by Chris Knopf
“You’re really following him, aren’t you?” said Benny Roscoe, the name I read off his permit.
“I am.”
“You a cop?”
“Engineer.”
“Then is this legal?” he asked.
“Absolutely. Engineers have all the same authority.”
Both cabs stopped at a red light at the next intersection. I slid down in my seat.
“Try not to look over at him,” I said. “Let him get a little ahead when the light changes.”
“Got it, Kojak.”
We settled into the usual rhythm of a cab ride down a Manhattan avenue—hurtling, undulating momentum interrupted by sudden lurching stops, abrupt lane changes, a series of near front-end collisions and generous application of the horn. Throughout Roscoe did a fine job of keeping pace with our quarry without calling undue attention, though he had to push the speed envelope occasionally to take up the slack.
“I’ll cover the ticket,” I said.
“You got that right.”
Down around 23rd Street Gelb cut over to Broadway, then continued south. We had a tense moment when a box truck got between us, but Roscoe managed to cut around on the right, using a wide entrance to a parking garage to cheat into the sidewalk space. No pedestrians were killed in the maneuver.
Gelb took Broadway past the Village and into SoHo. His cab turned onto Spring Street and stopped.
“Go halfway down and let me out,” I said, dropping a fifty dollar bill through the security slot, covering both the fare and the unscheduled stunt driving. “Nice work.”
“Not a problem. A car chase always breaks up the day.”
Gelb was easy to spot, heading west. He crossed Mercer, then walked to the end of the next block, crossing Greene and ducking into a restaurant that took up the whole corner. I gave it a few seconds, then followed him in.
The place featured a U-shaped bar anchoring the center of the room, lit by floor-to-ceiling tinted windows. The booze was on brass racks over the bartenders’ heads, the upper strata reachable by a ladder like the one in Donovan’s library.
There were also a few stool-high round tables between the bar and the window walls where Gelb was talking with a young woman who’d apparently saved him a seat. I sat at the bar on the other side of the U so I could keep them in direct view. I ordered an Absolut on the rocks to maintain authenticity.
The first fifteen minutes or so involved the usual boring stuff. Ordering food and drink, running to the restroom, settling in. Then it picked up when I saw the woman run her high-heeled foot up the inside of Gelb’s calf. She might have seen him grin in response. It looked to me more like a leer, though to be fair, I was sitting much farther away.
The woman leaned closer into the table and started fiddling with a necklace that hung between her breasts. Gelb leaned in as well. He held his drink by the rim of the glass and swirled it around to either melt the ice or send another suggestive message. He didn’t have to do it for my sake. My intuitive powers were up to the challenge.
Not knowing when I’d be back, I left a ten dollar bill on the bar. I walked over and set my drink down on their table. Gelb looked up with a jolt.
“Hey, Jerome,” I said, “Floyd Patterson again. Mrs. Gelb, I presume?” I added, looking at his ring finger, then his lunch date.
What followed was an awkward silence. For them. For me it was just a silence.
“No, actually,” said the woman, putting out her hand, “I’m Marla Cantor. A colleague of Jerome’s.”
“Oh,” I said, happily, “wonderful. Fine firm you folks work for.”
“So, Floyd,” said Gelb, not quite through his teeth, “what can I do for you this time?”
“That’d be a private matter, Mr. Gelb. I think you’d want that,” I said, keeping my smile as big as a face that almost never smiled would let it.
He grimaced, but judging by the red flush on his cheeks, he was eager to deal quickly with the situation. He made stammering apologies to Marla, who graciously wouldn’t hear of it. She said she’d concentrate on her salad and be there when he came back.
We went out to the sidewalk. I led him across the street to a shop that had a huge display window with a sill deep enough to sit on. We were both well dressed enough to loiter there while I asked him a few questions.
“I’ve consulted with our attorneys, by the way,” said Gelb. “They’re unaware of any action being taken against Eisler, Johnson.”
“That’s because there isn’t any,” I told him.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Shut up and listen. I found Iku Kinjo. Dead. It was very upsetting. When I think about how you talked about her, I get even more upset.”
“I wasn’t happy with her, but I didn’t want her dead, for God’s sake.”
“Your wife know about Marla?” I asked.
The rosy little patches on his cheeks drained away, turning his skin back to white.
“I resent the implication.”
“Don’t waste my time with all that. Assume I got the goods.”
“You’re a private investigator,” he said in a hushed breath.
“Doesn’t matter what I am. You need to tell me why you think Iku dropped out of sight. And you need to do it in the next five seconds.”
I looked at my watch.
“I don’t know,” he said, rushing out the words. “Honestly, I don’t. She just didn’t come in one day.”
“What kind of a mood was she in?”
“Tense. But who at Eisler isn’t? She seemed tired and a little frayed at the edges, but that’s also nothing unusual. Our relationship was one hundred percent professional,” he said, his eyes twitching toward the joint across the street, as if catching the irony. “So if she was concerned about something at work or in her personal life, I wouldn’t know. And that’s the honest-to-God truth.”
“So she was handling her job.”
“Iku? We used to think she dictated memos in her sleep. Everything brilliant, all the time.”
“Jealous of her, huh?” I asked.
He smirked.
“Yeah, of her talent. Not what it got her. I want a life outside of work.”
“Apparently.”
He was a really tall guy, but sitting there on the windowsill in SoHo, he’d begun to shrink. I felt a little bad for him, but not enough to take out the hook. Not yet.
“What was she working on? The big stuff.”
“Consolidated Global Energies. You’d know it as Con Globe. Oil-based, refining and petrochemical. Though her regular assignment was the hedge fund, Phillip Craig. And the usual load of small stuff that Eisler likes to pile on to maintain their reputation as the sweatshop of the consultancy trade.”
I made the mistake of stopping to think. Gelb took the opening.
“I need to get back to my table,” he said.
“Yeah, ’course you do.”
He stood up and looked down at me. I leaned back so I wouldn’t wrench my neck looking up at him.
“Are you going to talk to my wife?” he asked.
“I don’t think so. And if I do, we won’t be talking about Marla. Though we could.”
“That sounds like blackmail.”
I shook my head.
“I’m not threatening you. I’m just looking for some information. And a favor.”
“Oh?” he asked.
“Yeah. I want to talk to Angel. I need an introduction.”
His eyebrows rose, accentuating the lightbulb shape of his skull.
“Angel Valero?” he asked.
“Yeah. Iku’s Angel,” I said, hoping I had the right one.
“She consulted for him. Though I wouldn’t exactly say he was hers. Even if she did help him get a nice piece of the big oil deal.”
He went on to specify which deal. Big indeed.
“So he’s with Phillip Craig,” I said.
“Officially. Though he rarely leaves his house in the Hamptons. Why would he if he didn’t have to?”
I asked him to give Valero a call and tell him I had an opportunity worth listening to. He was welcome to improvise from there as long as he told me the story line. As I escorted him back across the street I said I couldn’t promise he’d never hear from me again, but I’d try to leave him alone after I got the introduction. Then I told him to call me on my cell phone, and gave him the number.
I didn’t know if he’d follow through, though nothing about him said he wouldn’t.
When I handed him back to Marla she shook my hand.
“It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Patterson. I must say retirement from the ring has had a surprising effect.”
“Remarkably well-preserved?”
“Remarkably white.”
Before checking into my hotel I found another bar where I could have a drink and call Amanda. I gave her a cleaned-up version of my meeting with Gelb, skipping minor details like the stakeout, the cab chase and the girlfriend at the SoHo bar. This wouldn’t have met Rosaline’s standards for full and free dis closure, but it did make for a less tense and sober conversation.
In turn, Amanda told me about her day sanding floors at one of her rehab houses. It sounded like more fun than I’d been having, only dustier.
“It’s not nearly so difficult as one would think,” she said.
“That’s because of the floor guy lobby. They’re very powerful.”
“I’m finishing it tomorrow.”
“Watch out for bubbles and don’t walk on it till it’s dry,” I told her.
“Excellent advice. Think of the trouble you just saved me.”
After that I called my daughter and asked her out to dinner. She delighted me by saying yes. So I got myself out of the monkey suit, cleaned up and took her to her favorite place, which was a few blocks from her apartment. We had a meal and a nice talk with not a single discouraging word from either of us. I was so afraid of breaking the spell I hardly said anything on the way back to her place. I just hummed something from Thelonius Monk, who’s just about unhummable, and then hugged her again, though not too hard like I did when she was a little girl.
So when I was trying to get to sleep, listening to the street noise leaking in through the old windows, I was elated to mark the second discord-free engagement with my daughter since she reached puberty. I’m sure she wasn’t aware of the occasion, though I wanted to think she noticed something as well.
And that even now she could sense my heart soaring high over New York City, leaving a temporarily unencumbered mind behind to fall into sleep.
TEN
I HAD TO SPEND THE NEXT two days in the little shop I built for myself in the basement of the cottage, to catch up on all the work I owed Frank Entwhistle. It was barely adequate to the tasks he’d normally assign: architectural details like mantelpieces, built-in bookcases and corner cabinets, and garden gates. I’d bought all the heavy equipment, like the table saw and lathe, and most of the smaller tools, from tradesmen I worked with on various job sites. The wear on some of those tools meant a fair amount of maintenance and repair, but I didn’t mind. In fact, I liked the chance to mix a little mechanical and electrical tinkering into all the sawdust.
I was ambivalent about the construction boom that had been going on in the Hamptons since about the time I wandered back home. Lucky for me, it provided a living. Enough to pay the taxes on the cottage, buy dog food for Eddie, parts for the Grand Prix—not an easy or inexpensive proposition—keep the lights on and fuel oil flowing, and sustain frequent forays to the Pequot.
My new woodcraft career bore some resemblance to the job I once had with the company. Design and fabrication, problem solving, enabling technology and a fair amount of trial and error. The only differences were the pay scale and the level of complexity.
And the management demands. At the company I had about four thousand people working in my division. Half of them were at headquarters in White Plains, the others scattered in field offices and operating plants all over the globe.
Nobody worked for me on Frank’s jobs, so I marked that as definite progress.
The equipment I once maintained and repaired was also more elaborate, with some petrochemical plants in the U.S. sprawling over an area the size of a small city. We built even bigger ones for the Saudis, Kuwaitis and Malaysians. All shiny new and run by automated control systems that reduced operating personnel from a few hundred to maybe two dozen. What a world.
The pay was a lot better at my old job, of course, I’d made a startling amount of money before losing most of it to Abby when we got divorced. I don’t know what she’s done with it because I haven’t spoken to her since the last time I saw her. If I can preserve that record till the day I die, it will have been a worthwhile investment.
It’d be nice to say my interest in engineering came from my father, who was a car mechanic his whole life and never designed a flue gas scrubber or optimized a single ammonia plant. For me, every faulty device was a little puzzle that was fun to solve. For him, it was a battle against evil, intransigent machines possessed by demons whose sole purpose was to frustrate his every honest effort.
As I moved into designing the devices themselves, the puzzle became making things that had never been made before. My reward was more than a favorable outcome, it was the thing itself, something I could look at, touch, contemplate in three dimensions. Tangible manifestations of imagination, of dreams.
People think things of substance are where legitimate value lives, where wealth is created. I learned wealth actually comes from manipulating the consequences of having material things. It’s the financial side of the house that ultimately matters. Since finance is based more on assumption and belief than empirical reality, it’s far closer to the world of imagination than the steel, gears and wiring of a complex process application.
So who am I to beef? It wasn’t the company’s fault I wanted my imagination to produce something more tangible than a number in the middle of a ledger column.
I don’t know where Iku Kinjo stood on this question. I know she had little difficulty absorbing the technical information I threw at her, never looking intimidated or knocked off balance. This was a woman who lived entirely in the world of the immaterial, the theoretical. The consultant’s world of genius, smoke and mirrors.
If the young Iku thought my operation could stand as a model for the rest of the company, I’m sure it pained her to admit it, but that was what her research and judgment yielded, and that was what she was going to report. No matter her personal feelings toward me.
Thoughts like this set my mind adrift as I worked alone in the shop. Mostly alone. Eddie would hang around when the power tools were off and I was drawing or noodling out a design. That’s why he was down there when I heard a gentle knock on the hatch door. Like the valiant watchdog he was, he looked up half interested. When Burton Lewis came down the stairs it was a different story.
“Quit sucking up,” I said, watching Eddie’s fawning attentions. “You’re already in his will.”
“You and your heirs,” said Burton.
“The ones we can find.”
“That’s what DNA is for. How about a beer?”
Despite the best efforts of visiting cops and intruders, I still had some of the good stuff. Burton dug one each out of the basement fridge and pulled a stool over to my drawing table.
Burton was about ten years younger than me, but still managed to look at least as weathered and roughed up, in a boyish, handsome sort of way, if all those things can be present in a single individual. It wasn’t because of a hard life, though Burton certainly worked as hard as anyone I knew. His great-grandfather had established one of the notable American fortunes in the early part of the last century and Burton had built it up from there. He was unquestionably a rich guy, though with little interest in pampered indolence.
He once said, “Spending the precious hours of one’s life pursuing leisure and entertainment, or obsessed by self-glorifying avocations—what could be more abhor
rent? What are you if you aren’t contributing to the economic advancement of the community at large? A silly, emasculated contrivance whose sole purpose is the redistribution of someone else’s hard-earned treasure.”
Before building his tax law business he’d founded a free criminal defense practice that operated out of a storefront in the City. Over the years it continued to expand and command a large portion of his precious hours and concentration. Everyone assumed this was standard noblesse oblige, but the truth was Burton loved the challenge and access to lives lived far closer to the bone than he’d otherwise ever experience. Along the way, he’d made a home for the idealists and misfits of the legal profession, and provided first-class defense to any and all, the less deserving the better.
He was able to work at whatever he wanted to work at, when he wanted to work, but I didn’t begrudge him that.
“So,” he said, “I’m holding two beers. Why loiter in a woodshop when the Little Peconic awaits just outside the door?”
On the way to the Adirondacks I started to brief him on current events, which I continued through two more rounds of beer.
He listened carefully throughout, then said, “The promise to modify your severance agreement offers some intriguing possibilities.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it. Anyway, it’s not about that now. It’s about the dead girl.”
“Not your obligation. You found her. There was no proviso concerning dead or alive,” he said.
“What do you know about the Phillip Craig Group?”
“The company reflects the personality of the founder: deranged by ambition and greed. Talented investors, though, I have to say. Creative. Our firm has managed the tax particulars on their major acquisitions. Most of the work had been done for us by their own excellent counsel. Anticipated nearly everything.”
“Iku was involved with them on the big oil deal,” I said.
“Big is right.”
“You know Angel Valero?”
“Nominally. The name comes up in relation to Craig. I see him at fundraisers, the Financial Roundtable. Nothing beyond that.”
“Reputation?”