by Tim Green
“Gentlemen,” he says, rubbing his hands together, “we’ve been expecting you. Good ride over?”
When he sees my Ferragamo shoes crusted with snow, he raises his eyebrows, chuckles, and says, “There’s a fire around the corner. If you want to give me your credit card, I’ll get you checked in.”
Bert takes four one-hundred-dollar-bills out of his wallet and extends them toward Russo. Russo looks up at him and his eyes strain for a moment as if he might have seen Bert before.
“We’ll pay cash,” I say.
“That’s not a problem,” Russo says, returning his eyes to me. He blinks under my gaze. “How should I fill out your registration?”
I flip out a business card between my first two fingers and extend it toward him. He takes the card and examines it.
“Ah, Mr. Bell, an attorney,” he says with a nod before angling his head toward Bert. “And your friend?”
“Put them both under my name,” I say. “I want to talk to you after dinner. About some business.”
Russo’s eyebrows pop up and he touches his fingertips to the knit reindeers.
“In private,” I say. I hand my coat and gloves to Bert, then I turn and walk into the great room whose wainscot walls are shimmering in the firelight.
There is a golden oak bar in the corner opposite the fireplace and a pale scrawny woman stares out at me from behind it with big dark eyes. Her hair is the most animated thing about her, long and frizzy. Dark, but shot through with strands of gray. The other guests, snowmobilers in jeans and sweaters, gaze up at my suit, but return their attention to their drinks as soon as they meet my eyes. I have a drink at the bar, answering the hostess-who is also Russo’s wife-in short sentences until she excuses herself to see to the dinner.
Bert and I eat our overcooked pot roast in silence. The dining room overlooks the frozen lake. In the winter moonlight, we can see it and the naked mountains beyond through the frosted panes of glass. The other guests begin their dinner in a drunken uproar, but by the time Mrs. Russo brings around wedges of store-bought pecan pie, our own solemnity seems to have spread. The loudest sound is the silverware striking the old ceramic plates.
Russo comes out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on an apron and casting a worried glance our way before disappearing in the direction of the great room. Bert presses his lips tight and wags his head and we get up and follow our host. Halfway down the hall, there is an open door and we step into a snug office where a fire crackles and Russo sits at a round oak table smoking a Marlboro Light.
“If you don’t mind,” Bert rumbles, “Mr. Bell doesn’t like smoke.”
I stare at Russo until he stabs out the cigarette in a ceramic ashtray, blows the smoke out of the corner of his mouth, and says, “No problem.”
I set my briefcase down on the table and sit opposite Russo. Bert quietly closes the door and remains standing there.
“Does… he want to sit down?” Russo asks.
“We’re fine,” I say, flipping the latches and opening the case so that the cover prevents Russo from seeing the money and the gun. “Mr. Russo, I am here for a client who might want to give you some money.”
“Money? For what?” he says, his eyes darting to Bert and back.
“For some information,” I say. “About a man named Raymond White.”
The blood drains from Russo’s face. In a whisper, he says, “Raymond was a friend.”
“That’s what I understand,” I say. “My client wants to know more about what happened to Mr. White. They were in prison together and Mr. White saved my client’s life. Unfortunately, Mr. White was killed during an attempted escape.”
“He’s dead?”
“Yes,” I say.
“I didn’t hear that,” he says, with his brow furrowed. “I heard they thought he was, but I never heard that he was.”
“And my client would like to do something for the people closest to Mr. White,” I say. “Mr. White mentioned you several times… as a friend.”
“Oh, I was,” he says. “Raymond…”
He shakes his head. “What they did to him… goddamn.”
“But you knew he was framed,” I say. “You knew what Frank Steffano and Bob Rangle did.”
“He told you?”
“He told my client.”
Russo puts his round flat face into his hand.
“I should have said something,” he says. “I know. I was drunk back then. Pretty much all the time. I didn’t really think they meant it, and when I…”
Russo looks up at me with red eyes and says, “I’m telling you the truth. I was scared. I still am. Of them.”
“What about his father?” I ask. “Weren’t you supposed to help him? I read that he died. They turned off his power. My client was told that you were supposed to help Raymond’s father.”
“Oh, I did,” he says. “Are you kidding? At least I tried. That old… he wasn’t easy. He didn’t want my help or anyone’s.”
“How do you know that?”
“There was a girl,” he says. “Lexis. I don’t know how much you know.”
“Go on.”
“She was Raymond’s girl. Then, after everything, she married Frank.”
“The man who-”
“Yeah, well, she had a baby boy,” he says. “I just know she came to me with money. A lot. She asked me to give it to the father, but that old crab-ass…
“He wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t take anything from anyone. Raymond, he was a stubborn son of a bitch and it wasn’t hard to see where it came from.”
“Why are you still afraid?” I ask.
“Do you know who those guys are?” he says, tilting his head just a touch.
“A cop who did well in business,” I say. “A politician who cashed in on Wall Street.”
“Ha, well in business?” he says. “That Frank, he cut people’s nuts off who got in his way. Got involved with the big boys down in Atlantic City. Owns some casinos and hotels and shit.
“Well? He’s gotta be worth a hundred million and Rangle’s probably worth even more. Some fund manager or something and he didn’t take any prisoners either, I can promise you that. Two very big men. Dangerous to your health, even a fancy lawyer like you.”
“And things haven’t gone that good for you,” I say, looking around.
“Yeah, well, it’s not so bad. Little cold in the winter.”
I look into the blaze of the fire and nod slowly.
“Aw, who the fuck am I kidding?” he says. “It sucks. If I don’t have like a convention of snowmobilers every day for the next two months, the fucking bank will probably take this shithole. Maybe do me a favor. I’m thinking about starting a rumor of a ghost. Sometimes that draws people in.”
“You deal drugs too,” I say, locking my eyes onto his.
“Hey, who the fuck are you, coming in here?” he says sitting straight and scowling down his nose, but his eyes flicker nervously up at Bert.
“There was another man,” I say, ignoring the flare in his nostrils. “His name was Dan Parsons.”
“Yeah, makes me look like King fucking Solomon,” he says, fidgeting with his pack of Marlboros.
“Meaning?”
“Got kicked out of his own fucking law firm,” Russo says. “Big fucking deal. Parsons amp; Trout. Dan Parsons this. Dan Parsons that. Oh, they paid him, but they wanted him out. His own firm. Didn’t do a damn thing but file appeals for Raymond White. Went a little batshit, I guess. Then he took every fuckin’ penny he had and got into that dotcom bullshit. Made a fuckin’ fortune, then lost a fuckin’ fortune. Uncle Sam-as in IRS-didn’t get their cut on the upside and last I heard the barbarians were at the gate.”
My eyes are drawn back to the fire. One log sticks up at an angle. On its tip is a fiery brand pulsing orange. I watch until the wood pops and the ember falls and disappears into the ashes beneath the grate.
“How much would it take to get this place into good shape?” I ask. “So you could stop selling po
t to kids?”
“Kids? You should see the shit these little bastards do.”
I stare at him without comment.
“Well,” he says, crossing his arms and frowning all the way into the area where his chin mixes with his neck, “I don’t know. If I had, like… two hundred thousand. That would put me in pretty good shape. That’d pay down my loan to where I could get down to Daytona for a week in February or something. Shit, the fucking winter here never ends.”
“Two hundred thousand dollars?” I say.
“Well, you asked.”
I reach into the briefcase and push the gun aside. I take twenty stacks of hundreds out and set them on the table.
“A gift,” I say, “from Seth Cole. In memory of Raymond White… To turn your life around.”
“Hey,” he says, reaching for the money. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t kid. It’s yours.”
“Do I have to claim it?”
A smile creeps onto my lips and I say, “You can do whatever you want with it. It’s yours. No one has to know where it came from.”
“Hey,” he says, peering around the cover of the case as I close it. “How much is in there?”
“There was a million,” I say, rising from my seat and snapping shut the latches on the case.
“What if I said I needed a million?”
“Then I would have given it to you,” I say. “But I was authorized to give you only what you needed to get your business on track so you could live an honest, decent life. Now hopefully you’ll do that.”
“I could use it all,” he says, his voice rising with the rest of him. “Really. I just didn’t want to be greedy, but I need it.”
“If you didn’t,” I say, “then don’t.”
“What?”
“Be greedy,” I say, and leave.
33
WHEN I AWAKE, it’s still dark. I shower and change. I open the door and Bert-playing guard dog-falls backward into the room. He wakes up in a sputter, grabbing for the handle of the Glock in the waist of his pants.
“It’s me,” I say. “Let’s go.”
The boards creak beneath our feet, otherwise there’s no sound. The wind is gone. Outside, it’s frigid. There is a low ceiling of gray clouds that are lit by the glow in the east. We cross the frozen lake and leave our machines in Byrd’s empty lot, and I tell Bert to drive us to Syracuse. After almost three hours, we stop at Cosmo’s diner near the university for breakfast and I order a broccoli and cheese omelet. It is a taste from another life.
Bert asks if he can get a burger this early and the waitress with an earring in her nose shrugs and says sure. I lean out of our booth and ask the woman at the cash register for a phone book. She smiles and takes it out from under the counter.
Bert hops up to get the book, but when he sits down, he puts it in his lap instead of giving it to me and says, “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“You got all that money now,” he says, “but you don’t do nothing that’s fun.”
“What’s the question?”
“Don’t you want to?”
“Maybe when I finish doing what I have to do,” I say, “I’ll go to Disney World.”
“My grandmother used to say that even a big chief needs to laugh,” he says, “or else it makes his spirit small.”
He’s wearing a crooked smile and extends his beefy fist across the tabletop and says, “Want to wrestle?”
I take his hand and bait him with a chance for a quick win, but I slip out at the last possible second, pin his thumb down, and quickly count to three.
“Best out of three,” he says. “You never win a war with just one battle, and I got the phone book.”
He beats me two in a row, mashing my thumb and rumbling with laughter, then slaps the phone book down on the table.
“Thanks,” I say, rubbing the joint between my first and second digits and opening the book. “My spirit’s now soaring.”
Dan Parsons is listed at a new address in Skaneateles. Elizabeth Street. Nice neighborhood, but nothing like his white Georgian mansion on the lake. There is also an office listed on Fennell Street. After breakfast, we drive out to Skaneateles, where the trees in the village are frosted and the homes and buildings wear fresh caps of snow.
Dan’s office is in the back of the old Trabold’s Garage. Someone has renovated the old stone blacksmith shop and put a restaurant on the ground floor. We park in the municipal lot behind all the stores and buildings. There is a bent old man in a hooded parka and heavy snow boots shoveling the stairs that lead up to the offices.
When we reach the bottom, I notice a tear in the corduroy pants stuck into the top of the man’s boots and say, “Excuse me, we’re looking for Dan Parsons’s office.”
The man stops his shoveling and turns. It’s Dan. His face is pink, either from the cold or embarrassment. Most of his curly white hair is gone. His nose is even more pronounced. His jowls hang limp from his jawbone and the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes sag with disappointment. His smile is gone.
“I’m him,” he says, glancing at Bert and then turning his attention back to the shovel. “If you wait a minute, I’ll finish this. What do you got? A house closing?”
I study the profile of his face for the joke. This is a man who brokered billion-dollar deals. A good house closing can net you five hundred.
“No,” I say. “I need to talk with you about the IRS.”
His head snaps up and his eyes seem to droop even more. He presses his lips tight.
“You don’t look like Feds,” he says.
“We’re not,” I say. “I’m here to help.”
“Well, I don’t have any money to pay you,” he says, “so unless you’re with Legal Aid, you might as well not waste your time. When’s the last time you saw a lawyer who had to shovel the steps to help pay his rent?”
“Can we go inside?” I ask.
Dan shakes his head and slowly mounts the stairs. He grips the railing tight through his ski gloves to steady himself. He kicks some of the snow off the landing and we go inside and down a narrow hall. His office isn’t much more than a closet with a desk and a phone. There are two chairs opposite the desk that are wedged between it and the wall. On the wall are pictures of Dan and his wife-fading, but still pretty and trim-and their son, who is now a good-looking young man.
After Dan hangs his parka on the back of the door, I see that his husky shoulders have gone round and his potbelly has become a barrel of flab. He wears an old herringbone blazer that’s too tight around his middle, and beneath the wrapping of his plaid scarf is a yellow paisley tie.
He sits down with a sigh and motions to the chairs. Bert and I sit.
“What do you want?” Dan asks.
“I said I’m here to help.”
“How’s that?”
“How much do you owe the government?” I ask.
Dan’s knuckles are swollen and bent. He rests his forearms on the edge of his desk and raps the knuckles gently on the edges of his blotter. Outside I hear the muted banging of a garbage truck emptying a Dumpster.
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m sorry,” I say, taking a card from my pocket and pushing it across the desk. “My name is Arthur Bell. I’m an attorney and I have a client who wants to help you.”
“Bob Rangle?” he says.
I have to swallow before I say, “Rangle?”
Dan shrugs and says, “No, I didn’t figure. He was the congressman. I put that son of a bitch in office and I went down to New York a few weeks ago to ask for a loan. He runs a fund now.”
“No,” I say, “I have nothing to do with him. My client is Seth Cole. He was friends with Raymond White.”
“What?” he says. His eyes narrow.
“My client was in prison for a time,” I say. “Raymond White saved his life. When he heard that Raymond died, my client wanted to do something for the people who were good to
him.”
“Raymond died?”
I nod.
Dan’s eyes lose their focus and he looks down at his hands. They are clenched tight like his teeth.
“No one told me,” he says, as if speaking to himself.
“No,” I say, “they probably wouldn’t. You weren’t actually related to him.”
His eyes snap up at me. He scowls and says, “He was-”
Then he drops his eyes again and says, “It doesn’t matter, does it?”
“My client wants to pay off your debt,” I say. “He thinks Raymond would have wanted that.”
“I’ve got this dream, you know,” Dan says as he massages the fingers of one hand with the other. “I got this dream of starting it over. Parsons amp; Parsons. My son’s gonna be a lawyer, you know?
“Mister,” Dan says, looking up again. “I appreciate your coming here. But I owe them thirteen million dollars… I’ve got an insurance policy for ten, and to be honest I’ve been thinking about taking a fast drive, maybe hitting a bridge. Problem is, my wife would still owe the bastards three more and you better believe these people don’t negotiate.”
“Mr. Parsons,” I say. “Seth Cole has authorized me to pay the IRS in full.”
“Hey. Get the hell out of here,” he says, shaking his head in disgust. He rises up out of his chair and draws himself up nearly straight. “Who sent you?”
“Believe me,” I say. “Thirteen million dollars to Seth Cole isn’t what it is to most people. Who’s your bank?”
He stares at me for a long time. I hold his gaze, fearful that he will see me.
Finally, he wags his head and says, “Next door.”
“Let’s go,” I say. “You’ll see.”
Together we go down the back stairs and into the single-story bank next door. I ask for a wire number and I call Bob Mancini, my contact at Goldman Sachs. The girls at the bank are twittering behind the counter and the manager comes out from his office as well.