by David Wind
It was a starting point. I reached for the phone, but it rang before I made it.
Femalé’s head snapped up. She reached across the desk, picked it up and pressed the line button. “Storm Investigations, how may I help you?”
I smiled at her dusky tone. “Whom may I say is calling?” Her eyebrows knit and she said, “Hold on please.” She pressed the hold button and looked at me.
“He won’t give his name. He said ‘just put him on’.”
I took the phone and hit the hold button. “Storm.”
The voice was coarse and deep, a whisper from a damaged larynx. “Drop this thing now. Let it go.”
“Who the hell is this?”
“You don’t need ta know. You are into something you don’ wanna be - Butt out now or you will pay da price.”
That was the wrong thing to say. My knuckles turned white on the receiver. “You listen to me you piece of crap. Here’s my message - You tell whoever is behind this he will be sitting in hell as soon as I have my hands on him!”
“You been warned,” the whisper retorted.
“So have you.” I slammed the phone down. As soon as I did, I hit the CID button on the phone, but the readout showed it as a restricted number. No name and no number showed on the LCD panel.
The accent had been pure Bronx—Whitestone was my guess.
“Boss…” Femalé began. I cut her off with the shake of my head.
I motioned to the pile. “Go to work on this. See what else you can find. And run a credit bureau on Scotty. See if there was anything unusual.”
She took the faxed sheets and left the office. When she was gone, I leaned back. I had a lot more thinking to do.
My next hour and a half was spent thinking and scribbling notes. Nothing made any sense. The play was looking good. There were no financial problems and Scotty didn’t run in any dark circles.
The intercom beeped and Femalé’s voice came through. “The legal papers are here. The messenger said he has to wait for them.”
I told her to bring them in to me. There were two copies, one for me and one to send back. I skimmed through each one, signing at all the little yellow tags Paul Gottlieb had attached to the papers. Several required me to read them. The first was the surrogate papers he had to file; the second was the authorization for Gottlieb to handle the financial transactions.
When I finished, I handed the originals to Femalé and set the copies off to the side. “You get anything?”
“Nothing more than what was in the FBI files. And Scotty’s Credit Bureau is clean. There was nothing irregular. He ate out a lot.”
“Keep looking.” Scotty ate out because he didn’t like eating alone. When he didn’t have a date, or someone to have dinner with, he would go to one of his favorite restaurants for dinner. He’d told me once that even when he sat alone at a table, having people around him felt good.
I understood why. He was alone a lot, growing up. His mother was a nurse and, after his father’s death, she worked a lot of overtime to pay the bills—double shifts were normal for her.
<><><>
I quit trying to think at four and decided to go to Scotty’s place. The phone had been busy, but Femalé had fielded the calls. I pulled a set of Scotty’s keys from the desk drawer, slipped on my jacket and went to the front office.
“I’m going over to Scotty’s. Call Albright and Lia Thornton and let them know about the funeral arrangements.”
“Will do,” she said with just a trace of her usual smile. “Boss, I need your help on something. We’ve been swamped with calls. The last one was Joe Hawks. A lot of people want to pay their respects. I think we need to have something at the funeral home tomorrow.”
“I thought the funeral was set for Thursday?”
“It is,” she said, nodding. Her braided hair bobbed in unison with her head. “But Scotty was popular. I think you should have a public viewing tomorrow.”
A new thought popped out, a viewing afforded some possibilities. “Okay, make the arrangements.”
“I’ll set it up for late afternoon and evening. Riverside won’t have a problem with it. They’re used to big names.”
Big names—I never thought of Scotty as a big name. He was just my friend. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Traffic was heavy, but I didn’t feel like walking and hailed a cab. Getting in, I told the driver to take me to Forty-seventh and Tenth. It took fifteen minutes. Rush hour had struck early on this Tuesday.
I paid and went into the renovated building, nodding at the doorman who recognized me. “Mr. Storm, I’m real sorry about Mr. Granger. He was a good guy.”
“Thanks. I have to take care of things in his apartment.”
“No problem. The police closed it off yesterday, but I guess it’s okay for you to go in.”
“Yeah, it’ll be fine.”
Upstairs, the reluctance to go inside grew strong. The reality of Scotty’s death had settled into my mind; the last thing I wanted to do was walk into those waiting memories.
The door was closed, but something was wrong. The yellow and black police seal was cut. I pushed the door a couple inches inward. It moved without any hindrance. I stepped back, pulled out my cell, and dialed Chris’s number.
“Did anyone go to Scotty’s apartment today?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“The seal’s broken. The door was unlocked.”
“Check it out. Let me know what you find.”
I drew my Sig and went in. Silence greeted me. Nothing had changed since I had been here yesterday afternoon. Everything was in the same mess. I would come in and clean up after the funeral. I went from the living room to the bedroom, then into the bathroom, holstered the Sig and used the toilet.
I washed my hands and stared around. Everything was neat and in its place. A standup tube of toothpaste sat next to a modern looking stainless steel toothbrush holder shaped like a glass with four opening for brushes.
Something tugged at my thoughts. I closed my eyes and thought back to yesterday when I’d looked around the apartment. My mind had been jumbled then, anger and sadness had pushed me through the apartment. What was it?
I forced myself to picture the bathroom. I had given it a cursory look-see, because nothing had been messed up. Had there been two toothbrushes in the holder yesterday? I pushed, but this time the eidetic part wasn’t working right.
Kneeling, I opened the sink vanity and looked inside. There wasn’t much: A multi-pack of toothbrushes with three empty slots, another tube of toothpaste; a sleeve of soap and a couple of bottles of shampoo. A stack of toilet paper was in the back, and next to it was a box of Stay Free mini pads.
Was that a leftover from an old girlfriend, or had he been seeing someone new? He hadn’t mentioned anyone to me. I filed the information away. Maybe it was nothing, or maybe it was something. Time would tell.
Moving from the bathroom to the office, I sat down at his computer and spent fifteen minutes going through the files and directories without finding anything interesting. I was about to call it a day when I noticed a sub-directory off the main document directory, called the G Journal.
A new play? I went into the directory. Each file was named by a year. I hit the last one, which was this year. The file started to open, but was stopped by a password screen. That hit me wrong. Why would he protect a file on his own computer?
I stared at the blue and white box for a minute before trying the old nickname Chris and I had bestowed on Scotty. ScottO. I typed in the letters, hit the enter button and the screen flicked and the page opened. I gave into a victorious smile, but it disappeared when the text came up.
It wasn’t a new play; it was his personal journal. G stood for Granger. I read the first paragraph. It was about the play, and about how he had talked Rebecca Thayer into taking the lead. There were also a few lines of introspection about their love affair, nine years before.
A sense of unease gripped me—a feeling of Scotty looking
over my shoulder. I shut the machine down, closed the top and unhooked it from its docking station. I spotted the black leather carrying case leaning against the wall and slipped it in. Five minutes later, I locked the front door and left the apartment. I would spend the night reading his journal at home. Maybe he wouldn’t follow me there.
Chapter 12
Paying the deliveryman for the Chinese takeout, I went into the kitchen, grabbed a pair of chopsticks, and set the two containers on the countertop. I fetched a cold bottle of Tsingtao from the fridge, sat on the tall pine stool and started to eat. As I did, I glanced around the apartment.
I’d bought the condo in a converted six-story brownstone on West Fifty-sixth Street, five years ago when it first came onto the market. The apartment suited me well, its best feature being a large kitchen that fed into the living room on one side and the dining room on the other.
The openness of the yellow trimmed white kitchen and the light coming in from a large window set above the sink, kept me connected with the outside world. Spending a couple of years in a high security prison with its dull grays and drab greens embeds the need for seeing the outside from everywhere. You’ll have to trust me on this - you don’t want to find out for yourself. Down the hall were two bedrooms: One was for sleep and the other was my home office.
I liked the place a lot. It was home.
The phone rang just as I bit into the second Szechwan dumpling. I set the chopsticks aside, chewed, and reached for the phone. “Yeah,” I said through the dough and meat.
“Anything happen today?”
“Good evening Christopher and not much. I saw Paul Gottlieb and went over the will.”
“Anything there?”
I thought about the will. “No. He left things to you, Amanda, Anna, and me. You’ll get a letter from Gottleib. There was a big gift to the Director’s Guild, Save Them and the church. That’s about it. He… he left me the bulk of his estate.” My words sounded guilty in my ears, but guilty of what I wasn’t sure.
“And you still think it wasn’t a robbery?” he asked, not curious about what was left to him and his family. Chris was like that.
“You know I do.”
“And there’s nothing else to look at?”
Chris was ever the terrier digging for a bone, so I threw him one. “The investors bother me. Albright is in deep financial trouble, but he dug up a million and a half to invest. Why invest in a show if he’s in trouble and, where did he get it?”
“That’s pretty thin on your part, and risky on his—not many shows pay off big.”
“But you’ll agree it is something.”
“Maybe. Are you going to do the eulogy?”
His question caught me flat. “I haven’t thought about it. But yeah, I will.”
“I want to speak as well.”
“I know.” And I did. Chris never shows a lot of emotion, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have them.
“Keep me posted on what you find. How’s the Chinese?”
I smiled. He knew me too well. “Good, if I could get to eating it.”
“Ciao, amigo. Talk to you tomorrow.”
“Mañana.” I hung up and went back to my dinner. When I was done, I turned to Scotty’s laptop, which I’d left on the counter earlier.
While I waited for it to warm up, I thought about the will. Scotty had left me a lot of money - not that I needed it. My father had seen to it that the State of New York paid handsomely for the time I’d spent in court, on Riker’s Island and behind bars: well enough for me not to work if I didn’t want to. But I had to work, for my own sanity, so except for the money for the apartment and the initial set-up of my office, the money sat in a brokerage account earning its five or six percent a year. My business did okay as well.
After the computer warmed up, I navigated to the journal I’d discovered at his apartment and began to read. I did my best not to feel like I was doing something wrong. It wasn’t easy, reading someone else’s life as they lived it—someone as close to me as was Scotty.
The first four months moved with relative speed. He wasn’t writing a day-by-day journal; rather, he wrote anything significant he might want to recall; or, about something troubling him, so he could put down his thoughts and work it out. There was nothing in those first four months relating to what had happened, but in May, things got interesting. He wrote a lot about his feelings for Rebecca Thayer, expressing the wish he’d not let his career or hers get in their way. But he’d also reasoned the past was the past, and he was strong enough to handle the relationship of writer to lead actor, and of friend-to-friend.
He’d started dating someone named Serena Hirsh in late May. He liked her, but was taking it easy. He didn’t want to rush into anything. She was a buyer for Bloomingdales, and they dated a couple of times a month. I liked what he’d written about her.
I wrote her name on the pad next to me. Then I rubbed my eyes and went back to the journal. No matter what anyone says about computers, there’s nothing like reading print on paper—it just doesn’t bother your eyes the way a monitor does after an hour or so into reading.
June gave up the first hints of trouble: Scotty had announced to everyone he was unhappy with the second scene and would be rewriting it. Albright argued the scene was good the way it was.
‘I think he’s afraid it will delay the show. He seemed nervous after the meeting and cornered me. He told me it would be bad if word got out there were problems with the show. I tried to assure him everything would go as planned, but I don’t think I got through to him. He’ll have to live with it.’
Did he live with it, or did he kill Scotty to keep the show on schedule? It was a possibility, but not a big one. I pushed on, ignoring the burning in my eyes, and skimmed over the next few weeks. Scotty was unhappy with the rewrite. He knew he was missing something, but couldn’t figure out what.
Interspersed with his own thoughts on the play, were several notations about he and Lia Thornton having dinner together. He wrote that he found her interesting and always positive regarding the play’s future. She was knowledgeable about Broadway, and the ways of the theatre and the peoples involved.
By the end of June, they had fallen into a habit of having dinner once a week. He’d also written that Serena Hirsh had been bothered when he’d mentioned their dinners. He had a single line under that entry: ‘That’s cool.’
Scotty wasn’t the debonair woman’s man he sometimes wrote into his plays: he was all heart and carried it on his sleeve.
A page later, I came across something that struck me as wrong. There was no name attached when he’d written the entry.
‘She came over tonight. Just showed up at my door and really took me by surprise. At first, I thought it was just to talk. She is lonely, in spite of all the attention she draws. But she didn’t come over to talk. I didn’t want something like this to happen. It isn’t that I don’t want it to happen - she’s so beautiful. But when I look into the depth of her eyes, something stops me, a sense of the unacceptable—not because she’s who she is, but a deeper feeling about what she’s been through tells me to it leave it alone for now—maybe in the future. It’s not like it was with Kathy… God, I still miss her.’
I grabbed the beer and drained it. Scotty had never been lucky in his selection of women. Perhaps it was his karma, or perhaps his need to always feel angst within his life so he could write about it. Kathy had been his last love. It had happened two years ago: the press had followed the affair for months - playwright and leading lady who leaves husband for him. But when the play’s run ended, and Hollywood came a calling on Kathy Seaward, Kathy said bye-bye to Scotty and caught the Hollywood Express, leaving Scotty broken hearted.
Who was the ‘she’ Scotty had written about? Who had come over and tried to seduce him? Rebecca Thayer? My intuition dismissed her. They had had their time together and it hadn’t lasted. But there was a ‘she’, and if Scotty had thought it would be wrong, then the odds were good ‘she’ had
something to do with the play. Could it have been the new woman, Serena Hirsh? I didn’t think so. He would have named her, not put her down as ‘She’ and would not have been dating her if he’d felt something ‘wrong’ about having sex with her.
I rubbed my eyes and shut the laptop down. The edges of depression pushed at me. I hadn’t had any downtime since Scotty’s death, and I was tired. Being tired left me vulnerable to emotions, and the last thing I wanted were the emotions that were coming up.
Dumping the food containers into the trash along with the empty Tsingtao, I grabbed a new one from the fridge and went into the living room, looking for something to take my mind off of life.
My movie collection stared at me. I pulled out the Jimmy Cagney and Pat O’Brien classic, ‘Angels with Dirty Faces’ and lost myself in the beautiful story of two childhood buddies from the slums on the Lower East Side in the 1920s - two kids who grew up together and ended on opposites sides of the law. It was Cagney’s Oscar winner and it sometimes reminded me of Chris and me, except we were on the same side, just doing it in different ways.
Chapter 13
No matter how much I needed to be on the case, Wednesday turned into a non-productive day of running and handling the arrangements for Scotty’s funeral. While Femalé followed up on everything I’d given her, including a call to Serena Hirsch, I handled the arrangements for the funeral and cremation.
By the time I was done at Riverside Chapels, there was a line waiting to come inside to pay their last respects. The line’s size surprised me. It stretched around the corner and halfway down Seventy-fifth Street.
The people all looked ordinary, not a publicity worthy face in the crowd. My momentary surprise was replaced with a good feeling: Scotty was liked. Then a local news van pulled to the curb, expelling a reporter and cameraman.