by David Duffy
He shook his head. “It’s not the scamming. Timing doesn’t line up, for one thing. For another, I can see where someone hacked into the frankyfun account months ago, and it’s a whole different picture. Does leave hanging the question of what Andras was going to do with the servers.”
“I’m guessing it was her idea—and that’s why he’s so close-lipped. He’s told us all about himself, but every time the story gets close to her, he veers off in another direction.”
“Protecting her?”
“Could be what he thinks.”
“Then what’s she up to?”
“No good, I’m all but certain, but beyond that…” I shrugged. “She’s also gone underground with eight grand in cash.”
“She’ll fuck up. Everyone does.”
“Maybe. Time’s not on her side—or ours.” I told him about Nosferatu.
“Think he really wants the kid?”
“Yeah, I do. Get the Basilisk to recheck Coryell’s calls on Tuesday, after he got out of the slammer.”
He worked the keyboard and the ConnectPay data field was replaced by the familiar Q&A screen. A short list of numbers, then names, came up. Andras. Nosferatu. Sebastian Leitz.
“Leitz call Coryell or the other way around?”
“Leitz placed the call.”
“And got through on the first try?”
“Right.”
“How’d he know Coryell was out? Anybody call Leitz right before?”
“Hold on … Guy named Patrick Burns.”
That name didn’t mean anything, unless … “Burns call Leitz two Tuesdays ago, from Bedford?”
The key board clattered. “Called from Bedford twice that morning, then from Midtown that afternoon.”
Tan Coat. I had a bad feeling.
I told Foos what I was thinking, and he grunted, which is what he does when he doesn’t have anything constructive to add.
I called Leitz. “We need to talk. Meet me at your house in an hour.”
“Where the hell’s my son?”
“Safe.”
“I could have you arrested for kidnapping.”
“I saved his life last night.”
“What the hell happened? The hotel said broken window…”
“I’ll tell you when I see you.”
“Where are you?”
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
“Can you baby-sit?” I asked Foos.
“No problem. Maybe I can convince our young friend to be more forthcoming when he wakes up.”
I called Victoria from the road.
“Where are you this time?” she asked without preamble, her voice flat and neutral. I listened for anger or concern or hostility. Nothing there—yet.
“Just leaving Stamford.”
“And what’s in Stamford?”
“The Leitz kid. Foos. Me. ConnectPay servers. Which I came by without breaking any laws that I know of.”
She didn’t say anything for a minute.
Then, “It’s a good thing for you—I think—that you arranged that wake-up call from Foos this morning. Not that I was getting much sleep. I was worried sick.”
“I’m sorry. I haven’t been in a place where I could call.”
“You have time to explain?”
“I’ll tell you all about it. Can we meet at your place? Noon?”
“Why my place?” Her voice was suspicious.
“I’ve got business uptown. Then I’m probably on the move again.”
“On top of everything else, you’ve turned into a gypsy. Okay. Noon.”
Beria appeared, shaking his head.
CHAPTER 46
I caught the tail end of the rush hour and reached East Sixty-second Street at 10:45 A.M. The sky was dark gray and presaged more bad weather. 1010 WINS confirmed the forecast—another storm on the way, possible accumulations of eight to twelve inches. With only two days to recover from the last one, everyone was back on blizzard alert.
Snowbanks packed the side streets, parked cars crusted in place, covered in dirty white. I found a vacated spot on Leitz’s block, full of shoveled snow, and forced the Explorer in. The same Filipina maid answered the door, and I climbed the two flights to his office. Impossible to pass through the Rothko chamber without pausing for one revolution of mystical color. I’ve never taken psychedelic drugs, but I had the idea that this was what it could be like. I pushed on.
Leitz was at his desk, under the Kline. The Malevich was in its place, and I felt two tinges of regret. One for Leitz. His life was probably over, at least as he’d known it. The other for the painting, which was unlikely now ever to grace my wall. Fate having its fun once again.
“Where’s Andras?” Leitz said, angry.
“Still safe.”
“I thought you were bringing him.”
“You don’t want him here, for all kinds of reasons.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
I took the copy of Daria’s note from my pocket, unfolded it and placed it on his desk, smoothing the crinkled paper. Then I stood back, out of range.
He read it, looked away and reread it. He turned the paper over and back again and read it one more time. When he looked up, he had tears in his big eyes.
“Where’d you get this?”
“Your brother, Thomas. Daria left it when she … Thomas was the first to get there and he took it. He’s been holding it over Coryell ever since. I know for a fact Coryell’s been paying Thomas’s bills whenever they got out of hand.”
He dropped his head and shook it. “Jesus. I thought … I thought we had that worked out years ago.”
“Hard for some to kick their addictions.”
He shook his head again. “Thomas, Marianna, Julia, and Walter—I’ve made a hash of all of it.”
He didn’t include Andras in the list. I waited.
He held up the note. “Does Andras…?”
I nodded. “He tried jumping from the Regency last night. That’s the broken glass. He blames himself.”
“Blames himself?” Leitz looked confused, and I had to assume the confusion was sincere. Memory can do that, rearrange history, along with responsibility, if you let it. The Soviets were masters of this kind of manipulation—they twisted the collective memory of an entire nation. The current crowd plays the same games.
“He blames himself for what happened to Daria,” I said, taking another step back. “For not doing anything about Coryell.”
“But it wasn’t…” Leitz pounded the desk with both fists. “IT WASN’T HIS FAULT!”
He looked around for something to throw, but the desktop was clean, except for a pad and some pencils. He swept those away. His face reddened and he started to rise, fists still balled. I got ready to powder.
He made it halfway up before he collapsed in his chair. His head fell on his arms. I stayed where I was, unsure what he’d do next.
He sobbed—and sobbed some more. A long time, maybe ten minutes. I hoped it was catharsis. When he finally looked up, he said, “It wasn’t his fault. Don’t you understand that? You have to understand. It wasn’t his fault. It was … It was mine.”
I’m not sure who he thought he was talking to. He seemed to be appealing directly to his son. Maybe, in grief and confusion, he transferred Andras onto me. Not so odd—I’d spent the last several weeks talking to a man who’s been dead since 1953. I nodded slightly, to show I did understand, and said nothing.
“What…? What should I do?” he whispered.
“Tell me what happened two weeks ago. Tuesday. You went to Queens, right? To see Coryell?”
He looked confused again at the change of subject. Then the eyes clarified. “Yes.”
“You talk to him?”
“Yes.”
His voice was still at whisper level. He knew where we were headed, alarms were sounding in his head, but we were beyond his ability to do anything about them.
“He tell you he’d just bailed himself out of jail?”
<
br /> “That’s right.”
“After he was caught with a kid in his car?”
Leitz nodded.
“That when you killed him?”
He looked around as if help might be coming from somewhere. He didn’t really expect it. When it didn’t show, he looked down at the desk.
Another long wait. But when he looked back up, he whispered, “Yes.”
I took the chance of coming into range, taking the chair across the desk. Eye level seemed important. I brought my own voice down.
“Tell me.”
He looked around again. Still no help coming.
“I … I don’t know where to start.”
“Start anywhere, as someone once said.”
“Walter … Walter had a problem, but you know that. He called it ‘the Urge.’ He thought he could control it. But…”
“It ended up controlling him,” I said.
“That’s right. I didn’t know that back then. The first thing was Andras, obviously. We got him help, child psychologists who specialize in this kind of thing. That seemed to work. But…”
He stopped and looked around again. Help still didn’t arrive.
“I guess I was wrong about that too. The question I kept asking myself, after that day Julia walked in and we all came to realize what we were dealing with, is how am I supposed to analyze this? It’s not the kind of question you ever expect to face. What am I supposed to do? How do I stop the pain? It’s not long before you get to the question of who don’t I want to hurt? Or hurt least? It’s hard to come to grips with the idea that pain is inevitable for someone, and you’re the one who decides who hurts and who walks away. That’s where I found myself. I won’t tell you I made the right decisions, I don’t know. Everything appeared in shades of gray, and I just don’t know.”
I knew the feeling.
“I made a calculation. We did what we could for Andras. That was the first thing, as I said. The question was, did we turn Walter over to the authorities? Julia was just getting her business off the ground. She’s a pain in the ass, but she’s so good at what she does, and for better or worse, she loves the guy. Scandal would have killed her. I was raising money. My second fund. Scandal would have killed me too. I’m not afraid to say it. I didn’t want to inflict pain on myself. So we made sure Walter got therapy—far away and out of sight. You can say it, if you want, but, yes, we swept it under the rug.”
I wasn’t going to say it. And I wasn’t going to point out that Thomas Leitz already had.
“The therapy seemed to work. So Julia claimed. Things returned to normal. Pauline was the most adamant but she calmed down after a while. We kept Walter at arm’s length. Julia knew he wasn’t welcome, of course. We did family gatherings without him. There was always some excuse and after a while, it became … normal, I guess. If Pauline or I mentioned him, it was never by name. Of course, we had no idea until…”
The fists balled again. But his temper was spent, overwhelmed perhaps by years of denial and deception. Perhaps that was unfair—I’d never been through this particular kind of hell.
“When Daria … We all jumped to the same conclusion, of course. But there was no evidence. Walter denied everything. Julia said he was never around. We didn’t focus on the question of whether Julia, with her twenty-four–seven schedule, would know. Maybe we didn’t want to. I’m not sure now. It’s all a blur. Pauline broke down. She blamed me, blamed the whole family, and I don’t fault her for that. Especially since…”
She was right, of course, but I didn’t say it.
“I truly didn’t know about Andras. He seemed a normal kid. Maybe too much involved with his computers, but I took that as a positive. He was applying himself to something, he was good at it. His grades were good. He was talking about Stanford or Cal Tech. I had dreams of … I had dreams…”
He got ready to weep again. Hard not to feel for him, but he was avoiding the point.
“Go back to Tuesday,” I said.
He took a minute to shift gears.
“I had the man who was following you watch Walter’s building. He called me when Walter arrived. I went over. You told me how he’d helped the tall man bug my system. I was furious. I confronted him in that … hovel. I’d never been there before. It underscored everything about him, the fraud, the deception. He tried to evade, obfuscate … He did everything he could to say it wasn’t him. I wouldn’t let him get away with it. When we got to where he’d been for the last week, I lost it. Just went berserk, I guess. We fought. The next thing I knew, he was slumped over the desk, not moving. If you ask me now how it happened, I couldn’t tell you. It was … It was just one of those things.”
Murder. Just one of those things. Andras had used almost the same language, talking about the Players.
I got up and walked. Kline and Motherwell and Malevich fired truth, albeit abstract truth, from the walls. Easy for you, I thought. You just had to get it onto canvas. Of course, they had to live it before they could paint it.
Leitz sat motionless at his desk.
“What now?” he asked, pained but resigned.
He was asking me to face the same question he’d wrestled with. Who do you hurt least?
Leitz was a murderer. On the other hand, the world was better off without his victim. Victoria would tell me that didn’t matter, and she’d be right. Also hard to ignore that Leitz’s actions had set off the chain of events that brought us here today. There were plenty of victims, including his own son and the kids at the Crestview playhouse.
I’m used to making my own decisions, but I’m no good at being a judge. The ones we had in the Soviet Union were corrupt—they had no concept of justice, they did what they were told. Victoria put her faith in the rule of law, which intentionally took decisions like this out of the hands of individuals like me. I could see the purpose of that, but I wasn’t quite ready to abdicate.
“The first thing now—is Andras,” I said. “I need to get back to him.”
“Wait! You haven’t told me where…”
“Don’t intend to. I’ll take care of the kid for the next few days. You’re in no shape to protect him. If you want to do something, think about coming clean with your family, then the cops. You’ve all got a ton of healing to do, assuming we get through this. It’ll also go a lot easier if you go to the police before they come to you.”
“But … What about…?”
“Jail?”
He tried to nod, but couldn’t manage.
I left him waiting for the help that wouldn’t arrive.
CHAPTER 47
The snow was already sticking as I walked to Victoria’s place at Third and Sixty-fifth. She welcomed me with a big hug and a long kiss and a wrinkled nose.
“You don’t stink this time, but I can feel it—you’re exhausted.”
“Won’t lie.”
“Want something to eat?”
“Sure.” Breakfast seemed a long time ago.
She led me through the living room to her dining area. I hadn’t been in her apartment before. I was struck by its temporary feel. Neutral everything—furniture, fabrics, decorations, not unlike the Regency Hotel or Julia Leitz’s office. Here, they all but announced, I’ll be moving on. Question was, where—and when?
“I got sandwiches from the deli. Something to drink?”
“Beer?”
“Is that a good idea? Never mind, I thought you’d ask, so I got that too.”
She brought a bottle of Heineken, a tasteless brew, but I wasn’t about to say so.
“Perfect,” I lied.
She smiled, and I reached for her hand.
“I’m trying,” she said. “But, as you pointed out, you don’t make it easy.”
“I’m trying too,” I said, biting back doubt. “I’m not very good at it.”
“You can say that again.”
“Want to hear about Stamford?” Get the sincerity ball rolling.
I took a long swallow of Heineken. It tasted better tha
n I remembered.
“Go easy, shug. If I know you, you’re not done for the day.”
She didn’t know the half of it. I put down the beer and picked up a sandwich. In between bites, I told her about Batkin, what he’d said about the BEC, Irina taking off, Thomas Leitz and Nosferatu, and Andras—the note and the overnight odyssey from the Regency to the Doubletree to the Super 8.
“Did you really have to call Nosferatu and rile him up?”
“I wanted the kid to hear what he’s up against and I wanted Nosferatu chasing me.”
“Exactly my point.”
“He doesn’t know where we are now.”
“He knew where to find you that night he beat you up.”
She was right. Arrogance … I chewed another bite of sandwich.
“What are you going to do about Leitz?”
“Don’t know.”
“He should be prosecuted. He could maybe plead it down to manslaughter, but he’s looking at prison time for sure.”
“I figured that.”
“And?”
“I told him to go to the police. But he’s got a terminally ill wife and a seriously screwed-up kid. Not going to do anyone any good if he’s in the slammer.”
“That’s not the point, and you know it.”
“It is the circumstance.”
“Circumstances get considered at sentencing time. The law says you can’t go around breaking people’s necks.”
She staked out the position I expected her to, and I couldn’t argue against it. But coming from a system where the law could be made up on the spot by anyone carrying a card that said ChK, GPU, NKVD, KGB or FSB, I had a hard time seeing it with such absolute clarity.
“I can tell we’re gonna keep having this argument,” she said.
“That’s a good thing, from my point of view.”
She smiled. “At least you’ve answered one question.”
“What’s that?”
“Why they did it—the kids. Some kind of power trip.”
“I don’t follow.”
“You said they were all abused—that was the common bond—usually by a family member or someone close to them. The abuse wasn’t just physical—it takes its psychological and emotional toll too. This was their way of getting back at their abusers. They owned these guys, their customers, psychologically speaking. They told them when to tune in, made them shell out thousands—tens of thousands—to watch. They were the performers, but that didn’t bother them. It was all about control, psychological control. Power trip, like I said.”