Second Story Man

by Charles Salzberg

  “He remained at the bar until the police arrived?”

  “Yup. He even mugged for the camera, like he was in some kind of stupid reality show. And the odd thing, Manny, is that he gave his real name. That’s what set off the alert. They fed it into the computer and his sheet came up. But there are no outstanding warrants on him so they let him go. I’m guessing the other guy was probably too embarrassed to press charges. It was one of those David and Goliath things.”

  “Thank you so much, David Chung. I truly appreciate your taking the time to relay this information to me. Would it be possible for you to email me the video file?”

  “So long as no one catches me. You know how they are down here. Everything by the book. I’m not about to go through all that red tape. You know what that’s like.”

  “I do not wish to see you get into any trouble, my friend.”

  “Don’t worry about me. You, me, we gotta stick together to get the bad guys. I’ll keep my eyes and ears open in case something else comes in. And Manny, one more thing. We miss you down here. Like I told you, we all know you were just doing your job and we think you got a raw deal.”

  “No, I was not doing my job. If I had been doing my job I would have obtained the proper warrant. I made a mistake and I accept my punishment. But I will be back and I will, as they say, ‘take care of business.’”

  “I’m sure you will. If I hear anything else I’ll let you know. Oh, and I’m still working on that other stuff for you. I’m hoping to have an address on Evelyn Kerns by tomorrow. Oh, and I stopped by to check on Esther yesterday. She’s fine. She and the kids miss you, of course, but I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”

  “Thank you, David Chung. You are a prince among men. I am hoping I will not be here that much longer.”

  As soon as I got off the phone I went into the kitchen to share the news with Charlie Floyd.

  “He wanted us to know he was there,” said Charlie Floyd.

  “Yes,” I said, “that is exactly what I thought.”

  “The question is, why?”

  Charlie Floyd

  Manny’s news put an interesting spin on the search for Francis Hoyt. I was sure it was all staged so Hoyt would lead us to believe he was in New Jersey and that’s where we should be targeting our search. But this didn’t fit with the information from Ricky B that put Hoyt in Connecticut with one of Ricky’s whores. I believed he was targeting New York or Connecticut.

  “He’s playing us, Manny,” I said to my partner as we ate dinner out on my deck.

  “Yes, Charlie Floyd, I am certain you are correct. He would not be so careless as to get into a senseless brawl and risk being arrested unless he wanted us to know where exactly where he is. Francis Hoyt is a meticulous planner. There is no such thing as coincidence when it comes to Francis Hoyt. I asked my friend, David Chung, to send us the video. I want to see it for myself. He informed me that not only did Francis Hoyt stick around for the police to arrive, but he mugged for the camera.”

  “The fucker’s toying with us, Manny, trying to throw us off. It’s his way of giving us a big, fat middle finger.”

  Manny nodded.

  “It’s a joke to him. He wants us to know he’s got his eye on us. I’d bet Ricky B’s been in touch with him since we saw him yesterday.”

  “I would not be surprised either.”

  “You think he’s in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, or Massachusetts?”

  “It is very possible that he is in all those places, just not at the same time.”

  “You know, Manny, I hate to say this but I wonder if we’re ever going to find him.”

  This wasn’t like me. I’ve never doubted my ability to do the job. But I couldn’t help flashing back to my futile search for John Hartman. If he hadn’t turned himself in after all those years on the run, it’s very possible I’d never had found him. That case was what precipitated thoughts of retirement. I had to shake out of this funk. I had to forget about the past and concentrate on the future. No more negative thoughts.

  As if reading my mind, Manny proclaimed, “We will find him, Charlie Floyd. Of that I can assure you. And in answer to your question, I still have work to do but from my examination of the magazines it appears to me that he is targeting homes in Connecticut.”

  “I hope you’re right. But it’s possible he’s changed course once he realized we were after him. My guess is Pfister talked. Hoyt is smart. He’s a master of misdirection. We can’t let ourselves be manipulated. Look, dinner’s almost ready. Why don’t we go over what we have while we eat? I don’t know about you but I’m pretty hungry.”

  Here’s what we knew:

  Francis Hoyt was definitely in the tri-state area.

  Hoyt knew we were after him.

  Hoyt was most likely planning a series of jobs.

  Tommy Pfister and Ricky B were funneling information to Hoyt.

  Evelyn Kerns and Melinda Shaw were two of his most recent girlfriends.

  This gave us something to work with. We agreed the next thing we’d do would be to track down Kerns and Shaw, in hopes one of them might lead us directly to Hoyt.

  To that end, Manny, who was anxious to see his family, made a reservation to return to Miami Friday morning to look for Kerns, while I would head down to New York City to track down Shaw.

  We had ourselves a plan.

  Francis Hoyt

  “I ain’t never thought I’d ever hear from you again, Francis. I’m thinkin’ you’re the kinda guy holds a grudge. Ain’t that so?”

  “Sorry, Vito, but you’ve got me all wrong. There’s no percentages in holding a grudge. You never know when you’re gonna need someone’s help, so why burn bridges? Besides, grudges never quite work out the way you want them to. There are two times in a man’s life when he shouldn’t act.”

  “When’s those?”

  “When he’s in love and when he’s angry.”

  “That’s very smart thinkin’, Francis. But no one ever said you wasn’t smart. So, to what do I owe the honor of your presence here?”

  We were sitting across from each other in some shit-ass tiny pasta joint in Little Italy. Dark walls. Dark floors. Very low lighting. I guess that’s the way wise guys like it. That way they don’t have to see exactly what they’re eating and they don’t have to see each other too good. Me, I had enough darkness in the joint. And since I work at night, I like to spend the daytime hours in the light. Turns out I’d eaten here once before and didn’t think the pasta was all that good. But the wise guys seem to like it and they’re creatures of habit, so that’s where I knew I’d find Vito.

  Here’s something to chew on. Wise guys aren’t that wise. If they were, they wouldn’t get pinched so often. Every morning you open up the Daily News you see some other wise guy’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. The last thing you ought to do if you’re playing patty-cake with the law is be predictable. The feds probably got the place wired. Maybe they’ve even got a camera hidden somewhere. Or one of those drones circling Mulberry Street. And you can be damn sure they’ve got the joint under constant surveillance. Hell, everything’s under constant surveillance these days. There’s cameras on every damn corner, in every damn store. There’s no such thing as being anonymous anymore. You’re on the air wherever you are, wherever you go. My advice: live with it, embrace it, use it, just don’t abuse it.

  It didn’t matter to me. Right now, the more I was seen, the better. Obviously, it didn’t matter to Vito, either. You’d think after all these years mob guys would have figured it out, but they haven’t. They still get pinched and sent upstate, nailed by their own words.

  Let’s face it, the Italian mob is pretty much on the way out. Their heyday has come and gone. Today it’s the Russians, Chinese, Armenians, Serbs, and Bulgarians you got to look out for. They’ll rip your guts out just for fun. They’ll shoot you in the head then chop up your body and use it for fertilizer. Nothing frightens them and if a man doesn’t
have fear in him, he becomes very dangerous, especially to himself. But they just don’t give a fuck. I mean, what sense does it make when Arabs and Muslims are blowing themselves up just to get to heaven where they’ll be met by a zillion fucking virgins?

  “Just thought I’d stop by and pay my respects, Vito.”

  Vito smiled. “Bullshit,” he said, lifting a glass of red wine. He brought it to his lips, held it there a second, swishing it around in the glass, before he drank. It was all a fucking act. Ever since The Godfather every two-bit hood thinks he’s Marlon Brando. Give me a fucking break.

  “Respect is important, Vito. You know that. I don’t always see eye to eye with you, but I respect you. You don’t get to the position you’re in without earning respect from your peers. I respect you and I think you respect me.”

  If I’d been in a bathroom I’d be vomiting straight into the toilet.

  “If you say so, Francis.”

  He knew it was bullshit and I knew it was bullshit, but I also knew he was lapping up every bit of it. Because even though it was bullshit it was the kind of bullshit he wanted to believe. That’s why I said it.

  He took another sip of wine while swishing around what was left in his glass, like he knew what the fuck he was doing.

  “This is very good wine. You sure you don’t want some?”

  “You know I don’t drink.”

  “Things change. I thought maybe you took it up again. I don’t know if I can trust a guy who don’t drink. Especially when he don’t drink vino as good as this.”

  “You shouldn’t trust me. You know why?”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because I’m unpredictable. That makes me unreliable and untrustworthy. I wouldn’t trust me if I was you.”

  “That so?”

  “Yeah, I’m afraid it is. I can’t help myself. I’m counter-intuitive. Sometimes even I don’t know what I’m doing. That’s true of all the great ones, Vito. Michael Jordan, he didn’t know exactly how he was going to dunk that ball until he was in mid-air. That’s me. You don’t know which way I’m gonna go. I don’t know which way I’m gonna go. It’s how I managed to stay out of the joint. That is until I got hooked up with you.”

  “See, I knew you held a grudge.”

  “No. You’ve got that wrong. It’s not a grudge. The way I figure it it’s more like a debt.”

  He rolled some spaghetti on his fork, using his spoon to guide it, then shoved it in his mouth. A little red sauce splattered onto the napkin tucked into his shirt.

  “You figure I owe you something? That the way you see it?”

  “What do you think?”

  “It wasn’t me that fucked up, Francis.”

  “It wasn’t me, either. It was one of those two doofuses you sent along with me even after I begged you not to.”

  “I made a mistake in judgment. Shit happens,” he said as he ripped off a hunk of bread and dabbed it in a dish of pasta sauce.

  “It does. But not when I’m in charge. When I’m in charge shit definitely does not happen.”

  “So whaddya want me to do? What’s done is done. I can’t change that. I can’t give you back those two years you spent in the joint. And I know you well enough to know it’s not about money. You got plenty of that. And even if it was, you’d be barking up the wrong tree.”

  He glared at me. Just to show me he wasn’t joking around. I knew that already. Guys like him don’t have much of a sense of humor. They don’t see the irony of life. If they did, they probably wouldn’t be doing what they do.

  “You’re right, Vito. I don’t give a fuck about the money.”

  “So whaddya want?”

  “I want a favor.”

  Charlie Floyd

  The next afternoon I found myself sitting in the waiting room of Matthew G. Cohan, licensed private investigator. I knew that much because that’s what he’d inscribed on the door in broken down, faded gold block letters that looked as if they’d been gnawed at by rats. That couldn’t be true, of course, because rats can’t jump that high, so it had to be simply the ravages of time and neglect.

  While I was on my way in to see Cohan, the PI who’d taken the photos of Melinda Shaw, Manny was on a plane back to Miami to find Evelyn Kerns.

  I hadn’t called to make a proper appointment and as a result his secretary who could have used a class on the fine art of applying makeup—she obviously did not subscribe to the less-is-more theory—had me cooling my heels in the small outer office while Mr. Cohan was supposedly “on a very important call with a very important client.” I didn’t believe a word of that. The dust that had accumulated on a small table that resided against the well-worn flowered upholstered couch I was seated on indicated that not many clients had recently passed through the hallowed halls of Mr. Matthew Cohan, licensed private investigator.

  “I’m sure he won’t be too much longer,” she said, while cracking her gum and filing her long, bright red painted nails.

  “Hope not,” I replied. “How long you worked for Mr. Cohan?”

  For a moment she looked confused, like it was a trick question.

  “Not long.”

  She was in her thirties, maybe a little older. Not pretty, not ugly, not plain. One of those anonymous faces you see in the subway going to work every morning. She was wearing too much makeup, especially the lavender mascara on her eyelids. It was a warm day so she was wearing a yellow sleeveless blouse and her shoulder-length brown hair was tied in a bun.

  “I’m only part-time,” she added, as if it just occurred to her to amend her answer.

  “You got a name?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Everyone’s got name, don’t they?”

  The more words she spoke the more her borough accent seemed to thicken. Whether the accent was the borough we were in, Brooklyn, or the Bronx, or Queens I couldn’t tell.

  “Everyone I’ve ever come across so far. So, what’s yours?”

  “Lauren.”

  “Nice name. Female version of Laurence.”

  “Huh?”

  She picked up her mobile phone and stared at it a moment, then plopped it into her large purse which was leaning against her desk.

  “Jeez, I gotta get going.”

  She dropped her nail file into the purse then picked the purse up.

  “Late lunch?” I asked, since it was already a few minutes after two o’clock.

  “Nope. Time to get to my other job.”

  “Which is?”

  “Pretty much the same thing I do here. Answer the phone. Take messages. But it’s for the nail salon downstairs.”

  “Very convenient.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Honey, before you take off,” I said to her as she dropped her purse on the desk and began to search in it for who knew what, “why don’t you stick your head in there and tell Mr. Cohan that I’m a busy man and if he doesn’t see me in the next two minutes I’m gonna take off.” I showed her my badge. “And on my way out I’ll have just enough time to make a call to some friends I have up in Albany about the validity of his PI license.”

  I was bluffing, of course, but she didn’t know that so she looked concerned. She dropped her purse and quickly disappeared into the inner sanctum. A minute later she came out and Cohan stuck his head out behind her and said, “Come right in.”

  “Sorry about that,” said Cohan, as he led me into an office that looked as if it had been designed by the Collyer brothers. There were papers strewn all over his desk, open boxes on the floor, magazines and newspapers piled on every surface, and a bookcase sagging under the weight of books and private dick gadgets like night goggles and two-way radios. It looked like a grown-up’s version of Dick Tracy’s office.

  “So, I’m Matthew Cohan,” he said, as he plopped into his chair. He was at most five-seven, and at least two hundred and twenty pounds. He wore suspenders to keep up his pants but they weren’t doing the job they were hired for. He sported one of those comb-overs that does nothing but call attention t
o the fact that you’re going bald. I’m not particularly good with ages, but Mr. Cohan looked like he could be anywhere from forty to sixty-five. He probably fell somewhere in between.

  “Any relation to George M.?”

  “Only if his real name was Cohen and he was a member of the tribe. I thought it was a better career move for the cops to think I was Irish.”

  “Did it work?”

  He shook his head. “The jury’s still out. And hey, call me Mattie. Everyone does. And your name?”

  “Charlie Floyd. You can call me Charlie. Everyone does.”

  He didn’t crack a smile. Evidently, Mr. Matthew Cohan no relation to George M. didn’t have much of a sense of humor.

  “Well, Charlie, pleased to meet you. Have a seat and tell me how I can help you today.”

  “I’m here in about Melinda Shaw.”

  “Shaw. Shaw. Melinda Shaw. Name sounds vaguely familiar. I know I should know who you’re referring to but…”

  “You were hired by her husband a while back, to see if she was having an affair.”

  “Oh, yeah. Melinda Shaw. Good looking chick. Yeah, yeah, I know who you’re talking about now. So, what about her?”

  “Tell me about how you found her and where she is now.”

  “I’m afraid no can do, Charlie. In case you didn’t know it we in the private investigating business have something we call client confidentiality. It’s like what priests and rabbis have. We owe it to our clients not to discuss their case with anyone without their permission. I assume you don’t have Miss Shaw’s permission…”

  While he was chatting away about whatever the hell he was trying to say to impress me I took out my wallet, opened it to my expired state ID issued by the AG’s office, placed it on the desk and pushed it toward him.

  “What have we here?”

  He picked it up.

  “Well, why didn’t you say so, Charlie? We’re colleagues. This official business?”

  I nodded a lie.

  “In that case, I’m always ready to help a colleague. One hand washes the other, right?”