“Seymour Franklin is a parasite. An overpaid parasite. He knows I have no use for him.”
Joe D. searched for some evidence of grief on Mona Samson’s face. He found none, and wondered if her face was capable of expressing grief. Perhaps her tear ducts had been surgically removed. Her voice, a breathy, unaccented monotone, seemed ill-suited to expressing any emotion stronger than benign amusement.
“But if the company makes money, what do you care who runs it?”
“When George’s will is probated I’ll own Samson Stores. Or, I should say, the seventy-five percent of the shares formerly owned by my husband. The public owns the rest.” She made public sound like a remote and ill-understood species.
“As long as you bring up the will…”
“I get everything,” she said matter-of-factly. “The shares, the real estate, all this.” She raised two long, bony arms to encompass the room and countless others like it. Then, after a long pause in which she seemed to be stewing over something, she said: “And George’s niece, Joanna Freeling. There’s been an accommodation for her.”
“Accommodation?”
“A million shares of Samson Stores. Worth about thirty-two million at yesterday’s close.”
Some accommodation. “She was close to her uncle, I take it.”
“She was his only living relative other than some…people out in Brooklyn. George never saw them. Joanna’s mother was George’s sister. Both parents died some time ago. I’ll give you her address before you leave. You might want to talk to her.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“I assume Seymour has you on a daily retainer. So you might as well stretch it out as much as possible. I have no doubt that when you’re through you’ll find that poor George was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“That reminds me—how many people knew he was going to be at the Art Alliance meeting the night he was killed?”
She hesitated before answering. Joe D. found it difficult to watch her—she was like a well-dressed anatomy chart, all bones and ill-disguised veins—so he glanced behind her and caught a glimpse of Central Park and the West Side through a window.
“I knew. And the other members of the board knew, of course. George’s secretary, Felicia Ravensworth, knew. No one else that I can think of.”
“You’re sure?”
“Check with Felicia. She’ll know.” Like her late husband—or, at any rate, like the man in the limo with Joe D.—Mona issued commands easily. Delegating was perhaps her chief talent. That and dieting.
“Is Wednesday the regular day off for your chauffeur?”
“We have no set schedule. He worked during the day and then George must have given him the night off.”
“May I speak with him?”
Instead of answering, she pressed a small button hidden among a variety of no-doubt precious items on a table next to the sofa. Porcelain figurines, an ashtray, two obelisks, a tiny marble bust on a bronze stake attached to a Lucite stand. Whatnots, his mother would call them. Alison would call them tchotchkes. Mona Samson probably called them objets d’art.
A few moments later the door to the library opened and the maid reappeared.
“Serena, could you ask Tony to step in here?” Mona Samson said without turning to face her employee. He was almost surprised that her voice carried across the large room, given the insubstantiality of her body.
Tony Manganino was a heavyset man in his early forties. He had gray hair and a thick, unruly gray moustache. He wore a wide blue tie that he hadn’t managed to pull up all the way. He looked uncomfortable in the tie, and even more ill at ease in the Samson library.
“I already told the police,” he said in a tough, New Yawk accent with a defensive edge. “I dropped Mr. Samson off at the Art Alliance at six and he gave me the rest of the night off. I garaged the car, had a few drinks at McGlade’s—that’s on First in the eighties—then I came back here. Ask the others,” he added unnecessarily.
“Did he often give you the night off like that when he was out?” Joe D. asked.
“Once in a while. The other night, he said he didn’t know how long he was going to be. Said he’d take a cab.”
Such benevolence didn’t jive with what Joe D. had heard about George Samson. Perhaps he had a soft spot for his driver. “How long did you work for Mr. Samson?”
“’Bout a year.”
“And before you?”
Manganino shrugged. “There was another guy. He didn’t last six months, and the guy before him…” He looked nervously at Mona and stopped himself.
“Anything else, Mr. DiGregorio?” asked Mona testily.
Joe D. shook his head and thanked Manganino, who turned and left.
“Well,” Mona said, clasping her hands on her imploded lap, as if signaling that the interview must be drawing to a close. “I think that’s about all I have for you.”
Joe D. swallowed and asked the question he’d been holding back. “Did your husband have a lover, Mrs. Samson?”
He watched carefully for a reaction but detected none. “He had…flings. I don’t know as I’d call any of them lovers.”
“You knew about…”
“I knew only that he fooled around,” she interrupted. “I wasn’t interested in who they were or what they were.”
“You don’t think there was one in particular?”
She attempted a smile but succeeded only in squinting. “My husband had only one love. His company. There was no one in particular, as you put it. He cared for nothing but his company—not his employees, not his family, such as it was, not his customers…” Here she broke off and seemed to laugh silently, as if the idea of her late husband caring for the legions of teenagers and working-class girls who’d made him rich was unbearably amusing.
“Are you sure there was no one special?”
“Positive,” she said evenly. Then her hand again moved slowly but steadily to the buzzer, and Joe D. know his time was up. He fished for a card in his jacket pocket and handed it to her. “If anything comes up, here’s how to reach me.”
“Nothing will come up, I assure you. This was a random act of violence.” After a moment’s pause she added impassively, “a tragedy.” She managed to locate a pen amidst the whatnots, tchotchkes, and objets d’art, and wrote something on the back of his card, which she returned to him. “Joanna Freeling, my husband’s niece. That’s her phone number.”
The door opened.
“Please show Mr. DiGregorio out, Serena.”
Six
Joe D. left Mona Samson’s building and headed east towards Lexington. There he caught the IRT down to Fifty-eighth, where he switched to the BMT out to Queens. Countless stops later he emerged somewhere in Flushing. He navigated streets crowded with Chinese, Puerto Ricans, and Pakistanis, until he managed to find the headquarters of the Apex Cab Company. He was an hour away from the Samson building by subway, but he might as well have traveled halfway round the world. The closest any of these people could get to the Samsons would be the front seat of a taxi.
Unfortunately for one former neighborhood resident, he’d come into contact with George Samson in just this way. Salik Mafouz had worked as a driver for Apex since arriving in America. He had a wife and three children back in Pakistan, waiting for Salik to send them enough money to join him in the promised land. Their wait had ended earlier this week.
Apex was located above a garage. Joe D. climbed a dark stairway and entered a small, dingy reception area. A middle-aged man with at least two days’ worth of stubble sat in a wire-mesh cage. He looked up at Joe D. and then looked back down. His plump fingers were sorting a huge wad of bills into neat piles of ones, fives, tens, and twenties.
Joe D. slipped a card into the cage. “I’d like to talk to someone about Salik Mafouz.”
“So talk.” He continued to sort bills.
“What I need to know is, did the driver fill out his route sheet for the Samson fare?” Most drivers who worked
for a cab company, rather than owning their own licenses, were required to fill out forms indicating the origin and destination of each of their fares. Every New Yorker knew this.
“Cops already took the sheet.”
Joe D. was not surprised. “Maybe you remember what it said.”
The man actually stopped counting for a moment. “Nope, don’t recall,” he said at length, unconvincingly.
“You sure?”
The man kept on sorting, then said “nope” a second time.
Joe D. considered slipping a twenty under the mesh, but the huge pile of bills already there put him off. Still, he needed to know where Samson was heading after he left the Art Alliance. A hunch told him he wasn’t going home, and that wherever he was going, he didn’t want anyone to know about it. Why else dismiss the chauffeur on a night when he’d be needing transportation? Consideration had never been one of Samson’s strong suits.
He decided, reluctantly, to send coals to Newcastle. “Think harder,” he said, sliding a twenty under the mesh but keeping a finger on it.
The man eyed the twenty as if it were an obvious forgery. “Still can’t quite recall.”
Joe D. pulled the twenty back. “Too bad.”
“Well, it wasn’t completely filled out,” the man said, as Joe D. started to turn. Joe D. slid the twenty back under the mesh.
“Most drivers, they don’t fill in the route sheets right away. Or maybe they just put the origin but not the destination. Fares don’t like to wait. So the drivers wait until the first red light. Sometimes they wait till the ride’s over. Sometimes they forget to fill them in at all, dumb fucks.”
He looked to Joe D. as if to commiserate over the sad state of the cab driver’s intellect. Joe D. wouldn’t join in, so he continued.
“Mafouz, he filled in the origin all right, West Sixty-fifth. Even put the time, eleven-fifteen P.M. Cops liked that. But he never got to the destination, except for the first letter.”
He paused, and Joe D. knew it would cost him. “What was the letter?”
“Well, that’s just it. Most times, it’s either an E or a W, right? As in east or west. And you know it’s a street, not an avenue, since only streets have east and west before them, right? But if it’s a number, then it’s usually the address on an avenue, like Three forty-five Park Avenue.”
“What was the letter?”
“For example, you see an E, you know it’s a street on the East Side, even if the cabby never got to filling in the rest of the line. If it’s a W…”
Joe D. shoved another twenty under the mesh. The dissertation ceased abruptly.
“G. The letter was G. Nothing else. Police figure he got a gun to his head before he could finish. First red light, probably, guy pulled a gun on him. Then took them over to the pier and shot ’em both. Blood all over the sheets and the meter. I know because I had to read them. Just because a guy’s killed don’t mean business comes to a halt. Believe me, our guys are shot at all the time. Well, not all the time, but you know what I mean. Though I gotta say, this was the first time a fare took it too. Christ.”
Joe D. popped a tape into his Walkman and listed to Bach’s second and third Brandenburgs on the subway back to Manhattan. The Brandenburgs were always a surefire antidote to the dreary, noisy subway. They exuded a vibrant enthusiasm, a self-satisfied but never smug cheeriness that he found irresistible, no matter what the circumstances. He briefly wondered what Bach would have thought of the notion of people listening to his music on tiny electronic cartridges while moving at forty miles an hour in underground tunnels. Then he decided he hated what-if meditations and concentrated on the music instead.
It was after four by the time Joe D. reached Manhattan. He figured he’d earned his three hundred dollars and could call it quits with a clear conscience. Instead of heading directly home he decided to stop in at the store to see Alison. He bought her a dozen yellow tulips on the way. One of the pleasures of New York, he was discovering, was the abundance of flowers for sale on virtually every block. Most of them were sold by Korean delis, but there were stores sprouting everywhere that carried nothing but roses.
Alison’s store was nearly 1500 square feet, narrow and long. It was minimally decorated, with gray industrial carpet and white walls—the better to display the often florid merchandise.
Alison was helping a customer when he entered. The only other employee, a recent college graduate named Michelle, was behind the register in the front of the store.
“I can’t get away with this,” the customer was saying when Joe D. entered. Indeed, there ought to be a law, he thought, for the dress she had on was way too short for her over-ample legs. Alison, who hadn’t noticed Joe D. entering, stepped back and squinted. Joe D. could see the opposing forces of honesty and greed waging war in her. Honesty won. “You’re right. It doesn’t do anything for you.”
It makes an ass of you, Joe D. would have said.
“How about something not quite as…” Alison hesitated.
“Demeaning,” Joe D. muttered, just loud enough for Alison, but not the customer, to hear. She turned, gave him a look, then smiled when he brought the tulips from behind his back. She turned back to her customer. “How about this,” she said, and grabbed a more substantial dress in red satin.
The customer dutifully took the dress and headed for the changing room. Alison gave Joe D. a kiss and then frowned. “Now that you have some business you think you can come in here and chase away my customers.”
“That dress could chase away an army.”
“I’ve sold three of them already, at six hundred each.”
“Jesus.”
“How’d it go today?”
“Swell. I met with Mona Samson.”
“You did? Gosh, if she started buying dresses here I’d be rich. Half the city follows her when it comes to fashion.”
“They do? She looks like she’d have to shop in the children’s department.”
“She’s a social X ray,” Alison said, offhandedly.
“A what?”
“You know, from Bonfire.”
Joe D. was going to ask for a clarification when Alison turned her attention to her customer, who had reemerged wearing the red dress, which did indeed make a positive contribution to her appearance, disguising most of her excess flesh. Five minutes later Michelle was wrapping it up for her.
Alison stepped out with Joe D. for some air.
“You were great with her,” Joe D. said.
“When you’re paying the rent and overhead, you become a very persuasive salesperson. Anyway, she did find the right dress, which makes me happy.”
“Make me happy and name all the streets in Manhattan beginning with the letter G.”
She thought for a moment. “Grand. Gansevoort. Gracie Square. Gerard.”
“If you were George Samson, and you had a girlfriend, which of those streets would she live on?”
“Easy, Gracie Square. Gansevoort’s in the Village—too bohemian. Grand’s too Lower East Side for him. But Gracie Square’s posh. If he had a girlfriend, that’s where he’d keep her.”
He walked back to the apartment with the tulips, which he placed in a vase. There were no messages on the answering machine, which didn’t depress him as much as it did just a week ago. It was nice to be on a case. Then he called Joanna Freeling and introduced himself.
“But Uncle George was killed by a thief.” Her voice could only be described as elegant, combining as it did a quiet confidence and a trace of arrogance.
He explained that he’d been asked by Seymour Franklin to confirm what the police already knew.
“I don’t really see the point,” she said. “But if my aunt’s been telling you things about me, well, I suppose I ought to have my day in court as well.” She laughed almost giddily and gave Joe D. her address.
On Grand Street.
Seven
Joanna Freeling lived in a loft building in the heart of Soho. Like the other structures on Grand Street
, it was a former commercial building, six stories high with fire escapes running from top to bottom. Joe D. opened the front door and found Freeling’s name on a small panel of buzzers. He buzzed her, then waited for an answer. He took in the general dinginess of the building, then buzzed again. He thought about why someone with $32 million would live in a place like this, then buzzed again. Finally, she answered.
“Who is it?” she said over the intercom, which managed to rinse her voice of its elegance. A moment later Joe D. was climbing three flights of the steepest stairs he’d ever encountered. They were metal and uncarpeted, and each step he took reverberated up and down the stairwell.
Joanna Freeling’s door was open when he arrived.
“I could have brought the elevator down for you,” she said. “It’s manually operated.”
“No problem,” Joe D. panted.
She stepped aside to let him in. Now he understood why someone with $32 million would live here. And he understood why it had taken so long for her to answer. The loft was immense and obviously expensively decorated. Joe D. glanced around. An endless expanse of highly polished wood floor extended for acres in either direction, interrupted only occasionally by groupings of starkly modern furniture. On the walls hung gigantic paintings, the kind Joe D. often saw in galleries on outings to Soho with Alison on her rare breaks from the store, the kind that prompted him to wonder: Who would hang this in their living room? Who has the space? Now he knew.
“Wow,” he said, after taking it all in. The loft seemed to demand a response.
“Thanks,” Joanna said lightly, assuming the compliment. “I’m just finishing up a canvas. Do you mind if we talk in my studio?”
She led Joe D. toward one end of the loft. Sometime later they arrived in an area that wasn’t as finished as the rest of the place, the floors splattered with paint, canvases leaning against the walls in stacks. Taped to one wall was a large canvas, perhaps eight feet by eight feet, to which Joanna headed.
Vanishing Act Page 4