by Al Roker
Joe blinked and said, “Okay. But you still not be long, right?”
Henry spent most of his mornings at Glory’s, arriving just after the breakfast customers and leaving just before the lunchtime crowd. He sat at “his” table at the rear of the shop, dressed in suit and tie, shoes polished to a sheen, sipping coffee, reading newspapers and magazines, and, on occasion, sharing some time with a friend who dropped by.
“This glazed doughnut hits the spot,” I said.
“It better,” Henry said. “Call your place a doughnut shop, better have some damn fine doughnuts.”
“And the coffee’s excellent.”
“Robusta brew,” he said. “Six dollars a pound wholesale, not that the poor brothers in the Congo who do the harvestin’ get more than a few pennies of that. But you didn’t drive all the way to Brooklyn to talk about pastry and fair trade.”
“I wanted to show you this,” I said, handing him my cellular with the photo of the cat drawing.
“My, my, my,” he said. “Felix’s calling card. These new boys got more vanity than opera singers. My man sent me a fax of a drawing that was found near the Nigerian general’s dissected corpse. This looks like the real deal. When d’you take this?”
“Last night in the Meatpacking District,” I said. “In front of a building that caught fire and killed a man.”
“Just read about it,” Henry said, pointing to the pile of papers. “They ID the victim?”
“Not officially. But every news source except the papers thinks it must’ve been the guy who lived there, a friend of mine named Phil Bruno, who worked for the network.”
Henry took one more look at the photo and returned the phone. “Yeah, well, that’s what I’d been told. Felix’s interest was somebody in the media.”
“Might have been a double,” I said, and reminded him of Rudy Gallagher.
“Any idea who sicced Felix on ’em?” Henry asked.
“Not who but why, maybe.” I told him about the night at the pub in Kabul and the mysterious object that seemed to link three deaths.
Henry nodded. “Probably something political at the heart of it,” he said. “From what I unnerstand, Felix’s early success kicked him up into the bigs, where the real money is. Political assassinations. He hopscotches the world for his clients.” He smiled. “You’re much too young to remember, but there used to be a TV newsman. Dapper little white dude. Always began his show with, ‘This is John Cameron Swayze, hopscotching the world for headlines.’
“But I digress. Mos’ likely there was a cat drawing somewhere in that Irish barroom that ever’body ignored.”
“I don’t see how Felix could have had anything to do with the death of the Touchstone mercenary in Kabul,” I said. “Witnesses saw the killers. Two Afghanis.”
Henry smiled at me as if I were a naive child. “Billy, you ever hear the term ‘murder by proxy’? The way it used to be done, back in the sixties, you sent some hop head at your vic with a speedball full of death. How hard it be to talk some Afginnie crazies into cutting the throat of an American who was bein’ paid a fortune to mess up their country?”
“The two killers were definitely focused on that particular target,” I said.
“Hell, probably a cat drawing at the apartment of the news guy who got poisoned,” Henry said. “Could be restin’ in a police evidence room.”
“The guys they’ve got investigating the murder might have thrown it away,” I said.
Henry chuckled. “Take it from me, Billy. No matter how stupid, cops never throw nothin’ away.”
“What else can you tell me about Felix, Henry?”
“Jus’ one thing: Leave him be.”
“I’m not sure I can.”
“Oh?” He was sitting upright now, frowning. “Why’s that?”
“Because right now I’m still the main suspect in Rudy Gallagher’s murder.”
“And you’re doing what?” Henry said. “Tryin’ to solve the murder yourself? Son, that’s about as smart as carrying a hair-trigger piece stuck down your pants. Didn’t work so well for that dumb shit played for the Giants, and it won’t turn out any better for you. My lawyers got excellent investigators who do that kind of stuff.”
“I’m not planning on hunting the guy down,” I said. “I just want to gather enough evidence to turn over to the cops. Let them take it from there.”
He reached out and placed a large hand on my arm. “I always figured you as bein’ bright, a man who knows the way the world works. You’re not seeing this situation clearly. If you do succeed in pointing the cops in Felix’s direction, it’ll be like poking a bear with a stick. A big-ass, dangerous bear. You think you got trouble now. Imagine what it’ll be like if you attract that bad boy’s full attention.”
“Point made and taken,” I said.
“I sincerely hope so, Billy,” the old man said. “Because of my profession and my age, I have become accustomed to losing friends. But I sure wouldn’t want to lose a good restaurant.”
Chapter
TWENTY-SIX
“This seem like not long to you?” Joe asked when I returned to the car.
“I couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes.”
“An eternity,” he said, “waiting here like lamb tied to tree with tigers all around.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Fear’s no fun.” I was feeling the effect of Henry’s warning.
“Where you want to go now? Flatbush? Iraq? Camden, New Jersey?”
“Let’s try someplace a little safer,” I said. “The Glass Tower.”
“Okay,” Joe said. “But I park underground, not on street.”
My first errand at the WBC building took me to a no-frills, windowless section at the rear of the nineteenth floor, where the editors worked their digital magic. It was like entering a workplace for low-ranking city-government employees. Gray carpet. Gray metal cubicles where the editors slouched on gray metal chairs, working at monitors resting on gray metal desks.
The walls were painted an ashlike smudge, their dullness unrelieved by any hanging art, even the color portraits of the network’s performers that graced many a wall in the rest of the building.
Judy Alridge, whose elevated position of senior editor merited a cubicle a few square feet bigger than the others and her very own ficus tree, was focused on her monitor, mixing and matching footage from a collapsed-bridge disaster in the Midwest. She was a full-figured woman, dressed casually in denim pants and a plaid woolen shirt cut large enough to hide the result of her fast-food addiction.
In response to her name, she spun around in her gray chair, saw it was me, frowned, and said, “Hey, Blessing. Fess up now. Did you poison that prick Gallagher?”
“No way,” I said. “I’m a live-and-let-live advocate.”
“And I was all set to reward you with a big wet one.”
“My loss,” I said. “Judy, I’m looking for some DVDs of Gallagher’s that you guys used in putting together his obit doc. Specifically a show he hosted called USS Huckleberry.”
“I did the obit myself,” Judy said. “I used a minute or two from that show. The son of a bitch actually seemed charming dealing with those kids. He shoulda stuck to his on-camera work. Then I wouldn’t have had to put up with his obnoxious real personality, not to mention his constant bitching and moaning.”
“And the disks are …?”
“We tossed all of his crap into a big cardboard box in the storeroom. Right down the hall on the left. Knock yourself out.”
The room was where she said it would be. Ditto the cardboard box and DVDs. There were about seventy-five of the silver disks in neatly labeled slim jewel cases. I shuffled through them and came up with a half-dozen labeled USS HUCKLEBERRY. Twelve full hours of stone-age TV animation interspersed with young Rudy Gallagher making nice with tots. Quite a treasure trove.
I jammed the six jewel cases into my coat pockets and moved on to the main reason I’d returned to the Glass Tower. For that I had to asc
end much higher, to the sixty-fourth floor that pre-9/11 had been the exclusive aerie of the network’s top executives. Now it was a windows-to-the-world nesting place for publicists, promotion copywriters, some advertising salespersons, researchers, the editors and maintainers of the company’s Internet websites, and an elderly coot known simply as Marvin.
“Yo, Billy, what’s the hap?” Marvin asked from behind his desk, staring out of the always-open door to his spacious office. He was wearing his usual sea-green warm-up togs and white cap with a flying dolphin logo, leaning back in his executive chair, long fingers interlocked across his flat tummy, huge feet snug in New Balance runners resting on top of his big, bare desk.
“Nothing much to report, Marvin,” I said, before moving on to a large room filled with a long U-shaped table on which rested computer monitors, keyboards, and mice. The room was empty. I backtracked to Marvin. “Any idea where the research people are?” I asked.
“Taking an early lunch,” he said, scratching his gray whiskers. “Violet—you know, the cute brunette with the ring stuck in her eyebrow—it’s her twenty-second birthday, and they all went to this new place opened on East Fifty-ninth. Nanu.”
“Any idea when they’ll be back?”
“They’re young,” he said. “Sometimes they don’t bother to come back. What do you need, Billy? Maybe I can help.”
Maybe. I was never quite sure what Marvin did at WBC, only that he’d been employed there long enough to have been hired by the commander’s father, Harold Di Voss. Marvin once told me he’d started in the business at NBC in the early 1950s, during the reign of Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, the genius who created the Today show and The Tonight Show and still had found the time to inaugurate the unique news and entertainment radio program Monitor.
When Weaver departed Marvin left, too, and was immediately hired by Harold Di Voss for one reason only. As Marvin likes to tell you, “He couldn’t get Pat.”
“I’m looking for information about a guy,” I told Marvin.
“He got a name?”
I hesitated, then decided, why not tell him? “An international assassin who calls himself Felix the Cat.”
“Well, now,” he said, grinning. He swung his big feet off the desk and got up from his chair. “Let’s go see what we can dig up.”
He led me back to the empty research room, where he sat at the nearest computer. Like a concert pianist, he popped his knuckles, flexed his long, thin fingers, and sent them flying over the keys, making his own electronic music.
“You’ve done this before,” I said.
“It’s like anything else,” he said. “Once you figure out how it works, it’s just a matter of refining your skills. Did that my whole career. No reason to stop now that I’m retired.”
On the flat screen, I saw that he had signed off the person who’d been using the computer and signed himself on, using the ID MonitorMan. It was obviously a reference to his work on Weaver’s weekend radio show.
“You’re retired?” I asked.
“Nearly seventeen years now,” he said. “Once I hit mandatory, I sure as hell didn’t want to spend all day in the house staring at my wife, Celia, even though she was and is very easy on the eyes. A certain amount of absence is needed. So I cut a deal with young Vern.” That would be the sixtysomething commander. Young Vern. “If he gave me an office to hang out in, I’d continue to advise him like I did his dad.
“Here we go, Billy.”
The name InfoScoob appeared on the monitor, followed by the description: “a meta search engine with the option to contact users conducting similar searches.” A line of type at the bottom of the screen read: “created by MonitorMan.”
“This is your program?”
“I worked it out last year when I got tired of watching these kids in research putzing around with Google. That Felix the Cat name all you got on this guy?”
“Afraid so.”
“We’ll start with that. But we’re gonna have to figure out a way to narrow down the search a little.”
Marvin typed in “Felix the Cat” and was almost immediately rewarded with more than a million hits. Judging by the first page, ninety-nine percent of those were references to the cartoon and comic-book character Felix the Cat.
Marvin changed the search to “Felix the Cat” plus “murder.” That brought the number of replies down to just more than one hundred thousand. “Felix the Cat” plus “assassination” narrowed the results to just eighteen thousand nine hundred.
Finally limiting the search to “Felix the Cat” plus “assassin,” we were rewarded with eighty-nine direct hits.
Nearly an hour later, having clicked through all the newspaper, magazine, and video reports, printing whatever I requested, Marvin said, “You’re not curious about who Minnie might be?”
“I don’t understand the question,” I said.
“You missed the notice that ‘Minnie’ had made a similar search last week,” he said. “I added user history to the program so that people who share a similar info quest might correspond with one another if they cared to.”
“I don’t think I want to correspond with Minnie,” I said. “But I wouldn’t mind knowing her real name.”
He tapped only two keys and the screen was suddenly filled with the user profile of … Trina Lomax.
“Hmmm. Looks like you and our executive producer share a common interest in Felix.”
I nodded.
“And since she’s already done her research, and since political assassination is a little off your beat, I take it your curiosity about Mr. Felix is personal rather than business. Right?”
“It’s personal.”
He nodded and closed down the session, logging the original researcher back on to the machine. “Why don’t we go back to my office and talk about it?”
I stared at him, wondering if it had been his age or the whiskers or the tarpon cap and warm-up suit that had led me to so underestimate the MonitorMan. He’d been a bright guy all of his life, smart enough to have earned the respect and confidence of both the commander and his father, and he hadn’t seemed to have lost any of his mental acuity to age. Still, I didn’t want to get into a discussion of my problems with a guy I barely knew.
“Thanks for the offer and for your help, but I think these printouts will be all I need right now.”
“Your call. As Vern will tell you, I give good advice.”
“I’m not even sure what kind of advice I’d ask,” I said.
“Well, if you figure that out, you know where to find me.”
“There is one thing.”
He eyed me, waiting.
“The commander sent Rudy Gallagher to Afghanistan on some kind of mission. I don’t suppose he asked your advice before he did that?”
Marvin smiled. “I see where you’re headed, Billy. You’re hoping to convince the cops that Felix had a better reason to put Rudy down than you did. And you think that reason may have something to do with Rudy’s trip to Kabul.”
He was definitely a shrewd old boy. “What was Rudy supposed to do for the commander, Marvin?”
“You’re going to have to ask Vern that question.”
“I did.”
“What’d he say?”
“That it had been a father’s mistake. I assume that means it had something to do with his son Bud’s death. Right?”
“I really can’t address that point,” Marvin said. “Good luck with your plan, Billy. But my advice is for you to abandon it and let nature take its course. If you didn’t kill Rudy, it’s gonna be damned hard for the cops to prove you did. Get on with your life and let Felix get on with his, until he slips up. They always do.”
I thanked him again for his help and his advice, and headed down to my dressing room with the printouts on Felix. I snagged a cup of Billionaire Blend from the kitchen and settled in at Kiki’s desk.
My assistant had left a reminder for me on the bulletin board: Lily Conover had scheduled the usual back-to-back Bless
ing’s in the Kitchen tapings for tomorrow at the Wine & Dine building. I groaned. Even in normal times, the every-other-Thursday workday was a grueling one, but rather than dote on that, I focused on the printouts.
There were more than forty separate articles and reports referencing the assassin. Not one of them offered anything other than rumors of Felix’s involvement. Nonetheless, I broke them down according to victims. Six piles. Six assassinations. The stabbing of the leader of the Moleta drug cartel in Bogotá. The long-range shooting of a Muslim firebrand with ties to Osama bin Laden in the Philippines. The bombing of an official in Yemen who was interfering with the investigation of another bombing, the one that took place on the USS Cole. There was a second stabbing that Henry Julian had mentioned, the Nigerian dictator General Santomacha. And finally, only a few weeks before, there had been an immolation of an ayatollah who’d been urging Iran’s president to break off talks with the West. You gotta love a guy who keeps changing the menu.
There were no witnesses to any of the crimes. No clues, other than the presence of a rudimentary drawing of a cat, that had led to the presumption that Felix had been the perpetrator.
The truly disturbing thing was that the assassinations weren’t just political, the victims had all been working against the interests of the United States. Could Felix be employed by the CIA? Or an agency even more clandestine than the CIA?
Marvin’s advice was sounding smarter and smarter. What had I been thinking? Just let nature take its course.
I collected the printouts and the notes I’d made, ran them through the shredder, and left my dressing room/office.
The Wake Up! studio was almost vacant, the exceptions being Trina Lomax standing at the news desk with Arnie Epps, complaining about the dullness of the set. Was Trina’s computer ID, “Minnie,” a reference to Mickey Mouse’s girlfriend, wife, whatever? Why hadn’t I thought of that immediately? Minnie the Mouse, looking up info on Felix the Cat.
Was it an inside joke she was sharing with Felix? Could they be associates?