The Bad Beat bn-4

by Tod Goldberg

  The house itself was a one-story ranch-style home on Ninety-ninth Street. Judging by the concrete-block stucco design, it had been built in the late 1940s or early 1950s, which was when Miami Shores was first developed. It was repainted recently, so in the sunlight it gleamed a brilliant white. That and the new slate on the roof indicated to me that Henry Grayson had kept the house in good order up to some recent point. The overgrown grass and shrubs told another story.

  We parked across the street and walked to the house. Fiona and Brent waited for us on the front porch and I could already tell, just from Fiona’s posture, that she was not in the best mood. Maybe having her pick up the kid was a mistake after her experience with Yuri Drubich.

  “Nice neighborhood,” Sam said. “Except for that high-pitched squealing sound. Do you hear that?”

  “They call those birds,” I said.

  “Annoying,” he said. “And it smells funny out here, too.”

  “That’s called fresh air,” I said. “That sweet scent is what’s known as flowers.”

  “For my money, Mikey, I prefer air with a bit more bite to it.”

  I looked down the block and noticed that two rather conspicuous-looking SUVs were now parked on either side of the street. Since no harried parents came tumbling out of them, followed by sugar-filled children, I had the sense that maybe they weren’t locals. Well, that and the tinted front windows, which don’t have much of a functional purpose for people not in the violence or protection business.

  “Looks like we have company,” I said.

  “Not exactly trying to hide,” Sam said. “Maybe more of Big Lumpy’s people?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Let’s see.” I stopped in the middle of the street and waved at both cars.

  “Michael,” Fiona called from the porch, “what are you doing?”

  “There are some bad guys parked down the street,” I said. “I’m letting them know that I see them and wish them well.”

  Fiona stomped across the front lawn and into the street, saw where I was looking and then mumbled something under her breath and began rummaging in her purse. She mumbled something again, this time with a bit more vehemence, so I said, “What was that?”

  Fiona looked up and her expression was… well, she seemed a touch on the angry side. Her face was a handsome shade of red. “I said, ‘We should just shoot them.’ Maybe you’ve heard me say that before?”

  “We’re in the middle of a residential street, Fiona.”

  “Maybe you haven’t noticed, Michael, but I have an open wound on my head.”

  “I noticed.”

  “And I turned my ankle-did you see that?”

  I looked down. She was wearing, as usual, a nice pair of heels. “It does look a bit swollen.”

  “While you and Sam were having beers with an evil scientist, I was in a fight for my life. So you’ll excuse me for not having much patience,” she said.

  “Fi,” Sam said, “maybe you should just wait in the house. Let the physically fit handle this.”

  “Where are you going to be, then, Sam?” Fi said and she headed off down the street.

  “Uh, Fi,” I said.

  “I’m in no mood for this,” Fiona shouted. She reached into her purse and pulled out a gun, not her Sig, I noticed, and then remembered what she’d told me. Nice that she already had a replacement. I didn’t anticipate her pulling another gun from her purse, too. She had both of her arms outstretched as she walked, which made for a rather striking image.

  “You want me to run after her?” Sam asked.

  “No,” I said. “She might kill you.”

  “Is everything all right?” Brent asked. He’d moved to the middle of his lawn but couldn’t see the action.

  “It sure is,” I said. “Just stay where you are.”

  Fiona stood directly in between both SUVs, but was far enough away that I couldn’t hear her voice. By the way she waved her guns, however, I had the impression that she was stating her points emphatically. After another thirty seconds of this, both SUVs pulled away at a normal rate of speed. Even used their blinkers at the corner.

  Fiona stuffed both of her guns back into her purse and walked back toward the house.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “Some gentlemen who believe Henry Grayson owes them money,” she said.

  “Bookies?”

  “Loan sharks,” she said.

  Not good. “What did you tell them?” I said.

  “To get in line.”

  “How much is he on the hook for?” Sam asked.

  “They didn’t say,” Fiona said, “but enough that the kind gentlemen apparently have spotters somewhere on the street to let them know when someone shows up unannounced.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “But I convinced them to leave the house alone,” she said.

  “Permanently?” Sam asked.

  “I told them I worked for Yuri Drubich,” she said,

  “and that if they valued their lives and the lives of their children they’d consider the debt a loss on this year’s earnings. Now, can we get on this? I have a lateevening appointment at a day spa to get rid of the ugly gash I have in my head. I’d like not to miss it.”

  Fi brushed past us then, grabbed the house keys from Brent’s hands as he stood patiently on the porch and calmly let herself into the house.

  “She seem a little agitated?” Sam asked.

  If you want to get to know someone, look at their bookshelves. If they have row after row of self-help books, you can assume with absolute clarity that they are insane, since clearly if self-help worked, they wouldn’t need dozens of books on the topic. If they have books primarily suggested by Glenn Beck, you can be fairly certain that if they’re not home it’s because they’re busy looking for the black helicopters or checking on the birth records of every elected government official and thus won’t be back to bother you anytime soon. If they don’t have bookshelves, that’s a sign, too. Never trust someone who doesn’t read.

  In Henry Grayson’s case, the bookshelves in his home office were filled with two kinds of books: ones on betting strategy-this included a fascinating work called Killing the Book, which, the cover blurb said, was written by “an ex-Mafia bookie” who “knew where the numbers and bodies were buried”-and then books on how to disappear.

  The first books were easy enough to understand-he was a compulsive gambler who must have always been looking to end the losses. The second books, of course, spoke to his current predicament and they weren’t the kinds of books one generally found on the shelves at Barnes amp; Noble: Hiding from the Government: A Guide to Living Off the Grid; Faking Your Death for Profit; The Minutemen Survival Handbook and about fifty others of a similar ilk. None of these books were actual bound books; rather, they were bulky photocopied messes held together with paper clips or velo binding or gold brads.

  Henry Grayson had spent a good deal of time scouring the dark corners of the Internet for source materials, which I admired-at least he wanted to get educated before he flew off-but the majority of books like these were written by crazy people for crazier people. The keys to disappearing were (1) don’t leave evidence sitting around and (2) stop creating new evidence-two things Henry Grayson had notably not done.

  His office was decorated in modern-day-man-cavemeets-aging-geek: built-in bookshelves, two flat-screen plasma televisions (which went well with the plasmas in the living room, kitchen, master bedroom, guest room and the one in the garage, which seemed an odd place to keep an expensive television), a small desk decorated with old Star Wars action figures (including at least half a dozen different Boba Fetts), framed comic books and photos of Henry’s deceased wife and of Brent.

  It was also surprisingly clean compared to the rest of the house, which was bachelor-dirty: old sports magazines on every available surface, dust bunnies under all of the furniture (which Brent assured me were there long before his father disappeared) and DVDs scattered throughout.

&n
bsp; The desk itself, with its carefully laid-out calendar in the center, the action figures along the rim, and the phone placed at a perfect diagonal to everything else, made me think of a catalog. There was a stack of papers inside a wicker mail organizer that by themselves weren’t noteworthy-a flyer for a notary conference next January in Palm Desert, California, the receipt for a small donation to hurricane relief in Haiti and a Post-it reminding him to pay Brent’s tuition and housing bills-but together they painted an odd picture. Why keep those things?

  There was something off about the office but I couldn’t exactly place what it was. The books might have given me an initial clue as to who he was, but the rest of the office told me something different. A Star Wars -obsessed notary who kept only one room in his entire home clean? And who needs two plasma TVs in one small room?

  I went back to the bookcase and examined his reading again, my eyes landing on a book called Building Bunkers, Safe Houses and Underground Domestic Dwellings by a writer calling himself “John Q. Keep Me Out of the Public.” Cute. I pulled it out and flipped through the pages once, stopping to ponder the entirely inaccurate information about planting trip wires before I headed to the living room.

  Fiona and Brent sat on the sofa going through stacks of old bills and bank statements. Sam was in the kitchen tinkering with a desktop computer that looked to be at least fifteen years old, which made it the perfect age for Sam’s computer skills.

  “Would you like some light reading?” I said to Fiona. I handed her the book but she just set it on the coffee table. She’d calmed down some. Or at least enough to patiently go through stacks of unopened mail Brent had found in his father’s bedroom, in the trash can and overflowing out of the mailbox.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I’m engrossed in the correspondence from the homeowners’ association.” She showed me a stack of yellow papers, all of which bore the telltale sign of an angry group of residents: a propensity to overuse capital letters.

  “What seems to be the problem?”

  “Uncut grass,” she said. “One letter says that every blade of grass over three inches in height is subject to a fine. Really, Michael, who chooses to live among these people? Why not just move into a gulag?”

  “Anything we can use?” I asked Fiona.

  “He let his beer-of-the-month-club membership slide,” she said quietly and then tilted her head in Brent’s direction. He was looking at an invoice with more attention than I’d been aware he could muster.

  “It was a gift from my mother,” Brent said. He handed me the invoice. His membership had lapsed three months ago. “He always made sure it was paid. Always. Each month, it came with a greeting card from my mother, or not my mother, but my mother’s name. It was a gift. He didn’t even drink that much.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m sure if he pays his bill, they’ll start it back up.”

  “That’s not the point, Michael,” Fiona said. I knew she was right, but I was just hoping to reel things in, if possible. I’d forgotten, again, that I was essentially dealing with a child.

  I handed the invoice back to Brent. “It’s silly, really,” Brent said. “It’s not like they got along when she was alive.”

  “It’s hard to tell with parents,” I said. “I thought my mom and dad hated each other, and, maybe after a while, they did. But what I think of as the worst years of my life, my mother tends to remember differently. Maybe it’s the same with your father, Brent.”

  “He once told me that he gambled because it was the closest thing to feeling normal that he had,” Brent said. “Does that make any sense?”

  I told him it did. One thing I’d learned all of these years, and why I’ve struggled so long to get my name back and clear my burn notice, was that I never felt more like who I was supposed to be than when I was a spy. It was the most natural state of calm and being I’d ever possessed. And then one day it was gone. Helping people like Brent salved the wound some, but nothing was the same.

  Sam came into the living room and plopped down in a caramel-colored recliner that was positioned about four feet from one of the ubiquitous flat-screen televisions. He attempted to turn on the television using one of the four remotes that were tucked in the recliner’s pocket, but none of them worked.

  “Life was easier when there were only thirteen channels,” Sam said. “I’m telling you, if Reagan were still in office, there would be one remote control in every house and it would operate every television in the universe.”

  “I’m guessing you didn’t find anything,” I said.

  “He had software on that computer from the nineties,” Sam said. “And judging from the amount of music he downloaded from Napster in 1999, I’m going to say he’s lucky he didn’t get thrown into record-industry prison.”

  “That was my mom’s computer,” Brent said. “He didn’t want to change anything on it.”

  “Your mom,” I said, “how did she die?”

  “Car accident,” Brent said. “Dad fell asleep at the wheel. They were driving home from the Keys. They’d gone down there for their anniversary and left me with my nana.” The way Brent recited the information was robotic. He’d given the answer so many times in his life that it was now just a series of simple, declarative facts. He’d boiled down the worst part of his life into three mundane sentences.

  “Jesus,” Fiona said. “How old were you?”

  “Nine,” Brent said.

  The problem in dealing with teenagers is that they sometimes leave out salient bits of personal information.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said. “Do you know if your dad gambled when your mom was alive?”

  “No, no, never,” he said. “He was a completely different person.”

  “Grief will do that,” I said.

  “No, I mean he was actually a different person,” Brent said. “He got thrown out of the car in the accident and his brain, it was like it got rewired. He was in the hospital for three months and when he got out, he had a different personality pretty much. I mean, you know, he was a notary. And now he’s like this… dirtbag.”

  Traumatic brain injuries resulting in changes in personality aren’t uncommon. In Henry’s case, married with the inadvertent death of his wife, it was pretty much textbook. That he was ready and able to risk everything on the outcome of a sporting match spoke to a larger mental instability, certainly, but in light of everything else I’d learned about Henry subsequent to his disappearance, there was a strong sense of paranoia at work here, too, and a certain fatalistic streak. He’d left his son to fend for himself, but also left him with a fortune in life insurance. Nothing about Henry made sense, because nothing in Henry made sense. I had a sinking feeling that when we found Henry, he wasn’t going to be in a good mental state.

  “When did your dad start collecting plasma TVs?” Sam asked.

  “That was a recent obsession,” Brent said. “For a long time he was just really into Star Wars. ”

  “How recent?” I asked.

  “He started stockpiling them a few months before he skipped town,” Brent said.

  “Any idea why?”

  “He watched a lot of sports,” Brent said. He then shrugged for maybe the thousandth time in the last two days. I was empathetic toward Brent for the odd life he’d been forced into, but I wondered if his shoulders ached from the amount of shrugging he did. “He’s a hoarder when he puts his mind to something.”

  I was pretty sure that wasn’t it. Ten plasma televisions was obsessive even for an obsessive. There had to be something else.

  “Your father’s gambling,” I said. “He ever think about turning the tables?”

  “What do you mean?” Brent said.

  “Going into business,” I said. “Starting his own sportsbook.” I remembered what Sam had said about his insurance coverage: You don’t hoard plasma televisions and then remember to add them to your home insurance. It spoke to a stability that seemed curious in light of everything else.

  “I don
’t think so,” Brent said.

  “Your pop hoard any of those beers of the month I heard you mention?” Sam asked.

  “Probably,” he said.

  “You mind if I find out?”

  Brent shrugged, which was all the permission Sam needed to pop out of the recliner and head to the kitchen. He came back a few minutes later with cold beers for all of us, even Brent.

  “I’m not twenty-one,” Brent said.

  “It’s all right, kid,” Sam said. “Your uncle Sammy is.”

  I sat there in the comfortable living room of Brent Grayson’s childhood home and pondered what it must have been like to grow up within these four walls. They weren’t so different from the walls I’d grown up around and crazy parents are crazy parents. The difference is that I had Nate and Brent had to be with his father on his own. I coped by becoming a spy. Brent coped by becoming the kind of nineteen-year-old who was smart enough to dupe a man like Yuri Drubich.

  I had no idea where Henry Grayson was. I thought I could take Big Lumpy at his word, but in light of the men on the street that Fi had dispatched, it seemed Henry had more people after him than could reasonably be accounted for, and that was a problem.

  I took a sip of my beer. It was ice-cold. The logo on the side of the bottle showed a cresting wave and so for a moment I imagined what life would be like if I were one of those people who actually was able to spend the majority of their Miami time beachside covered in suntan lotion versus constantly running into and out of trouble, mine and other people’s, in well-ventilated homes, hotels and secure government locations.

  And then it occurred to me: I was drinking an ice-cold beer in an air-conditioned home. A home that had been unoccupied for at least two months.

  I grabbed the stack of mail from the coffee table and began sifting through the envelopes until I found what I was looking for: the electric bill. It had a credit balance of three thousand dollars. Why would a person disappear but keep his electricity on? Actually pay for it for months in advance?

  I picked up the book on underground dwellings. If you want to find out what pages of a book have been read the most, you can do a simple fingerprint test using a variety of chemicals, but in a bind you can just use iodine and an oven. After the iodine is heated, the prints will be revealed, but only for a short period of time-just a matter of minutes. More effective is a brushing of silver nitrate followed by some good old-fashioned ultraviolet light, better known as black light to anyone who happens to watch too much television.