Unknown Remains

by Peter Leonard

  Jack thought about Vicki the whole way back to Darien, and she was the first thing on his mind when he opened his eyes the next morning, staring at her phone number in marker on his palm, and then at his wife sleeping next to him. He told himself he wasn’t going to see Vicki again, knowing what would happen, holding out for five days before he booked a dinner reservation in Vicki’s section, nervous as he rode in the taxi from Wall Street to SoHo, feeling like a high school kid on his first date.

  He arrived early, sat at the bar and ordered a flute of champagne, watching her moving through the dining room. Seeing things he had missed the first time: her hair tied in a ponytail accentuating high cheekbones and a slim, delicate neck, her high can and long legs in tight-fitting black slacks.

  Jack waited till Vicki went in the kitchen before he made his move, walked to the hostess’s stand, identified himself, and was escorted to a booth. His face was hidden behind the menu as Vicki approached. He brought the menu down and saw the look of surprise on her face.

  “My name’s Vicki,” she said. “I’ll be your server.” Not showing even a hint of recognition.

  “I should’ve called. I think your number’s still on my hand.”

  “What can I get you?”

  “Bring two glasses of champagne and join me?”

  She gave him a half smile now. “That’d go over well.”

  “Meet me later. What time do you get off?”

  “What do you want?”

  “You.” They stared at each other for a few seconds. “Where do you live?”

  She walked to the bar and came back with a glass of champagne, put it on the table, took a business card out of her apron, wrote an address on the back, and handed it to him. “I should be home by one.”

  Jack was standing in front of her building on Sullivan Street, holding a chilled bottle of Dom Pérignon in a paper bag, a Wall Street wino. The neighborhood was alive at twelve fifty, cars driving by and late-night revelers passing him on the sidewalk, the blur of lights, the smell of cigarettes, the sounds of the city around him, Vicki in his head, on his mind as she had been nonstop since he’d met her. Jack wondered why she’d had such an impact on him. He couldn’t explain it. He’d had a few brief affairs over the years, but never felt anything close to this.

  He stepped into the small vestibule and scanned the directory, saw Vicki’s name, pushed the button, and heard her voice: “Who is it?” Her tone serious.

  “It’s Jack.”

  She buzzed him in, and he walked up to the second floor, Vicki standing in the open doorway as he approached.

  “I’m kind of grubby; I’m gonna take a shower, you mind waiting?”

  He followed her into the apartment and closed the door. He put the champagne on a table, moved toward Vicki and took her in his arms and kissed her long and hard, Vicki giving it back to him with the same energy and eagerness, and when they finally paused he said, “I’ve been wanting to do that for five days.”

  “Why’d you wait so long?”

  “I’m married.”

  “Then why’re you here?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “You can’t live without me, huh?”

  “I can’t stop thinking about you, I’ll tell you that.”

  “You seem like you know what you’re doing. You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

  Jack didn’t say anything.

  “How long have you been married?”

  “Twelve years.”

  “Are you happy?”

  He wasn’t happy, but he wasn’t unhappy. They’d settled into a steady routine. It wasn’t boring, but it wasn’t exciting either.

  “What’re you doing here? Go home to your wife.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “No, I want you to stay, but I’m being selfish. I’ve been thinking about you too. I was hoping you’d call or show up, and here you are.” Vicki paused. “Do me a favor. Think about what you’re doing. I’m gonna go take a shower. If you’re not here when I get out, I’ll understand.”

  Jack was in her bed when the bathroom door opened, releasing a cloud of steam, and Vicki appeared, entering the room, untying the sash, pulling the robe apart and letting it slide off her shoulders. Jack watched her naked body moving toward him, breasts bigger than he would’ve guessed, bouncing, a small trimmed landing strip of dark hair between her legs, the only contrast to her olive skin.

  He slid over and she got in next to him, their bodies coming together, Jack feeling her warmth, trying to slow things down, take his time, but it didn’t happen that way.

  Jack woke early and took a taxi back to Darien, in a daze from lack of sleep, reliving the night, feeling guilty as he walked in the house and up to the bedroom and saw Diane asleep on her side of the bed. He showered, dressed, and went downstairs and made coffee. Sat at the counter, staring out the window at the backyard, picturing Vicki slipping out of the robe, coming to the bed and getting in next to him.

  “What time did you get home?” Diane came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek.

  “About thirty minutes ago.”

  “I don’t like sleeping alone.” She paused. “What’s this? You cut yourself.”

  He was so out of it he hadn’t noticed. She pulled a Kleenex out of the box on the counter, turned on the faucet, got it wet and dabbed his cheek. “What’d you do last night?”

  “Took clients out to dinner, Cipriani, and went back to Chuck’s and fell asleep on the couch.”

  “You must be exhausted.”

  “And I might have to do it again tonight.”

  “You poor guy. How about some breakfast?”

  “I’ll get something on the train.” Jack sipped his coffee. “I’ve got a meeting in L.A. next week”—which was true—“Wednesday through Friday.”

  “All you do is work. Am I ever going to see you?” Diane grinned now. “Hey, I’ve got an idea, why don’t I go with you? We could stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel, or somewhere in Santa Monica.”

  “I’m not going to have any time. We’re in strategy sessions all day, and long boring dinners at night. You know how it is,” he said, scheming, thinking about Vicki coming with him.

  Jack took the train to Grand Central Station and a taxi back to the Village. It was eight twenty. Standing outside Vicki’s apartment building, he called his office and talked to Mary.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m going to be late. See if you can move my ten thirty to this afternoon. Anytime after one.”

  Jack was waiting in the tiny vestibule as a young woman in business attire came through the door. He held it for her and smiled. “Morning.” In the blue Zegna suit and striped Zegna tie, he didn’t get a second look.

  Upstairs, Vicki’s door opened a crack and then all the way. Vicki’s hair was disheveled and she was wearing a T-shirt that came just past her hips. She was holding a coffee mug, steam rising from it.

  “Where’d you go?”

  “I had to change.”

  “You look nice.”

  He stepped in the apartment, closed the door, and kissed her, tasting coffee and a hint of toothpaste. She put her arm around Jack’s waist and walked him into the bedroom, placed her mug on the night table, turned, reached for his tie with both hands and undid the knot, and unbuttoned his shirt. “How much time do you have?”

  “How much do you want?”

  “I’ve got to be at work at five.”

  He pulled up the T-shirt, she was naked underneath, teased one of her nipples with his thumb and index finger, and brought the shirt over her head. She unbuckled his belt and pulled down his pants and he stepped out of them, pulled off his boxers and sat on the bed. She knelt in front of him, kissed his thighs and took him in her mouth, brown eyes looking up at him, saying, you’re mine, and he was.

  He awoke at noon, Vicki’s warm, naked body still pressed against him. He slid out of bed and dressed, tied the tie in the bathroom mirror, getting
the knot just right.

  He looked through the doorway at Vicki in bed, hair across her forehead, angling down, covering her right eye. He walked into the bedroom. “What time do you get off?”

  “Eleven, but I’m working tonight. I’m a dealer at an after-hours poker club. I’ve been doing it for about a month, couple nights a week.”

  “Why?”

  “Money, why do you think? I can make three, four hundred in tips—more than I make waitressing.” She sat up naked, pillows propped behind her, sheet to her waist.

  “I thought you were an actress?”

  “If I had to rely on that, I’d starve. I’ve got student loans to pay off, and I have to live.”

  Jack walked over and sat on the side of the bed. “How do you become a poker dealer?”

  “It helps if you’ve been around cards all your life like I have. My dad ran a game in our house. There were always guys stopping by to play five-card and blackjack. He didn’t charge admission, but made money off the rake.”

  “The rake, huh?”

  “It’s a percent of the pot. My mother made sandwiches and served drinks.”

  “How do you get a job as a dealer in an after-hours poker club?”

  “You know someone. A friend of my dad’s is a dealer. He called, said they were looking.”

  “Isn’t it against the law? The place gets raided, you get busted, right?”

  “The club’s owned by Frank DiCicco, ever heard of him?”

  “The Mafia guy?”

  “I’m sure he’s paying the police to leave us alone.”

  “Do you have any other hidden talents you want to tell me about?”

  Vicki smiled. “Come back later, I’ll show you. I can give you a key, you can spend the night. I’ll wake you up with a blow job when I get home.”

  In the morning, Jack called Sculley. “Listen, I’ve got to get out of town. What did you find out?”

  “The prosecutor said he heard there were a couple places in Brooklyn, convenience stores on Flatbush Avenue. Of course, he wanted to know why. I told him I have a friend who was doing research for a novel.”

  “He believed that?”

  “What do you care.”

  “Flatbush and what?”

  Jack got out of the taxi at the corner of Flatbush and Tilden. He walked north several blocks, crossed the street, and walked south back to Tilden and kept going. He came to a small market that had a sign in the window: IDs. Went in, looked around. He felt especially out of place in his J. Crew outfit.

  He waited by the checkout counter for the cashier to ring up a woman’s groceries and pack everything into paper bags. When the woman wheeled her grocery cart away from the counter, the cashier, a black man with short dyed blonde hair and a ring through his lower lip, said, “Look like you lost. What you need?”

  “An ID, driver’s license. I lost mine. And a passport.”

  “Cost you two fifty for the license. Don’t do passports.”

  “Do I pay you?”

  “See anyone else standing here?”

  “First, I want to see the finished product.”

  “Got concerns, take your biz elsewhere.”

  This wasn’t a time to negotiate. Jack took a wad of bills out of the pocket of his new khakis, counted the money, and handed it to the man. The cashier folded the money and put it in his pocket. He came around the counter, said, “Yo, over here,” and escorted Jack to the back of the store, opened a door, and motioned him inside. Jack followed the guy through the stockroom into an office with bare walls that needed paint. There was a teenager sitting at an old metal desk.

  The cashier said, “Yo, Reg, y’all take care of my man here? Needs a license.”

  The kid looked up from his computer, stood and moved behind a makeshift plywood counter that had a camera with a tripod on it. “Yo, want to come over here, gotta take your pitcher.”

  The cashier left the room. Jack stood in front of the camera, and the kid said, “Go back couple inches. Stop. Okay, now look here, don’t move.”

  Jack heard the camera click several times.

  The kid paused, looking in the viewfinder. “I think we got it. Have a seat over there.”

  There was furniture on the other side of the room, a beat-up couch facing a couple beat-up chairs. He sat and paged through yesterday’s New York Post.

  “Need your name and address, what you want it to say.” The kid offered Jack a piece of lined paper and a pen. “Write it down for me, okay?”

  Twenty minutes later, Jack walked out of the market with an authentic New York driver’s license that said he was Richard Alan Keefer, born October 6, 1960, his real birthday. Had brown eyes, was six feet tall, and lived on West 59th Street in Midtown.

  Now he could get out of the city, disappear.

  NINETEEN

  Cobb showed Jack McCann’s picture to the Latina hotel clerk. “He worked at the Trade Center. He’s gone missing. We’ve checked all the hospitals, and now we’re checking Manhattan hotels. I wonder, you seen this fella around the property?”

  “You with the police?”

  “Private investigator hired by the man’s wife, who is extremely distraught about her missing life partner she fears is deceased. Man has some issues upstairs,” he said, pointing at his temple. “Isn’t right in the head.” Cobb had read that many 9/11 survivors had ended up in New York hospitals without identification, and others were dazed, wandering the streets of the city. Many people living close to ground zero had to evacuate their homes. Cobb didn’t think he had to say anything else. There was a lot of emotion surrounding the events of 9/11.

  The hotel clerk said, “I have friends who lost their husbands that day.” She took a breath, eyes getting moist. “We’re not supposed to give out any information on our guests. I will tell you this, I have seen him in the hotel, but he is not registered as Mr. McCann.”

  “Do you happen to have a Charles Bellmore checked in by any chance?”

  The hotel clerk typed on the computer keyboard in front of her and glanced at the monitor. She wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to him.

  “You didn’t get it from me.”

  “Get what?” Cobb said and winked.

  He took the elevator up to the fourth floor and walked down the hall to room 410, put his ear up close to the door, but didn’t hear anything. He knocked and waited, but no one came.

  Duane Cobb sat at a table in the tiny bar with a clear view of the reception desk and elevators. The call log on Sculley’s cell phone had led him to the Michelangelo Hotel. Of the twenty-seven calls listed, only three weren’t identified by a name. According to Cobb’s old girlfriend with the state police, one number was a phone booth on Leonard Street; the second was listed to a Charles Bellmore, lived on Hudson Street, and the third was the hotel he was sitting in.

  Earlier, he’d picked up a map of Manhattan and found the two streets. Leonard and Hudson were in Tribeca, ran into each other. Now he pictured Jack McCann escaping from Tower One, walking to Chuck’s apartment, and ending up staying there. If that was true, why’d Jack use a phone booth to call Sculley?

  Cobb found the phone booth on Leonard Street, and right around the corner was the apartment building. He went in, saw C. Bellmore on the directory, and took the elevator up to the fifth floor.

  Cobb knocked on the door. No one came. He tried the door across the hall. It opened, and a girl with a ring in her nose said, “If you’re looking for Charlie, I haven’t seen him since nine-eleven. I don’t think he made it.”

  “I’m looking for a friend of his, guy named Jack.” Cobb showed her the photograph.

  “He was here, but now he’s gone. I saw him leave with a suitcase.”

  “When was that?”

  “Couple days ago.”

  “How long was he here?”

  “I don’t know for sure, a week, maybe more.”

  Cobb had nursed two Cokes and eaten a hamburger and fries at the Michelangelo bar. Normally easygoin
g, he’d gone into full impatient mode while he waited, the waitress looking at him like, hey, slick, you’ve been holding this table for a couple hours now, ever going to leave? And then a guy in a Yankees cap walked past him in the lobby. Cobb caught him in profile for several seconds. It was the man’s size and the way he moved that told him it was Jack McCann. Cobb took two twenties out of his wallet, left them on the table, and hurried to the elevators.

  Jack was looking at his perfect New York driver’s license, amazed it had been made in the back room of a neighborhood market. He heard a knock on the door. Hotel employees usually announced themselves. He got up and looked through the peephole, didn’t see anyone, and swung the safety bar in place. There was another knock, but whoever was on the other side of the door didn’t want to be seen. He slipped out of his loafers, picked them up, and quietly walked back into the room in his socks.

  He stood at the window, looking down at cars zipping by on the street in front of the hotel. Whoever was in the hall—and he assumed it was Cobb or his partner—knocked again. He sat on the foot of the bed, looking at the door. He got up and went to the phone, pressed the front desk button, and heard a woman’s voice say, “Mr. Bellmore, how can I be of assistance?”

  “There’s a drunk guy in the hall, banging on my door.”

  “Oh dear. I’ll contact security right away.”

  Jack repacked the suitcase and set it on the floor. A few minutes later, there was a loud knock. “Mr. Bellmore, it’s hotel security.”

  Jack opened the door, looking at a heavyset man in a blue blazer.

  “Sir, there’s no one out here. Tell me what happened.”

  “I rode up in the elevator with a guy who was hammered, started giving me a hard time. I don’t remember what it was about. Followed me down the hall to my room. I went in, and he banged on the door a few times, and I called the front desk.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Five eleven, dark hair, I don’t know, maybe a hundred and seventy.”

  “What was he wearing?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Jack went down to the front desk with the security guy, scanned the long, narrow lobby, and saw Duane Cobb on a couch, reading the newspaper, hotel guests moving past him, coming in and going out.