House of Secrets - v4

by Richard Hawke

  “Marion Mann?”

  Male. Southern accent. Strong. Almost a parody.

  “Yes, this is Marion.”

  “I need to confirm here. The same Marion Mann employed at Masters and Weiss Consulting? Your immediate superior is a Ms. Joy Elizabeth Resnick?”

  “That’s right. Who is this?”

  “I need to speak with you, Miss Mann. In person. It’s quite important. This concerns Miss Resnick.”

  On the television, the soap opera guy was goofing around with his dance partner while awaiting the judge’s scores. Marion wasn’t so keen about that girl. Each week she seemed more naked than the week before. Marion switched the phone to her other ear.

  “Who is this?”

  “I assure you, it is in your personal interest that you meet with me. Will eight thirty work?”

  “Eight… You mean tonight?

  “There’s a very pleasant Thai restaurant down at the end of your block. If I’m not mistaken, you are very fond of their pad thai?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s nice and public there, as you know. There are plenty of other diners. It’s all perfectly safe.”

  “Perfectly safe for what? What the heck is this about? I’m not going—”

  “I don’t mean to frighten you, Miss Mann, but you most definitely want to meet with me. You’ll understand once we’ve spoken. And please don’t make any other calls after we hang up. I can tell you that if you attempt to, your call will be terminated immediately.”

  “Terminated? What are you talking about? This is some sort of joke, right? I’m hanging up. I’m not meeting anyone anywhere!”

  “If you prefer, we can as easily meet in your apartment. I had simply assumed the restaurant would be more comfortable for you.”

  “My apartment? Oh, I don’t think so. Whoever you are, you’re not coming here, I can tell you that much.”

  “I can be there in five minutes.”

  “And what makes you think I’d let you in?”

  “You wouldn’t have to let me in, dear.”

  Marion’s blood went cold. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He didn’t answer right away. Marion thought for a second maybe he’d hung up. Just some strange crank call. But he hadn’t hung up. The man gave a little chuckle.

  “Miss Mann, I have a key.”

  Marion replaced her eyeglasses. She returned the phone to its cradle, and opened the thick folder she had pulled from Joy’s files and began leafing through its contents. This was no longer one of the active projects; its termination date was the previous November. Joy had been a gigantic pain in the ass on the account. Marion had never seen such micromanaging from her boss before. Granted, it had been one of the highest-profile projects that Joy had commandeered in her four years with the firm. But even so, that was no reason to terrorize the hired help.

  Marion continued flipping through the folder. The scripts, the thirty- and sixty-second spots, the print ads, insertion orders out the wazoo. Charts. Stats. The focus group analyses. Poll numbers. Joy’s “inspired” theme packages. Her precious strategy wheels.

  Marion’s phone rang, and she nearly leaped out of her skin. It couldn’t really be him again, could it? In the call she had just taken, he’d made the situation absolutely clear to her. What in the world could there be to add?

  She hesitated, then picked up the phone. “Joy Res—” She cut herself off, glancing over at the half-open door across the hall. It was not Joy Resnick’s office anymore.

  “Hello. This is Marion Mann. How may I help you?”

  “Hi. It’s me. I just wanted to make sure we’re still on.”

  Relief flooded her system. It was a voice she welcomed. “Oh, good, it’s you. Sure, we’re still on. Believe me, there’s nothing chaining me to my desk. Is five still good for you?”

  “Five. Yes.”

  “Great. Listen, I could use a drink now. I’m psyched. I’ll see you soon.”

  Marion hung up the phone. This was more like it. Drinks after work. And not with any of the snotty clowns in the firm. She was through handing the goods over to that crowd.

  Energized, Marion returned to the file folder, finally coming to the photograph she had been seeking. She had wondered if maybe Joy had already removed it from the file, but she hadn’t. The photograph had been taken around a month before the closing date for the project. In it the client was dressed in a light blue dress shirt, with his tie pulled loose and his shirtsleeves folded back to his forearms, and he was standing in the wings of a high school auditorium stage. The picture itself didn’t indicate the auditorium part, but Marion was familiar with the context. Fantastic news had just arrived. Truly a gift from the gods, and the photograph had caught the client at the precise moment of his reacting to the news. No smile could have been brighter or more joyful. A grease pencil square had been sketched around the client’s head, cropping the photograph. That image of his beaming face would be the one dominating the final month of the project. It had been too compelling and appealing to pass up.

  Cropped out of the image had been the upper torso of the client, his arms reaching forward to take in the person delivering the glorious news. Also cropped out was the beaming face of the deliverer herself: Joy Resnick. Joy’s masterful strategy wheel had spun just as planned and had delivered the goods right on time.

  Marion squared the photo on her desk and stared at it for nearly a minute. She happened to know that the evening the photograph was taken had also been the one when her boss and the charismatic client had first climbed into the sack together. Although Senator Andrew Foster’s successful reelection was then still a little over thirty days away, the celebration had already begun. And Marion Mann — who had snapped the photograph — had sussed this out all on her own. She had a nose for these things.

  Marion slipped the photograph into a large white envelope, which she put into her bag. The photograph had been on her mind ever since the Suffolk County detectives had brought up her boss’s social life. By which, of course, they had really meant her private life. By which they meant, who was she sleeping with?

  These are things that executive assistants know.

  The photograph by itself proved nothing. Even so, Marion still could have fished it out of the file folder and handed it over to the two men without a word. A knowing look to Detective Brown Eyes would have cinched it.

  But she hadn’t. She hadn’t dared to. The man she had been forced to meet with three months previous at the Thai place near her apartment had been blunt in letting her know what the consequences would be if she was ever to utter a word to anyone about Joy Resnick and the married senator. It was a point he had reiterated to Marion in his insidious low tone at Joy’s funeral.

  “Take a look at that grave, Marion. It doesn’t look terribly comfortable, does it? You be smart, Marion. We’d hate to lose a little sweetheart like you at so young an age.”

  The entire time he had been whispering into her ear, the man’s hand had been surreptitiously clenching and unclenching a portion of her rear end. If he was trying to demonstrate to her the tensile strength in his slender fingers, he’d achieved his objective.

  Marion turned off her computer and her desk light. The receptionist said nothing to her as she was leaving. Marion was alone when she entered the elevator and was part of a small crowd by the time it reached the lobby.

  The Madison Avenue sidewalk was alive with pedestrians. Marion walked the ten blocks north to the bar where she was to meet up with her date. She knew it was silly to get ahead of herself, but she couldn’t help it. She needed to have some fun; it had been a rough week. She deserved someone who would treat her right and who appreciated her for all her best qualities. If it ended up getting cozy, what was wrong with that?

  Marion picked up her pace. Her step was particularly light, and she covered the ground in no time, maneuvering through the crowded sidewalk with the precision of a slalom skier.

  Robert Smallwood ros
e to meet her. Such a large man. And a gentleman. Smallwood had snared a booth, and he gave Marion a deep, sad-looking smile as she sat down opposite him. He really did seem to be a caring person. That had been Marion’s impression at Joy’s funeral, when he had sat with her in her car as she had tried to pull herself together. He hadn’t pressed her any more about the man in the green coat. He’d been patient and gentle and very kind. Like a harmless bear.

  The two sat down in the booth.

  “It’s good to see you,” Smallwood said, placing his hand palm up on the table. The waiter stepped over. He nearly laughed out loud at the sappy expression on the face of the woman with the funky glasses as she delivered her little paw into the mitt of her large, odd-looking friend.

  Aleksey Titov’s McMansion sat overlooking the green-gray waters of the Atlantic, at the end of Dover Street, in Manhattan Beach. The majority of the furniture was leather. Titov liked leather. White leather. Black leather. Brown leather. Leather the color of dollar bills. Titov liked its smell. He liked the feel of it and the look of it, and he liked the message it sent. An expensive message: the slaughter of cows for the sake of my comfort.

  Titov was not much of a reader, but even so, soon after acquiring the house he had lined one entire wall of his ground-floor office with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and paid a queer little man from Cobble Hill to fill the shelves with leather-bound volumes. There were complete collections of authors and writers Titov had never heard of. On a whim he’d taken a crack once at something by a guy called Trollope — The Small House at Allington — but found the experience tedious beyond words. On the rare occasion when Titov actually read anything for pleasure, he wanted juice. This Trollope character didn’t have nearly enough juice. But the book cover was a nice copper leather with the title embossed in gold, so that was good.

  Titov’s living room was on the second level of the house, looking out onto the ocean. Chrome gooseneck lamps with helmet-shaped globes spouted from five different areas of the room. The leather sling chairs cost over two thousand dollars apiece. Twenty-five big ones for the L-shaped couch, which was white leather with black leather throw pillows. Dead cows everywhere. The fireplace was white brick. A black leather sling held the firewood.

  Moo.

  Directly above the living room was the master bedroom, also with a spectacular view of the ocean. Titov liked to tell people that his bed was the size of Rhode Island; he thought that was a clever line. Out of Titov’s earshot, there were some who would add that his wife’s hair was about that big. Gala Titov was a good nine inches taller than her husband, not including the hair. She was broad-hipped and big-boned, and possessed of an insatiable sexual appetite. The woman also enjoyed a little slapping now and then, which suited Titov just fine. Making love to his wife was like wrestling with a volatile bear. The rough stuff came a lot easier to him than all that cooing and gooing. That other crap just didn’t work for the little thug.

  Aleksey Titov never used his knuckles when he hit someone; instead it was always the balled part of his fist, the fleshy underside. He punched with the motion of a person wielding a knife. As a teenager in Moscow he had once received just such a beating, and it had made a lasting impression on him.

  Now he was looking to make an impression of his own.

  Leonard Bulakov was wheezing loudly. His lower lip was swollen to twice its normal size and split in two places. There was no white showing in his right eye, the one on which Aleksey Titov had been concentrating, only a lacework of red.

  It was Leonard’s nose that was causing the wheezing. The cartilage on the bridge had collapsed under Titov’s relentless pounding, and both nostrils were flattened and clogged with blood, but Titov had not allowed the man to wipe any of it away. He had also warned Leonard that if any of that blood found its way onto any of his leather books or furniture, there would be additional hell to pay.

  Titov had screwed up from the very first, and he knew it. Assigning a dullard such as Dimitri Bulakov to the job on Shelter Island had been a monumental lapse of judgment. The wrong bone to the wrong dog. Titov could not fathom why he had been so cavalier in sending Dimitri Bulakov out to do the job, but there was nothing to be done about that decision now. Titov’s client was spitting nails. He wanted what he’d spent handsomely for, and Titov knew full well there would be real hell to pay if he did not deliver. Titov was under a microscope these days. Recently, his name had found its way into the newspapers in connection with certain activities that the U.S. government had a history of frowning on, and it had taken no small expenditure of effort on Titov’s part to keep matters contained. Titov’s client — a man he had never met directly — had presented himself as someone who knew a thing or two about such matters, and he had promised the mobster with regard to the “project” he was offering that he would advocate for Titov and help his problems disappear. The project had seemed simple: a man, a woman, a hideaway out near the tip of Long Island. But now it wasn’t simple. Upon hearing from Aleksey Titov about the complications brought on by Dimitri Bulakov, the client had been lethally precise in his explanation of how things were going to unfold for Titov if that video file fell into anyone else’s hand but his. He was giving Titov until the end of the weekend to make matters right. Sunday, and no further. End of story.

  Titov gave a signal, and the man keeping Leonard Bulakov from slipping to the floor dragged him to a chair that was covered with a large towel and dropped him into it. Leonard collapsed forward, his forehead hovering several inches above his knees.

  Titov’s man was named Anton Gregor. Gregor was hard-packed muscle in a modest-sized frame. Dirty blond hair and pale blue eyes. If it had been Gregor’s nature to generate empathy, he might have done so for Leonard Bulakov and his ruined nose. Gregor’s own nose was well on its way to hell. Flat on the bridge, torqued slightly to the left, and scarred like distressed leather. Gregor wore a sky-blue wide-collared shirt with the top three buttons undone, tight black jeans, and deeply scuffed cowboy boots. He lifted his foot and used the tip of one of those boots to nudge gently against Leonard Bulakov’s ear. A quasi-human sound emerged from the man.

  Titov spoke up.

  “Leonard, I am only sorry that it is you we had to speak with like this and not your brother. Dimitri is giving me no choice. The message I need to send to him is that this is what will happen to the people he loves until he comes to his senses. I would prefer to tell this to him face-to-face, but he makes this impossible. So I have no choice but to ask you to deliver this message. I do not have the time for Dimitri to misunderstand me. What happened to you here — this happens to Dimitri unless he becomes smart and gives me what is mine. You will tell him this for me?”

  Leonard Bulakov stirred. His head rose partway. Titov gave another signal, and Gregor produced a handkerchief and shoved it into Leonard’s hand. Leonard brought it to his broken face.

  “I don’t… Dimitri is not saying to me where he is.”

  “Then you need to convince him, Leonard,” Titov said. “He needs to come see me. Call him. Call his wife. I am putting Anton here in charge of locating Dimitri and returning to me what is mine. You will answer to him next time. With no offense, Anton is not a polite man. He is very less polite than me. But he is a loyal man, and his loyalty is to me and to what I want.”

  Gregor gave his boss a smirk and stepped over to an open closet.

  Titov snapped. “Sit up, Leonard! Now!”

  Leonard complied. His one good eye blinked plaintively. The handkerchief was turning red in his hand. Gregor reached into the closet. Leonard could not see what he was up to.

  Titov crossed his arms on his small, puffed-up chest. “Remind me, Leonard. Are you left-handed or right-handed?”

  Gregor stepped back over from the closet. Leonard twisted his head in order to find the man with his good eye. What he saw was that the hoodlum was holding a thick rubber mallet.

  Andy’s promotional schedule called for the weekend to be spent in the Boston area. The
re had been some talk midweek about canceling the senator’s appearances due to the injury to his head, but Andy had assured his publicist that he was fine and more than capable of making the trek.

  Andy and Christine had decided to make it a getaway weekend for the two of them. On Friday morning, Christine packed an overnight bag for Michelle. Their daughter would be staying with Whitney and Jenny for the weekend. Michelle’s best friend, Emily, was going with her. Paul Jordan was picking the girls up after classes at Little Red and driving them up to Greenwich in the Bentley. Christine felt a little uneasy with the plan — the privileged princesses scene was not one she enjoyed promoting — but she was simply too busy to run the girls up herself after school and still catch the shuttle in time to make the seven o’clock event in Boston.

  Michelle got her fifty-seventh cupcake of the year at Boho, a little miffed when she learned that her secret boyfriend had called in sick. After her morning cappuccino, Christine swung by the framers on Hudson Street. At Easter her father had requested that Christine be sure to snap at least one photograph of each child so that he could present the photographs to the parents as mementos of the afternoon. A classic Whitney touch. Christine had chosen an array of brightly colored wooden frames for the pictures. The order was ready, but none of the frames had been wrapped for protection. Christine helped the clerk wrap the frames in brown paper and she left with them in a shopping bag. Retracing her steps, she dropped the bag off with the receptionist at Little Red, to give to Michelle to take up to Granddad.

  Christine’s appointment was in SoHo, at a place on Greene Street she’d been going to for five or six years. As she headed east on Prince Street she spotted a woman emerging from a residential building midblock. Christine grabbed her camera and fired off a series of shots as the woman crossed the street directly in front of her. The woman disappeared into a café, and Christine continued on to her appointment.