Montaro Caine: A Novel

by Sidney Poitier

  “That’s a dirty crack, Monty. For Christ’s sake, will you get to the point?”

  “The only known address for Socoloux is in care of your law firm.”

  “No shit!”

  “No shit, buddy. No shit. I put my best man on it and that’s all he could come up with. Now, who the hell are Beekman and Freich? What do they do? I mean, really do? I’ve got to know and I’m leaning on you, Larry.”

  “Jesus, I can’t,” said Larry. “I told you before—being a junior in a sea of seniors has its disadvantages.”

  “You’re gonna have to do better than that,” said Montaro. “I’m gonna need you to give me some answers.”

  Larry looked away. “I just can’t do it,” he said.

  “Yes you can.” Caine stared unblinkingly at Larry. “Which one of the seniors handles them personally?”

  Larry turned back to face Caine. He hesitated before answering. “Hargrove,” he said.

  “The head man?”

  Larry nodded. “Yes, Monty,” he said. “But look, if you’re thinking …”

  “Yes, you know exactly what I’m thinking,” said Caine. “Goddamn it, I did you the favor of meeting with Beekman and Freich and I’ve got nothing to show for it. Now, you’re going to do me the favor of finding out everything you can about them.”

  As the two men stared at each other, Larry began to sweat. He looked down at his plate in search of some comfort, but there was no food left on it.

  9

  DR. HOWARD MOZELLE WAS AN OBSTETRICIAN WHO OPERATED the Mozelle Women’s Health Center on East 67th Street near the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and had done so for nearly forty years. He was a good-hearted man of considerable integrity, a throwback, many said, to a previous age. He rarely ever refused a patient regardless of their insurance status or their ability to pay. His idealistic approach was perhaps not particularly beneficial to his bank account, but it was not all that dissimilar from that of his wife of forty-one years, Dr. Elsen Mozelle, a professor of European history at Columbia University; she had passed up dozens of think tank and consultancy positions rather than abandon the teaching job she loved.

  As was nearly always the case, Dr. Mozelle had been working later than he had planned to and was just getting ready to close down his office for the night when the phone rang. His receptionist had already left, so Mozelle picked up the phone himself before his service could answer. Though he immediately recognized the voice on the other end, he was stunned to hear it; he hadn’t heard it in years.

  “I hope I didn’t act incorrectly in calling you,” Madeline Pitcar told him. She spoke rapidly and Mozelle had trouble grasping everything she was saying, though he did understand her to say that there was a man who wanted very much to get in touch with him. “His name is Montaro Caine,” she said. “I didn’t let on that I knew anything about you. But, since I can’t reach Dr. Chasman, and since Mr. Caine said it was of the utmost importance, I wrote down what he said.” At which point, Pitcar repeated the story that Caine had begged her to pass on to the owner of the coin he had seen twenty-six years earlier at M.I.T. And the more Dr. Mozelle listened to that story, the more trouble he had believing his ears.

  When Madeline Pitcar was through telling Mozelle what Caine had told her, Dr. Mozelle thanked her, then hung up and called his wife, who was at her office at Columbia, also working late. Then he called Anna Hilburn, who had run his office for thirty years before arthritis had forced her into semiretirement, reducing her on-the-job time to only a few hours per week. He asked both women if they could try to meet him at his office as soon as they could.

  “It’s about the coin; I think something may be happening,” he told both of them, and neither had to ask what he was talking about.

  Dr. Mozelle’s office had a spectacular easterly view, but he kept his blinds drawn and his door closed while he and Elsen spoke with Anna Hilburn about the strange phone call he had received from Madeline Pitcar. The call reawakened memories of events that had occurred more than twenty-five years ago when the odd and seemingly miraculous discovery of a mysterious coin had put him in contact with both Michael Chasman and Richard Walmeyer, whose young assistant Montaro Caine had found that coin to have seemingly otherworldly properties. A girl named Whitney Carson had played a crucial role in the story as well.

  “Have you heard from Whitney lately?” Mozelle asked Anna Hilburn now as she sat in his office.

  Anna shrugged. “Not lately,” she said. “And I’m pretty sure she’s overdue for her checkup this year.”

  “I need you to try to get in touch with her and find out what her current situation is. Can you do that?”

  Anna Hilburn nodded, then rose unsteadily to her feet. Mrs. Mozelle reached out and patted Anna on the arm. After Anna had exited the room, Elsen turned to her husband. “What do you think about this guy Caine?” she asked. “How do you think we should handle him?”

  “We’ll hear what he has to say,” Mozelle said.

  Elsen took a short, tight breath. “You’re not going to show it to him, are you, Howard?” she asked.

  “I honestly don’t know,” he said. “We’ll have to see.”

  When Anna Hilburn returned to Dr. Mozelle’s office, she looked dazed and bewildered, and both the doctor and his wife immediately understood that something was amiss. In Anna’s three decades of working for the Mozelle Women’s Health Center, she had always been a model of calm and efficiency, rarely allowing emotions to get in the way of her work.

  “What’s the matter?” Howard Mozelle asked.

  Anna took a deep breath, then let it out. “I just got off the phone with Whitney,” she said. “She couldn’t talk long because she was at the airport and had to get on a flight.”

  “And?” asked Mozelle.

  “And she said she got married,” Anna said.

  Howard Mozelle looked momentarily pleased. Then, he looked stunned. And then he looked worried. “When?” he asked. But before Anna could answer, he was on her with more questions, each one more emphatic than the one that preceded it. “Did you speak with Whitney herself? Who did you say she married?”

  “She said her husband’s name is Franklyn Walker,” said Anna. “She sounded happy.”

  “Well, can she come in for her checkup?” Mozelle asked.

  Anna shook her head. “She moved,” she said.

  “Moved? Where to?” he asked.

  “Atlanta. And she’s traveling anyway.”

  “Traveling where?”

  “Abroad.”

  “How didn’t we know about this?” asked Mozelle. “Why didn’t she tell us?”

  “I don’t know what could have happened,” said Anna. “She said that she was in touch with the office and that she sent word.”

  “In touch with whom? What does that mean? ‘Sent word’?”

  “She said she was in town to pack up her apartment and dropped by to say hello and have her annual checkup, but it was when you were on vacation.”

  “Damn it,” said Dr. Mozelle, remembering the most recent trip he and Elsen had taken to Budapest, for one of his wife’s academic conferences. “Who did she say saw her?”

  “Dr. Chambers,” said Anna. “I saw the record of the appointment in his files. But here’s the strange thing—I didn’t see any record of it in Whitney’s chart.”

  “Shouldn’t you have known she was here?” Mozelle demanded, even as his wife touched him lightly on the arm in an attempt to calm him.

  “Must have been on a day when Cordiss was here by herself,” Anna said. She was referring to Cordiss Krinkle, one of Mozelle’s former employees who had left her position abruptly and apparently not long after Whitney had her appointment.

  “Cordiss didn’t tell you Whitney was here?” he asked.

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “And Chambers’s nurse didn’t mention it to you?”

  “Neither she nor Dr. Chambers knew that we were monitoring Whitney,” Anna said.

  “Well, Cordiss
Krinkle sure as hell knew, didn’t she?”

  “She must have,” said Anna. “But Cordiss is long gone.”

  “Where is she?” Mozelle asked, his face now crimson. “There’s no way Whitney could have had an examination in these offices without Cordiss knowing about it. We need to get in touch with her. Do you know where she is?”

  “I have no idea,” said Anna. “She said she was going to California. But she didn’t leave any number or forwarding address. We sent her her final check, but it was returned. Her email address is dead. I tried finding her, but I couldn’t, so I just gave up.”

  Elsen Mozelle took a step closer to Anna and spoke to her in a gentle voice. “You’re sure now, Anna? Cordiss never mentioned anything to you about Whitney, you’re absolutely sure?”

  “I’ve got arthritis, not Alzheimer’s. I’m sure, Elsen. She never mentioned anything.”

  “Married? And we missed it?” Elsen said in disbelief.

  “The boy she married, what did she say about him?” asked Dr. Mozelle. And then, as his eyes met Anna Hilburn’s, he felt as if he understood everything, and the knowledge terrified him. “Is she pregnant, Anna? Has she had a child?”

  “I don’t know, Dr. Mozelle,” said Anna. “She didn’t say.”

  “Get her back on the phone,” the doctor told her. “We need to find out.”

  This time, Anna took out her cell phone and redialed Whitney’s number, but the call went straight to voicemail.

  “She said she was about to board the plane,” said Anna. “She’s probably already on it.”

  “Where’s she going?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Leave her a message. Tell her to call us as soon as she can.”

  As Anna left that message on Whitney’s voice mail, Elsen Mozelle stroked the lapel of her husband’s jacket, then took his hand in hers and held it close to her chest.

  “Something’s going on here,” Howard Mozelle said after Anna hung up her phone. “Somebody must have found out.”

  “But how could they?” asked Anna. “The three of us are the only ones who know what happened. I’ve never spoken to anyone about it. Not one word in twenty-six years. You’re not thinking that Cordiss found out, are you?”

  But that was, in fact, exactly what Dr. Mozelle was beginning to think. “Well, Elsen and I haven’t spoken about it to anyone, obviously,” he said. “This Montaro Caine couldn’t know anything. He saw the coin, analyzed it, and made a report. He never had a clue about its background. I didn’t even tell Dr. Chasman. To this day, he knows nothing, and so Caine knows no more than he does, except he now says there’s another coin.”

  “Which is in the hands of someone in this city,” Anna reminded him.

  “Oh God,” Mrs. Mozelle suddenly gasped, and at the exact moment, she, her husband, and Anna Hilburn all had the same thought.

  “The safe,” Elsen Mozelle said.

  Though Dr. Mozelle had two bad hips, he sprinted out of his office, then through the corridor to a narrow hallway at the rear of the building while the two women struggled to keep pace. Just past the laboratory, he turned left and entered a small, windowless room. Forty-five years earlier, when the building had served as headquarters for a wholesale furrier, the safe had been a walk-in storage vault. When the doctor became the new tenant, it became a repository for medical and financial records.

  Dr. Mozelle stopped at a steel door only to realize that he had not been here for so long he could no longer recall the vault’s combination. When Anna, helped along by Mrs. Mozelle, arrived at the door, Dr. Mozelle pointed at the lock and impatiently gestured for her to apply the combination. Once inside, they wove their way around boxes of outdated paperwork, stacks of charts, medical books, pamphlets, and a few stray pieces of office furniture. When the women reached an old wooden file cabinet in a corner against the wall, Anna Hilburn forced her arm into the narrow space between the cabinet and the wall until her fingers reached a small key hanging on a nail embedded in the wall. With the key, she unlocked the bottom drawer of the cabinet, then stepped to one side.

  Dr. Mozelle kneeled quickly, slid the drawer open, plunged both hands to the bottom, and after several forceful jerks, he surfaced with a manila folder. He opened it, then shuffled frantically through many sheets of paper. He turned to his wife in horror.

  “All my notes are still here, but the coin is gone. Stolen,” he said. He looked to Anna Hilburn.

  “Call Montaro Caine,” he told her. “Call him now.”

  10

  TRAFFIC WAS HEAVY ON MANHATTAN’S EAST SIDE, SO MONTARO Caine handed a twenty-dollar bill to his taxi driver and told him that he would cover the rest of the distance to the Mozelle Women’s Health Center on foot. Anna Hilburn had left Howard Mozelle’s name, address, and a simple message with Caine’s secretary: “Tell Mr. Caine that we are ready to discuss the matter he expressed an interest in.” Caine had already scheduled a Fitzer board meeting as well as a phone conference with his lawyer Gordon Whitcombe for the morning to discuss his daughter’s situation at Mt. Herman. But when he received the message from Anna Hilburn, he told Nancy MacDonald that she would have to reschedule everything again.

  Caine moved east along 67th Street with a quick stride that every now and then exploded into a jog. He was overanxious and he knew it; he reminded himself to calm down before arriving at Mozelle’s office. It seemed strange—for twenty-six years, he had imagined the owner of the coin to be a wealthy collector of rare objects who lived somewhere in the Boston area not far from M.I.T., when in fact the coin’s owner was apparently right here in Manhattan, just ten minutes away from Fitzer.

  When Caine entered the office of Howard Mozelle and introduced himself to the doctor, his wife, and Anna Hilburn, who were already seated, awaiting his arrival, he sensed a pronounced uneasiness among his hosts. Perhaps it was just the clinical office setting that made Montaro feel that he was about to undergo some sort of invasive exam. Handshakes were loose and smiles seemed forced. Dr. Mozelle stared at Caine for several awkward moments, studying his features.

  “I’ve seen your name in the newspapers and on the society and financial pages, but your face is unfamiliar. I don’t think we’ve ever met. Have we?”

  “No, we haven’t, I’m afraid,” said Caine with a smile. He was not surprised that Mozelle did not recognize him; his managerial style had always been to stay out of public view as much as possible in favor of focusing on the business of his company. Even after the recent mining accident, he preferred to let his spokespeople talk to the press.

  “Through no fault of yours, as I recall,” Dr. Mozelle said by way of an apology for his refusal twenty-six years earlier to let Montaro and Richard Walmeyer reexamine the coin. “Yes, well, that was a long time ago,” he added. “Anyway, I recall that your interest in the coin was primarily in the composition of various elements, some of which were intriguing to you and my good friend Dr. Chasman.”

  “Yes,” said Caine. “We were fascinated and wanted very much to do a follow-up analysis. Some of those elements were strikingly unusual. I’d never seen anything like them before or since—until this week, that is.”

  Dr. Mozelle’s face turned serious. “How sure are you about what you saw? I mean, twenty-six years is a long time. Could what you saw possibly have been the same object you saw at M.I.T.?”

  “No, they’re different,” said Montaro. “They’re alike in many ways, but they are different objects. Absolutely.”

  “How can you be so sure of that?”

  “Chemicals and metals are my profession, Doctor.”

  “You were interested in commercial exploitation back then. Would it be fair to say that this is still true?”

  “I am interested in its potential value, yes,” said Caine. “But over and above that, I must admit to a healthy curiosity about the object itself.”

  Dr. Mozelle liked Caine’s forthright and accommodating manner of speaking. He had been expecting a much more aggressive man. Mozelle�
��s eyes shifted to his wife and his elderly secretary; then he gestured for Caine to have a seat.

  As Caine sat in the armchair in front of Mozelle’s desk, the doctor spoke. “We wanted to talk with Dr. Chasman before we saw you, but, as you have no doubt found out yourself, his secretary hasn’t been able to reach him. Have you kept in touch with him throughout the years?”

  “Three or four times in the last five years, I would say.”

  “Well,” said Dr. Mozelle, “since he isn’t here, and since time is of the essence, I’m going to tell you a story, one I very much wish he was here to listen to. Have you ever heard the name Hattie Sinclair?”

  Montaro shook his head. “I haven’t,” he said.

  Dr. Mozelle’s eyes seemed to glaze over and to focus on something beyond Caine. He rose slowly to his feet, took a deep breath, and then began pacing the floor as he went on to tell a story that, to Montaro, seemed almost as strange and wondrous as the coins themselves. For him, the story that Howard Mozelle related brought to mind not only the experience of encountering the coin when he was a young man at M.I.T., but also the lesson that he had learned as a child—that there is a great deal more to this world than we can perceive with our eyes. When Montaro began listening to Mozelle’s story, he had never heard the name Hattie Sinclair; when Mozelle was through, he knew that he would never forget it.

  11

  DR. MOZELLE STOPPED PACING AND STOOD BEHIND HIS DESK TO face Montaro Caine. Then he began the story Elsen and Anna Hilburn knew so well but had rarely spoken of in the past two-and-a-half decades. “About twenty-six years ago in the spring—on April seventeenth, to be exact—Elsen was diagnosed as having a quite fatal disease, a type of cancer that is usually unforgiving. To be brief, we explored every option open to us: cancer specialists, the usual institutions, the unusual ones as well. We even made ourselves available for experimental procedures, as long as they held out the slightest glimmer of hope.”

  Howard Mozelle said that he had already received three pessimistic opinions about his wife’s prognosis when he arrived at the office of famed cancer specialist Dr. Rudolf Kempler. At first, Dr. Kempler’s prognosis was hardly different from the others that Howard and Elsen had heard from the previous physicians; the cancer had spread too far to respond to treatment, and the only option was palliative care.