Jake & Mimi

by Frank Baldwin

  Mimi witnessed the seduction of three women. Two of them are missing and the third isn’t home. I shake my head. No. One of them is missing — Nina Torring. Elise Verren has high-strung parents. She could have met somebody last night, the way she met me a week ago, and she could have blown off her mother’s birthday, and her class today. Anne Keltner could be anywhere — it’s Friday night.

  I run my hands over the rough black railing and breathe in the hard, mineral smell of the night. I look at the windows of the building across the street. Most of the blinds are drawn, but a few are open, and through one I can see a young woman, standing at the counter in her lit kitchen. She is mixing something in a bowl.

  But what if Elise really is missing? What does it mean? The only connection in this world between Nina Torring and Elise Verren is that I seduced them and Mimi watched. But no one could possibly have known. I’ve told no one. Mimi… there’s no way she’s told a soul.

  The young woman across the way looks up suddenly from her mixing bowl, wipes her hands on her apron, and answers the phone. She smiles, leaves the counter, and sits down at her kitchen table. She twists the phone cord in her fingers as she talks.

  Only one person has ever seen Mimi and me together. Anne Keltner.

  The young woman looks out her window. She looks away, and then out her window again. She stands, lays the phone on the table, and walks to the window, her smile gone. She looks straight across, at this building, this fire escape, at me. She lowers the blinds.

  I stare at the closed blinds, and it hits me — someone is watching. If Elise Verren really is missing, then someone has been watching us. Nick Simms? No way. If he had found out, he would have come straight at me. Who else? No one on my side. Mimi then. Her fiancé? Not likely. He doesn’t strike me as a fighter. Who, then? Anne Keltner is the only one who’s ever seen us together. I close my eyes. No, that’s not quite true. Mr. Stein saw us together. Brought us together, the morning he assigned us to the Brice account. And then again the day we prepped him for their lunch. But Mr. Stein, our senior partner, a voyeur? Violent?

  I open my eyes and stare now into the rusted, peeling metal of the black railing. Andrew Brice requested her. That’s what Mr. Stein said. Twenty years without even one question for the firm, and then one morning he calls and requests Mimi Lessing. What was it she said? She had met him a year earlier, at the elevators. For thirty seconds. I look down into the street again, at the lit doorways of the apartment buildings, the dark walkers making their way toward Amsterdam. I shake my head. It’s too crazy. But why does an old man request a young woman that he met for thirty seconds a year before? Because she’s beautiful, that’s why. Okay. But why does a cop, who could’ve gotten my number a hundred ways, wait in my hallway to talk to me if he’s just doing a favor for a friend? If he doesn’t think in his gut that Elise is missing?

  I breathe in the night air a last time, then step back through the window and close it behind me. I latch it, walk to the bedroom, and pick up the phone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Please answer me. Please.”

  Even in terror she is beautiful. Even with the high red of her cheeks gone white.

  She woke gradually, and then all at once she began kicking her bound ankles off the car floor and twisting her body in an effort to see what held her wrists. Then she looked suddenly at me and was still. I had imagined this moment in so many ways, but never like this. Shock, then recognition, then terror flooded her brown eyes.

  “Andrew Brice,” she whispered, and I was riven by the sound of my name from her lips. I kept the wheel steady and looked back at the dark road ahead of us.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, her voice trembling. I didn’t answer. “Why?” she asked a minute later.

  She has courage. For five miles she sat without speaking. She tested the strength of the silk, quietly twisting her bound hands behind the seat back. She searched the darkness outside her window. She tried, somehow, to imagine what had brought her here and what might see her through. But now, as we pass the sign for Medway and she sees how far from the city we have come, the silence and the darkness and the strict ties overwhelm her.

  “Please answer me,” she says. “Please.”

  I reach with one hand for the storage compartment between our seats. She leans away from me, toward the car door. I lift the top and remove a plastic case. I take a cassette tape from the case and slip it into the stereo. Silence for a few seconds, and now, filling the car, soft, plaintive piano.

  “Convento Di Sant’Anna.”

  I watch the shock register in her eyes. Her wrists are suddenly still.

  “Nina,” she whispers, almost too low for me to hear.

  Yes, Nina.

  I spread Nina Torring as Jake Teller had spread her, leaving her eyes free so that she might see the metal instruments laid out beside her on the black felt. She remembered everything. The length of the binds. The position of the lamps. The order of the music. When she had given me every detail I needed, I asked her why she had allowed it. I told her that if she could make me understand, truly understand, she would be released.

  No one can be introspective under torture. But under the threat of it, yes. Such concentration. She had grown up in a strict household. She was sure that was part of it. She had learned to value control. I took a cloth from the stand beside me, and her eyes followed my hands as I selected a sharp length of metal from the felt and began to polish it. Please. Control. She had learned to value control. Above all else. And so to surrender that control… to have it taken away… Did I see? And it was only once. Would only ever have been once. Please. The perspiration poured down her Nordic face, and still she strained for precision. For truth. It hadn’t just been surrender. No, it had been something else. Something more. Release. That had been it. Yes, release. She had wanted release. Please. Could I understand that? Please.

  “And what of your vows?” I asked her, and laid the polishing cloth aside and raised the shining metal to the light.

  Now we pass the sign for Ravena as the last piano notes fade. In the silence before the next song begins, Miss Lessing tries to meet my eyes. She cannot, so she is looking down into her dress when the twin acoustic guitars begin to play. Peaceful, meandering. Her slender legs shake now, as if she has stepped from cold water. They shake because she recognizes the music again. The song that played as I sat in my car, across the street from the Harlem apartment, listening not only to these gentle Spanish guitars but to the gasps and the cries of Elise Verren.

  Elise, too, was given to understand that her lies would be punished. That the truth might set her free. And she, too, remembered everything. From her I learned of his toys. She described each in detail — its attributes, its purpose. And when I needed no more, I showed her that I, too, had toys. Harder ones.

  A new sound intrudes, and Miss Lessing turns her face toward the backseat. Her purse lies back there, on the floor, and coming from inside it are the tones of a cell phone. Two rings. Three rings. Four. She looks at me desperately, and again toward her purse. Five rings. Six. And now silence. She closes her eyes, and I see tears start down her cheek.

  She is quiet as we drive on. The Spanish guitars build, build, and now finish, leaving us in deep, intimate silence. Lines of perspiration have broken on her forehead. She waits, tensed, for the next song. And as the violin starts up, she gives a soft sigh of shock.

  “No one could know,” she whispers, biting her lip in anguish.

  Kreisler. “Caprice Viennois.”

  She fights to control her breathing. “Please,” she says, but as the magic refrain approaches, I hold up a hand for silence, and this gesture and then the notes themselves make her turn her face into the leather seat. These seventeen pure notes were her notes. She had confided their beauty to no one, not even her fiancé, and yet here they are, chosen by the man who drives her, bound, into the night.

  The notes end, giving way to the body of the piece again, and I engage the turn s
ignal, its steady click cutting through the music for a few seconds as I ease into the right lane and then onto the exit ramp. Miss Lessing looks back, back toward the relative safety of the Thruway, and now ahead through the windshield at the empty, desolate rest stop before us.

  I pull in behind the low brick restrooms to a spot hidden from the rest of the lot but with a view of the exit ramp behind us. I turn off the engine, then turn the ignition key to auxiliary, so that Kreisler can continue to play. I release the trunk latch. “Please,” she whispers, meeting my eyes now, trying to measure my intentions, my limits. I use the button beside me to lower her window. The touch of the night wind on her face makes her gasp and close her eyes and breathe in deeply what must to her be the smell of freedom.

  I step out my door and walk to the trunk. I open the stout black bag and take from it the cloth I used at the Century Motel. It still reeks of chloroform, but I hold it over the mouth of the heavy glass bottle and douse it again, and then, holding it out and away from me, I step to her window.

  “Please,” she says, “You have to —,” but her words are lost as I hold the cloth with one hand over her nose and mouth. She struggles, and now is still. I take the cloth away, and her face falls softly to her breast and rests there. I remove my gloves. I touch her hair. I look down at her bosom, at her dress, at the two inches of smooth leg above her socks. I touch my fingers to her cheek.

  Something in the wind reaches me, and I turn.

  In the distance a set of headlights break the darkness, just beginning their slow approach down the exit ramp. I must work quickly. I open the back door and untie her hands, then ease her into the backseat, as I did at the motel, covering her with the same quilt. I return the soaked cloth and gloves to the black bag, close the trunk, and step to my door. The twin headlights are just now reaching the rest area proper.

  I slide behind the wheel. I pull out from behind the brick restroom and start across the lot, our refrain playing for its final time now. Music from another age — measured, graceful. I accelerate onto the ramp and gain the Thruway again, merging into the well-spaced, northbound lights. In five minutes we will be safely through the toll plaza.

  In fifteen we will be home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The cowbell over the door chimes as I walk into Aquarius, an old-time sixties bar on Seventy-eighth and Broadway. Acoustic guitar pours from speakers mounted in the ceiling corners. Any song that played at Woodstock is on the jukebox in here. I look to the back and see that the wooden booths are all filled, so I take a window seat along the rustic bar. The bartender, his hair pulled into a graying sixties ponytail, makes his way down to me. I order two Guinnesses and watch as he pours them the right way, in stages, taking other orders as the dark ale settles.

  Jeremy will be here any minute with the copy of the Brice file that I took to his place a month ago, the night he prepped me on financial instruments.

  “What’s going on?” he asked me on the phone.

  “Just meet me,” I told him.

  The bartender returns and puts two pints of Guinness in front of me. I watch the heads settle, the foam cascade in layers to the bottom. At the Knicks game, Jeremy said something about the Brice file. He said something about it not being clean. I didn’t want to hear it at the time. The cowbell rings again, and I look up to see him walk in the front door. Even in Armani, and with a sharp leather briefcase under his arm, he still looks like a high-school senior. He takes the barstool beside me and lifts his pint of Guinness to mine.

  “Cheers,” he says, his eyes sparkling the way they used to on the morning of a big exam. He pulls a manila folder out of his briefcase and lays it on the bar. “I wondered when this would pique your interest, Jake. Is he in trouble?”

  “I don’t know. What did you mean at the Garden, Jeremy, when you said his file wasn’t clean?”

  He taps it with the bottom of his pint glass.

  “You’ve read it, right?” he asks.

  “We aren’t at TDX anymore. I do some of my own work now.”

  He puts up a hand. “Just asking.” He pauses. “You remember it?”

  “Brice inherits a pile from his dad. Liquidates everything, except for a… farm upstate somewhere.”

  “A winery. In Albany.”

  “Right. Which he sells a year ago.” Jeremy watches me, nodding intently. He waits for me to go on. “That’s pretty much it,” I say.

  He shakes his head sadly. “You missed it, Jake,” he says softly. “The red flag.” He opens the folder and hands me a sheet of paper. I squint to read it in the low light. It is the deed of sale, transferring ownership of the winery from Andrew Brice to the Iliad Corporation. I look it over, then back at Jeremy.

  “See anything wrong with that?” he asks.

  I examine it again. “The price,” I say finally.

  “What about it?”

  “Too low.”

  “Bingo.” Jeremy takes off his glasses and hooks them into his shirt pocket. “Thirty acres outside Albany,” he says, “With a winery on the grounds. Worth fifty grand when he inherited it in 1970. Thirty years later, he sells it for two hundred.”

  “A third of what he could have gotten. A quarter.”

  Jeremy nods.

  “So he’s a bad businessman,” I say. “Where’s the crime in that?”

  Jeremy sits quietly for a few seconds, as if with a little time it might all become clear to me.

  “You’ve seen his portfolio,” he says finally. “What there is of it. Don’t you think Brice is too cheap to be that bad a businessman?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought so, too. So I did some digging.” Jeremy puts his glasses back on and leafs through the papers in the folder. “Brice sold the winery to the Iliad Corporation. Six months later the Iliad Corporation sold it to Seine, Incorporated. Six months later they sold it.” He holds up copies of the three sales deeds. “It’s amazing what you can find on the Internet.” He lays them back on the bar and looks at me again, expectant.

  “You lost me,” I say.

  Jeremy sips his pint again, then rests it carefully on the bar.

  “Have you ever heard of a nesting scheme, Jake?”

  “No.”

  “It’s named after those Russian nesting dolls. You know the ones — you take the head off, there’s another one just like it inside. You take that one off, there’s another one. Then another one.”

  “Sure.”

  “Here’s how it works. You have a piece of property, right? You sell it to a dummy corporation that you’ve set up. A short time later, that dummy corporation sells it to another dummy corporation. That one then sells it to another. And so on. We studied this in b school. It was all the rage in South America in the eighties among the drug lords. Anyplace they had something big going on, they’d pull a nesting scheme. That way, if the drug lab blew up, they’ve got a piece of paper saying they sold the property years ago.”

  “And the paper trail back to them is a wild goose chase.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, I get it. What’s it have to do with Brice?”

  Jeremy takes off his glasses again and holds them against his leg.

  “I think Brice has a nesting scheme going.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning the companies that bought the winery are dummy corps that he made up. He never really sold it at all, Jake. The winery is still his.”

  I reach for the manila folder, slide it in front of me on the bar, and page through it until I find the piece of paper I’m looking for. “Only one problem with that theory, Jeremy.” I hold up the paper. “Canceled check. Seventy grand to the IRS. And right here, on the memo line: Sales tax on winery.”

  Jeremy doesn’t even look at the canceled check. He looks at me. Patiently, until he sees in my eyes that it’s starting to sink in.

  “That’s why a nesting scheme works, Jake,” he says quietly. “Because you pay the IRS. Who would ever think to question it? Remember
, it’s not money you’re trying to hide. It’s ownership. And you pay to hide it.”

  “That’s why the sale price was so low.”

  He nods. “Brice made it as low as he thought he could get away with.”

  “But he’s out seventy grand,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Jeremy sighs. “I have to admit, the ‘why’ got me.” He looks at me. “I had Pardo swing by the place last week.”

  I laugh. “You bulldog. Pardo?”

  “He’s in Albany half the time, right? Ten minutes away. Well, every nesting scheme I’ve ever seen, it’s because the owner’s up to something on the property. So I had Pardo drive over and take a look.”

  “What did he find?”

  “Nothing. The place is overgrown, abandoned. The winery itself is crumbling.”

  “So there goes your theory.”

  “Down in flames. Still, Jake, it’s strange. Three different companies own the property in one year. What are the chances that none of them would do anything with it? But that’s what happened. Iliad buys it — does nothing. Seine buys it — does nothing. Lessing Winery buys it — again, nothing.”

  I look at him.

  “What winery?” I ask.

  “Lessing Winery. The last dummy corp. The one who owns it now.”

  I pick up the three sales deeds from the bar and shuffle through to the last one. There it is, under buyer:

  LESSING WINERY

  I look for the sale date.

  MAY 1, 1999

  “Jesus.”

  “What is it, Jake?”

  I stare at the deed again. LESSING WINERY. Mimi Lessing. I stare at the type until it starts to blur. In my head I hear again Mr. Stein’s words to Mimi. You made a stronger impression on our legacy than he did on you.

  “Jake?”

  “One second.” I open my wallet and take from behind my license the scrap of paper with Mimi’s phone numbers on it. I take my cell phone from my jacket. I hesitate, then dial her home number. Three rings, and then her machine. I dial her cell phone. It rings. Twice. Three times. Four, five, six. I cut the call.