Nickel City Storm Warning (Gideon Rimes Book 3)

by Gary Earl Ross

  “You have work to do,” Kayla said, gazing at me. “Do what you need to.”

  I nodded.

  On the way downstairs I ran into Sam Wingard on the way up from his ground floor rear apartment to see Bobby. Sam was older and heavier than Bobby and wore a drooping gray mustache and thick glasses. I seldom saw him in anything other than gray Dickey work clothes. Like my late father, he had worked in maintenance at Buffalo State College and had become friends with Bobby. After both had retired and Bobby had bought the twelve-unit building on Elmwood, he offered Sam a rent-free apartment to serve as building super.

  “I been thinking,” Sam said. “After what happened to Drea and now to Bobby, it’s like this country is losin’ its damn mind.”

  “I started her book,” I said. “You’ll get no argument from me.”

  He chewed his lower lip for a second, looking down as if embarrassed. “If it’s not too much to ask, I was hopin’ you could kinda look after her when she’s here in town. I mean, she gets death threats regular so when she appears in public, her publisher hires security. Probably will when she’s here too, but she’s making lots of stops and giving lots of talks for this conference thing.” He swallowed. “With all she doin’, all she been through, I’d feel a whole lot better, G, if somebody I knew and trusted had her back. Can’t push out the other guys, of course, but you know this town and the kind of men who would go after her. I’ll pay you for your time. It’s just—”

  “You got it, Sam,” I said. “Friend and family rate.”

  “Friend and family rate?”

  “A cup of Tim Horton’s coffee. Large.”

  “All right, but you can’t do it all by yourself. I’ll pay for whoever’s got your back. I got enough saved for one or two guys. Two thousand.”

  “Fair enough for a week’s work,” I said.

  The next evening there was no noise at all at Bobby’s door. No Isaac Hayes, no Bill Withers singing “Use Me,” no violins. I felt safe unlocking the door. Bobby was sitting in his lumbar support desk chair. On the sofa across from him, forearms resting on knobby knees, was Jonah Landsburgh, one of Bobby’s oldest friends and the senior partner in Phoenix’s law firm. Both men glanced at me as I stepped inside. Then they returned their attention to the Renaissance chess set on the coffee table between them. After a few seconds, Jonah ran a hand through his shaggy white hair. “You got me boxed in,” he said, moving his knight. Then he looked at me. “I know you’re trying to find the guys who did this.”

  “It was a random thing, Jonah. I already told you.” Bobby took the knight. “Check.”

  I looked at Jonah. “Phoenix tell you that?”

  He huffed in feigned indignation. “Phoenix didn’t have to tell me anything.” He moved his rook. “How long have I known you? Since you were a kid, right?”

  “Mate,” Bobby said. “Leave Gideon alone and pay attention to your game.”

  Ignoring Bobby, Jonah eased his lanky frame against the back of the couch, adjusting the sleeves of his rumpled pinstriped suit jacket. “G, how often have I read your face in a poker game?”

  “Often enough,” I said.

  “I know how to read you.”

  “I’m not much of a poker player.”

  “But you’re a hell of an investigator. I can read your face when you’re working too. Even when you’re in the moment, you get this distant look. You will find these bastards. You run into trouble, I want you to know the firm has your back all the way.”

  “Thanks, Jonah. I know.” With a Jewish founder and senior partner, his Catholic niece serving as paralegal and office manager, a half-Japanese gay man as one junior partner, an Afro-Latina as the other, and me as one of their on-call investigators, Landsburgh, Falk, and Trinidad was a Rainbow Coalition among small law firms in Buffalo.

  “I’d like to see those sons of bitches pay for—”

  “Let it go!” Bobby snapped. “I don’t need Gideon to fight my battles.”

  Jonah hesitated. “Sorry, Bobby. Bad enough anti-vaxxers cheapen the Holocaust by using the Star of David. But swastikas in the twenty-first century?” He began to reposition his pieces for another game. “Makes me glad Kathleen isn’t here for this leap backward.”

  I found Kayla in the kitchen, wiping down the stainless steel appliance surfaces as the dishwasher thrummed and sloshed. Glasses sliding down her nose, she wore a pair of jeans and one of Bobby’s old weekend work shirts with the sleeves rolled up. She smiled when I kissed her reddish-brown cheek and offered me a cup of coffee. I said yes and sat at the bistro counter as she stopped the dishwasher mid-cycle.

  “No sense running it while we dirty new cups.” She popped a refillable K-cup into the Keurig and put an orange Mexico mug under the brew spout. When the mug was full she passed it to me. I added creamer as she emptied the pod and refilled it. Putting a blue mug labeled BuffState under the spout, she pushed the ON button and sat across from me.

  “Good coffee,” I said.

  “Kona.” She nodded toward the canister on the counter. “We got it on our second trip to Hawaii, last summer.”

  “Before or after the submarine ride and snorkeling in a shark cage?”

  “The sharks were on our first trip,” she said. “We got the coffee after the submarine but before the helicopter ride into a dormant volcano.” She paused. “Does it matter?”

  “Not at all. I think it’s great you guys did all that.”

  The Keurig clicked off. She reached for her mug. “At our age.”

  “At any age,” I said, meaning it.

  She was quiet a moment as she stirred in creamer. “I’m taking him to breakfast in the morning, so he’ll come home to a clean house.”

  “Then it’s back to your place tomorrow? He still has a week of restrictions left.”

  “He’s sore but he’s good to go.” She blew on her coffee to cool it, drank some. “His last check-up was good. His pain’s almost gone. Headaches too. He’s sitting up, playing chess, reading, listening to music.” She half-frowned. “He’s snoring more because he sleeps on his back, but I’m used to that by now.”

  I sipped more coffee. “He won’t talk about what happened, not to me or Jonah.”

  “Or me. He still has things to work out.”

  “You look tired.”

  One hand went to the side of her permed hair. “Does it show?”

  “Only to those who know you well enough to care.” I smiled. “That includes Bobby.”

  “I wasn’t this domestic when I was married,” she said. “But I was so scared for him in that hospital bed.” She lifted her glasses to wipe her eyes. “He needed me…”

  “And you love him. But now that he’s better, you need some space.”

  She drank more coffee. “Is it weird? Not being together all the time? Needing space?”

  “No. I read an article about relationships like yours—together apart, they call it.” I shrugged. “Phoenix and I are kind of the same.”

  “We’ve been at it longer.” She rotated her mug absently. “Alaila thinks we ought to get married, while he’s still interested. With more than a hundred forty years between us—”

  “Do you honestly think Bobby’s going anywhere?”

  “No. Neither am I.”

  “If what you have works for you both, why change it unless you want to?” I took one of her hands in both of mine. “Mira and I both love you, not for loving Bobby but for being someone strong enough not to need him. In case you haven’t noticed, he’s more than a walking almanac. He’s a good-hearted man. He loves to nurture people.”

  She smiled. “I’ve noticed.”

  “Too good-hearted. If the wrong person had come along, needing to be nurtured or rescued, she’d have taken advantage of him and hurt him. Bad. You were the right woman then. You still are.” Releasing her hand, I lifted my mug as if toasting her. “Thank you.”

  We clinked mugs.

  “I heard Jonah.” Kayla set down her coffee. “The best way to thank
me is to find those men, so do whatever you’ve gotta do, no matter what Bobby says.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m working on it.”

  We talked for a time about other things after our coffee was gone. After fifteen or twenty minutes, I planted another kiss on her cheek and said goodnight. In the living room, I said goodnight to Bobby and Jonah, each of whom had eight or nine pieces left on the board. I studied it long enough to determine Jonah would likely win. Then I went downstairs and logged onto Intellichexx to continue the hunt for Dr. C.J. Lansing.

  After I interviewed Stan the driver, Maury the lot attendant, and Mrs. Cathcart, who twice seemed to forget why I was there, the name Lansing was still my only lead from the day Bobby was attacked. I had no way to tap into Main Street CCTV cameras that might have recorded the gang fleeing the scene and not leave tracks that would open me to a cyber-crimes prosecution. Lansing was all I had. It was a longshot. If Lansing was indeed the man’s name, if he had a doctorate, if he had something to do with the gang of men outside Temple Beth Zion—all uncertainties. No one had sent Rory Gramm a cell phone picture for an image search, so I had a rudimentary description: mid-to-late thirties, average build and height, short brown hair, black glasses.

  Having found more than one hundred C. Lansings in the United States, I had spent the past several nights doing deep background dives on those I could not eliminate by gender, age, or race. Deep searching—in fact, the whole process—was taking longer than usual because my gifted tech associate, LJ Doran, the only son of my Buffalo State partner Jimmy, was incommunicado during his training for the FBI Cyber Division. Having earned both a summa cum laude Bachelor of Science degree and a Master’s in computer science, he had been fast-tracked despite his age. If LJ had been in town, I would by now have seen any CCTV footage run through facial recognition software, as well as the smartphone records, school transcripts, residential histories, work histories, financial transactions, and credit card statements of every Lansing on my list.

  You knew LJ had to grow up sometime, I told myself again. He couldn’t hack for you forever. Now work would be slow and steady—more slow than steady.

  7

  The week after Kayla left, Bobby was well enough to come downstairs Tuesday morning and let himself into my apartment. I found him making coffee when I got out of the shower. He slid an Albright-Knox Art Gallery mug to me as I tightened my robe. We sat at my counter.

  “You free for a talk this morning?” he asked.

  “Got some work to do,” I said. “How about lunch?”

  He hesitated a moment, lips pursed in thought. “All right, twelve-thirty. My treat.”

  “Then I guess whatever’s got you so serious isn’t my fault.”

  “Just like when you were a kid.” He relaxed a bit and smiled. “Something was always your fault till I told you it wasn’t. Well, it isn’t, so don’t take responsibility for it. I’ll pick you up at your office.”

  I nearly said I would drive, but the look on his face told me he needed to get behind the wheel himself.

  At twelve-thirty-nine I checked my office window for the third time and saw Bobby’s old silver Camry slide to the curb in front of the laundromat below. Pulling on a black denim jacket to cover the baby Glock in my shoulder rig, I hurried downstairs and pulled open the passenger door.

  “Sorry I’m late.” His silvery hair had been thinning more in the past year so he had taken to wearing hats and caps. Today’s was a beige summer-weight tam. “I got tied up.”

  “If you mean literally and you’re coming from Kayla’s, I don’t want to hear about it.”

  He laughed. For the first time in weeks, the laugh was his—full-bodied and unchecked, stretching his cheeks, and fanning up into the crinkly corners of his eyes. It felt good to hear it.

  We drove north to Pano’s-On-Elmwood and didn’t bother trying to find room amid the cars in the small lot adjacent to the restaurant. A space opened up five or six doors ahead. After he claimed it, Bobby activated the Buffalo Roams parking app on his phone and paid for two hours. Then he retrieved a small briefcase from the rear seat. We walked back.

  Despite the change in ownership, a new blue-themed décor, and the addition of On-Elmwood to the name, the menu was still mostly Greek. The lunchtime crowd was as large as ever. But our wait was short. We were shown to an upstairs table by a window overlooking Elmwood. The street was full of pedestrians, likely from places nearby—Buff State, the Albright-Knox and Burchfield-Penney art galleries, the Hotel Henry, or the new condos at Elmwood and Forest—as they searched for food, sunshine, or merchandise from specialty shops. It was a preview of the coming summer when crowd size would double.

  Bobby folded his hat and put it in the breast pocket of his sports jacket, which he draped over the bamboo chair back. I unbuttoned my jacket but left it on. Our server was a slender young man in a black shirt and khaki pants, with a nametag that said BRAD. We were ready to order before he set glasses of water on the marble-topped table and handed us menus. Spanakopita for Bobby, chicken souvlaki for me, and iced tea for both of us. Before and during our meal, we talked of routine things. Casual things. Normal things. What to get Mira and Shakti for their birthdays, hers in July and his in October. The Danube River cruise Bobby and Kayla would take in September. Whether the Camry could survive another winter. After Brad cleared our table and refilled our glasses, Bobby pulled the briefcase at his feet onto his lap. From it, he withdrew a legal-sized file folder.

  “What tied me up today was Jonah,” he said. “I wanted to discuss some of this with you before I saw him at ten to finalize. But you couldn’t, and I realized the decisions were mine anyway so I went ahead without you.”

  I nodded, already certain I knew where he was headed.

  He pulled papers from the folder and passed a thick stapled document to me. “My updated will. I also have copies for Mira and Kayla.”

  I read the first few lines—more or less identical to the will I already had at home in my fireproof document lockbox. Then I looked at Bobby and swallowed. With my parents and his wife Evelyn long dead, along with friends and comrades in arms, I was no stranger to death’s theft of loved ones. But in the absence of the others, Bobby was a constant in my life, in my grasp of reality, an anchor who long ago had begun to seem eternal. That he felt his mortality now sparked an anger I had not expected—not at him but at the skinheads who had reminded him he was going to die. As was the case with most non-lethal assaults that lacked definitive evidence, the police had moved on to more pressing matters. I was still no closer to identifying the assailants myself, which meant much of my anger was directed inward.

  “I’ll find them, Bobby.” I looked right at him, to let him know I understood what was tearing him apart from the inside. “I’ll make them pay for what they did to you.”

  He was quiet a moment, studying me, making me squirm as he had whenever he’d caught the teen-aged me in a lie. “Then what? You take them on yourself when none of us can be certain we got a good enough look at them? What happens when the case is kicked? Even if you track them down and bury them all, do you think it ends there? However deep the ground, the cancer in their hearts will make its way to the surface and find another soul to feed on. Another person to beat up. Another synagogue or mosque or church to deface, or worse, to shoot up on Facebook Live.” Face taut, he swallowed hard. “How many times in recent years have I gone to an interfaith service held after a slaughter? How many times have I heard the minister introduce the rabbi, the priest introduce the imam, the Buddhist introduce the Sikh or Hindu or Taoist so they can all say the same things about love and hate?”

  I placed my right hand over his left. “By trying to help, you may have been the thing that prevented another gathering like that.”

  His lower lip quivered and his eyes filled. “I tried to fight them back, Gideon. I really did.” He pulled off his glasses with one hand and pulled the other away from me to wipe his eyes. “First I said there was no need for viol
ence when we could talk. I tried to get in the middle so I could reason with them. I tried to reason with them…”

  “I know you did,” I said. “I know that without you telling me.”

  “When they turned on me and started calling me names, I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I tried not to hit anybody. I wasn’t afraid. I’m not a coward. I just wanted them to stop.”

  “You’re the bravest man I’ve ever known,” I said softly. “You taught me to box, but you taught me to talk it out first. Trying to reason first takes a rare courage.”

  “When they started hitting me, I knew I had no choice.” He was crying harder now, struggling to keep his volume low and angling his face toward the window so others in the restaurant would neither see nor hear him. I hadn’t seen him cry since Evelyn’s funeral. The sight was so disconcerting I wanted to stand and embrace him, but that would draw more attention to him. I waited, as I knew he would want me to.

  After a moment he dabbed his eyes with a paper napkin and blew his nose. Then he sat back and took a breath to collect himself. “I landed a couple of solid punches but there were so many of them. So many of them, filled with a hate deaf to reason.”

  “You can’t reason with hate,” I said.

  He shut his eyes for a moment. “Hate that couples with any human personality trait—fear or faith, anger or loss, despair or greed or lust—can only sire a monster. I stared into the face of that monster. What scares me most is that its lack of empathy is metastatic.”

  I said nothing and let the seconds crawl.

  Finally, Bobby broke the silence. “All right, my old will was simple. Everything went to you and Mira. But that was before Shakti and Kayla, before I had the building remodeled and real estate took off in the Village.” He smiled sadly. “This update is long overdue.”