Vanishing Act

by Seth Margolis

  “Sounds like a mismatch. Samson Stores are for teenage girls.”

  “Girls on a budget,” she added. “But that’s just the point. Samson was never interested in Rudolph’s for its merchandise or its reputation. George Samson only wanted the leases. Rudolph’s had stores all across the country with long-term leases with years left on them. As soon as he took over, he converted all the stores to Samson’s. It broke Mr. Rudolph’s heart, I think. Then it broke his mind.”

  Joe D. had heard sadder stories, but Grace Hodgson clearly placed the demise of Arthur Rudolph on a par with King Lear. “How does a nurse know so much about retailing?” he asked.

  “Administrator,” she corrected him. “It’s not that I know so much about retailing as that I make it my business to know about my patients. For starters, we run a detailed credit check on all applicants. Our fees are quite high.”

  “But Rudolph’s bills are paid by Samson Stores.”

  “Exactly. So in addition to looking into Mr. Rudolph’s finances, which I’m sorry to say were quite dismal, we had to check into Samson Stores as well. In particular, we had to ascertain to our satisfaction that Samson Stores would continue to pay Mr. Rudolph’s bills.”

  “And were you satisfied?”

  “Quite. And we made sure that the contractual obligation was with the corporation, not Mr. Samson personally.”

  “Very farsighted of you.”

  She smiled. “I think George Samson took a particular pleasure in destroying Arthur Rudolph. I almost hated to take his money.”

  This rang so untrue that Joe D. could only stare at her.

  “The Rudolphs are one of the oldest Jewish families in New York,” she continued. “Our Crowd and all that. Samson, on the other hand…” She paused, doubtless fishing for a way to express her scorn without sounding snobbish. “Samson was more…”

  “More Jewish,” Joe D. offered.

  She made a face. “I detest it when people put words in my mouth. It’s just that Arthur Rudolph was always one of New York’s most prominent citizens. I remember reading about him and his wife in the society pages. Giving parties for charity, that kind of thing. They were so handsome together.”

  “Where is Mrs. Rudolph now?”

  “She died about ten years ago. Cancer, I believe.”

  “About the same time Rudolph sold his company to Samson.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s correct. Perhaps if his wife hadn’t died he would have held on.”

  “And perhaps if she’d been alive he wouldn’t have spent every dime he had trying to take revenge on Samson.”

  “Yes, she might have kept him more firmly anchored.”

  “You mentioned Rudolph’s son. Were there any other children?”

  “None.”

  Joe D. asked for the son’s name and telephone number. She consulted a bulging Rolodex and copied it down for him. “His name is Arthur Rudolph, Junior. I believe he’s known as Chip. He lives in Manhattan.”

  Joe D. next asked to see Rudolph’s room. Grace Hodgson seemed almost enthusiastic about the idea. She escorted him there in long, brisk strides. She was clearly relieved that someone was looking into Rudolph’s disappearance, but her concern seemed official rather than personal. While losing a patient to death was probably no big deal at Tranquility Village, losing a live one was doubtless a serious problem. And losing such a prominent, or formerly prominent, patient was a potential public relations disaster.

  Rudolph’s room was in a modern annex to the main building. It was small and very neat, with a twin-sized bed in the center, a night table, a dresser, and a visitor’s chair. It had a private bath.

  “We’ve kept it for him since Wednesday, even though there’s a waiting list for new residents. He’s paid up through the end of the month. And of course we’re hoping he comes back,” she added quickly.

  “Mind if I look around?”

  “By all means.”

  Joe D. went through the dresser drawers first. Rudolph’s clothes were neatly folded, doubtless by the staff. Nothing much of interest there. In the drawer of the night table, however, he found a thick stack of documents. He pulled them out. There was an annual report for Samson Stores, some financial statements for the company, and some clippings about the company, quite recent, from the Wall Street Journal and Women’s Wear Daily.

  “Did Rudolph subscribe to these publications?” Joe D. showed her the stack of clippings.

  She shook her head. “I’m quite sure he didn’t. His son must have brought them here. Or mailed them.”

  Joe D. thumbed through the clippings. Quarterly earnings reports, executive changes, some society notes about Samson and his wife—nothing that had to do specifically with Rudolph. Still, Rudolph was keeping up to date on his nemesis, or was being kept up to date. The clippings, even the most recent ones, had a frayed, dog-eared look to them, as if they’d been consulted over and over again. Joe D. thought about Rudolph wasting away in Tranquility Village while Samson had lived like modern-day royalty. Must have eaten him alive, he thought. And his son, Arthur Junior—Chip—couldn’t have been too happy about the situation, either.

  He returned the clippings to the drawer and thanked Grace Hodgson, who walked him back to the front door. “I hope you locate him, Mr. DiGregorio. We were all very…” A defeated look came across her face for one moment, as if she simply wasn’t up to the effort of saying something that sounded sincere. “I hope you find him. Call me if you do.”

  Joe D. hurried to his car, anxious to escape the smothering atmosphere of Tranquility Village. The place had a falseness to it, a pretense, that he found deadening. If there hadn’t been such an expensive effort to disguise what the place really was—a last resort for the aged and the infirm—he might not have minded it as much. He’d been in less posh nursing homes before and had found them depressing, but Tranquility Village was depressing in a deeper way: Its residents lived more luxuriously, but they were all the more invisible for it. He sensed that the families of the residents felt a certain self-righteous satisfaction at being able to afford this place, and that this satisfaction frequently took the place of actual visits.

  Joe D. glanced in the rearview mirror at the mansion as it receded behind him, and thought that this was the kind of place George Samson might have lived in by himself, a country house. Rudolph, once his financial equal, had had to share it with dozens of senile old people and indifferent nurses.

  Until he disappeared on Wednesday. The day Samson was murdered.

  Fifteen

  It was just after 2:00 when Joe D. dropped off the Escort at the rental office near First Avenue. He and Alison had plans to meet some friends of hers for dinner at 7:30. He called her at the store and left a message with her assistant that he’d join her and the other couple at the restaurant.

  He walked the eight blocks to Ideal Locksmiths on Second Avenue. It was a tiny store, its walls lined with dummy keys, locks of all sizes, and any number of home-safety implements that were as much in demand in Manhattan as suntan lotion at a beach resort. Joe D. had first visited Ideal, and its owner Carmine, when he moved into New York last fall. He’d gone there to have duplicates of Alison’s keys made. Carmine had asked him if he was new to the neighborhood and what he did for a living. Joe D. told him. “Not many private dicks in this neighborhood,” he’d told Joe D. “You should do great here. And you ever need help with locks, installing them or de-installing them, you let me know.”

  In all the time he’d been in business, he’d only had to call on Carmine once. A friend of Alison’s father, who owned a dressmaking company on Seventh Avenue, had hired Joe D. to investigate a rash of employee thefts. Entire bolts of expensive fabric were found missing once or twice a week. Turned out it was a salesman, and not a seamstress, as had originally been suspected, who was taking the cloth—the man had a gambling problem, and sold the bolts at half price to pay off his debts. Joe D. had nailed the guy by spending three nights hidden in the shop foreman’s office. Th
e salesman would return to the company late at night, after losing at the track, lift a bolt of fabric, and stash it in his car until the following morning, when he sold it. Joe D. presented his evidence to the owner, who winced and said that the thieving salesman was one of the company’s best producers and couldn’t be gotten rid of. In fact, the owner didn’t even want to mention the whole affair to the salesman, lest he quit. So Joe D. had suggested locking up the fabric, and had thus involved Carmine in their first professional relationship.

  “Joe D., how are ya?” the locksmith said in classic New Yorkese.

  “I need some advice.”

  Carmine’s eyes widened at the prospect. “A job?”

  “It’s something I gotta do on my own. There’s a locked cabinet I need to get into, but I can’t let the owner know I’ve been there.”

  “What kind of cabinet?”

  “I don’t remember exactly, but I think it’s in a pretty expensive piece of furniture, something you’d see in a dining room, maybe. Except this piece is in an office.”

  “No problem. The more expensive the furniture, the worse the lock. You’ll need a few of these.” He rummaged around under the counter and produced a small box of what looked like old-fashioned skeleton keys. “There’s not too much variety in these babies, so one of these should work.”

  There must be twenty or more keys, Joe D. thought. His heart sank at the prospect of trying each of them.

  A woman walked in and took out a set of keys.

  “Now, they may have installed a modern lock in the old furniture. In which case you’d need…” He stopped himself and turned to the customer. “Can I help you?” he said testily.

  She took a key off her key ring and asked for a duplicate. He took it from her and quickly ground a new one. “Anything else?”

  Only in New York, Joe D. thought, would Carmine get away with this level of customer service. The woman paid for her key and left.

  “As I was saying, if it’s a new lock you’ll need this.” He crouched and rummaged a second time under the counter and emerged with a small vinyl case. “It’s a pick set. I can show you how to use it, but why don’t I come along with you and do it myself.”

  Joe D. shook his head.

  Carmine looked disappointed. “Shouldn’t be much of a problem to get in. People don’t install good locks in furniture. What’s the point? You can always pry the sucker open if you can’t get through the lock.”

  He gave Joe D. a quick lesson in picking a lock, interrupting his discourse, reluctantly, to help two customers. Joe D. left Carmine at close to 3:00 and took a cab over to the West Side.

  Joe D. had the cab let him off on Central Park West. He walked the half block to the New York Art Alliance building. He fished the key that Estelle Ferguson had given him out of his pocket, along with the alarm code. Then he approached the building as if he had every right to enter it, ignoring the several pedestrians on the block.

  He entered the building, closed the door, and immediately punched in the code on the electronic panel to the right of the entrance. A green light lit up on the LCD panel, which he took to mean that he’d either punched in the correct sequence of numbers or the cops were on the way. He waited a few moments to see if anything happened. Nothing did, so he crossed the large hallway and headed up the stairs.

  Buildings always have a completely different character when they’re empty. The New York Art Alliance building had first struck Joe D. as a self-satisfied kind of structure, almost smug in its well-constructed solidity. Everything about it, from the polished marble floor in the foyer to the massive bannister along the curved staircase, had seemed impervious, not merely untouched by the people who occupied it but in defiance of them. Now, empty and only dimly illuminated by fading sunlight, the building seemed oddly pathetic, its grand spaces almost ridiculous without occupants to give them purpose, life. Inhabited, the building achieved what it had been designed to do: intimidate. Empty, it revealed its true self: A big, hollow shell, needlessly grand, all dressed up with no one to impress.

  The Alliance didn’t strike him as the kind of place where employees worked on Saturdays—most of them probably had weekend places, he figured. But he tried to walk silently anyway, just in case there was someone working inside. The building was completely quiet. Eerily quiet: Marble and plaster and granite don’t squeak like wood, so there were none of the unnerving sounds you’d expect to hear in an old building. Still, the silence was unnerving in its own way.

  Joe D. headed straight for Arnot’s office. The door was open, as Estelle Ferguson had said it would be. Joe D. entered the large room and looked around. Sure enough, there was a low-slung cabinet next to Arnot’s massive desk. Joe D. crossed to it and smiled: The lock was of the old-fashioned, easy-to-pick variety, as Carmine had predicted. He knelt down in front of it and took out the small box of skeleton keys from the bag Carmine had put them in. Then he set about trying each of them, still careful to avoid making any noise.

  By the fifth key Joe D.’s spirits were beginning to flag. What if none of the keys worked? He was considering simply prying open the cabinet, which didn’t look like too big a challenge, when he turned the eighth or ninth key and felt the lock give. Is there a more delicious feeling than when a once-obstinate lock finally surrenders?

  He pulled open the door. The cabinet was perhaps eighteen inches deep, divided in two by a single shelf. Bunches of paper were stacked neatly on the bottom of the cabinet and on the shelf. Joe D. picked up one stack and saw at once that the papers dealt with salary issues, personnel matters—the sort of papers any manager would keep locked up. Another stack of papers appeared to be financial statements. Joe D. flipped through them, unable to make much sense of the columns and rows of figures.

  He found what he was looking for in the third pile of papers. These were the bank statements Estelle had told him about. Each statement was three pages long, folded in three, and held together by a large paper clip. Joe D. opened the statement on top, which was for the previous month. Inside were several dozen business-sized canceled checks. He flipped through them. They were made out to what were obviously arts groups, and many were quite large: Six hundred thousand to something called the Art for Seniors Program; five hundred thousand to Painting Partners in Russia. Halfway through the pile he found what he’d been looking for. One million, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, made out to the Caribbean League. The signature was Arnot’s, as it was on all the other checks. He turned the check over to look at the endorsement.

  Then he felt something on the back of his head.

  A tickle. No, something else. Something…harder. Much harder. Before he could make out what it was he was unconscious.

  Sixteen

  Joe D. opened his eyes to a swirl of colors, mostly reds and blues. He closed his eyes and his stomach started swirling. He opened his eyes. More swirling reds and blues. He repeated this process a few times until he was convinced that neither alternative was very appealing. Slowly, for he felt as if a weight had been strapped around his neck, he lifted his head. A moment later he let it fall back to the floor. He’d learned one thing at least. He was lying on the floor of Stuart Arnot’s office. He had a second revelation a moment later: The swirling reds and blues belonged to Arnot’s oriental rug, which was now, curiously, in orbit.

  He rested a few minutes, aware that he was lapsing in and out of consciousness. Every few moments he would latch onto a new piece of information about what was happening to him, or had happened. At one point he managed to localize the source of the pounding pain somewhere to the north of his neck by running his hand gingerly along his head. He felt a lump where there hadn’t ever been one, just at the base of his cranium. He carefully explored this lump with the very tips of his fingers. It appeared to be about two inches in diameter, and was as sensitive to touch as a testicle. The hair around it felt matted but dry.

  Joe D. rested with this information for a while before he managed to discern another bit of new
s: He’d been hit from behind. Not a brilliant conclusion, but the best his puréed brain could come up with under the circumstances.

  Lying on Arnot’s oriental rug. Bump on the back of the head. Hit from behind. It wasn’t long before Joe D. managed to weave these three facts into a coherent narrative that began with him kneeling before Arnot’s locked cabinet, studying documents, and ended with what felt like the world’s worst hangover.

  But what specifically had he been looking at? Joe D. figured it was time to stand up and have a look around. At first his limbs didn’t seem to respond. Apparently his autonomic nervous system had been extinguished by the blow to his head. Amazing that my heart keeps pumping without instructions, he thought. Happily, he found that if he gave his arms and legs deliberate orders, they obeyed—and functioned quite well at that. So he ordered his arms to push him off the floor, then told his legs to assume a kneeling position. So far so good. If only his head didn’t feel like a sixty-pound dumbbell. He felt he had to concentrate on keeping it upright, lest it topple over and bring his whole body with it.

  The office felt empty—certainly it was quiet. But then, it had been quiet earlier, just before someone brained him. How much earlier? Joe D. checked his watch, and at first thought that it too had been clobbered. It couldn’t be 7:00. He looked more closely a second time and saw the second hand moving with infuriating regularity around the dial. It was 7:00. Joe D. tried to calculate how long he must have been unconscious, but this effort made his head start to pound even more viciously. He settled for a long time. He slowly looked around the office and reassured himself that it was empty. Then he focused on the cabinet.

  It looked much as Joe D. remembered, discrete piles of papers stacked neatly along the bottom of the cabinet and on the single shelf. Then he recalled that he had been interested in something specific. A moment later he remembered the bank statements. He inched closer to the cabinet, still on his knees, and slowly examined each stack of papers. The bank statements were gone.