by Brad Parks
Finally, I gave up. Thinking too hard was a dangerous thing in my line of work. I flipped on one of the local all-news radio stations, which had a mention about Barry McAlister’s homicide at the top of the hour. It referred to Barry as “Newark real estate mogul Barry McAlister.” I thought about the wrinkled, chain-smoking, broken old man I had visited in his unfashionably decorated West Orange home and shook my head. Some mogul.
Traffic came next, and I heard about the tractor trailer that had jackknifed and then spilled its contents all across I-280, creating an eastbound delay of eight miles—and growing—and rubbernecking delays westbound. There’s a kind of schadenfreude you get from listening to New York-area traffic. You know there’s going to be traffic somewhere on a Friday afternoon, and you get this perverse joy knowing it’s hitting someone else. I was heading to Millburn on I-78, meaning the tractor trailer wasn’t my problem.
I pulled into the parking garage with Tommy just behind me. Together, we walked past the lobby security guard, who was actually asleep.
“Do you think we should we wake him up?” Tommy asked.
“No, he looks peaceful.”
“Hard to believe Vaughn was having a problem with break-ins with this kind of crackerjack security staff.”
“Yeah,” I confirmed. “DeNunzio Protective Services—on the job!”
We were still snickering as we reached the second floor, but the mood changed the instant I opened the office door. Marcia Fenstermacher was already inside. She was wearing business-casual clothing and a dour countenance that could have been due to at least a dozen different factors. But it seemed to be mostly the result of whatever she was looking at on her computer screen.
I introduced Tommy, then asked, “You look troubled. What’s the matter?”
“It’s this,” she said, pointing to the screen. “It’s … Something’s very wrong.”
“What?”
“Well, this P-and-L statement is more than a month old, because we only have to file them quarterly,” she said, picking up a spreadsheet printout that was on her desk. “So I wanted to get you the most up-to-date number on what’s in the reserve account.”
“Yeah, and?”
“Look at the number on the bottom right of the last page,” she said, handing me the printout.
I flipped to the end of the document and looked at the all-important bottom line. It listed the total reserves as $8,054,772.19—otherwise known as eight million bucks.
“Okay. What’s the problem?” I said.
“Now look at this,” she said.
She turned the screen toward me and I peered at it. It was the summary page for McAlister Properties, and there were several accounts listed. The largest was $35,483.22—which, while I’m not a Fields medalist, is substantially short of eight million bucks.
“Are you sure this is the same account as the one listed on the P-and-L statement?”
“Absolutely. Look at the account numbers.”
I looked from page to screen, then from screen to page. “Yeah,” I confirmed. “There’s definitely a problem.”
“I think I’m going to have that nervous breakdown right now,” she said, and I didn’t doubt it. Even her immutable hair had been slightly mussed by her pulling at it.
“It couldn’t have just disappeared,” Tommy said. “Have you looked at the recent transactions?”
“Right, of course. I’m sorry, I’m just … I can’t think straight.”
She clicked on the appropriate button and, sure enough, there was an eight-million-dollar wire transfer that had been completed at 4:38 P.M. on Thursday.
Marcia was starting to hyperventilate and was stammering out her questions. “But this isn’t … Who could have … Where…”
“Why don’t you call the bank and ask them what’s up?” Tommy said gently, casting a wary glance in my direction that I’m sure Marcia didn’t catch.
“Right, of course,” she said. “I’m sorry. Come on, Marcia, pull it together.”
She hit the speakerphone button on her desk and dialed the bank’s 800 number. She went through the prompts until she got a real human being, who identified himself as, “This is Robert in customer relations.” He went through the steps of verifying Marcia’s identity.
“I see you’re listed on the account as having administrative privileges,” Robert said. “What can I do for you today Ms. Fenstermacher?”
“There was a large amount of money transferred out of the account yesterday afternoon,” she said, obviously making an effort at keeping her voice controlled. “Can you tell me who authorized it?”
“Yes, ma’am, let me check that,” Robert said, and we heard him typing on his computer. “That transfer was made in person at our branch office on Broad Street in Newark. It was authorized by a Mr. McAlister.”
“That’s impossible,” Marcia burst. “Vaughn McAlister wasn’t even alive yesterday afternoon.”
“Not Vaughn McAlister,” Robert informed her. “This order was put in by a Barry McAlister.”
Barry McAlister. So one of the last things he did before being shot, stabbed, and burned was to give away the family fortune.
“Can you tell me where the money was wired to?” Marcia asked.
“Yes, ma’am. It was sent into the escrow account of Willard R. Imperiale, Esquire.”
“Him?” Marcia said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“But that was never … Is there any way you can, I don’t know, cancel the order?”
“No, ma’am,” Robert said, and had nothing more to add.
There wasn’t, of course. Banks didn’t give you backsies. The money was gone. Maybe she could recover it eventually, but that would require time, lawyers, and figuring out why Barry had given it away in the first place. I watched as this reality landed on Marcia Fenstermacher’s face.
Finally, Robert asked, “Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
“No … no, thank you.”
Marcia ended the call and for a moment there was more silence. Marcia was seated at her desk. Tommy and I were standing on the other side of it.
“Why would Barry fork over eight million dollars to that scumbag Will Imperiale?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m betting the authorities in West Orange will be very interested in asking him that question.”
“Oh, believe me, I’m going to ask him first,” Marcia said. She looked at her watch, then said, “He’s due here in less than five minutes.”
As if on cue, I heard the door open behind me. I turned to see two people, neither of whom I was exactly expecting under the circumstances.
One was a woman whose cheekbones I recognized instantly, from having gazed at her Facebook photos. She was brunette now, not a blonde, but there was no question in my mind she was Lisa Denbigh.
The other was a man I couldn’t quite place, but mostly because he was wearing a hat and dark glasses. Then he removed them and I realized he was someone I had seen before as well. His hair was different, too—he had dyed all the gray out of it. But there was no doubt about his identity, either.
It was Barry McAlister.
* * *
In retrospect, I should have given him the bum’s rush: just lowered my shoulder, wrapped my arms around him, and kept him down there for as long as it took. I’m not the brawniest guy alive—or the bravest—but I’m pretty sure I could take out a chain-smoking septuagenarian.
Except, as he closed the door behind him and pressed the lock button, I was still trying to process it. Barry McAlister was alive? As in, not dead? Not shot, stabbed, and burned?
By the time I had put this together, Barry had already reached into the black duffel bag he was carrying and pulled out a gun—also black—and, in doing so, had taken control of the situation.
“Barry!?” Marcia said. “Where’s Mr. Imperiale?”
“Mr. Imperiale is no longer with us,” he informed her. “Would you like to meet the ‘secretary’ wh
o set up this little meeting?”
Lisa just gave Marcia a sarcastic little wave.
Marcia was still trying to catch up to what was going on, stammering, “But what are you—”
“Shut up,” Barry cut her off, pointing the gun at her. “I didn’t expect you’d have so much company. You were supposed to be alone. Is anyone else here?”
Marcia didn’t answer. Without taking his eyes off any of the three of us—or his aim off Marcia—he slipped the bag off his shoulder and set it down. His left hand disappeared inside for a moment and produced yet another gun.
“Here,” he said, extending the second gun to Lisa. “Take this. Check the rest of the office and make sure there’s no one else here.”
Lisa accepted the gun. Other than her obviously augmented breasts, she was a small, slender woman—having been underfed since puberty—and the gun looked too big for her hand. Alas, it wasn’t so large that her fingers couldn’t make it to the trigger.
She entered the door to my left, the side that wasn’t Vaughn’s old office. Barry kept his gun pointed in our direction.
“You look a lot less dead than you’re supposed to be,” I said.
“Shut up, wiseass,” he said. “Or do you want some of this?”
He cocked the gun and trained it in the direction of my mouth, which I promptly closed. I thought back to what Brodie had told me about Barry chasing muggers away with a shotgun back in the seventies. I decided not to test if his proficiency with firearms had stayed with him in his old age.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he said. “Okay, first things first, I want to see everyone’s hands. Let’s get ’em up.”
Tommy, Marcia, and I complied.
“Good,” Barry said. “Oh, and let’s be clear, let’s keep it nice and quiet, too. I don’t want anyone doing any yelling or, trust me, I will make this hurt.”
None of us responded. He collected our cell phones next, going one at a time, not giving us any opening to make a move.
“There’s no one here,” Lisa said, having returned from her office tour.
“Okay, very good,” Barry said. “Great job, sweetheart.”
She smiled at him in a sickly sweet way, and it struck me: oh, lord, they had been sleeping together. A little part of me felt like hurling, and not because their tryst strained the acceptable limits of a May-December fling. Lisa had once been Barry’s daughter-in-law. Thirty-year age difference aside, that’s just nasty.
Marcia was obviously on the same wavelength as I was, because she spit out, “Sweetheart? Don’t tell me you two are…”
“Zip it, bitch,” Lisa said with her Georgia twang. “After what you did to Vaughn and me, I’ve heard enough out of you for an entire lifetime.”
“After what I did?” Marcia fired back. “Maybe if you had actually—”
“Enough!” Barry roared. “Marcia, I keep telling you, shut the hell up. I don’t want to hear anything else out of you. Now, Lisa…”
“Sorry, baby…” she started.
“Forget it. Just stay focused, honey,” he said. “Don’t make it emotional. Let’s take care of business first.”
“Yeah, this is no time for a lover’s quarrel,” Tommy said.
“That’s enough out of you,” Barry said, pointing his gun at Tommy. “Unless you want the last thing you see in this world to be a bullet heading toward your face. And you”—he swiveled the gun at me—“let’s keep those hands up.”
I lifted my hands a little higher.
“Now, first things first,” Barry continued. “Lisa, hand me your gun back, sweetheart.”
Lisa presented her gun to Barry, handle first, barrel pointed away. He closed his hand around it, and was now pointing both of them at us.
“Great,” he said. “Now I need you to go in the bag. I got a hammer and a cloth bag in there.”
“Okay,” she said, withdrawing the requested items. “Now what?”
“I want you to put the phones in that bag and start busting them up,” Barry said. “Bust ’em up good.”
“Oh … okay,” she said, clearly a little confused.
“I’ve read stories about some of these things having tracking devices,” he said, answering the question she hadn’t even asked. “Nobody needs to know where these three are.”
There was a crunching of plastic as Lisa started swinging the hammer at the bag. I glanced at Tommy and Marcia. She looked calm, more calm than I’d expected she would be; he looked stricken by what was happening to his phone. I might have felt the same way, but I sensed we had even bigger problems ahead.
I couldn’t figure out why Barry had asked Lisa to put the phones in the bag before crushing them. The only thing that made sense was that he planned not only to make our cell phones disappear, he planned to make us disappear. And when he did that, he didn’t want McAlister Properties’ employees to find little smashed-up bits of our phones on the carpet.
It also told me something else: whatever he was planning on doing to us, he wasn’t planning on doing it here. We were going to be taken somewhere else. My suspicion was confirmed when Lisa announced she was done with her demolition job.
“Excellent. Now let’s tie them up,” Barry said, pulling an industrial-size roll of duct tape from his duffel bag and handing Lisa both guns. “Let’s do Mr. Ross here first.” He herded me over to the corner of the room.
“Take a seat please,” he said to me. “Lisa honey, stand right over there. If he tries anything funny, put a couple shots in his ear. We can clean up the mess later.”
* * *
It was kind of surreal, watching Barry duct-tape various parts of my body together. Lisa kept a wary eye on Tommy and Marcia. As Barry went to work, unwinding a not-inconsiderable length of duct tape on my ankles and then my knees, I let my brain go to work on what, exactly, was going on.
The first, most obvious, thing was that Barry had faked his own death. He wanted to be able to disappear with no one looking for him. And, what’s more, he had apparently succeeded.
“The blood,” I said. “The crime scene guys said the blood was yours. They DNA tested it and everything.”
He said nothing.
“The West Orange police chief said there was tons of it—enough to make it look like your throat had been slashed,” I said. “How is that possible, unless…”
The answer hit me: “You were banking your own blood. You got yourself a big enough stockpile and then spread it around. You’ve been planning this for a while.”
Barry allowed himself a chuckle. “Very good, smart guy,” he said.
“You’re sick,” Marcia said.
“Can I shoot her?” Lisa asked.
“No, honey,” Barry said, patiently. “Not now.”
As he started in on my hands and wrists, I kept trying to put things together. Okay, so Barry had successfully played dead. And he must have found a way to take that eight million dollars with him. There seemed to be little point in disappearing broke.
So that’s why he had killed Vaughn—or, rather, had Vaughn killed. The two white guys in the black leather coats that Kevin Mack had seen disposing of Vaughn’s body, the two guys I had assumed were DeNunzio henchmen, were, in fact, hired by Barry.
But why had he also killed Will Imperiale? I could only presume that’s what Barry meant when he’d said Mr. Imperiale was no longer with us. It stood to reason the burned body in Barry’s house was Imperiale’s.
For that matter, why involve Imperiale at all? If you needed a body to burn in a fire, you wouldn’t grab someone like Imperiale. Sure, he was about the same height—that could help fool the medical examiner, who wouldn’t test the DNA of a corpse that everyone assumed was Barry’s. But Imperiale was a high-profile personal injury lawyer. Why not grab someone more anonymous who happened to share roughly the same bone structure?
It didn’t make sense. Adding a lawyer into the mix would just seem to complicate things. If you’re going to steal eight million dollars, filtering it throug
h a lawyer’s escrow account wouldn’t seem to give you any advantage I could think of. There had to be easier ways.
Barry finished with me and turned to Tommy next, making him sit in the corner next to me. I surreptitiously tested my duct-tape bonds and couldn’t make them budge. He had done a thorough job: my legs up to my thighs, my arms up to elbows, then my forearms to my thighs. It didn’t exactly leave a lot of wiggle room. And you’d be surprised how strong multiple layers of duct tape can be.
I looked outside at the street traffic one story below me—people in their cars and on foot, hurrying home on a Friday afternoon. I could see them, but of course they couldn’t see in through the tinted windows. A hostage scene was playing out just a few feet from them, but they were completely unaware of it.
“You know I’m due at my mother’s house at four thirty,” I said. “If I don’t show up, she’s going to start to worry. And she’s a champion worrier. I once saw her worry a coat of paint off the walls.”
Barry didn’t pause in his task to comment on this—not even to tell me to shut up. He was too intent on getting Tommy trussed up in the same fashion as he had done me.
When he was through, he turned to Marcia and said, “All right, before I take care of you, you’ve got a little paperwork to do for me, Miss Fenstermacher.”
“What are you talking about?” she said, proudly. “I’m not doing anything for you.”
Barry grabbed a gun from Lisa, walked deliberately up to Marcia, who was still seated at her desk, and roughly grabbed her hair. He pressed the gun to her lips, grinding the barrel into her teeth.
Marcia turned her head so that the gun was pressing into her cheek instead. “Oww, stop that!” she protested. “That really hurts.”
“Let’s be very clear about something here,” Barry said in a low, deadly serious voice. “You’re going to do what I tell you to do. You’re going to sign what I tell you to sign. And you’re going to do it without complaining.”