Known to Evil
Page 23
"What did this Shell look like?" I asked.
"White guy," she said. "Kinda tall."
"Fat? Skinny?"
"Just normal. You got the feeling he was pretty strong. His hair was dark but I don't think that was his natural color. Here's the card he gave me," she said, handing it over.
There was just a name, Oscar Shell, and a phone number with a 917 area code. I tried the number right then but the automatic operator told me that the line had been disconnected.
"Where was it that you met him?" I asked.
"The Leontine Building, on Park and Thirty-first."
After that she told me about the attack in front of her building. I pretended to listen as if this were all new information. I even asked a few questions about the men. But none of that mattered.
Three-quarters of an hour had gone by when we had finished with her stories.
"Three thousand dollars," I said, "plus expenses. You can pay me when I prove that you are innocent on all counts."
"But you don't even know what you're saying you'll prove me innocent of."
"Doesn't matter. I'm sure that this Shell is dirty. All I have to do is show him to the cops and they'll do the legwork."
"And if you don't prove it?"
"You save three thousand dollars and you can still run away."
"I never told you that I was going anywhere."
"Your bags did that."
"And so I should just stay here until I hear from you?" she asked rather hopefully.
"No," I said. "I don't think so. You need to go where nobody knows you. You need a new name and identity."
I fished a Visa credit card out of my wallet. It was in my daughter's name. This I handed over to Miss Lear.
"Michelle Constance McGill," Angie read. "Is this your daughter?"
"Yeah."
"Won't she mind?"
"She doesn't even know the card exists. It has a fifteen-hundred-dollar limit. But remember--every cent you spend will go for expenses. Go find a cheap hotel someplace and call me at my office every day at four-thirty. If I'm out, Mardi will put you through to me wherever I am."
"Why are you doing all this?" she asked.
"You look like a good kid," I said easily. "If it works out, I make my weekly nut and see that justice is done--for a change."
51
It only took a minute for Tiny "Bug" Bateman to disengage the lock on the shamrock-green, reinforced metal door to his underground apartment/workshop. This door was eight feet below street level on Charles, near Hudson.
The electronics lab that had once been a living space was now a series of rooms lined with worktables containing every sort of gadget that a spy-store devotee could imagine. Listening devices, hidden lenses, specialized walkie-talkie telephones, motion sensors, and a lot of things I couldn't even begin to explain.
I was walking down the hall toward the one-time master bedroom that was now filled with a dozen or more linked CPUs that combined to make one of the fastest civilian computers in the world.
Bug met me in the hall.
I had never seen Tiny outside of the hole cut into the round table that dominated his control room. There he always sat, surrounded by more than a dozen screens, swiveling this way and that between keyboards and other, more exotic, devices.
I had never seen his fat, cafe au lait feet before. As usual, he was wearing blue-jean overalls with no shirt and the red-and-blue iridescent glasses used to track the otherwise invisible spectrums that appeared on some of his more bizarre screens. He was four inches taller than I, close to three hundred pounds, and very, very soft. His curly hair was longish and unruly.
"Tiny?"
He lifted his hinged ultraviolet lenses, so that they flipped up over his forehead, and gave a rare smile.
"Did you talk to her?" he asked.
"What?"
"Zephyra," he said as if he were the pope and I a priest who had somehow forgotten the Latinate Lord's Prayer.
"No, man," I said. "I've been on a case. I've been working."
"You couldn't make a call?"
"Zephyra Ximenez is not a call girl," I said. "Not when it comes to something like this, anyway. I was thinking that if I survived the next few days I'd meet with her at the Naked Ear and we'd talk. But now that I see you got feet that actually work, maybe all three of us could meet there."
The look on the brooding young man's face was classic. He went from monadic particulate to an eight-year-old boy in no time.
"Um . . ." he said.
"I'll take that as a yes. Now can we get down to some business?"
EVEN ONCE HE WAS back in his hole, Tiny was still a little off at first. I kept having to repeat myself when explaining about the Leontine Building and the man named Shell.
In order to prime him for more challenging work, I had him look up the license-plate number I got from Lonnie, the redheaded ex-con, but that was just a rental to a guy named Bob Brown.
"And you want to know where this Shell is?" Tiny asked once we were back into the meat of my visit.
"If that'll help me find out who he's working for," I said. "I need to know who's behind all this."
After some time Tiny settled down to his usual brilliance and brought his bug-eyes to bear on the subject of Oscar Shell.
Problems showed up immediately when it became clear that no one by that name worked for any company situated in the Leontine Building. No Oscar Shell had ever rented space there. As a matter of fact, there wasn't an Oscar Shell that fit Angie's description anywhere in the tristate area.
"This isn't gonna work," Tiny said after an hour on the bully's trail. "How about we take another route?"
"The building?" I asked.
From there the fat genius went into overdrive.
T. D. Donnie and Sons were listed as the owners of the Leontine but they actually owned less than one percent of the building, making their money as absentee property managers. The corporation they answered to was Graski Incorporated, which was located in Chicago. Graski had gone out of business in 1955, however, though the corporate name was owned by a woman named Hedda Martins of Miami. Hedda had died three years earlier, and a Florida lawyer's report had informed her heirs that Hedda was a small partner in a company in San Francisco called Real Innovations. RI had listed among its properties the Leontine.
The trail might have ended there, except for one of Hedda's pesky heirs--a man named Thom Soams. Soams filed suits in New York, Illinois, Florida, and California in an attempt to receive payment for what he felt was the heirs' rightful due. After two and half years of wrangling with a new firm, Mallory Investments, Soams collected the sum of $22,307.31 in settlement.
Mallory Investments was a subsidiary of Regents Bank of New York, a private institution owned lock, stock, and barrel by a sometime socialite oddly named Sandra Sanderson III.
It wasn't exactly a smoking gun, but at least I had a business, and maybe even a name.
The articles we pulled up on Sanderson painted her as a hands-on tyrant in her multibillion-dollar business. She fought long and hard against anyone who stood in her way. The New York skyline owed a lot to Regents Bank, which collected its interest with a stopwatch and a stable of lawyers.
Her son, Desmond, had died of a rare heart disease at the beginning of 2008, and Sandra had gone into seclusion, which was peculiar, because mother and son had been on the outs for years.
The structure of this story put me in a rather literary frame of mind.
If Desmond was Grendel, and Sandra Grendel's mama, then maybe Alphonse was Beowulf and this was all a reenactment of a classic masterpiece.
I smiled to myself, leaning on Tiny's round white table as I read the articles he'd produced for me.
"Uh-oh," the genius said.
"What?"
"Somebody's trying to track me down."
"Regents?"
"Not by the signature, but you can bet whoever it is, they work for them."
"How close are they?"
"What if they do?"
"If they pushed hard enough they might break the shield on my place."
"That's a lot of work, isn't it?"
"I hacked their database," he said blandly. "They're worth billions. But don't worry, I have a lot of traps set. It's very unlikely that they'd make it all the way here."
" 'Unlikely' is not a word I swear by," I said. "Maybe we should get you out of here for a couple of days."
"No."
"No?"
"No one drives me from my home. My life's work is here in this room. I'll die before I let anyone take it from me or me from it."
"You don't really mean that," I said.
"This bunker could withstand a nuclear blast," he told me. I believed him. "It would take a crew of construction engineers just to take down my front door. Being underground, I don't have any assailable walls, and the apartment overhead is mine, with a reinforced floor. There's booby traps all down the hallway and even in the toilet and I have plastic explosives embedded in all four walls of this room. If they ever got this far--they'd never get out."
I didn't doubt a word that Tiny had said. I did, however, wonder if he had considered how vulnerable someone like Zephyra would make him. She wouldn't agree to live in a hole, or to a suicide pact, in order to protect data.
"You got a pencil?" I asked him.
He reached under the table, coming out with a cheap retractable pen and a violet notepad. I scribbled down a phone number and pushed the tiny binder back at him.
"What's this?"
"That's a special number that every important person in the city has. It connects to a solitary 911 operator who has at her beck and call an elite SWAT unit, one in each borough. All you have to do is call that number and the police will be here in force in under five minutes--no questions asked."
In my years moving among gangsters and bent businessmen I'd accumulated a whole treasure trove of information. The special emergency number came from Alphonse Rinaldo himself.
"Wow." It was a rare thing to impress Bug.
"Yeah," I said. "Before you level the block, you might just use that."
52
Regents Bank's main office was on Sixth, at Fifty-third. They owned the entire building. The ground floor brought to mind a futuristic grand ballroom with forty-foot ceilings and crystal walls. The floor was a huge mosaic, a copy of an Australian Aboriginal rock painting depicting their god, the Great Lizard, passing over the Land of Man.
Most of the floor was empty of furniture or partitions. Small groups stood here and there, discussing who knows what. There was a large semicircular desk toward the far end of the vast room where three young women waited to grant or disallow entrance to the higher levels of Regents.
The desk was made from plastic, or maybe glass, with an emerald tint. The young women were Asian, African-American, and Hispanic--all young and, to one degree or another, lovely.
"Yes? Can I help you?" the smiling Asian child asked.
"Leonid Trotter McGill," I said. "For Mr. Oscar Shell."
"What department?"
"He's a special operative in the employ of Sandra Sanderson the Third."
Something like fear entered the young woman's eyes. However, the smile managed to keep a place hold on the lower half of her face.
She turned to her girlfriends and huddled.
A guard with an earphone entered from stage right. I gazed wistfully at the red-and-ochre mosaic tiles at my feet.
All three of the women stood and approached me.
"What is your business?" the black woman asked me.
"Is Mr. Shell here?"
"That's not what I asked you."
"The only thing you need to know is that my business with you is getting to Mr. Shell."
No one there liked me.
"I'm sorry, we, we don't have anybody by that name here," the Hispanic woman said.
"Then I'll leave."
The suited guard took a step toward me.
Evoking my beloved, and favorite, son, I did a single shoulder shrug and made to turn away.
"Excuse me," the Asian woman said.
I noticed then that all three were the same height.
"Yes?"
"Does this business have to do with Regents?"
"No," I said. "I'm pretty sure not. At least I hope not."
"What does that mean?"
Another guard appeared--stage left.
"A woman may have been threatened by Mr. Shell. And we believe that he is known to Ms. Sanderson. I came here to investigate along that line of inquiry."
" 'We'?"
"I represent a consortium that reports to a central body interested in the welfare of this woman and the actions of those connected with said Mr. Shell."
Highbrow language usually gets under the skin of the underlings of power.
One of the guards spoke into his left cuff. I wondered if their earphones were somehow connected to a transmitter at the clear green reception desk.
"But you say that there is no Mr. Shell here?" I said.
"No," the first receptionist I spoke to said.
"Then we've been misinformed." I turned to go.
"Sir?" the black receptionist said. She was holding a small green wireless phone against the left side of her face.
"Yes?"
"Take the elevator through the door behind our desk."
I glanced at the portal and wondered.
"To what floor?" I asked.
"It only goes to one floor."
"Will Oscar Shell be there?"
"I can only tell you what I've been told."
I hesitated a moment more. I hadn't actually expected admission to Regents' inner sanctum. I only wanted to shake things up a bit. But there I was, flanked by two mortal descendants of Cerberus and faced with three modern- day sirens.
Knowing the mythology, I should have walked out.
"Okay," I said.
The Latina raised a section of the round desk as the Asian used an electronic card to open the door.
I walked through into a small cylindrical room that was colored dark red from ceiling to floor. Before me stood an onyx elevator door that slid open, seemingly at my approach.
The black car had two buttons: a green disc over a cream-colored one. I pressed the upper button, and, after a moment, the car began a speedy ascent.
Maybe eighty seconds later, the car came to a stop and the door opened onto a large space that was more like a living room than an office. The floors were white marble and the distant windows looked eastward, toward Long Island. There was a rainstorm passing in the distance.
"Forgive me, sir," a well-built white man in an olive-green suit said.
"For what?"
"I'm going to search you."
He was tall enough, in his forties, I guessed, and bald. Probably pretty strong.
"No," I said.
Mild surprise rippled across his handsome features.
"I'm afraid I'll have to insist."
"You should be--afraid, that is. Because I'm mad as a mothahfuckah and I don't believe you can take me. At the very least you have to prove it before you can see what's in my pockets."
The bodyguard's face had a tan complexion. His intelligent eyes gave the impression of education--both formal and from the street. He had seen a lot of struggle in his life but did not expect it in this rarefied atmosphere.
I noticed a jet in the distant sky, taking off from Kennedy, no doubt.
The bodyguard took a step in my direction.
I smiled invitingly.
"Mr. Corman," a deep feminine voice intoned.
From somewhere to the left a tall and slender woman approached.
"Yes, ma'am?"
"Let's forgo the routine this time. I'm sure that Mr. McGill isn't here to make trouble."
"But Ms. Sanderson--"
Mr. Corman backed away as the woman strode forward.
At first I couldn't make out her features because of the light from behind. But then, suddenly, the light of the entryway revealed her face.
It was the mask of a forty-year-old woman perfectly molded to a skull that sat atop a fit seventy-year-old body. She had done her Pilates and eaten acres of broccoli but that hadn't stopped the clock, not completely.
"You'll have to forgive Mr. Corman," she said. "He's a new employee and hasn't yet mastered the subtleties of his position."
"Is another one of your employees an Oscar Shell?" I asked.
"Thousands of people work for me. You can't expect that I would know them all by name."
Twelve feet behind her sat two black sofas on a bright pine floor.
"What do you want with this Mr. Shell?" she asked.
Her steel-gray pants suit and lilac blouse were designed for the forty-year-old she was impersonating. But the backs of her hands were discolored and wrinkled.
I glanced to the left to see what Corman was up to. He watched me with the same purpose.
"Mr. McGill?" Sandra Sanderson III prodded.
"I wanted to ask him a question."
"What's that?"
"Who hired him to frighten and harass my client?"
"You're a lawyer?"
"A dick."
"I see. And who is your client?"
"My business."
"And how much is this client paying?"
"She's paying the going rate. The only rate I ever charge."
"I see."
"You don't know him?"
"No."
"Then why am I here?" I asked.
"I wanted to get a look at you." Her words accomplished their sinister intent.
"May I ask you something?"
"If you wish."
"I never heard of a woman, outside of royalty and cruise ships, called 'the Third.' Did your mother go by 'Junior'?"
"I come from a long line of strong women, Mr. McGill. I believe you will discover that fact at some point in your misguided investigation."
"Are you telling me that you don't own the Leontine Building over on Park?" I said.
That did something to the old woman's eyes.