He looked at me sideways. “No, I don’t know.”
“Yeah, well I know. Look, I’m not worried about that. That’s none of my business. But here’s the thing. He’s hurt from the accident. He can’t move well. So maybe he takes a little drugs. Maybe he takes a little too much drugs, you know. He ought to get out of there and get help, but he’s hurt, he can’t move. So he just lies there. He can’t answer the door. He can’t answer the phone. He’s in trouble, but there’s nothing he can do.”
The super was staring at me. “So?”
“So he dies. I don’t get his signature, so the lawyer can’t sue. The lawyer can’t sue, so I don’t get paid.”
“Too bad.”
“And too bad for you. The cops wanna know what kind of a super you are, you let people take drugs and O.D. in their rooms, and lie around dead for days, and you don’t do nothing about it.”
“Not my fault, some guy takes drugs.”
“Yeah, but if you don’t help me, then I gotta go to the cops, tell ’em I think some guy O.D.’d and the super won’t do nothing. Then they come here and hassle you. If the guy’s dead, they hassle you a lot more.”
The super had ceased to be my friend. “Why the hell you wanna do that?”
“I don’t wanna do that. I’d hate like hell to do that. I just wanna get paid.”
“So what you want?”
“You’re the super. You got keys to all the rooms here. You go upstairs with me, we knock on his door. We get no answer, you open the door and we see if our friend is lying there and can’t get up.”
“You kidding?”
“Hey, I’m not a cop. I don’t give a shit if there’s a bunch of drugs up there. That’s none of my business. I just want to get paid.”
“How I know you’re not a cop?”
I had him. At least, I was pretty sure I had him. The thing is, I had never bribed anyone before, and I was somewhat hesitant about doing it, but that’s where I figured we’d gotten to. The way I figured it, the super didn’t care if I was a cop or not, or if Gutierrez was dead or not, or whether he opened the guy’s door or not. All it came down to now, assuming I’d read the situation correctly, was how much money it was going to take to get this basically lazy guy who just wanted to go back and watch TV to climb four flights of stairs in this stifling heat. If, of course, I was right.
What made me hesitant, of course, was what if I was wrong? What if I pulled out a wad of money and, instead of taking it, the guy got offended and froze up on me? In that case I would feel like an asshole, and I wouldn’t know what to do next, which is a hell of a position for a private detective to find himself in.
I needn’t have worried. My assessment was dead on. I opened the bidding at five dollars and closed it out at ten.
Guillermo Gutierrez’s apartment was about what I expected. A dirty, ill-furnished, one-room apartment with a kitchen alcove and a small bath. I couldn’t help wondering why a guy who obviously moved huge quantities of drugs for exorbitant amounts of money would choose to live in squalor like this. The answer, of course, was obvious. He was investing all of his capital in his arm.
I couldn’t search the apartment with the super there watching me like a hawk, so I didn’t find anything interesting, but I hadn’t expected to anyway. I just wanted a little confirmation. I found it on the floor just outside the door into the bathroom. A faint reddish tinge on the floorboards, which were cleaner there than anywhere else in the room, as if someone had made an effort to mop something up. I didn’t point it out to the super, nor did I suggest to him that he notify the police that the occupant of the apartment was, to the best of his knowledge, missing. But I would have given long odds right then and there that, whatever information Rosa might have notwithstanding, I wasn’t going to be seeing Guillermo Gutierrez in the near future.
7.
THE SECURITY AT ALBRECT’S UPPER East Side apartment house was a trifle better than it had been at Gutierrez’s Lower East Side one. I’d known I was in trouble the minute I walked into the lobby. A uniformed doorman was stopping all visitors and calling upstairs on a house phone to get the tenant’s permission before letting anyone up. There was actually a line ahead of me. I watched a young man receive approval to visit a Lisa Hartman, and a middle-aged woman be confirmed as a suitable caller for a Mrs. Ruth Goldstein. I jotted the names in my notebook and left.
I went outside and did some serious thinking. This was not going to be easy. First I had to get past the doorman, then I had to get past the door. My talents did not seem particularly suited to either task. I racked my brain for an answer. I didn’t get an answer, but at least I got an idea.
I went to a pay phone on the corner and called Leroy Stanhope Williams. For me, this was a radical departure. You see, Leroy was one of Richard’s clients. I had never called any of Richard’s clients before on anything other than Richard’s business and, quite frankly, I was sure I’d never want to. You see, it is an occupational hazard of my profession that one soon becomes contemptuous of the very people one is supposed to be helping. Often, I have to stifle the urge to say, “Madam, you are fat, lazy, stupid, and incompetent. You fell down because you are overweight and clumsy and too dumb to look where you are going. And now you want to sue someone for something that is obviously your own fault.” I never actually say that, but I often have the urge.
Leroy Stanhope Williams was an exception.
The first hint I got that Leroy Stanhope Williams was something special, aside from the three names, was that his address in Queens was listed as a private house. Of course, that could have meant nothing. Many clients listed their address as a private house, but when I got there it turned out they had an apartment in the basement they illegally rented from the owner, whom they wanted to sue for not fixing the cellar stars. Or, it turned out they actually did live in a private house, but the front door was a sheet of plywood, if you leaned against the walls the ceiling would come down, and the only reason the place hadn’t been condemned was that no one in his right mind would have wanted the property.
Leroy’s house was different. It was a three-story frame house, newly painted white with blue trim, on a small but immaculately kept lawn with actual grass and a flower garden. A smooth, clean concrete walk led up to a small front porch, framed by windows with ornate, decorative blue grillwork.
As I went up the steps to the front porch, the first thing I noticed was that there were three locks on the front door, the regular lock and two deadbolts. Then I noticed that the grillwork on the windows, though ornate, was also functional. It was, in effect, bars, and all the windows had them, even those on the upper floors. Great. Some doddering 80-year-old man, hiding from the world. The door would undoubtedly open two inches on a safety chain, and I’d have to slide my I.D. through before I got in.
I rang the doorbell. As I did so, I noticed the eye of an infra-red beam set into the doorjamb. That caught me up short. I looked at the windows again, and discovered a thin wire embedded in the glass running around the perimeter of the panes. This was something else. I could understand some paranoid old fart investing in a couple of deadbolts, but an electronic burglar alarm system?
I was still thinking about that when the front door swung open, not on a safety chain, to reveal a black man on crutches, standing in the shadows of the front hallway.
I inquired, “Leroy Stanhope Williams?” and he nodded. “Stanley Hastings from the lawyer’s office.” He nodded again and ushered me in with a gesture, momentarily holding that crutch with only his armpit. I walked by him through the dimly-lit foyer and into the living room, where I stood and gawked.
I must admit, I don’t know anything about art; in fact, I’m not even sure what I like, but I must say I was impressed. I think that even without having seen the security system, I would have known that the paintings on the walls were originals, the statues genuine, the antique pottery authentic, the gold pieces solid not plate, and the jewelry real.
While I looked arou
nd, Leroy lowered himself into a wheelchair, and raised his broken right leg up onto the support in front of him. When he was settled, he turned to me, raised his hand in one flowing gesture to the couch, and said, “Please be seated.”
A character study in three words and a gesture. The gesture was theatrical or regal, take your pick, but it was certainly grand. The voice was resonant, cultured, and refined. It had an almost British hint to it, which could have merely meant he was a foreigner from some British province, but somehow. I didn’t think so. Something about him said New York.
I murmured, “Thank you, Mr. Williams,” and sat. Usually, I identify my clients by name as I come in the door to make sure I’m talking to the right person, and after that just call them “you,” but I just naturally called him Mr. Williams. In fact, it took an effort not to call him “Sir.”
And he was not old, that is to say he was younger than me, perhaps somewhere around thirty-five. It’s hard to guess a man’s height and weight when he’s sitting in a wheelchair, but I guessed he was about my build, not too tall, not too short, not too fat, not too thin, just about average. His skin was chocolate brown. Bemused eyes, and a high, sloping forehead gave him an intellectual look which, coupled with his pattern of speech, made him remind me of a young Roscoe Lee Brown.
I pulled myself together, took out my papers, and got down to the task. Leroy had been hit by a car. It turned out he had all the necessary information and more, including the name and address of the driver, license and license-plate numbers, driver’s insurance carrier, names and precinct number of the officers on the scene, and even the names and addresses of two witnesses. How he managed to get all that while lying in the street with a broken leg is beyond me, but he had it and, as I would have expected, he supplied it all succinctly and precisely.
Things were going so well I was quite surprised when we bogged down on one of the simpler parts of the form. When I asked Leroy what his occupation was there was a long pause. I would not have been surprised to hear “Classics professor from Columbia University” or “New York Supreme Court judge,” but what Leroy actually said was “electrician.”
I believe I gave him a look before writing “electrician” in the proper blank. Then I moved on to the question that I always hate to ask people, but which is a necessary part of the form.
“And how much do you make as an electrician?” I asked him.
This time Leroy gave me a look. “Why do you have to know that?”
“For the suit,” I told him. “We want to show an earnings loss. You’re losing a lot of work with that broken leg. We can get the money back for you.”
“I see,” he said. He didn’t look happy about it.
There was another long pause, during which Leroy looked as if he were wrestling with something and trying to make up his mind.
At length he sighed. “All right. Look. You’re a lawyer,” he said, making the usual assumption which, as usual, I did not jump in to correct. “I have to be honest with you, right?”
“It’s not a bad idea,” I told him.
“All right, then. I am not really an electrician.”
“Oh? What are you?”
“I’m a thief.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m a thief.”
“A thief?”
“Yes.” Leroy leaned back in his wheelchair and cocked his head in my direction. “And you see I have a terrible earnings loss because, now, if I were to steal something, I would not be able to get away.”
I looked at him closely. He was smiling, and there was a twinkle in his eye, and for a moment I thought I knew what it meant. He was putting me on. His eyes were twinkling because he was not a thief, because everything he was telling me was a complete fabrication. I immediately realized this assumption was wrong. He was not putting me on. His eyes were twinkling because he was a thief, because everything he was telling me was absolutely true. And suddenly I realized I was talking to a person one usually meets only in works of fiction, a gentleman jewel thief, a modern day Arsène Lupin, operating out of Flushing, Queens.
I pursed my lips, nodded my head thoughtfully, and dead-panned, “That must be a considerable inconvenience,” and he had the good grace to smile.
After that we had a grand old time. I countered his I’m-not-really-an-electrician-I’m-a-thief confession with my I’m-not-really-a-lawyer-I’m-a-detective confession, and we spent the afternoon talking shop.
I found out how Leroy had come to call Richard, which was interesting, since Richard’s clientele were not often in his class. It happened that Leroy’s criminal attorney was the lawyer to whom Richard, who did no criminal work of his own, often referred clients. So when Leroy had broken his leg, the attorney, who handled no litigation, had reciprocated by sending him to us.
Leroy told me something about his background. He was born and raised in Harlem, and grew up on the streets. He had been arrested several times as a teenager, and had eventually been sent to a reform school in upstate New York. The school had been Leroy’s salvation. He had done so well there that when he emerged he got a scholarship to N.Y.U. He majored in fine arts, and by the time he graduated he had developed a taste for the finer things in life which, unfortunately, he was unable to afford. And so he had taken his street education and college education, and managed to combine his talents.
In the end, I crossed out the word “electrician” on the fact sheet and wrote in the word “thief,” assuring Leroy it would make no difference and, sure enough, Richard took the case.
It took Leroy less than thirty seconds to open the door to Albrect’s apartment. That was the easy part. The hard part was getting the two of us into the building, and I must say it encouraged me considerably to find out I was able to do it.
Here’s what I did.
After I called Leroy, I hunted up a candy store, bought a Whitman Sampler, and had it gift-wrapped. Then I went back to the office, found a summons I'd been given to serve, and went out and had it Xeroxed. I bought a bottle of Liquid Paper, the red one “for copies,” and whited out the name and address of the defendant on the summons. Then I Xeroxed it again. I took the new copy and typed in the name “Ruth Goldstein” and the address of Albrect’s apartment house. Then I Xeroxed that. The end result was a pretty official-looking summons.
I met Leroy in front of Albrect’s building and gave him the Whitman Sampler. Leroy had dressed down for the occasion, in jeans and a T-shirt. The jeans looked a bit new for the part, and I couldn’t help wondering if they were something Leroy had had in some drawer but had never worn, or whether he had rushed out and bought them after I called.
I went in first. The lobby was empty, and the doorman gave me his full attention. After all, I was wearing my suit.
“Yes?” he said.
“I have a delivery for Ruth Goldstein.”
“Your name, sir.”
“Stanley Hastings.”
The doorman called up on the house phone and relayed the information. “She doesn’t know you,” he said.
I raised my voice. “I’m an officer of the Supreme Court of the State of New York. I have a summons for Mrs. Goldstein.”
The house phone immediately began making squawking noises. It was still squawking when Leroy strolled in with the Whitman Sampler.
“Package for Lisa Hartman,” he announced.
The doorman, still listening on the phone, said, “I’ll take it,” and held out his hand.
“Hell you will, bro,” Leroy said. “I ain’t gettin’ done outa ma tip.”
To be honest, Leroy’s attempt at talking jive left a little bit to be desired, but I wasn’t about to complain, and the doorman wasn’t about to notice.
The doorman was overmatched. Leroy and the Supreme Court might not have intimidated him, but Mrs. Goldstein sure did. The beleaguered man waved Leroy on up, so he could give her his full attention.
After considerable negotiation, I went up, too. I’d known I would. In the long run, Mrs. Gold
stein just had to find out what it was all about.
I hadn’t stuck around while she found out what it was all about, since I knew damn well that as soon as she turned to page two she was going to discover she was being sued for owning a building on Patchen Avenue in Brooklyn where someone had fallen down and broken their wrist due to a faulty riser on the stair. I had signed that case myself, and from what I remembered of the neighborhood, I was sure Mrs. Goldstein wouldn’t have been caught dead anywhere near Patchen Avenue in Brooklyn, so I made damn sure I was out of sight around the corner of the corridor before she got to the second page.
Moments later, I joined Leroy in front of Albrect’s door, Leroy clicked the lock back, stood up, smiled, and said, “There you are.”
“I really appreciate this, Leroy,” I told him. “Could I compensate you for helping me out?”
Leroy held up his hand, palm out. “That will not be necessary,” he said. He fished in his pocket and produced a dollar bill. “Miss Hartman has already taken care of it.”
We shook hands and Leroy took his leave, commenting that it would be just his luck to be apprehended breaking and entering when he had no intention to steal. He was heading for the elevator as I let myself into the apartment.
Albrect’s apartment was a large one-bedroom that probably set him back $1200 a month. I proceeded to take it apart. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for; I just knew it would be something Albrect didn’t want anybody to find. I tried to put myself in Albrect’s shoes and imagine what I would do if I were Albrect, but that made me nauseous. Instead I just tried to figure out what Albrect might do if he had something to hide. The inside of the mattress or the pages of a book would probably seem like nifty hiding places to him. I pulled out the mattress and searched it, but there were no incisions. I started in on the books. I was halfway through the second shelf when I found it. It was pressed between the pages of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” but I tried to attach no undue significance to that. I mean, hell, I like to pull the old pud every now and then myself, even after ten years of marriage. So I concentrated on what I’d found.
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