Vanishing Act

by Seth Margolis

  Tonight they ordered in from the appropriately named Jackson Hole, which specialized in burgers as large as a Rocky Mountain. Joe D. told Alison about the limo service.

  “I guess you’ll have to wait and see if any billionaires die in the next couple of weeks.”

  Joe D. had thought of this. That morning he had read the obituaries in the Times. No billionaires today, just a former ambassador to someplace in Africa, a vice president of Merrill Lynch, a writer of off-off-Broadway plays, an actor, (both of the latter from AIDS), and six columns of paid death announcements of people who’d led lives deemed unfit to print by the Times. “Maybe I should have gone along with the guy, just till it got hairy. I mean, he gave the limo driver five hundred dollars, he would have given me ten times that just for starters, just for playing along.”

  “Forget it, Joe D. That’s not the kind of business you want.”

  “I’m getting desperate.”

  “Something will come up.” She said this with so little conviction that they both resumed their assaults on their burgers, which they’d abandoned only minutes ago, rather than pursue the topic of Joe D.’s fading prospects.

  After dinner Joe D. went for a walk. He invited Alison, but she said she was exhausted. Joe D. was never exhausted these days; it was the major occupational hazard of idleness.

  Fortunately, the city offered innumerable pleasures for the insomniac stroller. Back in Waterside, no one walked much farther than the distance from their front door to their car. But New York was a city of walkers—even overweight women had good legs in Manhattan, he’d noticed. Joe D. liked to leave Alison’s apartment on Seventy-third Street and head towards the East River. Tonight he followed his usual route, entering Carl Shurz Park at Seventy-ninth and walking along the river up to Gracie Mansion. (The first time he’d made this walk, with Alison, she’d told him that her grandmother had been delighted when Abe Beame was elected mayor, replacing John Lindsay. “Thank God there’s finally a Jew in Gracie’s Mansion.”) He left the park at Ninety-second and headed over to Third Avenue, which was invariably busy, something he liked in a city street. Then he walked back to Alison’s…their apartment.

  “Where’d you go?” Alison asked, as she always did.

  “To Gracie’s,” he answered, as he always did.

  Alison was already in bed, reading a magazine. Joe D. undressed and joined her.

  “I was thinking…” he began.

  She put down the magazine. “Uh oh.”

  “Maybe I should think about the city police. Nothing’s happening, and I’m getting tired of waiting. Besides, the pay’s good.”

  “The pay’s okay,” Alison corrected him. “But what kind of future is there in being a cop? At least with your own business…”

  “I don’t have a business. I have myself and a phone. Your phone.”

  “And some clients.”

  “Clients referred by your father.”

  “That’s how you get started in business, through referrals.”

  Joe D. turned away from her. He wished that Alison wasn’t so caught up in his having his own “business.” It just wasn’t so important to him what he did for a living, as long as he was active and earning money. It had always been like that for him. But Alison took working very seriously, and now that she had her own store she was almost fanatical. He suspected that her real motivation in urging him to stick it out was that she didn’t want to be living with, and perhaps eventually married to, a mere cop. The president of a private investigations agency, on the other hand, particularly one that specialized in corporate work, would suit her much better.

  “Look, Joe D.,” she said, and put a warm hand on his shoulder. “Maybe I push too hard. You must think I’m some kind of Lady Macbeth. And maybe it is important to me that you’re successful. I know that’s what you think.”

  He turned around, impressed, as he often was, by her insight into his feelings.

  “Just give it until the end of the year, okay? See what happens. If nothing develops, okay, then you can start exploring alternatives.”

  “Like the city police force.”

  Alison rolled her eyes. “Even that.” She picked up her magazine, then put it down.

  They made love before turning out the lights. Sex for them was the balm that soothed all wounds. It was the one part of their relationship that they could both lose themselves in. Alison could immerse herself in her work, and Joe D. could find relief from pressure (or, worse, the total absence of it) at the gym or walking the streets of Manhattan. Only sex was a shared release.

  Alison fell asleep in his arms within seconds, but Joe D. felt himself growing less drowsy by the moment. Should have run today, he thought. He carefully extricated himself from under Alison and slipped out of bed. He checked the digital clock. Midnight. He put on a bathrobe and walked into the living room, closing the door quietly behind him.

  He placed a CD on the player, Bach’s Goldberg Variations. They had been written for an insomniac, and though they never produced anything but bliss in Joe D.—a heightened alertness, if anything—he figured he’d give it a shot. He kept the volume low and lay down on the floor to listen. The recording was by Glenn Gould on the piano. Joe D. had a harpsichord version too, but thought the piano would be more soothing, despite the eery moaning of the pianist that wafted up now and then behind the glorious music. He tried to picture Goldberg attempting to sleep while a paid musician picked away at a keyboard across the room. He thought about men who paid other men to do for them what they should be able to do for themselves: Put them to sleep, put them to “death.” Money was power, not just over other people but over oneself. With enough money you could be lulled to sleep by heavenly music even before the phonograph had been invented. With enough money you could discard one life like an out-of-fashion suit and put on another, or so one very rich person believed. And without money, Joe D. knew firsthand, you were not only stuck with the life you led, you felt powerless to even change its direction.

  Or so he felt on a bad day.

  He woke, hours later, to a dull thud not far from his ears. He opened his eyes and could tell from the muted, unfamiliar light edging in from the corners of the blinds that it was very early in the morning. He stood, stretched for a moment to work out the kinks, then looked around for the source of the thud. Nothing in the apartment seemed out of order. He checked the clock on the oven in the kitchen. 5:30. Then he figured it out. He returned to the living room and opened the front door. There, on the floor, was the source of the thud: Thursday’s New York Times.

  “Alison, are you awake?”

  She was now.

  “I know who it was.”

  “Who who was?” she said groggily.

  “The guy who asked me to kill him.”

  She propped herself up on her elbows.

  “It’s on the front page of the Times. George Samson. He was murdered. It’s got to be him.”

  Alison looked at him and nodded dumbly. “What time is it?”

  “Five-thirty. Almost six,” he added encouragingly.

  “I’m going back to sleep.”

  She rolled over and appeared to do just that. He made a pot of coffee and studied the obit. A few minutes later, wearing a flannel robe, she joined Joe D. in the living room. She took a big swig from Joe D.’s coffee mug and asked him how he knew it was the same guy.

  “I don’t know for sure. But the article says he’s one of the richest men in the city. He has a wife and no kids.”

  “Picture?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t get a good enough look at him the other day. It could be him, though.”

  “Let me see.”

  He handed Alison the front section. “Jesus,” was all she said after reading for a few moments.

  It was horrible. George Samson, founder of Samson Stores, had been found shot dead with a single bullet in the face alone in the back of a taxi. The driver, Salik Mafouz, who’d arrived in New York from Pakistan just six months ago, had also
been killed with one bullet. The cab was discovered on an abandoned pier next to the West Side Highway. Samson’s wallet was found next to him on the back seat, all the money gone. Police were labeling the case a “hijacking,” the latest in a series of such robberies in which a thief jumps into a vehicle stopped at a light, orders the occupant to drive to a secluded spot, and then picks him or her clean. The only difference in this case: The passenger and the driver had been killed.

  “George Samson, I can’t believe it.”

  Alison said this with such conviction, Joe D. thought she must have known the man. “You knew him?”

  “Of course I didn’t know him. But I heard of him.”

  “Oh.”

  “You never heard of George Samson?”

  Joe D. shook his head, admitting to the failing.

  “Samson Stores?”

  “Never shopped there, no.”

  “They’re women’s stores, Joe D. About a thousand of them, I’d guess. All over the place. Samson’s one of the richest men in America.”

  “So he led me to believe, assuming it was him.”

  “Are you going to tell the police about what happened the other day?”

  “Not until I can prove that it was Samson I met with. Anyway, if he was going to fake his death, he’d make sure there wasn’t a body left over to ID. This sounds like a genuine murder.”

  Alison got up and poured herself a cup of coffee. “God, George Samson killed in the back of a cab. It seems so…common.”

  “A limo would have been classier?”

  “Infinitely. Speaking of which, why wasn’t he in his limo?”

  “It was a rental, remember?”

  “Yeah, but a guy like Samson must have a fleet of cars.”

  “Then he made a big mistake, taking a cab.”

  Four

  “George Samson was a brilliant and innovative businessman, a loving husband, a devoted uncle, and, speaking personally, a warm and loyal friend.”

  These lines were delivered in a flat, fill-in-the-blanks voice by Seymour Franklin, once Samson’s second-in-command and now his chief eulogizer (as well as chief executive officer of his company).

  Joe D. sat in the last row of the filled-to-capacity room, the largest chapel in the poshest funeral parlor on the Upper East Side (or so Alison had told him). If he’d had anything better to do he wouldn’t be here. And just about anything would be better than this amazingly dry-eyed funeral.

  Joe D. didn’t know what he was expecting to learn at the funeral, or what, for that matter, was in it for him, as they say. Still, he couldn’t stay away.

  The eulogy was interminable. George Samson was a tycoon, a visionary, a philanthropist, a saint. Joe D. knew that it was considered bad taste to bring up the faults of the deceased at his own funeral, but he hadn’t heard so many superlatives since Schwarzkopf’s final press briefing in Saudi Arabia. Wasn’t it customary to include little quips about the deceased’s idiosyncracies, delightfully embarrassing recollections that would make him seem more human, and thus all the more likable?

  But no humorous anecdotes were forthcoming from Seymour Franklin, and so George Samson failed utterly to come to life after his death for the thousand or so “mourners” gathered to pay their last respects.

  After the service the crowd didn’t so much disband as form discrete groupings. Factions was the word that sprang to Joe D.’s mind, for each group appeared to turn its back, literally, on the others. One faction swarmed around Seymour Franklin, congratulating him on his eulogy. Lots of handshaking in this faction. Another faction hovered about an astonishingly thin, taut-faced woman in a short black dress whom Joe D. guessed was the widow. Still another faction flitted about a woman who looked to be in her early thirties. She, too, was dressed in black, though her punky hair and coolly bored expression suggested that black was her favored color even when she wasn’t attending funerals. The smallest faction consisted of perhaps a dozen, mostly elderly men and women. The men wore yarmulkes. They appeared no more distraught at Samson’s demise than any of the others, but as they peered out of their tightly formed group they seemed to be casting disapproving glances at their fellow mourners. A final faction swarmed about no one in particular, but seemed reluctant to leave, preferring instead to ogle the other three factions.

  Joe D. didn’t belong in any group and was about to leave when the prospect of yet another long, empty day persuaded him to return to the chapel for a little of what Alison had once referred to, in what turned out to be the trigger for a minor argument, as “practice development.” He stood in the back of the large room and surveyed the four factions before choosing to prospect in the largest, that of Seymour Franklin.

  It wasn’t easy making his way through the tightly knit crowd: No one was willing to cede a favored position close to the new CEO of Samson Stores. Joe D. eventually managed to fight his way to the epicenter of this group, as dense with accumulated power as an atomic particle. When he tapped Seymour Franklin on the shoulder he half-expected to receive an electrical shock. Instead he received an automatic smile followed by a look of aloof indignation. “Do I know you?” Franklin said with more feeling that he’d revealed in the entire eulogy.

  “Here’s my card, Mr. Franklin,” Joe D. said as softly as he could. He waited while Samson glanced at it.

  “Investigations?”

  “In case you’re not satisfied with what the police tell you,” Joe D. said.

  Samson seemed about to hand the card back to Joe D. but pocketed it instead. Then he turned away from Joe D. as if from a waiter offering unwanted hors d’oeuvres.

  Central Park was at its springtime best that afternoon. Magnolias and cherry trees were in bloom, forming a pastel border around the reservoir jogging track. Joe D. circled the reservoir once—nearly one-and-a-half miles—then circled it again, and, inspired by the bracing April air and wondrous foliage, he circled it again. Four-and-a-half miles is not a prudent distance for a first-time jogger. Joe D. knew he’d suffer tomorrow. No pain, no gain, he thought. He’d always hated that expression.

  The message light on Alison’s answering machine was blinking when he returned. He figured it was Alison, and decided to take a shower before unlocking its secrets. Hope beat out despair and he changed his mind. “Mr. DiGregorio,” began a female voice. “This is Seymour Franklin’s office. Would you kindly call Mr. Franklin at your earliest convenience.” She gave a phone number and hung up.

  Joe D. returned the call at his earliest convenience, which happened to be right away.

  “Is there something about George Samson’s death you know that the police don’t?” Franklin said by way of greeting after his secretary had put Joe D. through.

  “Possibly,” Joe D. replied honestly.

  A long pause. “How soon can you be in my office?”

  Franklin’s office overlooking Fifth Avenue was the length of a bowling alley and about as cozy. Crossing from the door to Samson’s massive desk seemed to take forever—or at least, it took long enough for Joe D. to consider and reconsider exactly what he was doing there. Second thoughts were something of a specialty of his. Franklin nodded at a chair in front of his desk without offering his hand.

  “Now, what is it you know?”

  Joe D. decided his best strategy was keeping what he knew to himself. “Hold on, Mr. Franklin. Why don’t you begin by telling me why you called me.”

  Franklin took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “The police, as you know, are labeling Samson’s death a ‘hijacking.’ A random thing. I have my doubts.”

  “What kind of doubts?”

  “Samson was at a board meeting of the New York Art Alliance Tuesday evening. The meeting began at seven and ended about nine-thirty. His chauffeur had the night off, so he took a cab home. The killer could have waited outside the Alliance’s offices on West Sixty-fifth Street, followed Samson, jumped into the cab at a red light…”

  “Whoa. How could the killer have followed a moving cab? Unless w
e’re talking about an Olympic sprinter, which would narrow the list of suspects.”

  Samson grimaced at this attempt at humor. “I know who killed him,” he said evenly.

  “Have you told the police?”

  Franklin shook his head. “I have no proof. That’s why I called you. You can get the proof I need. Then I’ll go to the police.” Easy as pie, he might have added.

  Joe D. felt the tips of his fingers begin to tingle. A job! “Who’s your suspect?”

  “Mona Samson.” The words escaped his mouth like a belch. “The widow.”

  “And the motive?”

  “Money,” he said, as if this were obvious. “Theirs was not exactly a close marriage. Now she’s one of the wealthiest women in New York. And single.”

  “Does she have a lover?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I don’t move in the Samsons’ social set. George and I were colleagues but hardly friends.”

  “But in the eulogy…”

  “My last professional chore for George.”

  “And now you run the show here.”

  “Correct.”

  “So Samson’s death wasn’t exactly tragic for you either.”

  Franklin seemed about to respond to this but stopped himself. “Do you want this job, Mr. DiGregorio, or not?”

  “My fees are three hundred dollars a day plus expenses.”

  Samson nodded readily and Joe D. instantly wished he’d mentioned a higher sum. “I’ll have my secretary draw up a check for the first week. I believe you fellows like the first week in advance?”

  Joe D. assured him that this was the case.

  “Who identified the body?” he then asked.

  “Mona,” Franklin replied. “I understand George was a bit of a mess. The shot was point-blank in his face.”

  Which could make positive identification a problem. “Did they check dental records?”