other sister isn’t missing—she’s dead.”
“Dead? Are you saying that Mouse simply looks a lot like these Davenport girls?”
“I don’t know. It’s a shocking story and a sad one also. Let me repeat it to you the way Mrs. Wallingford told it to me, she really has a remarkable memory. While on a business trip, Blake Davenport fell deeply in love. He was in his fifties, something of a playboy and had never been married, the woman—Angeline—was in her early twenties. Mrs. Wallingford says that April and May resemble her greatly. After marrying in Paris they came back here to live, that’s when Blake found out that Angeline had a drug problem, it was heroin.”
“Jesus!” David exclaims. Mouse looks over at him momentarily and then goes back to watching television.
“Blake sent Angeline to a clinic in Ohio to get clean, a month later she was back, seemingly cured. A year went by with no problems and then Angeline became pregnant with the triplets. Oh, by the way they were named April, May and June. Cute, don’t you think?”
“June huh,” David says, he turns to Mouse. “June!” he calls in her direction, but Mouse doesn’t respond, she is engrossed in watching her television program.
“Nice try Davey,” Carol says. “Anyway, three months into the pregnancy a blood test reveals the presence of cocaine in Angeline’s system. It seems she had never stopped taking drugs, she had just gotten better at hiding that fact from Blake. Blake then kept her locked in the house like a prisoner until the girls were born. He even arranged for them to be born at home, a very risky thing to have done with triplets involved. After the babies were born, Blake divorced Angeline and got full custody of the girls.”
“Wasn’t that unusual?” David says. “Even with her drug problem and all, I mean, judges almost always side with the mothers, especially over newborns.”
“I asked the same question, but Mrs. Wallingford told me that Blake was a very important man back then with a lot of rich and powerful friends and Angeline was a foreigner and a drug addict. Mrs. Wallingford said that Blake could have had her killed at that time and most likely gotten away with it.”
“I see.” David says simply, as the fate of the four Rats crosses his mind.
“With Angeline banished from the house, Blake and a servant named Simon raised the children alone. When the girls were nine-years-old Angeline snuck back into the house to see them. Mrs. Wallingford says that Angeline slept with the chauffer in exchange for access to the girls. When Blake came home and found her in the girls’ bedroom they had a nasty fight that ended in Blake pushing Angeline. Angeline hit her head on something and fell to the floor, there was a lot of blood.”
“How could Mrs. Wallingford possibly know all this? Was she there?”
“Servants Davey, Mrs. Wallingford knows nearly every maid, butler and chauffer in the county, or at least she did at that time, this woman lives for gossip. By the way, you owe me big for this. I had to trade her some gossip I’ve overheard from my patients to get this information. She doesn’t tell you a thing unless she gets something back.”
“I appreciate your efforts, but get back to the story.”
“All right, where was I? Oh yes, Angeline lies on the floor bleeding from her scalp. The girls by now were screaming and crying their heads off after witnessing the violence. Blake ran out of the room to get help. When he returned, Angeline was gone and so was one of the girls. She had taken June and run away. The police searched for weeks. A short time later, the body of a young girl was found by firemen after a blaze at a rooming house.
“The child’s body was slightly burned in the fire, but the cause of death was smoke inhalation. Blake later identified the body as June’s. To this day no one knows what happened to Angeline.”
“So June is dead. Mouse sure looks an awful lot like them, a coincidence?”
“Possibly, but there is one odd thing that could point to Mouse somehow being June.”
“What?”
“Triplets, like twins, each come from the same fertilized egg, they have been documented to share some amazing precognitive abilities. Mrs. Wallingford said that the Davenport girls were extraordinary. She said if one stood up, then all three stood up simultaneously. Watching them eat was like having triple vision, they would chew and swallow in unison and when they moved it was like watching dance partners. But, it was something she said about the aftermath of June’s kidnapping that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.”
“What did she say?”
“She said that the three girls were crying horribly when Blake went to get help for Angeline, but when he returned, April and May were sitting in an almost catatonic state. They also seemed to have lost their ability to move in unison, as if with June gone their link had been severed, and Davey, they stopped talking, they became mutes.”
David looks over at Mouse. “What brought them out of it?”
“Over two years of intensive therapy with one of the most respected child psychiatrist in the world at that time. First April started talking, later May. Davey do you think Mouse may actually be June Davenport and that Blake identified the wrong body years ago?”
David reaches over and takes Mouse’s hand. “I don’t know, but I promise you I’ll find out.”
5
Tuesday, December 3rd,
F.B.I. Special Agent Jack Martin, forty-one, with graying temples, works at his desk in midtown Manhattan. He’s looking over reports of recent computer sales made in the tri-state area over a thirty-day period.
Nothing here jumps out at me, but then that’s why we investigate. If hackers were obvious anybody could catch them.
A woman in her late twenties walks in and sits across from him. She’s tall, nearly as tall as Jack’s own six-foot-one inch height and her slim, athletic build makes her appear even taller. Her long blond hair is tied back in a ponytail and her pretty face, oval-shaped with a wide, full mouth, is nearly devoid of make-up. She looks over at Jack and smiles.
“Are you reading those sales reports again? I thought you agreed with me that it was basically a waste of time to scour those.”
“I know I said that Kelly, but I got to thinking about them. My gut tells me to keep searching through them, that they’ll pay off someday.”
“We’ve been looking for months and have nothing to show for it.”
“I know, but I’m going to keep looking anyway
, I’ve got a feeling about them. It’s still sound logic you know. We’re only looking at computer sales that total more than ten thousand dollars. Over ninety-six percent of these are purchases made by businesses and institutions, those are totally legit, and the other less than four percent are individuals. So far all the big sales to individuals have turned out to be legit, but eventually Smith’s going to buy new computer equipment and we’ll be there to ask him why he needs it. Only a hacker like Mr. Smith would buy the high-end stuff and then have no legit reason for owning it, we just have to be patient, that’s all.”
“OK, I trust your instincts, it’s just that most hackers only use your run of the mill desktop computer. Hunting for Mr. Smith is like chasing a ghost. I want us to produce more results so we don’t get reassigned to other task forces.”
“There’s no need to worry about them shutting us down, not after what happened in Los Angeles last week. The hacker that broke into the air traffic control system at LAX nearly caused a multi-plane collision. No, in fact I’ve been told each unit’s getting a new man, five in all. That’ll grow the task force to fifteen agents, so soon we’ll be a three man unit.”
Kelly gets up and sits on the corner of Jack’s desk. Her skirt rides up, revealing her legs nicely.
“I’m not a man, in case you haven’t noticed.”
Jack grins up at her. “Believe me, I’ve noticed. I think I’m a little old for you though, and besides, I’m not much use to anybody these days, not until I find Cathy.”
“You’re not old, and don’t worry, you’ll find your daughter soon, your exwife can’t stay hidden forever. How about dinner tonight, my treat?”
Jack looks at Kelly for long seconds. Hell, why fight it?
“Dinner it is, but I’m paying partner.”
“Kelly, Jack, my name is Kelly, not partner.”
Jack smiles. “I look forward to our dinner tonight Kelly.”
Kelly smiles back at him. And I look forward to our breakfast tomorrow morning Jacky boy.
Snow falls in a flurry of dancing flakes in the early evening sky.
In one of the city’s finest restaurants, David sits wearing suit and tie, a rare option of style for him. His choice of both restaurant and personal couture were dictated to him by his companion’s attire.
Double or Nothing Page 5